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🔗 Internet 🔗 Internet culture

The Society for Preventing Parents from Naming Their Children Jennifer (SPPNTCJ) was a popular and sometimes controversial website that contributed to early web culture, online from 1996 to 2000. The SPPNTCJ home page was created and updated by Jennifer Farwell, one of the three founding members of the SPPNTCJ. Other founding members were Jennifer Rich and Jennifer Ang.

The SPPNTCJ began as an inside joke on an email discussion list that both Farwell and Rich subscribed to, which included five or more Jennifers who actively posted at that time. One of the Jennifers tossed out the comment that there should be "a society for preventing parents from naming their children Jennifer." The idea took off, and Farwell created the SPPNTCJ's website. It welcomed more than 2 million visitors while online.

During its run, the SPPNTCJ was noted by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, Thunder Bay Television News, 580 CKPR radio program Tech Talk, California State University, Chico, SignsOnSanDiego.com, WebMD and more. It received several Internet "cool site" acknowledgments, from Cool Central, Seven Wonders, Twoeys, Fallen Thinkers, and Secret Einstein.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Numismatics

In economics, Gresham's law is a monetary principle stating that "bad money drives out good". For example, if there are two forms of commodity money in circulation, which are accepted by law as having similar face value, the more valuable commodity will gradually disappear from circulation.

The law was named in 1860 by Henry Dunning Macleod, after Sir Thomas Gresham (1519–1579), who was an English financier during the Tudor dynasty. However, the concept itself had been previously expressed by others, including by Aristophanes in his play The Frogs, which dates from around the end of the 5th century BC, in the 14th century by Nicole Oresme c. 1350, in his treatise On the Origin, Nature, Law, and Alterations of Money, and by jurist and historian Al-Maqrizi (1364–1442) in the Mamluk Empire; and in 1519 by Nicolaus Copernicus in a treatise called Monetae cudendae ratio For this reason, it is occasionally known as the Gresham–Copernicus' law.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Climate change 🔗 Environment 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Antarctica 🔗 Arctic 🔗 Oceans 🔗 Antarctica/British Antarctic Territory

Boaty McBoatface (also known as Boaty) is the British lead boat in a fleet of three robotic lithium battery–powered autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) of the Autosub Long Range (ALR) class. Launched in 2017 and carried on board the polar scientific research vessel RRS Sir David Attenborough, she is a focal point of the Polar Explorer Programme of the UK Government.

Boaty and her two fleet-mates are part of the UK National Marine Equipment Pool and owned by the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton. She is classified as an "autosub long range (ALR) autonomous underwater vehicle", and will use her onboard sensors to map the movement of deep waters that play a vital role in regulating the Earth's climate.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Java

Project Looking Glass is a now inactive free software project under the GPL to create an innovative 3D desktop environment for Linux, Solaris, and Windows. It was sponsored by Sun Microsystems.

Looking Glass is programmed in the Java language using the Java 3D system to remain platform independent. Despite the use of graphics acceleration features, the desktop explores the use of 3D windowing capabilities for both existing application programs and ones specifically designed for Looking Glass.

There is a Live CD available from Project Looking Glass. The Looking Glass environment is also included on a Live DVD (FunWorks 2007 edition) from the Granular Linux project.

🔗 Robotics

An eigenface () is the name given to a set of eigenvectors when used in the computer vision problem of human face recognition. The approach of using eigenfaces for recognition was developed by Sirovich and Kirby (1987) and used by Matthew Turk and Alex Pentland in face classification. The eigenvectors are derived from the covariance matrix of the probability distribution over the high-dimensional vector space of face images. The eigenfaces themselves form a basis set of all images used to construct the covariance matrix. This produces dimension reduction by allowing the smaller set of basis images to represent the original training images. Classification can be achieved by comparing how faces are represented by the basis set.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Education 🔗 Game theory 🔗 Games

A simulation game is "a game that contains a mixture of skill, chance, and strategy to simulate an aspect of reality, such as a stock exchange". Similarly, Finnish author Virpi Ruohomäki states that "a simulation game combines the features of a game (competition, cooperation, rules, participants, roles) with those of a simulation (incorporation of critical features of reality). A game is a simulation game if its rules refer to an empirical model of reality". A properly built simulation game used to teach or learn economics would closely follow the assumptions and rules of the theoretical models within this discipline.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing

This is a list of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) response status codes. Status codes are issued by a server in response to a client's request made to the server. It includes codes from IETF Request for Comments (RFCs), other specifications, and some additional codes used in some common applications of the HTTP. The first digit of the status code specifies one of five standard classes of responses. The message phrases shown are typical, but any human-readable alternative may be provided. Unless otherwise stated, the status code is part of the HTTP/1.1 standard (RFC 7231).

