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๐ Dishwasher Salmon
Dishwasher salmon is an American fish dish made with the heat from a dishwasher, particularly from its drying phase.
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- "Dishwasher Salmon" | 2023-04-16 | 466 Upvotes 371 Comments
๐ Operation Popeye
Operation Popeye (Project Controlled Weather Popeye / Motorpool / Intermediary-Compatriot) was a highly classified weather modification program in Southeast Asia during 1967โ1972. The cloud seeding operation during the Vietnam War ran from March 20, 1967 until July 5, 1972 in an attempt to extend the monsoon season, specifically over areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The operation was used to induce rain and extend the East Asian Monsoon season in support of U.S. government efforts related to the War in Southeast Asia.
The former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, was aware that there might be objections raised by the international scientific community but said in a memo to the president that such objections had not in the past been a basis for prevention of military activities considered to be in the interests of U.S. national security.
The chemical weather modification program was conducted from Thailand over Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam and allegedly sponsored by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA without the authorization of then Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird who had categorically denied to Congress that a program for modification of the weather for use as a tactical weapon even existed.
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- "Operation Popeye" | 2020-04-28 | 69 Upvotes 17 Comments
๐ Deep Crack
In cryptography, the EFF DES cracker (nicknamed "Deep Crack") is a machine built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in 1998, to perform a brute force search of the Data Encryption Standard (DES) cipher's key space โ that is, to decrypt an encrypted message by trying every possible key. The aim in doing this was to prove that the key size of DES was not sufficient to be secure.
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- "Deep Crack" | 2009-04-24 | 23 Upvotes 6 Comments
๐ Stolperstein
A Stolperstein (pronounced [หสtษlpษหสtaษชn] (listen); plural Stolpersteine; literally "stumbling stone", metaphorically a "stumbling block") is a sett-size, ten-centimetre (3.9ย in) concrete cube bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution.
The Stolpersteine project, initiated by the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, aims to commemorate individuals at exactly the last place of residencyโor, sometimes, workโwhich was freely chosen by the person before he or she fell victim to Nazi terror, euthanasia, eugenics, deportation to a concentration or extermination camp, or escaped persecution by emigration or suicide. As of December 2019, 75,000 Stolpersteine have been laid, making the Stolpersteine project the world's largest decentralized memorial.
The majority of Stolpersteine commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Others have been placed for Sinti and Romani people (then also called "gypsies"), homosexuals, the physically or mentally disabled, Jehovah's Witnesses, black people, members of the Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the anti-Nazi Resistance, the Christian opposition (both Protestants and Catholics), and Freemasons, along with International Brigade soldiers in the Spanish Civil War, military deserters, conscientious objectors, escape helpers, capitulators, "habitual criminals", looters, and others charged with treason, military disobedience, or undermining the Nazi military, as well as Allied soldiers.
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- "Stolperstein" | 2022-06-18 | 445 Upvotes 170 Comments
๐ Cantu a tenore
The cantu a tenรฒre (Sardinian: su tenรฒre, su cuncรฒrdu, su cuntrร ttu, su cussรจrtu, s'agorropamรจntu, su cantu a prรฒa; Italian: canto a tenore) is a style of polyphonic folk singing characteristic of the island of Sardinia (Italy's second largest island), particularly the region of Barbagia, though some other Sardinian sub-regions bear examples of such tradition.
In 2005, UNESCO proclaimed the cantu a tenore to be an example of intangible cultural heritage.
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- "Cantu a tenore" | 2023-03-29 | 69 Upvotes 26 Comments
๐ Toxorhynchites โ Mosquito Eater
Toxorhynchites, also called elephant mosquito or mosquito eater, is a genus of diurnal and often relatively colorful mosquitoes, found worldwide between about 35ยฐ north and 35ยฐ south. It includes the largest known species of mosquito, at up to 18ย mm (0.71ย in) in length and 24ย mm (0.94ย in) in wingspan. It is among the many kinds of mosquito that do not consume blood. The adults subsist on carbohydrate-rich materials, such as honeydew, or saps and juices from damaged plants, refuse, fruit, and nectar.
Their larvae prey on the larvae of other mosquitoes and similar nektonic prey, making Toxorhynchites beneficial to humans. In this respect, they contrast with blood-sucking species of mosquitoes. Toxorhynchites larvae live on a protein- and fat-rich diet of aquatic animals such as mosquito larvae. They have no need to risk their lives sucking blood in adulthood, having already accumulated the necessary materials for oogenesis and vitellogenesis.
