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🔗 Books 🔗 Business

The 48 Laws of Power (1998) is a non-fiction book by American author Robert Greene. The book is a bestseller, selling over 1.2 million copies in the United States, and is popular with prison inmates and celebrities.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Women scientists 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Ukraine

Kateryna Lohvynivna Yushchenko (Ukrainian: Катерина Логвинівна Ющенко, Russian: Екатерина Логвиновна Ющенко, December 8, 1919, Chyhyryn - died August 15, 2001) was a Ukrainian computer and information research scientist, corresponding member of USSR Academy of Sciences (1976), and member of The International Academy of Computer Science. She developed one of the world's first high-level languages with indirect address in programming, called the Address programming language. Over the period of her academic career, Yushchenko supervised 45 Ph.D students. Further professional achievements include Yushchenko being awarded two USSR State Prizes, The USSR Council of Ministers Prize, The Academician Glushkov Prize, and The Order of Princess Olga. Yushchenko was the first woman in the USSR to become a Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences in programming.

🔗 India 🔗 Time 🔗 Hinduism 🔗 Measurement

Hindu texts describe units of Kala measurements, from microseconds to Trillions of years. According to these texts, time is cyclic, which repeats itself forever.

🔗 Olympics 🔗 Lists 🔗 Arts

There were 146 medalists in the art competitions that were part of the Olympic Games from 1912 until 1948. These art competitions were considered an integral part of the movement by International Olympic Committee (IOC) founder Pierre de Coubertin and necessary to recapture the complete essence of the Ancient Olympic Games. Their absence before the 1912 Summer Olympics, according to journalism professor Richard Stanton, stems from Coubertin "not wanting to fragment the focus of his new and fragile movement". Art competitions were originally planned for inclusion in the 1908 Summer Olympics but were delayed after that edition's change in venue from Rome to London following the 1906 eruption of Mount Vesuvius. By the 1924 Summer Olympics they had grown to be considered internationally relevant and potentially "a milestone in advancing public awareness of art as a whole".

During their first three appearances, the art competitions were grouped into five broad categories: architecture, literature, music, painting, and sculpture. The Dutch Organizing Committee for the 1928 Summer Olympics split these into subcategories in the hopes of increasing participation. Although it was a successful strategy, the 1932 Summer Olympics eliminated several of these subcategories, which led to fewer entries in the broader categories. For the 1936 Summer Olympics, the German government proposed the addition of a film contest to the program, which was rejected.

Following a final appearance at the 1948 Summer Olympics, art competitions were removed from the Olympic program. Planners of the 1952 Summer Olympics opposed their inclusion on logistical grounds, claiming that the lack of an international association for the event meant that the entire onus of facilitation was placed on the local organizing committee. Concerns were also raised about the professionalism of the event, since only amateurs were allowed to participate in the sporting tournaments, and the growing commercialization of the competitions, as artists had been permitted to sell their submissions during the course of the Games since 1928. In 1952 an art festival and exhibition was held concurrent with the Games, a tradition that has been maintained in all subsequent Summer Olympics.

The IOC does not track medalists in Olympic art competitions in its database and thus the prize winners are only officially recorded in the original Olympic reports. Judges were not required to distribute first, second, and third place awards for every category, and thus certain events lack medalists in these placements. Since participants were allowed multiple submissions, it was also possible for artists to win more than one in a single event, as Alex Diggelmann of Switzerland did in the graphic arts category of the 1948 edition. Diggelmann is tied with Denmark's Josef Petersen, who won second prize three times in literature, for the number of medals captured in the art competitions. Luxembourg's Jean Jacoby is the only individual to win two gold medals, doing so in painting in 1924 and 1928. Of the 146 medalists, 11 were women and only Finnish author Aale Tynni was awarded gold. Germany was the most successful nation, with eight gold, seven silver, and nine bronze medals, although one was won by Coubertin himself, a Frenchman. He submitted his poem Ode to Sport under the pseudonyms Georges Hohrod and Martin Eschbach, as if it were a joint-entry, and won first prize in the 1912 literature category. The original report credits this medal to Germany. Two individuals, Walter W. Winans and Alfréd Hajós, won medals in both athletic and art competitions.

🔗 Literature

In literature, the competent man is a stock character who exhibits a very wide range of abilities and knowledge, making him a form of polymath. While not the first to use such a character type, the heroes and heroines of Robert A. Heinlein's fiction (with Jubal Harshaw being a prime example) generally have a wide range of abilities, and one of Heinlein's characters, Lazarus Long, gives a wide summary of requirements:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

The competent man, more often than not, is written without explaining how he achieved his wide range of skills and abilities. When such characters are young, there is often not much explanation as to how they acquired so many skills at an early age.

