Random Articles (Page 10)
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π Marree Man
The Marree Man, or Stuart's Giant, is a modern geoglyph the circumstances of whose creation have not been ascertained. It appears to depict an indigenous Australian man hunting with a boomerang or stick. It lies on a plateau at Finnis Springs 60Β km (37Β mi) west of the township of Marree in central South Australia. It is just outside the 127,000-square-kilometre (49,000Β sqΒ mi) Woomera Prohibited Area. The figure is 2.7Β km (1.7Β mi) tall with a perimeter of 28Β km (17Β mi), extending over an area of about 2.5Β km2 (620 acres). Although it is one of the largest geoglyphs in the world (arguably second to the Sajama Lines), its origin remains a mystery, with no one claiming responsibility for its creation nor any eye-witness having been found, notwithstanding the scale of the operation required to form the outline on the plateau floor. The description "Stuart's Giant" was used in anonymous faxes sent to media as "Press Releases" in July 1998, in a reference to the explorer John McDouall Stuart. It was discovered fortuitously by a charter pilot in an overflight on 26 June 1998.
Shortly after its discovery, the site was closed by the South Australian government following legal action taken in late July by native title claimants, but flights over the site were not forbidden as native title fell under federal government jurisdiction.
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- "Marree Man" | 2019-08-24 | 103 Upvotes 27 Comments
π Foam Concrete
Foam concrete, also known as Lightweight Cellular Concrete (LCC), Low Density Cellular Concrete (LDCC), and other terms is defined as a cement-based slurry, with a minimum of 20% (per volume) foam entrained into the plastic mortar. As mostly no coarse aggregate is used for production of foam concrete the correct term would be called mortar instead of concrete; it may be called "foamed cement" as well. The density of foam concrete usually varies from 400Β kg/mΒ³ to 1600Β kg/mΒ³. The density is normally controlled by substituting fully or part of the fine aggregate with foam.
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- "Foam Concrete" | 2020-07-04 | 25 Upvotes 3 Comments
π List of music considered the worst
This list consists of albums or songs that have been considered the worst music ever made by various combinations of music critics, television broadcasters (such as MTV), radio stations, composers, and public polls.
Individual tastes can vary widely such that very little consensus can be achieved. For example, the winning song in a CNN email poll received less than 5 percent of the total votes cast.
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- "List of music considered the worst" | 2015-09-23 | 10 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Uncanny Valley
In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object's resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object. The concept of the uncanny valley suggests that humanoid objects which imperfectly resemble actual human beings provoke uncanny or strangely familiar feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers. "Valley" denotes a dip in the human observer's affinity for the replica, a relation that otherwise increases with the replica's human likeness.
Examples can be found in robotics, 3D computer animations, and lifelike dolls among others. With the increasing prevalence of virtual reality, augmented reality, and photorealistic computer animation, the "valley" has been cited in the popular press in reaction to the verisimilitude of the creation as it approaches indistinguishability from reality. The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human will risk eliciting cold, eerie feelings in viewers.
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- "Uncanny Valley" | 2019-11-19 | 29 Upvotes 15 Comments
π W. T. Tutte - mathematician and code breaker
William Thomas "Bill" Tutte OC FRS FRSC (; 14 May 1917 β 2 May 2002) was a British codebreaker and mathematician. During the Second World War, he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major Nazi German cipher system which was used for top-secret communications within the Wehrmacht High Command. The high-level, strategic nature of the intelligence obtained from Tutte's crucial breakthrough, in the bulk decrypting of Lorenz-enciphered messages specifically, contributed greatly, and perhaps even decisively, to the defeat of Nazi Germany. He also had a number of significant mathematical accomplishments, including foundation work in the fields of graph theory and matroid theory.
Tutte's research in the field of graph theory proved to be of remarkable importance. At a time when graph theory was still a primitive subject, Tutte commenced the study of matroids and developed them into a theory by expanding from the work that Hassler Whitney had first developed around the mid 1930s. Even though Tutte's contributions to graph theory have been influential to modern graph theory and many of his theorems have been used to keep making advances in the field, most of his terminology was not in agreement with their conventional usage and thus his terminology is not used by graph theorists today. "Tutte advanced graph theory from a subject with one text (D. KΕnig's) toward its present extremely active state."
