April 21, 2025
Prussian blue (also known as Berlin blue, Brandenburg blue, Parisian and Paris blue) is a dark blue pigment produced by oxidation of ferrous ferrocyanide salts. Turnbull’s blue is essentially identical chemically, excepting that it has different impurities and particle sizes—because it is made from different reagents—and thus it has a slightly different color.
Prussian blue was created in the early 18th century and is the first modern synthetic pigment. It is prepared as a very fine colloidal dispersion, because the compound is not soluble in water. It contains variable amounts of other ions and its appearance depends sensitively on the size of the colloidal particles. The pigment is used in paints, it became prominent in 19th-century aizuri-e Japanese woodblock prints, and it is the traditional ‘blue’ in technical blueprints. Continue reading →
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April 13, 2025
Woody breast is an abnormal muscle condition that impacts the texture and usability of chicken breast meat. The affected meat is described as tough, chewy, and gummy due to stiff or hardened muscle fibers that spread through the filet. The specific cause is not known but may be related to factors associated with rapid growth rates.
Companies often use a three-point scale to grade the woodiness of a particular breast. Although distasteful to many, meat that exhibits woody breast is not known to be harmful to humans who consume it. When detected by suppliers, product shown to have the condition present may be discounted or processed as ground chicken. Continue reading →
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April 7, 2025
Belphegor’s prime is the palindromic prime number 1000000000000066600000000000001 (1030 + 666 × 1014 + 1), a number which reads the same both backwards and forwards and is only divisible by itself and one. It first discovered by Harvey Dubner, a mathematician known for his discoveries of many large prime numbers and prime number forms. For Belphegor’s prime in particular, he discovered the prime while determining a sequence of primes it belongs to.
The name “Belphegor’s prime” was coined by author Clifford A. Pickover in 2012. Belphegor is one of the Seven Princes of Hell; specifically, ‘the demon of inventiveness.’ The number itself contains superstitious elements that have given it its name: the number 666 at the heart of Belphegor’s prime is widely associated as being the number of the beast, used in symbolism to represent one of the creatures in the apocalypse or, more commonly, the devil. This number is surrounded on either side by thirteen zeroes and is 31 digits in length (thirteen reversed), with thirteen itself long regarded superstitiously as an unlucky number in Western culture.
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March 31, 2025
Steganography [steg-uh-nog-ruh-fee] is the practice of representing information within another message or physical object, in such a manner that the presence of the concealed information would not be evident to an unsuspecting person’s examination.
The word steganography comes from Greek words steganós (‘covered or concealed’) and graphia (‘writing’). The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by German Benedictine abbot Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography, disguised as a book on magic. Continue reading →
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March 21, 2025
Malbolge [mahl-bol-jeh] is a public domain esoteric programming language invented by Ben Olmstead in 1998, named after the eighth circle of hell in Dante’s Inferno, the Malebolge. It was specifically designed to be almost impossible to use, via a counter-intuitive ‘crazy operation,’ base-three arithmetic, and self-altering code. It builds on the difficulty of earlier challenging esoteric languages (such as Brainfuck and Befunge) but exaggerates this aspect to an extreme degree, playing on the entangled histories of computer science and encryption. Despite this design, it is possible to write useful Malbolge programs, though the author himself has never written one.
The first program was not written by a human being; it was generated by a beam search algorithm designed by Andrew Cooke and implemented in Lisp. Later, Lou Scheffer posted a cryptanalysis of Malbolge and provided a program to copy its input to its output. He also saved the original interpreter and specification after the original site stopped functioning and offered a general strategy of writing programs in Malbolge as well as some thoughts on its Turing completeness.
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March 19, 2025
A stele [stee-lee] or stela [stee-lah] is a stone or wooden slab, generally taller than it is wide, erected in the ancient world as a monument. The surface of the stele often has text, ornamentation, or both. These may be inscribed, carved in relief, or painted.
Steles have also been used to publish laws and decrees, to record a ruler’s exploits and honors, to mark sacred territories or mortgaged properties, as territorial markers, as the boundary steles of Akhenaton at Amarna, or to commemorate military victories. They were widely used in the ancient Near East, Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and, most likely independently, in China and elsewhere in the Far East, and, independently, by Mesoamerican civilizations, notably the Olmec and Maya.
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March 8, 2025
In mathematics, Hilbert’s program, formulated by German mathematician David Hilbert in the early 1920s, was a proposed solution to the foundational crisis of mathematics, when early attempts to clarify the foundations of mathematics were found to suffer from paradoxes and inconsistencies. Hilbert wanted to ground all existing theories to a finite, complete set of axioms, and provide a proof that these axioms were consistent. He proposed that the consistency of more complicated systems, such as real analysis, could be proven in terms of simpler systems.
