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๐ The Volfefe Index
The Volfefe Index is a stock market index of volatility in market sentiment for US Treasury bonds caused by tweets by President Donald Trump.
Bloomberg News observed Volfefe was created due to the statistical significance of Trump tweets on bond prices. ABC News Online posited Volfefe could help analyze interest rate risk in the face of "unpredictable" activity on social media by Trump.
Discussed on
- "The Volfefe Index" | 2019-09-11 | 63 Upvotes 22 Comments
๐ Pourquoi-Pas (1908)
Pourquoi Pas? IV (English: Why Not? IV) was the fourth ship built for Jean-Baptiste Charcot, which completed the second Charcot expedition of the Antarctic regions from 1908 to 1910. Charcot died aboard when the ship was wrecked on 16 September 1936, off the coast of Iceland. Of the forty men on board, only one survived.
Discussed on
- "Pourquoi-Pas (1908)" | 2019-09-08 | 38 Upvotes 10 Comments
๐ Smoke point of cooking oils
Discussed on
- "Smoke Point of Cooking Oils" | 2023-08-13 | 10 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Smoke point of cooking oils" | 2019-09-08 | 125 Upvotes 167 Comments
๐ List of countries by mobile phones in use
This list ranks the countries of the world by the number of mobile phone numbers in use. Note that it is not the number of phone devices that are being given here, but the number of phone numbers in a country. In some countries, one person might have two mobile phones. Also, some mobile phone numbers may be used by machines as a modem (examples: intrusion detection systems, home automation, leak detection).
Discussed on
- "List of countries by mobile phones in use" | 2019-09-05 | 54 Upvotes 27 Comments
๐ Wanggongchang Explosion
The Wanggongchang Explosion (Chinese: ็ๆญๅป ๅคง็็ธ), also known as the Great Tianqi Explosion (ๅคฉๅๅคง็็ธ), Wanggongchang Calamity (็ๆญๅป ไน่ฎ) or Beijing Explosive Incident in Late Ming (ๆๆๅไบฌ็็ธไบไปถ), was an unexplained catastrophic explosion that occurred on May 30 of the Chinese calendar in 1626 AD during the late reign of Tianqi Emperor, at the heavily populated Ming China capital Beijing, and had reportedly killed around 20,000 people. The nature of the explosion is still unclear to this day, as it is estimated to have released energy equivalent to about 10-20 kiloton of TNT, similar to that of the Hiroshima bombing.
Discussed on
- "Wanggongchang Explosion" | 2020-01-04 | 204 Upvotes 41 Comments
๐ Esterel โ Synchronous programming language for complex, reactive systems
Esterel is a synchronous programming language for the development of complex reactive systems. The imperative programming style of Esterel allows the simple expression of parallelism and preemption. As a consequence, it is well suited for control-dominated model designs.
The development of the language started in the early 1980s, and was mainly carried out by a team of Ecole des Mines de Paris and INRIA led by Gรฉrard Berry in France. Current compilers take Esterel programs and generate C code or hardware (RTL) implementations (VHDL or Verilog).
The language is still under development, with several compilers out. The commercial version of Esterel is the development environment Esterel Studio. The company that commercialize it (Synfora) initiated a normalization process with the IEEE in April 2007 however the working group (P1778) dissolved March 2011. The Esterel v7 Reference Manual Version v7 30 โ initial IEEE standardization proposal is publicly available.
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- "Esterel โ Synchronous programming language for complex, reactive systems" | 2019-12-27 | 56 Upvotes 5 Comments
๐ Porkchop plot
A porkchop plot (also pork-chop plot) is a chart that shows contours of equal characteristic energy (C3) against combinations of launch date and arrival date for a particular interplanetary flight.
By examining the results of the porkchop plot, engineers can determine when launch opportunities exist (a launch window) that is compatible with the capabilities of a particular spacecraft. A given contour, called a porkchop curve, represents constant C3, and the center of the porkchop the optimal minimum C3. The orbital elements of the solution, where the fixed values are the departure date, the arrival date, and the length of the flight, were first solved mathematically in 1761 by Johann Heinrich Lambert, and the equation is generally known as Lambert's problem (or theorem).
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- "Porkchop plot" | 2019-12-27 | 101 Upvotes 13 Comments
๐ ISO week date
The ISO week date system is effectively a leap week calendar system that is part of the ISO 8601 date and time standard issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) since 1988 (last revised in 2004) and, before that, it was defined in ISO (R) 2015 since 1971. It is used (mainly) in government and business for fiscal years, as well as in timekeeping. This was previously known as "Industrial date coding". The system specifies a week year atop the Gregorian calendar by defining a notation for ordinal weeks of the year.
The Gregorian leap cycle, which has 97 leap days spread across 400 years, contains a whole number of weeks (20871). In every cycle there are 71 years with an additional 53rd week (corresponding to the Gregorian years that contain 53 Thursdays). An average year is exactly 52.1775 weeks long; months (โ1โ12 year) average at exactly 4.348125 weeks.
An ISO week-numbering year (also called ISO year informally) has 52 or 53 full weeks. That is 364 or 371 days instead of the usual 365 or 366 days. The extra week is sometimes referred to as a leap week, although ISO 8601 does not use this term.
Weeks start with Monday. Each week's year is the Gregorian year in which the Thursday falls. The first week of the year, hence, always contains 4 January. ISO week year numbering therefore slightly deviates from the Gregorian for some days close to 1 January.
A precise date is specified by the ISO week-numbering year in the format YYYY, a week number in the format ww prefixed by the letter 'W', and the weekday number, a digit d from 1 through 7, beginning with Monday and ending with Sunday. For example, the Gregorian date Monday 23 December 2019 corresponds to Monday in the 52nd week of 2019, and is written 2019-W52-1 (in extended form) or 2019W521 (in compact form). The ISO year is slightly offset to the Gregorian year; for example, Monday 30 December 2019 in the Gregorian calendar is the first day of week 1 of 2020 in the ISO calendar, and is written as 2020-W01-1 or 2020W011.
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- "ISO week date" | 2019-12-26 | 141 Upvotes 84 Comments
๐ The Amiga Smart File System
The Smart File System (SFS) is a journaling filesystem used on Amiga computers and AmigaOS-derived operating systems (though some support also exists for IBM PC compatibles). It is designed for performance, scalability and integrity, offering improvements over standard Amiga filesystems as well as some special or unique features.
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- "The Amiga Smart File System" | 2019-09-01 | 129 Upvotes 32 Comments
๐ Alcohol Belts of Europe
The alcohol belts of Europe divide Europe by their traditional alcoholic beverages: beer, wine, or spirits. They do not necessarily correspond with current drinking habits, as beer has become the most popular alcoholic drink world-wide. The definitions of these belts are not completely objective.
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- "Alcohol Belts of Europe" | 2019-08-31 | 166 Upvotes 130 Comments