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🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Paranormal

John Titor (May 5, 6 or 7, 1998) is a name used on several bulletin boards during 2000 and 2001 by a poster claiming to be an American military time traveler from 2036. Titor made numerous vague and specific predictions regarding calamitous events in 2004 and beyond, including a nuclear war, none of which came true. Subsequent closer examination of Titor's assertions provoked widespread skepticism. Inconsistencies in his explanations, the uniform inaccuracy of his predictions, and a private investigator's findings all led to the general impression that the entire episode was an elaborate hoax. A 2009 investigation concluded that Titor was likely the creation of Larry Haber, a Florida entertainment lawyer, along with his brother Morey, a computer scientist.

🔗 Computer science

In computing, aspect-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm that aims to increase modularity by allowing the separation of cross-cutting concerns. It does so by adding behavior to existing code (an advice) without modifying the code itself, instead separately specifying which code is modified via a "pointcut" specification, such as "log all function calls when the function's name begins with 'set'". This allows behaviors that are not central to the business logic (such as logging) to be added to a program without cluttering the code core to the functionality.

AOP includes programming methods and tools that support the modularization of concerns at the level of the source code, while aspect-oriented software development refers to a whole engineering discipline.

Aspect-oriented programming entails breaking down program logic into distinct parts (so-called concerns, cohesive areas of functionality). Nearly all programming paradigms support some level of grouping and encapsulation of concerns into separate, independent entities by providing abstractions (e.g., functions, procedures, modules, classes, methods) that can be used for implementing, abstracting and composing these concerns. Some concerns "cut across" multiple abstractions in a program, and defy these forms of implementation. These concerns are called cross-cutting concerns or horizontal concerns.

Logging exemplifies a crosscutting concern because a logging strategy necessarily affects every logged part of the system. Logging thereby crosscuts all logged classes and methods.

All AOP implementations have some crosscutting expressions that encapsulate each concern in one place. The difference between implementations lies in the power, safety, and usability of the constructs provided. For example, interceptors that specify the methods to express a limited form of crosscutting, without much support for type-safety or debugging. AspectJ has a number of such expressions and encapsulates them in a special class, an aspect. For example, an aspect can alter the behavior of the base code (the non-aspect part of a program) by applying advice (additional behavior) at various join points (points in a program) specified in a quantification or query called a pointcut (that detects whether a given join point matches). An aspect can also make binary-compatible structural changes to other classes, like adding members or parents.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/19th century 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Women writers

The Last Man is an apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, first published in 1826. The narrative concerns Europe in the late 21st century, ravaged by a mysterious plague pandemic that rapidly sweeps across the entire globe, ultimately resulting in the near-extinction of humanity. It also includes discussion of the British state as a republic, for which Shelley sat in meetings of the House of Commons to gain insight to the governmental system of the Romantic era. The novel includes many fictive allusions to her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned in a shipwreck four years before the book's publication, as well as their close friend Lord Byron, who had died two years previously.

The Last Man is one of the first pieces of dystopian fiction published. It was critically savaged and remained largely obscure at the time of its publication. It was not until the 1960s that the novel resurfaced for the public.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Judaism 🔗 Journalism 🔗 Sweden 🔗 Israel 🔗 Palestine

On 17 August 2009, the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet published an article reporting how Israel stole the organs of Palestinians in custody. Before eventually admitting to theft of organs, the Israeli government initially denied the allegations and called them antisemetic. The Swedish government refused to condemn the article, and upheld Aftonbladet's freedom of speech, leading to a rift between the Swedish and the Israeli governments. Palestinian officials and families of the deceased called for an independent investigation. In December 2009, Israeli officials admitted that they had harvested the organs of Palestinians without their families' permission. These Palestinians had been killed by the Israeli military, but Israeli officials emphasized they did not kill Palestinians in order to harvest their organs.

The article that sparked the controversy was written by Swedish freelance photojournalist Donald Boström, with the title Våra söner plundras på sina organ ("Our sons are being plundered for their organs"). It presented allegations that in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, many young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by Israeli forces and their bodies returned to their families with organs missing. It was published by Aftonbladet, one of the largest daily newspapers in the Nordic countries.

