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๐ Add oil
"Add oil" is a Hong Kong English expression used as an encouragement and support to a person. Derived from the Chinese phrase Gayau (or Jiayou; Chinese: ๅ ๆฒน), the expression is literally translated from the Cantonese phrase. It is originated in Hong Kong and is commonly used by bilingual Hong Kong speakers.
"Add oil" can be roughly translated as "Go for it". Though it is often described as "the hardest to translate well", the literal translation is the result of Chinglish and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018.
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- "Add oil" | 2023-12-05 | 64 Upvotes 28 Comments
๐ Download Valley
Download Valley is a cluster of software companies in Israel, producing and delivering adware to be installed alongside downloads of other software. The primary purpose is to monetize shareware and downloads. These software items are commonly browser toolbars, adware, browser hijackers, spyware, and malware. Another group of products are download managers, possibly designed to induce or trick the user to install adware, when downloading a piece of desired software or mobile app from a certain source.
Although the term references Silicon Valley, it does not refer to a specific valley or any geographical area. Many of the companies are located in Tel Aviv and the surrounding region. It has been used by Israeli media as well as in other reports related to IT business.
Download managers from Download Valley companies have been used by major download portals and software hosts, including Download.com by CNET, Softonic.com and SourceForge.
๐ Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
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- "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" | 2023-12-03 | 37 Upvotes 16 Comments
- "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" | 2023-08-25 | 17 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" | 2020-05-20 | 170 Upvotes 118 Comments
- "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" | 2019-07-15 | 12 Upvotes 1 Comments
๐ WikiReader
WikiReader was a project to deliver an offline, text-only version of Wikipedia on a mobile device. The project was sponsored by Openmoko and made by Pandigital, and its source code has been released.
The project debuted an offline portable reader for Wikipedia in October 2009. Updates in multiple languages were available online and a twice-yearly offline update service delivered via Micro SD card was also available at a cost of $29 per year. WikiReader versions of the English Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wiktionary and Project Gutenberg can be installed together on a user-supplied 16ย GB Micro SDHC memory card. Unlike Wikipedia itself, the device features parental controls.
The device can also run programs written in the Forth programming language; a simple calculator program is included.
In late 2014, the WikiReader website and project itself were shut down and abandoned for unknown reasons. Existing WikiReaders no longer receive updates to their database. Devices, professionally produced updates, and homegrown updates continue to be available from the secondary markets (e.g. eBay and Amazon), as well as from community efforts centered around the WikiReader subreddit.
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- "WikiReader" | 2023-12-03 | 78 Upvotes 24 Comments
๐ List of Car Crash Songs
The car crash song emerged as a popular pop and rock music teenage tragedy song during the 1950s and 1960s at a time when the number of people being killed in vehicle collisions was rising rapidly in many countries. In the United Kingdom, the number of fatalities on UK roads rose to a peace-time peak of 7,985 in 1966 before then falling to a new low of 2,222 in 2009. The theme also appears in country and other music styles.
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- "List of Car Crash Songs" | 2023-12-02 | 13 Upvotes 6 Comments
๐ Butterfly gardening
Butterfly gardening is a way to create, improve, and maintain habitat for lepidopterans including butterflies, skippers, and moths. Butterflies have four distinct life stagesโegg, larva, chrysalis, and adult. In order to support and sustain butterfly populations, an ideal butterfly garden contains habitat for each life stage.
Butterfly larvae, with some exceptions such as the carnivorous harvester (Feniseca tarquinius), consume plant matter and can be generalists or specialists. While butterflies like the painted lady (Vanessa cardui) are known to consume over 200 plants as caterpillars, other species like the monarch (Danaus plexippus), and the regal fritillary (Speyeria idalia) only consume plants in one genus, milkweed and violets, respectively.
