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"i am lonely will anyone speak to me" is the title of a thread that was posted on the Internet forum of the video codec downloads site Moviecodec.com, and had become "the web's top hangout for lonely folk". The thread began July 14, 2004; it was the first hit when the phrase "I am lonely" was entered into the Google search engine though it has since dropped.

It was featured in the magazines Wired, Guardian Unlimited, and The New Yorker. Bjarne Lundgren, the webmaster of Moviecodec.com, has stated "Like-minded people tend to flock together and, in this case, Google helped in flocking them together on my site".

Mark Griffiths, a researcher in internet psychology at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, also addressed this question, stating: "There are a lot of lonely people out there. Some people rely heavily on technology and end up treating it as an electronic friend, a sounding board—just writing it down can make you feel better... That doesn't change their psychological world at that moment, but creating a kinship with like-minded people can help. You're all in this virtual space together."

Due to its large community, Bjarne created a new forum entitled "A Lonely Life", for the thread's numerous lonely inhabitants to move to. The original thread is now located on Moviecodec.com's branch site, The Lounge Forums.

As of December 24, 2016, the website the thread is hosted on was shut down and can no longer be accessed.

🔗 Italy 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

The Vigenère cipher (French pronunciation: ​[viʒnɛːʁ]) is a method of encrypting alphabetic text by using a series of interwoven Caesar ciphers, based on the letters of a keyword. It employs a form of polyalphabetic substitution.

First described by Giovan Battista Bellaso in 1553, the cipher is easy to understand and implement, but it resisted all attempts to break it until 1863, three centuries later. This earned it the description le chiffre indéchiffrable (French for 'the indecipherable cipher'). Many people have tried to implement encryption schemes that are essentially Vigenère ciphers. In 1863, Friedrich Kasiski was the first to publish a general method of deciphering Vigenère ciphers.

In the 19th century the scheme was misattributed to Blaise de Vigenère (1523–1596), and so acquired its present name.

🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Athletics 🔗 Running 🔗 Evolutionary biology

The endurance running hypothesis is the hypothesis that the evolution of certain human characteristics can be explained as adaptations to long-distance running. The hypothesis suggests that endurance running played an important role for early hominins in obtaining food. Researchers have proposed that endurance running began as an adaptation for scavenging and later for persistence hunting.

🔗 United States 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Lists 🔗 Business

This is a list of the largest United States bank failures with respect to total assets under management at the time of the bank failure (banks with $1.0 billion or more in assets are listed here). Assets of the banks listed here are figures provided by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States

Intellipedia is an online system for collaborative data sharing used by the United States Intelligence Community (IC). It was established as a pilot project in late 2005 and formally announced in April 2006. Intellipedia consists of three wikis running on the separate JWICS (Intellipedia-TS), SIPRNet (Intellipedia-S), and DNI-U (Intellipedia-U) networks. The levels of classification allowed for information on the three wikis are Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS SCI), Secret (S), and Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU or FOUO) information, respectively. Each of the wikis is used by individuals with appropriate clearances from the 16 agencies of the US intelligence community and other national-security related organizations, including Combatant Commands and other federal departments. The wikis are not open to the public.

Intellipedia is a project of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (ICES) office headquartered in Fort Meade, Maryland. It includes information on the regions, people, and issues of interest to the communities using its host networks. Intellipedia uses MediaWiki, the same software used by the Wikipedia free-content encyclopedia project. To the contrary of mainstream Wikipedia, its intelligence analogue encourages editing that incorporates personal points of view regardless of rank as it was decided that, "much of the self-corrective knowledge in the Intelligence Community resides in personal points of view," and that, "not all good ideas originate at the top."

The Secret version connected to SIPRNet predominantly serves Department of Defense and the Department of State personnel, many of whom do not use the Top Secret JWICS network on a day-to-day basis. Users on unclassified networks can access Intellipedia from remote terminals outside their workspaces via a VPN, in addition to their normal workstations. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) users share information on the unclassified Intelink-U wiki.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/relativity

Gravity Probe B (GP-B) was a satellite-based experiment to test two unverified predictions of general relativity: the geodetic effect and frame-dragging. This was to be accomplished by measuring, very precisely, tiny changes in the direction of spin of four gyroscopes contained in an Earth-orbiting satellite at 650 km (400 mi) altitude, crossing directly over the poles.

The satellite was launched on 20 April 2004 on a Delta II rocket. The spaceflight phase lasted until 2005; Its aim was to measure spacetime curvature near Earth, and thereby the stress–energy tensor (which is related to the distribution and the motion of matter in space) in and near Earth. This provided a test of general relativity, gravitomagnetism and related models. The principal investigator was Francis Everitt.

Initial results confirmed the expected geodetic effect to an accuracy of about 1%. The expected frame-dragging effect was similar in magnitude to the current noise level (the noise being dominated by initially unmodeled effects due to nonuniform coatings on the gyroscopes). Work continued to model and account for these sources of error, thus permitting extraction of the frame-dragging signal. By August 2008, the frame-dragging effect had been confirmed to within 15% of the expected result, and the December 2008 NASA report indicated that the geodetic effect was confirmed to be better than 0.5%.

In an article published in the journal Physical Review Letters in 2011, the authors reported analysis of the data from all four gyroscopes results in a geodetic drift rate of −6601.8±18.3 mas/yr and a frame-dragging drift rate of −37.2±7.2 mas/yr, in good agreement with the general relativity predictions of −6606.1±0.28% mas/yr and −39.2±0.19% mas/yr, respectively.

