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🔗 Computing 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Brands 🔗 Food and drink/Beverages

OpenCola is a brand of open-source cola, where the instructions for making it are freely available and modifiable. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe. It was launched in 2001 by free software P2P company Opencola, to promote their open-source software concept.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Cognitive science

Functional fixedness is a cognitive bias that limits a person to use an object only in the way it is traditionally used. The concept of functional fixedness originated in Gestalt psychology, a movement in psychology that emphasizes holistic processing. Karl Duncker defined functional fixedness as being a "mental block against using an object in a new way that is required to solve a problem". This "block" limits the ability of an individual to use components given to them to complete a task, as they cannot move past the original purpose of those components. For example, if someone needs a paperweight, but they only have a hammer, they may not see how the hammer can be used as a paperweight. Functional fixedness is this inability to see a hammer's use as anything other than for pounding nails; the person couldn't think to use the hammer in a way other than in its conventional function.

When tested, 5-year-old children show no signs of functional fixedness. It has been argued that this is because at age 5, any goal to be achieved with an object is equivalent to any other goal. However, by age 7, children have acquired the tendency to treat the originally intended purpose of an object as special.

🔗 Science

In computing, tree shaking is a dead code elimination technique that is applied when optimizing code written in ECMAScript dialects like JavaScript or TypeScript into a single bundle that is loaded by a web browser. Often contrasted with traditional single-library dead code elimination techniques common to minifiers, tree shaking eliminates unused functions from across the bundle by starting at the entry point and only including functions that may be executed. It is succinctly described as "live code inclusion".

🔗 United States 🔗 Companies 🔗 Business 🔗 Philately

The American Letter Mail Company was started by Lysander Spooner in 1844, competing with the presumed legal monopoly of the United States Post Office (USPO, now the USPS).

🔗 Video games 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Business and economy 🔗 Video games/Sega

SuperH (or SH) is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Hitachi and currently produced by Renesas. It is implemented by microcontrollers and microprocessors for embedded systems.

At the time of introduction, SuperH was notable for having fixed-length 16-bit instructions in spite of its 32-bit architecture. This was a novel approach; at the time, RISC processors always used an instruction size that was the same as the internal data width, typically 32-bits. Using smaller instructions had consequences, the register file was smaller and instructions were generally two-operand format. But for the market the SuperH was aimed at, this was a small price to pay for the improved memory and processor cache efficiency.

Later versions of the design, starting with SH-5, included both 16- and 32-bit instructions, with the 16-bit versions mapping onto the 32-bit version inside the CPU. This allowed the machine code to continue using the shorter instructions to save memory, while not demanding the amount of instruction decoding logic needed if they were completely separate instructions. This concept is now known as a compressed instruction set and is also used by other companies, the most notable example being ARM for its Thumb instruction set.

As of 2015, many of the original patents for the SuperH architecture are expiring and the SH-2 CPU has been reimplemented as open source hardware under the name J2.

🔗 Cognitive science

Shepard tables (also known as the Shepard tabletop illusion) are an optical illusion first published in 1990 as "Turning the Tables," by Stanford psychologist Roger N. Shepard in his book Mind Sights, a collection of illusions that he had created. It is one of the most powerful optical illusions, typically creating length miscalculations of 20–25%.

To quote A Dictionary of Psychology, the Shepard table illusion makes "a pair of identical parallelograms representing the tops of two tables appear radically different" because our eyes decode them according to rules for three-dimensional objects.

This illusion is based on a drawing of two parallelograms, identical aside from a rotation of 90 degrees. When the parallelograms are presented as tabletops, however, we see them as objects in three-dimensional space. One "table" seems long and narrow, with its longer dimension receding into the distance. The other "table" looks almost square, because we interpret its shorter dimension as foreshortening. The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences explains the illusion as an effect of "size and shape constancy [which] subjectively expand[s] the near-far dimension along the line of sight." It classifies Shepard tables as an example of a geometrical illusion, in the category of an "illusion of size."

According to Shepard, "any knowledge or understanding of the illusion we may gain at the intellectual level remains virtually powerless to diminish the magnitude of the illusion." Children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder are less susceptible to the Shepard table illusion than typically developing children but are equally susceptible to the Ebbinghaus illusion.

Shepard had described an earlier, less-powerful version of the illusion in 1981 as the "parallelogram illusion" (Perceptual Organization, pp. 297–9). The illusion can also be constructed using identical trapezoids rather than identical parallelograms.

A variant of the Shepard tabletop illusion was named "Best Illusion of the Year" for 2009.

Christopher W. Tyler, among others, has done scholarly research on the illusion.

🔗 Robotics

An eigenface () is the name given to a set of eigenvectors when used in the computer vision problem of human face recognition. The approach of using eigenfaces for recognition was developed by Sirovich and Kirby (1987) and used by Matthew Turk and Alex Pentland in face classification. The eigenvectors are derived from the covariance matrix of the probability distribution over the high-dimensional vector space of face images. The eigenfaces themselves form a basis set of all images used to construct the covariance matrix. This produces dimension reduction by allowing the smaller set of basis images to represent the original training images. Classification can be achieved by comparing how faces are represented by the basis set.

🔗 Textile Arts

Polar fleece is a soft napped insulating fabric made from polyester.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

In cryptography, a random oracle is an oracle (a theoretical black box) that responds to every unique query with a (truly) random response chosen uniformly from its output domain. If a query is repeated, it responds the same way every time that query is submitted.

Stated differently, a random oracle is a mathematical function chosen uniformly at random, that is, a function mapping each possible query to a (fixed) random response from its output domain.

Random oracles as a mathematical abstraction were firstly used in rigorous cryptographic proofs in the 1993 publication by Mihir Bellare and Phillip Rogaway (1993). They are typically used when the proof cannot be carried out using weaker assumptions on the cryptographic hash function. A system that is proven secure when every hash function is replaced by a random oracle is described as being secure in the random oracle model, as opposed to secure in the standard model of cryptography.

🔗 London 🔗 Books 🔗 Sexology and sexuality 🔗 Sexology and sexuality/Sex work

Harris's List of Covent Garden Ladies, published from 1757 to 1795, was an annual directory of prostitutes then working in Georgian London. A small pocketbook, it was printed and published in Covent Garden, and sold for two shillings and sixpence. A contemporary report of 1791 estimates its circulation at about 8,000 copies annually.

Each edition contains entries describing the physical appearance and sexual specialities of about 120–190 prostitutes who worked in and around Covent Garden. Through their erotic prose, the list's entries review some of these women in lurid detail. While most compliment their subjects, some are critical of bad habits, and a few women are even treated as pariahs, perhaps having fallen out of favour with the list's authors, who are never revealed.

Samuel Derrick is the man normally credited for the design of Harris's List, possibly having been inspired by the activities of a Covent Garden pimp, Jack Harris. A Grub Street hack, Derrick may have written the lists from 1757 until his death in 1769; thereafter, the annual's authors are unknown. Throughout its print run it was published pseudonymously by H. Ranger, although from the late 1780s it was printed by three men: John and James Roach, and John Aitkin.

As the public's opinion began to turn against London's sex trade, and with reformers petitioning the authorities to take action, those involved in the release of Harris's List were in 1795 fined and imprisoned. That year's edition was the last to be published. By then, its content was cruder, lacking the originality of earlier editions. Modern writers tend to view Harris's List as erotica; in the words of one author, it was designed for "solitary sexual enjoyment".