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🔗 Internet 🔗 Polynesia 🔗 Polynesia/Tokelau

.tk is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for Tokelau, a territory of New Zealand in the South Pacific.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Michael J. (Mike) Karels (August 2, 1956 – June 2, 2024) was an American software engineer and one of the key figures in history of BSD UNIX.

In 1993, the USENIX Association gave a Lifetime Achievement Award (Flame) to the Computer Systems Research Group at University of California, Berkeley, honoring 180 individuals, including Karels, who contributed to the CSRG's 4.4BSD-Lite release.

In February 1992 Karels moved to BSDi (Berkeley Software Design) and designed BSD/OS, which, for years, was the only commercially available BSD style Unix on Intel platform. BSDi's software assets were bought by Wind River in April 2001, and Karels joined Wind River as the Principal Technologist for the BSD/OS platform.

Following his time at Wind River, Karels joined Secure Computing Corporation in 2003 as a Sr. Principal Engineer. Secure Computing used BSD/OS as the basis for SecureOS, the operating system of its Sidewinder firewall, later known as McAfee Firewall Enterprise. However, BSD/OS development had ceased, so Karels was involved in transitioning SecureOS to use FreeBSD as its base, and porting its unique features over to the new kernel. Secure Computing and the Sidewinder firewall team went through a series of acquisitions and spinoffs, including McAfee, Intel, and Forcepoint, so while Karels appeared to have several different jobs from that point onward, he had remained in roughly the same role from 2003 until his retirement in 2021.

The Sidewinder product was eventually discontinued, though Karels fed some SecureOS changes back into the main FreeBSD codebase. Karels officially became a FreeBSD committer in 2017. He continued working on FreeBSD in his spare time following retirement.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Law 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Bible 🔗 Islam 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion 🔗 Judaism 🔗 Atheism 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Bahá'í Faith 🔗 Spirituality 🔗 Theology 🔗 Sikhism 🔗 Zoroastrianism

Lawsuits against God have occurred in real life and in fiction. Issues debated in the actions include the problem of evil and harmful "acts of God".

🔗 Technology 🔗 Africa 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Africa/Tanzania 🔗 Afghanistan 🔗 Africa/Kenya

M-Pesa (M for mobile, pesa is Swahili for money) is a mobile phone-based money transfer, financing and microfinancing service, launched in 2007 by Vodafone for Safaricom and Vodacom, the largest mobile network operators in Kenya and Tanzania. It has since expanded to Afghanistan, South Africa, India and in 2014 to Romania and in 2015 to Albania. M-Pesa allows users to deposit, withdraw, transfer money and pay for goods and services (Lipa na M-Pesa) easily with a mobile device.

The service allows users to deposit money into an account stored on their cell phones, to send balances using PIN-secured SMS text messages to other users, including sellers of goods and services, and to redeem deposits for regular money. Users are charged a small fee for sending and withdrawing money using the service.

M-Pesa is a branchless banking service; M-Pesa customers can deposit and withdraw money from a network of agents that includes airtime resellers and retail outlets acting as banking agents.

M-Pesa has spread quickly, and by 2010 had become the most successful mobile-phone-based financial service in the developing world. By 2012, a stock of about 17 million M-Pesa accounts had been registered in Kenya. By June 2016, a total of 7 million M-Pesa accounts have been opened in Tanzania by Vodacom. The service has been lauded for giving millions of people access to the formal financial system and for reducing crime in otherwise largely cash-based societies.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Physics 🔗 Science Fiction

A black hole starship is a theoretical idea for enabling interstellar travel by propelling a starship by using a black hole as the energy source. The concept was first discussed in science fiction, notably in the book Imperial Earth by Arthur C. Clarke, and in the work of Charles Sheffield, in which energy extracted from a Kerr-Newman black hole is described as powering the rocket engines in the story "Killing Vector" (1978).

In a more detailed analysis, a proposal to create an artificial black hole and using a parabolic reflector to reflect its Hawking radiation was discussed in 2009 by Louis Crane and Shawn Westmoreland. Their conclusion was that it was on the edge of possibility, but that quantum gravity effects that are presently unknown will either make it easier, or make it impossible. Similar concepts were also sketched out by Bolonkin.