Gödel’s incompleteness theorems, published in 1931, showed that Hilbert’s program was unattainable for key areas of mathematics. In his first theorem, Gödel showed that any consistent system with a computable set of axioms which is capable of expressing arithmetic can never be complete. In his second theorem, he showed that such a system could not prove its own consistency, so it certainly cannot be used to prove the consistency of anything stronger with certainty. This refuted Hilbert’s assumption that a finitistic system could be used to prove the consistency of itself, and therefore could not prove everything else. Many current lines of research in mathematical logic, such as proof theory and reverse mathematics, can be viewed as natural continuations of Hilbert’s original program.
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March 3, 2025
The Acme siren is a musical instrument used in concert bands for comic effect. Often used in cartoons, it produces the stylized sound of a police siren. It is one of the few aerophones in the percussion section of an orchestra. The instrument is typically made of metal and is cylindrical. Inside the cylinder is a type of fan-blade which, when the performer blows through one end, spins and creates the sound. The faster the performer blows, the faster the fan-blade moves and the higher the pitch the instrument creates. Conversely, the slower the performer blows, the lower the pitch.
Iannis Xenakis used it in the 1960s in his works Oresteia, Terretektorh, and Persephassa. A siren was used in Bob Dylan’s classic album, ‘Highway 61 Revisited.’ One is also heard in Stevie Wonder’s song ‘Sir Duke’ just before the second chorus. Dan Zanes also uses a siren in his version of ‘Washington at Valley Forge.’ Acme is the trade name of J Hudson & Co of Birmingham, England, who developed and patented the Acme siren in 1895. It was sometimes known as ‘the cyclist’s road clearer.’
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February 13, 2025
The Enhanced Games is a planned international sports event where the athletes will not be subject to drug testing. It is headed by Aron D’Souza, an Australian businessman. The event is meant to take place in 2025. Reactions from the sporting world have been generally negative, with commentators highlighting the safety risks of encouraging performance-enhancing drug use. Critics have dubbed it the Steroid Olympics. Some of the prominent investors in the Enhanced Games include Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan, and Donald Trump Jr.
The event is intended to be annual and to include track and field, swimming, weightlifting, gymnastics, and combat sports. Continue reading →
Posted in Drugs, Games, Health |
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February 5, 2025
Pono [poh-noh] (Hawaiian for ‘proper’ or ‘righteousness’) was a portable digital media player and music download service for high-resolution audio. It was developed by musician Neil Young and his company PonoMusic, which raised money for development and initial production through a crowd-funding campaign on Kickstarter. Production and shipments to backers started in 2014, and shipments to the general public began in the first quarter of 2015.
Pono’s stated goal to present songs ‘as they first sound during studio recording sessions,’ using ‘high-resolution’ 24-bit 192kHz audio instead of ‘the compressed audio inferiority that MP3s offer’ received mixed reactions, with some describing Pono as a competitor to similar music services such as HDtracks, but others doubting its potential for success. Pono was discontinued in 2017, and alternative plans were later abandoned. Continue reading →
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February 3, 2025
The phantom time conspiracy theory is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory first asserted by Heribert Illig in 1991. It hypothesizes a conspiracy by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and possibly the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, to fabricate the Anno Domini dating system retroactively, in order to place them at the special year of AD 1000, and to rewrite history to legitimize Otto’s claim to the Holy Roman Empire.
Illig suggested this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence. According to this scenario, the entire Carolingian period, including the figure of Charlemagne, is a fabrication, with a ‘phantom time’ of 297 years (614–911) added to the Early Middle Ages. Substantial evidence contradicts the hypothesis and it failed to gain the support of historians, and calendars in other European countries, most of Asia and parts of pre-Columbian America contradict this. Continue reading →
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January 30, 2025
“Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us” event began as a satirical Facebook post by Matty Roberts in June 2019, which jokingly proposed raiding the classified military base in search of aliens and garnered over 2 million RSVPs. Roberts later stated his intentions for the event had been purely comedic, and disavowed responsibility for any casualties had there been any actual attempt to raid the military base.
On the day of the event, only about 150 people were reported to have shown up at the two entrances to Area 51, with none succeeding in entering the site. Two music festivals were planned to coincide with the event: Alienstock in Rachel, Nevada, and Storm Area 51 Basecamp in Hiko, Nevada. An estimated 1,500 people attended these festivals, according to state and local law enforcement. Air Force spokeswoman Grace Manock stated government officials were briefed on the event and discouraged people from attempting to enter military property. Nevada law enforcement also warned potential participants against trespassing. Continue reading →
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