The Israeli government and several US representatives claimed that the article was baseless and incendiary, alluding to the history of antisemitism and blood libels against Jews, and asked the Swedish government to denounce the article. The government refused, citing freedom of the press and the Swedish constitution. Swedish ambassador to Israel Elisabet Borsiin Bonnier condemned the article as "shocking and appalling" and stated that freedom of the press carries responsibility, but the Swedish government distanced itself from her remarks. The Swedish Newspaper Publishers' Association and Reporters Without Borders supported Sweden's refusal to condemn it. The former warned of venturing onto a slope with government officials damning occurrences in Swedish media, which may curb warranted debate and restrain freedom of expression by self-censorship. Italy made a stillborn attempt to defuse the diplomatic situation by a European resolution condemning antisemitism. A survey among the cultural editors of the other major Swedish newspapers found that all would have refused the article. The Palestinian National Authority announced that it would establish a commission to investigate the article's claims.

In December 2009, a 2000 interview with the chief pathologist at the L. Greenberg National Institute of Forensic Medicine Yehuda Hiss was released in which he had admitted taking organs from the corpses of Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers without their families' permission. Israeli health officials confirmed Hiss's confession but stated that such incidents had ended in the 1990s and noted that Hiss had been removed from his post. The Palestinian press said the report "appeared to confirm Palestinians' allegations that Israel returned their relatives' bodies with their chests sewn up, having harvested their organs". Several news agencies claimed the Aftonbladet article accused Israel of killing Palestinians to harvest their organs, although the author, the culture editor for Aftonbladet, and Nancy Scheper-Hughes denied that it had made that claim.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Lists 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Time 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 Geology 🔗 Extinction 🔗 Solar System 🔗 Astronomy/Solar System

While the future can never be predicted with absolute certainty, present understanding in various scientific fields allows for the prediction of some far-future events, if only in the broadest outline. These fields include astrophysics, which has revealed how planets and stars form, interact, and die; particle physics, which has revealed how matter behaves at the smallest scales; evolutionary biology, which predicts how life will evolve over time; and plate tectonics, which shows how continents shift over millennia.

All projections of the future of Earth, the Solar System, and the universe must account for the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy, or a loss of the energy available to do work, must rise over time. Stars will eventually exhaust their supply of hydrogen fuel and burn out. Close encounters between astronomical objects gravitationally fling planets from their star systems, and star systems from galaxies.

Physicists expect that matter itself will eventually come under the influence of radioactive decay, as even the most stable materials break apart into subatomic particles. Current data suggest that the universe has a flat geometry (or very close to flat), and thus will not collapse in on itself after a finite time, and the infinite future allows for the occurrence of a number of massively improbable events, such as the formation of Boltzmann brains.

The timelines displayed here cover events from the beginning of the 11th millennium to the furthest reaches of future time. A number of alternative future events are listed to account for questions still unresolved, such as whether humans will become extinct, whether protons decay, and whether the Earth survives when the Sun expands to become a red giant.

🔗 United States 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Alternative medicine 🔗 United States/Louisiana

Hadacol was a patent medicine marketed as a vitamin supplement. Its principal attraction, however, was that it contained 12 percent alcohol (listed on the tonic bottle's label as a "preservative"), which made it quite popular in the dry counties of the southern United States. It was the product of four-term Louisiana State Senator Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Democrat from Erath in Vermilion Parish in southwestern Louisiana. He was not a medical doctor, nor a registered pharmacist, but had a strong talent for self-promotion. Time magazine once described him as "a stem-winding salesman who knows every razzle-dazzle switch in the pitchman's trade".

🔗 Computer science

The limits of computation are governed by a number of different factors. In particular, there are several physical and practical limits to the amount of computation or data storage that can be performed with a given amount of mass, volume, or energy.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Florida

Marvin Pipkin (November 18, 1889 – January 7, 1977) was an American chemist. During his time in the United States Army he worked on gas masks. In his civilian life he invented a process for frosting the inside of incandescent light bulbs to cut down on the sharp glare and diffuse the light. He went on to make many other inventions and innovative improvements to the light bulb.

🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Sports 🔗 Greece/Byzantine world

The Nika riots (Greek: Στάσις τοῦ Νίκα, romanized: Stásis toû Níka), Nika revolt or Nika sedition took place against Byzantine emperor Justinian I in Constantinople over the course of a week in 532 C.E. They are often regarded as the most violent riots in the city's history, with nearly half of Constantinople being burned or destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed.

🔗 Writing systems

This is a list of rare glyph variants of the Cyrillic letter O. They were proposed for inclusion into Unicode in 2007 and incorporated as in Unicode 5.1.