🔗 Australia 🔗 Amphibians and Reptiles 🔗 Academic Journals

The Wells and Wellington affair was a dispute about the publication of three papers in the Australian Journal of Herpetology in 1983 and 1985. The publication was established in 1981 as a peer-reviewed scientific journal focusing on the study of amphibians and reptiles (herpetology). Its first two issues were published under the editorship of Richard W. Wells, a first-year biology student at Australia's University of New England. Wells then ceased communicating with the journal's editorial board for two years before suddenly publishing three papers without peer review in the journal in 1983 and 1985. Coauthored by himself and high school teacher Cliff Ross Wellington, the papers reorganized the taxonomy of all of Australia's and New Zealand's amphibians and reptiles and proposed over 700 changes to the binomial nomenclature of the region's herpetofauna.

Members of the herpetological community reacted strongly to the pair's actions and eventually brought a case to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature to suppress the scientific names they had proposed. After four years of arguments, the commission opted not to vote on the case because it hinged largely on taxonomic arguments rather than nomenclatural ones, leaving some of Wells and Wellington's names available. The case's outcome highlighted the vulnerability to the established rules of biological nomenclature that desktop publishing presented. As of 2020, 24 of the specific names assigned by Wells and Wellington remained valid senior synonyms.

🔗 Computing

Mode X is an alternative graphics display mode of the IBM VGA graphics hardware that was popularized by Michael Abrash. It was first published in July 1991 in Dr. Dobb's Journal, and republished in chapters 47-49 of Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book (now freely available online). The term "Mode X" was coined by Abrash.

The primary advantage of Mode X is that it has square pixels: a resolution of 320×240 instead of the standard VGA Mode 13h which is 320×200. Additionally, Abrash enabled the VGA's planar memory mode (also called "unchained mode"). Even though planar memory mode is a documented part of the VGA standard and was used in earlier commercial games, it was first widely publicized in the Mode X articles, leading many programmers to consider Mode X and planar memory synonymous. It is possible to enable planar memory in standard 320x200 mode, which became known as Mode Y in the Usenet rec.games.programmer group.

Planar memory arrangement splits the pixels horizontally into groups of four. For any given byte in PC video memory, four pixels on screen can be accessed depending on which plane(s) are enabled. This is more complicated for the programmer, but the advantages gained by this arrangement—primarily the ability to use all 256 KB of VGA memory for one or more display buffers, instead of only one quarter of that (64 KB)—were considered worthwhile by many.

🔗 Spaceflight

MOOSE, originally an acronym for Man Out Of Space Easiest but later changed to the more professional-sounding Manned Orbital Operations Safety Equipment, was a proposed emergency "bail-out" system capable of bringing a single astronaut safely down from Earth orbit to the planet's surface. The design was proposed by General Electric in the early 1960s. The system was quite compact, weighing 200 lb (91 kg) and fitting inside a suitcase-sized container. It consisted of a small twin-nozzle rocket motor sufficient to deorbit the astronaut, a PET film bag 6 ft (1.8 m) long with a flexible 0.25 in (6.4 mm) ablative heat shield on the back, two pressurized canisters to fill it with polyurethane foam, a parachute, radio equipment and a survival kit.

The astronaut would leave the vehicle in a space suit, climb inside the plastic bag, and then fill it with foam. The bag had the shape of a blunt cone, with the astronaut embedded in its base facing the apex of the cone. The rocket pack would protrude from the bag and be used to slow the astronaut's orbital speed enough so that he would reenter Earth's atmosphere, and the foam-filled bag would act as insulation during the subsequent aerobraking. Finally, once the astronaut had descended to 30,000 ft (9.1 km) where the air was sufficiently dense, the parachute would automatically deploy and slow the astronaut's fall to 17 mph (7.6 m/s). The foam heat shield would serve a final role as cushioning when the astronaut touched down and as a flotation device should they land on water. The radio beacon would guide rescuers.

