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🔗 Rome

Secessio plebis (withdrawal of the commoners, or secession of the plebs) was an informal exercise of power by Rome's plebeian citizens, similar in concept to the general strike. During the secessio plebis, the plebs would abandon the city en masse and leave the patrician order to themselves. Therefore, a secessio meant that all shops and workshops would shut down and commercial transactions would largely cease. This was an effective strategy in the Conflict of the Orders due to strength in numbers; plebeian citizens made up the vast majority of Rome's populace and produced most of its food and resources, while a patrician citizen was a member of the minority upper class, the equivalent of the landed gentry of later times. Authors report different numbers for how many secessions there were. Cary & Scullard state there were five between 494 BC and 287 BC.

🔗 Companies 🔗 Internet 🔗 Crime 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Websites 🔗 Websites/Computing 🔗 Numismatics/Cryptocurrency 🔗 Cryptocurrency

Mt. Gox was a bitcoin exchange based in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. Launched in July 2010, by 2013 and into 2014 it was handling over 70% of all bitcoin (BTC) transactions worldwide, as the largest bitcoin intermediary and the world's leading bitcoin exchange.

In February 2014, Mt. Gox suspended trading, closed its website and exchange service, and filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors. In April 2014, the company began liquidation proceedings.

Mt. Gox announced that approximately 850,000 bitcoins belonging to customers and the company were missing and likely stolen, an amount valued at more than $450 million at the time. Although 200,000 bitcoins have since been "found", the reasons for the disappearance—theft, fraud, mismanagement, or a combination of these—were initially unclear. New evidence presented in April 2015 by Tokyo security company WizSec led them to conclude that "most or all of the missing bitcoins were stolen straight out of the Mt. Gox hot wallet over time, beginning in late 2011."

🔗 Companies 🔗 Finance & Investment

Renaissance Technologies LLC is an American hedge fund firm based in East Setauket, New York, on Long Island, which specializes in systematic trading using quantitative models derived from mathematical and statistical analyses. The firm is regarded as one of the "most secretive and successful" hedge funds in the world. Their signature Medallion fund is famed for the best record in investing history. Renaissance was founded in 1982 by James Simons, an award-winning mathematician and former Cold War code breaker.

In 1988, the firm established its most profitable portfolio, the Medallion Fund, which used an improved and expanded form of Leonard Baum's mathematical models, improved by algebraist James Ax, to explore correlations from which they could profit. Jim Berlekamp was instrumental in evolving trading to shorter-dated, pure systems driven decision-making. The hedge fund was named Medallion in honor of the math awards that Simons and Ax had won.

Renaissance's flagship Medallion fund, which is run mostly for fund employees, is famed for the best track record on Wall Street, returning more than 66 percent annualized before fees and 39 percent after fees over a 30-year span from 1988 to 2018. Renaissance offers two portfolios to outside investors—Renaissance Institutional Equities Fund (RIEF) and Renaissance Institutional Diversified Alpha (RIDA).

Simons ran Renaissance until his retirement in late 2009. The company is now run by Peter Brown (after Robert Mercer resigned). Both of them were computer scientists specializing in computational linguistics who joined Renaissance in 1993 from IBM Research. Simons continues to play a role at the firm as non-executive chairman and remains invested in its funds, particularly the secretive and consistently profitable black-box strategy known as Medallion. Because of the success of Renaissance in general and Medallion in particular, Simons has been described as the best money manager on earth.

🔗 Trains 🔗 Bridges and Tunnels

The Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT; German: Gotthard-Basistunnel, Italian: Galleria di base del San Gottardo, Romansh: Tunnel da basa dal Son Gottard) is a railway tunnel through the Alps in Switzerland. It opened on 1 June 2016, and full service began on 11 December 2016. With a route length of 57.09 km (35.5 mi), it is the world's longest railway and deepest traffic tunnel and the first flat, low-level route through the Alps. It lies at the heart of the Gotthard axis and constitutes the third tunnel connecting the cantons of Uri and Ticino, after the Gotthard Tunnel and the Gotthard Road Tunnel.

