Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Economics 🔗 Business 🔗 Rock music 🔗 Business/Accounting

A celebrity bond is commercial debt security issued by a holder of fame-based intellectual property rights to receive money upfront from investors on behalf of the bond issuer and their celebrity clients in exchange for assigning investors the right to collect future royalty monies to the works covered by the intellectual property rights listed in the bond. Typically backed by music properties, the investment vehicle was pioneered in 1997 by rock and roll investment banker David Pullman through his $55 million David Bowie bond deal.

🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Robotics 🔗 Theatre 🔗 Czech Republic

R.U.R. is a 1920 science-fiction play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek. "R.U.R." stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum's Universal Robots, a phrase that has been used as a subtitle in English versions). The play had its world premiere on 2 January 1921 in Hradec Králové; it introduced the word "robot" to the English language and to science fiction as a whole. R.U.R. soon became influential after its publication. By 1923 it had been translated into thirty languages. R.U.R. was successful in its time in Europe and North America. Čapek later took a different approach to the same theme in his 1936 novel War with the Newts, in which non-humans become a servant-class in human society.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Rule of three ("Three strikes and you refactor") is a code refactoring rule of thumb to decide when similar pieces of code should be refactored to avoid duplication. It states that two instances of similar code don't require refactoring, but when similar code is used three times, it should be extracted into a new procedure. The rule was popularised by Martin Fowler in Refactoring and attributed to Don Roberts.

Duplication is considered a bad practice in programming because it makes the code harder to maintain. When the rule encoded in a replicated piece of code changes, whoever maintains the code will have to change it in all places correctly.

However, choosing an appropriate design to avoid duplication might benefit from more examples to see patterns in. Attempting premature refactoring risks selecting a wrong abstraction, which can result in worse code as new requirements emerge and will eventually need to be refactored again.

The rule implies that the cost of maintenance certainly outweighs the cost of refactoring and potential bad design when there are three copies, and may or may not if there are only two copies.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

dwm is a dynamic, minimalist tiling window manager for the X Window System that has influenced the development of several other X window managers, including xmonad and awesome. It is externally similar to wmii, but internally much simpler. dwm is written purely in C for performance and security in addition to simplicity, and lacks any configuration interface besides editing the source code. One of the project's guidelines is that the source code is intended to never exceed 2000 SLOC, and options meant to be user-configurable are all contained in a single header file.

🔗 Role-playing games

Tunnels & Trolls (abbreviated T&T) is a fantasy role-playing game designed by Ken St. Andre and first published in 1975 by Flying Buffalo. The second modern role-playing game published, it was written by Ken St. Andre to be a more accessible alternative to Dungeons & Dragons and is suitable for solitaire, group, and play-by-mail gameplay.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Geology 🔗 Extinction

The Holocene extinction, otherwise referred to as the sixth mass extinction or Anthropocene extinction, is an ongoing extinction event of species during the present Holocene epoch (with the more recent time sometimes called Anthropocene) as a result of human activity. The included extinctions span numerous families of plants and animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and arthropods. With widespread degradation of highly biodiverse habitats such as coral reefs and rainforests, as well as other areas, the vast majority of these extinctions are thought to be undocumented, as the species are undiscovered at the time of their extinction, or no one has yet discovered their extinction. The current rate of extinction of species is estimated at 100 to 1,000 times higher than natural background rates.

The Holocene extinction includes the disappearance of large land animals known as megafauna, starting at the end of the last glacial period. Megafauna outside of the African mainland (thus excluding Madagascar), which did not evolve alongside humans, proved highly sensitive to the introduction of new predation, and many died out shortly after early humans began spreading and hunting across the Earth (many African species have also gone extinct in the Holocene, but – with few exceptions – megafauna of the mainland was largely unaffected until a few hundred years ago). These extinctions, occurring near the Pleistocene–Holocene boundary, are sometimes referred to as the Quaternary extinction event.

The most popular theory is that human overhunting of species added to existing stress conditions as the extinction coincides with human emergence. Although there is debate regarding how much human predation affected their decline, certain population declines have been directly correlated with human activity, such as the extinction events of New Zealand and Hawaii. Aside from humans, climate change may have been a driving factor in the megafaunal extinctions, especially at the end of the Pleistocene.

