Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Terrorism 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Politics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Criminal Biography 🔗 Chicago 🔗 United States/FBI 🔗 University of California 🔗 Illinois 🔗 Montana 🔗 Philosophy/Anarchism

Theodore John Kaczynski (; born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber (), is an American domestic terrorist, anarchist, and former mathematics professor. He was a mathematics prodigy, but he abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a more primitive lifestyle. Between 1978 and 1995, he killed three people and injured 23 others in an attempt to start a revolution by conducting a nationwide bombing campaign targeting people involved with modern technology.

In 1971, Kaczynski moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water near Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient. He witnessed the destruction of the wilderness surrounding his cabin and concluded that living in nature was untenable; he began his bombing campaign in 1978. In 1995, he sent a letter to The New York Times and promised to "desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his essay Industrial Society and Its Future, in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies that require large-scale organization.

Kaczynski was the subject of the longest and most expensive investigation in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Before his identity was known, the FBI used the case identifier UNABOM (University and Airline Bomber) to refer to his case, which resulted in the media naming him the "Unabomber." The FBI and Attorney General Janet Reno pushed for the publication of Industrial Society and Its Future, which led to a tip from Kaczynski's brother David, who recognized the writing style.

After his arrest in 1996, Kaczynski tried unsuccessfully to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers because they wanted him to plead insanity in order to avoid the death penalty, whereas he did not believe that he was insane. In 1998, a plea bargain was reached under which he pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Computing 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Disney

Alan Curtis Kay (born May 17, 1940) is an American computer scientist. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Royal Society of Arts. He is best known for his pioneering work on object-oriented programming and windowing graphical user interface (GUI) design.

He was the president of the Viewpoints Research Institute before its closure in 2018, and an adjunct professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is also on the advisory board of TTI/Vanguard. Until mid-2005, he was a senior fellow at HP Labs, a visiting professor at Kyoto University, and an adjunct professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Kay is also a former professional jazz guitarist, composer, and theatrical designer, and an amateur classical pipe organist.

🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Firearms

The TP-82 (Russian: ТП-82) was a triple-barrelled Soviet pistol that was carried by cosmonauts on space missions.

It was intended as a survival aid to be used after landings and before recovery in the Siberian wilderness. The TP-82 was the result of cosmonaut Alexei Leonov's concerns after being stranded in the Siberian wilderness when his Voskhod capsule malfunctioned. He feared that the 9mm pistol that was provided in the survival kit would be ineffective against the Siberian wildlife, namely bears and wolves.

The upper two shotgun barrels used 12.5×70 mm ammunition (40 gauge), and the lower rifled barrel used 5.45×39mm ammunition developed for the AK-74 assault rifle. The TP-82 has a large lever on the left side of the receiver that opens the action and a small grip-safety under the trigger-guard that resembles a secondary trigger.

The pistol could be used for hunting, to defend against predators and for visible and audible distress signals. The detachable buttstock was also a machete that came with a canvas sheath. TP-82s were carried regularly on Soviet and Russian space missions from 1986 to 2007. They were part of the Soyuz Portable Emergency-Survival Kit (Носимый аварийный запас, Nosimyi Avariynyi Zapas, NAZ). In 2007, the media reported that the remaining ammunition for the TP-82 had become unusable and that a regular semi-automatic pistol would be used on future missions.

🔗 Mathematics

John von Neumann's universal constructor is a self-replicating machine in a cellular automata (CA) environment. It was designed in the 1940s, without the use of a computer. The fundamental details of the machine were published in von Neumann's book Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, completed in 1966 by Arthur W. Burks after von Neumann's death.

Von Neumann's goal was to specify an abstract machine which, when run, would replicate itself. In his design, the machine consists of three parts: a 'blueprint' for itself, a mechanism that can read any blueprint and construct the machine (sans blueprint) specified by that blueprint, and a 'copy machine' that can make copies of any blueprint. After the mechanism has been used to construct the machine specified by the blueprint, the copy machine is used to create a copy of that blueprint, and this copy is placed into the new machine, resulting in a working replication of the original machine. Some machines will do this backwards, copying the blueprint and then building a machine.

To define his machine in more detail, von Neumann invented the concept of a cellular automaton. The one he used consists of a two-dimensional grid of cells, each of which can be in one of 29 states at any point in time. At each timestep, each cell updates its state depending on the states of the surrounding cells at the prior timestep. The rules governing these updates are identical for all cells.

The universal constructor is a certain pattern of cell states in this cellular automaton. It contains one line of cells that serve as a 'tape', encoding a sequence of instructions that serve as a 'blueprint' for the machine. The machine reads these instructions one by one and performs the corresponding actions. The instructions direct the machine to use its 'construction arm' to build a copy of the machine, without tape, at some other location in the cell grid. The tape can't contain instructions to build an equally long tape, just as a container can't contain a container of the same size. Therefore, the machine contains a separate 'copy machine' which reads the tape and places a copy into the newly constructed machine. The resulting new machine and tape is identical to the old one, and it proceeds to replicate again.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 History 🔗 Computing 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed "Deep Crack") is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1998, to perform a brute force search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher's key space – that is, to decrypt an encrypted message by trying every possible key. The aim in doing this was to prove that the key size of DES was not sufficient to be secure.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Chaos theory

In mathematics, the Cantor function is an example of a function that is continuous, but not absolutely continuous. It is a notorious counterexample in analysis, because it challenges naive intuitions about continuity, derivative, and measure. Though it is continuous everywhere and has zero derivative almost everywhere, its value still goes from 0 to 1 as its argument reaches from 0 to 1. Thus, in one sense the function seems very much like a constant one which cannot grow, and in another, it does indeed monotonically grow, by construction.

