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🔗 Hawaiian pizza
Hawaiian pizza is a pizza topped with tomato sauce, cheese, pineapple, and ham.
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- "Hawaiian pizza" | 2018-08-18 | 37 Upvotes 23 Comments
🔗 Timeline of audio formats
An audio format is a medium for sound recording and reproduction. The term is applied to both the physical recording media and the recording formats of the audio content—in computer science it is often limited to the audio file format, but its wider use usually refers to the physical method used to store the data.
Music is recorded and distributed using a variety of audio formats, some of which store additional information.
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- "Timeline of audio formats" | 2018-08-17 | 45 Upvotes 17 Comments
🔗 M4 (computer language)
m4 is a general-purpose macro processor included in all UNIX-like operating systems, and is a component of the POSIX standard.
The language was designed by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie for the original versions of UNIX. It is an extension of an earlier macro processor m3, written by Ritchie for an unknown AP-3 minicomputer.
The macro preprocessor operates as a text-replacement tool. It is employed to re-use text templates, typically in computer programming applications, but also in text editing and text-processing applications. Most users require m4 as a dependency of GNU autoconf.
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- "M4 (computer language)" | 2018-08-17 | 70 Upvotes 26 Comments
🔗 Video game crash of 1983
The video game crash of 1983 (known as the Atari shock in Japan) was a large-scale recession in the video game industry that occurred from 1983 to 1985, primarily in the United States. The crash was attributed to several factors, including market saturation in the number of game consoles and available games, and waning interest in console games in favor of personal computers. Revenues peaked at around $3.2 billion in 1983, then fell to around $100 million by 1985 (a drop of almost 97 percent). The crash abruptly ended what is retrospectively considered the second generation of console video gaming in North America.
Lasting about two years, the crash shook the then-booming industry, and led to the bankruptcy of several companies producing home computers and video game consoles in the region. Analysts of the time expressed doubts about the long-term viability of video game consoles and software.
The North American video game console industry eventually recovered a few years later, mostly due to the widespread success of the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) in 1985; Nintendo designed the NES as the Western branding for its Famicom console originally released in 1983 in order to avoid the missteps which caused the 1983 crash and avoid the stigma which video games had at that time.
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- "Video game crash of 1983" | 2018-08-16 | 84 Upvotes 85 Comments
🔗 Curry–Howard correspondence
In programming language theory and proof theory, the Curry–Howard correspondence (also known as the Curry–Howard isomorphism or equivalence, or the proofs-as-programs and propositions- or formulae-as-types interpretation) is the direct relationship between computer programs and mathematical proofs.
It is a generalization of a syntactic analogy between systems of formal logic and computational calculi that was first discovered by the American mathematician Haskell Curry and logician William Alvin Howard. It is the link between logic and computation that is usually attributed to Curry and Howard, although the idea is related to the operational interpretation of intuitionistic logic given in various formulations by L. E. J. Brouwer, Arend Heyting and Andrey Kolmogorov (see Brouwer–Heyting–Kolmogorov interpretation) and Stephen Kleene (see Realizability). The relationship has been extended to include category theory as the three-way Curry–Howard–Lambek correspondence.
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- "Curry–Howard correspondence" | 2018-08-13 | 55 Upvotes 22 Comments
🔗 Absolute Hot
Absolute hot is a theoretical upper limit to the thermodynamic temperature scale, conceived as an opposite to absolute zero.
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- "Absolute Hot" | 2018-08-13 | 155 Upvotes 71 Comments
🔗 Odeillo solar furnace
The Odeillo solar furnace is the world's largest solar furnace. It is situated in Font-Romeu-Odeillo-Via, in the department of Pyrénées-Orientales, in south of France. It is 54 metres (177 ft) high and 48 metres (157 ft) wide, and includes 63 heliostats. It was built between 1962 and 1968, and started operating in 1969, and has a power of one megawatt.
It serves as a science research site studying materials at very high temperatures.
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- "Odeillo solar furnace" | 2018-08-12 | 38 Upvotes 14 Comments
🔗 Tide-Predicting Machine No. 2
Tide-Predicting Machine No. 2, also known as Old Brass Brains, was a special-purpose mechanical computer that uses gears, pulleys, chains, and other mechanical components to compute the height and time of high and low tides for specific locations. The machine can perform tide calculations much faster than a person could do with pencil and paper. The U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey put the machine into operation in 1910. It was used until 1965, when it was replaced by an electronic computer.
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- "Tide-Predicting Machine No. 2" | 2018-08-12 | 82 Upvotes 13 Comments
🔗 The Bielefeld Conspiracy
The Bielefeld conspiracy (German: Bielefeldverschwörung or Bielefeld-Verschwörung, pronounced [ˈbiːləfɛltfɛɐ̯ˌʃvøːʁʊŋ]) is a satire of conspiracy theories that claims that the city of Bielefeld, Germany, does not exist, but is an illusion propagated by various forces. First posted on the German Usenet in 1994, the conspiracy has since been mentioned in the city's marketing, and referenced by Chancellor Angela Merkel.
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- "The Bielefeld Conspiracy" | 2018-08-12 | 22 Upvotes 13 Comments
🔗 Alcubierre drive
The Alcubierre drive, Alcubierre warp drive, or Alcubierre metric (referring to metric tensor) is a speculative idea based on a solution of Einstein's field equations in general relativity as proposed by Mexican theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, by which a spacecraft could achieve apparent faster-than-light travel if a configurable energy-density field lower than that of vacuum (that is, negative mass) could be created.
Rather than exceeding the speed of light within a local reference frame, a spacecraft would traverse distances by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it, resulting in effective faster-than-light travel. Objects cannot accelerate to the speed of light within normal spacetime; instead, the Alcubierre drive shifts space around an object so that the object would arrive at its destination faster than light would in normal space without breaking any physical laws.
Although the metric proposed by Alcubierre is consistent with the Einstein field equations, construction of such a drive is not necessarily possible. The proposed mechanism of the Alcubierre drive implies a negative energy density and therefore requires exotic matter. So if exotic matter with the correct properties cannot exist, then the drive could not be constructed. At the close of his original article, however, Alcubierre argued (following an argument developed by physicists analyzing traversable wormholes) that the Casimir vacuum between parallel plates could fulfill the negative-energy requirement for the Alcubierre drive.
Another possible issue is that, although the Alcubierre metric is consistent with Einstein's equations, general relativity does not incorporate quantum mechanics. Some physicists have presented arguments to suggest that a theory of quantum gravity (which would incorporate both theories) would eliminate those solutions in general relativity that allow for backwards time travel (see the chronology protection conjecture) and thus make the Alcubierre drive invalid.
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- "Alcubierre drive" | 2018-08-12 | 166 Upvotes 125 Comments