Random Articles (Page 2)
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π Corporate Memphis
Corporate Memphis is a term used (often disparagingly) to describe a flat, geometric art style, widely used in Big Tech illustrations in the late 2010s and early 2020s. It is often criticized as seeming uninspired and dystopian.
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- "Corporate Memphis" | 2022-06-30 | 22 Upvotes 3 Comments
π KarTrak, a bar code system designed to automatically identify rail cars
KarTrak, sometimes KarTrak ACI (for Automatic Car Identification) is a colored bar code system designed to automatically identify rail cars and other rolling stock. KarTrak was made a requirement in North America, but technical problems led to abandonment of the system in the late 1970s.
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- "KarTrak, a bar code system designed to automatically identify rail cars" | 2014-08-31 | 11 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License
WTFPL is a GPL-compatible permissive license most commonly used as a free software license. As a public domain like license, the WTFPL is essentially the same as dedication to the public domain. It allows redistribution and modification of the work under any terms. The title is an abbreviation of "Do what the fuck you want to Public License".
The first version of the WTFPL, released in March 2000, was written by Banlu Kemiyatorn for his own software project. Sam Hocevar, Debian's former project leader, wrote version 2.
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- "Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License" | 2022-09-13 | 18 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Do What the Fuck You Want to Public License" | 2013-05-19 | 38 Upvotes 63 Comments
- "WTFPL" | 2010-03-01 | 64 Upvotes 34 Comments
π China's Final Warning
"China's final warning" (Russian: ΠΠΎΡΠ»Π΅Π΄Π½Π΅Π΅ ΠΊΠΈΡΠ°ΠΉΡΠΊΠΎΠ΅ ΠΏΡΠ΅Π΄ΡΠΏΡΠ΅ΠΆΠ΄Π΅Π½ΠΈΠ΅) is a Russian proverb meaning a warning that carries no real consequences.
π Salters Duck
Salter's duck, also known as the nodding duck or by its official name the Edinburgh duck, is a device that converts wave power into electricity. The wave impact induces rotation of gyroscopes located inside a pear-shaped "duck", and an electrical generator converts this rotation into electricity with an overall efficiency of up to 90%. The Salter's duck was invented by Stephen Salter in response to the oil shortage in the 1970s and was one of the earliest generator designs proposed to the Wave Energy programme in the United Kingdom. The funding for the project was cut off in the early 1980s after oil prices rebounded and the UK government moved away from alternative energy sources. As of May 2018 no wave-power devices have ever gone into large-scale production.
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- "Salters Duck" | 2015-01-30 | 84 Upvotes 39 Comments
π Galilean Moons and Determination of Longitude
The Galilean moons (), or Galilean satellites, are the four largest moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. They are the most readily visible Solar System objects after Saturn, the dimmest of the classical planets; though their closeness to bright Jupiter makes naked-eye observation very difficult, they are readily seen with common binoculars, even under night sky conditions of high light pollution. The invention of the telescope enabled the discovery of the moons in 1610. Through this, they became the first Solar System objects discovered since humans have started tracking the classical planets, and the first objects to be found to orbit any planet beyond Earth.
They are planetary-mass moons and among the largest objects in the Solar System. All four, along with Titan, Triton, and Earth's Moon, are larger than any of the Solar System's dwarf planets. The largest, Ganymede, is the largest moon in the Solar System and surpasses the planet Mercury in size (though not mass). Callisto is only slightly smaller than Mercury in size; the smaller ones, Io and Europa, are about the size of the Moon. The three inner moons β Io, Europa, and Ganymede β are in a 4:2:1 orbital resonance with each other. While the Galilean moons are spherical, all of Jupiter's remaining moons have irregular forms because they are too small for their self-gravitation to pull them into spheres.
