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🔗 Computing 🔗 China 🔗 East Asia 🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Hong Kong

Han unification is an effort by the authors of Unicode and the Universal Character Set to map multiple character sets of the so-called CJK languages into a single set of unified characters. Han characters are a common feature of written Chinese (hanzi), Japanese (kanji), and Korean (hanja).

Modern Chinese, Japanese and Korean typefaces typically use regional or historical variants of a given Han character. In the formulation of Unicode, an attempt was made to unify these variants by considering them different glyphs representing the same "grapheme", or orthographic unit, hence, "Han unification", with the resulting character repertoire sometimes contracted to Unihan.

Unihan can also refer to the Unihan Database maintained by the Unicode Consortium, which provides information about all of the unified Han characters encoded in the Unicode Standard, including mappings to various national and industry standards, indices into standard dictionaries, encoded variants, pronunciations in various languages, and an English definition. The database is available to the public as text files and via an interactive website. The latter also includes representative glyphs and definitions for compound words drawn from the free Japanese EDICT and Chinese CEDICT dictionary projects (which are provided for convenience and are not a formal part of the Unicode Standard).

🔗 Crime 🔗 Death 🔗 Korea 🔗 Korea/North Korea 🔗 Malaysia

On 13 February 2017, the eldest son of Kim Jong-il and half-brother of Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-nam, was attacked with the nerve agent VX at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia. He had been exiled from North Korea in 2003 and had been living abroad.

Following his visit to the resort island Langkawi, Kim Jong-nam had arrived at terminal 2 sometime before 9:00 a.m. to take a 10:50 a.m. AirAsia flight to Macau. At approximately 9:00 a.m., two women attacked Kim Jong-nam with the VX nerve agent. He died about 15 to 20 minutes later.

The women were identified as Siti Aisyah, an Indonesian and Đoàn Thị Hương, a Vietnamese. Both were charged with the murder of Kim Jong-nam. The charges were dropped, although Hương pled guilty to "voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means" and received a sentence of three years and four months. Four North Korean suspects left the airport shortly after the assassination and reached Pyongyang without being arrested. Other North Koreans were arrested but were released without charge.

It is widely believed that Kim Jong-nam was murdered on the orders of Kim Jong-un.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Computing 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 New York City 🔗 Women scientists 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Women's History 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Pritzker Military Library

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (née Murray December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.

Prior to joining the Navy, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College. Hopper attempted to enlist in the Navy during World War II but was rejected because she was 34 years old. She instead joined the Navy Reserves. Hopper began her computing career in 1944 when she worked on the Harvard Mark I team led by Howard H. Aiken. In 1949, she joined the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and was part of the team that developed the UNIVAC I computer. At Eckert–Mauchly she began developing the compiler. She believed that a programming language based on English was possible. Her compiler converted English terms into machine code understood by computers. By 1952, Hopper had finished her program linker (originally called a compiler), which was written for the A-0 System. During her wartime service, she co-authored three papers based on her work on the Harvard Mark 1.

In 1954, Eckert–Mauchly chose Hopper to lead their department for automatic programming, and she led the release of some of the first compiled languages like FLOW-MATIC. In 1959, she participated in the CODASYL consortium, which consulted Hopper to guide them in creating a machine-independent programming language. This led to the COBOL language, which was inspired by her idea of a language being based on English words. In 1966, she retired from the Naval Reserve, but in 1967 the Navy recalled her to active duty. She retired from the Navy in 1986 and found work as a consultant for the Digital Equipment Corporation, sharing her computing experiences.

The U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper was named for her, as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC. During her lifetime, Hopper was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities across the world. A college at Yale University was renamed in her honor. In 1991, she received the National Medal of Technology. On November 22, 2016, she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

🔗 Culture

Bohm Dialogue (also known as Bohmian Dialogue or "Dialogue in the Spirit of David Bohm") is a freely flowing group conversation in which participants attempt to reach a common understanding, experiencing everyone's point of view fully, equally and nonjudgementally. This can lead to new and deeper understanding. The purpose is to solve the communication crises that face society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness. It utilizes a theoretical understanding of the way thoughts relate to universal reality. It is named after physicist David Bohm who originally proposed this form of dialogue.

🔗 Law 🔗 England

In criminal law, Blackstone's ratio (also known as the Blackstone ratio or Blackstone's formulation) is the idea that:

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

As expressed by the English jurist William Blackstone in his seminal work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s.

The idea subsequently became a staple of legal thinking in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions and continues to be a topic of debate. There is also a long pre-history of similar sentiments going back centuries in a variety of legal traditions. The message that government and the courts must err on the side of innocence has remained constant.

