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🔗 Freedom of speech 🔗 Journalism 🔗 Singapore

"Disneyland with the Death Penalty" is a 4,500-word article about Singapore written by William Gibson. His first major piece of non-fiction, it was first published as the cover story for Wired magazine's September/October 1993 issue (1.4).

The article follows Gibson's observations of the architecture, phenomenology and culture of Singapore, and the clean, bland and conformist impression the city-state conveys during his stay. Its title and central metaphor—Singapore as Disneyland with the death penalty—is a reference to the authoritarian artifice the author perceives the city-state to be. Singapore, Gibson details, is lacking any sense of creativity or authenticity, absent of any indication of its history or underground culture. He finds the government to be pervasive, corporatist and technocratic, and the judicial system rigid and draconian. Singaporeans are characterized as consumerists of insipid taste. The article is accentuated by local news reports of criminal trials by which the author illustrates his observations, and bracketed by contrasting descriptions of the Southeast Asian airports he arrives and leaves by.

Though Gibson's first major piece of non-fiction, the article had an immediate and lasting impact. The Singaporean government banned Wired upon the publication of the issue. The phrase "Disneyland with the death penalty" came to stand internationally for an authoritarian and austere reputation that the city-state found difficult to shake off.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Physics

The Fresnel integrals S(x) and C(x) are two transcendental functions named after Augustin-Jean Fresnel that are used in optics and are closely related to the error function (erf). They arise in the description of near-field Fresnel diffraction phenomena and are defined through the following integral representations:

The simultaneous parametric plot of S(x) and C(x) is the Euler spiral (also known as the Cornu spiral or clothoid).

🔗 Video games 🔗 Comics 🔗 Comics/Superman

Superman: The New Superman Adventures, commonly referred to as Superman 64, is an action-adventure game developed and published by Titus Interactive for the Nintendo 64 and based on the television series Superman: The Animated Series. Released in North America on May 31, 1999, and in Europe on July 23, 1999, it is the first 3D Superman game.

In the game, Lex Luthor has trapped Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, and Professor Hamilton in a virtual reality version of Metropolis that he created with the help of Brainiac, leaving it up to Superman to save them and break apart the virtual world. The game shifts between outdoor levels where the player flies through rings while saving civilians, and indoor levels where the player looks for access cards, activates computers, and fights villains such as Brainiac, Mala, Metallo, Darkseid, and Parasite.

The development of Superman began in 1997 and was largely hampered by constraints between Titus and the game's licensors, Warner Bros. and DC Comics, leaving little room for polishing the gameplay. BlueSky Software attempted to redo the game for the PlayStation, but this version was ultimately canceled, as Titus's license with Warner Bros. had expired by the time it was completed. With three E3 presentations and positive press coverage before its release, Superman 64 was released to strong sales and positive consumer reception; however, critical reviews were extremely negative, claiming it to be one of the worst video games ever made and panning its unresponsive controls, technical flaws, repetitive gameplay, overuse of distance fog, and poor graphics.

🔗 Music/Music genres

Black MIDI is a music genre consisting of compositions that use MIDI files to create a song or a remix containing a large number of notes, typically in the thousands, millions, billions, or even trillions. People who make black MIDIs are known as blackers. However, there are no specific criteria of what is considered "black"; as a result, pinpointing the exact origin of black MIDI is impossible.

🔗 Science

In combinatorial mathematics, an Aztec diamond of order n consists of all squares of a square lattice whose centers (x,y) satisfy |x| + |y| ≤ n. Here n is a fixed integer, and the square lattice consists of unit squares with the origin as a vertex of 4 of them, so that both x and y are half-integers.

The Aztec diamond theorem states that the number of domino tilings of the Aztec diamond of order n is 2^n(n+1)/2. The Arctic Circle theorem says that a random tiling of a large Aztec diamond tends to be frozen outside a certain circle.

It is common to color the tiles in the following fashion. First consider a checkerboard coloring of the diamond. Each tile will cover exactly one black square. Vertical tiles where the top square covers a black square, is colored in one color, and the other vertical tiles in a second. Similarly for horizontal tiles.

Knuth has also defined Aztec diamonds of order n + 1/2. They are identical with the polyominoes associated with the centered square numbers.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Aviation/aerospace biography 🔗 Former countries 🔗 Former countries/Ottoman Empire

Lagâri Hasan Çelebi was an Ottoman aviator who, according to the account written by traveller Evliya Çelebi, made a successful crewed rocket flight.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Climate change 🔗 Environment 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Energy

James Ephraim Lovelock (26 July 1919 – 26 July 2022) was a British independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He was best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.

With a PhD in medicine, Lovelock began his career performing cryopreservation experiments on rodents, including successfully thawing frozen specimens. His methods were influential in the theories of cryonics (the cryopreservation of humans). He invented the electron capture detector, and using it, became the first to detect the widespread presence of chlorofluorocarbons in the atmosphere. While designing scientific instruments for NASA, he developed the Gaia hypothesis.

In the 2000s, he proposed a method of climate engineering to restore carbon dioxide–consuming algae. He was an outspoken member of Environmentalists for Nuclear, asserting that fossil fuel interests have been behind opposition to nuclear energy, citing the effects of carbon dioxide as being harmful to the environment, and warning of global warming due to the greenhouse effect. He authored several environmental science books based upon the Gaia hypothesis from the late 1970s.

🔗 Comedy 🔗 Psychology

"No soap radio" is a form of practical joke and an example of surreal comedy. The joke is a prank whereby the punch line has no relation to the body of the joke; but participants in the prank pretend otherwise. The effect is to either trick someone into laughing along as if they "get it" or to ridicule them for not understanding.

The joke became popular in New York in the 1950s. The punch line is known for its use as a basic sociological and psychological experiment, specifically relating to mob mentality and the pressure to conform. The basic setup is similar to the Asch conformity experiments, in which people showed a proclivity to agree with a group despite their own judgments.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Law Enforcement

In criminology, the broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes. The theory suggests that policing methods that target minor crimes such as vandalism, loitering, public drinking, jaywalking, and fare evasion help to create an atmosphere of order and lawfulness.

The theory was introduced in a 1982 article by social scientists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. It was popularized in the 1990s by New York City police commissioner William Bratton and mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose policing policies were influenced by the theory.

The theory became subject to debate both within the social sciences and the public sphere. Broken windows policing has been enforced with controversial police practices, such as the high use of stop-and-frisk in New York City in the decade up to 2013. In response, Bratton and Kelling have written that broken windows policing should not be treated as "zero tolerance" or "zealotry", but as a method that requires "careful training, guidelines, and supervision" and a positive relationship with communities, thus linking it to community policing.