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🔗 Military history 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Cold War

World War III or the Third World War, often abbreviated as WWIII or WW3, are names given to a hypothetical third worldwide large-scale military conflict after World War I and World War II. The term has been in use since at least as early as 1941. Some apply it loosely to limited or more minor conflicts such as the Cold War or the war on terror. In contrast, others assume that such a conflict would surpass prior world wars in both scope and destructive impact.

Due to the development and use of nuclear weapons near the end of World War II and their subsequent acquisition and deployment by many countries, the potential risk of a nuclear apocalypse causing widespread destruction of Earth's civilization and life is a common theme in speculations about a Third World War. Another primary concern is that biological warfare could cause many casualties. It could happen intentionally or inadvertently, by an accidental release of a biological agent, the unexpected mutation of an agent, or its adaptation to other species after use. Large-scale apocalyptic events like these, caused by advanced technology used for destruction, could render Earth's surface uninhabitable.

Before the beginning of World War II in 1939, World War I (1914–1918) was believed to have been "the war to end [all] wars." It was popularly believed that never again could there possibly be a global conflict of such magnitude. During the interwar period, World War I was typically referred to simply as "The Great War". The outbreak of World War II disproved the hope that humanity might have already "outgrown" the need for such widespread global wars.

With the advent of the Cold War in 1945 and with the spread of nuclear weapons technology to the Soviet Union, the possibility of a third global conflict became more plausible. During the Cold War years, the possibility of a Third World War was anticipated and planned for by military and civil authorities in many countries. Scenarios ranged from conventional warfare to limited or total nuclear warfare. At the height of the Cold War, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD), which determined an all-out nuclear confrontation would destroy all of the states involved in the conflict, had been developed. The absolute potential destruction of the human race may have contributed to the ability of both American and Soviet leaders to avoid such a scenario.

🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Health and fitness

The ketchup as a vegetable controversy stemmed from proposed regulations of school lunches by the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) in 1981, early in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The regulations were intended to provide meal planning flexibility to local school lunch administrators coping with cuts to the National School Lunch Program enacted by the Omnibus Reconciliation Acts of 1980 and 1981. The proposed changes allowed administrators to meet nutritional requirements by crediting food items not explicitly listed. While ketchup was not mentioned in the original regulations, pickle relish was used as an example of an item that could count as a vegetable.

A similar controversy arose in 2011, when Congress passed a bill prohibiting the USDA from increasing the amount of tomato paste required to constitute a vegetable; the bill allowed pizza with two tablespoons (30 mL) of tomato paste to qualify as a vegetable.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 Electronics 🔗 Systems/Systems theory 🔗 Telecommunications/Bell System 🔗 Cycling

Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as "the father of information theory". Shannon is noted for having founded information theory with a landmark paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", that he published in 1948.

He is also well known for founding digital circuit design theory in 1937, when—as a 21-year-old master's degree student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—he wrote his thesis demonstrating that electrical applications of Boolean algebra could construct any logical numerical relationship. Shannon contributed to the field of cryptanalysis for national defense during World War II, including his fundamental work on codebreaking and secure telecommunications.

🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Chaos theory

The Burning Ship fractal, first described and created by Michael Michelitsch and Otto E. Rössler in 1992, is generated by iterating the function:

${\displaystyle z_{n+1}=(|\operatorname {Re} \left(z_{n}\right)|+i|\operatorname {Im} \left(z_{n}\right)|)^{2}+c,\quad z_{0}=0}$

in the complex plane ${\displaystyle \mathbb {C} }$ which will either escape or remain bounded. The difference between this calculation and that for the Mandelbrot set is that the real and imaginary components are set to their respective absolute values before squaring at each iteration. The mapping is non-analytic because its real and imaginary parts do not obey the Cauchy–Riemann equations.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

CipherSaber is a simple symmetric encryption protocol based on the RC4 stream cipher. Its goals are both technical and political: it gives reasonably strong protection of message confidentiality, yet it's designed to be simple enough that even novice programmers can memorize the algorithm and implement it from scratch. According to the designer, a CipherSaber version in the QBASIC programming language takes just sixteen lines of code. Its political aspect is that because it's so simple, it can be reimplemented anywhere at any time, and so it provides a way for users to communicate privately even if government or other controls make distribution of normal cryptographic software completely impossible.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Birds

A chicken can be hypnotized, or put into a trance, by holding its head down against the ground, and drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at the beak and extending straight outward in front of the chicken. If the chicken is hypnotized in this manner, it will continue to stare at the line, remaining immobile for as long as 30 minutes. Other methods of inducing this state are also known. Ethologists refer to this state as 'tonic immobility' i.e. a natural state of semi-paralysis that some animals enter when presented with a threat, which is probably a defensive mechanism intended to feign death, albeit rather poorly.

