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🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 Elections and Referendums 🔗 United States/U.S. presidential elections

The 1876 United States presidential election was the 23rd quadrennial presidential election, held on Tuesday, November 7, 1876, in which Republican nominee Rutherford B. Hayes faced Democrat Samuel J. Tilden. It was one of the most contentious and controversial presidential elections in American history, and gave rise to the Compromise of 1877 by which the Democrats conceded the election to Hayes in return for an end to Reconstruction and the withdrawal of federal troops from the South. After a controversial post-election process, Hayes was declared the winner.

After President Ulysses S. Grant declined to seek a third term despite previously being expected to do so, Congressman James G. Blaine emerged as the front-runner for the Republican nomination. However, Blaine was unable to win a majority at the 1876 Republican National Convention, which settled on Governor Hayes of Ohio as a compromise candidate. The 1876 Democratic National Convention nominated Governor Tilden of New York on the second ballot.

The results of the election remain among the most disputed ever. Although it is not disputed that Tilden outpolled Hayes in the popular vote, after a first count of votes, Tilden had won 184 electoral votes to Hayes's 165, with 20 votes from four states unresolved: in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, each party reported its candidate had won the state, while in Oregon, one elector was replaced after being declared illegal for being an "elected or appointed official". The question of who should have been awarded these electoral votes is the source of the continued controversy.

An informal deal was struck to resolve the dispute: the Compromise of 1877, which awarded all 20 electoral votes to Hayes; in return for the Democrats' acquiescence to Hayes' election, the Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops from the South, ending Reconstruction. The Compromise in effect ceded power in the Southern states to the Democratic Redeemers, who proceeded to disenfranchise black voters thereafter.

The 1876 election is the second of five presidential elections in which the person who won the most popular votes did not win the election, but the only such election in which the popular vote winner received a majority (rather than a plurality) of the popular vote. To date, it remains the election that recorded the smallest electoral vote victory (185–184), and the election that yielded the highest voter turnout of the eligible voting age population in American history, at 81.8%. Despite not becoming president, Tilden was the first Democratic presidential nominee since James Buchanan in 1856 to win the popular vote and the first since Franklin Pierce in 1852 to do so in an outright majority (In fact, Tilden received a slightly higher percentage than Pierce in 1852, despite the fact that Pierce won in a landslide).

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

In cryptography, the socialist millionaire problem is one in which two millionaires want to determine if their wealth is equal without disclosing any information about their riches to each other. It is a variant of the Millionaire's Problem whereby two millionaires wish to compare their riches to determine who has the most wealth without disclosing any information about their riches to each other.

It is often used as a cryptographic protocol that allows two parties to verify the identity of the remote party through the use of a shared secret, avoiding a man-in-the-middle attack without the inconvenience of manually comparing public key fingerprints through an outside channel. In effect, a relatively weak password/passphrase in natural language can be used.

🔗 Philately

A Royal Mail rubber band is a small red elastic loop used by the postal delivery service in the United Kingdom. In the course of its work, the Royal Mail consumes nearly one billion rubber bands per year to tie together bundles of letters at sorting offices. In the 2000s, complaints about Royal Mail rubber bands littering the streets of Britain gave rise to ongoing press interest in this minor cultural phenomenon. The Royal Mail no longer uses red rubber bands.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Greece 🔗 Turkey 🔗 Archaeology

The Late Bronze Age collapse was a dark age transition in a large area covering much of Southeast Europe, West Asia and North Africa (comprising the overlapping regions of the Near East, the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, with the Balkans, the Aegean, Anatolia, and the Caucasus), which took place from the Late Bronze Age to the emerging Early Iron Age. It was a transition which historians believe was violent, sudden, and culturally disruptive, and involved societal collapse for some civilizations during the 12th century BCE. The palace economy of Mycenaean Greece, the Aegean region and Anatolia that characterized the Late Bronze Age disintegrated, transforming into the small isolated village cultures of the Greek Dark Ages. The Hittite Empire of Anatolia and the Levant collapsed, while states such as the Middle Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia and the New Kingdom of Egypt survived but were considerably weakened.

Competing and even mutually compatible theories for the ultimate cause of the Late Bronze Age collapse have been made since the 19th century. These include volcanic eruptions, droughts, invasions by the Sea Peoples or migrations of Dorians, economic disruptions due to the rising use of ironworking, and changes in military technology and methods of war that saw the decline of chariot warfare.

🔗 London 🔗 Politics 🔗 Cats 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Politics of the United Kingdom

Larry (born c. January 2007) is a British domestic tabby cat who has served as Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street since 2011. He is cared for by Downing Street staff, and is not the personal property of the prime minister of the United Kingdom. Larry has lived at 10 Downing Street during the premierships of six prime ministers: David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. He is the first cat to be officially given the title of Chief Mouser, according to the Downing Street government website.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Geology 🔗 Explosives

Tired mountain syndrome is a condition in which underground nuclear testing fractures and weakens rock, increasing permeability and the risk of release of radionuclides and radioactive contamination of the environment. Locations said to have undergone the syndrome include the French Polynesian island of Moruroa, Rainier Mesa in the United States, the Dnepr 1 nuclear test site on the Kola Peninsula in Russia, possibly Mount Lazarev in the Novaya Zemlya Test Site in Russia, and Mount Mantap in North Korea.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Operations research

Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines, or queues. A queueing model is constructed so that queue lengths and waiting time can be predicted. Queueing theory is generally considered a branch of operations research because the results are often used when making business decisions about the resources needed to provide a service.

Queueing theory has its origins in research by Agner Krarup Erlang when he created models to describe the system of Copenhagen Telephone Exchange company, a Danish company. The ideas have since seen applications including telecommunication, traffic engineering, computing and, particularly in industrial engineering, in the design of factories, shops, offices and hospitals, as well as in project management.

🔗 Sociology

The Matthew effect of accumulated advantage, Matthew principle, or Matthew effect for short, is sometimes summarized by the adage "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer". The concept is applicable to matters of fame or status, but may also be applied literally to cumulative advantage of economic capital. In the beginning, Matthew effects were primarily focused on the inequality in the way scientists were recognized for their work. However, Norman Storer, of Columbia University, led a new wave of research. He believed he discovered that the inequality that existed in the social sciences also existed in other institutions.

The term was coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968 and takes its name from the Parable of the talents or minas in the biblical Gospel of Matthew. Merton credited his collaborator and wife, sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, as co-author of the concept of the Matthew effect.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Scotland

Willy's Chocolate Experience was an unlicensed event based on the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory franchise, held in Glasgow, Scotland, in February 2024. The event was promoted as an immersive and interactive family experience, illustrated on its website with "dreamlike" AI-generated images. When customers discovered that the event was held in a sparsely decorated warehouse, many complained and the police were called to the venue. The event went viral on the Internet, garnering international media attention.

The event drew comparisons to the Tumblr fan convention DashCon in 2014 and Billy McFarland's Fyre Festival in 2017.