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🔗 Crime 🔗 Mining

Sand theft or unauthorised or illegal sand mining leads to a widely unknown global example of natural and non-renewable resource depletion problem comparable in extent to global water scarcity. Beach theft is illegal removal of large quantities of sand from a beach leading to full or partial disappearance of the beach.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Astronomy

The berserker hypothesis, also known as the deadly probes scenario, is the idea that humans have not yet detected intelligent alien life in the universe because it has been systematically destroyed by a series of lethal Von Neumann probes. The hypothesis is named after the Berserker series of novels (1963-2005) written by Fred Saberhagen.

The hypothesis has no single known proposer, and instead is thought to have emerged over time in response to the Hart–Tipler conjecture, or the idea that an absence of detectable Von Neumann probes is contrapositive evidence that no intelligent life exists outside of the Sun's Solar System. According to the berserker hypothesis, an absence of such probes is not evidence of life's absence, since interstellar probes could "go berserk" and destroy other civilizations, before self-destructing.

In his 1983 paper "The Great Silence", astronomer David Brin summarized the frightening implications of the berserker hypothesis: it is entirely compatible with all the facts and logic of the Fermi paradox, but would mean that there exists no intelligent life left to be discovered. In the worst-case scenario, humanity has already alerted others to its existence, and is next in line to be destroyed.

There is no need to struggle to suppress the elements of the Drake equation in order to explain the Great Silence, nor need we suggest that no [intelligent aliens] anywhere would bear the cost of interstellar travel. It need only happen once for the results of this scenario to become the equilibrium conditions in the Galaxy. We would not have detected extra-terrestrial radio traffic – nor would any [intelligent aliens] have ever settled on Earth – because all were killed shortly after discovering radio.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Computing 🔗 Electronics 🔗 Engineering

Electrochemical Random-Access Memory (ECRAM) is a type of non-volatile memory (NVM) with multiple levels per cell (MLC) designed for deep learning analog acceleration. An ECRAM cell is a three-terminal device composed of a conductive channel, an insulating electrolyte, an ionic reservoir, and metal contacts. The resistance of the channel is modulated by ionic exchange at the interface between the channel and the electrolyte upon application of an electric field. The charge-transfer process allows both for state retention in the absence of applied power, and for programming of multiple distinct levels, both differentiating ECRAM operation from that of a field-effect transistor (FET). The write operation is deterministic and can result in symmetrical potentiation and depression, making ECRAM arrays attractive for acting as artificial synaptic weights in physical implementations of artificial neural networks (ANN). The technological challenges include open circuit potential (OCP) and semiconductor foundry compatibility associated with energy materials. Universities, government laboratories, and corporate research teams have contributed to the development of ECRAM for analog computing. Notably, Sandia National Laboratories designed a lithium-based cell inspired by solid-state battery materials, Stanford University built an organic proton-based cell, and International Business Machines (IBM) demonstrated in-memory selector-free parallel programming for a logistic regression task in an array of metal-oxide ECRAM designed for insertion in the back end of line (BEOL). In 2022, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology built an inorganic, CMOS-compatible protonic technology that achieved near-ideal modulation characteristics using nanosecond fast pulses

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 Death 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Netherlands 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Malaysia

Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17/MAS17) was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down on 17 July 2014 while flying over eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed. Contact with the aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER, was lost when it was about 50 km (31 mi) from the Ukraine–Russia border, and wreckage of the aircraft fell near Hrabove in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 40 km (25 mi) from the border. The shoot-down occurred in the War in Donbas in an area controlled by pro-Russian rebels.

The responsibility for investigation was delegated to the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and the Dutch-led joint investigation team (JIT), who concluded that the airliner was downed by a Buk surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine. According to the JIT, the Buk that was used originated from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Federation and had been transported from Russia on the day of the crash, fired from a field in a rebel-controlled area and the launch system returned to Russia afterwards. The findings by the DSB and JIT are consistent with the earlier claims by American and German intelligence sources and claims by the Ukrainian government. On the basis of the JIT's conclusions, the governments of the Netherlands and Australia held Russia responsible for the deployment of the Buk installation and were pursuing legal routes as of May 2018. The Russian government denied involvement in the shooting down of the airplane, and its account of how the aircraft was shot down has varied over time. Coverage in Russian media has also differed from that in other countries.

