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🔗 Biology 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Science

Xenobots, named after the African clawed frog (Xenopus laevis), are synthetic organisms that are automatically designed by computers to perform some desired function and built by combining together different biological tissues.

Xenobots are less than a 1 millimeter (0.039 inches) wide and composed of just two things: skin cells and heart muscle cells, both of which are derived from stem cells harvested from early (blastula stage) frog embryos. The skin cells provide rigid support and the heart cells act as small motors, contracting and expanding in volume to propel the xenobot forward. The shape of a xenobot's body, and its distribution of skin and heart cells, are automatically designed in simulation to perform a specific task, using a process of trial and error (an evolutionary algorithm). Xenobots have been designed to walk, swim, push pellets, carry payloads, and work together in a swarm to aggregate debris scattered along the surface of their dish into neat piles. They can survive for weeks without food and heal themselves after lacerations.

🔗 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.

🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

The traitorous eight was a group of eight employees who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. William Shockley had in 1956 recruited a group of young PhD graduates with the goal to develop and produce new semiconductor devices. While Shockley had received a Nobel Prize in Physics and was an experienced researcher and teacher, his management of the group was authoritarian and unpopular. This was accentuated by Shockley's research focus not proving fruitful. After the demand for Shockley to be replaced was rebuffed, the eight left to form their own company.

Shockley described their leaving as a "betrayal". The eight who left Shockley Semiconductor were Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, and Sheldon Roberts. In August 1957, they reached an agreement with Sherman Fairchild, and on September 18, 1957, they formed Fairchild Semiconductor. The newly founded Fairchild Semiconductor soon grew into a leader of the semiconductor industry. In 1960, it became an incubator of Silicon Valley and was directly or indirectly involved in the creation of dozens of corporations, including Intel and AMD. These many spin-off companies came to be known as "Fairchildren".

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Songs 🔗 Electronic music

"The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet" (also known as "Like the Wind", "Blind the Wind", "Check It In, Check It Out" or "Take It In, Take It Out" after lines in fan-interpreted lyrics; acronymed as TMMSOTI or TMS) is the nickname given to an unidentified song recording, most likely composed in the 1980s.

The song was reportedly recorded from a Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) broadcast sometime in the mid-1980s, likely during or after 1984. Since 2019, this song has been the subject of a viral Internet phenomenon, with many users of sites such as Reddit and Discord involved in a collaborative effort to search for the origins of the song. Through the search, other unknown songs were discovered. Users have coined the term "Lostwave" to describe songs of this nature.

🔗 Books 🔗 Writing systems

An abecedarium (also known as an abecedary or ABCs or simply an ABC) is an inscription consisting of the letters of an alphabet, almost always listed in order. Typically, abecedaria (or abecedaries) are practice exercises.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology

In epistemology, the Münchhausen trilemma is a thought experiment used to demonstrate the impossibility of proving any truth, even in the fields of logic and mathematics. If it is asked how any given proposition is known to be true, proof may be provided. Yet that same question can be asked of the proof, and any subsequent proof. The Münchhausen trilemma is that there are only three options when providing further proof in response to further questioning:

• The circular argument, in which the proof of some proposition is supported only by that proposition
• The regressive argument, in which each proof requires a further proof, ad infinitum
• The axiomatic argument, which rests on accepted precepts which are merely asserted rather than defended

The trilemma, then, is the decision among the three equally unsatisfying options.

The name Münchhausen-Trilemma was coined by the German philosopher Hans Albert in 1968 in reference to a trilemma of "dogmatism versus infinite regress versus psychologism" used by Karl Popper. It is a reference to the problem of "bootstrapping", based on the story of Baron Munchausen (in German, "Münchhausen") pulling himself and the horse on which he was sitting out of a mire by his own hair.

It is also known as Agrippa's trilemma or the Agrippan trilemma after a similar argument reported by Sextus Empiricus, which was attributed to Agrippa the Skeptic by Diogenes Laërtius, as well as Fries's trilemma after German philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries. Sextus' argument, however, consists of five (not three) "modes". Popper in his original 1935 publication mentions neither Sextus nor Agrippa, but attributes his trilemma to Fries.

