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🔗 Biography 🔗 New York (state) 🔗 New York (state)/Columbia University

Randolph Silliman Bourne (; May 30, 1886 – December 22, 1918) was a progressive writer and intellectual born in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and a graduate of Columbia University. He is considered to be a spokesman for the young radicals living during World War I. His articles appeared in journals including The Seven Arts and The New Republic. Bourne is best known for his essays, especially his unfinished work "The State," discovered after he died. From this essay (which was published posthumously and included in Untimely Papers) comes the phrase "war is the health of the state" which laments the success of governments in arrogating authority and resources during conflicts.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science

Timsort is a hybrid stable sorting algorithm, derived from merge sort and insertion sort, designed to perform well on many kinds of real-world data. It was implemented by Tim Peters in 2002 for use in the Python programming language. The algorithm finds subsequences of the data that are already ordered (runs) and uses them to sort the remainder more efficiently. This is done by merging runs until certain criteria are fulfilled. Timsort has been Python's standard sorting algorithm since version 2.3. It is also used to sort arrays of non-primitive type in Java SE 7, on the Android platform, in GNU Octave, on V8, and Swift.

It uses techniques from Peter McIlroy's 1993 paper "Optimistic Sorting and Information Theoretic Complexity".

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics 🔗 History of Science

Stigler's law of eponymy, proposed by University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler in his 1980 publication Stigler’s law of eponymy, states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Examples include Hubble's law, which was derived by Georges Lemaître two years before Edwin Hubble, the Pythagorean theorem, which was known to Babylonian mathematicians before Pythagoras, and Halley's Comet, which was observed by astronomers since at least 240 BC (although its official designation is due to the first ever mathematical prediction of such astronomical phenomenon in the sky, not to its discovery). Stigler himself named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer of "Stigler's law" to show that it follows its own decree, though the phenomenon had previously been noted by others.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

In cryptography and computer science, a hash tree or Merkle tree is a tree in which every leaf node is labelled with the cryptographic hash of a data block, and every non-leaf node is labelled with the cryptographic hash of the labels of its child nodes. Hash trees allow efficient and secure verification of the contents of large data structures. Hash trees are a generalization of hash lists and hash chains.

Demonstrating that a leaf node is a part of a given binary hash tree requires computing a number of hashes proportional to the logarithm of the number of leaf nodes of the tree; this contrasts with hash lists, where the number is proportional to the number of leaf nodes itself.

The concept of hash trees is named after Ralph Merkle, who patented it in 1979.

🔗 United States 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 United States/Washington - Seattle 🔗 United States/Washington

The Seattle windshield pitting epidemic is a phenomenon which affected Bellingham, Seattle, and other communities of Washington state in April, 1954; it is considered an example of a mass delusion. It was characterized by widespread observation of previously unnoticed windshield holes, pits and dings, leading residents to believe that a common causative agent was at work. It was originally thought to be the work of vandals but the rate of pitting was so great that residents began to attribute it to everything from sand flea eggs to nuclear bomb testing.

Originating in Bellingham in March, police initially believed the work to be vandals using BB guns. However the pitting was soon observed in the nearby towns of Sedro Woolley and Mount Vernon and by mid-April, appeared to have spread to the town of Anacortes on Fidalgo Island.

Within a week, the news and the so-called "pitting epidemic" had reached metropolitan Seattle. As the newspapers began to feature the story, more and more reports of pitting were called in. Motorists began stopping police cars to report damage. Car lots and parking garages reported particularly severe attacks.

Several hypotheses for the widespread damage were postulated:

• Some thought that a new million-watt radio transmitter at nearby Jim Creek Naval Radio Station was producing waves that caused physical oscillations in glass;
• Some believed it to be the work of cosmic rays;
• Some reported seeing glass bubbles form right before their eyes, believing it to be the work of sand fleas.

By April 15, close to 3,000 windshields had been reported as affected. Mayor Allan Pomeroy contacted Washington Governor Arthur B. Langlie, then President Dwight D. Eisenhower asking for assistance.

Finally, Sergeant Max Allison of the Seattle police crime laboratory stated that the pitting reports consisted of "5 per cent hoodlum-ism, and 95 per cent public hysteria." By April 17, the pitting suddenly stopped.

The "Seattle Windshield Pitting Epidemic" as it is called has become a textbook case of collective delusion (not "mass hysteria" as reported). Although natural windshield pitting had been going on for some time, it was only when the media called public attention to it that people actually looked at their windshields and saw damage they had never noticed before.

🔗 Linguistics

In linguistics, a mass noun, uncountable noun, non-count noun, uncount noun, or just uncountable, is a noun with the syntactic property that any quantity of it is treated as an undifferentiated unit, rather than as something with discrete elements. Non-count nouns are distinguished from count nouns.