General Electric performed preliminary testing on some of the components of the MOOSE system, including flying samples of heat shield material on a Mercury mission, inflating a foam-filled bag with a human subject embedded inside, and test-dropping dummies and a human subject in MOOSE foam shields short distances. U.S. Air Force Capt. Joe Kittinger's historic freefall from a balloon at 103,000 ft (31,000 m) in August 1960 also helped demonstrate the feasibility of such extreme parachuting. However, the MOOSE system was nonetheless always intended as an extreme emergency measure when no other option for returning an astronaut to Earth existed; falling from orbit protected by nothing more than a spacesuit and a bag of foam was unlikely to ever become a particularly safe—or enticing—maneuver.

Neither NASA nor the U.S. Air Force expressed an interest in the MOOSE system, and so by the end of the 1960s the program had been quietly shelved.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography

William Robert Sutherland (May 10, 1936 – February 18, 2020) was an American computer scientist who was the longtime manager of three prominent research laboratories, including Sun Microsystems Laboratories (1992–1998), the Systems Science Laboratory at Xerox PARC (1975–1981), and the Computer Science Division of Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Inc. which helped develop the ARPANET.

In these roles, Sutherland participated in the creation of the personal computer, the technology of advanced microprocessors, the Smalltalk programming language, the Java programming language and the Internet.

Unlike traditional corporate research managers, Sutherland added individuals from fields like psychology, cognitive science, and anthropology to enhance the work of his technology staff. He also directed his scientists to take their research, like the Xerox Alto "personal" computer, outside of the laboratory to allow people to use it in a corporate setting and to observe their interaction with it.

In addition, Sutherland fostered a collaboration between the researchers at California Institute of Technology developing techniques of very large scale integrated circuits (VLSI) — his brother Ivan and Carver Mead — and Lynn Conway of his PARC staff. With PARC resources made available by Sutherland, Mead and Conway developed a textbook and university syllabus that helped expedite the development and distribution of a technology whose effect is now immeasurable.

Sutherland said that a research lab is primarily a teaching institution, "teaching whatever is new so that the new can become familiar, old, and used widely."

Sutherland was born in Hastings, Nebraska on May 10, 1936, to a father from New Zealand; his mother was from Scotland. The family moved to Wilmette, Illinois, then Scarsdale, New York, for his father's career. Bert Sutherland graduated from Scarsdale High School, then received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), and his master's degree and Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); his thesis advisor was Claude Shannon. During his military service in the United States Navy, he was awarded the Legion of Merit as a Carrier ASW plane commander. He was the older brother of Ivan Sutherland. Bert Sutherland died on February 18, 2020, aged 83.

🔗 Internet 🔗 China

50 Cent Party, 50 Cent Army and wumao ( WOO-mow) are terms for Internet commentators who are hired by the authorities of the People's Republic of China to manipulate public opinion and disseminate disinformation to the benefit of the governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It was created during the early phases of the Internet's rollout to the wider public in China.

The name is derived from the allegation that such commentators are paid RMB¥0.50 for every post. These commentators create comments or articles on popular Chinese social media networks that are intended to derail discussions which are critical of the CCP, promoting narratives that serve the government's interests and insulting or spreading misinformation about political opponents of the Chinese government, both domestic and abroad. Some of these commentators have labeled themselves ziganwu (Chinese: 自干五, short for 自带干粮的五毛, lit. 'wumao who bring their own dry rations'), claiming they are not paid by authorities and express their support for the Chinese government out of their own volition.

Authors of a paper published in 2017 in the American Political Science Review estimate that the Chinese government fabricates 488 million social media posts per year. In contrast to common assumptions, the 50 Cent Party consists mostly of paid bureaucrats who respond to government directives and rarely defend their government from criticism or engage in direct arguments because "... the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject." Around 80% of the analysed posts involve pro-China cheerleading with inspirational slogans, and 13% involve general praise and suggestions on governmental policies. Despite the common allegation of the commentators getting paid for their posts, the paper suggested there was "no evidence" that they are paid anything for their posts, instead being required to do so as a part of their official party duties.

Research by professors at Harvard, Stanford, and UC San Diego indicated a "massive secretive operation" to fill China's Internet with propaganda, and has resulted in some 488 million posts written by fake social media accounts, representing about 0.6% of the 80 billion posts generated on Chinese social media. To maximize their influence, such pro-government comments are made largely during times of intense online debate, and when online protests have a possibility of transforming into real life actions. The colloquial term wumao has also been used by some English speakers outside of China as an insult against people with perceived pro-CCP bias.