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π The Third Wave Experiment
The Third Wave was an experimental social movement created by California high school history teacher Ron Jones in 1967 to explain how the German population could accept the actions of the Nazi regime during the Second World War. While he taught his students about Nazi Germany during his "Contemporary World History" class, Jones found it difficult to explain how the German people could accept the actions of the Nazis, and decided to create a social movement as a demonstration of the appeal of fascism. Over the course of five days, Jones β a member of the SDS, Cubberley United Student Movement sponsor and Black Panthers supporter β conducted a series of exercises in his classroom emphasizing discipline and community, intended to model certain characteristics of the Nazi movement. As the movement grew outside his class and began to number in the hundreds, Jones began to feel that the movement had spiraled out of control. He convinced the students to attend a rally where he claimed that the classroom project was part of a nationwide movement, and that the announcement of a Third Wave presidential candidate would be televised. Upon their arrival, the students were presented with a blank channel. Jones told his students of the true nature of the movement as an experiment in fascism, and presented to them a short film discussing the actions of Nazi Germany.
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- "The Third Wave (Experiment)" | 2023-11-08 | 58 Upvotes 21 Comments
- "The Third Wave Experiment" | 2020-08-10 | 50 Upvotes 14 Comments
π Nipkow disk
A Nipkow disk (sometimes Anglicized as Nipkov disk; patented in 1884), also known as scanning disk, is a mechanical, rotating, geometrically operating image scanning device, patented in 1885 by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow. This scanning disk was a fundamental component in mechanical television through the 1920s and 1930s.
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- "Nipkow Disk" | 2020-11-27 | 39 Upvotes 10 Comments
- "Nipkow disk" | 2019-08-02 | 42 Upvotes 20 Comments
π Black Hole Electron
In physics, there is a speculative hypothesis that, if there were a black hole with the same mass, charge and angular momentum as an electron, it would share other properties of the electron. Most notably, Brandon Carter showed in 1968 that the magnetic moment of such an object would match that of an electron. This is interesting because calculations ignoring special relativity and treating the electron as a small rotating sphere of charge give a magnetic moment roughly half the experimental value (see Gyromagnetic ratio).
However, Carter's calculations also show that a would-be black hole with these parameters would be "super-extremal". Thus, unlike a true black hole, this object would display a naked singularity, meaning a singularity in spacetime not hidden behind an event horizon. It would also give rise to closed timelike curves.
Standard quantum electrodynamics (QED), currently the most comprehensive theory of particles, treats the electron as a point particle. There is no evidence that the electron is a black hole (or naked singularity) or not. Furthermore, since the electron is quantum-mechanical in nature, any description purely in terms of general relativity is paradoxical until a better model based on understanding of quantum nature of blackholes and gravitational behaviour of quantum particles is developed by research. Hence, the idea of a black hole electron remains strictly hypothetical.
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- "Black Hole Electron" | 2023-09-06 | 64 Upvotes 38 Comments
- "Black Hole Electron" | 2023-03-11 | 19 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Senet: board game from predynastic and ancient Egypt
Senet (or senat) is a board game from ancient Egypt, whose original rules are the subject of conjecture. The oldest hieroglyph resembling a senet game dates to around 3100 BC. The full name of the game in Egyptian is thought to have been zn.t n.t αΈ₯Λb, meaning the "game of passing".
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- "Senet" | 2021-07-19 | 293 Upvotes 119 Comments
- "Senet: board game from predynastic and ancient Egypt" | 2016-02-14 | 33 Upvotes 5 Comments
π 2019 in spaceflight
This article documents notable spaceflight events during the year 2019.
π The Great Illyrian Revolt
The Bellum Batonianum (Latin for 'War of the Batos') was a military conflict fought in the Roman province of Illyricum in the 1st century AD, in which an alliance of native peoples of the two regions of Illyricum, Dalmatia and Pannonia, revolted against the Romans. The rebellion began among native peoples who had been recruited as auxiliary troops for the Roman army. They were led by Bato the Daesitiate, a chieftain of the Daesitiatae in the central part of present-day Bosnia and Herzegovina, and were later joined by the Breuci, a tribe in Pannonia led by Bato the Breucian. Many other tribes in Illyria also joined the revolt.
