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🔗 Crime 🔗 Death 🔗 Korea 🔗 Korea/North Korea 🔗 Malaysia

On 13 February 2017, the eldest son of Kim Jong-il and half-brother of Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-nam, was attacked with the nerve agent VX at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia. He had been exiled from North Korea in 2003 and had been living abroad.

Following his visit to the resort island Langkawi, Kim Jong-nam had arrived at terminal 2 sometime before 9:00 a.m. to take a 10:50 a.m. AirAsia flight to Macau. At approximately 9:00 a.m., two women attacked Kim Jong-nam with the VX nerve agent. He died about 15 to 20 minutes later.

The women were identified as Siti Aisyah, an Indonesian and Đoàn Thị Hương, a Vietnamese. Both were charged with the murder of Kim Jong-nam. The charges were dropped, although Hương pled guilty to "voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means" and received a sentence of three years and four months. Four North Korean suspects left the airport shortly after the assassination and reached Pyongyang without being arrested. Other North Koreans were arrested but were released without charge.

It is widely believed that Kim Jong-nam was murdered on the orders of Kim Jong-un.

🔗 Urban studies and planning

Marchetti's constant is the average time spent by a person for commuting each day, which is approximately one hour. It is named after Italian physicist Cesare Marchetti, though Marchetti himself attributed the "one hour" finding to transportation analyst and engineer Yacov Zahavi. Marchetti posits that although forms of urban planning and transport may change, and although some live in villages and others in cities, people gradually adjust their lives to their conditions (including location of their homes relative to their workplace) such that the average travel time stays approximately constant. Ever since Neolithic times, people have kept the average time spent per day for travel the same, even though the distance may increase due to the advancements in the means of transportation. In his 1934 book Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford attributes this observation to Bertrand Russell:

Mr. Bertrand Russell has noted that each improvement in locomotion has increased the area over which people are compelled to move: so that a person who would have had to spend half an hour to walk to work a century ago must still spend half an hour to reach his destination, because the contrivance that would have enabled him to save time had he remained in his original situation now—by driving him to a more distant residential area—effectually cancels out the gain.

A related concept is that of Zahavi, who also noticed that people seem to have a constant "travel time budget", that is, "a stable daily amount of time that people make available for travel." David Metz, former chief scientist at the Department of Transport, UK, cites data of average travel time in Britain drawn from the British National Travel Survey in support of Marchetti's and Zahavi's conclusions. The work casts doubt on the contention that investment in infrastructure saves travel time. Instead, it appears from Metz's figures that people invest travel time saved in travelling a longer distance, a particular example of Jevons paradox described by the Lewis–Mogridge position. Because of the constancy of travel times as well as induced travel, Robert Cervero has argued that the World Bank and other international aid agencies evaluate transportation investment proposals in developing and rapidly motorizing cities less on the basis of potential travel-time savings and more on the accessibility benefits they confer.

🔗 Chemicals 🔗 Dentistry

Tin(II) fluoride, commonly referred to commercially as stannous fluoride (from Latin stannum, 'tin'), is a chemical compound with the formula SnF₂. It is a colourless solid used as an ingredient in toothpastes.

🔗 Books

The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-Line Pioneers is a 1998 book by Tom Standage. The book was first published in September 1998 through Walker & Company and discusses the development and uses of the electric telegraph during the second half of the 19th century and some of the similarities the telegraph shared with the Internet of the late 20th century.

The central thesis of the book argues that of these two technologies, it was the telegraph that was the more significant, since the ability to communicate globally at all in real-time was a qualitative shift, while according to Standage the change brought on by the modern Internet was merely a quantitative shift.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 Effective Altruism

Effective accelerationism, often abbreviated as "e/acc", is a 21st-century philosophical movement advocating an explicit pro-technology stance. Its proponents believe that artificial intelligence-driven progress is a great social equalizer which should be pushed forward. They see themselves as a counterweight to the cautious view that AI is highly unpredictable and needs to be regulated, often giving their opponents the derogatory labels of "doomers" or "decels" (short for deceleration).

Central to effective accelerationism is the belief that propelling technological progress at any cost is the only ethically justifiable course of action. The movement carries utopian undertones and argues that humans need to develop and build faster to ensure their survival and propagate consciousness throughout the universe.

Although effective accelerationism has been described as a fringe movement, it has gained mainstream visibility. A number of high-profile Silicon Valley figures, including investors Marc Andreessen and Garry Tan, explicitly endorsed the movement by adding "e/acc" to their public social media profiles. Yann LeCun and Andrew Ng are seen as further supporters, as they have argued for less restrictive AI regulation.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/relativity

The Gödel metric is an exact solution of the Einstein field equations in which the stress–energy tensor contains two terms, the first representing the matter density of a homogeneous distribution of swirling dust particles (dust solution), and the second associated with a negative cosmological constant (see lambdavacuum solution). It is also known as the Gödel solution or Gödel universe.

