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π White House Reconstruction
The White House Reconstruction, also known as the Truman Reconstruction, was a comprehensive dismantling and rebuilding of the interior of the White House from 1949 to 1952. A century and a half of wartime destruction and rebuilding, hurried renovations, additions of new services, technologies, the added third floor and inadequate foundations brought the Executive Residence portion of the White House Complex to near-imminent collapse.
In 1948, architectural and engineering investigations deemed it unsafe for occupancy. President Harry S. Truman, his family, and the entire residence staff were relocated across the street to Blair House. For over three years, the White House was gutted, expanded, and rebuilt.
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- "White House Reconstruction" | 2024-12-10 | 24 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Wikipedia policies on what editors should do in the case of impending apocalypse
The Terminal Event Management Policy (TEMP) is a Wikipedia policy detailing the procedures to be followed to safeguard the content of the encyclopedia in the event of a non-localized event that would render the continuation of Wikipedia in its current form untenable.
The policy is designed to facilitate the preservation of the encyclopedia by a transition to non-electronic media in an orderly, time-sensitive manner or, if events dictate otherwise, the preservation of the encyclopedia by other means. Editors are asked to familiarize themselves with the procedures and in the unlikely event that the implementation of these procedures proves necessary, act in accordance with the procedural guidelines, inasmuch as circumstances allow.
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- "Wikipedia policies on what editors should do in the case of impending apocalypse" | 2019-06-28 | 25 Upvotes 15 Comments
- "Wikipedia: Terminal Event Management Policy" | 2019-05-26 | 18 Upvotes 3 Comments
π Ron Graham has left us
Ronald Lewis Graham (born October 31, 1935) is an American mathematician credited by the American Mathematical Society as being "one of the principal architects of the rapid development worldwide of discrete mathematics in recent years". He has done important work in scheduling theory, computational geometry, Ramsey theory, and quasi-randomness.
He is the Chief Scientist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (also known as Cal-(IT)2) and the Irwin and Joan Jacobs Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
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- "Ron Graham has left us" | 2020-07-07 | 13 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Verlan: French slang that inverses words
Verlan (French pronunciation:Β β[vΙΚlΙΜ]), (verlan is the reverse of the expression "l'envers") is a type of argot in the French language, featuring inversion of syllables in a word, and is common in slang and youth language. It rests on a long French tradition of transposing syllables of individual words to create slang words. The name verlan itself is an example: it is derived from inverting the sounds of the syllables in l'envers ([lΙΜvΙΚ], "the inverse", frequently used in the sense of "back-to-front").
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- "Verlan: French slang that inverses words" | 2020-02-02 | 178 Upvotes 240 Comments
π Knolling
Tom Sachs (born July 26, 1966) is an American contemporary artist who lives and works in New York City.
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- "Knolling" | 2017-08-07 | 249 Upvotes 76 Comments
π Wikipedia is currently in an edit war over the definition of recession
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- "Wikipedia is currently in an edit war over the definition of recession" | 2022-07-29 | 61 Upvotes 61 Comments
π HTTP Status 418 I'm a teapot
This is a list of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) response status codes. Status codes are issued by a server in response to a client's request made to the server. It includes codes from IETF Request for Comments (RFCs), other specifications, and some additional codes used in some common applications of the HTTP. The first digit of the status code specifies one of five standard classes of responses. The message phrases shown are typical, but any human-readable alternative may be provided. Unless otherwise stated, the status code is part of the HTTP/1.1 standard (RFC 7231).
The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) maintains the official registry of HTTP status codes.
All HTTP response status codes are separated into five classes or categories. The first digit of the status code defines the class of response, while the last two digits do not have any classifying or categorization role. There are five classes defined by the standard:
- 1xx informational response β the request was received, continuing process
- 2xx successful β the request was successfully received, understood, and accepted
- 3xx redirection β further action needs to be taken in order to complete the request
- 4xx client error β the request contains bad syntax or cannot be fulfilled
- 5xx server error β the server failed to fulfil an apparently valid request
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- "HTTP Status 418 I'm a teapot" | 2011-02-15 | 112 Upvotes 33 Comments
π Daphne Caruana Galizia
Daphne Anne Caruana Galizia (nΓ©e Vella; 26 August 1964 β 16 October 2017) was a Maltese writer, journalist, blogger and anti-corruption activist, who reported on political events in Malta. In particular, she focused on investigative journalism, reporting on government corruption, nepotism, patronage, allegations of money laundering, links between Malta's online gambling industry and organized crime, Malta's citizenship-by-investment scheme, and payments from the government of Azerbaijan. Caruana Galizia's national and international reputation was built on her regular reporting of misconduct by Maltese politicians and politically exposed persons.