🔗 Australia 🔗 Australia/Western Australia 🔗 Australia/Australian biota 🔗 Spiders

Number 16 (c. 1974 – 2016), also known as #16, was a wild female trapdoor spider (Gaius villosus, family Idiopidae) that lived in North Bungulla Reserve near Tammin, Western Australia. She lived an estimated 43 years and became the longest-lived spider on record, beating a 28-year-old tarantula who previously held the title. When Number 16 finally died in 2016, it was not of old age but from a parasitic wasp sting.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

Diffie–Hellman key exchange is a method of securely exchanging cryptographic keys over a public channel and was one of the first public-key protocols as conceived by Ralph Merkle and named after Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman. DH is one of the earliest practical examples of public key exchange implemented within the field of cryptography.

Traditionally, secure encrypted communication between two parties required that they first exchange keys by some secure physical means, such as paper key lists transported by a trusted courier. The Diffie–Hellman key exchange method allows two parties that have no prior knowledge of each other to jointly establish a shared secret key over an insecure channel. This key can then be used to encrypt subsequent communications using a symmetric key cipher.

Diffie–Hellman is used to secure a variety of Internet services. However, research published in October 2015 suggests that the parameters in use for many DH Internet applications at that time are not strong enough to prevent compromise by very well-funded attackers, such as the security services of large governments.

The scheme was published by Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman in 1976, but in 1997 it was revealed that James H. Ellis, Clifford Cocks, and Malcolm J. Williamson of GCHQ, the British signals intelligence agency, had previously shown in 1969 how public-key cryptography could be achieved.

Although Diffie–Hellman key agreement itself is a non-authenticated key-agreement protocol, it provides the basis for a variety of authenticated protocols, and is used to provide forward secrecy in Transport Layer Security's ephemeral modes (referred to as EDH or DHE depending on the cipher suite).

The method was followed shortly afterwards by RSA, an implementation of public-key cryptography using asymmetric algorithms.

Expired U.S. Patent 4,200,770 from 1977 describes the now public-domain algorithm. It credits Hellman, Diffie, and Merkle as inventors.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Brazil 🔗 Indigenous peoples of the Americas

The Man of the Hole (also known as "Indian of the Hole", Portuguese: índio do buraco) is a man indigenous to Brazil who lives alone in the Amazon rainforest. He is believed to be the last surviving member of his tribe. It is unknown what language he speaks or what his tribe was called. The term "Man of the Hole" is a nickname used by officials and the media; his real name is unknown.

🔗 Chess 🔗 Hungary 🔗 Turkey

The Turk, also known as the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player (German: Schachtürke, "chess Turk"; Hungarian: A Török), was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854 it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hoax. Constructed and unveiled in 1770 by Wolfgang von Kempelen (Hungarian: Kempelen Farkas; 1734–1804) to impress the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, the mechanism appeared to be able to play a strong game of chess against a human opponent, as well as perform the knight's tour, a puzzle that requires the player to move a knight to occupy every square of a chessboard exactly once.

The Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess master hiding inside to operate the machine. With a skilled operator, the Turk won most of the games played during its demonstrations around Europe and the Americas for nearly 84 years, playing and defeating many challengers including statesmen such as Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin. The device was later purchased in 1804 and exhibited by Johann Nepomuk Mälzel. The chess masters who secretly operated it included Johann Allgaier, Boncourt, Aaron Alexandre, William Lewis, Jacques Mouret, and William Schlumberger, but the operators within the mechanism during Kempelen's original tour remain a mystery.

🔗 Geology 🔗 Geology/Meteorites

Thokcha (Tibetan: ཐོག་ལྕགས, Wylie: thog lcags; also alternatively Tibetan: གནམ་ལྕགས, Wylie: gnam lcags) are tektites and meteorites which serve as amulets. Typically high in iron content, these are traditionally believed to contain a magical, protective power comparable to Tibetan dzi beads. Most thokcha are made of a copper alloy.

The use of meteoric iron has been common throughout the history of ferrous metallurgy. Historically, thokcha were prized for the metallurgical fabrication of weapons, musical instruments, and sacred tools, such as the phurba. Thokcha are an auspicious addition in the metallurgical fabrication of sacred objects cast from panchaloha.

Writer Robert Beer regards meteoric iron as "the supreme substance for forging the physical representation of the vajra or other iron weapons." It was believed that these amulets had been tempered by the celestial gods before falling to Earth. Beer describes the metal falling from space as a metaphor for "the indivisibility of form and emptiness." Many meteorite fragments can be found in Tibet due to its high altitude and open landscape.