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🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Novels/Short story

"The Murderer" (1953) is a short story by Ray Bradbury, published in his collection The Golden Apples of the Sun.

🔗 Georgia (U.S. state) 🔗 Georgia (U.S. state)/Atlanta

The Crypt of Civilization is a sealed airtight chamber built between 1937 and 1940 at Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, Georgia, in Metro Atlanta. The 2,000-cubic-foot (57 m³) room contains numerous artifacts and documents, and is designed for opening in the year 8113 AD. During the 50th anniversary year of its sealing, the Guinness Book of World Records cited the crypt as the "first successful attempt to bury a record of this culture for any future inhabitants or visitors to the planet Earth."

🔗 Computing

FRACTRAN is a Turing-complete esoteric programming language invented by the mathematician John Conway. A FRACTRAN program is an ordered list of positive fractions together with an initial positive integer input n. The program is run by updating the integer n as follows:

1. for the first fraction f in the list for which nf is an integer, replace n by nf
2. repeat this rule until no fraction in the list produces an integer when multiplied by n, then halt.

Conway 1987 gives the following formula for primes in FRACTRAN:

${\displaystyle \left({\frac {17}{91}},{\frac {78}{85}},{\frac {19}{51}},{\frac {23}{38}},{\frac {29}{33}},{\frac {77}{29}},{\frac {95}{23}},{\frac {77}{19}},{\frac {1}{17}},{\frac {11}{13}},{\frac {13}{11}},{\frac {15}{2}},{\frac {1}{7}},{\frac {55}{1}}\right)}$

Starting with n=2, this FRACTRAN program generates the following sequence of integers:

2, 15, 825, 725, 1925, 2275, 425, 390, 330, 290, 770, ... (sequence A007542 in the OEIS)

After 2, this sequence contains the following powers of 2:

${\displaystyle 2^{2}=4,\,2^{3}=8,\,2^{5}=32,\,2^{7}=128,\,2^{11}=2048,\,2^{13}=8192,\,2^{17}=131072,\,2^{19}=524288,\,\dots }$ (sequence A034785 in the OEIS)

which are the prime powers of 2.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Trains 🔗 Trains/Rail transport modelling

The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Historically it has been a wellspring of hacker culture and the oldest such hacking group in North America. Formed in 1946, its HO scale layout specializes in automated operation of model trains.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Physics 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia

The tennis racket theorem or intermediate axis theorem is a result in classical mechanics describing the movement of a rigid body with three distinct principal moments of inertia. It is also dubbed the Dzhanibekov effect, after Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Dzhanibekov who noticed one of the theorem's logical consequences while in space in 1985 although the effect was already known for at least 150 years before that.

The theorem describes the following effect: rotation of an object around its first and third principal axes is stable, while rotation around its second principal axis (or intermediate axis) is not.

This can be demonstrated with the following experiment: hold a tennis racket at its handle, with its face being horizontal, and try to throw it in the air so that it will perform a full rotation around the horizontal axis perpendicular to the handle, and try to catch the handle. In almost all cases, during that rotation the face will also have completed a half rotation, so that the other face is now up. By contrast, it is easy to throw the racket so that it will rotate around the handle axis (the third principal axis) without accompanying half-rotation around another axis; it is also possible to make it rotate around the vertical axis perpendicular to the handle (the first principal axis) without any accompanying half-rotation.

The experiment can be performed with any object that has three different moments of inertia, for instance with a book, remote control or smartphone. The effect occurs whenever the axis of rotation differs only slightly from the object's second principal axis; air resistance or gravity are not necessary.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Russia 🔗 Crime 🔗 Religion 🔗 Islam 🔗 LGBT studies 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Chechnya 🔗 Discrimination 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities 🔗 Sexology and sexuality

Anti-gay purges in the Chechen Republic, a part of the Russian Federation, have included forced disappearances — secret abductions, imprisonment, torture — and extrajudicial killing by authorities targeting persons based on their perceived sexual orientation. An unknown number of people, who authorities detained on suspicion of being gay or bisexual, have reportedly died after being held in what human rights groups and eyewitnesses have called concentration camps.

Allegations were initially reported on 1 April 2017 in Novaya Gazeta, a Russian-language opposition newspaper, which reported that since February 2017 over 100 men had allegedly been detained and tortured and at least three had died in an extrajudicial killing. The paper, citing its sources in the Chechen special services, called the wave of detentions a "prophylactic sweep". The journalist who first reported on the subject went into hiding. There have been calls for reprisals against journalists who report on the situation.

As news spread of Chechen authorities' actions, which have been described as part of a systematic anti-LGBT purge, Russian and international activists scrambled to evacuate survivors of the camps and other vulnerable Chechens but were met with difficulty obtaining visas to conduct them safely beyond Russia.

The reports of the persecution were met with a variety of reactions worldwide. The Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov denied not only the occurrence of any persecution but also the existence of gay men in Chechnya, adding that such people would be killed by their own families. Officials in Moscow were skeptical, although in late May the Russian government reportedly agreed to send an investigative team to Chechnya. Numerous national leaders and other public figures in the West condemned Chechnya's actions, and protests were held in Russia and elsewhere. A report released in December 2018 by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) confirmed claims that persecution of LGBT persons had taken place and was ignored by authorities.

On 11 January 2019, it was reported that another 'gay purge' had begun in the country in December 2018, with several gay men and women being detained. The Russian LGBT Network believes that around 40 persons were detained and two killed.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Networking

The Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP) is an augmented password-authenticated key agreement (PAKE) protocol, specifically designed to work around existing patents.

Like all PAKE protocols, an eavesdropper or man in the middle cannot obtain enough information to be able to brute force guess a password without further interactions with the parties for each guess. Furthermore, being an augmented PAKE protocol, the server does not store password-equivalent data. This means that an attacker who steals the server data cannot masquerade as the client unless they first perform a brute force search for the password.

In layman's terms, during SRP (or any other PAKE protocol) authentication, one party (the "client" or "user") demonstrates to another party (the "server") that they know the password, without sending the password itself nor any other information from which the password can be derived. The password never leaves the client and is unknown to the server.

Furthermore, the server also needs to know about the password (but not the password itself) in order to instigate the secure connection. This means that the server also authenticates itself to the client, without reliance on the user parsing complex URLs. This prevents Phishing.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Oregon 🔗 Perl

Randal L. Schwartz (born November 22, 1961), also known as merlyn, is an American author, system administrator and programming consultant.

He is known for his expertise in the Perl programming language, his promotional role within the Perl community, as a co-host of FLOSS Weekly, and for a controversial felony conviction resulting from State of Oregon vs. Randal Schwartz, later officially expunged.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Lists 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Bibliographies 🔗 Bibliographies/Science

This is a list of important publications in computer science, organized by field.

Some reasons why a particular publication might be regarded as important:

• Topic creator – A publication that created a new topic
• Breakthrough – A publication that changed scientific knowledge significantly
• Influence – A publication which has significantly influenced the world or has had a massive impact on the teaching of computer science.