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🔗 United States 🔗 Companies 🔗 Law 🔗 United States/Delaware

The Corporation Trust Center, 1209 North Orange Street, is a single-story building located in the Brandywine neighborhood of Wilmington, Delaware, USA, operated by CT Corporation, a subsidiary of Dutch multinational services firm Wolters Kluwer. This is CT Corporation's location in the state of Delaware for providing "registered agent services." In 2012 it was the registered agent address of at least 285,000 separate businesses.

Many companies are incorporated in Delaware for its business-friendly General Corporation Law and it was estimated in 2012 that 9.5 billion dollars of potential taxes had not been levied over the past decade, due to an arrangement known as the "Delaware loophole." Companies formed in Delaware are required to have an address in the state at which process may be served. Therefore, Delaware entities with no physical office in the state must have a registered agent with a Delaware address. Notable companies represented by CT at this location include Google, American Airlines, Apple Inc., General Motors, The Coca-Cola Company, Walmart, Yum! Brands, Verizon, and about 430 of Deutsche Bank's more than 2,000 subsidiary companies and special purpose companies. Both Former President of the United States Donald Trump, and his opponent in the 2016 United States presidential election, Hillary Clinton, have registered companies at the center.

🔗 Computing

Anton is a massively parallel supercomputer designed and built by D. E. Shaw Research in New York, first running in 2008. It is a special-purpose system for molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of proteins and other biological macromolecules. An Anton machine consists of a substantial number of application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), interconnected by a specialized high-speed, three-dimensional torus network.

Unlike earlier special-purpose systems for MD simulations, such as MDGRAPE-3 developed by RIKEN in Japan, Anton runs its computations entirely on specialized ASICs, instead of dividing the computation between specialized ASICs and general-purpose host processors.

Each Anton ASIC contains two computational subsystems. Most of the calculation of electrostatic and van der Waals forces is performed by the high-throughput interaction subsystem (HTIS). This subsystem contains 32 deeply pipelined modules running at 800 MHz arranged much like a systolic array. The remaining calculations, including the bond forces and the fast Fourier transforms (used for long-range electrostatics), are performed by the flexible subsystem. This subsystem contains four general-purpose Tensilica cores (each with cache and scratchpad memory) and eight specialized but programmable SIMD cores called geometry cores. The flexible subsystem runs at 400 MHz.

Anton's network is a 3D torus and thus each chip has 6 inter-node links with a total in+out bandwidth of 607.2 Gbit/s. An inter-node link is composed of two equal one-way links (one traveling in each direction), with each one-way link having 50.6 Gbit/s of bandwidth. Each one-way link is composed of 11 lanes, where a lane is a differential pair of wires signaling at 4.6 Gbit/s. The per-hop latency in Anton's network is 50 ns. Each ASIC is also attached to its own DRAM bank, enabling large simulations.

The performance of a 512-node Anton machine is over 17,000 nanoseconds of simulated time per day for a protein-water system consisting of 23,558 atoms. In comparison, MD codes running on general-purpose parallel computers with hundreds or thousands of processor cores achieve simulation rates of up to a few hundred nanoseconds per day on the same chemical system. The first 512-node Anton machine became operational in October 2008. The multiple petaFLOP, distributed-computing project Folding@home has achieved similar aggregate ensemble simulation timescales, comparable to the total time of a single continuous simulation on Anton, specifically achieving the 1.5-millisecond range in January 2010.

The Anton supercomputer is named after Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who is often referred to as "the father of microscopy" because he built high-precision optical instruments and used them to visualize a wide variety of organisms and cell types for the first time.

The ANTON 2 machine with four 512 nodes and substantially increased speed and problem size has been described.

The National Institutes of Health have supported an ANTON for the biomedical research community at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, Carnegie-Mellon University, and recently approved support of an ANTON 2 there.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Philately 🔗 Amateur radio

An international reply coupon (IRC) is a coupon that can be exchanged for one or more postage stamps representing the minimum postage for an unregistered priority airmail letter of up to twenty grams sent to another Universal Postal Union (UPU) member country. IRCs are accepted by all UPU member countries.

