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🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

The Cardan grille is a method of writing secret messages using a grid.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Lists 🔗 Ethnic groups 🔗 Jewish history 🔗 Israel 🔗 Jewish culture 🔗 Awards

Nobel Prizes have been awarded to over 900 individuals, of whom at least 20% were Jews although the Jewish population comprises less than 0.2% of the world's population. Various theories have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, which has received considerable attention. Israeli academics Dr. Elay Ben-Gal and Professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz, curious about the phenomenon, started to form an encyclopedia of Jewish Nobel laureates and interview as many as possible about their life and work.

Jews have been recipients of all six awards. The first Jewish recipient, Adolf von Baeyer, was awarded the prize in Chemistry in 1905. As of 2019, the most recent Jewish recipient was economics laureate Michael Kremer.

Jewish laureates Elie Wiesel and Imre Kertész survived the extermination camps during the Holocaust, while François Englert survived by being hidden in orphanages and children's homes. Others, such as Walter Kohn, Otto Stern, Albert Einstein, Hans Krebs and Martin Karplus had to flee Nazi Germany to avoid persecution. Still others, including Rita Levi-Montalcini, Herbert Hauptman, Robert Furchgott, Arthur Kornberg, and Jerome Karle experienced significant antisemitism in their careers.

Arthur Ashkin, a 96-year-old American Jew was, at the time of his award, the oldest person to receive a Nobel Prize.

🔗 Agriculture 🔗 Birds 🔗 Veterinary medicine

Chicken eyeglasses, also known as chicken specs, chicken goggles, generically as pick guards, and under other names, were small eyeglasses made for chickens intended to prevent feather pecking and cannibalism. They differ from blinders in that they allow the bird to see forward, whereas blinders do not. One variety used rose-colored lenses, as the coloring was thought to prevent a chicken wearing them from recognizing blood on other chickens, which may increase the tendency for abnormal injurious behavior. They were mass-produced and sold throughout the United States as early as the beginning of the 20th century.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Bulgaria

Pravetz (Правец in the original Cyrillic, series 8 and series 16) were Bulgarian computers, manufactured mainly in the town of Pravetz. Some components and software were produced in Stara Zagora, Plovdiv, and other Bulgarian cities.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computer graphics

Xsnow is a software application that was originally created as a virtual greeting card for Macintosh systems in 1984. In 1993, the concept was ported to the X Window System as Xsnow, and was included on a number of Linux distributions in the late 1990s.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Brands 🔗 Food and drink/Beverages

OpenCola is a brand of open-source cola, where the instructions for making it are freely available and modifiable. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe. It was launched in 2001 by free software P2P company Opencola, to promote their open-source software concept.

🔗 Science

In computing, tree shaking is a dead code elimination technique that is applied when optimizing code written in ECMAScript dialects like JavaScript or TypeScript into a single bundle that is loaded by a web browser. Often contrasted with traditional single-library dead code elimination techniques common to minifiers, tree shaking eliminates unused functions from across the bundle by starting at the entry point and only including functions that may be executed. It is succinctly described as "live code inclusion".

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Canada 🔗 Law 🔗 Canada/Canadian law

Section 33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is part of the Constitution of Canada. It is commonly known as the notwithstanding clause (French: clause dérogatoire or clause nonobstant), sometimes referred to as the override power, and it allows Parliament or provincial legislatures to temporarily override sections 2 and 7–15 of the Charter.

🔗 Electronics

A Wallace tree is an efficient hardware implementation of a digital circuit that multiplies two integers. It was devised by the Australian computer scientist Chris Wallace in 1964.

The Wallace tree has three steps:

1. Multiply (that is – AND) each bit of one of the arguments, by each bit of the other, yielding ${\displaystyle n^{2}}$ results. Depending on position of the multiplied bits, the wires carry different weights, for example wire of bit carrying result of ${\displaystyle a_{4}b_{3}}$ is 128 (see explanation of weights below).
2. Reduce the number of partial products to two by layers of full and half adders.
3. Group the wires in two numbers, and add them with a conventional adder.

The second step works as follows. As long as there are three or more wires with the same weight add a following layer:-

• Take any three wires with the same weights and input them into a full adder. The result will be an output wire of the same weight and an output wire with a higher weight for each three input wires.
• If there are two wires of the same weight left, input them into a half adder.
• If there is just one wire left, connect it to the next layer.

The benefit of the Wallace tree is that there are only ${\displaystyle O(\log n)}$ reduction layers, and each layer has ${\displaystyle O(1)}$ propagation delay. As making the partial products is ${\displaystyle O(1)}$ and the final addition is ${\displaystyle O(\log n)}$, the multiplication is only ${\displaystyle O(\log n)}$, not much slower than addition (however, much more expensive in the gate count). Naively adding partial products with regular adders would require ${\displaystyle O(\log ^{2}n)}$ time. From a complexity theoretic perspective, the Wallace tree algorithm puts multiplication in the class NC¹.

These computations only consider gate delays and don't deal with wire delays, which can also be very substantial.

The Wallace tree can be also represented by a tree of 3/2 or 4/2 adders.

It is sometimes combined with Booth encoding.

🔗 Iran 🔗 London 🔗 British Museum 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Sculpture

The Oxus treasure (Persian: گنجینه آمودریا) is a collection of about 180 surviving pieces of metalwork in gold and silver, the majority rather small, plus perhaps about 200 coins, from the Achaemenid Persian period which were found by the Oxus river about 1877-1880. The exact place and date of the find remain unclear, and it is likely that many other pieces from the hoard were melted down for bullion; early reports suggest there were originally some 1500 coins, and mention types of metalwork that are not among the surviving pieces. The metalwork is believed to date from the sixth to fourth centuries BC, but the coins show a greater range, with some of those believed to belong to the treasure coming from around 200 BC. The most likely origin for the treasure is that it belonged to a temple, where votive offerings were deposited over a long period. How it came to be deposited is unknown.

As a group, the treasure is the most important survival of what was once an enormous production of Achaemenid work in precious metal. It displays a very wide range of quality of execution, with the many gold votive plaques mostly crudely executed, some perhaps by the donors themselves, while other objects are of superb quality, presumably that expected by the court.

The British Museum now has nearly all the surviving metalwork, with one of the pair of griffin-headed bracelets on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and displays them in Room 52. The group arrived at the museum by different routes, with many items bequeathed to the nation by Augustus Wollaston Franks. The coins are more widely dispersed, and more difficult to firmly connect with the treasure. A group believed to come from it is in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, and other collections have examples.