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๐ The Accursed Share
The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (French: La Part maudite) is a 1949 book about political economy by the French intellectual Georges Bataille, in which the author presents a new economic theory which he calls "general economy". The work comprises Volume I: Consumption, Volume II: The History of Eroticism, and Volume III: Sovereignty. It was first published in France by Les รditions de Minuit, and in the United States by Zone Books. It is considered one of the most important of Bataille's books.
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- "The Accursed Share" | 2025-05-11 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
๐ VIC-20
The VIC-20 (known as the VC-20 in Germany and the VIC-1001 in Japan) is an 8-bit entry level home computer that was sold by Commodore Business Machines. The VIC-20 was announced in 1980, roughly three years after Commodore's first personal computer, the PET. The VIC-20 was the first computer of any description to sell one million units, eventually reaching 2.5 million. It was described as "one of the first anti-spectatorial, non-esoteric computers by design...no longer relegated to hobbyist/enthusiasts or those with money, the computer Commodore developed was the computer of the future."
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- "VIC-20" | 2025-05-11 | 12 Upvotes 2 Comments
๐ Gonzalo Guerrero
Gonzalo Guerrero (also known as Gonzalo Marinero, Gonzalo de Aroca and Gonzalo de Aroza) was a sailor from Palos, Spain who was shipwrecked along the Yucatรกn Peninsula and was taken as a slave by the local Maya. Earning his freedom, Guerrero became a respected warrior under a Maya lord and raised three of the first mestizo children in Mexico and one of the first mestizo children in the Americas, alongside Miguel Dรญez de Aux and the children of Caramuru and Joรฃo Ramalho in Brazil. Little is known of his early life.
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- "Gonzalo Guerrero" | 2025-05-11 | 98 Upvotes 27 Comments
๐ Unique Games Conjecture
In computational complexity theory, the unique games conjecture (often referred to as UGC) is a conjecture made by Subhash Khot in 2002. The conjecture postulates that the problem of determining the approximate value of a certain type of game, known as a unique game, has NP-hard computational complexity. It has broad applications in the theory of hardness of approximation. If the unique games conjecture is true and Pย โ ย NP, then for many important problems it is not only impossible to get an exact solution in polynomial time (as postulated by the P versus NP problem), but also impossible to get a good polynomial-time approximation. The problems for which such an inapproximability result would hold include constraint satisfaction problems, which crop up in a wide variety of disciplines.
The conjecture is unusual in that the academic world seems about evenly divided on whether it is true or not.
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- "Unique Games Conjecture" | 2025-05-10 | 26 Upvotes 2 Comments
๐ Codd's Cellular Automaton
Codd's cellular automaton is a cellular automaton (CA) devised by the British computer scientist Edgar F. Codd in 1968. It was designed to recreate the computation- and construction-universality of von Neumann's CA but with fewer states: 8 instead of 29. Codd showed that it was possible to make a self-reproducing machine in his CA, in a similar way to von Neumann's universal constructor, but never gave a complete implementation.
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- "Codd's Cellular Automaton" | 2025-05-01 | 21 Upvotes 4 Comments
๐ The entire 1941 Japanese film Kanzashi can be watched on its Wikipedia page
Ornamental Hairpin (็ฐช, Kanzashi) is a 1941 Japanese comedy-drama film written and directed by Hiroshi Shimizu. It is based on the short story Yottsu no yubune (ๅใคใฎๆนฏๆงฝ, lit. "The four bathtubs") by Masuji Ibuse.
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- "The entire 1941 Japanese film Kanzashi can be watched on its Wikipedia page" | 2025-05-02 | 13 Upvotes 1 Comments
๐ International Workers' Day
International Workers' Day, also called Labour Day in some countries and often referred to as May Day, is a celebration of labourers and the working classes that is promoted by the international labour movement and occurs every year on 1 May, or the first Monday in May.
Traditionally, 1 May is the date of the European spring festival of May Day. The International Workers Congress held in Paris in 1889 established the Second International for labor, socialist, and Marxist parties. It adopted a resolution for a "great international demonstration" in support of working-class demands for the eight-hour day. The date was chosen by the American Federation of Labor to commemorate a general strike in the United States, which had begun on 1 May 1886 and culminated in the Haymarket affair on 4 May. The demonstration subsequently became a yearly event. The 1904 Sixth Conference of the Second International, called on "all Social Democratic Party organisations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the First of May for the legal establishment of the eight-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace".
The 1st of May, or first Monday in May, is a national public holiday in many countries, in most cases known as "International Workers' Day" or a similar name. Some countries celebrate a Labour Day on other dates significant to them, such as the United States and Canada, which celebrate Labor Day on the first Monday of September. In 1955, the Catholic Church dedicated 1 May to "Saint Joseph the Worker". Saint Joseph is the patron saint of workers and craftsmen, among others.
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- "International Workers' Day" | 2025-05-01 | 401 Upvotes 151 Comments
๐ Wikipedia: Database Download
Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, offline use or database queries (such as for Wikipedia:Maintenance). All text content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC-BY-SA), and most is additionally licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Images and other files are available under different terms, as detailed on their description pages. For our advice about complying with these licenses, see Wikipedia:Copyrights.
Some of the many ways to read Wikipedia while offline:
- Kiwix: (ยงย Kiwix)ย โ index of images (2024)
- XOWA: (ยงย XOWA)ย โ index of images (2015)
- WikiTaxi: ยงย WikiTaxi (for Windows)
- aarddict: ยงย Aard Dictionary / Aard 2
- BzReader: ยงย BzReader and MzReader (for Windows)
- WikiFilter: ยงย WikiFilter
- Wikipedia on rockbox: ยงย Wikiviewer for Rockbox
- Selected Wikipedia articles as a printed document: Help:Printing
Some of them are mobile applicationsย โ see "List of Wikipedia mobile applications".
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- "Wikipedia: Database Download" | 2025-04-27 | 203 Upvotes 99 Comments
๐ Breitspurbahn
The Breitspurbahn (German pronunciation: [หbสaษชtสpuหษฬฏbaหn], transl.โbroad-gauge railway) was a railway system planned and partly surveyed by Nazi Germany. Its track gauge โ the distance between the two running rails โ was to be 3000ย mm (9ย ftย 10+1โ8ย in), more than twice that of the 1435ย mm (4ย ftย 8+1โ2ย in) standard gauge used in western Europe. The railway was intended initially to run between major cities of the Greater Germanic Reich (the regime's expanded Germany) and neighbouring states.
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- "Breitspurbahn" | 2025-04-25 | 10 Upvotes 5 Comments
๐ The Population Bomb (1968)
The Population Bomb is a 1968 book co-authored by former Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich and former Stanford senior researcher in conservation biology Anne H. Ehrlich. From the opening page, it predicted worldwide famines due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a "population explosion" existed in the mid-20th century baby boom years, but the book and its authors brought the idea to an even wider audience.
The book has been criticized since its publication for an alarmist tone, and over the subsequent decades, for inaccurate assertions and failed predictions. For instance, regional famines have occurred since the publication of the book, but not world famines. The Ehrlichs themselves still stand by the book despite the flaws identified by its critics, with Paul stating in 2009 that "perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future," despite having predicted catastrophic global famines that never came to pass. They believe that it achieved their goals because "it alerted people to the importance of environmental issues and brought human numbers into the debate on the human future."