This was Malaysia Airlines' second aircraft loss during 2014, after the disappearance of Flight 370 on 8 March, and is the deadliest airliner shoot-down incident to date.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Computing 🔗 Business 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 New York (state) 🔗 Criminal Biography 🔗 Computing/Computer Security 🔗 New Jersey 🔗 New York (state)/Cornell University 🔗 Computing/Networking

Robert Tappan Morris (born November 8, 1965) is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is best known for creating the Morris worm in 1988, considered the first computer worm on the Internet.

Morris was prosecuted for releasing the worm, and became the first person convicted under the then-new Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. He went on to co-found the online store Viaweb, one of the first web-based applications, and later the funding firm Y Combinator—both with Paul Graham.

He later joined the faculty in the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received tenure in 2006. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019.

🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 France 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Books 🔗 Military history/World War II

112 Gripes About the French was a 1945 handbook issued by the United States military authorities to enlisted personnel arriving in France after the Liberation. It was meant to defuse the growing tension between the American military and the locals.

The euphoria of victory over Germany was short-lived, and within months of Liberation, tensions began to rise between the French and the U.S. military personnel stationed in the country, with the former seeing the latter as arrogant and wanting to flaunt their wealth, and the latter seeing the former as proud and resentful. Fights were breaking out more often, and fears were raised, even among high officials, that the situation might eventually lead to a breakdown of civil order.

Set out in a question-and-answer format, 112 Gripes about the French posed a series of well-rehearsed complaints about the French, and then provided a common-sense rejoinder to each of them — the aim of the authors being to bring the average American soldier to a fuller understanding of his hosts.

It has recently been republished in the United States (ISBN 1-4191-6512-7), and in France under the title "Nos amis les Français" ("Our friends the French"), ISBN 2-7491-0128-X.

🔗 Color

In many languages, the colors described in English as "blue" and "green" are colexified, i.e. expressed using a single cover term. To describe this English lexical gap, linguists use the portmanteau word grue, from green and blue, which the philosopher Nelson Goodman coined—with a different meaning—in his 1955 Fact, Fiction, and Forecast to illustrate his "new riddle of induction".

The exact definition of "blue" and "green" may be complicated by the speakers not primarily distinguishing the hue, but using terms that describe other color components such as saturation and luminosity, or other properties of the object being described. For example, "blue" and "green" might be distinguished, but a single term might be used for both if the color is dark. Furthermore, green might be associated with yellow, and blue with black or gray.

According to Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's 1969 study Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, distinct terms for brown, purple, pink, orange and grey will not emerge in a language until the language has made a distinction between green and blue. In their account of the development of color terms the first terms to emerge are those for white/black (or light/dark), red and green/yellow.

🔗 Geography 🔗 Mountains

A gravity hill, also known as a magnetic hill, mystery hill, mystery spot, gravity road, or anti-gravity hill, is a place where the layout of the surrounding land produces an optical illusion, making a slight downhill slope appear to be an uphill slope. Thus, a car left out of gear will appear to be rolling uphill against gravity. There are hundreds of recognized gravity hills around the world.

The slope of gravity hills is an optical illusion, although sites are often accompanied by claims that magnetic or supernatural forces are at work. The most important factor contributing to the illusion is a completely or mostly obstructed horizon. Without a horizon, it becomes difficult to judge the slope of a surface as a reliable reference is missing. Objects which one would normally assume to be more or less perpendicular to the ground, such as trees, may actually be leaning, offsetting the visual reference.

A 2003 study looked into how the absence of a horizon can skew the perspective on gravity hills by recreating a number of antigravity places in the lab to see how volunteers would react. As a conclusion, researchers from Universities of Padova and Pavia in Italy found that without a true horizon in sight, landmarks such as trees and signs actually played these tricks on the human brain.

The illusion is similar to the Ames room, in which objects can also appear to roll against gravity.

The opposite phenomenon—an uphill road that appears flat—is known in bicycle racing as a "false flat".

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing

In computer networking, the Name/Finger protocol and the Finger user information protocol are simple network protocols for the exchange of human-oriented status and user information.