Ecologically, humanity has been noted as an unprecedented "global superpredator" that consistently preys on the adults of other apex predators, and has worldwide effects on food webs. There have been extinctions of species on every land mass and in every ocean: there are many famous examples within Africa, Asia, Europe, Australia, North and South America, and on smaller islands. Overall, the Holocene extinction can be linked to the human impact on the environment. The Holocene extinction continues into the 21st century, with meat consumption, overfishing, and ocean acidification and the decline in amphibian populations being a few broader examples of a cosmopolitan decline in biodiversity. Human population growth and increasing per capita consumption are considered to be the primary drivers of this decline.

The 2019 Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, published by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, posits that roughly one million species of plants and animals face extinction within decades as the result of human actions.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Military history/Medieval warfare

The Siege of Caffa was a 14th-century military encounter when Jani Beg of the Golden Horde sieged the city of Caffa, (today Feodosia) between two periods in the 1340s. The city of Caffa, a Genoese colony, was a vital trading hub located in Crimea. The city was then part of Gazaria, a group of seven ports located in Crimea and belonging to the maritime empire of the Republic of Genoa. The event is historically significant primarily because it is believed to be one of the earliest instances of biological warfare.

The siege of Caffa was characterized by intense military tactics from both sides. After several years of siege, the armies of the Horde were forced to withdraw. The siege is famous for a story recounted by Italian notary Gabriel de Mussis, which attributed the subsequent spread of the Black Death to plague-infested corpses having been launched over the walls at the end of the siege.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Lists 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Time 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 Geology 🔗 Extinction 🔗 Solar System 🔗 Astronomy/Solar System

While the future can never be predicted with absolute certainty, present understanding in various scientific fields allows for the prediction of some far-future events, if only in the broadest outline. These fields include astrophysics, which has revealed how planets and stars form, interact, and die; particle physics, which has revealed how matter behaves at the smallest scales; evolutionary biology, which predicts how life will evolve over time; and plate tectonics, which shows how continents shift over millennia.

All projections of the future of Earth, the Solar System, and the universe must account for the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy, or a loss of the energy available to do work, must rise over time. Stars will eventually exhaust their supply of hydrogen fuel and burn out. Close encounters between astronomical objects gravitationally fling planets from their star systems, and star systems from galaxies.

Physicists expect that matter itself will eventually come under the influence of radioactive decay, as even the most stable materials break apart into subatomic particles. Current data suggest that the universe has a flat geometry (or very close to flat), and thus will not collapse in on itself after a finite time, and the infinite future allows for the occurrence of a number of massively improbable events, such as the formation of Boltzmann brains.

The timelines displayed here cover events from the beginning of the 11th millennium to the furthest reaches of future time. A number of alternative future events are listed to account for questions still unresolved, such as whether humans will become extinct, whether protons decay, and whether the Earth survives when the Sun expands to become a red giant.

🔗 Espionage 🔗 Internet 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing

Van Eck phreaking (also known as Van Eck Radiation) is a form of eavesdropping in which special equipment is used to pick up side-band electromagnetic emissions from electronic devices that correlate to hidden signals or data for the purpose of recreating these signals or data in order to spy on the electronic device. Side-band electromagnetic radiation emissions are present in (and with the proper equipment, can be captured from) keyboards, computer displays, printers, and other electronic devices.

In 1985, Wim van Eck published the first unclassified technical analysis of the security risks of emanations from computer monitors. This paper caused some consternation in the security community, which had previously believed that such monitoring was a highly sophisticated attack available only to governments; van Eck successfully eavesdropped on a real system, at a range of hundreds of metres, using just $15 worth of equipment plus a television set.

As a consequence of this research, such emanations are sometimes called "van Eck radiation", and the eavesdropping technique van Eck phreaking. Government researchers were already aware of the danger, as Bell Labs had noted this vulnerability to secure teleprinter communications during World War II and was able to produce 75% of the plaintext being processed in a secure facility from a distance of 80 feet (24 metres). Additionally the NSA published Tempest Fundamentals, NSA-82-89, NACSIM 5000, National Security Agency (Classified) on February 1, 1982. In addition, the van Eck technique was successfully demonstrated to non-TEMPEST personnel in Korea during the Korean War in the 1950s.

While Phreaking is the process of exploiting telephone networks, it is used here because of its connection to eavesdropping. Van Eck phreaking of CRT displays is the process of eavesdropping on the contents of a CRT by detecting its electromagnetic emissions.