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🔗 Curse of knowledge
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand. This bias is also called by some authors the curse of expertise, although that term is also used to refer to various other phenomena.
For example, in a classroom setting, teachers have difficulty teaching novices because they cannot put themselves in the position of the student. A brilliant professor might no longer remember the difficulties that a young student encounters when learning a new subject. This curse of knowledge also explains the danger behind thinking about student learning based on what appears best to faculty members, as opposed to what has been verified with students.
Discussed on
- "Curse of knowledge" | 2017-04-23 | 92 Upvotes 30 Comments
- "Curse of knowledge" | 2012-03-26 | 74 Upvotes 8 Comments
🔗 Tree hacker
Axel Erlandson (December 15, 1884 – April 28, 1964) was a Swedish American farmer who shaped trees as a hobby, and opened a horticultural attraction in 1947 advertised as "See the World's Strangest Trees Here," and named "The Tree Circus."
The trees appeared in the column of Robert Ripley's Believe It or Not! twelve times. Erlandson sold his attraction shortly before his death. The trees were moved to Gilroy Gardens in 1985.
Discussed on
- "Tree hacker" | 2011-09-27 | 12 Upvotes 1 Comments
🔗 List of company name etymologies
This is a list of company names with their name origins explained. Some of the origins are disputed.
Discussed on
- "List of company name etymologies" | 2011-09-27 | 66 Upvotes 12 Comments
🔗 Meta-jokes
Meta-joke refers to several somewhat different, but related categories: joke templates, self-referential jokes, and jokes about jokes (also known as meta-humor).
Discussed on
- "Meta-jokes" | 2011-09-27 | 63 Upvotes 22 Comments
🔗 Our world is turning into the one depicted in Ray Bradbury's "The Murderer"
"The Murderer" (1953) is a short story by Ray Bradbury, published in his collection The Golden Apples of the Sun.
Discussed on
- "Our world is turning into the one depicted in Ray Bradbury's "The Murderer"" | 2011-09-26 | 10 Upvotes 2 Comments
🔗 P vs NP on simple english wikipedia - feedback, please
Discussed on
- "P vs NP on simple english wikipedia - feedback, please" | 2011-09-15 | 93 Upvotes 59 Comments
🔗 Crypt of Civilization
The Crypt of Civilization is a sealed airtight chamber built between 1937 and 1940 at Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, Georgia, in Metro Atlanta. The 2,000-cubic-foot (57Â m3) room contains numerous artifacts and documents, and is designed for opening in the year 8113 AD. During the 50th anniversary year of its sealing, the Guinness Book of World Records cited the crypt as the "first successful attempt to bury a record of this culture for any future inhabitants or visitors to the planet Earth."
Discussed on
- "Crypt of Civilization " | 2011-09-04 | 73 Upvotes 31 Comments
🔗 FRACTRAN
FRACTRAN is a Turing-complete esoteric programming language invented by the mathematician John Conway. A FRACTRAN program is an ordered list of positive fractions together with an initial positive integer input n. The program is run by updating the integer n as follows:
- for the first fraction f in the list for which nf is an integer, replace n by nf
- repeat this rule until no fraction in the list produces an integer when multiplied by n, then halt.
Conway 1987 gives the following formula for primes in FRACTRAN:
Starting with n=2, this FRACTRAN program generates the following sequence of integers:
- 2, 15, 825, 725, 1925, 2275, 425, 390, 330, 290, 770, ... (sequence A007542 in the OEIS)
After 2, this sequence contains the following powers of 2:
- (sequence A034785 in the OEIS)
which are the prime powers of 2.
Discussed on
- "FRACTRAN" | 2017-04-26 | 82 Upvotes 8 Comments
🔗 Scenery nerds and systems nerds: MIT's Model Railroad Club
The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) is a student organization at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Historically it has been a wellspring of hacker culture and the oldest such hacking group in North America. Formed in 1946, its HO scale layout specializes in automated operation of model trains.
Discussed on
- "Scenery nerds and systems nerds: MIT's Model Railroad Club" | 2011-09-02 | 26 Upvotes 6 Comments
🔗 Tennis racket theorem – Wikipedia
The tennis racket theorem or intermediate axis theorem is a result in classical mechanics describing the movement of a rigid body with three distinct principal moments of inertia. It is also dubbed the Dzhanibekov effect, after Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Dzhanibekov who noticed one of the theorem's logical consequences while in space in 1985 although the effect was already known for at least 150 years before that.
The theorem describes the following effect: rotation of an object around its first and third principal axes is stable, while rotation around its second principal axis (or intermediate axis) is not.
This can be demonstrated with the following experiment: hold a tennis racket at its handle, with its face being horizontal, and try to throw it in the air so that it will perform a full rotation around the horizontal axis perpendicular to the handle, and try to catch the handle. In almost all cases, during that rotation the face will also have completed a half rotation, so that the other face is now up. By contrast, it is easy to throw the racket so that it will rotate around the handle axis (the third principal axis) without accompanying half-rotation around another axis; it is also possible to make it rotate around the vertical axis perpendicular to the handle (the first principal axis) without any accompanying half-rotation.
The experiment can be performed with any object that has three different moments of inertia, for instance with a book, remote control or smartphone. The effect occurs whenever the axis of rotation differs only slightly from the object's second principal axis; air resistance or gravity are not necessary.
Discussed on
- "Tennis racket theorem – Wikipedia" | 2017-04-15 | 14 Upvotes 4 Comments