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🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software

Expect is an extension to the TCL scripting language written by Don Libes. The program automates interactions with programs that expose a text terminal interface. Expect, originally written in 1990 for the Unix platform, has since become available for Microsoft Windows and other systems.

🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Plants

Lignum nephriticum (Latin for "kidney wood") is a traditional diuretic that was derived from the wood of two tree species, the narra (Pterocarpus indicus) and the Mexican kidneywood (Eysenhardtia polystachya). The wood is capable of turning the color of water it comes in contact with into beautiful opalescent hues that change depending on light and angle, the earliest known record of the phenomenon of fluorescence. Due to this strange property, it became well known in Europe from the 16th to the early 18th-century. Cups made from lignum nephriticum were given as gifts to royalty. Water drunk from such cups, as well as imported powders and extracts from lignum nephriticum, were thought to have great medicinal properties.

The lignum nephriticum derived from Mexican kidneywood was known as the coatli, coatl, or cuatl ("snake water") or tlapalezpatli ("blood-tincture medicine") in the Nahuatl language. It was traditionally used by the Aztec people as a diuretic prior to European contact. Similarly, the lignum nephriticum cups made from narra wood were part of the native industry of the Philippines before the arrival of the Spanish. The cups were manufactured in southern Luzon, particularly in the Naga region. The name of which was derived from the abundance of the narra trees, which was known as naga in the Bikol language (literally "serpent" or "dragon").

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer Security 🔗 Computing/Websites 🔗 Computing/Networking

Domain fronting is a technique for Internet censorship circumvention that uses different domain names in different communication layers of an HTTPS connection to discreetly connect to a different target domain than is discernable to third parties monitoring the requests and connections.

Due to quirks in security certificates, the redirect systems of the content delivery networks (CDNs) used as 'domain fronts', and the protection provided by HTTPS, censors are typically unable to differentiate circumvention ("domain-fronted") traffic from overt non-fronted traffic for any given domain name. As such they are forced to either allow all traffic to the domain front—including circumvention traffic—or block the domain front entirely, which may result in expensive collateral damage and has been likened to "blocking the rest of the Internet".

Domain fronting does not conform to HTTP standards that require the SNI extension and HTTP Host header to contain the same domain. Many large cloud service providers, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, actively prohibit domain fronting, which has limited it as a censorship bypass technique. Pressure from censors in Russia and China is thought to have contributed to these prohibitions, but domain fronting can also be used maliciously.

A newer variant of domain fronting, domain hiding, passes an encrypted request for one resource (say, a website), concealed behind an unencrypted (plaintext) request for another resource whose DNS records are stored in the same cloud. It has much the same effect. Refraction networking is an application of the broader principle.

🔗 Economics

The men's underwear index (MUI) is an economic index that can supposedly detect the beginnings of a recovery during an economic slump. The premise is that men's underwear are a necessity in normal economic times and sales remain stable. During a severe downturn, demand for these goods changes as new purchases are deferred. Hence, men's purchasing habits for underwear (and that of their spouses on their behalf) is thought to be a good indicator of discretionary spending for consumption at large especially during turnaround periods.

This indicator is noted for being followed by former Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan.

🔗 Apple Inc./Macintosh 🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Human–Computer Interaction 🔗 Industrial design 🔗 Apple Inc./iOS

A skeuomorph () is a derivative object that retains nonfunctional ornamental design cues (attributes) from structures that were inherent to the original. Examples include pottery embellished with imitation rivets reminiscent of similar pots made of metal and a software calendar that imitates the appearance of binding on a paper desk calendar.

🔗 Linguistics

Ghoti is a creative respelling of the word fish, used to illustrate irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation.

🔗 New York City 🔗 Engineering

The Citicorp Center engineering crisis was the discovery, in 1978, of a significant structural flaw in Citicorp Center, then a recently completed skyscraper in New York City, and the subsequent effort to quietly make repairs over the next few months. The building, now known as Citigroup Center, occupied an entire block and was to be the headquarters of Citibank. Its structure, designed by William LeMessurier, had several unusual design features, including a raised base supported by four offset stilts, and diagonal bracing which absorbed wind loads from upper stories.

