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π Hwasong Concentration Camp
Hwasong concentration camp (ChosΕn'gΕl: νμ± μ 16νΈ κ΄λ¦¬μ, also spelled HwasΕng or Hwaseong) is a labor camp in North Korea for political prisoners. The official name is Kwan-li-so (Penal-labor colony) No. 16.
π Abraham Lempel (LZ77) has died
Abraham Lempel (Hebrew: ΧΧΧ¨ΧΧ ΧΧΧ€Χ, 10 February 1936 β 4 February 2023) was an Israeli computer scientist and one of the fathers of the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms.
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- "RIP Abraham Lempel β one of the fathers of the LZ(ZIP) compression algorithms" | 2023-02-06 | 12 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Ulugh Beg Observatory
The Ulugh Beg Observatory is an observatory in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Built in the 1420s by the Timurid astronomer Ulugh Beg. Islamic astronomers who worked at the observatory include Al-Kashi, Ali Qushji, and Ulugh Beg himself. The observatory was destroyed in 1449 and rediscovered in 1908.
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- "Ulugh Beg Observatory" | 2023-02-06 | 80 Upvotes 11 Comments
π Wikipedia on Santos
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- "Wikipedia on Santos" | 2023-02-05 | 13 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Curta: a mechanical calculator
The Curta is a small mechanical calculator developed by Curt Herzstark. The Curta's design is a descendant of Gottfried Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner and Charles Thomas's Arithmometer, accumulating values on cogs, which are added or complemented by a stepped drum mechanism. It has an extremely compact design: a small cylinder that fits in the palm of the hand.
Curtas were considered the best portable calculators available until they were displaced by electronic calculators in the 1970s.
Discussed on
- "Curta" | 2023-02-05 | 66 Upvotes 12 Comments
- "Curta: a mechanical calculator" | 2015-07-17 | 28 Upvotes 6 Comments
- "Curta mechanical calculator" | 2015-01-12 | 38 Upvotes 14 Comments
- "Curta calculator - hand-held, mechanical arithmetic" | 2011-10-02 | 42 Upvotes 16 Comments
- "Curta calculator" | 2010-01-11 | 23 Upvotes 17 Comments
π The Last Man
The Last Man is an apocalyptic, dystopian science fiction novel by Mary Shelley, first published in 1826. The narrative concerns Europe in the late 21st century, ravaged by a mysterious plague pandemic that rapidly sweeps across the entire globe, ultimately resulting in the near-extinction of humanity. It also includes discussion of the British state as a republic, for which Shelley sat in meetings of the House of Commons to gain insight to the governmental system of the Romantic era. The novel includes many fictive allusions to her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned in a shipwreck four years before the book's publication, as well as their close friend Lord Byron, who had died two years previously.
The Last Man is one of the first pieces of dystopian fiction published. It was critically savaged and remained largely obscure at the time of its publication. It was not until the 1960s that the novel resurfaced for the public.
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- "The Last Man" | 2023-02-04 | 64 Upvotes 22 Comments
π Sraffa asks Wittgenstein: βWhat is the logical form of that?β
Piero Sraffa (5 August 1898 β 3 September 1983) was an influential Italian economist who served as lecturer of economics at the University of Cambridge. His book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is taken as founding the neo-Ricardian school of economics.
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- "Sraffa asks Wittgenstein: βWhat is the logical form of that?β" | 2023-02-03 | 13 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Bir Tawil
Bir Tawil (Egyptian Arabic: Ψ¨ΩΨ± Ψ·ΩΩΩ, romanized:Β BΔ«r αΉ¬awΔ«l, lit.β'tall water well', [biΛΙΎ tΛ€ΙΛwiΛl]) is a 2,060Β km2 (795.4Β sqΒ mi) area of land along the border between Egypt and Sudan, which is uninhabited and claimed by neither country. When spoken of in association with the neighbouring Halaib Triangle, it is sometimes referred to as the Bir Tawil Triangle, despite the area's quadrilateral shape; the two "triangles" border at a quadripoint.
Its terra nulliuscode: lat promoted to code: la status results from a discrepancy between the straight political boundary between Egypt and Sudan established in 1899, and the irregular administrative boundary established in 1902. Egypt asserts the political boundary, and Sudan asserts the administrative boundary, with the result that the Hala'ib Triangle is claimed by both and Bir Tawil by neither. In 2014, author Alastair Bonnett described Bir Tawil as the only place on Earth that was habitable but was not claimed by any recognised government.
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- "Bir Tawil" | 2023-02-02 | 40 Upvotes 17 Comments
π Contiki β OS for networked, memory-constrained systems
Contiki is an operating system for networked, memory-constrained systems with a focus on low-power wireless Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Extant uses for Contiki include systems for street lighting, sound monitoring for smart cities, radiation monitoring, and alarms. It is open-source software released under the BSD-3-Clause license.
Contiki was created by Adam Dunkels in 2002 and has been further developed by a worldwide team of developers from Texas Instruments, Atmel, Cisco, ENEA, ETH Zurich, Redwire, RWTH Aachen University, Oxford University, SAP, Sensinode, Swedish Institute of Computer Science, ST Microelectronics, Zolertia, and many others. Contiki gained popularity because of its built in TCP/IP stack and lightweight preemptive scheduling over event-driven kernel which is a very motivating feature for IoT. The name Contiki comes from Thor Heyerdahl's famous Kon-Tiki raft.
Contiki provides multitasking and a built-in Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP stack), yet needs only about 10 kilobytes of random-access memory (RAM) and 30 kilobytes of read-only memory (ROM). A full system, including a graphical user interface, needs about 30 kilobytes of RAM.
A new branch has recently been created, known as Contiki-NG: The OS for Next Generation IoT Devices
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- "Contiki β OS for networked, memory-constrained systems" | 2023-01-30 | 155 Upvotes 28 Comments
π Spaghetti-Tree Hoax
The spaghetti-tree hoax was a three-minute hoax report broadcast on April Fools' Day 1957 by the BBC current-affairs programme Panorama, purportedly showing a family in southern Switzerland harvesting spaghetti from the family "spaghetti tree". At the time spaghetti was relatively unknown in the UK, so many British people were unaware that it is made from wheat flour and water; a number of viewers afterwards contacted the BBC for advice on growing their own spaghetti trees. Decades later, CNN called this broadcast "the biggest hoax that any reputable news establishment ever pulled".
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- "Spaghetti-Tree Hoax" | 2023-01-29 | 174 Upvotes 93 Comments