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π Religious Views of Isaac Newton
Isaac Newton (4 January 1643 β 31 March 1727) was considered an insightful and erudite theologian by his Protestant contemporaries. He wrote many works that would now be classified as occult studies, and he wrote religious tracts that dealt with the literal interpretation of the Bible. He kept his heretical beliefs private.
Newton's conception of the physical world provided a model of the natural world that would reinforce stability and harmony in the civic world. Newton saw a monotheistic God as the masterful creator whose existence could not be denied in the face of the grandeur of all creation. Although born into an Anglican family, and a devout but unorthodox Christian, by his thirties Newton held a Christian faith that, had it been made public, would not have been considered orthodox by mainstream Christians. Scholars now consider him a Nontrinitarian Arian.
He may have been influenced by Socinian christology.
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- "Religious Views of Isaac Newton" | 2022-02-11 | 13 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Rich Hickey's Wikipedia page nominated for deletion
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- "Rich Hickey's Wikipedia page nominated for deletion" | 2011-07-11 | 16 Upvotes 12 Comments
π Mathematical Universe Hypothesis
In physics and cosmology, the mathematical universe hypothesis (MUH), also known as the ultimate ensemble theory, is a speculative "theory of everything" (TOE) proposed by cosmologist Max Tegmark.
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- "Mathematical Universe Hypothesis" | 2023-06-30 | 13 Upvotes 3 Comments
π International Workers' Day
International Workers' Day, also called Labour Day in some countries and often referred to as May Day, is a celebration of labourers and the working classes that is promoted by the international labour movement and occurs every year on 1 May, or the first Monday in May.
Traditionally, 1 May is the date of the European spring festival of May Day. The International Workers Congress held in Paris in 1889 established the Second International for labor, socialist, and Marxist parties. It adopted a resolution for a "great international demonstration" in support of working-class demands for the eight-hour day. The date was chosen by the American Federation of Labor to commemorate a general strike in the United States, which had begun on 1 May 1886 and culminated in the Haymarket affair on 4 May. The demonstration subsequently became a yearly event. The 1904 Sixth Conference of the Second International, called on "all Social Democratic Party organisations and trade unions of all countries to demonstrate energetically on the First of May for the legal establishment of the eight-hour day, for the class demands of the proletariat, and for universal peace".
The 1st of May, or first Monday in May, is a national public holiday in many countries, in most cases known as "International Workers' Day" or a similar name. Some countries celebrate a Labour Day on other dates significant to them, such as the United States and Canada, which celebrate Labor Day on the first Monday of September. In 1955, the Catholic Church dedicated 1 May to "Saint Joseph the Worker". Saint Joseph is the patron saint of workers and craftsmen, among others.
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- "International Workers' Day" | 2025-05-01 | 401 Upvotes 151 Comments
π Elizabeth Fleischman
Elizabeth Fleischman-Aschheim (nΓ©e Fleischman 5 March 1867 β 3 August 1905) was an American radiographer who is considered an X-ray pioneer. Fleischman was the first woman to die as a result of X-ray radiation exposure.
π M.2
M.2, formerly known as the Next Generation Form Factor (NGFF), is a specification for internally mounted computer expansion cards and associated connectors. M.2 replaces the mSATA standard, which uses the PCI Express Mini Card physical card layout and connectors. Employing a more flexible physical specification, the M.2 allows different module widths and lengths, and, paired with the availability of more advanced interfacing features, makes the M.2 more suitable than mSATA in general for solid-state storage applications, and particularly in smaller devices such as ultrabooks and tablets.
Computer bus interfaces provided through the M.2 connector are PCI ExpressΒ 3.0 (up to four lanes), Serial ATAΒ 3.0, and USBΒ 3.0 (a single logical port for each of the latter two). It is up to the manufacturer of the M.2 host or module to select which interfaces are to be supported, depending on the desired level of host support and device type. The M.2 connector keying notches denote various purposes and capabilities of both M.2 hosts and devices. The unique key notches of M.2 modules also prevent them from being inserted into incompatible host connectors.
