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๐ Aristotle's Views on Women
Aristotle's views on women influenced later Western thinkers, as well as Islamic thinkers, who quoted him as an authority until the end of the Middle Ages, influencing women's history.
In his Politics, Aristotle saw women as subject to men, but as higher than slaves, and lacking authority; he believed the husband should exert political rule over the wife. Among women's differences from men were that they were, in his view, more impulsive, more compassionate, more complaining, and more deceptive. He gave the same weight to women's happiness as to men's, and in his Rhetoric stated that society could not be happy unless women were happy too. Whereas Plato was open to the potential equality of men and women, stating both that women were not equal to men in terms of strength and virtue, but were equal to men in terms of rational and occupational capacity, and hence in the ideal Republic should be educated and allowed to work alongside men without differentiation, Aristotle appears to have disagreed.
In his theory of inheritance, Aristotle considered the mother to provide a passive material element to the child, while the father provided an active, ensouling element with the form of the human species.
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- "Aristotle's Views on Women" | 2020-09-28 | 10 Upvotes 4 Comments
๐ Kaffeklubben Island โ northernmost undisputed point of land on Earth
Kaffeklubben Island or Coffee Club Island (Danish: Kaffeklubbenย ร; Greenlandic: Inuit Qeqertaat) is an uninhabited island lying off the northern shore of Greenland. It contains the northernmost undisputed point of land on Earth.
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- "Kaffeklubben Island โ northernmost undisputed point of land on Earth" | 2024-05-17 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
๐ Ocean Temperature
The ocean temperature varies by depth, geographical location and season. Both the temperature and salinity of ocean water differs. Warm surface water is generally saltier than the cooler deep or polar waters; in polar regions, the upper layers of ocean water are cold and fresh. Deep ocean water is cold, salty water found deep below the surface of Earth's oceans. This water has a very uniform temperature, around 0-3ย ยฐC. The ocean temperature also depends on the amount of solar radiation falling on its surface. In the tropics, with the Sun nearly overhead, the temperature of the surface layers can rise to over 30ย ยฐC (86ย ยฐF) while near the poles the temperature in equilibrium with the sea ice is about โ2ย ยฐC (28ย ยฐF). There is a continuous circulation of water in the oceans. Thermohaline circulation (THC) is a part of the large-scale ocean circulation that is driven by global density gradients created by surface heat and freshwater fluxes. Warm surface currents cool as they move away from the tropics, and the water becomes denser and sinks. The cold water moves back towards the equator as a deep sea current, driven by changes in the temperature and density of the water, before eventually welling up again towards the surface.
Ocean temperature as a term is used either for the temperature in the ocean at any depth, or specifically for the ocean temperatures that are not near the surface (in which case it is synonymous with "deep ocean temperature").
It is clear that the oceans are warming as a result of climate change and this rate of warming is increasing.:โ9โ The upper ocean (above 700 m) is warming fastest, but the warming trend extends throughout the ocean. In 2022, the global ocean was the hottest ever recorded by humans.
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- "Ocean Temperature" | 2023-05-13 | 87 Upvotes 53 Comments
๐ The repetitive and boring gameplay in WoW is probably intentional.
In video games, grinding is performing repetitive tasks, usually for a gameplay advantage or loot but in some cases for purely aesthetic or cosmetic benefits. Many video games use different tactics to implement, or reduce, the amount of grinding in the gameplay. The general use of grinding is for "experience points", or to improve a character's level. In addition, the behavior is sometimes referred to as pushing the bar (leveling up), farming (acquiring loot repeatedly from one source), or catassing.
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- "The repetitive and boring gameplay in WoW is probably intentional." | 2010-01-16 | 34 Upvotes 37 Comments
๐ Rhythm 0
Rhythm 0 was a six-hour work of performance art by Serbian artist Marina Abramoviฤ in Naples in 1974. The work involved Abramoviฤ standing still while the audience was invited to do to her whatever they wished, using one of 72 objects she had placed on a table. These included a rose, feather, perfume, honey, bread, grapes, wine, scissors, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar, a gun, and a bullet.
There were no separate stages. Abramoviฤ and the visitors stood in the same space, making it clear that the latter were part of the work. The purpose of the piece, she said, was to find out how far the public would go: "What is the public about and what are they going to do in this kind of situation?"