In the original design, potential wind loads for the building were calculated incorrectly. The flaw was discovered by Diane Hartley, an undergraduate student at Princeton University who was writing a thesis on the building, and was communicated to the firm responsible for the structural design. LeMessurier was subsequently lauded for acknowledging his error and orchestrating a successful repair effort. Estimates at the time suggested that the building could be toppled by a 70-mile-per-hour (110 km/h) wind, with possibly many people killed as a result. The crisis was kept secret until 1995 and Hartley had no knowledge of the significance of her work until after that time.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 History 🔗 China 🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Culture

The Cultural Revolution, formally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, was a sociopolitical movement in China from 1966 until 1976. Launched by Mao Zedong, Chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC), its stated goal was to preserve Chinese Communism by purging remnants of capitalist and traditional elements from Chinese society, and to re-impose Mao Zedong Thought (known outside China as Maoism) as the dominant ideology in the CPC. The Revolution marked Mao's return to the central position of power in China after a period of less radical leadership to recover from the failures of the Great Leap Forward, which led to approximately 30 million deaths in the Great Chinese Famine only five years prior.

Launching the movement in May 1966 with the help of the Cultural Revolution Group, Mao soon called on young people to "bombard the headquarters", and proclaimed that "to rebel is justified". In order to eliminate his rivals within the CPC and in schools, factories, and government institutions, Mao charged that bourgeois elements had infiltrated the government and society with the aim of restoring capitalism. He insisted that revisionists be removed through violent class struggle, to which China's youth, as well as urban workers, responded by forming Red Guards and "rebel groups" around the country. They would begin to hold struggle sessions regularly, and grab power from local governments and CPC branches, eventually establishing the revolutionary committees in 1967. The groups often split into rival factions, however, becoming involved in 'violent struggles' (simplified Chinese: 武斗; traditional Chinese: 武鬥; pinyin: wǔdòu), to which the People's Liberation Army had to be sent to restore order.

Having compiled a selection of Mao's sayings into the Little Red Book, which became a sacred text for Mao's personality cult, Lin Biao, Vice Chairman of the CPC, was written into the constitution as Mao's successor. In 1969, Mao suggested the end of the Cultural Revolution. However, the Revolution's active phase would last until at least 1971, when Lin Biao, accused of a botched coup against Mao, fled and died in a plane crash. In 1972, the Gang of Four rose to power and the Cultural Revolution continued. After Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, the Cultural Revolution finally came to an end.

The Cultural Revolution damaged China's economy and traditional culture, with an estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to 20 million. Beginning with the Red August of Beijing, massacres took place across China, including the Guangxi Massacre, in which massive cannibalism also occurred; the Inner Mongolia incident; the Guangdong Massacre; the Yunnan Massacres; and the Hunan Massacres. Red Guards destroyed historical relics and artifacts, as well as ransacking cultural and religious sites. The 1975 Banqiao Dam failure, one of the world's greatest technological catastrophes, also occurred during the Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, tens of millions of people were persecuted: senior officials, most notably Chinese president Liu Shaoqi, along with Deng Xiaoping, Peng Dehuai, and He Long, were purged or exiled; millions were accused of being members of the Five Black Categories, suffering public humiliation, imprisonment, torture, hard labor, seizure of property, and sometimes execution or harassment into suicide; intellectuals were considered the "Stinking Old Ninth" and were widely persecuted—notable scholars and scientists such as Lao She, Fu Lei, Yao Tongbin, and Zhao Jiuzhang were killed or committed suicide. Schools and universities were closed with the college entrance exams cancelled. Over 10 million urban intellectual youths were sent to the countryside in the Down to the Countryside Movement.

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping became the new paramount leader of China and started the "Boluan Fanzheng" program which gradually dismantled the Maoist policies associated with the Cultural Revolution, and brought the country back to order. Deng then began a new phase of China by initiating the historic Reforms and Opening-Up program. In 1981, the Communist Party of China declared that the Cultural Revolution was "responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the country, and the people since the founding of the People's Republic."

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Books

Proofs from THE BOOK is a book of mathematical proofs by Martin Aigner and Günter M. Ziegler. The book is dedicated to the mathematician Paul Erdős, who often referred to "The Book" in which God keeps the most elegant proof of each mathematical theorem. During a lecture in 1985, Erdős said, "You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book."

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 LGBT studies

The "gay bomb" and "halitosis bomb" are formal names for two non-lethal psychochemical weapons that a United States Air Force research laboratory speculated about producing. The theories involve discharging female sex pheromones over enemy forces in order to make them sexually attracted to each other.

In 1994 the Wright Laboratory in Ohio, a predecessor to today's United States Air Force Research Laboratory, produced a three-page proposal on a variety of possible nonlethal chemical weapons, which was later obtained by the Sunshine Project through a Freedom of Information Act request.