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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.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

The Dadda multiplier is a hardware binary multiplier design invented by computer scientist Luigi Dadda in 1965. It uses a selection of full and half adders to sum the partial products in stages (the Dadda tree or Dadda reduction) until two numbers are left. The design is similar to the Wallace multiplier, but the different reduction tree reduces the required number of gates (for all but the smallest operand sizes) and makes it slightly faster (for all operand sizes).

Dadda and Wallace multipliers have the same three steps for two bit strings ${\displaystyle w_{1}}$ and ${\displaystyle w_{2}}$ of lengths ${\displaystyle \ell _{1}}$ and ${\displaystyle \ell _{2}}$ respectively:

1. Multiply (logical AND) each bit of ${\displaystyle w_{1}}$, by each bit of ${\displaystyle w_{2}}$, yielding ${\displaystyle \ell _{1}\cdot \ell _{2}}$ results, grouped by weight in columns
2. Reduce the number of partial products by stages of full and half adders until we are left with at most two bits of each weight.
3. Add the final result with a conventional adder.

As with the Wallace multiplier, the multiplication products of the first step carry different weights reflecting the magnitude of the original bit values in the multiplication. For example, the product of bits ${\displaystyle a_{n}b_{m}}$ has weight ${\displaystyle n+m}$.

Unlike Wallace multipliers that reduce as much as possible on each layer, Dadda multipliers attempt to minimize the number of gates used, as well as input/output delay. Because of this, Dadda multipliers have a less expensive reduction phase, but the final numbers may be a few bits longer, thus requiring slightly bigger adders.

🔗 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.

🔗 Electronic music 🔗 Music/Music genres

Lowercase is an extreme form of ambientminimalism where very quiet, usually unheard sounds are amplified to extreme levels. Minimal artist Steve Roden popularized the movement with an album entitled Forms of Paper, in which he made recordings of himself handling paper in various ways. These recordings were commissioned by the Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles Public Library.

🔗 Professional sound production

The loudness war (or loudness race) refers to the trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, which reduces audio fidelity, and according to many critics, listener enjoyment. Increasing loudness was first reported as early as the 1940s, with respect to mastering practices for 7" singles. The maximum peak level of analog recordings such as these is limited by varying specifications of electronic equipment along the chain from source to listener, including vinyl and Compact Cassette players. The issue garnered renewed attention starting in the 1990s with the introduction of digital signal processing capable of producing further loudness increases.

With the advent of the Compact Disc (CD), music is encoded to a digital format with a clearly defined maximum peak amplitude. Once the maximum amplitude of a CD is reached, loudness can be increased still further through signal processing techniques such as dynamic range compression and equalization. Engineers can apply an increasingly high ratio of compression to a recording until it more frequently peaks at the maximum amplitude. In extreme cases, efforts to increase loudness can result in clipping and other audible distortion. Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as "victims of the loudness war."

🔗 Philosophy

The teletransportation paradox or teletransport paradox (also known in alternative forms as the duplicates paradox) is a thought experiment on the philosophy of identity that challenges common intuitions on the nature of self and consciousness. It first appeared under this name in full published form presumably in Derek Parfit's 1984 book Reasons and Persons.

The Polish science-fiction writer Stanisław Lem described the same problem in the mid-twentieth century. He put it in writing in his philosophical text "Dialogs", 1957. Similarly, in Lem's Star Diaries ("Fourteenth Voyage") of 1957 the hero visits a planet and he finds himself recreated from a backup record, after his death from a meteorite strike, which on this planet is a very commonplace procedure.

Similar questions of identity have been raised as early as 1775.

I would be glad to know your Lordship's opinion whether when my brain has lost its original structure, and when some hundred years after the same materials are fabricated so curiously as to become an intelligent being, whether, I say that being will be me; or, if, two or three such beings should be formed out of my brain; whether they will all be me, and consequently one and the same intelligent being.

The Squarial (a portmanteau of the words square and aerial) was a satellite antenna used for reception of the now defunct British Satellite Broadcasting television service (BSB). The Squarial was a flat plate satellite antenna, built to be unobtrusive and unique. BSB were counting on the form factor of the antenna to clearly differentiate themselves from their competitors at the time. At the time of development, satellite installations usually required a 90 cm dish in order to receive a clear signal from the transmitting satellite. The smaller antenna was BSB's unique selling point and was heavily advertised in order to attract customers to their service.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics 🔗 History of Science

Stigler's law of eponymy, proposed by University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler in his 1980 publication Stigler’s law of eponymy, states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Examples include Hubble's law, which was derived by Georges Lemaître two years before Edwin Hubble, the Pythagorean theorem, which was known to Babylonian mathematicians before Pythagoras, and Halley's Comet, which was observed by astronomers since at least 240 BC (although its official designation is due to the first ever mathematical prediction of such astronomical phenomenon in the sky, not to its discovery). Stigler himself named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law" to show that it follows its own decree, though the phenomenon had previously been noted by others.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Japanese military history 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/Japanese military history

A Fu-Go (ふ号[兵器], fugō [heiki], lit. "Code Fu [Weapon]"), or fire balloon (風船爆弾, fūsen bakudan, lit. "balloon bomb"), was a weapon launched by Japan during World War II. A hydrogen balloon with a load varying from a 33 lb (15 kg) antipersonnel bomb to one 26-pound (12 kg) incendiary bomb and four 11 lb (5.0 kg) incendiary devices attached, it was designed as a cheap weapon intended to make use of the jet stream over the Pacific Ocean and drop bombs on American cities, forests, and farmland. Canada and Mexico reported fire balloon sightings as well.

The Japanese fire balloon was the first ever weapon possessing intercontinental range (the second being the Convair B-36 Peacemaker and the third being the R-7 ICBM). The Japanese balloon attacks on North America were at that time the longest ranged attacks ever conducted in the history of warfare, a record which was not broken until the 1982 Operation Black Buck raids during the Falkland Islands War.

The balloons were intended to instill fear and terror in the U.S., though the bombs were relatively ineffective as weapons of destruction due to extreme weather conditions.