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π Albert's Swarm
Albert's swarm was an immense concentration of the Rocky Mountain locust that swarmed the Western United States in 1875. It was named after Albert Child, a physician interested in meteorology, who calculated the size of the swarm to 198,000 square miles (510,000Β km2) by multiplying the swarm's estimated speed with the time it took for it to move through southern Nebraska.
The 1875 swarm is referred to repeatedly in a western Missouri historical record that explains:
It was the year 1875 that will long be remembered by the people of at least four states, as the grasshopper year. The scourge struck Western Missouri April, 1875, and commenced devastating some of the fairest portions of our noble commonwealth. They gave Henry [County] an earnest and overwhelming visitation, and demonstrated with an amazing rapidity that their appetite was voracious, and that everything green belonged to them for their sustenance.
One estimate numbers the locusts in the swarm at 3.5 trillion. Another estimate numbers the swarm at 12.5 trillion, which is the greatest concentration of animals ever speculatively guessed, according to Guinness World Records.
Discussed on
- "Albert's Swarm" | 2026-03-21 | 16 Upvotes 3 Comments
π International Reply Coupon
An international reply coupon (IRC) is a coupon that can be exchanged for one or more postage stamps representing the minimum postage for an unregistered priority airmail letter of up to twenty grams sent to another Universal Postal Union (UPU) member country. IRCs are accepted by all UPU member countries.
UPU member postal services are obliged to exchange an IRC for postage, but are not obliged to sell them.
The purpose of the IRC is to allow a person to send someone in another country a letter, along with the cost of postage for a reply. If the addressee is within the same country, there is no need for an IRC because a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) or return postcard will suffice; but if the addressee is in another country an IRC removes the necessity of acquiring foreign postage or sending appropriate currency.
Discussed on
- "International Reply Coupon" | 2024-07-07 | 57 Upvotes 13 Comments
π Tinkerbell Effect
The Tinkerbell effect is an American English expression describing things that are thought to exist only because people believe in them. The effect is named after Tinker Bell, the fairy in the play Peter Pan, who is revived from near death by the belief of the audience.
Another form is called the Reverse Tinkerbell effect, a term coined by David Post in 2003. It stipulates that the more you believe in something the more likely it is to vanish. For example, as more people believe that driving is safe, more people will drive carelessly, in turn making driving less safe.
Discussed on
- "Tinkerbell Effect" | 2020-03-08 | 16 Upvotes 6 Comments
π Pandemic
A pandemic (from Greek ΟαΎΆΞ½ pan "all" and Ξ΄αΏΞΌΞΏΟ demos "people") is a disease epidemic that has spread across a large region, for instance multiple continents, or worldwide. A widespread endemic disease with a stable number of infected people is not a pandemic. Further, flu pandemics generally exclude recurrences of seasonal flu.
Throughout history, there have been a number of pandemics of diseases such as smallpox and tuberculosis. One of the most devastating pandemics was the Black Death (also known as The Plague), which killed an estimated 75β200 million people in the 14th century. Other notable pandemics include the 1918 influenza pandemic (Spanish flu) and the 2009 flu pandemic (H1N1). Current pandemics include HIV/AIDS and the 2019 coronavirus disease, which was declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020 by the World Health Organization (WHO).
π Nuclear Gandhi
Nuclear Gandhi is an Internet meme and an urban legend about the video game Civilization. According to the legend, there was a bug in Civilization that eventually forced the pacifist leader Mahatma Gandhi to be extremely aggressive and to use nuclear weapons heavily.
The bug was first mentioned in 2012, two years after the release of Civilization V, and eventually became one of the most recognizable video game glitches; it has been used as an example of integer overflow in computer science and was included in other Civilization games as an easter egg.
In 2020, Sid Meier contradicted the urban legend, stating there had never been a bug of this sort in the original 1991 game. Nuclear Gandhi was first implemented in Civilization V (2010) as a joke.
Discussed on
- "Nuclear Gandhi" | 2021-11-11 | 38 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Dunbar's Number
Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationshipsβrelationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. Dunbar explained it informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar".
Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150. Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.
Dunbar theorised that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size [...] the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained". On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues, such as high school friends, with whom a person would want to reacquaint himself or herself if they met again.
Discussed on
- "Dunbar's Number" | 2018-04-07 | 108 Upvotes 63 Comments
π Great Man-Made River
The Great Man-Made River (GMMR, Ψ§ΩΩΩΨ± Ψ§ΩΨ΅ΩΨ§ΨΉΩ Ψ§ΩΨΉΨΈΩΩ ) is a network of pipes that supplies fresh water obtained from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System fossil aquifer across Libya. It is the world's largest irrigation project. The project utilizes a pipeline system that pumps water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System from down south in Libya to cities in the populous Libyan northern Mediterranean coast including Tripoli and Benghazi. The water covers a distance of up to 1,600 kilometers and provides 70% of all freshwater used in Libya.
According to its website, it is the largest underground network of pipes (2,820 kilometres (1,750Β mi)) and aqueducts in the world. It consists of more than 1,300 wells, most more than 500 m deep, and supplies 6,500,000 m3 of fresh water per day to the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte and elsewhere. The late Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi described it as the "Eighth Wonder of the World".
Discussed on
- "Great Man-Made River" | 2021-03-07 | 128 Upvotes 48 Comments
π Freedom to Roam
The freedom to roam, or "everyman's right", is the general public's right to access certain public or privately owned land, lakes, and rivers for recreation and exercise. The right is sometimes called the right of public access to the wilderness or the "right to roam".
In Scotland, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria, Czech Republic and Switzerland, the freedom to roam takes the form of general public rights which are sometimes codified in law. The access is ancient in parts of Northern Europe and has been regarded as sufficiently basic that it was not formalised in law until modern times. However, the right usually does not include any substantial economic exploitation, such as hunting or logging, or disruptive activities, such as making fires and driving offroad vehicles.
In England and Wales public access rights apply only to certain categories of mainly uncultivated land.
Discussed on
- "Freedom to Roam" | 2024-05-01 | 24 Upvotes 43 Comments
π Millipede Memory
Millipede memory is a form of non-volatile computer memory. It promised a data density of more than 1 terabit per square inch (1 gigabit per square millimeter), which is about the limit of the perpendicular recording hard drives. Millipede storage technology was pursued as a potential replacement for magnetic recording in hard drives and a means of reducing the physical size of the technology to that of flash media.
IBM demonstrated a prototype millipede storage device at CeBIT 2005, and was trying to make the technology commercially available by the end of 2007. However, because of concurrent advances in competing storage technologies, no commercial product has been made available since then.
π List of wikileaks mirrors deleted on Wikipedia
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- "List of wikileaks mirrors deleted on Wikipedia" | 2010-12-09 | 18 Upvotes 3 Comments