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πŸ”— Agent 355

πŸ”— Biography πŸ”— Military history πŸ”— Military history/North American military history πŸ”— Military history/United States military history πŸ”— Women's History πŸ”— Military history/Military biography πŸ”— Military history/Early Modern warfare πŸ”— Military history/American Revolutionary War πŸ”— Biography/military biography πŸ”— Military history/Intelligence

Agent 355 (died after 1780) was the code name of a female spy during the American Revolution, part of the Culper Ring. Agent 355 was one of the first spies for the United States, but her real identity is unknown. The number, 355, could be de-crypted from the system the Culper Ring used to mean "lady."

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πŸ”— Machine Identification Code

πŸ”— Computing

A Machine Identification Code (MIC), also known as printer steganography, yellow dots, tracking dots or secret dots, is a digital watermark which certain color laser printers and copiers leave on every single printed page, allowing identification of the device with which a document was printed and giving clues to the originator. Developed by Xerox and Canon in the mid-1980s, its existence became public only in 2004. In 2018, scientists developed privacy software to anonymize prints in order to support whistleblowers publishing their work.

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πŸ”— Scenery nerds and systems nerds: MIT's Model Railroad Club

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Trains πŸ”— Trains/Rail transport modelling

The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Historically it has been a wellspring of hacker culture and the oldest such hacking group in North America. Formed in 1946, its HO scale layout specializes in automated operation of model trains.

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πŸ”— Almost Integer

πŸ”— Mathematics

In recreational mathematics, an almost integer (or near-integer) is any number that is not an integer but is very close to one. Almost integers may be considered interesting when they arise in some context in which they are unexpected.

πŸ”— AN/PSQ-42

πŸ”— Military history πŸ”— Military history/North American military history πŸ”— Military history/United States military history πŸ”— Military history/Military science, technology, and theory

The AN/PSQ-42 Enhanced Night Vision Goggle-Binocular (ENVG-B) is a third-generation passive binocular night vision device developed for the United States Army by L3Harris. It combines dual tube image-intensifying (IΒ²) and thermal-imaging technologies into a single goggle, enabling vision in low-light conditions. The two methods can be used individually or simultaneously in a fused mode. The ENVG-B is intended to be issued to the dismounted combat arms soldiers within the Army's Brigade combat teams (BCT), and so far over 10,000 have been issued to several BCT's within the 1st Infantry Division, 2nd Infantry Division, 25th Infantry Division, 82nd Airborne Division and 101st Airborne Division. The US Marine Corps has also purchased 3,100 ENVG-B units.

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πŸ”— Battle of Athens (1946)

πŸ”— Military history πŸ”— Military history/North American military history πŸ”— Military history/United States military history πŸ”— Law πŸ”— Tennessee

The Battle of Athens (sometimes called the McMinn County War) was a rebellion led by citizens in Athens and Etowah, Tennessee, United States, against the local government in August 1946. The citizens, including some World WarΒ II veterans, accused the local officials of predatory policing, police brutality, political corruption, and voter intimidation.

πŸ”— Weierstrass Function

πŸ”— Mathematics πŸ”— Systems πŸ”— Systems/Chaos theory

In mathematics, the Weierstrass function is an example of a real-valued function that is continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere. It is an example of a fractal curve. It is named after its discoverer Karl Weierstrass.

The Weierstrass function has historically served the role of a pathological function, being the first published example (1872) specifically concocted to challenge the notion that every continuous function is differentiable except on a set of isolated points. Weierstrass's demonstration that continuity did not imply almost-everywhere differentiability upended mathematics, overturning several proofs that relied on geometric intuition and vague definitions of smoothness. These types of functions were denounced by contemporaries: Henri PoincarΓ© famously described them as "monsters" and called Weierstrass' work "an outrage against common sense", while Charles Hermite wrote that they were a "lamentable scourge". The functions were difficult to visualize until the arrival of computers in the next century, and the results did not gain wide acceptance until practical applications such as models of Brownian motion necessitated infinitely jagged functions (nowadays known as fractal curves).

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πŸ”— High Arctic relocation

πŸ”— Canada πŸ”— Canada/History of Canada πŸ”— Canada/Geography of Canada πŸ”— Canada/Canadian Territories

The High Arctic relocation (French: La dΓ©localisation du Haut-Arctique, Inuktitut syllabics: α–α‘¦α‘Žα’ƒα‘α’₯ᐅᑦᑕ ᓅᑕᐅᓂᖏᑦ Inuktitut: Quttiktumut nuutauningit) took place during the Cold War in the 1950s, when 92 Inuit were moved by the Government of Canada to the High Arctic.

The relocation has been a source of controversy: on one hand being described as a humanitarian gesture to save the lives of starving indigenous people and enable them to continue a subsistence lifestyle; and on the other hand, said to be a forced migration instigated by the federal government to assert its sovereignty in the Far North by the use of "human flagpoles", in light of both the Cold War and the disputed territorial claims to the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Both sides acknowledge that the relocated Inuit were not given sufficient support to prevent extreme privation during their first years after the move. The story was the subject of a book called The Long Exile, published by Melanie McGrath in 2006.

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πŸ”— Long S

πŸ”— Writing systems πŸ”— Typography

The long s (ſ) is an archaic form of the lower case letter s. It replaced the single s, or the first s in a double s (e.g. "ſinfulneſs" for "sinfulness" and "ſucceſs" for "success"). The long s is the basis of the first half of the grapheme or the German alphabet ligature letter ß, which is known as the Eszett. The modern letterform is known as the short, terminal, or round s.

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πŸ”— Erewhon

πŸ”— Novels πŸ”— Novels/19th century πŸ”— Novels/Science fiction πŸ”— New Zealand πŸ”— Sociology

Erewhon: or, Over the Range () is a novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published anonymously in 1872, set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. The book is a satire on Victorian society.

The first few chapters of the novel dealing with the discovery of Erewhon are in fact based on Butler's own experiences in New Zealand, where, as a young man, he worked as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station for about four years (1860–64), and explored parts of the interior of the South Island and wrote about in his A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863).

The novel is one of the first to explore ideas of artificial intelligence, as influenced by Darwin's recently published On the Origin of Species (1859) and the machines developed out of the Industrial Revolution (late 18th to early 19th centuries). Specifically, it concerns itself, in the three-chapter "Book of the Machines", with the potentially dangerous ideas of machine consciousness and self-replicating machines.