WikimediaUI Dark mode is a gadget for enabling dark mode in modern browsers, based on experimental work of Wikimedia Design team members Volker E. and Alex Hollender in support by volunteer MusikAnimal and others.

Preview dark mode on the Main Page.

To enable, go to your gadget preferences, and enable the gadget "Dark mode toggle: Enable a toggle for using a light text on dark background color scheme".

You should now see a "Dark mode" switch at the top of pages. If you wish to enable/disable dark mode automatically based on your system colour scheme, add the following to your common.js page:

Any modern browser works with the only exception being Opera Mini, which lacks filter support.

The CSS was written with Wikipedia sites in mind (see phab:T221425) so experience on other wikis may not be optimal.

To set up the gadget on your wiki, ask an interface-admin to do the following:

• Create the pages MediaWiki:Gadget-dark-mode.css, MediaWiki:Gadget-dark-mode-toggle-pagestyles.css and MediaWiki:Gadget-dark-mode-toggle.js by copying the English Wikipedia versions. Adjust the localisation strings as appropriate.
  • While the CSS pages need to be copied to avoid FOUCs arising from slow load, for the JS page you may instead dynamically load the enwiki version:
  • Replace "Dark mode" and "Light mode" after content: in the CSS files with the localised labels.
• Add to MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition:
• Add the following to the bottom of MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition. This is an internal gadget which can't be marked as hidden, for technical reasons.
• Create the gadget description pages MediaWiki:Gadget-dark-mode-toggle (the main "dark mode" gadget) and MediaWiki:Gadget-dark-mode (this is the internal gadget – make sure the description is such that users don't enable this one).

The gadget has several limitations due to the way it achieves the dark mode. Known issues are:

• It can be slow, especially on larger pages.
• Images are colorshifted
• Native Emojis are inverted
• Text only SVGs with transparent backgrounds can be unreadable (as they are treated as images, and thus do not get dark mode)
• The color legends in captions, might not match the colors of images for maps and/or graphs.

Most problems are due to how the gadget was implemented. It first inverts and colorshifts the entire page, and then tries to 'undo' the areas you do not want inverted, such as images. The benefit to this approach is that it takes care of dark mode everywhere, without having hundreds and hundreds of lines of codes for all the nooks and crannies of Wikipedia/MediaWiki that have their own styling. The downside are the problems listed.

For an example of what to expect on invert "dark mode" and double-invert "undo", see the question pictures in this StackOverflow question. The question uses the same invert and hue-rotate filter used by this extension.

🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Ethnic groups 🔗 Israel 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Dacia

The Sea Peoples are a purported seafaring confederation that attacked ancient Egypt and other regions of the East Mediterranean prior to and during the Late Bronze Age collapse (1200–900 BCE). Following the creation of the concept in the nineteenth century, it became one of the most famous chapters of Egyptian history, given its connection with, in the words of Wilhelm Max Müller: "the most important questions of ethnography and the primitive history of classic nations". Their origins undocumented, the various Sea Peoples have been proposed to have originated from places that include western Asia Minor, the Aegean, the Mediterranean islands and Southern Europe. Although the archaeological inscriptions do not include reference to a migration, the Sea Peoples are conjectured to have sailed around the eastern Mediterranean and invaded Anatolia, Syria, Phoenicia, Canaan, Cyprus and Egypt toward the end of the Bronze Age.

French Egyptologist Emmanuel de Rougé first used the term peuples de la mer (literally "peoples of the sea") in 1855 in a description of reliefs on the Second Pylon at Medinet Habu documenting Year 8 of Ramesses III. Gaston Maspero, de Rougé's successor at the Collège de France, subsequently popularized the term "Sea Peoples" — and an associated migration-theory — in the late 19th century. Since the early 1990s, his migration theory has been brought into question by a number of scholars.

The Sea Peoples remain unidentified in the eyes of most modern scholars and hypotheses regarding the origin of the various groups are the source of much speculation. Existing theories variously propose equating them with several Aegean tribes, raiders from Central Europe, scattered soldiers who turned to piracy or who had become refugees, and links with natural disasters such as earthquakes or climatic shifts.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics

In probability theory and intertemporal portfolio choice, the Kelly criterion (or Kelly strategy or Kelly bet), also known as the scientific gambling method, is a formula for bet sizing that leads almost surely to higher wealth compared to any other strategy in the long run (i.e. approaching the limit as the number of bets goes to infinity). The Kelly bet size is found by maximizing the expected value of the logarithm of wealth, which is equivalent to maximizing the expected geometric growth rate. The Kelly Criterion is to bet a predetermined fraction of assets, and it can seem counterintuitive. It was described by J. L. Kelly Jr, a researcher at Bell Labs, in 1956.

For an even money bet, the Kelly criterion computes the wager size percentage by multiplying the percent chance to win by two, then subtracting one-hundred percent. So, for a bet with a 70% chance to win the optimal wager size is 40% of available funds.

The practical use of the formula has been demonstrated for gambling and the same idea was used to explain diversification in investment management. In the 2000s, Kelly-style analysis became a part of mainstream investment theory and the claim has been made that well-known successful investors including Warren Buffett and Bill Gross use Kelly methods. William Poundstone wrote an extensive popular account of the history of Kelly betting.