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🔗 Military history/United States military history

🔗 Literature

The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations is a descriptive list which was first proposed by Georges Polti in 1895 to categorize every dramatic situation that might occur in a story or performance. Polti analyzed classical Greek texts, plus classical and contemporaneous French works. He also analyzed a handful of non-French authors. In his introduction, Polti claims to be continuing the work of Carlo Gozzi, who also identified 36 situations.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Lists 🔗 Science Fiction

Computers have often been used as fictional objects in literature, movies and in other forms of media. Fictional computers tend to be considerably more sophisticated than anything yet devised in the real world.

This is a list of computers that have appeared in notable works of fiction. The work may be about the computer, or the computer may be an important element of the story. Only static computers are included. Robots and other fictional computers that are described as existing in a mobile or humanlike form are discussed in a separate list of fictional robots and androids.

🔗 Physics

Coulombic explosions are a mechanism for transforming energy in intense electromagnetic fields into atomic motion and are thus useful for controlled destruction of relatively robust molecules. The explosions are a prominent technique in laser-based machining, and appear naturally in certain high-energy reactions.

🔗 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.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 ArtAndFeminism

'Pataphysics (French: 'pataphysique) is a "philosophy" of science invented by French writer Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) intended to be a parody of science. Difficult to be simply defined or pinned down, it has been described as the "science of imaginary solutions".

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Florida

The Wingless Electromagnetic Air Vehicle (WEAV) is a heavier than air flight system developed at the University of Florida, funded by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The WEAV was invented in 2006 by Dr. Subrata Roy, plasma physicist, aerospace engineering professor at the University of Florida, and has been a subject of several patents. The WEAV employs no moving parts, and combines the aircraft structure, propulsion, energy production and storage, and control subsystems into one integrated system.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Books

Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960 is a 1998 novel, presented as a biography, by the Scottish writer William Boyd. Nat Tate was an imaginary person, invented by Boyd and created as "an abstract expressionist who destroyed '99%' of his work and leapt to his death from the Staten Island ferry. His body was never found." At the time of the novel's launch, Boyd went some way to encourage the belief that Tate had really existed.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 Citizendium Porting

Kerckhoffs's principle (also called Kerckhoffs's desideratum, assumption, axiom, doctrine or law) of cryptography was stated by Netherlands born cryptographer Auguste Kerckhoffs in the 19th century: A cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public knowledge.

Kerckhoffs's principle was reformulated (or possibly independently formulated) by American mathematician Claude Shannon as "the enemy knows the system", i.e., "one ought to design systems under the assumption that the enemy will immediately gain full familiarity with them". In that form, it is called Shannon's maxim. This concept is widely embraced by cryptographers, in contrast to "security through obscurity", which is not.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 History 🔗 Germany 🔗 Politics 🔗 Cold War 🔗 European history

The Stalin Note, also known as the March Note, was a document delivered to the representatives of the Western Allies (the United Kingdom, France, and the United States) from the Soviet Union in Germany on 10 March 1952. Soviet general secretary and premier Joseph Stalin put forth a proposal for a German reunification and neutralisation with no conditions on economic policies and with guarantees for "the rights of man and basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, press, religious persuasion, political conviction, and assembly" and free activity of democratic parties and organizations.

James Warburg, a member of the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, testified before the committee on 28 March 1952 and observed that the Soviet proposal might be a bluff, but he thought that it seemed "that our government is afraid to call the bluff for the fear that it may not be a bluff at all" and might lead to "a free, neutral, and demilitarised Germany", which might be "subverted into Soviet orbit". That led to an exchange of notes between the West and the Soviet Union, which eventually ended after the West had insistence for a unified Germany to be free to join the European Defence Community and to be rearmed, demands that Stalin rejected.

West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Western Allies characterised Stalin's move as an aggressive action that attempted to stall the reintegration of West Germany. However, there was later a debate on whether a chance for reunification had been missed. Six years after the exchange, two West German ministers, Thomas Dehler and Gustav Heinemann, blamed Adenauer for not having explored the chance of reunification.