In contemporary epistemology, advocates of coherentism are supposed to accept the "circular" horn of the trilemma; foundationalists rely on the axiomatic argument. The view that accepts infinite regress is called infinitism.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 International relations 🔗 Germany 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Gerald Ford 🔗 Politics 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Biography/politics and government 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Cold War 🔗 Chile 🔗 Football 🔗 Football/American and Canadian soccer

Henry Alfred Kissinger (; German: [ˈkɪsɪŋɐ]; born Heinz Alfred Kissinger, May 27, 1923) is an American diplomat, political theorist, geopolitical consultant, and politician who served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. For his actions negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam, Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize under controversial circumstances.

Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. Upon arriving in the United States, he excelled academically and graduated from Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively.

A practitioner of Realpolitik, Kissinger played a prominent role in United States foreign policy between 1969 and 1977, pioneering the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, orchestrating an opening of relations with the People's Republic of China, engaging in what became known as shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East to end the Yom Kippur War, and negotiating the Paris Peace Accords, which ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. Kissinger has also been associated with such controversial policies as the U.S. bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, U.S. involvement in the 1973 Chilean military coup, a "green light" to Argentina's military junta for their Dirty War, and U.S. support for Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War despite a genocide being perpetrated by Pakistan. After leaving government, he formed Kissinger Associates, an international geopolitical consulting firm. Kissinger has written over a dozen books on diplomatic history and international relations.

Kissinger remains a controversial and polarizing figure in U.S. politics, both venerated by some as a highly effective U.S. Secretary of State and condemned by others for allegedly tolerating or supporting war crimes committed by allied nation states during his tenure. A 2015 survey of top international relations scholars, conducted by College of William & Mary, ranked Kissinger as the most effective U.S. secretary of state in the 50 years to 2015. A centenarian, Kissinger is the oldest living former U.S. Cabinet member and the last surviving member of Nixon's Cabinet. The previous oldest cabinet member was George Shultz, who died at the age of 100 in February 2021.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Computing/Software

DRAKON is an algorithmic visual programming and modeling language developed within the Buran space project following ergonomic design principles. The language provides a uniform way to represent flowcharts of any complexity that are easy to read and understand.

The DRAKON Editor, which was released in September 2011, is an implementation of the language available in the public domain. It can be used for creating documentation, or for creating visual programs that can be converted to source code in other languages.

Unlike UML's philosophy, DRAKON's language philosophy is based on being augmented if needed, by using a hybrid language, which can be illustrated as "incrustating code snippets from text language used into shape DRAKON requires". This way, DRAKON always remains a simple visual language that can be used as an augmentation for a programmer who is interested in making their own project code easier to support or other long-term needs for example improving the ergonomics of the coding process or to making code easier to review and understand.

The name DRAKON is the Russian acronym for "Дружелюбный Русский Алгоритмический [язык], Который Обеспечивает Наглядность", which translates to "Friendly Russian algorithmic [language] that illustrates (or provides clarity)". The word "наглядность" (pronounced approximately as "naa-glya-dno-st-th") refers to a concept or idea being easy to imagine and understand, and may be translated as "clarity".

The DRAKON language can be used both as a modelling/"markup" language (which is considered a standalone "pure DRAKON" program) and as a programming language (as part of a hybrid language).

Integration of a stricter, "academic", variant of a markup language into programming, such as provided by DRAKON, adds syntactic sugar allowing users of different programming languages to comprehend each other's contributions to the overall project and even provide commentary if needed.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Time

The Day of the Programmer is an international professional day that is celebrated on the 256th (hexadecimal 100th, or the 2⁸th) day of each year (September 13 during common years and on September 12 in leap years). It is officially recognized in Russia.

The number 256 (2⁸) was chosen because it is the number of distinct values that can be represented with a byte, a value well known to programmers. 256 is also the highest power of two that is less than 365, the number of days in a common year.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Poetry 🔗 United Kingdom

The person from Porlock was an unwelcome visitor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his composition of the poem Kubla Khan in 1797. Coleridge claimed to have perceived the entire course of the poem in a dream (possibly an opium-induced haze), but was interrupted by this visitor from Porlock while in the process of writing it. Kubla Khan, only 54 lines long, was never completed. Thus "person from Porlock", "man from Porlock", or just "Porlock" are literary allusions to unwanted intruders who disrupt inspired creativity.