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🔗 Biography 🔗 Computing 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Thomas Preston-Werner (born October 28, 1979) is an American billionaire software developer and entrepreneur. He is an active contributor within the open-source development community, most prominently in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he lives.

He is best known as the founder and former CEO of GitHub, a Git repository web-based hosting service, which he co-founded in 2008 with Chris Wanstrath and PJ Hyett. He resigned from GitHub in 2014 when an internal investigation concluded that he and his wife harassed an employee. Preston-Werner is also the creator of the avatar service Gravatar, the TOML configuration file format and the Semantic Versioning Specification (SemVer)

Preston-Werner lives in San Francisco with his wife Theresa and their sons.

His wife is a former graduate student in cultural anthropology known for her involvement in historical research and social subjects.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

Bubble memory is a type of non-volatile computer memory that uses a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas, known as bubbles or domains, each storing one bit of data. The material is arranged to form a series of parallel tracks that the bubbles can move along under the action of an external magnetic field. The bubbles are read by moving them to the edge of the material, where they can be read by a conventional magnetic pickup, and then rewritten on the far edge to keep the memory cycling through the material. In operation, bubble memories are similar to delay-line memory systems.

Bubble memory started out as a promising technology in the 1970s, offering performance similar to core memory, memory density similar to hard drives, and no moving parts. This led many to consider it a contender for a "universal memory" that could be used for all storage needs. The introduction of dramatically faster semiconductor memory chips in the early 1970s pushed bubble into the slow end of the scale and it began to be considered mostly as a replacement for disks. The equally dramatic improvements in hard-drive capacity through the early 1980s made it uncompetitive in price terms for mass storage.

Bubble memory was used for some time in the 1970s and 1980s in applications where its non-moving nature was desirable for maintenance or shock-proofing reasons. The introduction of flash storage and similar technologies rendered even this niche uncompetitive, and bubble disappeared entirely by the late 1980s.

🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Glass

🔗 Biography 🔗 France 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology 🔗 Philosophy/Modern philosophy 🔗 Libertarianism

Michel Eyquem, Seigneur de Montaigne ( mon-TAYN; French: [miʃɛl ekɛm də mɔ̃tɛɲ]; 28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592), known as Michel de Montaigne, was one of the most significant philosophers of the French Renaissance. He is known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is noted for its merging of casual anecdotes and autobiography with intellectual insight. Montaigne had a direct influence on numerous Western writers; his massive volume Essais contains some of the most influential essays ever written.

During his lifetime, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that "I am myself the matter of my book" was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne came to be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt that began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, ''Que sçay-je?" ("What do I know?", in Middle French; now rendered as "Que sais-je?" in modern French).

🔗 Geology 🔗 Rocks and minerals 🔗 Iceland

Iceland spar, formerly called Iceland crystal (Icelandic: silfurberg [ˈsɪlvʏrˌpɛrk], lit. 'silver-rock') and also called optical calcite, is a transparent variety of calcite, or crystallized calcium carbonate, originally brought from Iceland, and used in demonstrating the polarization of light.

🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Film 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Science Fiction

THX 1138 is a 1971 American social science fiction film directed by George Lucas in his feature film directorial debut. It is set in a dystopian future in which the populace is controlled through android police and mandatory use of drugs that suppress emotions. Produced by Francis Ford Coppola and written by Lucas and Walter Murch, it stars Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence.

THX 1138 was developed from Lucas's student film Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, which he made in 1967 while attending the USC School of Cinematic Arts. The feature film was produced in a joint venture between Warner Bros. and American Zoetrope. A novelization by Ben Bova was published in 1971. The film received mixed reviews from critics and failed to find box-office success on initial release; however, the film has subsequently received critical acclaim and gained a cult following, particularly in the aftermath of Lucas' success with Star Wars in 1977.

🔗 Law

Jury nullification, also known in the United Kingdom as jury equity, or a perverse verdict, is when the jury in a criminal trial gives a verdict of not guilty even though they think a defendant has broken the law. The jury's reasons may include the belief that the law itself is unjust, that the prosecutor has misapplied the law in the defendant's case, that the punishment for breaking the law is too harsh, or general frustrations with the criminal justice system. Some juries have also refused to convict due to their own prejudices in favor of the defendant. Such verdicts are possible because a jury has an absolute right to return any verdict it chooses. Nullification is not an official part of criminal procedure but is the logical consequence of two rules governing the systems in which it exists:

1. Jurors cannot be punished for passing an incorrect verdict.
2. In many jurisdictions, a defendant who is acquitted cannot be tried a second time for the same offense.

A jury verdict that is contrary to the letter of the law pertains only to the particular case before it; however, if a pattern of acquittals develops in response to repeated attempts to prosecute a particular offence, this can have the de facto effect of invalidating the law. Such a pattern may indicate public opposition to an unwanted legislative enactment. It may also happen that a jury convicts a defendant even if no law was broken, although such a conviction may be overturned on appeal. Nullification can also occur in civil trials; unlike in criminal trials, if the jury renders a not liable verdict that is clearly at odds with the evidence, the judge can issue a judgment notwithstanding the verdict or order a new trial.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history

Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States Armed Forces in mid-2002. The exercise, which ran from 24 July to 15 August and cost US$250 million (equivalent to about $355M in 2019), involved both live exercises and computer simulations. MC02 was meant to be a test of future military "transformation"—a transition toward new technologies that enable network-centric warfare and provide more effective command and control of current and future weaponry and tactics. The simulated combatants were the United States, referred to as "Blue", and a fictitious state in the Persian Gulf, "Red", often characterized as Iran or Iraq.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic

In logic, a many-valued logic (also multi- or multiple-valued logic) is a propositional calculus in which there are more than two truth values. Traditionally, in Aristotle's logical calculus, there were only two possible values (i.e., "true" and "false") for any proposition. Classical two-valued logic may be extended to n-valued logic for n greater than 2. Those most popular in the literature are three-valued (e.g., Łukasiewicz's and Kleene's, which accept the values "true", "false", and "unknown"), the finite-valued (finitely-many valued) with more than three values, and the infinite-valued (infinitely-many-valued), such as fuzzy logic and probability logic.

🔗 Mathematics

In recreational mathematics, an almost integer (or near-integer) is any number that is not an integer but is very close to one. Almost integers may be considered interesting when they arise in some context in which they are unexpected.