This solution has many unusual properties—in particular, the existence of closed timelike curves that would allow time travel in a universe described by the solution. Its definition is somewhat artificial in that the value of the cosmological constant must be carefully chosen to match the density of the dust grains, but this spacetime is an important pedagogical example.

This solution was found in 1949 by Kurt Gödel.

🔗 Lepidoptera

Butterfly gardening is a way to create, improve, and maintain habitat for lepidopterans including butterflies, skippers, and moths. Butterflies have four distinct life stages—egg, larva, chrysalis, and adult. In order to support and sustain butterfly populations, an ideal butterfly garden contains habitat for each life stage.

Butterfly larvae, with some exceptions such as the carnivorous harvester (Feniseca tarquinius), consume plant matter and can be generalists or specialists. While butterflies like the painted lady (Vanessa cardui) are known to consume over 200 plants as caterpillars, other species like the monarch (Danaus plexippus), and the regal fritillary (Speyeria idalia) only consume plants in one genus, milkweed and violets, respectively.

As adults, butterflies feed mainly on nectar, but they have also evolved to consume rotting fruit, tree sap, and even carrion. Supporting nectarivorous adult butterflies involves planting nectar plants of different heights, color, and bloom times. Butterfly bait stations can easily be made to provide a food source for species that prefer fruit and sap. In addition to food sources, windbreaks in the form of trees and shrubs shelter butterflies and can provide larval food and overwintering grounds. "Puddling" is a behavior generally done by male butterflies in which they gather to drink nutrients and water and incorporating a puddling ground for butterflies will enhance a butterfly garden. While butterflies are not the only pollinator, creating butterfly habitat also creates habitat for bees, beetles, flies, and other pollinators

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Pirate Politics 🔗 Elections and Referendums 🔗 Politics/Political parties

The United States Pirate Party (USPP) is an American political party founded in 2006 by Brent Allison and Alex English. The party's platform is aligned with the global Pirate movement, and supports reform of copyright laws to reflect open source and free culture values, government transparency, protection of privacy and civil liberties. The United States Pirate Party also advocates for evidence-based policy, egalitarianism, meritocracy and the hacker ethic as well as the rolling back of corporate personhood and corporate welfare. The USPP has also made a priority to advocate for changes in the copyright laws and removal of patents. It is the belief of the party that these restrictions greatly hinder the sharing and expansion of knowledge and resources.

The party's national organization has existed in multiple incarnations since its 2006 founding. Its most recent is the Pirate National Committee (PNC), formed in 2012 as a coalition of state parties. The PNC officially recognizes Pirate parties from 8 states, and tracks and assists in the growth of more state parties throughout the United States. The board of the USPP is the board of the PNC. The current Chair of the Pirate National Committee is Lindsay-Anne Gorski (née Brunner).

🔗 Climate change 🔗 Geography

The Third Pole, also known as the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalayan system (HKKH), is a mountainous region located in the west and south of the Tibetan Plateau. Part of High-Mountain Asia, it spreads over an area of more than 4.2 million square kilometres (1.6 million square miles) across nine countries, i.e. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Tajikistan, bordering ten countries. The area is nicknamed the "Third Pole" because its mountain glaciers and snowfields store more frozen water than anywhere else in the world after the Arctic and Antarctic polar caps. With the world's loftiest mountains, comprising all 14 peaks above 8,000 metres (26,000 ft), it is the source of 10 major rivers and forms a global ecological buffer.

The Third Pole area is rich with natural resources and consists of all or some of four global biodiversity hotspots. The mountain resources administer a wide range of ecosystem benefits and are the base for the drinking water, food production and livelihoods of the 220 million inhabitants of the region, as well as indirectly to the 1.5 billion people — one sixth of the world's population — living in the downstream river basins. Billions of people benefit from the food and energy produced in these river basins whose headwaters rely on meltwaters and precipitations that run off these mountains.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Architecture 🔗 England 🔗 Military history/Fortifications 🔗 Military history/Napoleonic era 🔗 Ireland 🔗 Kent 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history 🔗 Irish Maritime

Martello towers, sometimes known simply as Martellos, are small defensive forts that were built across the British Empire during the 19th century, from the time of the French Revolutionary Wars onwards. Most were coastal forts.

They stand up to 40 feet (12 m) high (with two floors) and typically had a garrison of one officer and 15–25 men. Their round structure and thick walls of solid masonry made them resistant to cannon fire, while their height made them an ideal platform for a single heavy artillery piece, mounted on the flat roof and able to traverse, and hence fire, over a complete 360° circle. A few towers had moats or other batteries and works attached for extra defence.

The Martello towers were used during the first half of the 19th century, but became obsolete with the introduction of powerful rifled artillery. Many have survived to the present day, often preserved as historic monuments.