The link consists of two single-track tunnels connecting Erstfeld (Uri) with Bodio (Ticino) and passing below Sedrun (Graubünden). It is part of the New Railway Link through the Alps (NRLA) project, which also includes the Ceneri Base Tunnel further south (scheduled to open late 2020) and the Lötschberg Base Tunnel on the other main north–south axis. It is referred to as a "base tunnel" since it bypasses most of the existing Gotthard railway line, a winding mountain route opened in 1882 across the Saint-Gotthard Massif, which was operating at its capacity before the opening of the GBT. The new base tunnel establishes a direct route usable by high-speed rail and heavy freight trains.

The main purpose of the Gotthard Base Tunnel is to increase local transport capacity through the Alpine barrier, especially for freight, notably on the Rotterdam–Basel–Genoa corridor, and more specifically to shift freight volumes from trucks to freight trains. This both significantly reduces the danger of fatal road crashes involving trucks, and reduces the environmental damage caused by heavy trucks. The tunnel provides a faster connection between the canton of Ticino and the rest of Switzerland, as well as between northern and southern Europe, cutting the Basel/Zürich–Lugano–Milan journey time for passenger trains by one hour (and from Lucerne to Bellinzona by 45 minutes).

After 64 percent of Swiss voters accepted the NRLA project in a 1992 referendum, first preparatory and exploratory work began in 1996. The official start of construction began on 4 November 1999 at Amsteg. Drilling operations in the eastern tunnel were completed on 15 October 2010 in a breakthrough ceremony broadcast live on Swiss TV, and in the western tunnel on 23 March 2011. The tunnel's constructor, AlpTransit Gotthard AG, originally planned to hand over the tunnel to Swiss Federal Railways (SBB CFF FFS) in operating condition in December 2016 but, on 4 February 2014, the handover date was changed to 5 June 2016 with the start of an 850-day opening countdown calendar on the AlpTransit homepage. As of 1998, the total projected cost of the project was CHF 6.323 billion; as of December 2015, the final cost is projected as CHF 9.560 billion. Nine people died during construction.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Popular Culture

A self-replicating machine is a type of autonomous robot that is capable of reproducing itself autonomously using raw materials found in the environment, thus exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature. Such machines are often featured in works of science fiction.

🔗 Lists 🔗 Songs

This is a list of musical compositions or pieces of music that have unusual time signatures. "Unusual" is here defined to be any time signature other than simple time signatures with top numerals of 2, 3, or 4 and bottom numerals of 2, 4, or 8, and compound time signatures with top numerals of 6, 9, or 12 and bottom numerals 4, 8, or 16.

The conventions of musical notation typically allow for more than one written representation of a particular piece. The chosen time signature largely depends upon musical context, personal taste of the composer or transcriber, and the graphic layout on the written page. Frequently, published editions were written in a specific time signature to visually signify the tempo for slow movements in symphonies, sonatas, and concerti.

A perfectly consistent unusual metrical pattern may be notated in a more familiar time signature that does not correspond to it. For example, the Passacaglia from Britten's opera Peter Grimes consists of variations over a recurring bass line eleven beats in length but is notated in ordinary ⁴
₄ time, with each variation lasting 2+3⁄4 bars, and therefore commencing each time one crotchet earlier in the bar than the preceding one.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Law 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Websites 🔗 Computing/Networking

In computer networking, HTTP 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons is an error status code of the HTTP protocol to be displayed when the user requests a resource which cannot be served for legal reasons, such as a web page censored by a government. The number 451 is a reference to Ray Bradbury's 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451, in which books are outlawed. 451 intends to provide more information than 403 Forbidden, which is often used for the same purpose. This status code is standardized in RFC 7725.

