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๐ Pravetz Computers
Pravetz (ะัะฐะฒะตั in the original Cyrillic, series 8 and series 16) were Bulgarian computers, manufactured mainly in the town of Pravetz. Some components and software were produced in Stara Zagora, Plovdiv, and other Bulgarian cities.
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- "Pravetz Computers" | 2021-02-11 | 171 Upvotes 50 Comments
๐ List of Generic and Genericized Trademarks
The following three lists of generic and genericized trademarks are:
- marks which were originally legally protected trademarks, but have been genericized and have lost their legal status due to becoming generic terms,
- marks which have been abandoned and are now generic terms
- marks which are still legally protected as trademarks, at least in some jurisdictions
Discussed on
- "List of Generic and Genericized Trademarks" | 2021-02-11 | 12 Upvotes 3 Comments
๐ Cable Bacteria
Cable bacteria are filamentous bacteria that conduct electricity across distances over 1ย cm in sediment and groundwater aquifers. Cable bacteria allow for long distance electron transport, which connects electron donors to electron acceptors, connecting previously separated oxidation and reduction reactions. Cable bacteria couple the reduction of oxygen or nitrate at the sediment's surface to the oxidation of sulfide in the deeper, anoxic, sediment layers.
Discussed on
- "Cable Bacteria" | 2021-02-10 | 22 Upvotes 2 Comments
๐ Crash-Only Software
Crash-only software refers to computer programs that handle failures by simply restarting, without attempting any sophisticated recovery. Correctly written components of crash-only software can microreboot to a known-good state without the help of a user. Since failure-handling and normal startup use the same methods, this can increase the chance that bugs in failure-handling code will be noticed, except when there are leftover artifacts, such as data corruption from a severe failure, that don't occur during normal startup.
Crash-only software also has benefits for end-users. All too often, applications do not save their data and settings while running, only at the end of their use. For example, word processors usually save settings when they are closed. A crash-only application is designed to save all changed user settings soon after they are changed, so that the persistent state matches that of the running machine. No matter how an application terminates (be it a clean close or the sudden failure of a laptop battery), the state will persist.
Discussed on
- "Crash-Only Software" | 2021-02-08 | 10 Upvotes 4 Comments
๐ Society for Preventing Parents from Naming Their Children Jennifer
The Society for Preventing Parents from Naming Their Children Jennifer (SPPNTCJ) was a popular and sometimes controversial website that contributed to early web culture, online from 1996 to 2000. The SPPNTCJ home page was created and updated by Jennifer Farwell, one of the three founding members of the SPPNTCJ. Other founding members were Jennifer Rich and Jennifer Ang.
The SPPNTCJ began as an inside joke on an email discussion list that both Farwell and Rich subscribed to, which included five or more Jennifers who actively posted at that time. One of the Jennifers tossed out the comment that there should be "a society for preventing parents from naming their children Jennifer." The idea took off, and Farwell created the SPPNTCJ's website. It welcomed more than 2 million visitors while online.
During its run, the SPPNTCJ was noted by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, Thunder Bay Television News, 580 CKPR radio program Tech Talk, California State University, Chico, SignsOnSanDiego.com, WebMD and more. It received several Internet "cool site" acknowledgments, from Cool Central, Seven Wonders, Twoeys, Fallen Thinkers, and Secret Einstein.
Discussed on
- "Society for Preventing Parents from Naming Their Children Jennifer" | 2021-02-08 | 19 Upvotes 7 Comments
๐ Long Hundred
The long hundred, also known as the great hundred or twelfty, is the number that was referred to as "hundred" in Germanic languages prior to the 15th century, which is now known as 120, one hundred and twenty, or six score. The number was simply described as hundred and translated into Latin in Germanic-speaking countries as centum (Roman numeral C), but the qualifier "long" is now added because present English uses the word "hundred" exclusively to refer to the number of five score (100) instead.
The long hundred was 120 but the long thousand was reckoned decimally as 10 long hundreds (1200).
Discussed on
- "Long Hundred" | 2021-02-08 | 97 Upvotes 106 Comments
๐ The fire that has been burning for 56 years
The Centralia mine fire is a coal-seam fire that has been burning underneath the borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, United States, since at least May 27, 1962. Its original cause is still a matter of debate. It is burning in underground coal mines at depths of up to 300 feet (90ย m) over an 8-mile (13ย km) stretch of 3,700 acres (15ย km2). At its current rate, it could continue to burn for over 250 years. It has caused most of the town to be abandoned: the population dwindled from around 1,500 at the time the fire started to 7 in 2013, and most of the buildings have been levelled.
Discussed on
- "Pennsylvania town coal mine has been on fire since 1962" | 2021-02-07 | 60 Upvotes 35 Comments
- "The fire that has been burning for 56 years" | 2018-12-13 | 12 Upvotes 5 Comments
๐ Inventors killed by their own inventions
This is a list of inventors whose deaths were in some manner caused by or related to a product, process, procedure, or other innovation that they invented or designed.
Discussed on
- "List of Inventors Killed by Their Own Inventions" | 2021-02-07 | 73 Upvotes 22 Comments
- "Inventors killed by their own inventions" | 2019-06-06 | 273 Upvotes 149 Comments
- "List of inventors killed by their own inventions" | 2019-06-05 | 16 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Inventors killed by their own inventions" | 2016-12-19 | 67 Upvotes 27 Comments
- "List of Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions" | 2009-09-02 | 109 Upvotes 59 Comments
๐ Clerihew
A clerihew () is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem's subject, usually a famous person put in an absurd light, or revealing something unknown or spurious about them. The rhyme scheme is AABB, and the rhymes are often forced. The line length and metre are irregular. Bentley invented the clerihew in school and then popularized it in books. One of his best known is this (1905):
Discussed on
- "Clerihew" | 2021-02-07 | 69 Upvotes 34 Comments
๐ List of Helicopter Prison Escapes
A helicopter prison escape is made when an inmate escapes from a prison by means of a helicopter. This list includes prisoner escapes where a helicopter was used in an attempt to free prisoners from a place of internment, a prison or correctional facility.
One of the earliest instances of using a helicopter to escape a prison was the escape of Joel David Kaplan, nicknamed "Man Fan", on August 19, 1971 from the Santa Martha Acatitla in Mexico. Kaplan was a New York businessman who not only escaped the prison but eventually got out of Mexico and went on to write a book about his experience, The 10-Second Jailbreak.
France has had more recorded helicopter escape attempts than any other country, with at least 11. One of the most notable French jail breaks occurred in 1986, when the wife of bank robber Michel Vaujour studied for months to learn how to fly a helicopter. Using her newly acquired skills, she rented a white helicopter and flew low over Paris to pluck her husband off the roof of his fortress prison. Vaujour was later seriously wounded in a shootout with police, and his pilot wife was arrested.
The record for most helicopter escapes goes to convicted murderer Pascal Payet, who has used helicopters to escape from prisons in 2001, 2003, and most recently 2007.
Another multiple helicopter escapee is Vasilis Paleokostas who on February 22, 2009 escaped for the second time from the same prison. Because of this, many prisons have taken applicable precautions, such as nets or cables strung over open prison courtyards.
Discussed on
- "List of Helicopter Prison Escapes" | 2021-02-06 | 17 Upvotes 4 Comments