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🔗 United States 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Oregon 🔗 Crime 🔗 Religion 🔗 Biology 🔗 Terrorism

The 1984 Rajneeshee bioterror attack was the food poisoning of 751 individuals in The Dalles, Oregon, through the deliberate contamination of salad bars at ten local restaurants with Salmonella. A group of prominent followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later known as Osho) led by Ma Anand Sheela had hoped to incapacitate the voting population of the city so that their own candidates would win the 1984 Wasco County elections. The incident was the first and is the single largest bioterrorist attack in United States history.

Having previously gained political control of Antelope, Oregon, Rajneesh's followers, who were based in nearby Rajneeshpuram, sought election to two of the three seats on the Wasco County Circuit Court that were up for election in November 1984. Fearing they would not gain enough votes, some Rajneeshpuram officials decided to incapacitate voters in The Dalles, the largest population center in Wasco County. The chosen biological agent was Salmonella enterica Typhimurium, which was first delivered through glasses of water to two County Commissioners and then, on a larger scale, at salad bars and in salad dressing.

As a result of the attack, 751 people contracted salmonellosis, 45 of whom were hospitalized, but none died. Although an initial investigation by the Oregon Public Health Division and the Centers for Disease Control did not rule out deliberate contamination, the agents and contamination were only confirmed a year later. On February 28, 1985, Congressman James H. Weaver gave a speech in the United States House of Representatives in which he "accused the Rajneeshees of sprinkling Salmonella culture on salad bar ingredients in eight restaurants".

At a press conference in September 1985, Rajneesh accused several of his followers of participation in this and other crimes, including an aborted plan in 1985 to assassinate a United States Attorney, and he asked state and federal authorities to investigate. Oregon Attorney General David B. Frohnmayer set up an interagency task force, composed of Oregon State Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and executed search warrants in Rajneeshpuram. A sample of bacteria matching the contaminant that had sickened the town residents was found in a Rajneeshpuram medical laboratory. Two leading Rajneeshpuram officials were convicted on charges of attempted murder and served 29 months of 20-year sentences in a minimum-security federal prison.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science

🔗 Biography 🔗 Computing

Francesco Vianello (30 August 1952 – 3 May 2009), better known by his nickname Fravia (sometimes +Fravia or Fravia+), was a software reverse engineer, and hacker, known for his web archive of reverse engineering techniques and papers. He is also known for his work on steganography. He had taught on subjects such as data mining, anonymity, stalking, klebing, advertisement reversing and ad-busting.

Fravia spoke six languages (including Latin) and had a degree in the history of the early Middle Ages. He was an expert in linguistics-related informatics. For five years he made available a large quantity of material related to reverse engineering through his website, which also hosted the advice of reverse engineering experts, known as reversers, who provided tutorials and essays on how to hack software code as well as advice related to the assembly and disassembly of applications, and software protection reversing.

Fravia was a professor at the High Cracking University (+HCU), founded by Old Red Cracker (+ORC), a legendary figure in reverse engineering, to conduct research into Reverse Code Engineering. The addition of the "+" sign in front of the nickname of a reverser signified membership in the +HCU. His website was known as "+Fravia's Pages of Reverse Engineering" and he used it to challenge programmers as well as the wider society to "reverse engineer" the "brainwashing of a corrupt and rampant materialism". In its heyday, his website was receiving millions of visitors per year and its influence was "widespread".

His web presence dates from 1995 when he first got involved in research related to reverse code engineering (RCE). In 2000 he changed his focus and concentrated on advanced internet search methods and the reverse engineering of search engine code.

His websites "www.fravia.com" and "www.searchlores.org" contained a large amount of specialised information related to data mining. His website "www.searchlores.org" has been called a "very useful instrument for searching the web", and his "www.fravia.com" site has been described as "required reading for any spy wanting to go beyond simple Google searches."

🔗 Religion 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Christianity/theology 🔗 Christianity/Calvinism

The Protestant work ethic, also known as the Calvinist work ethic or the Puritan work ethic, is a work ethic concept in scholarly sociology, economics and historiography. It emphasizes that diligence, discipline, and frugality are a result of a person's subscription to the values espoused by the Protestant faith, particularly Calvinism.

