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🔗 Economics 🔗 Politics 🔗 Energy

The technocracy movement is a social and ideological movement which arose in the early 20th century. Technocracy was popular in the United States and Canada for a brief period in the early 1930s, before it was overshadowed by other proposals for dealing with the crisis of the Great Depression. The technocracy movement proposed replacing politicians and businesspeople with scientists and engineers who had the technical expertise to manage the economy.

The movement was committed to abstaining from all revolutionary and political activities. It gained strength in the 1930s but in 1940, due to an alleged initial opposition to the Second World War, was banned in Canada. The ban was lifted in 1943 when it was apparent that 'Technocracy Inc. was committed to the war effort, proposing a program of total conscription.' The movement continued to expand during the remainder of the war and new sections were formed in Ontario and the Maritime Provinces.

In the post-war years, perhaps due to the growing distrust of socialism in the cold war, membership and interest in technocracy decreased. Though now relatively insignificant, the Technocracy movement survives into the present day, and as of 2013, was continuing to publish a newsletter, maintain a website, and hold member meetings. Smaller groups included the Technical Alliance, The New Machine and the Utopian Society of America, though Bellamy had the most success due to his nationalistic stances, and Veblen's rhetoric, removing the current pricing system and his blueprint for a national directorate to reorganize all produced goods and supply, and ultimately to radically increase all industrial output.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing

The host protected area (HPA) is an area of a hard drive or solid-state drive that is not normally visible to an operating system. It was first introduced in the ATA-4 standard CXV (T13) in 2001.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Molecular Biology 🔗 Molecular Biology/Molecular and Cell Biology

Foldit is an online puzzle video game about protein folding. It is part of an experimental research project developed by the University of Washington, Center for Game Science, in collaboration with the UW Department of Biochemistry. The objective of Foldit is to fold the structures of selected proteins as perfectly as possible, using tools provided in the game. The highest scoring solutions are analyzed by researchers, who determine whether or not there is a native structural configuration (native state) that can be applied to relevant proteins in the real world. Scientists can then use these solutions to target and eradicate diseases and create biological innovations. A 2010 paper in the science journal Nature credited Foldit's 57,000 players with providing useful results that matched or outperformed algorithmically computed solutions.

An emirp (prime spelled backwards) is a prime number that results in a different prime when its decimal digits are reversed. This definition excludes the related palindromic primes. The term reversible prime is used to mean the same as emirp, but may also, ambiguously, include the palindromic primes.

The sequence of emirps begins 13, 17, 31, 37, 71, 73, 79, 97, 107, 113, 149, 157, 167, 179, 199, 311, 337, 347, 359, 389, 701, 709, 733, 739, 743, 751, 761, 769, 907, 937, 941, 953, 967, 971, 983, 991, ... (sequence A006567 in the OEIS).

All non-palindromic permutable primes are emirps.

As of November 2009, the largest known emirp is 10¹⁰⁰⁰⁶+941992101×10⁴⁹⁹⁹+1, found by Jens Kruse Andersen in October 2007.

The term 'emirpimes' (singular) is used also in places to treat semiprimes in a similar way. That is, an emirpimes is a semiprime that is also a (distinct) semiprime upon reversing its digits.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computer science/Computing

Lucid is a dataflow programming language designed to experiment with non-von Neumann programming models. It was designed by Bill Wadge and Ed Ashcroft and described in the 1985 book Lucid, the Dataflow Programming Language.

pLucid was the first interpreter for Lucid.

🔗 Brands

The AlphaSmart was a brand of portable, battery powered, word-processing keyboards manufactured by NEO Direct, Inc. (formerly Renaissance Learning, Inc, formerly AlphaSmart, Inc., formerly Intelligent Peripheral Devices, Inc.). Originally released in 1993, the first AlphaSmart models were intended for writing on-the-go and could be plugged into a computer to transfer saved written text. The units' portability and long battery life made them valuable to journalists, writers, and students. Later models expanded functionality by spell-checking, running applications, and accessing wireless printers.

The last model, Neo 2, was released in 2007, and production was discontinued by the company in late September 2013, although the company still offers support and software to existing users.

🔗 Physics

A Klemperer rosette is a gravitational system of heavier and lighter bodies orbiting in a regular repeating pattern around a common barycenter. It was first described by W. B. Klemperer in 1962, and is a special case of a central configuration.

Klemperer described the system as follows:

Such symmetry is also possessed by a peculiar family of geometrical configurations which may be described as 'rosettes'. In these an even number of 'planets' of two (or more) kinds, one (or some) heavier than the other, but all of each set of equal mass, are placed at the corners of two (or more) interdigitating regular polygons so that the lighter and heavier ones alternate (or follow each other in a cyclic manner).

The simplest rosette would be a series of four alternating heavier and lighter bodies, 90 degrees from one another, in a rhombic configuration [Heavy, Light, Heavy, Light], where the two larger bodies have the same mass, and likewise the two smaller bodies have the same mass. The number of "mass types" can be increased, so long as the arrangement pattern is cyclic: e.g. [ 1,2,3 ... 1,2,3 ], [ 1,2,3,4,5 ... 1,2,3,4,5 ], [ 1,2,3,3,2,1 ... 1,2,3,3,2,1 ], etc.

Klemperer also mentioned octagonal and rhombic rosettes. While all Klemperer rosettes are vulnerable to destabilization, the hexagonal rosette has extra stability because the "planets" sit in each other's L4 and L5 Lagrangian points.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Languages

"The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (Spanish: "El idioma analítico de John Wilkins") is a short essay by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, first printed in La Nación on 8 February 1942 and subsequently published in Otras Inquisiciones (1937–1952). It is a critique of the English natural philosopher and writer John Wilkins's proposal for a universal language and of the representational capacity of language generally. In it, Borges imagines a bizarre and whimsical (and fictional) Chinese taxonomy later quoted by Michel Foucault, David Byrne, and others.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Internet 🔗 History 🔗 Computing 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Economics 🔗 Law 🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 Capitalism 🔗 Globalization 🔗 Google

Surveillance capitalism has a number of meanings around the commodification of personal information. Since 2014, social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff has used and popularized the term.

🔗 Australia 🔗 Insects 🔗 Australia/Australian biota

Pantala flavescens, the globe skimmer, globe wanderer or wandering glider, is a wide-ranging dragonfly of the family Libellulidae. This species and Pantala hymenaea, the "spot-winged glider", are the only members of the genus Pantala. It was first described by Johan Christian Fabricius in 1798. It is considered to be the most widespread dragonfly on the planet with good population on every continent except Antarctica although rare in Europe. Globe skimmers make an annual multigenerational journey of some 18,000 km (about 11,200 miles); to complete the migration, individual globe skimmers fly more than 6,000 km (3,730 miles)—one of the farthest known migrations of all insect species.