It is also referred to as the Cantor ternary function, the Lebesgue function, Lebesgue's singular function, the Cantor–Vitali function, the Devil's staircase, the Cantor staircase function, and the Cantor–Lebesgue function. Georg Cantor (1884) introduced the Cantor function and mentioned that Scheeffer pointed out that it was a counterexample to an extension of the fundamental theorem of calculus claimed by Harnack. The Cantor function was discussed and popularized by Scheeffer (1884), Lebesgue (1904) and Vitali (1905).

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Computing/Computer Security

A Kensington Security Slot (also called a K-Slot or Kensington lock) is part of an anti-theft system designed in the early 1990s and patented by Kryptonite in 1999–2000, assigned to Schlage in 2002, and since 2005 owned and marketed by Kensington Computer Products Group, a division of ACCO Brands.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States

Intellipedia is an online system for collaborative data sharing used by the United States Intelligence Community (IC). It was established as a pilot project in late 2005 and formally announced in April 2006. Intellipedia consists of three wikis running on the separate JWICS (Intellipedia-TS), SIPRNet (Intellipedia-S), and DNI-U (Intellipedia-U) networks. The levels of classification allowed for information on the three wikis are Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS SCI), Secret (S), and Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU or FOUO) information, respectively. Each of the wikis is used by individuals with appropriate clearances from the 16 agencies of the US intelligence community and other national-security related organizations, including Combatant Commands and other federal departments. The wikis are not open to the public.

Intellipedia is a project of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (ICES) office headquartered in Fort Meade, Maryland. It includes information on the regions, people, and issues of interest to the communities using its host networks. Intellipedia uses MediaWiki, the same software used by the Wikipedia free-content encyclopedia project. To the contrary of mainstream Wikipedia, its intelligence analogue encourages editing that incorporates personal points of view regardless of rank as it was decided that, "much of the self-corrective knowledge in the Intelligence Community resides in personal points of view," and that, "not all good ideas originate at the top."

The Secret version connected to SIPRNet predominantly serves Department of Defense and the Department of State personnel, many of whom do not use the Top Secret JWICS network on a day-to-day basis. Users on unclassified networks can access Intellipedia from remote terminals outside their workspaces via a VPN, in addition to their normal workstations. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) users share information on the unclassified Intelink-U wiki.

🔗 Mathematics

In number theory, Mills' constant is defined as the smallest positive real number A such that the floor function of the double exponential function

${\displaystyle \lfloor A^{3^{n}}\rfloor }$

is a prime number, for all natural numbers n. This constant is named after William H. Mills who proved in 1947 the existence of A based on results of Guido Hoheisel and Albert Ingham on the prime gaps. Its value is unknown, but if the Riemann hypothesis is true, it is approximately 1.3063778838630806904686144926... (sequence A051021 in the OEIS).

🔗 Religion 🔗 Biology 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Science 🔗 Evolutionary biology 🔗 Molecular Biology 🔗 Creationism 🔗 Tree of Life 🔗 Molecular Biology/Genetics

Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes that are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Different characteristics tend to exist within any given population as a result of mutation, genetic recombination and other sources of genetic variation. Evolution occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection (including sexual selection) and genetic drift act on this variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more common or rare within a population. The evolutionary pressures that determine whether a characteristic would be common or rare within a population constantly change, resulting in a change in heritable characteristics arising over successive generations. It is this process of evolution that has given rise to biodiversity at every level of biological organisation, including the levels of species, individual organisms and molecules.

The theory of evolution by natural selection was conceived independently by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in the mid-19th century and was set out in detail in Darwin's book On the Origin of Species. Evolution by natural selection was first demonstrated by the observation that more offspring are often produced than can possibly survive. This is followed by three observable facts about living organisms: (1) traits vary among individuals with respect to their morphology, physiology and behaviour (phenotypic variation), (2) different traits confer different rates of survival and reproduction (differential fitness) and (3) traits can be passed from generation to generation (heritability of fitness). Thus, in successive generations members of a population are more likely to be replaced by the progenies of parents with favourable characteristics that have enabled them to survive and reproduce in their respective environments. In the early 20th century, other competing ideas of evolution such as mutationism and orthogenesis were refuted as the modern synthesis reconciled Darwinian evolution with classical genetics, which established adaptive evolution as being caused by natural selection acting on Mendelian genetic variation.

All life on Earth shares a last universal common ancestor (LUCA) that lived approximately 3.5–3.8 billion years ago. The fossil record includes a progression from early biogenic graphite, to microbial mat fossils, to fossilised multicellular organisms. Existing patterns of biodiversity have been shaped by repeated formations of new species (speciation), changes within species (anagenesis) and loss of species (extinction) throughout the evolutionary history of life on Earth. Morphological and biochemical traits are more similar among species that share a more recent common ancestor, and can be used to reconstruct phylogenetic trees.

Evolutionary biologists have continued to study various aspects of evolution by forming and testing hypotheses as well as constructing theories based on evidence from the field or laboratory and on data generated by the methods of mathematical and theoretical biology. Their discoveries have influenced not just the development of biology but numerous other scientific and industrial fields, including agriculture, medicine, and computer science.