Universal Math Solutions in Dimensions 8 and 24

Universal Math Solutions in Dimensions 8 and 24

Now, she and her co-authors have proved something even more remarkable: The configurations that solve the sphere-packing problem in those two dimensions also solve an infinite number of other problems about the best arrangement for points that are trying to avoid each other. Dimension three, meanwhile, is a zoo: Different point configurations are better in different circumstances, and for some problems, mathematicians don’t even have a good guess for what the best configuration is. Then in 2016, Viazovska took the first step by proving that these two lattices are the best possible sphere packings (she was joined, for the Leech lattice proof, by Cohn and the other three authors of the new paper: Abhinav Kumar, Stephen Miller of Rutgers University and Danylo Radchenko of the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany).

Source: www.quantamagazine.org

The struggles of an open source maintainer

The struggles of an open source maintainer

When a software project reaches the popularity Redis reached, and at the same time once the communications between individuals are made so simple by the new social tools, and by your attitude to be “there” for users, the amount of messages, issues, pull requests, suggestions the authors receive will grow exponentially. At the same time, at least in the case of Redis, but I believe this to be a common problem, the amount of very qualified people that can look at such inputs from the community grows very slowly. As the leader of a popular OSS project, in one way or the other you’ll have to confront with these people, and that’s maybe one of the most stressful things I ever did in the course of the Redis I believe that software, while great, will never be huge like writing a book that will survive for centuries.

Source: antirez.com

U.S. Presidents and Comparative Stock Market Performance

U.S. Presidents and Comparative Stock Market Performance

Using Dow Jones Industrial Average (“DJIA”) data back to 1900, a comparative analysis is performed using stock market performance throughout twenty different presidential tenures in the United States. While the stock market dropped significantly following between his election and inauguration, he still holds the sixth best stock market performance among U.S. presidential elections. Ultimately, stock market performance is just one measurement of a President’s time in office and it may only be a coincidental measurement.

Source: www.endlessmetrics.com

Dark Side of the Ring: Pro Wrestling and Americana

Dark Side of the Ring: Pro Wrestling and Americana

Young Mike Von Erich, though skinnier and less skilled, was rushed into his place on the cards of World Class Championship Wrestling but a violent fit of toxic shock after an operation, added to the weight of media and familial pressure, crushed him and he killed himself at the age of 23. The Von Erich tragedies occupy one episode of the splendid Viceland series Dark Side of the Ring, but other episodes detail other tragedies close to them. It was in the nine-year span between David and Kerry Von Erich’s deaths that wrestling was at its biggest.

Source: spectator.us

Firms That Promised Ransomware Decryption Almost Always Just Pay the Hackers

Firms That Promised Ransomware Decryption Almost Always Just Pay the Hackers

Proven Data Recovery of Elmsford, New York, regularly made ransom payments to SamSam hackers over more than a year, according to Jonathan Storfer, a former employee who dealt with them. Another U.S. company, Florida-based MonsterCloud, also professes to use its own data recovery methods but instead pays ransoms, sometimes without informing victims such as local law enforcement agencies, ProPublica has found. Storfer, who worked for Proven Data from March 2017 until September 2018, said in a series of interviews that the company not only paid ransoms to the SamSam hackers, but also developed a mutually beneficial relationship with them.

Source: features.propublica.org

The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus

The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus

The Unified Astronomy Thesaurus (UAT) is an open, interoperable and community-supported thesaurus which unifies the existing divergent and isolated Astronomy & Astrophysics thesauri into a single high-quality, freely-available open thesaurus formalizing astronomical concepts and their inter-relationships. The UAT builds upon the existing IAU Thesaurus with major contributions from the Astronomy portions of the thesauri developed by the Institute of Physics Publishing and the American Institute of Physics. This includes professional associations (IVOA, IAU), learned societies (AAS, RAS), publishers (IOP, AIP), librarians and other curators working for major astronomy institutes and data archives.

Source: astrothesaurus.org

Coca-Cola most common source of packaging pollution on UK beaches: study

Coca-Cola most common source of packaging pollution on UK beaches: study

However, SAS complains that in practice the vast majority of the cost of dealing with litter and packaging waste – about 90% – is borne by local authorities and that the parent companies of many leading brands do not share information on the quantity of packaging they produce. Following the consultation, the government may toughen the rules, making companies 100% responsible for the cost of the waste resulting from their packaging, from production to final disposal. The company, which produces 3m tonnes of plastic packaging a year, has pledged to collect and recycle one bottle or can for every one that it sells, as part of a global initiative called WorldWithoutWaste, and last year said it would increase the amount of recycled plastic in all bottles across its brands from 25% to 50% by 2020.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Tracking down the teenage hackers of the Inner Circle (2016)

Tracking down the teenage hackers of the Inner Circle (2016)

Bill, Chris, and other members of their collective had been accessing all kinds of networks, from GTE’s Telemail—which hosted email for companies like Coca-Cola, Raytheon, Citibank, and NASA—to the Arpanet, which was largely used by university researchers and military personnel until Milnet was completed in the mid-1980s. The Inner Circle wasn’t the only teen hacking group of the early 1980s, but their interference with both government networks and the email accounts of large corporations put them on the FBI’s radar. After WarGames came out in June 1983, every wannabe hacker with more money than sense went out and got a computer and modem…The story of Bill and Chris is one of simple curiosity, and the birth of the modern internet in an era before computer hacking laws existed.

Source: paleofuture.gizmodo.com