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π Antiobjects
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- "Antiobjects" | 2009-12-07 | 133 Upvotes 28 Comments
π Bacon's Cipher
Bacon's cipher or the Baconian cipher is a method of steganographic message encoding devised by Francis Bacon in 1605. A message is concealed in the presentation of text, rather than its content. Bacon cipher is categorized as both a substitution cipher (in plain code) and a concealment cipher (using the two typefaces).
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- "Bacon's Cipher" | 2023-07-11 | 80 Upvotes 9 Comments
π Kilroy Was Here
Kilroy was here is a meme that became popular during World War II, typically seen in graffiti. Its origin is debated, but the phrase and the distinctive accompanying doodle became associated with GIs in the 1940s: a bald-headed man (sometimes depicted as having a few hairs) with a prominent nose peeking over a wall with his fingers clutching the wall.
"Mr Chad" or just "Chad" was the version that became popular in the United Kingdom. The character of Chad may have been derived from a British cartoonist in 1938, possibly pre-dating "Kilroy was here". According to Dave Wilton, "Some time during the war, Chad and Kilroy met, and in the spirit of Allied unity merged, with the British drawing appearing over the American phrase." Other names for the character include Smoe, Clem, Flywheel, Private Snoops, Overby, Eugene the Jeep, Scabooch, and Sapo.
According to Charles Panati, "The outrageousness of the graffiti was not so much what it said, but where it turned up." It is not known if there was an actual person named Kilroy who inspired the graffiti, although there have been claims over the years.
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- "Kilroy Was Here" | 2024-03-31 | 26 Upvotes 5 Comments
π You ain't gonna need it
"You aren't gonna need it" (YAGNI) is a principle of extreme programming (XP) that states a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary. XP co-founder Ron Jeffries has written: "Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them." Other forms of the phrase include "You aren't going to need it" and "You ain't gonna need it".
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- "You ain't gonna need it" | 2010-02-23 | 20 Upvotes 3 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
Discussed on
- "HTTP Status 418 I'm a teapot" | 2011-02-15 | 112 Upvotes 33 Comments
π Ultraviolet catastrophe
The ultraviolet catastrophe, also called the RayleighβJeans catastrophe, was the prediction of late 19th century to early 20th century classical physics that an ideal black body at thermal equilibrium would emit an unbounded quantity of energy as wavelength decreased into the ultraviolet range.:β6β7β The term "ultraviolet catastrophe" was first used in 1911 by Paul Ehrenfest, but the concept originated with the 1900 statistical derivation of the RayleighβJeans law.
The phrase refers to the fact that the empirically derived RayleighβJeans law, which accurately predicted experimental results at large wavelengths, failed to do so for short wavelengths. (See the image for further elaboration.) As the theory diverged from empirical observations when these frequencies reached the ultraviolet region of the electromagnetic spectrum, there was a problem. This problem was later found to be due to a property of quanta as proposed by Max Planck: There could be no fraction of a discrete energy package already carrying minimal energy.
Since the first use of this term, it has also been used for other predictions of a similar nature, as in quantum electrodynamics and such cases as ultraviolet divergence.
Discussed on
- "Ultraviolet catastrophe" | 2024-04-03 | 12 Upvotes 2 Comments
π List of virtual communities with more than 1 million users
This is a list of notable active virtual communities with more than 1 million registered members.
- Defunct
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- "List of virtual communities with more than 1 million users" | 2016-12-18 | 68 Upvotes 24 Comments
π Council of Trent
The Council of Trent (Latin: Concilium Tridentinum), held between 1545 and 1563 in Trent (or Trento), now in northern Italy, was the 19th ecumenical council of the Catholic Church. Prompted by the Protestant Reformation at the time, it has been described as the embodiment of the Counter-Reformation.
The Council issued condemnations of what it defined to be heresies committed by proponents of Protestantism, and also issued key statements and clarifications of the Church's doctrine and teachings, including scripture, the biblical canon, sacred tradition, original sin, justification, salvation, the sacraments, the Mass, and the veneration of saints. The Council met for twenty-five sessions between 13 December 1545 and 4 December 1563. Pope Paul III, who convoked the Council, oversaw the first eight sessions (1545β47), while the twelfth to sixteenth sessions (1551β52) were overseen by Pope Julius III and the seventeenth to twenty-fifth sessions (1562β63) by Pope Pius IV.
The consequences of the Council were also significant with regard to the Church's liturgy and practices. In its decrees, the Council made the Latin Vulgate the official biblical text of the Roman Church (without prejudice to the original texts in Hebrew and Greek, nor to other traditional translations of the Church, but favoring the Latin language over vernacular translations, such as the controversial English-language Tyndale Bible). In doing so, they commissioned the creation of a revised and standardized Vulgate in light of textual criticism, although this was not achieved until the 1590s. The Council also officially affirmed (for the second time at an ecumenical council) the traditional Catholic Canon of biblical books in response to the increasing Protestant exclusion of the deuterocanonical books. The former dogmatic affirmation of the Canonical books was at the Council of Florence in the 1441 bull Cantate Domino, as affirmed by Pope Leo XIII in his 1893 encyclical Providentissimus Deus (#20). In 1565, a year after the Council finished its work, Pius IV issued the Tridentine Creed (after Tridentum, Trent's Latin name) and his successor Pius V then issued the Roman Catechism and revisions of the Breviary and Missal in, respectively, 1566, 1568 and 1570. These, in turn, led to the codification of the Tridentine Mass, which remained the Church's primary form of the Mass for the next four hundred years.
More than three hundred years passed until the next ecumenical council, the First Vatican Council, was convened in 1869.
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- "Council of Trent" | 2023-06-02 | 24 Upvotes 12 Comments
π Archaeal Richmond Mine Acidophilic Nanoorganisms
Archaeal Richmond Mine acidophilic nanoorganisms (ARMAN) were first discovered in an extremely acidic mine located in northern California (Richmond Mine at Iron Mountain) by Brett Baker in Jill Banfield's laboratory at the University of California Berkeley. These novel groups of archaea named ARMAN-1, ARMAN-2 (Candidatus Micrarchaeum acidiphilum ARMAN-2 ), and ARMAN-3 were missed by previous PCR-based surveys of the mine community because the ARMANs have several mismatches with commonly used PCR primers for 16S rRNA genes. Baker et al. detected them in a later study using shotgun sequencing of the community. The three groups were originally thought to represent three unique lineages deeply branched within the Euryarchaeota, a subgroup of the Archaea. However, this has been revised, based on more complete archaeal genomic tree, that they belong to a super phylum named DPANN. The ARMAN groups now comprise deeply divergent phyla named Micrarchaeota and Parvarchaeota. Their 16S rRNA genes differ by as much as 17% between the three groups. Prior to their discovery all of the Archaea shown to be associated with Iron Mountain belonged to the order Thermoplasmatales (e.g., Ferroplasma acidarmanus).
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- "Archaeal Richmond Mine Acidophilic Nanoorganisms" | 2020-01-13 | 17 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Somebody Else's Problem
"Somebody else's problem" (also "someone else's problem") is a phrase used to describe an issue which is dismissed by a person on the grounds that they consider somebody else to be responsible for it. The term is also used to refer to a factor that is "out of scope" in a particular context.
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- "Somebody Else's Problem" | 2014-06-03 | 28 Upvotes 5 Comments