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🔗 Disambiguation

A rat king is a rare phenomenon where a group of rats' tails become entangled.

Rat King or Ratking may also refer to:

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophical literature 🔗 Books 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy

The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (French: La Part maudite) is a 1949 book about political economy by the French intellectual Georges Bataille, in which the author presents a new economic theory which he calls "general economy". The work comprises Volume I: Consumption, Volume II: The History of Eroticism, and Volume III: Sovereignty. It was first published in France by Les Éditions de Minuit, and in the United States by Zone Books. It is considered one of the most important of Bataille's books.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Computing

The E6B flight computer is a form of circular slide rule used in aviation. It is an instance of an analog calculating device still being used in the 21st century.

They are mostly used in flight training, because these flight computers have been replaced with electronic planning tools or software and websites that make these calculations for the pilots. These flight computers are used during flight planning (on the ground before takeoff) to aid in calculating fuel burn, wind correction, time en route, and other items. In the air, the flight computer can be used to calculate ground speed, estimated fuel burn and updated estimated time of arrival. The back is designed for wind vector solutions, i.e., determining how much the wind is affecting one's speed and course. They are frequently referred to by the nickname "whiz wheel".

🔗 Marketing & Advertising

Ad creep is the "creep" of advertising into previously ad-free spaces.

The earliest verified appearance of the term "ad creep" is in a 1996 article "Creeping Commercials: Ads Worming Way Into TV Scripts" by Steve Johnson for the Chicago Tribune, however it may have been coined by a subscriber to Stay Free! magazine, according to another source.

While the virtues of advertising can be debated, ad-creep often especially refers to advertising which is invasive and coercive, such as ads in schools, doctor's offices and hospitals, restrooms, elevators, on ATMs, on garbage cans, on vehicles, on restaurant menus, and countless other items. In Steve Johnson's piece referenced above, he criticizes product placement and "creative advertising enhancements" as "one more manifestation of an environment in which the commercial assault is almost nonstop". Commercial Alert, a nonprofit organization founded by Public Citizen "to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy" also characterizes "ad creep" as an assault, with ad companies fighting a "relentless battle to claim every waking moment, and what one executive called, with chilling candor, mind share". A 2017 Daily Express story in the UK suggests "the creeping incursion of adverts in Windows 10" has been an issue.

On the other hand, modern advertisers are compelled to react to changes in consumer habits. An article in The New York Times notes that "consumers’ viewing and reading habits are so scattershot now that many advertisers say the best way to reach time-pressed consumers is to try to catch their eye at literally every turn." And, the article suggests that ad agencies believe that as long as ads are entertaining, people may not mind the saturation. As people have turned from traditional media, advertisers have not only struggled to create brand awareness, but there is also a move to "microtarget people at precisely timed moments" as well, according to an article in Stay Free!.

Occasionally, the term "Ad Creep" has been used to describe a process of slowly infusing more ads into places where ads have been expected (television shows, for example) such as in a 2011 Advertising Age article describing the increase in both the time devoted to ads and the number of ad messages in the Super Bowl. This is not a standard use of the term, but it is related. A 2017 blog post by the chief global analyst of Kantar Millward Brown, a marketing firm, notes "that average ad loads on national television in the U.S. continued to creep upwards from 10.4 minutes per hour in December 2014, to 10.9 minutes in December 2016". Although the increase is less than 5%, he suggests "marketers should be concerned because the evidence suggests that more clutter is a bad thing for brands."

🔗 Biography 🔗 Linux

Wim Odilia Georges Taymans is a Belgian software developer based in Malaga, Spain. He is the original developer behind GStreamer and Pipewire technologies, which provide core multimedia processing capabilities to many modern operating systems.

Taymans started his career in multimedia development on the Commodore 64 and the Amiga writing various games and demos. In 1994 he installed the Linux operating system on his Amiga and has since been involved with the development of various multimedia technologies for the Linux platform. His first efforts on Linux were some assembly optimizations for the rtjpeg library; later, he worked on the Trinity video editor before teaming up with Erik Walthinsen to create the GStreamer multimedia framework.

In 2004 he started working for Fluendo in Spain as employee number 3. While working for Fluendo he designed and wrote most of the 0.10 release series of GStreamer. In July 2007 he left Fluendo and joined with Collabora. As part of his job at Collabora he maintained and developed GStreamer further. In November 2013, Taymans started as a Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat spending most of his time working on upstream GStreamer.

