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🔗 Germany 🔗 Books 🔗 Politics 🔗 Women writers 🔗 Jewish history 🔗 Israel

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.

🔗 Physics

The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester is a quantum mechanics thought experiment that uses interaction-free measurements to verify that a bomb is functional without having to detonate it. It was conceived in 1993 by Avshalom Elitzur and Lev Vaidman. Since their publication, real-world experiments have confirmed that their theoretical method works as predicted.

The bomb tester takes advantage of two characteristics of elementary particles, such as photons or electrons: nonlocality and wave-particle duality. By placing the particle in a quantum superposition, it is possible for the experiment to verify that the bomb works without triggering its detonation, although there is still a 50% chance that the bomb will detonate in the effort.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Hungary 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/European military history

András Toma (5 December 1925 – 30 March 2004) was a Hungarian soldier taken prisoner by the Red Army in 1945, then discovered living in a Russian psychiatric hospital in 2000. He was probably the last prisoner of war from the Second World War to be repatriated.

Because Toma never learned Russian and nobody at the hospital spoke Hungarian, he had apparently not had a single conversation in over 50 years, a situation of great interest for the fields of psychiatry and psycholinguistics.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software

Unums (universal numbers) are a family of number formats and arithmetic for implementing real numbers on a computer, proposed by John L. Gustafson in 2015. They are designed as an alternative to the ubiquitous IEEE 754 floating-point standard. The latest version is known as posits.

🔗 Espionage 🔗 Books 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing

The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage is a 1989 book written by Clifford Stoll. It is his first-person account of the hunt for a computer hacker who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

Stoll's use of the term extended the metaphor Cuckoo's egg from brood parasitism in birds to malware.

🔗 Computing

Plankalkül (German pronunciation: [ˈplaːnkalkyːl]) is a programming language designed for engineering purposes by Konrad Zuse between 1942 and 1945. It was the first high-level programming language to be designed for a computer.

Kalkül is the German term for a formal system—as in Hilbert-Kalkül, the original name for the Hilbert-style deduction system—so Plankalkül refers to a formal system for planning.

🔗 Music theory

A Picardy third () (French: tierce picarde), also known as a Picardy cadence, is a major chord of the tonic at the end of a musical section that is either modal or in a minor key. This is achieved by raising the third of the expected minor triad by a semitone to create a major triad, as a form of resolution.

For example, instead of a cadence ending on an A minor chord containing the notes A, C, and E, a Picardy third ending would consist of an A major chord containing the notes A, C♯, and E. Note that the minor third between the A and C of the A minor chord has become a major third in the Picardy third chord.

Musicologist Peter Kivy writes:

Even in instrumental music, the picardy third retains its expressive quality: it is the "happy third". ... Since at least the beginning of the seventeenth century, it is no longer enough to describe it as a resolution to the more consonant triad; it is a resolution to the happier triad as well. ... The picardy third is absolute music's happy ending. Furthermore, I hypothesize that in gaining this expressive property of happiness or contentment, the picardy third augmented its power as the perfect, most stable cadential chord, being both the most emotionally consonant chord, so to speak, as well as the most musically consonant.

According to Deryck Cooke, "Western composers, expressing the 'rightness' of happiness by means of a major third, expressed the 'wrongness' of grief by means of the minor third, and for centuries, pieces in a minor key had to have a 'happy ending' – a final major chord (the 'tierce de Picardie') or a bare fifth."

The Picardy third does not necessarily occur at the end of a section: it can be found at any perfect cadence or plagal cadence where the prevailing key is minor. As a harmonic device, the Picardy third originated in Western music in the Renaissance era.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Korea 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Spain 🔗 Military history/Korean military history

Massacre in Korea (French: Massacre en Corée) is an expressionistic painting completed on 18 January 1951 by Pablo Picasso. It is Picasso's third anti-war painting and depicts a scene of a massacre of a group of naked women and children by a firing squad. It has been considered to be a condemnation of American intervention in the Korean War. The painting is exhibited in the Musée Picasso in Paris.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Disability 🔗 United States/Utah

Laurence Kim Peek (November 11, 1951 – December 19, 2009) was an American savant. Known as a "megasavant", he had an exceptional memory, but he also experienced social difficulties, possibly resulting from a developmental disability related to congenital brain abnormalities. He was the inspiration for the autistic savant character Raymond Babbitt in the movie Rain Man. Although Peek was previously diagnosed with autism, it is now thought that he instead had FG syndrome.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Germany/Hamburg

The Ovelgönne Bread Roll is the remaining part of a bread roll originating from the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe, which was found in 1952 during archaeological excavations in a loam mine in the Buxtehude district Ovelgönne in Lower Saxony, Germany. The piece of bread is the oldest surviving viennoiserie and formed bakery product from Europe. The find, along with a reconstruction, are in the permanent exhibition of the Archaeological Museum Hamburg in Harburg, Hamburg.