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🔗 Internet 🔗 Marketing & Advertising

Domain tasting is the practice of temporarily registering a domain under the five-day Add Grace Period at the beginning of the registration of an ICANN-regulated second-level domain. During this period, a registration must be fully refunded by the domain name registry if cancelled. This was designed to address accidental registrations, but domain tasters use the Add Grace Period for illegal purposes.

🔗 Mathematics

In number theory, Mills' constant is defined as the smallest positive real number A such that the floor function of the double exponential function

${\displaystyle \lfloor A^{3^{n}}\rfloor }$

is a prime number, for all natural numbers n. This constant is named after William H. Mills who proved in 1947 the existence of A based on results of Guido Hoheisel and Albert Ingham on the prime gaps. Its value is unknown, but if the Riemann hypothesis is true, it is approximately 1.3063778838630806904686144926... (sequence A051021 in the OEIS).

🔗 Mathematics

In symbolic computation (or computer algebra), at the intersection of mathematics and computer science, the Risch algorithm is an algorithm for indefinite integration. It is used in some computer algebra systems to find antiderivatives. It is named after the American mathematician Robert Henry Risch, a specialist in computer algebra who developed it in 1968.

The algorithm transforms the problem of integration into a problem in algebra. It is based on the form of the function being integrated and on methods for integrating rational functions, radicals, logarithms, and exponential functions. Risch called it a decision procedure, because it is a method for deciding whether a function has an elementary function as an indefinite integral, and if it does, for determining that indefinite integral.

The complete description of the Risch algorithm takes over 100 pages. The Risch–Norman algorithm is a simpler, faster, but less powerful variant that was developed in 1976 by Arthur Norman.

🔗 Chemicals

Nitrophenyl pentadienal, nitrophenylpentadienal, NPPD, or METKA (Russian for "mark") colloquially known as "spy dust", is a chemical compound used as a tagging agent by the KGB during the Cold War Soviet Era. Soviet authorities in Moscow tracked Americans by applying an almost invisible powder to their clothing, cars, doorknobs and other objects. Some other variants of "spy dust" may have contained luminol and would glow under ultraviolet light.

🔗 Education

Forest kindergarten is a type of preschool education for children between the ages of three and six that is held almost exclusively outdoors. Whatever the weather, children are encouraged to play, explore and learn in a forest environment. The adult supervision is meant to assist rather than lead. It is also known as Waldkindergarten (in German), outdoor nursery, or nature kindergarten.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

In software development, the yo-yo problem is an anti-pattern that occurs when a programmer has to read and understand a program whose inheritance graph is so long and complicated that the programmer has to keep flipping between many different class definitions in order to follow the control flow of the program. It often happens in object-oriented programming. The term comes from comparing the bouncing attention of the programmer to the up-down movement of a toy yo-yo. Taenzer, Ganti, and Podar described the problem by name, explaining: "Often we get the feeling of riding a yoyo when we try to understand one of these message trees."

Most practices of object-oriented programming recommend keeping the inheritance graph as shallow as possible, in part to avoid this problem. The use of composition instead of inheritance is also strongly preferred, although this still requires that a programmer keep multiple class definitions in mind at once.

More generally, the yo-yo problem can also refer to any situation where a person must keep flipping between different sources of information in order to understand a concept.

Object-oriented design techniques such as documenting layers of the inheritance hierarchy can reduce the effect of this problem, as they collect in one place the information that the programmer is required to understand.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Networking

The Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP) is an augmented password-authenticated key agreement (PAKE) protocol, specifically designed to work around existing patents.

Like all PAKE protocols, an eavesdropper or man in the middle cannot obtain enough information to be able to brute force guess a password without further interactions with the parties for each guess. Furthermore, being an augmented PAKE protocol, the server does not store password-equivalent data. This means that an attacker who steals the server data cannot masquerade as the client unless they first perform a brute force search for the password.

In layman's terms, during SRP (or any other PAKE protocol) authentication, one party (the "client" or "user") demonstrates to another party (the "server") that they know the password, without sending the password itself nor any other information from which the password can be derived. The password never leaves the client and is unknown to the server.

Furthermore, the server also needs to know about the password (but not the password itself) in order to instigate the secure connection. This means that the server also authenticates itself to the client, without reliance on the user parsing complex URLs. This prevents Phishing.

🔗 Italy 🔗 Musical Instruments 🔗 Classical music

Intonarumori are experimental musical instruments invented and built by the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo between roughly 1910 and 1930. There were 27 varieties of intonarumori in total with different names.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 China 🔗 Islam 🔗 Central Asia 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities 🔗 2010s

The Xinjiang internment camps are internment camps operated by the government of Xinjiang and the Chinese Communist Party Provincial Standing Committee. Human Rights Watch says that they have been used to indoctrinate Uyghurs since 2017 as part of a "Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism", a policy announced in 2014 after the May 2014 Ürümqi attack. Xinjiang internment camps have been described as "the most extreme example of China's inhumane policies against Uighurs". They were established as what are officially called vocational education and training centers by the government of the People's Republic of China. According to researcher Adrian Zenz, mass internments peaked in 2018 and have abated somewhat since then, with officials shifting focus towards forced labor programs. Since then, the Chinese government has claimed the centers have been closed. Individuals in the camps have been shifted into the formal penal system, with remaining camps being converted into prisons or factories using forced labor.

The camps were established in 2017 by the administration of CCP general secretary Xi Jinping. Between 2017 and 2021 operations were led by CCP Politburo member and Xinjiang Party secretary Chen Quanguo. The camps are reportedly operated outside the Chinese legal system; many Uyghurs have reportedly been interned without trial and no charges have been levied against them (held in administrative detention). Local authorities are reportedly holding hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in these camps as well as members of other ethnic minority groups in China, for the stated purpose of countering extremism and terrorism and promoting social integration.

In July 2019, UN ambassadors of 37 countries, predominantly in Africa and Asia, signed a joint letter to the United Nations Human Rights Council defending China's policies in Xinjiang while 22 countries, mostly in North America and Europe, opposed them. In October 2020, 16 countries that defended China's policies in 2019 did not do so.

The internment of Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in the camps constituted the largest-scale arbitrary detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II. In 2020, it was estimated that Chinese authorities may have detained up to 1.8 million people, mostly Uyghurs but also including Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians, as well as some foreign citizens including Kazakhstanis, in these secretive internment camps located throughout the region. In September 2020, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) reported in its Xinjiang Data Project that construction of camps continued despite government claims that their function was winding down. There have been comparisons between the Xinjiang camps and the Cultural Revolution.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Skepticism

Time Cube was a personal web page, founded in 1997 by the self-proclaimed "wisest man on earth," Otis Eugene "Gene" Ray. It was a self-published outlet for Ray's theory of everything, called "Time Cube," which polemically claims that all modern sciences are participating in a worldwide conspiracy to teach lies, by omitting his theory's alleged truth that each day actually consists of four days occurring simultaneously. Alongside these statements, Ray described himself as a "godlike being with superior intelligence who has absolute evidence and proof" for his views. Ray asserted repeatedly and variously that "academia" had not taken Time Cube seriously.

Otis Eugene Ray died on March 18, 2015 at age 87. Ray's website domain names expired in August 2015, and Time Cube was last archived by the Wayback Machine on January 12, 2016. (January 10–14)