Taymans was the main architect and developer behind the GStreamer 1.0 release which came out on September 24, 2012.

In July 2015, Taymans announced that he was designing Pinos, which became PipeWire, from his position as Principal Engineer at Red Hat. PipeWire is a server for handling audio and video streams on Linux.

🔗 Internet culture

Zalgo text, also known as cursed text due to the nature of its use, is digital text that has been modified with numerous combining characters, Unicode symbols used to add diacritics above or below letters, to appear frightening or glitchy.

Named for a 2004 Internet creepypasta story that ascribes it to the influence of an eldritch deity, Zalgo text has become a significant component of many Internet memes, particularly in the "surreal meme" culture. The formatting of Zalgo text also allows it to be used to halt or impair certain computer functions, whether intentionally or not.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Politics 🔗 Biography/politics and government 🔗 Politics of the United Kingdom

Count Binface is a satirical perennial candidate created by the British comedian Jonathan David Harvey in 2018. He was a candidate for Uxbridge and South Ruislip in the 2019 United Kingdom general election against the then prime minister, Boris Johnson. He also stood in the London Mayoral elections in 2021 and 2024.

In earlier elections, Harvey stood as Lord Buckethead, but was forced to change the character due to a copyright dispute with the American filmmaker Todd Durham, who created Lord Buckethead for his 1984 science fiction film Hyperspace. Since then Harvey has used the forced name change to his advantage by using the platform of Binface to promote electoral participation, with the slogan, "Make your vote COUNT".

In 2019, another individual contested the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat as Buckethead, representing the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, to which Binface said he "look[s] forward to both the hustings and to challenging [him] to take part in a receptacle-to-receptacle debate".

When Johnson resigned as an MP in 2023, Binface again stood as a candidate in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election, finishing eighth of 17. Originally standing as an independent, since 2023 his affiliation has been given as Count Binface Party on ballot papers. Count Binface plans to contest the seat of current UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, in Richmond and Northallerton, in the 2024 general election on 4 July.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Telecommunications

A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, or hand phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while the user is moving within a telephone service area. The radio frequency link establishes a connection to the switching systems of a mobile phone operator, which provides access to the public switched telephone network (PSTN). Modern mobile telephone services use a cellular network architecture, and, therefore, mobile telephones are called cellular telephones or cell phones, in North America. In addition to telephony, 2000s-era mobile phones support a variety of other services, such as text messaging, MMS, email, Internet access, short-range wireless communications (infrared, Bluetooth), business applications, video games, and digital photography. Mobile phones offering only those capabilities are known as feature phones; mobile phones which offer greatly advanced computing capabilities are referred to as smartphones.

The development of metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) large-scale integration (LSI) technology, information theory and cellular networking led to the development of affordable mobile communications. The first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated by John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola in 1973, using a handset weighing c. 2 kilograms (4.4 lbs). In 1979, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) launched the world's first cellular network in Japan. In 1983, the DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercially available handheld mobile phone. From 1983 to 2014, worldwide mobile phone subscriptions grew to over seven billion—enough to provide one for every person on Earth. In the first quarter of 2016, the top smartphone developers worldwide were Samsung, Apple, and Huawei, and smartphone sales represented 78 percent of total mobile phone sales. For feature phones (slang: “dumbphones”) as of 2016, the largest were Samsung, Nokia, and Alcatel.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Archaeology

YBC 7289 is a Babylonian clay tablet notable for containing an accurate sexagesimal approximation to the square root of 2, the length of the diagonal of a unit square. This number is given to the equivalent of six decimal digits, "the greatest known computational accuracy ... in the ancient world". The tablet is believed to be the work of a student in southern Mesopotamia from some time in the range from 1800–1600 BC, and was donated to the Yale Babylonian Collection by J. P. Morgan.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Computing/Computer science 🔗 Computing/Early computers 🔗 Computing/Networking

Jonathan Bruce Postel (; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death. In his lifetime he was known as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence on the medium.

The Internet Society's Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. His obituary was written by Vint Cerf and published as RFC 2468 in remembrance of Postel and his work. In 2012, Postel was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society. The Channel Islands' Domain Registry building was named after him in early 2016.