The phrase was initially coined in 1905 by Max Weber in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber asserted that Protestant ethics and values, along with the Calvinist doctrines of asceticism and predestination, enabled the rise and spread of capitalism. It is one of the most influential and cited books in sociology, although the thesis presented has been controversial since its release. In opposition to Weber, historians such as Fernand Braudel and Hugh Trevor-Roper assert that the Protestant work ethic did not create capitalism and that capitalism developed in pre-Reformation Catholic communities. Just as priests and caring professionals are deemed to have a vocation (or "calling" from God) for their work, according to the Protestant work ethic the "lowly" workman also has a noble vocation which he can fulfill through dedication to his work.

The concept is often credited with helping to define the societies of Northern, Central and Northwestern Europe as well as the United States of America.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Delphi is an event-driven programming language based on Object Pascal and an associated integrated development environment (IDE) for rapid application development of desktop, mobile, web, and console software, currently developed and maintained by Embarcadero Technologies.

Delphi's compilers generate native code for Microsoft Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and Linux (x64 only). Since 2016, there have been new releases of Delphi every six months, with new platforms being added approximately every second release.

Delphi includes a code editor, a visual designer, an integrated debugger, a source code control component, and support for third-party plugins. The code editor features Code Insight (code completion), Error Insight (real-time error-checking), and refactoring. The visual forms designer has traditionally used Visual Component Library (VCL) for native Windows development, but the FireMonkey (FMX) platform was later added for cross-platform development. Database support in Delphi is very strong. A Delphi project of a million lines of code can compile in a few seconds – one benchmark compiled 170,000 lines per second.

Delphi was originally developed by Borland as a rapid application development tool for Windows as the successor of Turbo Pascal. Delphi added full object-oriented programming to the existing language, and since then the language has grown to support generics and anonymous methods, and native Component Object Model (COM) support. In 2006, Borland’s developer tools section was transferred from Borland to a wholly owned subsidiary known as CodeGear, which was sold to Embarcadero Technologies in 2008. In 2015, Embarcadero was purchased by Idera Software, but the Embarcadero mark was retained for the developer tools division.

Delphi and its C++ counterpart, C++Builder, are interoperable. They share many core components, notably the IDE, VCL, and much of the runtime library. In addition, they can be used jointly in a project. For example, C++Builder 6 and later can consume Delphi source code and C++ in one project, while packages compiled with C++Builder can be used from within Delphi. In 2007, the products were released jointly as RAD Studio, a shared host for Delphi and C++Builder, which can be purchased with either or both.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Military history 🔗 British Empire 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history 🔗 Commonwealth

Operation Legacy was a British Colonial Office (later Foreign Office) programme to destroy or hide files, to prevent them being inherited by its ex-colonies. It ran from the 1950s until the 1970s, when the decolonisation of the British Empire was at its height.

MI5 or Special Branch agents vetted all secret documents in the colonial administrations to find those that those that could embarrass the British government—for instance by showing racial or religious bias. They identified 8,800 files to conceal from at least 23 countries and territories in the 1950s and 1960s, and destroyed them or sent them to the United Kingdom. Precise instructions were given for methods to be used for destruction, including burning and dumping at sea. Some of the files detailed torture methods used against opponents of the colonial administrations, such as during the Mau Mau Uprising.

As decolonisation progressed, British officials were keen to avoid a repeat of the embarrassment that had been caused by the overt burning of documents that took place in New Delhi in 1947, which had been covered by Indian news sources. On 3 May 1961, Iain Macleod, who was Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote a telegram to all British embassies to advise them on the best way to retrieve and dispose of sensitive documents. To prevent post-colonial governments from ever learning about Operation Legacy, officials were required to dispatch "destruction certificates" to London. In some cases, as the handover date approached, the immolation task proved so huge that colonial administrators warned the Foreign Office that there was a danger of "celebrating Independence Day with smoke."

