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π Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928β1960
Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928β1960 is a 1998 novel, presented as a biography, by the Scottish writer William Boyd. Nat Tate was an imaginary person, invented by Boyd and created as "an abstract expressionist who destroyed '99%' of his work and leapt to his death from the Staten Island ferry. His body was never found." At the time of the novel's launch, Boyd went some way to encourage the belief that Tate had really existed.
π Curta: a mechanical calculator
The Curta is a small mechanical calculator developed by Curt Herzstark. The Curta's design is a descendant of Gottfried Leibniz's Stepped Reckoner and Charles Thomas's Arithmometer, accumulating values on cogs, which are added or complemented by a stepped drum mechanism. It has an extremely compact design: a small cylinder that fits in the palm of the hand.
Curtas were considered the best portable calculators available until they were displaced by electronic calculators in the 1970s.
Discussed on
- "Curta" | 2023-02-05 | 66 Upvotes 12 Comments
- "Curta: a mechanical calculator" | 2015-07-17 | 28 Upvotes 6 Comments
- "Curta mechanical calculator" | 2015-01-12 | 38 Upvotes 14 Comments
- "Curta calculator - hand-held, mechanical arithmetic" | 2011-10-02 | 42 Upvotes 16 Comments
- "Curta calculator" | 2010-01-11 | 23 Upvotes 17 Comments
π Pax Calendar
The Pax calendar was invented by James A. Colligan, SJ in 1930 as a perennializing reform of the annualized Gregorian calendar.
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- "Pax Calendar" | 2023-05-12 | 48 Upvotes 24 Comments
π Razor 1911
Razor 1911 (RZR) is a warez and demogroup founded in Norway, 1986. It was the first ever such group to be initially founded exclusively as a demogroup, before moving into warez in 1987. According to the US Justice Department, Razor 1911 is the oldest software cracking group that is still active on the internet. Razor 1911 ran the diskmag 'Propaganda' until 1995.
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- "Razor 1911" | 2023-10-30 | 242 Upvotes 118 Comments
π Slaughterbots
Slaughterbots is a 2017 arms-control advocacy video presenting a dramatized near-future scenario where swarms of inexpensive microdrones use artificial intelligence and facial recognition to assassinate political opponents based on preprogrammed criteria. The video was released onto YouTube by the Future of Life Institute and Stuart Russell, a professor of computer science at Berkeley, on 12 November 2017. The video quickly went viral, gaining over two million views. The video was also screened to the November 2017 United Nations Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons meeting in Geneva.
π Howland Will Forgery Trial
The Howland will forgery trial was a U.S. court case in 1868 to decide Henrietta Howland Robinson's contest of the will of Sylvia Ann Howland. It is famous for the forensic use of mathematics by Benjamin Peirce as an expert witness.
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- "Howland Will Forgery Trial" | 2020-07-31 | 66 Upvotes 21 Comments
π Heckler's Veto
In the United States, a heckler's veto is a situation in which a party who disagrees with a speaker's message is able to unilaterally trigger events that result in the speaker being silenced. For example, a heckler can disrupt a speech to the point that the speech is canceled.
In the legal sense, a heckler's veto occurs when the speaker's right is curtailed or restricted by the government in order to prevent a reacting party's behavior. The common example is the termination of a speech or demonstration in the interest of maintaining the public peace based on the anticipated negative reaction of someone opposed to that speech or demonstration.
The term heckler's veto was coined by University of Chicago professor of law Harry Kalven. Colloquially, the concept is invoked in situations where hecklers or demonstrators silence a speaker without intervention of the law.
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- "Heckler's Veto" | 2023-09-28 | 36 Upvotes 9 Comments
π Foucault pendulum
The Foucault pendulum or Foucault's pendulum is a simple device named after French physicist LΓ©on Foucault and conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the Earth's rotation. The pendulum was introduced in 1851 and was the first experiment to give simple, direct evidence of the earth's rotation. Foucault pendulums today are popular displays in science museums and universities.
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- "Foucault pendulum" | 2020-04-27 | 69 Upvotes 33 Comments
π Dyson Tree
A Dyson tree is a hypothetical genetically engineered plant (perhaps resembling a tree) capable of growing inside a comet, suggested by the physicist Freeman Dyson. Plants could produce a breathable atmosphere within hollow spaces in the comet (or even within the plants themselves), utilising solar energy for photosynthesis and cometary materials for nutrients, thus providing self-sustaining habitats for humanity in the outer solar system analogous to a greenhouse in space or a shell grown by a mollusc.
A Dyson tree might consist of a few main trunk structures growing out from a comet nucleus, branching into limbs and foliage that intertwine, forming a spherical structure possibly dozens of kilometers across.
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- "Dyson Tree" | 2019-08-23 | 176 Upvotes 42 Comments
π Circle Packing
In geometry, circle packing is the study of the arrangement of circles (of equal or varying sizes) on a given surface such that no overlapping occurs and so that no circle can be enlarged without creating an overlap. The associated packing density, Ξ·, of an arrangement is the proportion of the surface covered by the circles. Generalisations can be made to higher dimensions β this is called sphere packing, which usually deals only with identical spheres.
While the circle has a relatively low maximum packing density of 0.9069 on the Euclidean plane, it does not have the lowest possible. The "worst" shape to pack onto a plane is not known, but the smoothed octagon has a packing density of about 0.902414, which is the lowest maximum packing density known of any centrally-symmetric convex shape. Packing densities of concave shapes such as star polygons can be arbitrarily small.
The branch of mathematics generally known as "circle packing" is concerned with the geometry and combinatorics of packings of arbitrarily-sized circles: these give rise to discrete analogs of conformal mapping, Riemann surfaces and the like.
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- "Circle Packing" | 2020-05-30 | 98 Upvotes 30 Comments