Random Articles (Page 114)
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π The moving sofa problem
The moving sofa problem or sofa problem is a two-dimensional idealisation of real-life furniture-moving problems and asks for the rigid two-dimensional shape of largest area A that can be maneuvered through an L-shaped planar region with legs of unit width. The area A thus obtained is referred to as the sofa constant. The exact value of the sofa constant is an open problem.
Discussed on
- "The moving sofa problem" | 2018-07-13 | 215 Upvotes 51 Comments
- "Moving sofa problem" | 2016-12-28 | 38 Upvotes 5 Comments
π Ligne Claire
Ligne claire (French for "clear line", pronouncedΒ [liΙ² klΙΚ]; Dutch: klare lijn) is a style of drawing created and pioneered by HergΓ©, the Belgian creator of The Adventures of Tintin. It uses clear strong lines sometimes of varied width and no hatching, while contrast is downplayed as well. Cast shadows are often illuminated, and the style often features strong colours and a combination of cartoonish characters against a realistic background. All these elements together can result in giving comics drawn this way a flat aspect. The name was coined by Joost Swarte in 1977.
Discussed on
- "Ligne Claire" | 2021-10-02 | 222 Upvotes 63 Comments
π 1700 Cascadia Earthquake
The 1700 Cascadia earthquake occurred along the Cascadia subduction zone on January 26, 1700 with an estimated moment magnitude of 8.7β9.2. The megathrust earthquake involved the Juan de Fuca Plate from mid-Vancouver Island, south along the Pacific Northwest coast as far as northern California. The length of the fault rupture was about 1,000 kilometers (620 miles), with an average slip of 20 meters (66Β ft).
The earthquake caused a tsunami which struck the west coast of North America and the coast of Japan.
Discussed on
- "1700 Cascadia Earthquake" | 2025-03-15 | 31 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "1700 Cascadia Earthquake" | 2021-05-05 | 132 Upvotes 115 Comments
π United States Camel Corps
The United States Camel Corps was a mid-19th-century experiment by the United States Army in using camels as pack animals in the Southwestern United States. While the camels proved to be hardy and well suited to travel through the region, the Army declined to adopt them for military use. The Civil War interfered with the experiment and it was eventually abandoned; the animals were sold at auction.
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- "United States Camel Corps" | 2025-01-28 | 11 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "United States Camel Corps" | 2017-08-16 | 70 Upvotes 19 Comments
π Blind faith (computer programming)
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- "Blind faith (computer programming)" | 2013-07-21 | 24 Upvotes 16 Comments
π Pink Noise
Pink noise or β1βf noise is a signal or process with a frequency spectrum such that the power spectral density (energy or power per frequency interval) is inversely proportional to the frequency of the signal. In pink noise, each octave (halving or doubling in frequency) carries an equal amount of noise energy.
Pink noise is one of the most common signals in biological systems.
The name arises from the pink appearance of visible light with this power spectrum. This is in contrast with white noise which has equal intensity per frequency interval.
Discussed on
- "Pink Noise" | 2019-09-27 | 10 Upvotes 4 Comments
π Bleem
Bleem! (styled as bleem!) is a commercial PlayStation emulator released by the Bleem! Company in 1999 for IBM-compatible PCs and Dreamcast. It is notable for being one of the few commercial software emulators to be aggressively marketed during the emulated console's lifetime, and was the center of multiple controversial lawsuits.
Discussed on
- "Bleem" | 2024-03-08 | 13 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Judy arrays are patented
In computer science, a Judy array is a data structure implementing a type of associative array with high performance and low memory usage. Unlike most other key-value stores, Judy arrays use no hashing, leverage compression on their keys (which may be integers or strings), and can efficiently represent sparse data, that is, they may have large ranges of unassigned indices without greatly increasing memory usage or processing time. They are designed to remain efficient even on structures with sizes in the peta-element range, with performance scaling on the order of O(log n). Roughly speaking, Judy arrays are highly optimized 256-ary radix trees.
Judy trees are usually faster than AVL trees, B-trees, hash tables and skip lists because they are highly optimized to maximize usage of the CPU cache. In addition, they require no tree balancing and no hashing algorithm is used.
The Judy array was invented by Douglas Baskins and named after his sister.
Discussed on
- "Judy arrays are patented" | 2013-01-11 | 42 Upvotes 56 Comments
π Zooko's Triangle
Zooko's triangle is a trilemma of three properties that are generally considered desirable for names of participants in a network protocol:
- Human-meaningful: Meaningful and memorable (low-entropy) names are provided to the users.
- Secure: The amount of damage a malicious entity can inflict on the system should be as low as possible.
- Decentralized: Names correctly resolve to their respective entities without the use of a central authority or service.
Discussed on
- "Zooko's Triangle" | 2022-08-17 | 79 Upvotes 40 Comments
- "Zooko's Triangle" | 2021-02-17 | 153 Upvotes 54 Comments
- "Zooko's Triangle" | 2010-08-22 | 23 Upvotes 7 Comments