Given that different languages have different grammatical features, the actual test for which nouns are mass nouns may vary between languages. In English, mass nouns are characterized by the impossibility of being directly modified by a numeral without specifying a unit of measurement and by the impossibility of being combined with an indefinite article (a or an). Thus, the mass noun "water" is quantified as "20 litres of water" while the count noun "chair" is quantified as "20 chairs". However, both mass and count nouns can be quantified in relative terms without unit specification (e.g., "so much water", "so many chairs").

Mass nouns have no concept of singular and plural, although in English they take singular verb forms. However, many mass nouns in English can be converted to count nouns, which can then be used in the plural to denote (for instance) more than one instance or variety of a certain sort of entity – for example, "Many cleaning agents today are technically not soaps [i.e. types of soap], but detergents," or "I drank about three beers [i.e. bottles or glasses of beer]".

Some nouns can be used indifferently as mass or count nouns, e.g., three cabbages or three heads of cabbage; three ropes or three lengths of rope. Some have different senses as mass and count nouns: paper is a mass noun as a material (three reams of paper, one sheet of paper), but a count noun as a unit of writing ("the students passed in their papers").

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Psychology

Magical thinking is a term used in anthropology, philosophy and psychology, denoting the causal relationships between thoughts, actions and events. There are subtle differences in meaning between individual theorists as well as amongst fields of study.

In anthropology, it denotes the attribution of causality between entities grouped with one another (coincidence) or similar to one another.

In psychology, the entities between which a causal relation has to be posited are more strictly delineated; here it denotes the belief that one's thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking something corresponds with doing it. In both cases, the belief can cause a person to experience fear, seemingly not rationally justifiable to an observer outside the belief system, of performing certain acts or having certain thoughts because of an assumed correlation between doing so and threatening calamities.

In psychiatry, magical thinking is a disorder of thought content; here it denotes the false belief that one's thoughts, actions, or words will cause or prevent a specific consequence in some way that defies commonly understood laws of causality.

🔗 United States 🔗 Film 🔗 Library of Congress 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 United States/Film - American cinema 🔗 Film/Core

The Conversation is a 1974 American mystery thriller film written, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starring Gene Hackman with supporting roles by John Cazale, Allen Garfield, Cindy Williams, Frederic Forrest, Harrison Ford, Teri Garr and Robert Duvall.

The plot revolves around a surveillance expert and the moral dilemma he faces when his recordings reveal a potential murder. Coppola cited the 1966 film Blowup as a key influence. However, since the film was released to theaters just a few months before Richard Nixon resigned as President, he felt that audiences interpreted the film to be a reaction to the Watergate scandal. The Conversation has won critical acclaim and multiple accolades, including the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film, the highest honor at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival. It was nominated for three Academy Awards in 1974 and lost Best Picture to The Godfather Part II, another Francis Ford Coppola film. In 1995, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

🔗 Caves

Snottite, also snoticle, is a microbial mat of single-celled extremophilic bacteria which hang from the walls and ceilings of caves and are similar to small stalactites, but have the consistency of nasal mucus. In the Frasassi Caves in Italy, over 70% of cells in Snottite have been identified as Acidithiobacillus thiooxidans, with smaller populations including an archaeon in the uncultivated 'G-plasma' clade of Thermoplasmatales (>15%) and a bacterium in the Acidimicrobiaceae family (>5%).

The bacteria derive their energy from chemosynthesis of volcanic sulfur compounds including H₂S and warm-water solution dripping down from above, producing sulfuric acid. Because of this, their waste products are highly acidic (approaching pH=0), with similar properties to battery acid. Researchers at the University of Texas have suggested that this sulfuric acid may be a more significant cause of cave formation than the usual explanation offered of the carbonic acid formed from carbon dioxide dissolved in water.

Snottites were brought to attention by researchers Diana Northup and Penny Boston studying them (and other organisms) in a toxic sulfur cave called Cueva de Villa Luz (Cave of the Lighted House), in Tabasco, Mexico. Snottites were first discovered in this cave by Jim Pisarowicz in 1986, who also coined the term.

The BBC series Wonders of the Solar System saw Professor Brian Cox examining snottites and positing that if there is life on Mars, it may be similarly primitive and hidden beneath the surface of the Red Planet.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction

Dune: The Butlerian Jihad is a 2002 science fiction novel by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, set in the fictional Dune universe created by Frank Herbert. It is the first book in the Legends of Dune prequel trilogy, which takes place over 10,000 years before the events of Frank Herbert's celebrated 1965 novel Dune. The series chronicles the fictional Butlerian Jihad, a crusade by the last free humans in the universe against the thinking machines, a violent and dominating force led by the sentient computer Omnius.

Dune: The Butlerian Jihad rose to #7 on The New York Times Best Seller list in its second week of publication.