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🔗 List of people claimed to be Jesus
This is a partial list of notable people who have been claimed, either by themselves or by their followers, in some way to be the reincarnation or incarnation of Jesus, or the Second Coming of Christ.
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- "List of people claimed to be Jesus" | 2018-10-21 | 17 Upvotes 3 Comments
🔗 Hebrew: the only language to revive from absolute 0 native speakers to Millions
The revival of the Hebrew language took place in Europe and Palestine toward the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, through which the language's usage changed from the sacred language of Judaism to a spoken and written language used for daily life in Israel. The process began as a diversity of Jews started arriving and establishing themselves alongside the pre-existing Jewish community in the region of Palestine in the first half of the nineteenth century, when veteran Jews in Palestine (largely Arabic-speaking by that time) and the linguistically diverse newly arrived Jews all switched to use Hebrew as a lingua franca, the historical linguistic common denominator of all the Jewish groups. At the same time, a parallel development in Europe changed Hebrew from primarily a sacred liturgical language into a literary language which played a key role in the development of nationalist educational programs. Modern Hebrew was one of three official languages of Mandatory Palestine, and after the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, one of two official languages of Israel, along with Modern Arabic. In July 2018, a new law made Hebrew the sole official language of the state of Israel, with Arabic having "special status". More than purely a linguistic process, the revival of Hebrew was utilized by Jewish modernization and political movements, and became a tenet of the ideology associated with settlement of the land, Zionism and Israeli policy.
The process of Hebrew's return to regular usage is unique; there are no other examples of a natural language without any native speakers subsequently acquiring several million native speakers, and no other examples of a sacred language becoming a national language with millions of "first language" speakers.
The language's revival eventually brought linguistic additions with it. While the initial leaders of the process insisted they were only continuing "from the place where Hebrew's vitality was ended", what was created represented a broader basis of language acceptance; it includes characteristics derived from all periods of Hebrew language, as well as from the non-Hebrew languages used by the long-established European, North African, and Middle Eastern Jewish communities, with Yiddish (the European variant) being predominant.
🔗 Prince Rupert's cube
In geometry, Prince Rupert's cube (named after Prince Rupert of the Rhine) is the largest cube that can pass through a hole cut through a unit cube, i.e. through a cube whose sides have length 1, without splitting the cube into two pieces. Its side length is approximately 6% larger than that of the unit cube through which it passes. The problem of finding the largest square that lies entirely within a unit cube is closely related, and has the same solution.
The original proposition posed by Prince Rupert of the Rhine was that a cube could be passed through a hole made in another cube of the same size without splitting the cube into two pieces.
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- "Prince Rupert's cube" | 2018-02-17 | 126 Upvotes 40 Comments
🔗 Stańczyk
Stańczyk (c. 1480–1560) (Polish pronunciation: [ˈstaɲt͡ʂɨk]) was a Polish court jester, the most famous in Polish history. He was employed by three Polish kings: Alexander, Sigismund the Old and Sigismund Augustus.
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- "Stańczyk" | 2019-10-01 | 142 Upvotes 13 Comments
🔗 Hagia Triada Sarcophagus
The Hagia Triada Sarcophagus is a late Minoan 137 cm (54 in)-long limestone sarcophagus, dated to about 1400 BC or some decades later, excavated from a chamber tomb at Hagia Triada, Crete in 1903, and now on display in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum ("AMH") in Crete.
Uniquely for such a piece from this date on Crete, it is coated in plaster and painted in fresco on all faces. Otherwise the Minoans (unlike the ancient Egyptians) only used frescoes to decorate palaces and houses for the enjoyment of the living and not in funerary practice. It is the only limestone sarcophagus of its era discovered to date; there are a number of smaller terracotta "ash-chests" (larnax), painted far more crudely, usually in a single colour. It is the only object with a series of narrative scenes of Minoan funerary ritual (later sarcophagi found in the Aegean were decorated with abstract designs and patterns). It was probably originally used for the burial of a prince.
It provides probably the most comprehensive iconography of a pre-Homeric thysiastikis ceremony and one of the best pieces of information on noble burial customs when Crete was under Mycenaean rule, combining features of Minoan and Mycenaean style and subject matter, as well as probable influence from Ancient Egyptian religion.
