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πŸ”— Why is P3P not used more?

The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) is an obsolete protocol allowing websites to declare their intended use of information they collect about web browser users. Designed to give users more control of their personal information when browsing, P3P was developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and officially recommended on April 16, 2002. Development ceased shortly thereafter and there have been very few implementations of P3P. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Edge were the only major browsers to support P3P. Microsoft has ended support from Windows 10 onwards. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Edge on Windows 10 will no longer support P3P. The president of TRUSTe has stated that P3P has not been implemented widely due to the difficulty and lack of value.

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πŸ”— Magdeburg Hemispheres

πŸ”— Physics

The Magdeburg hemispheres are a pair of large copper hemispheres, with mating rims. They were used to demonstrate the power of atmospheric pressure. When the rims were sealed with grease and the air was pumped out, the sphere contained a vacuum and could not be pulled apart by teams of horses. The Magdeburg hemispheres were invented by German scientist and mayor of Magdeburg, Otto von Guericke, to demonstrate the air pump that he had invented, and the concept of atmospheric pressure. The first artificial vacuum had been produced a few years earlier by Evangelista Torricelli, and had inspired Guericke to design the world's first vacuum pump, which consisted of a piston and cylinder with one-way flap valves. The hemispheres became popular in physics lectures as an illustration of the strength of air pressure, and are still used in education. A pair of the original hemispheres are preserved in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

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πŸ”— In 1979, a Gulf of Mexico oil spill went on for 10 months at about the BP rate.

πŸ”— Environment πŸ”— Disaster management πŸ”— Mexico πŸ”— Occupational Safety and Health πŸ”— Energy πŸ”— Caribbean πŸ”— Fisheries and Fishing

Ixtoc I was an exploratory oil well being drilled by the semi-submersible drilling rig Sedco 135 in the Bay of Campeche of the Gulf of Mexico, about 100Β km (62Β mi) northwest of Ciudad del Carmen, Campeche in waters 50Β m (160Β ft) deep. On 3 June 1979, the well suffered a blowout resulting in one of the largest oil spills in history.

πŸ”— Unschooling

πŸ”— Education πŸ”— Homeschooling πŸ”— Alternative education

Unschooling is an informal learning that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. Unschooling students learn through their natural life experiences including play, household responsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective classes, family, mentors, and social interaction. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, believing that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood and therefore useful it is to the child. While courses may occasionally be taken, unschooling questions the usefulness of standard curricula, conventional grading methods, and other features of traditional schooling in the education of each unique child.

The term "unschooling" was coined in the 1970s and used by educator John Holt, widely regarded as the father of unschooling. While unschooling is often considered a subset of homeschooling and homeschooling has been subject to widespread public debate, little media attention has been given to unschooling in particular.

Critics of unschooling see it as an extreme educational philosophy, with concerns that unschooled children will lack the social skills, structure, and motivation of their schooled peers, while proponents of unschooling say exactly the opposite is true: that self-directed education in a natural environment better equips a child to handle the "real world."

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πŸ”— Canadian Traveller Problem

πŸ”— Computer science πŸ”— Mathematics

In computer science and graph theory, the Canadian traveller problem (CTP) is a generalization of the shortest path problem to graphs that are partially observable. In other words, the graph is revealed while it is being explored, and explorative edges are charged even if they do not contribute to the final path.

This optimization problem was introduced by Christos Papadimitriou and Mihalis Yannakakis in 1989 and a number of variants of the problem have been studied since. The name supposedly originates from conversations of the authors who learned of a difficulty Canadian drivers had: traveling a network of cities with snowfall randomly blocking roads. The stochastic version, where each edge is associated with a probability of independently being in the graph, has been given considerable attention in operations research under the name "the Stochastic Shortest Path Problem with Recourse" (SSPPR).

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πŸ”— Bead sort: faster than O(N log N) sort

πŸ”— Computer science

Bead sort, also called gravity sort, is a natural sorting algorithm, developed by Joshua J. Arulanandham, Cristian S. Calude and Michael J. Dinneen in 2002, and published in The Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. Both digital and analog hardware implementations of bead sort can achieve a sorting time of O(n); however, the implementation of this algorithm tends to be significantly slower in software and can only be used to sort lists of positive integers. Also, it would seem that even in the best case, the algorithm requires O(n2) space.

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πŸ”— Jumping Frenchmen of Maine

πŸ”— Medicine πŸ”— Maine

The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine were a group of 19th-century lumberjacks who exhibited a rare disorder of unknown origin. The syndrome entails an exaggerated startle reflex which may be described as an uncontrollable "jump"; individuals with this condition can exhibit sudden movements in all parts of the body. Jumping Frenchmen syndrome shares some symptoms with other startle disorders.

Individuals with this condition were first found in the Moosehead Lake region of Maine, and were first described by George Miller Beard in 1878.

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πŸ”— Polyphasic Sleep

πŸ”— Medicine πŸ”— Psychology πŸ”— Physiology

Biphasic sleep (or diphasic, bimodal or bifurcated sleep) is the practice of sleeping during two periods over the course of 24 hours, while polyphasic sleep refers to sleeping multiple times – usually more than two. Each of these is in contrast to monophasic sleep, which is one period of sleep within 24 hours. Segmented sleep and divided sleep may refer to polyphasic or biphasic sleep, but may also refer to interrupted sleep, where the sleep has one or several shorter periods of wakefulness. A common form of biphasic or polyphasic sleep includes a nap, which is a short period of sleep, typically taken between the hours of 9Β am and 9Β pm as an adjunct to the usual nocturnal sleep period. Nowadays, the definition of polyphasic sleep is any sleep schedule with at least two sleeps per day, to distinguish it from monophasic sleep, which only has one sleep per day.

The term polyphasic sleep was first used in the early 20th century by psychologist J. S. Szymanski, who observed daily fluctuations in activity patterns (see Stampi 1992). It does not imply any particular sleep schedule. The circadian rhythm disorder known as irregular sleep-wake syndrome is an example of polyphasic sleep in humans. Polyphasic sleep is common in many animals, and is believed to be the ancestral sleep state for mammals, although simians are monophasic.

The term polyphasic sleep is also used by an online community that experiments with alternative sleeping schedules to achieve more time awake each day. However, researchers such as Piotr WoΕΊniak warn that such forms of sleep deprivation are not healthy. While many claim that polyphasic sleep was widely used by some polymaths and prominent people such as Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon, and Nikola Tesla, there are few reliable sources supporting that view.

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πŸ”— Fire balloon

πŸ”— Aviation πŸ”— Military history πŸ”— Military history/Military aviation πŸ”— Military history/Military science, technology, and theory πŸ”— Military history/Weaponry

An incendiary balloon (or balloon bomb) is a balloon inflated with a lighter than air gas such as hot air, hydrogen, or helium, that has a bomb, incendiary device, or Molotov cocktail attached. The balloon is carried by the prevailing winds to the target area, where it falls or releases its payload.

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