Examples of situations where an HTTP 451 error code could be displayed include web pages deemed a danger to national security, or web pages deemed to violate copyright, privacy, blasphemy laws, or any other law or court order.

The RFC is specific that a 451 response does not indicate whether the resource exists but requests for it have been blocked, if the resource has been removed for legal reasons and no longer exists, or even if the resource has never existed, but any discussion of its topic has been legally forbidden (see superinjunction). Some sites have previously returned HTTP 404 (Not Found) or similar if they are not legally permitted to disclose that the resource has been removed. Such a tactic is used in the United Kingdom by some internet service providers utilising the Internet Watch Foundation blacklist, returning a 404 message or another error message instead of showing a message indicating the site is blocked.

The status code was formally proposed in 2013 by Tim Bray, following earlier informal proposals by Chris Applegate in 2008 and Terence Eden in 2012. It was approved by the IESG on December 18, 2015. It was published as RFC 7725 in February 2016.

HTTP 451 was mentioned by the BBC's From Our Own Correspondent program, as an indication of the effects of sanctions on Sudan and the inability to access Airbnb, iOS's App Store, or other Western web services.

After introduction of the GDPR in European Economic Area (EEA) many websites located outside EEA started to serve HTTP 451 instead of trying to comply with this new privacy law.

🔗 Mathematics

The dangerous bend or caution symbol ☡ (U+2621 ☡ CAUTION SIGN) was created by the Nicolas Bourbaki group of mathematicians and appears in the margins of mathematics books written by the group. It resembles a road sign that indicates a "dangerous bend" in the road ahead, and is used to mark passages tricky on a first reading or with an especially difficult argument.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Plants

Synsepalum dulcificum is a plant in the Sapotaceae family, native to tropical Africa. It is known for its berry that, when eaten, causes sour foods (such as lemons and limes) subsequently consumed to taste sweet. This effect is due to miraculin. Common names for this species and its berry include miracle fruit, miracle berry, miraculous berry, sweet berry, and in West Africa, where the species originates, agbayun (in Yoruba), taami, asaa, and ledidi.

The berry itself has a low sugar content and a mildly sweet tang. It contains a glycoprotein molecule, with some trailing carbohydrate chains, called miraculin. When the fleshy part of the fruit is eaten, this molecule binds to the tongue's taste buds, causing sour foods to taste sweet. At neutral pH, miraculin binds and blocks the receptors, but at low pH (resulting from ingestion of sour foods) miraculin binds proteins and becomes able to activate the sweet receptors, resulting in the perception of sweet taste. This effect lasts until the protein is washed away by saliva (up to about 30 minutes).

The names miracle fruit and miracle berry are shared by Gymnema sylvestre and Thaumatococcus daniellii, which are two other species used to alter the perceived sweetness of foods.

🔗 Statistics 🔗 Books 🔗 Project-independent assessment

How to Lie with Statistics is a book written by Darrell Huff in 1954, presenting an introduction to statistics for the general reader. Not a statistician, Huff was a journalist who wrote many how-to articles as a freelancer.

The book is a brief, breezy illustrated volume outlining the misuse of statistics and errors in the interpretation of statistics, and how errors create incorrect conclusions.

In the 1960s and 1970s, it became a standard textbook introduction to the subject of statistics for many college students. It has become one of the best-selling statistics books in history, with over one and a half million copies sold in the English-language edition. It has also been widely translated.

Themes of the book include "Correlation does not imply causation" and "Using random sampling." It also shows how statistical graphs can be used to distort reality. For example, by truncating the bottom of a line or bar chart so that differences seem larger than they are. Or, by representing one-dimensional quantities on a pictogram by two- or three-dimensional objects to compare their sizes so that the reader forgets that the images do not scale the same way the quantities do.

The original edition contained illustrations by artist Irving Geis. In a UK edition, Geis' illustrations were replaced by cartoons by Mel Calman.