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- "Hagia Triada Sarcophagus" | 2022-02-10 | 42 Upvotes 1 Comments
🔗 Gödel's Loophole
Gödel's Loophole is a "inner contradiction" in the Constitution of the United States which Austrian-German-American logician, mathematician, and analytic philosopher Kurt Gödel claimed to have discovered in 1947. The flaw would have allowed the American democracy to be legally turned into a dictatorship. Gödel told his friend Oskar Morgenstern about the existence of the flaw and Morgenstern told Albert Einstein about it at the time, but Morgenstern, in his recollection of the incident in 1971, never mentioned the exact problem as Gödel saw it. This has led to speculation about the precise nature of what has come to be called "Gödel's Loophole". It has been called "one of the great unsolved problems of constitutional law."
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- "Gödel's Loophole" | 2025-08-06 | 21 Upvotes 11 Comments
- "Gödel's Loophole" | 2023-07-24 | 21 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Gödel's Loophole" | 2023-04-05 | 12 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Gödel's Loophole" | 2023-01-20 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Gödel's Loophole" | 2021-03-25 | 131 Upvotes 130 Comments
🔗 Soviet Lun-Class Ekranoplan Ground Effect Vehicle
The Lun-class ekranoplan is a ground effect vehicle (GEV) designed by Rostislav Evgenievich Alexeyev in 1975 and used by the Soviet and Russian navies from 1987 until sometime in the late 1990s.
It flew using the lift generated by the ground effect of its large wings when within about four metres (13 ft) above the surface of the water. Although they might look similar to regular aircraft, and have related technical characteristics, ekranoplans like the Lun are not aircraft, seaplanes, hovercraft, nor hydrofoils. Rather, "ground effect" is a distinct technology. The International Maritime Organization classifies these vehicles as maritime ships.
The name Lun comes from the Russian word for harrier.
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- "Soviet Lun-Class Ekranoplan Ground Effect Vehicle" | 2020-11-08 | 77 Upvotes 26 Comments
🔗 Bubble Memory
Bubble memory is a type of non-volatile computer memory that uses a thin film of a magnetic material to hold small magnetized areas, known as bubbles or domains, each storing one bit of data. The material is arranged to form a series of parallel tracks that the bubbles can move along under the action of an external magnetic field. The bubbles are read by moving them to the edge of the material, where they can be read by a conventional magnetic pickup, and then rewritten on the far edge to keep the memory cycling through the material. In operation, bubble memories are similar to delay-line memory systems.
Bubble memory started out as a promising technology in the 1970s, offering performance similar to core memory, memory density similar to hard drives, and no moving parts. This led many to consider it a contender for a "universal memory" that could be used for all storage needs. The introduction of dramatically faster semiconductor memory chips in the early 1970s pushed bubble into the slow end of the scale and it began to be considered mostly as a replacement for disks. The equally dramatic improvements in hard-drive capacity through the early 1980s made it uncompetitive in price terms for mass storage.
Bubble memory was used for some time in the 1970s and 1980s in applications where its non-moving nature was desirable for maintenance or shock-proofing reasons. The introduction of flash storage and similar technologies rendered even this niche uncompetitive, and bubble disappeared entirely by the late 1980s.
🔗 Just Room Enough Island
Just Room Enough Island, also known as Hub Island, is an island located in the Thousand Islands chain, belonging to New York, United States. The island is known for being the smallest inhabited island, which appears to be around 3,300 square feet (310 m2), or about one-thirteenth of an acre. Purchased by the Sizeland family in the 1950s, the island has a house, a tree, shrubs, and a small beach.
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- "Just Room Enough Island" | 2020-05-16 | 39 Upvotes 9 Comments
🔗 First They Came
"First they came ..." is the poetic form of a post-war confessional prose by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). It is about the cowardice of German intellectuals and certain clergy—including, by his own admission, Niemöller himself—following the Nazis' rise to power and subsequent incremental purging of their chosen targets, group after group. Many variations and adaptations in the spirit of the original have been published in the English language. It deals with themes of persecution, guilt, repentance, and personal responsibility.