The Romans referred to the conflict as Bellum Batonianum ("Batonian War") after these two leaders with the same name; Velleius Paterculus called it the Pannonian and Dalmatian War because it involved both regions of Illyricum, and in English it has also been called the Great Illyrian Revolt, PannonianβDalmatian uprising, and Bato uprising.
The four-year war lasted from AD 6 to AD 9 and witnessed a large deployment of Roman forces in the province, with whole armies operating across the western Balkans and fighting on more than one front. In AD 8, the Breuci of the Sava valley surrendered, but it took a winter blockade and another season of fighting before the surrender in Dalmatia in AD 9. The Roman historian Suetonius described the uprising as the most difficult conflict faced by Rome since the Punic Wars two centuries earlier.
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- "The Great Illyrian Revolt" | 2023-03-13 | 81 Upvotes 61 Comments
π Retrofuturism
Retrofuturism (adjective retrofuturistic or retrofuture) is a movement in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced in an earlier era. If futurism is sometimes called a "science" bent on anticipating what will come, retrofuturism is the remembering of that anticipation. Characterized by a blend of old-fashioned "retro styles" with futuristic technology, retrofuturism explores the themes of tension between past and future, and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology. Primarily reflected in artistic creations and modified technologies that realize the imagined artifacts of its parallel reality, retrofuturism can be seen as "an animating perspective on the world". However, it has also manifested in the worlds of fashion, architecture, design, music, literature, film, and video games.
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- "Retrofuturism" | 2020-05-05 | 171 Upvotes 78 Comments
π Domain Fronting
Domain fronting is a technique for Internet censorship circumvention that uses different domain names in different communication layers of an HTTPS connection to discreetly connect to a different target domain than is discernable to third parties monitoring the requests and connections.
Due to quirks in security certificates, the redirect systems of the content delivery networks (CDNs) used as 'domain fronts', and the protection provided by HTTPS, censors are typically unable to differentiate circumvention ("domain-fronted") traffic from overt non-fronted traffic for any given domain name. As such they are forced to either allow all traffic to the domain frontβincluding circumvention trafficβor block the domain front entirely, which may result in expensive collateral damage and has been likened to "blocking the rest of the Internet".
Domain fronting does not conform to HTTP standards that require the SNI extension and HTTP Host header to contain the same domain. Many large cloud service providers, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, actively prohibit domain fronting, which has limited it as a censorship bypass technique. Pressure from censors in Russia and China is thought to have contributed to these prohibitions, but domain fronting can also be used maliciously.
A newer variant of domain fronting, domain hiding, passes an encrypted request for one resource (say, a website), concealed behind an unencrypted (plaintext) request for another resource whose DNS records are stored in the same cloud. It has much the same effect. Refraction networking is an application of the broader principle.
π Kelvin's hydroelectric generator
The Kelvin water dropper, invented by Scottish scientist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) in 1867, is a type of electrostatic generator. Kelvin referred to the device as his water-dropping condenser. The apparatus is variously called the Kelvin hydroelectric generator, the Kelvin electrostatic generator, or Lord Kelvin's thunderstorm. The device uses falling water to generate voltage differences by electrostatic induction occurring between interconnected, oppositely charged systems. This eventually leads to an electric arc discharging in the form of a spark. It is used in physics education to demonstrate the principles of electrostatics.
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- "Kelvin's hydroelectric generator" | 2009-04-09 | 17 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Matrioshka Brain
A Matrioshka brain is a hypothetical megastructure of immense computational capacity powered by a Dyson sphere. It was proposed in 1997 by Robert J. Bradbury (1956β2011). It is an example of a Class B stellar engine, employing the entire energy output of a star to drive computer systems. This concept derives its name from the nesting Russian Matryoshka dolls. The concept was deployed by Bradbury in the anthology Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge.
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- "Matrioshka Brain" | 2021-08-04 | 12 Upvotes 2 Comments