The first known written reference for this method came in 1646, in Mirabele Experimentum de Imaginatione Gallinae by Athanasius Kircher in Rome.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Computing/Software

The x86 instruction set refers to the set of instructions that x86-compatible microprocessors support. The instructions are usually part of an executable program, often stored as a computer file and executed on the processor.

The x86 instruction set has been extended several times, introducing wider registers and datatypes as well as new functionality.

🔗 Physics

In physics, the fourth, fifth and sixth derivatives of position are defined as derivatives of the position vector with respect to time – with the first, second, and third derivatives being velocity, acceleration, and jerk, respectively. Unlike the first three derivatives, the higher-order derivatives are less common, thus their names are not as standardized, though the concept of a minimum snap trajectory has been used in robotics and is implemented in MATLAB.

The fourth derivative is often referred to as snap or jounce. The name "snap" for the fourth derivative led to crackle and pop for the fifth and sixth derivatives respectively, inspired by the Rice Krispies mascots Snap, Crackle, and Pop. These terms are occasionally used, though "sometimes somewhat facetiously".

🔗 Computing 🔗 Books

EPUB is an e-book file format that uses the ".epub" file extension. The term is short for electronic publication and is sometimes styled ePub. EPUB is supported by many e-readers, and compatible software is available for most smartphones, tablets, and computers. EPUB is a technical standard published by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). It became an official standard of the IDPF in September 2007, superseding the older Open eBook standard.

The Book Industry Study Group endorses EPUB 3 as the format of choice for packaging content and has stated that the global book publishing industry should rally around a single standard. The EPUB format is implemented as an archive file consisting of XHTML files carrying the content, along with images and other supporting files. EPUB is the most widely supported vendor-independent XML-based (as opposed to PDF) e-book format; that is, it is supported by almost all hardware readers, except for Kindle.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Economics 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Gender Studies

Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no action or allocation is available that makes one individual better off without making another worse off. The concept is named after Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923), Italian civil engineer and economist, who used the concept in his studies of economic efficiency and income distribution. The following three concepts are closely related:

• Given an initial situation, a Pareto improvement is a new situation where some agents will gain, and no agents will lose.
• A situation is called Pareto-dominated or Pareto-inefficient if there is some possible Pareto improvement that has not been made.
• A situation is called Pareto-optimal or Pareto-efficient if no change could lead to improved satisfaction for some agent without some other agent losing or, equivalently, if there is no scope for further Pareto improvement (in other words, the situation is not Pareto-dominated).

The Pareto front (also called Pareto frontier or Pareto set) is the set of all Pareto-efficient situations.

Pareto originally used the word "optimal" for the concept, but as it describes a situation where a limited number of people will be made better off under finite resources, and it does not take equality or social well-being into account, it is in effect a definition of and better captured by "efficiency".

In addition to the context of efficiency in allocation, the concept of Pareto efficiency also arises in the context of efficiency in production vs. x-inefficiency: a set of outputs of goods is Pareto-efficient if there is no feasible re-allocation of productive inputs such that output of one product increases while the outputs of all other goods either increase or remain the same.

Pareto efficiency is measured along the production possibility frontier (PPF), which is a graphical representation of all the possible options of output for two products that can be produced using all factors of production.

Besides economics, the notion of Pareto efficiency has been applied to the selection of alternatives in engineering and biology. Each option is first assessed, under multiple criteria, and then a subset of options is ostensibly identified with the property that no other option can categorically outperform the specified option. It is a statement of impossibility of improving one variable without harming other variables in the subject of multi-objective optimization (also termed Pareto optimization).