Academic study of the end of the British Empire has been assisted in recent years by the declassification of the migrated archives in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 141 series. After the UK government admitted in 2011 that it had secret documents related to the Mau Mau Uprising, it began to declassify documents and by November 2013 some 20,000 files had been declassified. These documents can now be accessed at the National Archives in Kew, London.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Biology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Plants

Tendril perversion, often referred to in context as simply perversion, is a geometric phenomenon found in helical structures such as plant tendrils, in which a helical structure forms that is divided into two sections of opposite chirality, with a transition between the two in the middle. A similar phenomenon can often be observed in kinked helical cables such as telephone handset cords.

The phenomenon was known to Charles Darwin, who wrote in 1865,

A tendril ... invariably becomes twisted in one part in one direction, and in another part in the opposite direction... This curious and symmetrical structure has been noticed by several botanists, but has not been sufficiently explained.

The term "tendril perversion" was coined by Goriely and Tabor in 1998 based on the word perversion found in the 19th Century science literature. "Perversion" is a transition from one chirality to another and was known to James Clerk Maxwell, who attributed it to the topologist J. B. Listing.

Tendril perversion can be viewed as an example of spontaneous symmetry breaking, in which the strained structure of the tendril adopts a configuration of minimum energy while preserving zero overall twist.

Tendril perversion has been studied both experimentally and theoretically. Gerbode et al. have made experimental studies of the coiling of cucumber tendrils. A detailed study of a simple model of the physics of tendril perversion was made by MacMillen and Goriely in the early 2000s. Liu et al. showed in 2014 that "the transition from a helical to a hemihelical shape, as well as the number of perversions, depends on the height to width ratio of the strip's cross-section."

Generalized tendril perversions were put forward by Silva et al., to include perversions that can be intrinsically produced in elastic filaments, leading to a multiplicity of geometries and dynamical properties.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Microsoft 🔗 Reference works

Microsoft Encarta was a digital multimedia encyclopedia published by Microsoft Corporation from 1993 to 2009. Originally sold on CD-ROM or DVD, it was also later available on the World Wide Web via an annual subscription – although later many articles could also be viewed free online with advertisements. By 2008, the complete English version, Encarta Premium, consisted of more than 62,000 articles, numerous photos and illustrations, music clips, videos, interactive content, timelines, maps, atlases and homework tools.

Microsoft published similar encyclopedias under the Encarta trademark in various languages, including German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese. Localized versions contained contents licensed from national sources and more or less content than the full English version. For example, the Dutch version had content from the Dutch Winkler Prins encyclopedia.

In March 2009, Microsoft announced it was discontinuing both the Encarta disc and online versions. The MSN Encarta site was closed on October 31, 2009, in all countries except Japan, where it was closed on December 31, 2009. Microsoft continued to operate the Encarta online dictionary until 2011.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Germany 🔗 Military history 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Military history/Intelligence 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/German military history 🔗 Military history/European military history

In the statistical theory of estimation, the German tank problem consists of estimating the maximum of a discrete uniform distribution from sampling without replacement. In simple terms, suppose we have an unknown number of items which are sequentially numbered from 1 to N. We take a random sample of these items and observe their sequence numbers; the problem is to estimate N from these observed numbers.

The problem can be approached using either frequentist inference or Bayesian inference, leading to different results. Estimating the population maximum based on a single sample yields divergent results, whereas estimation based on multiple samples is a practical estimation question whose answer is simple (especially in the frequentist setting) but not obvious (especially in the Bayesian setting).

The problem is named after its historical application by Allied forces in World War II to the estimation of the monthly rate of German tank production from very few data. This exploited the manufacturing practice of assigning and attaching ascending sequences of serial numbers to tank components (chassis, gearbox, engine, wheels), with some of the tanks eventually being captured in battle by Allied forces.

🔗 Astronomy

A Messier marathon is an attempt, usually organized by amateur astronomers, to find as many Messier objects as possible during one night. The Messier catalogue was compiled by French astronomer Charles Messier during the late 18th century and consists of 110 relatively bright deep-sky objects (galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters).