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πŸ”— Amusing Ourselves to Death

πŸ”— Books

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state control.

Postman's book has been translated into eight languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide. In 2005, Postman's son Andrew reissued the book in a 20th anniversary edition.

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πŸ”— Ellison's Cave

πŸ”— Georgia (U.S. state) πŸ”— Caves

Ellison's Cave is a pit cave located in Walker County, on Pigeon Mountain in the Appalachian Plateaus of Northwest Georgia. It is the 12th deepest cave in the United States and features the deepest, unobstructed pit in the continental US named Fantastic Pit. The cave is over 12 miles long and extends 1063 feet vertically.

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πŸ”— Guy Goma (2006)

πŸ”— Biography πŸ”— Africa πŸ”— BBC πŸ”— Africa/Republic of the Congo

Guy Goma (born 1969) is a Congolese-French business studies graduate from Brazzaville in the Republic of the Congo who was accidentally interviewed live on BBC News 24, a UK television news station, on Monday 8 May 2006. Goma was mistaken for technology expert Guy Kewney when he attended the BBC for a job interview and was brought onto a BBC special regarding the case Apple Corps v Apple Computer to provide insight on a subject he knew little about.

Goma became well known for the incident, which is noted as a memorable TV moment.

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πŸ”— Stationary Bandit Theory

Theory of the Stationary Bandit β€” theory of the origin of the state, developed by American scholars Martin C. McGuire and Mansur Olson.

πŸ”— Privilegium Maius

The Privilegium maius (German: Großer Freiheitsbrief 'greater privilege') was a medieval document forged in 1358 or 1359 at the behest of Duke Rudolf IV of Austria (1358–65) of the House of Habsburg, claiming the family has the right to rule Rome because of land rights granted to them by Nero and Julius Caesar. It was essentially a modified version of the Privilegium minus issued by Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa in 1156, which had elevated the former March of Austria into a duchy. In a similar way, the Privilegium maius elevated the duchy into an Archduchy of Austria.

The privileges described in the document had great influence on the Austrian political landscape, and created a unique connection between the House of Habsburg and Austria.

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πŸ”— Pecha Kucha: Preventative Medicine for Death By PowerPoint

PechaKucha (Japanese: ぺけゃくけゃ, IPA: [petΙ•a kΙ―Μ₯tΙ•a], chit-chat) is a storytelling format where a presenter shows 20 slides for 20 seconds of commentary each (6 minutes and 40 seconds total). At a PechaKucha Night, individuals gather at a venue to share personal presentations about their work. The PechaKucha format can be used, for example, in business presentations to clients or staff, as well as in education settings.

Inspired by their desire to "talk less, show more," Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Tokyo's Klein-Dytham Architecture (KDa) created PechaKucha in February 2003. It was a way to attract people to SuperDeluxe, their experimental event space in Roppongi, and to enable young designers to meet, show their work, and exchange ideas in 6 minutes 40 seconds.

In 2004, cities in Europe began hosting PK Nights and days, followed over the years by hundreds of others. As of April 2019, PKNs had been held in more than 1,142 cities worldwide. More than 3 million people have attended a PK Night.

PechaKucha is a registered trademark of PechaKucha, Inc.

In January 2018, PK's Astrid Klein, Mark Dytham, and Sean Smyth established PK, Inc. to create software to expand the PK platform.

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πŸ”— 1 is not prime

πŸ”— Mathematics

A prime number (or a prime) is a natural number greater than 1 that cannot be formed by multiplying two smaller natural numbers. A natural number greater than 1 that is not prime is called a composite number. For example, 5 is prime because the only ways of writing it as a product, 1 Γ— 5 or 5 Γ— 1, involve 5 itself. However, 6 is composite because it is the product of two numbers (2 Γ— 3) that are both smaller than 6. Primes are central in number theory because of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic: every natural number greater than 1 is either a prime itself or can be factorized as a product of primes that is unique up to their order.

The property of being prime is called primality. A simple but slow method of checking the primality of a given number n {\displaystyle n} , called trial division, tests whether n {\displaystyle n} is a multiple of any integer between 2 and n {\displaystyle {\sqrt {n}}} . Faster algorithms include the Miller–Rabin primality test, which is fast but has a small chance of error, and the AKS primality test, which always produces the correct answer in polynomial time but is too slow to be practical. Particularly fast methods are available for numbers of special forms, such as Mersenne numbers. As of DecemberΒ 2018 the largest known prime number has 24,862,048 decimal digits.

There are infinitely many primes, as demonstrated by Euclid around 300 BC. No known simple formula separates prime numbers from composite numbers. However, the distribution of primes within the natural numbers in the large can be statistically modelled. The first result in that direction is the prime number theorem, proven at the end of the 19th century, which says that the probability of a randomly chosen number being prime is inversely proportional to its number of digits, that is, to its logarithm.

Several historical questions regarding prime numbers are still unsolved. These include Goldbach's conjecture, that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes, and the twin prime conjecture, that there are infinitely many pairs of primes having just one even number between them. Such questions spurred the development of various branches of number theory, focusing on analytic or algebraic aspects of numbers. Primes are used in several routines in information technology, such as public-key cryptography, which relies on the difficulty of factoring large numbers into their prime factors. In abstract algebra, objects that behave in a generalized way like prime numbers include prime elements and prime ideals.

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πŸ”— Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 69

πŸ”— Crime πŸ”— Classical Greece and Rome πŸ”— Greece πŸ”— Egypt

Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 69 (P. Oxy. 69) is a complaint about a robbery, written in Greek. The manuscript was written on papyrus in the form of a sheet. It was discovered by Grenfell and Hunt in 1897 in Oxyrhynchus. The document was written on 21 November 190. Currently it is housed in the Haskell Oriental Institute at the University of Chicago (2061). The text was published by Grenfell and Hunt in 1898.

The beginning of the letter is lost. It is a petition to an unknown official describing the theft of some barley and asking that an investigation be carried out. The author is unknown. The measurements of the fragment are 178 by 115Β mm. The description of the crime scene is quite detailed:

... they broke down a door that led into the public street and had been blocked up with bricks, probably using a log of wood as a battering-ram. They then entered the house and contented themselves with taking what was stored there, 10 artabae of barley, which they carried off by the same way. We guessed that this was removed piecemeal by the said door from the marks of a rope dragged along in that direction, and pointed out this fact to the chief of the police of that village and to the other officials.

10 artabae are equivalent to approximately 30–40 kilograms (66–88Β lb) of barley.

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πŸ”— Jonathan James

πŸ”— Biography πŸ”— Law πŸ”— Computer Security πŸ”— Computer Security/Computing πŸ”— Biography/science and academia πŸ”— Florida

Jonathan Joseph James (December 12, 1983 – May 18, 2008) was an American hacker who was the first juvenile incarcerated for cybercrime in the United States. The South Florida native was 15 years old at the time of the first offense and 16 years old on the date of his sentencing. He died at his Pinecrest, Florida home on May 18, 2008, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

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πŸ”— Open Source Cola

πŸ”— Food and drink πŸ”— Open πŸ”— Food and drink/Beverages

Open-source cola is any cola soft drink produced according to a published and shareable recipe. Unlike the secretive Coca-Cola formula, the recipes are openly published and their re-use is encouraged. The texts of OpenCola and Cube-Cola recipes are published under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

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