UPU member postal services are obliged to exchange an IRC for postage, but are not obliged to sell them.

The purpose of the IRC is to allow a person to send someone in another country a letter, along with the cost of postage for a reply. If the addressee is within the same country, there is no need for an IRC because a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) or return postcard will suffice; but if the addressee is in another country an IRC removes the necessity of acquiring foreign postage or sending appropriate currency.

🔗 Computing

In computer programming, program slicing is the computation of the set of program statements, the program slice, that may affect the values at some point of interest, referred to as a slicing criterion. Program slicing can be used in debugging to locate source of errors more easily. Other applications of slicing include software maintenance, optimization, program analysis, and information flow control.

Slicing techniques have been seeing a rapid development since the original definition by Mark Weiser. At first, slicing was only static, i.e., applied on the source code with no other information than the source code. Bogdan Korel and Janusz Laski introduced dynamic slicing, which works on a specific execution of the program (for a given execution trace). Other forms of slicing exist, for instance path slicing.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Neuroscience

The free energy principle tries to explain how (biological) systems maintain their order (non-equilibrium steady-state) by restricting themselves to a limited number of states. It says that biological systems minimise a free energy function of their internal states, which entail beliefs about hidden states in their environment. The implicit minimisation of variational free energy is formally related to variational Bayesian methods and was originally introduced by Karl Friston as an explanation for embodied perception in neuroscience, where it is also known as active inference.

The free energy principle is that systems—those that are defined by their enclosure in a Markov blanket—try to minimize the difference between their model of the world and their sense and associated perception. This difference can be described as "surprise" and is minimized by continuous correction of the world model of the system. As such, the principle is based on the Bayesian idea of the brain as an “inference engine”. Friston added a second route to minimization: action. By actively changing the world into the expected state, systems can also minimize the free energy of the system. Friston assumes this to be the principle of all biological reaction.. Friston also believes his principle applies to mental disorders as well as to artificial intelligence. AI implementations based on the active inference principle have shown advantages over other methods.

The free energy principle has been criticized for being very difficult to understand, even for experts. Discussions of the principle have also been criticized as invoking metaphysical assumptions far removed from a testable scientific prediction, making the principle unfalsifiable. In a 2018 interview, Friston acknowledged that the free energy principle is not properly falsifiable: "the free energy principle is what it is — a principle. Like Hamilton’s Principle of Stationary Action, it cannot be falsified. It cannot be disproven. In fact, there’s not much you can do with it, unless you ask whether measurable systems conform to the principle."

🔗 Video games 🔗 Film 🔗 Television 🔗 Science Fiction

Black Mirror: Bandersnatch is a 2018 interactive film in the science fiction anthology series Black Mirror. It was written by series creator Charlie Brooker and directed by David Slade. Netflix released the standalone film on 28 December 2018.

In Bandersnatch, viewers make decisions for the main character, the young programmer Stefan Butler (Fionn Whitehead), who is adapting a fantasy choose-your-own-adventure novel into a video game in 1984. Other characters include Mohan Thakur (Asim Chaudhry) and Colin Ritman (Will Poulter), both of whom work at a video game company, Butler's father, Peter (Craig Parkinson), and Butler's therapist, Dr. Haynes (Alice Lowe). The film is based on a planned Imagine Software video game of the same name which went unreleased after the company filed for bankruptcy. It also alludes to Lewis Carroll's own works that feature the bandersnatch creature. A piece of science fiction and horror, Bandersnatch incorporates meta-commentary and rumination on free will.

Brooker and executive producer Annabel Jones were approached by Netflix about making an interactive film in May 2017, during which time Netflix had several interactive projects for children underway. Difficulty in writing the highly non-linear script led to the creation of a bespoke program called Branch Manager for Netflix; the unique nature of the content required adaptations in the platform's use of cache memory. Filming and production took longer than for typical Black Mirror episodes, resulting in the show's fifth series being delayed. A quickly-deleted tweet from a Netflix account about the release of Bandersnatch led to widespread media speculation throughout December which Netflix declined to comment on. The trailer for Bandersnatch was released on 27 December 2018, a day before the film was released. Critical reception for the film was generally positive, though some found the interactive nature to be too gimmicky for a proper Black Mirror narrative. In 2019, the episode won two Emmy Awards, including the Outstanding Television Movie award.