The Galilean moons are named after Galileo Galilei, who observed them in either December 1609 or January 1610, and recognized them as satellites of Jupiter in March 1610; they remained the only known moons of Jupiter until the discovery of the fifth largest moon of Jupiter Amalthea in 1892. Galileo initially named his discovery the Cosmica Sidera ("Cosimo's stars") or Medicean Stars, but the names that eventually prevailed were chosen by Simon Marius. Marius discovered the moons independently at nearly the same time as Galileo, 8 January 1610, and gave them their present individual names, after mythological characters that Zeus seduced or abducted, which were suggested by Johannes Kepler in his Mundus Jovialis, published in 1614. Their discovery showed the importance of the telescope as a tool for astronomers by proving that there were objects in space that cannot be seen by the naked eye. The discovery of celestial bodies orbiting something other than Earth dealt a serious blow to the then-accepted (among educated Europeans) Ptolemaic world system, a geocentric theory in which everything orbits around Earth.
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- "Galilean Moons and Determination of Longitude" | 2024-09-24 | 17 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Exception That Proves the Rule
"The exception that proves the rule" (sometimes "the exception proves the rule") is a saying whose meaning is contested. Henry Watson Fowler's Modern English Usage identifies five ways in which the phrase has been used, and each use makes some sort of reference to the role that a particular case or event takes in relation to a more general rule.
Two original meanings of the phrase are usually cited. The first, preferred by Fowler, is that the presence of an exception applying to a specific case establishes ("proves") that a general rule exists. A more explicit phrasing might be "the exception that proves the existence of the rule." Most contemporary uses of the phrase emerge from this origin, although often in a way which is closer to the idea that all rules have their exceptions. The alternative origin given is that the word "prove" is used in the archaic sense of "test". In this sense, the phrase does not mean that an exception demonstrates a rule to be true or to exist, but that it tests the rule, thereby proving its value. There is little evidence of the phrase being used in this second way.
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- "Exception That Proves the Rule" | 2019-05-05 | 10 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Agner Krarup Erlang
Agner Krarup Erlang (1 January 1878 β 3 February 1929) was a Danish mathematician, statistician and engineer, who invented the fields of traffic engineering and queueing theory.
By the time of his relatively early death at the age of 51, Erlang had created the field of telephone networks analysis. His early work in scrutinizing the use of local, exchange and trunk telephone line usage in a small community to understand the theoretical requirements of an efficient network led to the creation of the Erlang formula, which became a foundational element of modern telecommunication network studies.
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- "Agner Krarup Erlang" | 2019-12-03 | 69 Upvotes 8 Comments
π The Iron Law of Wages
The iron law of wages is a proposed law of economics that asserts that real wages always tend, in the long run, toward the minimum wage necessary to sustain the life of the worker. The theory was first named by Ferdinand Lassalle in the mid-nineteenth century. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attribute the doctrine to Lassalle (notably in Marx's 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program), the idea to Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, and the terminology to Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws" in Das GΓΆttliche.
It was coined in reference to the views of classical economists such as David Ricardo's Law of rent, and the competing population theory of Thomas Malthus. It held that the market price of labour would always, or almost always, tend toward the minimum required for the subsistence of the labourers, reducing as the working population increased and vice versa. Ricardo believed that happened only under particular conditions.
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- "The Iron Law of Wages" | 2020-08-20 | 26 Upvotes 35 Comments
π Chess Boxing
Chess boxing, or chessboxing, is a hybrid that combines two traditional pastimes: chess, a cerebral board game, and boxing, a physical sport. The competitors fight in alternating rounds of chess and boxing. Chessboxing was invented by French comic book artist Enki Bilal and adapted by Dutch performance artist Iepe Rubingh as an art performance and has subsequently grown into a competitive sport. Chessboxing is particularly popular in Germany, the United Kingdom, India, and Russia.
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- "Chess boxing" | 2018-05-15 | 219 Upvotes 110 Comments
- "Chess boxing" | 2010-10-13 | 44 Upvotes 37 Comments