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🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Physics

A topological quantum computer is a theoretical quantum computer that employs two-dimensional quasiparticles called anyons, whose world lines pass around one another to form braids in a three-dimensional spacetime (i.e., one temporal plus two spatial dimensions). These braids form the logic gates that make up the computer. The advantage of a quantum computer based on quantum braids over using trapped quantum particles is that the former is much more stable. Small, cumulative perturbations can cause quantum states to decohere and introduce errors in the computation, but such small perturbations do not change the braids' topological properties. This is like the effort required to cut a string and reattach the ends to form a different braid, as opposed to a ball (representing an ordinary quantum particle in four-dimensional spacetime) bumping into a wall. Alexei Kitaev proposed topological quantum computation in 1997. While the elements of a topological quantum computer originate in a purely mathematical realm, experiments in fractional quantum Hall systems indicate these elements may be created in the real world using semiconductors made of gallium arsenide at a temperature of near absolute zero and subjected to strong magnetic fields.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind 🔗 Philosophy/Modern philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics 🔗 Philosophy/Analytic philosophy 🔗 Folklore

In the metaphysics of identity, the ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object. The concept is one of the oldest in Western philosophy, having been discussed by the likes of Heraclitus and Plato by ca. 500-400 BC.

🔗 Biography 🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Apple Inc. 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 LGBT studies

Ronald Wayne (born May 17, 1934) is a retired American electronics industry businessman. He co-founded Apple Computer Company (now Apple Inc.) as a partnership with Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, providing administrative oversight and documentation for the new venture. Twelve days later, he sold his 10% share of the new company back to Jobs and Wozniak for US$800, and one year later accepted a final US$1,500 to forfeit any potential future claims against the newly legally incorporated Apple, totaling $2,300.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Energy 🔗 Pennsylvania 🔗 Mining

The Centralia mine fire is a coal-seam fire that has been burning underneath the borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States, since at least May 27, 1962. Its original cause is still a matter of debate. It is burning in underground coal mines at depths of up to 300 feet (90 m) over an 8-mile (13 km) stretch of 3,700 acres (15 km²). At its current rate, it could continue to burn for over 250 years. It has caused most of the town to be abandoned: the population dwindled from around 1,500 at the time the fire started to 7 in 2013, and most of the buildings have been levelled.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Alternative Views

The dead Internet theory is a theory that asserts that the Internet now consists almost entirely of bot activity and automatically generated content, marginalizing human activity. The date given for this "death" is generally around 2016 or 2017.

In 2012, YouTube removed billions of video views from major record labels, such as Sony and Universal, as a result of discovering that they had used fraudulent services to artificially increase the views of their content. The removal of the inflated views aimed to restore credibility to the platform and improve the accuracy of view counts. The move by YouTube also signaled a change in the way the platform would tackle fake views and bot traffic.

🔗 Sociology

Xennials or xennials (also known as the Oregon Trail Generation and Generation Catalano) are the micro-generation of people on the cusp of the Generation X and Millennial demographic cohorts. Researchers and popular media use birth years from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.

In 2020, xennial was included in the Oxford Dictionary of English.

🔗 Geographical coordinates 🔗 Microformats

Geohash is a public domain geocode system invented in 2008 by Gustavo Niemeyer and (similar work in 1966) G.M. Morton, which encodes a geographic location into a short string of letters and digits. It is a hierarchical spatial data structure which subdivides space into buckets of grid shape, which is one of the many applications of what is known as a Z-order curve, and generally space-filling curves.

Geohashes offer properties like arbitrary precision and the possibility of gradually removing characters from the end of the code to reduce its size (and gradually lose precision). As a consequence of the gradual precision degradation, nearby places will often (but not always) present similar prefixes. While in rare cases nearby places may have very short shared prefixes, the longer their shared prefix is, the closer two places are guaranteed to be.

🔗 Highways 🔗 Road transport 🔗 Transport in Scotland 🔗 Highways/United Kingdom Roads 🔗 UK geography

The Great Britain road numbering scheme is a numbering scheme used to classify and identify all roads in Great Britain. Each road is given a single letter, which represents the road's category, and a subsequent number, of 1 to 4 digits. Introduced to arrange funding allocations, the numbers soon became used on maps and as a method of navigation. Two sub-schemes exist: one for motorways, and another for non-motorway roads. While some major roads form part of the International E-road network, no E-routes are signposted in Great Britain, or the rest of the UK.

The scheme applies only to Great Britain (England, Scotland and Wales); a similar system is used in Northern Ireland, as well as outside the UK in the Isle of Man, Jersey and British overseas territories. These other numbering schemes use similar conventions.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Futures studies

Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states that an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future would be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development. It originated in a 2010 post at discussion board LessWrong, a technical forum focused on analytical rational enquiry. The thought experiment's name derives from the poster of the article (Roko) and the basilisk, a mythical creature capable of destroying enemies with its stare.

While the theory was initially dismissed as nothing but conjecture or speculation by many LessWrong users, LessWrong co-founder Eliezer Yudkowsky reported users who described symptoms such as nightmares and mental breakdowns upon reading the theory, due to its stipulation that knowing about the theory and its basilisk made one vulnerable to the basilisk itself. This led to discussion of the basilisk on the site to be banned for five years. However, these reports were later dismissed as being exaggerations or inconsequential, and the theory itself was dismissed as nonsense, including by Yudkowsky himself. Even after the post's discreditation, it is still used as an example of principles such as Bayesian probability and implicit religion. It is also regarded as a modern version of Pascal's wager. In the field of artificial intelligence, Roko's basilisk has become notable as an example that raises the question of how to create an AI which is simultaneously moral and intelligent.

🔗 Italy 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

The Vigenère cipher (French pronunciation: ​[viʒnɛːʁ]) is a method of encrypting alphabetic text by using a series of interwoven Caesar ciphers, based on the letters of a keyword. It employs a form of polyalphabetic substitution.

First described by Giovan Battista Bellaso in 1553, the cipher is easy to understand and implement, but it resisted all attempts to break it until 1863, three centuries later. This earned it the description le chiffre indéchiffrable (French for 'the indecipherable cipher'). Many people have tried to implement encryption schemes that are essentially Vigenère ciphers. In 1863, Friedrich Kasiski was the first to publish a general method of deciphering Vigenère ciphers.

In the 19th century the scheme was misattributed to Blaise de Vigenère (1523–1596), and so acquired its present name.