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🔗 Internet culture

The Valeriepieris circle is a South China Sea-centered circular region on the world map that is about 4,000 kilometers (2,500 mi) in radius and contains more than half the world’s population. It was named after the Reddit username of Ken Myers, a Texas ESL teacher who first drew attention to the phenomenon in 2013. The map became a meme and was featured in numerous forms of media.

In 2015, the circle was tested by Danny Quah, who verified the claim but moved the circle slightly to exclude most of Japan, and used a globe model rather than a map projection as well as more specific calculations. He calculated that, as of 2015, half of the world's population lived within a 3,300-kilometer (2,050 mi) radius of the city of Mong Khet in Myanmar.

The most common visual of the circle, originally used by Myers and also featured by io9 and Tech in Asia, used the Winkel tripel projection.

🔗 Musical Instruments

The Siemens Synthesizer (or "Siemens Studio für Elektronische Musik") was developed in Germany in 1959 by the German electronics manufacturer Siemens, originally to compose live electronic music for its own promotional films.

From 1956 to 1967, it had a significant influence on the development of electronic music. Among others, Mauricio Kagel, Henri Pousseur, Herbert Brün and Ernst Krenek completed important electronic works there.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia

Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky (Russian: Соломон Вениаминович Шерешевский; 1886 – 1 May 1958), also known simply as 'Ш' ('Sh'), 'S.', or Luria's S, was a Soviet journalist and mnemonist active in the 1920s. He was the subject of Alexander Luria's case study The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968).

🔗 Computing 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Computing/Networking

In mathematics, the Cheeger constant (also Cheeger number or isoperimetric number) of a graph is a numerical measure of whether or not a graph has a "bottleneck". The Cheeger constant as a measure of "bottleneckedness" is of great interest in many areas: for example, constructing well-connected networks of computers, card shuffling. The graph theoretical notion originated after the Cheeger isoperimetric constant of a compact Riemannian manifold.

The Cheeger constant is named after the mathematician Jeff Cheeger.

🔗 Law 🔗 England

In criminal law, Blackstone's ratio (also known as the Blackstone ratio or Blackstone's formulation) is the idea that:

It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.

As expressed by the English jurist William Blackstone in his seminal work, Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s.

The idea subsequently became a staple of legal thinking in Anglo-Saxon jurisdictions and continues to be a topic of debate. There is also a long pre-history of similar sentiments going back centuries in a variety of legal traditions. The message that government and the courts must err on the side of innocence has remained constant.

🔗 Crime 🔗 COVID-19 🔗 Women's History

The Signal for Help (or the Violence at Home Signal for Help) is a single-handed gesture that can be used by an individual to alert others that they feel threatened and need help over a video call, or in-person. It was originally created as a tool to combat the rise in domestic violence cases around the world as a result of the self-isolation measures related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The signal is performed by holding one hand up with the thumb tucked into the palm, then folding the four other fingers down, symbolically trapping the thumb in the rest of the fingers. It was intentionally designed as a single continuous hand movement, rather than a sign held in one position, that could be made easily visible.

The Signal for Help was first introduced in Canada by the Canadian Women's Foundation on April 14, 2020, and on April 28, 2020 in the United States by the Women's Funding Network (WFN). It received widespread praise from local, national, and international news organizations for helping provide a modern solution to the issue of a rise in domestic violence cases.

Addressing concerns that abusers may become aware of such a widespread online initiative, the Canadian Women's Foundation and other organizations clarified that this signal is not "something that's going to save the day," but rather a tool someone could use to get help.

Instructions for what to do if an individual sees the signal, and how to check-in safely, were also created.

🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Marketing & Advertising

Fearmongering, or scaremongering, is the act of exploiting feelings of fear by using exaggerated rumors of impending danger, usually for personal gain.

🔗 History 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Palaeontology 🔗 Geology 🔗 Archaeology

The Silurian hypothesis is a thought experiment which assesses modern science's ability to detect evidence of a prior advanced civilization, perhaps several million years ago. In a 2018 paper, Adam Frank, an astrophysicist at the University of Rochester, and Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute, imagined an advanced civilization before humans and pondered whether it would "be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record". They wrote, "While we strongly doubt that any previous industrial civilization existed before our own, asking the question in a formal way that articulates explicitly what evidence for such a civilization might look like raises its own useful questions related both to astrobiology and to Anthropocene studies." The term "silurian hypothesis" was inspired by a 1970s Dr Who serial Doctor Who and the Silurians which featured a species called the Silurians.

According to Frank and Schmidt, since fossilization is relatively rare and little of Earth's exposed surface is from before the quaternary time period, the chances of finding direct evidence of such a civilization, such as technological artifacts, is small. After a great time span, the researchers concluded, we would be more likely to find indirect evidence such as anomalies in the chemical composition or isotope ratios of sediments. Objects that could indicate possible evidence of past civilizations include plastics and nuclear wastes residues buried deep underground or on the ocean floor.

Prior civilizations could have gone to space and left artifacts on other celestial bodies, such as the Moon and Mars. Evidence for artifacts on these two worlds would be easier to find than on Earth, where erosion and tectonic activity would erase much of it.

Frank first approached Schmidt to discuss how to detect alien civilizations via their potential impact upon climate through the study of ice cores and tree rings. They both realized that the hypothesis could be expanded and applied to Earth and humanity due to the fact that humans have been in their current form for the past 300,000 years and have had sophisticated technology for only the last few centuries.

🔗 Companies 🔗 Brands 🔗 Retailing 🔗 Spain

El Corte Inglés S.A. (Spanish pronunciation: [el ˈkoɾte iŋˈɡles]), headquartered in Madrid, is the biggest department store group in Europe and ranks third worldwide. El Corte Inglés is Spain's only remaining department store chain. El Corte Inglés has been a member of the International Association of department stores since 1998.