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π Wife Acceptance Factor
Wife acceptance factor, wife approval factor, or wife appeal factor (WAF) is an assessment of design elements that either increase or diminish the likelihood a wife will approve the purchase of expensive consumer electronics products such as high-fidelity loudspeakers, home theater systems and personal computers. Stylish, compact forms and appealing colors are commonly considered to have a high WAF. The term is a tongue-in-cheek play on electronics jargon such as "form factor" and "power factor" and derives from the idea that men are predisposed to appreciate gadgetry and performance criteria whereas women must be wooed by visual and aesthetic factors.
Discussed on
- "Wife Acceptance Factor" | 2026-04-20 | 23 Upvotes 10 Comments
- "Wife Acceptance Factor" | 2012-11-16 | 14 Upvotes 4 Comments
π List of people imprisoned for editing Wikipedia
There are eight known cases of Wikipedia editors being imprisoned for contributing to Wikipedia. In the case of Bassel Khartabil, he was subsequently executed.
π Business Plot
The Business Plot was a political conspiracy in 1933 in the United States. Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler revealed that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization with Butler as its leader and use it in a coup d'Γ©tat to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1934, Butler testified before the United States House of Representatives Special Committee on Un-American Activities (the "McCormackβDickstein Committee") on these revelations. No one was prosecuted.
At the time of the incidents, news media dismissed the plot, with a New York Times editorial characterizing it as a "gigantic hoax". While historians have not accepted the notion of a plot, they agree that Butler described one.
Discussed on
- "The Business Plot of 1933" | 2026-04-18 | 16 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Business Plot" | 2020-01-10 | 24 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Human Accelerated Region 1
In molecular biology, Human Accelerated Region 1 (Highly Accelerated Region 1, HAR1) is a segment of the human genome found on the long arm of chromosome 20. It is a human accelerated region. It is located within a pair of overlapping long non-coding RNA genes, HAR1A (HAR1F) and HAR1B (HAR1R).
Discussed on
- "Human Accelerated Region 1" | 2026-04-17 | 125 Upvotes 58 Comments
π Simon Oxley, famous tech logo designer, has died
Simon Oxley (1969 β April 2026) was a British freelance graphic designer and illustrator who was most famous for designing the original bird logo for Twitter, the Octocat logo for GitHub, the puffer fish for Bitly, and Sammy the Shark for DigitalOcean. Operating predominantly under the studio pseudonym Idokungfoo, Oxley became a pioneer in the microstock economy and played a seminal role in establishing the friendly, mascot-driven aesthetic of the Web 2.0 era.
Discussed on
- "Simon Oxley, famous tech logo designer, has died" | 2026-04-15 | 25 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Michael Rabin Has Died
Michael Oser Rabin (Hebrew: ΧΦ΄ΧΧΦΈΧΦ΅Χ Χ’ΧΧΧ¨ Χ¨Φ·ΧΦ΄ΦΌΧΧ; September 1, 1931 β April 14, 2026) was an Israeli mathematician and computer scientist who was co-recipient, with Dana Scott, of the 1976 ACM Turing Award for their work on computational complexity.
Discussed on
- "Michael Rabin Has Died" | 2026-04-15 | 414 Upvotes 90 Comments
π Game Oriented Assembly Lisp
Game Oriented Assembly Lisp (GOAL) is a programming language, a dialect of the language Lisp, made for video games developed by Andy Gavin and the Jak and Daxter team at the company Naughty Dog.
It was written using Allegro Common Lisp and used in the development of the entire Jak and Daxter series of games.
Discussed on
- "Game Oriented Assembly Lisp" | 2011-01-11 | 47 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Shape Grammar
Shape grammars in computation are a specific class of production systems that generate geometric shapes. Typically, shapes are 2- or 3-dimensional, thus shape grammars are a way to study 2- and 3-dimensional languages. Shape grammars were first introduced in a seminal article by George Stiny and James Gips in 1971. The mathematical and algorithmic foundations of shape grammars (in particular, for linear elements in two-dimensions) were developed in "Pictorial and Formal Aspects of Shapes and Shape Grammars" (BirkhΓ€user Basel, 1975) by George Stiny. Applications of shape grammars were first considered in "Shape Grammars and their Uses" (BirkhΓ€user Basel, 1975) by James Gips. These publications also contain two independent, though equivalent, constructions showing that shape grammars can simulate Turing machines.
Discussed on
- "Shape Grammar" | 2026-04-13 | 16 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Galactic Algorithm
A galactic algorithm is one that runs faster than any other algorithm for problems that are sufficiently large, but where "sufficiently large" is so big that the algorithm is never used in practice. Galactic algorithms were so named by Richard Lipton and Ken Regan, as they will never be used on any of the merely terrestrial data sets we find here on Earth.
An example of a galactic algorithm is the fastest known way to multiply two numbers, which is based on a 1729-dimensional Fourier transform. This means it will not reach its stated efficiency until the numbers have at least 2172912 bits (at least 101038 digits), which is vastly larger than the number of atoms in the known universe. So this algorithm is never used in practice.
Despite the fact that they will never be used, galactic algorithms may still contribute to computer science:
- An algorithm, even if impractical, may show new techniques that may eventually be used to create practical algorithms.
- Computer sizes may catch up to the crossover point, so that a previously impractical algorithm becomes practical.
- An impractical algorithm can still demonstrate that conjectured bounds can be achieved, or alternatively show that conjectured bounds are wrong. As Lipton says "This alone could be important and often is a great reason for finding such algorithms. For example, if tomorrow there were a discovery that showed there is a factoring algorithm with a huge but provably polynomial time bound, that would change our beliefs about factoring. The algorithm might never be used, but would certainly shape the future research into factoring." Similarly, a algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem, although unusable in practice, would settle the P versus NP problem, the most important open problem in computer science and one of the Millennium Prize Problems.
Discussed on
- "Galactic Algorithm" | 2023-12-02 | 123 Upvotes 25 Comments
- "Galactic Algorithm" | 2019-10-05 | 382 Upvotes 71 Comments
π Costasiella kuroshimae β Solar Powered animals, that do indirect photosynthesis
Costasiella kuroshimae (also known as a leaf slug, sea sheep, or leaf sheep) is a species of sacoglossan sea slug. Costasiella kuroshimae are shell-less marine opisthobranch gastropod mollusks in the family Costasiellidae. Despite being animals, they perform photosynthesis, via kleptoplasty.
Discussed on
- "Costasiella kuroshimae β Solar Powered animals, that do indirect photosynthesis" | 2026-04-12 | 153 Upvotes 56 Comments