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🔗 Philately

Letterlocking is the act of folding and securing a written message which could be on papyrus, parchment, or paper, so that it does not require an envelope or additional enclosure. It is a document security tradition which utilizes folding and cutting. The process dates to the 13th century in Western history, corresponding with the availability of flexible writing paper. Letterlocking uses small slits, tab, and holes placed directly into a letter, which combined with folding techniques are used to secure the letter ("letterpacket"), preventing reading the letter without breaking seals or slips, providing a means of tamper resistance. These folds and holes may be additionally secured with string and sealing wax. A Scottish diplomat in Italy, William Keith of Delny, sent letters to James VI of Scotland which would tear in two if not opened with care.

Intricate letterlocking works contain artistic elements, demonstrating more than a utilitarian purpose. While the use of sealing techniques may have been limited to ecclesiastic and the nobility, letterlocking was historically performed by all classes of writers. An individual could also be recognised by their personal technique of folding, as was the case with Jane Whorwood, of whose letter Charles I, imprisoned in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, wrote: "This Note [...] I know, by the fowldings [...] that it is written by [Mrs Whorwood]".

Letterlocking is also a discipline focusing on "the materially engineered security and privacy of letters, both as a technology and a historically evolving tradition."

🔗 Internet 🔗 Media 🔗 Cuba

El Paquete Semanal ("The Weekly Package") or El Paquete is a one terabyte collection of digital material distributed since around 2008 on the underground market in Cuba as a substitute for broadband Internet. Since 2015, it has been the primary source of entertainment for millions of Cubans, as Internet in Cuba has been suppressed for many years with only about a 38.8% Internet penetration rate as of 2018. El Paquete Semanal has its own page that is running in the United States, where one could view its contents and is consistently updated every week.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Belarus

On 11 March 2022, Mark Izraylevich Bernstein (Russian: Марк Израйлевич Бернштейн), a Belarusian blogger and editor of the Russian-language Wikipedia based in Minsk, was detained by the Belarusian GUBOPiK security force after online accusations of violating the 2022 Russian fake news law for his editing of Wikipedia articles on the topic of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was sentenced to 15 days' administrative arrest under Article 24.3 of the Administrative Code of Belarus (for disobedience to police officers).

🔗 History 🔗 Military history 🔗 British Empire 🔗 Military history/World War I 🔗 Politics of the United Kingdom 🔗 Arab world 🔗 Jewish history 🔗 Israel 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Former countries 🔗 Military history/Middle Eastern military history 🔗 Former countries/Ottoman Empire 🔗 British Library

The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917.

Immediately following their declaration of war on the Ottoman Empire in November 1914, the British War Cabinet began to consider the future of Palestine; within two months a memorandum was circulated to the Cabinet by a Zionist Cabinet member, Herbert Samuel, proposing the support of Zionist ambitions in order to enlist the support of Jews in the wider war. A committee was established in April 1915 by British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith to determine their policy towards the Ottoman Empire including Palestine. Asquith, who had favoured post-war reform of the Ottoman Empire, resigned in December 1916; his replacement David Lloyd George favoured partition of the Empire. The first negotiations between the British and the Zionists took place at a conference on 7 February 1917 that included Sir Mark Sykes and the Zionist leadership. Subsequent discussions led to Balfour's request, on 19 June, that Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann submit a draft of a public declaration. Further drafts were discussed by the British Cabinet during September and October, with input from Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews but with no representation from the local population in Palestine.

By late 1917, in the lead-up to the Balfour Declaration, the wider war had reached a stalemate, with two of Britain's allies not fully engaged: the United States had yet to suffer a casualty, and the Russians were in the midst of a revolution with Bolsheviks taking over the government. A stalemate in southern Palestine was broken by the Battle of Beersheba on 31 October 1917. The release of the final declaration was authorised on 31 October; the preceding Cabinet discussion had referenced perceived propaganda benefits amongst the worldwide Jewish community for the Allied war effort.

The opening words of the declaration represented the first public expression of support for Zionism by a major political power. The term "national home" had no precedent in international law, and was intentionally vague as to whether a Jewish state was contemplated. The intended boundaries of Palestine were not specified, and the British government later confirmed that the words "in Palestine" meant that the Jewish national home was not intended to cover all of Palestine. The second half of the declaration was added to satisfy opponents of the policy, who had claimed that it would otherwise prejudice the position of the local population of Palestine and encourage antisemitism worldwide by "stamping the Jews as strangers in their native lands". The declaration called for safeguarding the civil and religious rights for the Palestinian Arabs, who composed the vast majority of the local population, and also the rights and political status of the Jewish communities in other countries outside of Palestine. The British government acknowledged in 1939 that the local population's wishes and interests should have been taken into account, and recognised in 2017 that the declaration should have called for the protection of the Palestinian Arabs' political rights.