🔗 Mathematics

In combinatorial mathematics, the ménage problem or problème des ménages asks for the number of different ways in which it is possible to seat a set of male-female couples at a round dining table so that men and women alternate and nobody sits next to his or her partner. This problem was formulated in 1891 by Édouard Lucas and independently, a few years earlier, by Peter Guthrie Tait in connection with knot theory. For a number of couples equal to 3, 4, 5, ... the number of seating arrangements is

12, 96, 3120, 115200, 5836320, 382072320, 31488549120, ... (sequence A059375 in the OEIS).

Mathematicians have developed formulas and recurrence equations for computing these numbers and related sequences of numbers. Along with their applications to etiquette and knot theory, these numbers also have a graph theoretic interpretation: they count the numbers of matchings and Hamiltonian cycles in certain families of graphs.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Transhumanism

A Fire Upon the Deep is a 1992 science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge. It is a space opera involving superhuman intelligences, aliens, variable physics, space battles, love, betrayal, genocide, and a communication medium resembling Usenet. A Fire Upon the Deep won the Hugo Award in 1993, sharing it with Doomsday Book by Connie Willis.

Besides the normal print book editions, the novel was also included on a CD-ROM sold by ClariNet Communications along with the other nominees for the 1993 Hugo awards. The CD-ROM edition included numerous annotations by Vinge on his thoughts and intentions about different parts of the book, and was later released as a standalone e-book (no longer available).

🔗 Musical Instruments 🔗 Electronic music

The Ondioline is an electronic keyboard instrument, invented in 1941 by the Frenchman Georges Jenny, and is a forerunner of today's synthesizers. It is sometimes called the "Jenny Ondioline."

The Ondioline is capable of creating a wide variety of sounds. Its keyboard has an unusual feature: it is suspended on special springs which makes it possible to introduce a natural vibrato if the player moves the keyboard (not the entire instrument) from side to side (laterally) with their playing hand. The result is an almost human-like vibrato that lends a wide range of expression to the Ondioline. The keyboard is also pressure-sensitive, and the instrument has a knee volume lever, as well.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 International relations 🔗 Human rights 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 United States/North Carolina

Edward Joseph Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2013 when he was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employee and subcontractor. His disclosures revealed numerous global surveillance programs, many run by the NSA and the Five Eyes Intelligence Alliance with the cooperation of telecommunication companies and European governments, and prompted a cultural discussion about national security and individual privacy.

In 2013, Snowden was hired by an NSA contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton, after previous employment with Dell and the CIA. Snowden says he gradually became disillusioned with the programs with which he was involved and that he tried to raise his ethical concerns through internal channels but was ignored. On May 20, 2013, Snowden flew to Hong Kong after leaving his job at an NSA facility in Hawaii, and in early June he revealed thousands of classified NSA documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Ewen MacAskill. Snowden came to international attention after stories based on the material appeared in The Guardian and The Washington Post. Further disclosures were made by other publications including Der Spiegel and The New York Times.

On June 21, 2013, the United States Department of Justice unsealed charges against Snowden of two counts of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 and theft of government property, following which the Department of State revoked his passport. Two days later, he flew into Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport, where Russian authorities noted that his U.S. passport had been cancelled, and he was restricted to the airport terminal for over one month. Russia later granted Snowden the right of asylum with an initial visa for residence for one year, and repeated extensions have permitted him to stay at least until 2020. In early 2016, he became the president of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a San Francisco-based organization that states its purpose is to protect journalists from hacking and government surveillance.

On September 17, 2019, his memoir Permanent Record was published. On the first day of publication, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a civil lawsuit against Snowden over publication of his memoir, alleging he had breached nondisclosure agreements signed with the U.S. federal government. Former The Guardian national security reporter Ewen MacAskill called the civil lawsuit a "huge mistake", noting that the "UK ban of Spycatcher 30 years ago created huge demand". The memoir was listed as no. 1 on Amazon's bestseller list that same day. In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! on September 26, 2019, Snowden clarified he considers himself a "whistleblower" as opposed to a "leaker" as he considers "a leaker only distributes information for personal gain".

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Military history/Classical warfare

Polybolos, meaning "multi thrower" in Greek, was an ancient Greek repeating ballista reputedly invented by Dionysius of Alexandria, a 3rd-century BC Greek engineer at the Rhodes arsenal, and used in antiquity.

Philo of Byzantium encountered and described a weapon similar to the polybolos, a catapult that like a modern machine gun could fire again and again without a need to reload. Philo left a detailed description of the gears that powered its chain drive, the oldest known application of such a mechanism, and that placed bolt after bolt into its firing slot.