Caruana Galizia continued to publish articles for decades, despite intimidation and threats, libel suits and other lawsuits. She was arrested by the Malta Police Force on two occasions. Caruana Galizia's investigations were published via her personal blog Running Commentary, which she set up in 2008. She was a regular columnist with The Sunday Times of Malta and later The Malta Independent. Her blog consisted of investigative reporting and commentary, some of which was regarded as personal attacks on individuals, leading to a series of legal battles. In 2016 and 2017, she revealed controversially sensitive information and allegations relating to a number of Maltese politicians and the Panama Papers scandal.
On 16 October 2017, Caruana Galizia was killed close to her home when a car bomb was detonated inside her vehicle, attractingΒ widespread local and international condemnation of the attack. In December 2017, three men were arrested in connection with the car bomb attack. Police arrested Yorgen Fenech, the owner of the Dubai-based company 17 Black, on his yacht on 20 November 2019 in connection with her murder.
In April 2018, an international consortium of 45 journalists published The Daphne Project, a collaboration to complete her investigative work. The GUE/NGL Award for Journalists, Whistleblowers & Defenders of the Right to Information was established in 2018 in honour of Galizia.
π Srinivasa Ramanujan
Srinivasa Ramanujan FRS (; listenΒ ; 22 December 1887Β β 26 April 1920) was an Indian mathematician who lived during the British Rule in India. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable. Ramanujan initially developed his own mathematical research in isolation: "He tried to interest the leading professional mathematicians in his work, but failed for the most part. What he had to show them was too novel, too unfamiliar, and additionally presented in unusual ways; they could not be bothered". Seeking mathematicians who could better understand his work, in 1913 he began a postal partnership with the English mathematician G. H. Hardy at the University of Cambridge, England. Recognizing Ramanujan's work as extraordinary, Hardy arranged for him to travel to Cambridge. In his notes, Ramanujan had produced groundbreaking new theorems, including some that Hardy said had "defeated him and his colleagues completely", in addition to rediscovering recently proven but highly advanced results.
During his short life, Ramanujan independently compiled nearly 3,900 results (mostly identities and equations). Many were completely novel; his original and highly unconventional results, such as the Ramanujan prime, the Ramanujan theta function, partition formulae and mock theta functions, have opened entire new areas of work and inspired a vast amount of further research. Nearly all his claims have now been proven correct. The Ramanujan Journal, a scientific journal, was established to publish work in all areas of mathematics influenced by Ramanujan, and his notebooksβcontaining summaries of his published and unpublished resultsβhave been analyzed and studied for decades since his death as a source of new mathematical ideas. As late as 2011 and again in 2012, researchers continued to discover that mere comments in his writings about "simple properties" and "similar outputs" for certain findings were themselves profound and subtle number theory results that remained unsuspected until nearly a century after his death. He became one of the youngest Fellows of the Royal Society and only the second Indian member, and the first Indian to be elected a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Of his original letters, Hardy stated that a single look was enough to show they could only have been written by a mathematician of the highest calibre, comparing Ramanujan to mathematical geniuses such as Euler and Jacobi.
In 1919, ill healthβnow believed to have been hepatic amoebiasis (a complication from episodes of dysentery many years previously)βcompelled Ramanujan's return to India, where he died in 1920 at the age of 32. His last letters to Hardy, written in January 1920, show that he was still continuing to produce new mathematical ideas and theorems. His "lost notebook", containing discoveries from the last year of his life, caused great excitement among mathematicians when it was rediscovered in 1976.
A deeply religious Hindu, Ramanujan credited his substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and said the mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by his family goddess. "An equation for me has no meaning," he once said, "unless it expresses a thought of God."
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- "Srinivasa Ramanujan" | 2019-12-22 | 22 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Srinivasa Ramanujan" | 2009-10-29 | 77 Upvotes 48 Comments
π Hofstadter's butterfly
In condensed matter physics, Hofstadter's butterfly describes the spectral properties of non-interacting two dimensional electrons in a magnetic field. The fractal, self-similar, nature of the spectrum was discovered in the 1976 Ph.D. work of Douglas Hofstadter and is one of the early examples of computer graphics. The name reflects the visual resemblance of the figure on the right to a swarm of butterflies flying to infinity.
The Hofstadter butterfly plays an important role in the theory of the integer quantum Hall effect, and D.J. Thouless has been awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 2016 for the discovery that the wings of the butterfly are characterized by Chern integers, the quantized Hall conductances discovered in 1980 by Klaus von Klitzing for which he has been awarded the Nobel prize in 1985. The colors in the diagram reflect the different Chern numbers.
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- "Hofstadter's butterfly" | 2014-06-20 | 41 Upvotes 10 Comments