The declaration had many long-lasting consequences. It greatly increased popular support for Zionism within Jewish communities worldwide, and became a core component of the British Mandate for Palestine, the founding document of Mandatory Palestine. It indirectly led to the emergence of Israel and is considered a principal cause of the ongoing Israeli–Palestinian conflict, often described as the world's most intractable conflict. Controversy remains over a number of areas, such as whether the declaration contradicted earlier promises the British made to the Sharif of Mecca in the McMahon–Hussein correspondence.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Systems 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics

In the social sciences, unintended consequences (sometimes unanticipated consequences or unforeseen consequences) are outcomes of a purposeful action that are not intended or foreseen. The term was popularised in the twentieth century by American sociologist Robert K. Merton.

Unintended consequences can be grouped into three types:

• Unexpected benefit: A positive unexpected benefit (also referred to as luck, serendipity or a windfall).
• Unexpected drawback: An unexpected detriment occurring in addition to the desired effect of the policy (e.g., while irrigation schemes provide people with water for agriculture, they can increase waterborne diseases that have devastating health effects, such as schistosomiasis).
• Perverse result: A perverse effect contrary to what was originally intended (when an intended solution makes a problem worse).

🔗 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.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Smithsonian Institution

During the 1940s–1960s, nude photographs were routinely taken of incoming freshmen at elite colleges in the United States, such as the Ivy Leagues and Seven Sisters schools. Purportedly taken to assess the posture and health of the students, the bulk of the photographs were produced by W. H. Sheldon, a psychologist and eugenicist who believed non-white races were intellectually stunted. Sheldon developed a theory that measuring a human body could predict the subject's intelligence, temperament, and moral worth. The inspiration to take mass photos for his research came from the founder of eugenics, Francis Galton, who proposed such a photo archive for the British population.

The institutions that had "posture photo" programs included Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Vassar, Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Swarthmore, University of Pennsylvania, Hotchkiss, Syracuse, University of California, University of Wisconsin, Purdue, Brooklyn College, the Oregon Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and others. The years that each institution participated vary. Some schools, such as Harvard and Wellesley, had their own practice of taking posture photos well before Sheldon's involvement, as early as the 1880s.

Most of the photo archives were destroyed voluntarily by the schools in the 1960s and '70s, after ending their posture photo practices. After Sheldon's death in 1977, his personal archive of over 20,000 photos and negatives was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution's National Anthropological Archives. These were never displayed, and could only be viewed by researchers who petitioned the chief archivist. After a write-up in the New York Times Magazine in 1995, the Smithsonian sealed the documents completely, and destroyed the Yale archives upon request.

Some celebrities have mentioned their experiences getting their posture photo taken, including Sylvia Plath, Nora Ephron, Dick Cavett and Judith Martin (the etiquette expert known as Miss Manners). In the 2020s posture photos of the actors James Franciscus and Bill Hinnant resurfaced and were sold on eBay.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophical literature 🔗 Books 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Continental philosophy

Simulacra and Simulation (French: Simulacres et Simulation) is a 1981 philosophical treatise by Jean Baudrillard, in which the author seeks to examine the relationships between reality, symbols, and society, in particular the significations and symbolism of culture and media involved in constructing an understanding of shared existence.

Simulacra are copies that depict things that either had no original, or that no longer have an original. Simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time.

🔗 Economics

The men's underwear index (MUI) is an economic index that can supposedly detect the beginnings of a recovery during an economic slump. The premise is that men's underwear are a necessity in normal economic times and sales remain stable. During a severe downturn, demand for these goods changes as new purchases are deferred. Hence, men's purchasing habits for underwear (and that of their spouses on their behalf) is thought to be a good indicator of discretionary spending for consumption at large especially during turnaround periods.

This indicator is noted for being followed by former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics

Dialetheism (from Greek δι- di- 'twice' and ἀλήθεια alḗtheia 'truth') is the view that there are statements that are both true and false. More precisely, it is the belief that there can be a true statement whose negation is also true. Such statements are called "true contradictions", dialetheia, or nondualisms.

Dialetheism is not a system of formal logic; instead, it is a thesis about truth that influences the construction of a formal logic, often based on pre-existing systems. Introducing dialetheism has various consequences, depending on the theory into which it is introduced. A common mistake resulting from this is to reject dialetheism on the basis that, in traditional systems of logic (e.g., classical logic and intuitionistic logic), every statement becomes a theorem if a contradiction is true, trivialising such systems when dialetheism is included as an axiom. Other logical systems, however, do not explode in this manner when contradictions are introduced; such contradiction-tolerant systems are known as paraconsistent logics. Dialetheists who do not want to allow that every statement is true are free to favour these over traditional, explosive logics.

Graham Priest defines dialetheism as the view that there are true contradictions. Jc Beall is another advocate; his position differs from Priest's in advocating constructive (methodological) deflationism regarding the truth predicate.