🔗 History of Science 🔗 Transhumanism

The Drexler–Smalley debate on molecular nanotechnology was a public dispute between K. Eric Drexler, the originator of the conceptual basis of molecular nanotechnology, and Richard Smalley, a recipient of the 1996 Nobel prize in Chemistry for the discovery of the nanomaterial buckminsterfullerene. The dispute was about the feasibility of constructing molecular assemblers, which are molecular machines which could robotically assemble molecular materials and devices by manipulating individual atoms or molecules. The concept of molecular assemblers was central to Drexler's conception of molecular nanotechnology, but Smalley argued that fundamental physical principles would prevent them from ever being possible. The two also traded accusations that the other's conception of nanotechnology was harmful to public perception of the field and threatened continued public support for nanotechnology research.

The debate was carried out from 2001 to 2003 through a series of published articles and open letters. It began with a 2001 article by Smalley in Scientific American, which was followed by a rebuttal published by Drexler and coworkers later that year, and two open letters by Drexler in early 2003. The debate was concluded in late 2003 in a "Point–Counterpoint" feature in Chemical & Engineering News in which both parties participated.

The debate has been often cited in the history of nanotechnology due to the fame of its participants and its commentary on both the technical and social aspects of nanotechnology. It has also been widely criticized for its adversarial tone, with Drexler accusing Smalley of publicly misrepresenting his work, and Smalley accusing Drexler of failing to understand basic science, causing commentators to go so far as to characterize the tone of the debate as similar to "a pissing match" and "reminiscent of [a] Saturday Night Live sketch".

🔗 Apple Inc./Macintosh 🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

OpenDoc is a multi-platform software componentry framework standard created by Apple for compound documents, intended as an alternative to Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). As part of the AIM alliance between Apple, IBM, and Motorola, OpenDoc is one of Apple's earliest experiments with open standards and collaborative development methods with other companies—effectively starting an industry consortium. Active development was discontinued in March 1997.

The core idea of OpenDoc is to create small, reusable components, responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing, or browsing an FTP server. OpenDoc provides a framework in which these components can run together, and a document format for storing the data created by each component. These documents can then be opened on other machines, where the OpenDoc frameworks substitute suitable components for each part, even if they are from different vendors. In this way users can "build up" their documents from parts. Since there is no main application and the only visible interface is the document itself, the system is known as document centered.

At its inception, it was envisioned that OpenDoc would allow smaller, third-party developers to enter the then-competitive office software market, able to build one good editor instead of having to provide a complete suite.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Astronomy/Astronomical objects

2024 YR₄ is an asteroid between 40 and 90 metres (130 and 300 ft) in diameter, classified as an Apollo-type (Earth-crossing) near-Earth object. It was discovered by the Chilean station of the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) on 27 December 2024. As of 5 February 2025, 2024 YR₄ was rated 3 on the Torino scale with a 1 in 53 (1.9%) chance of impacting Earth on 22 December 2032. NASA gives a Palermo Technical Impact Hazard Scale rating of −0.40 for 2024 YR₄, which corresponds to an impact hazard of 39.8% of the background hazard level. The discovery has triggered the first step in planetary defense responses, in which all available telescopes are asked to gather data about the object and United Nations-endorsed space agencies are prompted to begin planning for asteroid threat mitigation.

Preliminary analysis of spectra and photometric timeseries of this asteroid suggests it is a stony S-type or L-type asteroid with a rotation period near 19.5 minutes. The asteroid previously made a close approach of 828,800 kilometres (515,000 miles; 2.156 lunar distances) to Earth on 25 December 2024 (two days before its discovery), and is now moving away from Earth. It will make its next close approach around 17 December 2028. By early April 2025 and until June 2028, 2024 YR₄ will have moved too far away from Earth to be observed by ground-based telescopes. Space-based infrared telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope may be able to observe 2024 YR₄ when it is far from Earth.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Germany 🔗 Physics 🔗 Women scientists 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Women writers 🔗 Physics/Biographies 🔗 Toys