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🔗 Russia 🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/relativity 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia

The Novikov self-consistency principle, also known as the Novikov self-consistency conjecture and Larry Niven's law of conservation of history, is a principle developed by Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in the mid-1980s. Novikov intended it to solve the problem of paradoxes in time travel, which is theoretically permitted in certain solutions of general relativity that contain what are known as closed timelike curves. The principle asserts that if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. It would thus be impossible to create time paradoxes.

🔗 Ships

The Voith Schneider propeller (VSP), also known as a cycloidal drive is a specialized marine propulsion system (MPS). It is highly maneuverable, being able to change the direction of its thrust almost instantaneously. It is widely used on tugs and ferries.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer graphics

The Stanford bunny is a computer graphics 3D test model developed by Greg Turk and Marc Levoy in 1994 at Stanford University. The model consists of 69,451 triangles, with the data determined by 3D scanning a ceramic figurine of a rabbit. This figurine and others were scanned to test methods of range scanning physical objects.

The data can be used to test various graphics algorithms, including polygonal simplification, compression, and surface smoothing. There are a few complications with this dataset that can occur in any 3D scan data: the model is manifold connected and has holes in the data, some due to scanning limits and some due to the object being hollow. These complications provide a more realistic input for any algorithm that is benchmarked with the Stanford bunny, though by today's standards, in terms of geometric complexity and triangle count, it is considered a simple model.

The model was originally available in .ply (polygons) file format with 4 different resolutions.

🔗 Internet

Do Not Track (DNT) was a proposed HTTP header field, designed to allow internet users to opt-out of tracking by websites—which includes the collection of data regarding a user's activity across multiple distinct contexts, and the retention, use, or sharing of data derived from that activity outside the context in which it occurred.

The Do Not Track header was originally proposed in 2009 by researchers Christopher Soghoian, Sid Stamm, and Dan Kaminsky. Efforts to standardize Do Not Track by the W3C in the Tracking Preference Expression (DNT) Working Group did not make it past the Candidate Recommendation stage and ended in September 2018 due to insufficient deployment and support.Mozilla Firefox became the first browser to implement the feature, while Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari, Opera and Google Chrome all later added support.

DNT is not widely adopted by the industry, with companies citing the lack of legal mandates for its use, as well as unclear standards and guidelines for how websites are to interpret the header. Thus, it is not guaranteed that enabling DNT will actually have any effect at all. The W3C disbanded its DNT working group in January 2019, citing insufficient support and adoption. Apple discontinued support for DNT the following month.

🔗 California 🔗 Crime

The 1999 Loomis truck robbery was a robbery of a Loomis, Fargo & Co. semi-trailer truck on March 24, 1999, as it transported money from Sacramento, California to San Francisco. At some point during the transit, one or more robbers boarded the truck, cut a hole in the roof, removed approximately 2.3 million dollars, and exited the truck with the money, completely evading detection by the truck's driver and guards. The robbery was not discovered until after the truck arrived at its destination. No suspects were ever identified by authorities and the robbery is now a cold case. Even the exact tools and methods used by robber or robbers were never conclusively determined.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Germany 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Poland 🔗 Current events 🔗 Rivers

The 2022 Oder environmental disaster is a mass die-off of fish, beavers and other wildlife in the Oder river in Poland and Germany, causing a health and environmental crisis in large parts of the country and subsequently a political scandal.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/airline

Janet, sometimes called Janet Airlines, is the unofficial name given to a highly classified fleet of passenger aircraft operated for the United States Department of the Air Force as an employee shuttle to transport military and contractor employees. The purpose is to pick up the employees at their home airport, and take them to their place of work. Then, in the afternoon, they take the employees back to their home airports. The airline mainly serves the Nevada National Security Site (most notably Area 51 and the Tonopah Test Range), from a private terminal at Las Vegas's McCarran International Airport.

The airline's aircraft are generally unmarked, but do have a red paint strip along the windows of the aircraft, which gives some sort of hint at Janet being the operator.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of science 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind

Moravec's paradox is the observation by artificial intelligence and robotics researchers that, contrary to traditional assumptions, reasoning (which is high-level in humans) requires very little computation, but sensorimotor skills (comparatively low-level in humans) require enormous computational resources. The principle was articulated by Hans Moravec, Rodney Brooks, Marvin Minsky and others in the 1980s. As Moravec writes, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility".

Similarly, Minsky emphasized that the most difficult human skills to reverse engineer are those that are unconscious. "In general, we're least aware of what our minds do best", he wrote, and added "we're more aware of simple processes that don't work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly".

🔗 Mathematics

Zero to the power of zero, denoted by 0⁰, is a mathematical expression with no agreed-upon value. The most common possibilities are 1 or leaving the expression undefined, with justifications existing for each, depending on context. In algebra and combinatorics, the generally agreed upon value is 0⁰ = 1, whereas in mathematical analysis, the expression is sometimes left undefined. Computer programs also have differing ways of handling this expression.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Novels

Victory Garden is a work of electronic literature by American author Stuart Moulthrop. It was written in StorySpace and published by Eastgate Systems in 1992. It is often discussed along with Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story as an important work of hypertext fiction.