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🔗 Biography 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 France 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Évariste Galois (; French: [evaʁist ɡalwa]; 25 October 1811 – 31 May 1832) was a French mathematician and political activist. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a problem that had been open for 350 years. His work laid the foundations for Galois theory and group theory, two major branches of abstract algebra.

Galois was a staunch republican and was heavily involved in the political turmoil that surrounded the French Revolution of 1830. As a result of his political activism, he was arrested repeatedly, serving one jail sentence of several months. For reasons that remain obscure, shortly after his release from prison, Galois fought in a duel and died of the wounds he suffered.

🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

In computer security, a cold boot attack (or to a lesser extent, a platform reset attack) is a type of side channel attack in which an attacker with physical access to a computer performs a memory dump of a computer's random access memory by performing a hard reset of the target machine. Typically, cold boot attacks are used to retrieve encryption keys from a running operating system for malicious or criminal investigative reasons. The attack relies on the data remanence property of DRAM and SRAM to retrieve memory contents that remain readable in the seconds to minutes after power has been removed.

An attacker with physical access to a running computer typically executes a cold boot attack by cold-booting the machine and booting a lightweight operating system from a removable disk to dump the contents of pre-boot physical memory to a file. An attacker is then free to analyze the data dumped from memory to find sensitive data, such as the keys, using various forms of key finding attacks. Since cold boot attacks target random access memory, full disk encryption schemes, even with a trusted platform module installed are ineffective against this kind of attack. This is because the problem is fundamentally a hardware (insecure memory) and not a software issue. However, malicious access can be prevented by limiting physical access and using modern techniques to avoid storing sensitive data in random access memory.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/History 🔗 University of Oxford

The Oxford Electric Bell or Clarendon Dry Pile is an experimental electric bell that was set up in 1840 and which has run nearly continuously ever since. It was one of the first pieces purchased for a collection of apparatus by clergyman and physicist Robert Walker. It is located in a corridor adjacent to the foyer of the Clarendon Laboratory at the University of Oxford, England, and is still ringing, though inaudibly due to being behind two layers of glass.

🔗 Business

A shotgun clause (or Texas Shootout Clause) is a term of art, rather than a legal term. It is a specific type of exit provision that may be included in a shareholders' agreement, and may often be referred to as a buy-sell agreement. The shotgun clause allows a shareholder to offer a specific price per share for the other shareholder(s)' shares; the other shareholder(s) must then either accept the offer or buy the offering shareholder's shares at that price per share.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Australia 🔗 Crime 🔗 Death 🔗 Australia/Australian crime 🔗 Australia/Adelaide

The Somerton Man was an unidentified man whose body was found on 1 December 1948 on the beach at Somerton Park, a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. The case is also known after the Persian phrase tamám shud (Persian: تمام شد), meaning "is over" or "is finished", which was printed on a scrap of paper found months later in the fob pocket of the man's trousers. The scrap had been torn from the final page of a copy of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, authored by 12th-century poet Omar Khayyám.

Following a public appeal by police, the book from which the page had been torn was located. On the inside back cover, detectives read through indentations left from previous handwriting: a local telephone number, another unidentified number, and text that resembled a coded message. The text has not been deciphered or interpreted in a way that satisfies authorities on the case.

Since the early stages of the police investigation, the case has been considered "one of Australia's most profound mysteries". There has been intense speculation ever since regarding the identity of the victim, the cause of his death, and the events leading up to it. Public interest in the case remains significant for several reasons: the death occurred at a time of heightened international tensions following the beginning of the Cold War; the apparent involvement of a secret code; the possible use of an undetectable poison; and the inability of authorities to identify the dead man.

On 26 July 2022, Adelaide University professor Derek Abbott, in association with genealogist Colleen M. Fitzpatrick, claimed to have identified the man as Carl "Charles" Webb, an electrical engineer and instrument maker born in 1905, based on genetic genealogy from DNA of the man's hair. South Australia Police and Forensic Science South Australia have not verified the result, but South Australia Police said they were "cautiously optimistic" about it.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history

Deep operation (Russian: Глубокая операция, glubokaya operatsiya), also known as Soviet Deep Battle, was a military theory developed by the Soviet Union for its armed forces during the 1920s and 1930s. It was a tenet that emphasized destroying, suppressing or disorganizing enemy forces not only at the line of contact, but throughout the depth of the battlefield.

The term comes from Vladimir Triandafillov, an influential military writer, who worked with others to create a military strategy with its own specialized operational art and tactics. The concept of deep operations was a national strategy, tailored to the economic, cultural and geopolitical position of the Soviet Union. In the aftermath of several failures or defeats in the Russo-Japanese War, First World War and Polish–Soviet War, the Soviet High Command (Stavka) focused on developing new methods for the conduct of war. This new approach considered military strategy and tactics, but also introduced a new intermediate level of military art: operations. The Soviet Union was the first country to officially distinguish the third level of military thinking which occupied the position between strategy and tactics.

Using these templates, the Soviets developed the concept of deep battle and by 1936 it had become part of the Red Army Field Regulations. Deep operations had two phases: the tactical deep battle, followed by the exploitation of tactical success, known as the conduct of deep battle operations. Deep battle envisaged the breaking of the enemy's forward defenses, or tactical zones, through combined arms assaults, which would be followed up by fresh uncommitted mobile operational reserves sent to exploit the strategic depth of an enemy front. The goal of a deep operation was to inflict a decisive strategic defeat on the enemy's logistical abilities and render the defence of their front more difficult, impossible—or, indeed, irrelevant. Unlike most other doctrines, deep battle stressed combined arms cooperation at all levels: strategic, operational, and tactical.

🔗 Sociology 🔗 Project-independent assessment

In sociology and economics, the precariat () is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which means existing without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term is a portmanteau merging precarious with proletariat.

Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labor to live, members of the precariat are only partially involved in labor and must undertake extensive unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings. Classic examples of such unpaid activities include continually having to search for work (including preparing for and attending job interviews), as well as being expected to be perpetually responsive to calls for "gig" work (yet without being paid an actual wage for being "on call").

The hallmark of the precariat class is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence. The emergence of this class has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism.

🔗 Australia 🔗 Organizations 🔗 Men's Issues

Men's sheds or community sheds are non-profit local organisations that provide a space for craftwork and social interaction. The movement originated in Australia around the 1980s as a way to improve the health and wellbeing of older men. However some have expanded their remit to anyone regardless of age or gender, and have similar aims and functions to hackerspaces. There are over 900 located across Australia, with thousands of active members. Men's sheds can also be found in the United Kingdom, Ireland, United States, Canada, Finland, Estonia, New Zealand and Greece.

The slogan for men's sheds is "Shoulder To Shoulder", shortened from "Men don't talk face to face, they talk shoulder to shoulder", adopted after the 2008 Australian Men's Shed Association (AMSA) conference. The users of men's sheds are known as "shedders". In 2014, Professor Barry Golding coined the term "shedagogy" to describe "a distinctive, new way of acknowledging, describing and addressing the way some men prefer to learn informally in shed-like spaces mainly with other men." Sheds as a venue for mentoring other men and Inter-generational mentoring is a growing outcome. Academics are using men's sheds as a research venue and research partner in exploring men's health and social needs.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Physics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Physics/Biographies

Sir James Dewar (20 September 1842 – 27 March 1923) was a Scottish chemist and physicist. He is best known for his invention of the vacuum flask, which he used in conjunction with research into the liquefaction of gases. He also studied atomic and molecular spectroscopy, working in these fields for more than 25 years.

🔗 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)