The Buenos Aires government has decided to prohibit concerts of electronic music because a teenager died trying a new designer drug at one last weekend.
supposedly the new #oil #taxes in #Russia represent the beginning of the end of Russia as a great power. Forgive me if I’m not that convinced. #politics
Flood #Egypt’s Qattara Depression with Mediterranean water in order to generate hydroelectric #energy from the continuing evaporation, and cover much of the Sahara with rain? Probably not a great idea in 2016, aside from the possible groundwater contamination, since the resulting clouds would probably reflect a lot more solar energy than you could harvest hydroelectrically, and putting photovoltaic panels in the Qattara would probably generate more energy than letting the water evaporate. The alternative of capturing freshwater from the Nile seems more appealing.
It seems like we might have found some #books from the #history of #China from before #Qin-Shi-Huang burned everything, smuggled into Hong Kong in 2008, now at Tsinghua University, being studied by Li Xueqin. It’s not totally clear from the article how many there are and whether they’re one #archaeology find or several, but I think it says they were buried around 300 BCE, near the end of the Zhou, just a century before Qin Shi Huang and stolen from one of the #Guodian-tombs in 1993 in the village of Guodian, in Hubei province; 1200 slips were bought by the Shanghai Museum at the time. Dartmouth paleographer Sarah Allan has written a new book about them, Buried Ideas: Legends of Abdication and Ideal Government in Early Chinese Bamboo-Slip Manuscripts, with a translation of four Confucian texts; an annotation and translation of the 800 Guodian slips is Scott Cook’s The Bamboo Texts of Guodian. #archival
804 bamboo slips buried since about 300 BCE (near the end of the Zhou) were found in 1993 in the tomb of an elderly teacher of Crown Prince Heng of Chu, now part of #China, one of the #Guodian-tombs. #archaeology #history #archival
The #Ed25519 signature scheme (used in OpenBSD’s #signify, among others) needs 64 bytes for a signature with a 2¹²⁸ security level. #cryptography #security
The #history of peer review and referee systems in science and scientific publication.
Different variants of the lambda-calculus are differently powerful: “The simply-typed lambda calculus is strongly normalizing (i.e. every term has a normal form) and is thus not Turing-complete.” “A partial lambda calculus is Turing complete. A total lambda calculus [i.e. guaranteed to terminate] with inductive recursion primitives is a linear bound TM. A total lambda calculus without recursion primitives is a push down automaton. For an FSA you’d have to limit passing variables in some way.” “There are polynomial time calculi that can calculate only polynomial time things... Generally they work by doing linear typing.” #cs
by abusing let-polymorphism in #Hindley-Milner type systems, you can force the type-checking to be exponential-time complexity. #cs