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🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Spirits

Andrew Johnson was drunk when he made his inaugural address as Vice President of the United States on March 4, 1865. Multiple sources suggest Johnson had been drunk for at least a week prior, he drank heavily the night before the inauguration, and he consumed either three glasses of whisky or one glass of French brandy the morning of the ceremony. Witnesses variously described Johnson's speech as incoherent, inane, self-aggrandizing, repetitive, hostile, sloppy, and overly long. He kissed the Bible when he took the oath of office, and he was too drunk to administer the oath of office to incoming senators. The incident presaged some of Johnson's difficulties as chief executive when he succeeded to the presidency 42 days later, following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Edwin Ray Guthrie (; January 9, 1886 in Lincoln, Nebraska – April 23, 1959 in Seattle, Washington) was a behavioral psychologist. He first worked as a mathematics teacher, and philosopher, but switched to psychology when he was 33. He spent most of his career at the University of Washington, where he became full professor and then emeritus professor in psychology.

Guthrie is best known for his theory that all learning was based on a stimulus–response association. This was variously described as one trial theory, non-reinforcement, and contiguity learning. The theory was:

"A combination of stimuli which has accompanied a movement will on its recurrence tend to be followed by that movement".

One word that his coworkers and students used to describe Guthrie and his theories was "simple", and perhaps he did prefer to use simple terms to illustrate complex ideas. However, "It is undoubtedly true that many reviews of Guthrie in the literature have mistaken incompleteness for simplicity".

His simple nature carried into his teachings where he took great pride in working with and teaching students.

🔗 Computer science

The Hutter Prize is a cash prize funded by Marcus Hutter which rewards data compression improvements on a specific 1 GB English text file. Specifically, the prize awards 5000 euros for each one percent improvement (with 500,000 euros total funding) in the compressed size of the file enwik9, which is the larger of two files used in the Large Text Compression Benchmark; enwik9 is the first 1,000,000,000 characters of a specific version of English Wikipedia. The ongoing competition is organized by Hutter, Matt Mahoney, and Jim Bowery.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Physics 🔗 Philosophy

Norton's dome is a thought experiment that exhibits a non-deterministic system within the bounds of Newtonian mechanics. It was devised by John D. Norton in 2003. It is a special limiting case of a more general class of examples from 1997 due to Sanjay Bhat and Dennis Bernstein. The Norton's dome problem can be regarded as a problem in physics, mathematics, or philosophy.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Astronomy/Astronomical objects

Tabby's Star (also known as Boyajian's Star and WTF Star, and designated KIC 8462852 in the Kepler Input Catalog) is an F-type main-sequence star in the constellation Cygnus approximately 1,470 light-years (450 pc) from Earth. Unusual light fluctuations of the star, including up to a 22% dimming in brightness, were discovered by citizen scientists as part of the Planet Hunters project. In September 2015, astronomers and citizen scientists associated with the project posted a preprint of an article describing the data and possible interpretations. The discovery was made from data collected by the Kepler space telescope, which observed changes in the brightness of distant stars to detect exoplanets.

Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the star's large irregular changes in brightness as measured by its light curve, but none to date fully explain all aspects of the curve. One explanation is that an "uneven ring of dust" orbits Tabby's Star. In another explanation, the star's luminosity is modulated by changes in the efficiency of heat transport to its photosphere, so no external obscuration is required. A third hypothesis, based on a lack of observed infrared light, posits a swarm of cold, dusty comet fragments in a highly eccentric orbit; however, the notion that disturbed comets from such a cloud could exist in high enough numbers to obscure 22% of the star's observed luminosity has been doubted. Another hypothesis is that a large number of small masses in "tight formation" are orbiting the star. Furthermore, spectroscopic study of the system has found no evidence for coalescing material or hot close-in dust or circumstellar matter from an evaporating or exploding planet within a few astronomical units of the mature central star. It has also been hypothesized that the changes in brightness could be signs of activity associated with intelligent extraterrestrial life constructing a Dyson swarm; however, further analysis based on data through the end of 2017 showed wavelength-dependent dimming consistent with dust but not an opaque object such as an alien megastructure, which would block all wavelengths of light equally.

Tabby's Star is not the only star that has large irregular dimmings, but other such stars include young stellar objects called YSO dippers, which have different dimming patterns. An example of such an object is EPIC 204278916.

New fluctuations ran from mid-May 2017 until July 2018, assuming their continuance in late-December 2017 to mid-February 2018 when obscured by the Sun.

In September 2019, astronomers reported that the observed dimmings of Tabby's Star may have been produced by fragments resulting from the disruption of an orphaned exomoon. An overall study of other similar stars has been presented. In January 2021, a distant stellar-mass companion was reported, making Tabby's Star a binary stellar system.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Books 🔗 Novels/Short story 🔗 Horror

The King in Yellow is a book of short stories by American writer Robert W. Chambers, first published by F. Tennyson Neely in 1895. The British first edition was published by Chatto & Windus in 1895 (316 pages).

The book contains nine short stories and a sequence of poems; while the first stories belong to the genres of supernatural horror and weird fiction, The King in Yellow progressively transitions towards a more light-hearted tone, ending with romantic stories devoid of horror or supernatural elements. The horror stories are highly esteemed, and it has been described by critics such as E. F. Bleiler, S. T. Joshi, and T. E. D. Klein as a classic in the field of the supernatural. Lin Carter called it "an absolute masterpiece, probably the single greatest book of weird fantasy written in this country between the death of Poe and the rise of Lovecraft", and it was an influence on Lovecraft himself.

The book is named for the eponymous play within the stories which recurs as a motif through the first four stories, a forbidden play which induces madness in those who read it.

🔗 Italy 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Athletics 🔗 Highways 🔗 Road transport 🔗 Highways/European Highways

The Appian Way (Latin and Italian: Via Appia) is one of the earliest and strategically most important Roman roads of the ancient republic. It connected Rome to Brindisi, in southeast Italy. Its importance is indicated by its common name, recorded by Statius, of Appia longarum... regina viarum ("the Appian Way, the queen of the long roads").

The road is named after Appius Claudius Caecus, the Roman censor who began and completed the first section as a military road to the south in 312 BC during the Samnite Wars.

A light-on-dark color scheme (dark mode, night mode) is available to Wikipedia's smartphone apps and website (for users using the default skins) since July 2024.

In addition to this there is a gadget on English Wikipedia, and various volunteer-written CSS files that allow customization for logged-in users.

🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing

In computer security, a billion laughs attack is a type of denial-of-service (DoS) attack which is aimed at parsers of XML documents.

It is also referred to as an XML bomb or as an exponential entity expansion attack.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Law Enforcement

The iron law of prohibition is a term coined by Richard Cowan in 1986 which posits that as law enforcement becomes more intense, the potency of prohibited substances increases. Cowan put it this way: "the harder the enforcement, the harder the drugs."

This law is an application of the Alchian–Allen effect; Libertarian judge James P. Gray calls the law the "cardinal rule of prohibition", and notes that is a powerful argument for the legalization of drugs. It is based on the premise that when drugs or alcohol are prohibited, they will be produced in black markets in more concentrated and powerful forms, because these more potent forms offer better efficiency in the business model—they take up less space in storage, less weight in transportation, and they sell for more money. Economist Mark Thornton writes that the iron law of prohibition undermines the argument in favor of prohibition, because the higher potency forms are less safe for the consumer.