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- "W. T. Tutte - mathematician and code breaker" | 2013-05-28 | 27 Upvotes 2 Comments
π My Dinner with Andre
My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 American comedy-drama film directed by Louis Malle, and written by and starring AndrΓ© Gregory (Andre) and Wallace Shawn (Wally). The actors play fictionalized versions of themselves sharing a conversation at CafΓ© des Artistes in Manhattan. The film's dialogue covers topics such as experimental theatre, the nature of theatre, and the nature of life, and contrasts Wally's modest humanism with Andre's spiritual experiences.
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- "My Dinner with Andre" | 2022-12-04 | 11 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Analysis of Competing Hypotheses
The analysis of competing hypotheses (ACH) is a methodology for evaluating multiple competing hypotheses for observed data. It was developed by Richards (Dick) J. Heuer, Jr., a 45-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, in the 1970s for use by the Agency. ACH is used by analysts in various fields who make judgments that entail a high risk of error in reasoning. ACH aims to help an analyst overcome, or at least minimize, some of the cognitive limitations that make prescient intelligence analysis so difficult to achieve.
ACH was a step forward in intelligence analysis methodology, but it was first described in relatively informal terms. Producing the best available information from uncertain data remains the goal of researchers, tool-builders, and analysts in industry, academia and government. Their domains include data mining, cognitive psychology and visualization, probability and statistics, etc. Abductive reasoning is an earlier concept with similarities to ACH.
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- "Analysis of Competing Hypotheses" | 2024-03-20 | 11 Upvotes 1 Comments
π IBM Simon
The IBM Simon Personal Communicator (simply known as IBM Simon) is a handheld, touchscreen PDA designed by International Business Machines (IBM), and manufactured by Mitsubishi Electric. BellSouth Cellular Corp. distributed the Simon Personal Communicator in the United States between August 1994 and February 1995, selling 50,000 units. The Simon Personal Communicator was the first personal digital assistant or PDA to include telephony features. The battery lasted only an hour, and flip phones became increasingly slim which led to its demise.
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- "IBM Simon" | 2022-02-03 | 47 Upvotes 17 Comments
- "IBM Simon" | 2014-08-12 | 43 Upvotes 4 Comments
π Greta Thunberg
Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg (Swedish:Β [ΛΙ‘rΓͺΛta ΛtΚΜΛnbΓ¦rj] (listen); born 3 January 2003) is a Swedish environmental activist who has gained international recognition for promoting the view that humanity is facing an existential crisis arising from climate change. Thunberg is known for her youth and her straightforward speaking manner, both in public and to political leaders and assemblies, in which she criticizes world leaders for their failure to take sufficient action to address the climate crisis.
Thunberg's activism started after convincing her parents to adopt several lifestyle choices to reduce their own carbon footprint. In August 2018, at age 15, she started spending her school days outside the Swedish parliament to call for stronger action on climate change by holding up a sign reading Skolstrejk fΓΆr klimatet (School strike for climate). Soon, other students engaged in similar protests in their own communities. Together, they organised a school climate strike movement under the name Fridays for Future. After Thunberg addressed the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, student strikes took place every week somewhere in the world. In 2019, there were multiple coordinated multi-city protests involving over a million students each. To avoid flying, Thunberg sailed to North America where she attended the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit. Her speech there, in which she exclaimed "how dare you", was widely taken up by the press and incorporated into music.
Her sudden rise to world fame has made her both a leader and a target for critics. Her influence on the world stage has been described by The Guardian and other newspapers as the "Greta effect". She has received numerous honours and awards including: honorary Fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society; Time magazine's 100 most influential people and the youngest Time Person of the Year; inclusion in the Forbes list of The World's 100 Most Powerful Women (2019) and two consecutive nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize (2019 and 2020).
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- "Greta Thunberg" | 2019-05-26 | 32 Upvotes 18 Comments
π Horseshoe Theory
In popular discourse, the horseshoe theory asserts that the far-left and the far-right, rather than being at opposite and opposing ends of a linear continuum of the political spectrum, closely resemble each other, analogous to the way that the opposite ends of a horseshoe are close together. The theory is attributed to the French philosopher and writer of fiction and poetry Jean-Pierre Faye in his 2002 book Le Siècle des idéologies ("The Century of Ideologies").
Several political scientists, psychologists, and sociologists have criticized the horseshoe theory. Proponents point to a number of perceived similarities between extremes and allege that both have a tendency to support authoritarianism or totalitarianism; this does not appear to be supported by scholars in the field of political science, and the few instances of peer-reviewed research on the subject are scarce. Existing studies and comprehensive reviews often find only limited support and only under certain conditions; they generally contradict the theory's central premises.
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- "Horseshoe Theory" | 2024-02-22 | 11 Upvotes 7 Comments