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๐ Wireworld
Wireworld is a cellular automaton first proposed by Brian Silverman in 1987, as part of his program Phantom Fish Tank. It subsequently became more widely known as a result of an article in the "Computer Recreations" column of Scientific American. Wireworld is particularly suited to simulating transistors, and Wireworld is Turing-complete.
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- "Wireworld" | 2016-07-07 | 290 Upvotes 26 Comments
๐ Closed-eye hallucination
Closed-eye hallucinations and closed-eye visualizations (CEV) are a distinct class of hallucination. These types of hallucinations generally only occur when one's eyes are closed or when one is in a darkened room. They can be a form of phosphene. Some people report closed-eye hallucinations under the influence of psychedelics. These are reportedly of a different nature than the "open-eye" hallucinations of the same compounds. Similar hallucinations that occur due to loss of vision are called visual release hallucinations.
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- "Closed-eye hallucination" | 2016-07-04 | 54 Upvotes 18 Comments
๐ Mise en abyme
In Western art history, Mise en abyme (French pronunciation:ย โ[miz ษฬnโฟabim]; also mise en abรฎme) is a formal technique of placing a copy of an image within itself, often in a way that suggests an infinitely recurring sequence. In film theory and literary theory, it refers to the technique of inserting a story within a story. The term is derived from heraldry and literally means "placed into abyss". It was first appropriated for modern criticism by the French author Andrรฉ Gide.
A common sense of the phrase is the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, seeing as a result an infinite reproduction of one's image. Another is the Droste effect, in which a picture appears within itself, in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear. That is named after the 1904 Droste cocoa package, which depicts a woman holding a tray bearing a Droste cocoa package, which bears a smaller version of her image.
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- "Mise en abyme" | 2016-06-30 | 87 Upvotes 59 Comments
๐ NorwayโEuropean Union relations
Norway is not a member state of the European Union (EU). However, it is associated with the Union through its membership in agreements in the European Economic Area (EEA) established in 1994, and by virtue of being a founding member of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) which was founded in 1960, one of the two historically dominant western European trade blocs. Norway had considered joining the European Community and the European Union twice, but opted to decline following referendums in 1972 and 1994.
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- "NorwayโEuropean Union relations" | 2016-06-25 | 50 Upvotes 66 Comments
๐ GOES 3 satellite
GOES-3, known as GOES-C before becoming operational, is an American geostationary weather and communications satellite. It was originally built for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as part of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite system, and was launched in June 1978. It is positioned in geostationary orbit, from where it was initially used for weather forecasting in the United States. Since ceasing to function as a weather satellite in 1989, it has been used as a communications satellite, and has spent over thirty-eight years in operation. GOES-3 was decommissioned 29 June 2016 at the CSTARS facility in Miami, Florida.
GOES-3 was built by Ford Aerospace, and is based on the satellite bus developed for the SMS programme. At launch it had a mass of 627 kilograms (1,382ย lb).
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- "GOES 3 satellite" | 2016-06-22 | 18 Upvotes 11 Comments
๐ McCollough effect
The McCollough effect is a phenomenon of human visual perception in which colorless gratings appear colored contingent on the orientation of the gratings. It is an aftereffect requiring a period of induction to produce it. For example, if someone alternately looks at a red horizontal grating and a green vertical grating for a few minutes, a black-and-white horizontal grating will then look greenish and a black-and-white vertical grating will then look pinkish. The effect is remarkable because, where time-elapse testing is employed, it has been reported to last up to 2.8 months.
The effect was discovered by American psychologist Celeste McCollough in 1965.
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- "McCollough effect" | 2016-06-16 | 32 Upvotes 9 Comments
๐ Works Records System โ A multi-user online programmable spreadsheet in 1974
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- "Works Records System โ A multi-user online programmable spreadsheet in 1974" | 2016-06-10 | 75 Upvotes 20 Comments
๐ Spiegelman's Monster
Spiegelman's Monster is the name given to an RNA chain of only 218 nucleotides that is able to be reproduced by the RNA replication enzyme RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, also called RNA replicase. It is named after its creator, Sol Spiegelman, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who first described it in 1965.
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- "Spiegelman's Monster" | 2016-06-06 | 125 Upvotes 34 Comments
๐ Pauli Effect
The Pauli effect or Pauli's Device Corollary is the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people. The term was coined after mysterious anecdotal stories involving Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, describing numerous instances in which demonstrations involving equipment suffered technical problems only when he was present.
The Pauli effect is not related with the Pauli exclusion principle, which is a bona fide physical phenomenon named after Pauli. However the Pauli effect was humorously tagged as a second Pauli exclusion principle, according to which a functioning device and Wolfgang Pauli may not occupy the same room. Pauli himself was convinced that the effect named after him was real. Pauli corresponded with Hans Bender and Carl Jung and saw the effect as an example of the concept of synchronicity.
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- "Pauli Effect" | 2016-05-29 | 109 Upvotes 33 Comments
๐ MD6 Message-Digest Algorithm
The MD6 Message-Digest Algorithm is a cryptographic hash function. It uses a Merkle tree-like structure to allow for immense parallel computation of hashes for very long inputs. Authors claim a performance of 28 cycles per byte for MD6-256 on an Intel Core 2 Duo and provable resistance against differential cryptanalysis. The source code of the reference implementation was released under MIT license.
Speeds in excess of 1 GB/s have been reported to be possible for long messages on 16-core CPU architecture.
In December 2008, Douglas Held of Fortify Software discovered a buffer overflow in the original MD6 hash algorithm's reference implementation. This error was later made public by Ron Rivest on 19 February 2009, with a release of a corrected reference implementation in advance of the Fortify Report.
MD6 was submitted to the NIST SHA-3 competition. However, on July 1, 2009, Rivest posted a comment at NIST that MD6 is not yet ready to be a candidate for SHA-3 because of speed issues, a "gap in the proof that the submitted version of MD6 is resistant to differential attacks", and an inability to supply such a proof for a faster reduced-round version, although Rivest also stated at the MD6 website that it is not withdrawn formally. MD6 did not advance to the second round of the SHA-3 competition. In September 2011, a paper presenting an improved proof that MD6 and faster reduced-round versions are resistant to differential attacks was posted to the MD6 website.
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- "MD6 Message-Digest Algorithm" | 2016-05-29 | 30 Upvotes 3 Comments