The M.2 specification supports NVM Express (NVMe) as the logical device interface for M.2 PCI Express SSDs, in addition to supporting legacy Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) at the logical interface level. While the support for AHCI ensures software-level backward compatibility with legacy SATA devices and legacy operating systems, NVM Express is designed to fully utilize the capability of high-speed PCI Express storage devices to perform many I/O operations in parallel.
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- "M.2" | 2018-06-03 | 17 Upvotes 4 Comments
π Galactic Algorithm
A galactic algorithm is one that runs faster than any other algorithm for problems that are sufficiently large, but where "sufficiently large" is so big that the algorithm is never used in practice. Galactic algorithms were so named by Richard Lipton and Ken Regan, as they will never be used on any of the merely terrestrial data sets we find here on Earth.
An example of a galactic algorithm is the fastest known way to multiply two numbers, which is based on a 1729-dimensional Fourier transform. This means it will not reach its stated efficiency until the numbers have at least 2172912 bits (at least 101038 digits), which is vastly larger than the number of atoms in the known universe. So this algorithm is never used in practice.
Despite the fact that they will never be used, galactic algorithms may still contribute to computer science:
- An algorithm, even if impractical, may show new techniques that may eventually be used to create practical algorithms.
- Computer sizes may catch up to the crossover point, so that a previously impractical algorithm becomes practical.
- An impractical algorithm can still demonstrate that conjectured bounds can be achieved, or alternatively show that conjectured bounds are wrong. As Lipton says "This alone could be important and often is a great reason for finding such algorithms. For example, if tomorrow there were a discovery that showed there is a factoring algorithm with a huge but provably polynomial time bound, that would change our beliefs about factoring. The algorithm might never be used, but would certainly shape the future research into factoring." Similarly, a algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem, although unusable in practice, would settle the P versus NP problem, the most important open problem in computer science and one of the Millennium Prize Problems.
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- "Galactic Algorithm" | 2023-12-02 | 123 Upvotes 25 Comments
- "Galactic Algorithm" | 2019-10-05 | 382 Upvotes 71 Comments
π Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 (MH17/MAS17) was a scheduled passenger flight from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur that was shot down on 17 July 2014 while flying over eastern Ukraine. All 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed. Contact with the aircraft, a Boeing 777-200ER, was lost when it was about 50Β km (31Β mi) from the UkraineβRussia border, and wreckage of the aircraft fell near Hrabove in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine, 40Β km (25Β mi) from the border. The shoot-down occurred in the War in Donbas in an area controlled by pro-Russian rebels.
The responsibility for investigation was delegated to the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and the Dutch-led joint investigation team (JIT), who concluded that the airliner was downed by a Buk surface-to-air missile launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory in Ukraine. According to the JIT, the Buk that was used originated from the 53rd Anti-Aircraft Missile Brigade of the Russian Federation and had been transported from Russia on the day of the crash, fired from a field in a rebel-controlled area and the launch system returned to Russia afterwards. The findings by the DSB and JIT are consistent with the earlier claims by American and German intelligence sources and claims by the Ukrainian government. On the basis of the JIT's conclusions, the governments of the Netherlands and Australia held Russia responsible for the deployment of the Buk installation and were pursuing legal routes as of MayΒ 2018. The Russian government denied involvement in the shooting down of the airplane, and its account of how the aircraft was shot down has varied over time. Coverage in Russian media has also differed from that in other countries.
This was Malaysia Airlines' second aircraft loss during 2014, after the disappearance of Flight 370 on 8 March, and is the deadliest airliner shoot-down incident to date.
π Purity Spiral
A purity spiral is a theory which argues for the existence of a form of groupthink in which it becomes more beneficial to hold certain views than to not hold them, and more extreme views are rewarded while expressing doubt, nuance, or moderation is punished (a process sometimes called "moral outbidding"). It is argued that this feedback loop leads to members competing to demonstrate the zealotry or purity of their views.
A purity spiral is argued to occur when a community's primary focus becomes implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and where that value does not have an agreed interpretation.
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- "Purity Spiral" | 2024-11-13 | 16 Upvotes 1 Comments