As adults, butterflies feed mainly on nectar, but they have also evolved to consume rotting fruit, tree sap, and even carrion. Supporting nectarivorous adult butterflies involves planting nectar plants of different heights, color, and bloom times. Butterfly bait stations can easily be made to provide a food source for species that prefer fruit and sap. In addition to food sources, windbreaks in the form of trees and shrubs shelter butterflies and can provide larval food and overwintering grounds. "Puddling" is a behavior generally done by male butterflies in which they gather to drink nutrients and water and incorporating a puddling ground for butterflies will enhance a butterfly garden. While butterflies are not the only pollinator, creating butterfly habitat also creates habitat for bees, beetles, flies, and other pollinators
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- "Butterfly gardening" | 2023-12-02 | 33 Upvotes 13 Comments
๐ James-Lange Theory
The JamesโLange theory is a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions and is one of the earliest theories of emotion within modern psychology. It was developed by philosopher John Dewey and named for two 19th-century scholars, William James and Carl Lange (see modern criticism for more on the theory's origin). The basic premise of the theory is that physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion. Previously people considered emotions as reactions to some significant events or their features, i.e. events come first, and then there is an emotional response. James-Lange theory proposed that the state of the body can induce emotions or emotional dispositions. In other words, this theory suggests that when we feel teary, it generates a disposition for sad emotions; when our heartbeat is out of normality, it makes us feel anxiety. Instead of feeling an emotion and subsequent physiological (bodily) response, the theory proposes that the physiological change is primary, and emotion is then experienced when the brain reacts to the information received via the body's nervous system. It proposes that each specific category of emotion is attached to a unique and different pattern of physiological arousal and emotional behaviour in reaction due to an exciting stimulus.
The theory has been criticized and modified over the course of time, as one of several competing theories of emotion. Modern theorists have built on its ideas by proposing that the experience of emotion is modulated by both physiological feedback and other information, rather than consisting solely of bodily changes, as James suggested. Psychologist Tim Dalgleish states that most modern affective neuroscientists would support such a viewpoint. In 2002, a research paper on the autonomic nervous system stated that the theory has been "hard to disprove".
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- "James-Lange Theory" | 2023-12-01 | 38 Upvotes 12 Comments
๐ Chicken Hypnotism
A chicken can be hypnotized, or put into a trance, by holding its head down against the ground, and drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at the beak and extending straight outward in front of the chicken. If the chicken is hypnotized in this manner, it will continue to stare at the line, remaining immobile for as long as 30 minutes. Other methods of inducing this state are also known. Ethologists refer to this state as 'tonic immobility' i.e. a natural state of semi-paralysis that some animals enter when presented with a threat, which is probably a defensive mechanism intended to feign death, albeit rather poorly.
The first known written reference for this method came in 1646, in Mirabele Experimentum de Imaginatione Gallinae by Athanasius Kircher in Rome.
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- "Chicken Hypnotism" | 2023-11-30 | 54 Upvotes 35 Comments
- "Chicken Hypnotism" | 2020-12-21 | 11 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Chicken Hypnotism" | 2019-08-25 | 153 Upvotes 47 Comments
๐ Useful Idiots
In political jargon, a useful idiot is a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically used by the cause's leaders. The term was originally used during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation. The term has often been attributed to Vladimir Lenin, but this attribution is unsubstantiated.
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- "Useful Idiot" | 2023-11-29 | 11 Upvotes 9 Comments
๐ Erwin Schrรถdinger โ Sexual Abuse
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrรถdinger (UK: , US: ; German: [หษษฬฏvษชn หสสรธหdษชลษ]; 12 August 1887 โ 4 January 1961), sometimes written as Schroedinger or Schrodinger, was a Nobel Prizeโwinning Austrian and naturalized Irish physicist who developed fundamental results in quantum theory. In particular, he is recognized for postulating the Schrรถdinger equation, an equation that provides a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time. He coined the term "quantum entanglement", and was the earliest to discuss it, doing so in 1932.
In addition, he wrote many works on various aspects of physics: statistical mechanics and thermodynamics, physics of dielectrics, colour theory, electrodynamics, general relativity, and cosmology, and he made several attempts to construct a unified field theory. In his book What Is Life? Schrรถdinger addressed the problems of genetics, looking at the phenomenon of life from the point of view of physics. He also paid great attention to the philosophical aspects of science, ancient, and oriental philosophical concepts, ethics, and religion. He also wrote on philosophy and theoretical biology. In popular culture, he is best known for his "Schrรถdinger's cat" thought experiment.
Spending most of his life as an academic with positions at various universities, Schrรถdinger, along with Paul Dirac, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 for his work on quantum mechanics, the same year he left Germany due to his opposition to Nazism. In his personal life, he lived with both his wife and his mistress which may have led to problems causing him to leave his position at Oxford. Subsequently, until 1938, he had a position in Graz, Austria, until the Nazi takeover when he fled, finally finding a long-term arrangement in Dublin where he remained until retirement in 1955. He died in Vienna of tuberculosis when he was 73.
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- "Erwin Schrรถdinger โ Sexual Abuse" | 2023-11-28 | 18 Upvotes 6 Comments