The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) maintains the official registry of HTTP status codes.

All HTTP response status codes are separated into five classes or categories. The first digit of the status code defines the class of response, while the last two digits do not have any classifying or categorization role. There are five classes defined by the standard:

• 1xx informational response – the request was received, continuing process
• 2xx successful – the request was successfully received, understood, and accepted
• 3xx redirection – further action needs to be taken in order to complete the request
• 4xx client error – the request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled
• 5xx server error – the server failed to fulfil an apparently valid request

🔗 Internet 🔗 China

50 Cent Party, 50 Cent Army and wumao ( WOO-mow) are terms for Internet commentators who are hired by the authorities of the People's Republic of China to manipulate public opinion and disseminate disinformation to the benefit of the governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It was created during the early phases of the Internet's rollout to the wider public in China.

The name is derived from the allegation that such commentators are paid RMB¥0.50 for every post. These commentators create comments or articles on popular Chinese social media networks that are intended to derail discussions which are critical of the CCP, promoting narratives that serve the government's interests and insulting or spreading misinformation about political opponents of the Chinese government, both domestic and abroad. Some of these commentators have labeled themselves ziganwu (Chinese: 自干五, short for 自带干粮的五毛, lit. 'wumao who bring their own dry rations'), claiming they are not paid by authorities and express their support for the Chinese government out of their own volition.

Authors of a paper published in 2017 in the American Political Science Review estimate that the Chinese government fabricates 488 million social media posts per year. In contrast to common assumptions, the 50 Cent Party consists mostly of paid bureaucrats who respond to government directives and rarely defend their government from criticism or engage in direct arguments because "... the goal of this massive secretive operation is instead to distract the public and change the subject." Around 80% of the analysed posts involve pro-China cheerleading with inspirational slogans, and 13% involve general praise and suggestions on governmental policies. Despite the common allegation of the commentators getting paid for their posts, the paper suggested there was "no evidence" that they are paid anything for their posts, instead being required to do so as a part of their official party duties.

Research by professors at Harvard, Stanford, and UC San Diego indicated a "massive secretive operation" to fill China's Internet with propaganda, and has resulted in some 488 million posts written by fake social media accounts, representing about 0.6% of the 80 billion posts generated on Chinese social media. To maximize their influence, such pro-government comments are made largely during times of intense online debate, and when online protests have a possibility of transforming into real life actions. The colloquial term wumao has also been used by some English speakers outside of China as an insult against people with perceived pro-CCP bias.

🔗 Books 🔗 Food and drink

This Is the Boke of Cokery, or The Boke of Cokery, is believed to be the first cookery book printed in English. The name of the author is unknown. It was printed and published by Richard Pynson in 1500. The book remained in print for many years in the 16th century, but was superseded and forgotten by the 18th. The only known surviving copy of the book is in the possession of the Marquess of Bath at Longleat House, Wiltshire.

🔗 Egypt

The Siwa Oasis (Arabic: واحة سيوة‎, Wāḥat Sīwah, IPA: [ˈwæːħet ˈsiːwæ]; Coptic: ⲥⲓⲟⲩⲁϩ Siwah; Berber languages: Isiwan, ⵉⵙⵉⵡⴰⵏ ) is an urban oasis in Egypt between the Qattara Depression and the Great Sand Sea in the Western Desert, 50 km (30 mi) east of the Libyan border, and 560 km (348 mi) from Cairo. About 80 km (50 mi) in length and 20 km (12 mi) wide, Siwa Oasis is one of Egypt's most isolated settlements with about 33,000 people, mostly Berbers, who developed a unique and isolated desert culture and a distinct dialect and language different than all other dialects called Siwi, they are also fluent in the Egyptian dialect of Arabic which is called "Masry" meaning Egyptian.

Its fame lies primarily in its ancient role as the home to an oracle of Ammon, the ruins of which are a popular tourist attraction which gave the oasis its ancient name Oasis of Amun Ra. Historically, it was part of Ancient Egypt.