Most species occur in forests. The larvae of one jungle variety, Toxorhynchites splendens, consume larvae of other mosquito species occurring in tree crevices, particularly Aedes aegypti.
Unlike Toxorhynchites mosquitoes, detritus feeder mosquito female larvae rely on blood meals to produce eggs more plentifully than a diet of nectar would permit. And even though blood sucking is a risky strategy that entails more casualties, and they could in principle subsist on nectar and the like as their males generally do, the risk is outweighed on average by the increase in the number and size of yolk-rich eggs that such protein-rich food permit.
Environmental scientists have suggested that Toxorhynchites mosquitoes be introduced to areas outside their natural range in order to fight dengue fever. This has been practiced historically, but errors have been made. For example, when intending to introduce T. splendens to new areas, scientists actually introduced T. amboinensis. An extinct species is known from Miocene aged Mexican Amber
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- "Toxorhynchites โ Mosquito Eater" | 2019-07-25 | 73 Upvotes 41 Comments
๐ Soar (Cognitive Architecture)
Soar is a cognitive architecture, originally created by John Laird, Allen Newell, and Paul Rosenbloom at Carnegie Mellon University. (Rosenbloom continued to serve as co-principal investigator after moving to Stanford University, then to the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute.) It is now maintained and developed by John Laird's research group at the University of Michigan.
The goal of the Soar project is to develop the fixed computational building blocks necessary for general intelligent agents โ agents that can perform a wide range of tasks and encode, use, and learn all types of knowledge to realize the full range of cognitive capabilities found in humans, such as decision making, problem solving, planning, and natural language understanding. It is both a theory of what cognition is and a computational implementation of that theory. Since its beginnings in 1983 as John Lairdโs thesis, it has been widely used by AI researchers to create intelligent agents and cognitive models of different aspects of human behavior. The most current and comprehensive description of Soar is the 2012 book, The Soar Cognitive Architecture.
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- "Soar (Cognitive Architecture)" | 2022-03-11 | 39 Upvotes 8 Comments
๐ ลmoto
Oomoto (ๅคงๆฌ, ลmoto, Great Source, or Great Origin), also known as Oomoto-kyo (ๅคงๆฌๆ, ลmoto-kyล), is a religion founded in 1892 by Deguchi Nao (1836โ1918), often categorised as a new Japanese religion originated from Shinto. The spiritual leaders of the movement have predominantly been women; however, Deguchi Onisaburล (1871โ1948) has been considered an important figure in Omoto as a seishi (spiritual teacher). Since 2001, the movement has been guided by its fifth leader, Kurenai Deguchi.
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- "ลmoto" | 2018-02-05 | 47 Upvotes 4 Comments
๐ Plan 9 from Bell Labs
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system, originating in the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s, and building on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. The final official release was in early 2015.
Under Plan 9, UNIX's everything is a file metaphor is extended via a pervasive network-centric filesystem, and graphical user interface is assumed as a basis for almost all functionality, though it retains a heavily text-centric ideology.
The name Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a reference to the Ed Wood 1959 cult science fiction Z-movie Plan 9 from Outer Space. The name of the project's mascot is "Glenda, the Plan 9 Bunny". The system continues to be used and developed by operating system researchers and hobbyists.
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- "Plan9 โ A Distributed Operating System" | 2020-04-26 | 35 Upvotes 17 Comments
- "Plan 9 from Bell Labs" | 2013-03-26 | 13 Upvotes 8 Comments
๐ Wikipedia Has Cancer
Alternative Title: Just because you have some money, that doesn't mean that you have to spend it.
In biology, the hallmarks of an aggressive cancer include limitless multiplication of ordinarily beneficial cells, even when the body signals that further multiplication is no longer needed. The Wikipedia page on the wheat and chessboard problem explains that nothing can keep growing forever. In biology, the unwanted growth usually terminates with the death of the host. Ever-increasing spending can often lead to the same undesirable result in organizations.
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- "Wikipedia Has Cancer" | 2024-04-20 | 110 Upvotes 52 Comments
- "Wikipedia Has Cancer" | 2022-10-31 | 42 Upvotes 15 Comments
- "Wikipedia has Cancer (Wikipedia costs growth over time)" | 2021-03-17 | 41 Upvotes 6 Comments
- "Wikipedia Has Cancer (2017)" | 2019-12-04 | 528 Upvotes 310 Comments
- "Wikimedia Foundation's runaway spending growth" | 2017-10-08 | 150 Upvotes 121 Comments
- "Wikimedia Foundation spending" | 2017-05-07 | 1054 Upvotes 406 Comments