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- "Rhythm 0" | 2023-09-25 | 388 Upvotes 269 Comments
๐ Leachim โ 4th grade teaching robot
Leachim was an early example of Diphone synthetic speech and demonstrated how voice branching could be done quickly via computer discs to create understandable speech (i.e. verbal output). This method combined phonemes, words, and sentences to form verbal responsive messages when prompted by the computer. The device received attention on a world-wide basis because hundreds of articles were written about it.
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- "Leachim โ 4th grade teaching robot" | 2024-06-21 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
๐ The Drowned World
The Drowned World is a 1962 science fiction novel by British writer J. G. Ballard. The novel depicts a post-apocalyptic future in which global warming has caused the majority of the Earth to become uninhabitable. The story follows a team of scientists researching ongoing environmental developments in a flooded, abandoned London. The novel is an expansion of a novella of the same title first published in Science Fiction Adventures magazine in January 1962, Vol. 4, No. 24.
In 2010, Time Magazine named The Drowned World one of the top 10 best post-apocalyptic books. The novel has been identified as a founding text in the literary genre known as climate fiction.
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- "The Drowned World" | 2020-01-18 | 14 Upvotes 8 Comments
๐ The German tank problem
In the statistical theory of estimation, the German tank problem consists of estimating the maximum of a discrete uniform distribution from sampling without replacement. In simple terms, suppose we have an unknown number of items which are sequentially numbered from 1 to N. We take a random sample of these items and observe their sequence numbers; the problem is to estimate N from these observed numbers.
The problem can be approached using either frequentist inference or Bayesian inference, leading to different results. Estimating the population maximum based on a single sample yields divergent results, whereas estimation based on multiple samples is a practical estimation question whose answer is simple (especially in the frequentist setting) but not obvious (especially in the Bayesian setting).
The problem is named after its historical application by Allied forces in World War II to the estimation of the monthly rate of German tank production from very few data. This exploited the manufacturing practice of assigning and attaching ascending sequences of serial numbers to tank components (chassis, gearbox, engine, wheels), with some of the tanks eventually being captured in battle by Allied forces.
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- "German Tank Problem" | 2023-11-26 | 39 Upvotes 7 Comments
- "The German tank problem" | 2016-12-03 | 64 Upvotes 6 Comments
- "German tank problem" | 2014-02-21 | 231 Upvotes 83 Comments
- "German tank problem" | 2011-03-02 | 28 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "The German Tank Problem" | 2009-06-23 | 103 Upvotes 18 Comments
๐ Irony punctuation
Irony punctuation is any proposed form of notation used to denote irony or sarcasm in text. Written English lacks a standard way to mark irony, and several forms of punctuation have been proposed. Among the oldest and most frequently attested is the percontation point proposed by English printer Henry Denham in the 1580s, and the irony mark, used by Marcellin Jobard and French poet Alcanter de Brahm during the 19th century. Both marks take the form of a reversed question mark, "โธฎ".
Irony punctuation is primarily used to indicate that a sentence should be understood at a second level. A bracketed exclamation point or question mark as well as scare quotes are also occasionally used to express irony or sarcasm.
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- "Irony punctuation" | 2010-08-12 | 30 Upvotes 17 Comments
๐ Polanyiโs Paradox
Polanyiโs paradox, named in honour of the British-Hungarian philosopher Michael Polanyi, is the theory that human knowledge of how the world functions and capability are, to a large extent, beyond our explicit understanding. The theory was articulated by Michael Polanyi in his book The Tacit Dimension in 1966, but it was economist David Autor that named it as Polanyiโs paradox in his 2014 research paper on โPolanyiโs Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growthโ.
Summarised in the slogan "We can know more than we can tell", Polanyiโs paradox is mainly to explain the cognitive phenomenon that there exist many tasks which we, human beings, understand intuitively how to perform but cannot verbalize the rules or procedures behind it. This "self-ignorance" is common to many human activities, from driving a car in traffic to face recognition. As Polanyi argues, humans are relying on their tacit knowledge, which is difficult to adequately express by verbal means, when engaging these tasks. Polanyi's paradox has been widely considered a major obstacle in the fields of AI and automation, since the absence of consciously accessible knowledge creates tremendous difficulty in programming.
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- "Polanyiโs Paradox" | 2019-07-14 | 88 Upvotes 46 Comments