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π Open Letter to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees
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- "Open Letter to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees" | 2019-06-30 | 113 Upvotes 133 Comments
π Closed city
A closed city or closed town is a settlement where travel or residency restrictions are applied so that specific authorization is required to visit or remain overnight. They may be sensitive military establishments or secret research installations that require much more space or freedom than is available in a conventional military base. There may also be a wider variety of permanent residents including close family members of workers or trusted traders who are not directly connected with its clandestine purposes.
Many closed cities existed in the Soviet Union until its collapse in 1991. After 1991, a number of them still existed in the CIS countries, especially Russia. In modern Russia, such places are officially known as "closed administrative-territorial formations" (Π·Π°ΠΊΡΡΡΡΠ΅ Π°Π΄ΠΌΠΈΠ½ΠΈΡΡΡΠ°ΡΠΈΠ²Π½ΠΎ-ΡΠ΅ΡΡΠΈΡΠΎΡΠΈΠ°Π»ΡΠ½ΡΠ΅ ΠΎΠ±ΡΠ°Π·ΠΎΠ²Π°Π½ΠΈΡ, zakrytye administrativno-territorial'nye obrazovaniya, or ΠΠΠ’Π ZATO for short).
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- "Closed city" | 2016-08-01 | 84 Upvotes 27 Comments
- "Atomgrads" | 2013-06-08 | 31 Upvotes 11 Comments
π Vim, 25 years since initial release
Vim (; a contraction of Vi IMproved) is a clone, with additions, of Bill Joy's vi text editor program for Unix. Vim's author, Bram Moolenaar, based it upon the source code for a port of the Stevie editor to the Amiga and released a version to the public in 1991. Vim is designed for use both from a command-line interface and as a standalone application in a graphical user interface. Vim is free and open-source software and is released under a license that includes some charityware clauses, encouraging users who enjoy the software to consider donating to children in Uganda. The license is compatible with the GNU General Public License through a special clause allowing distribution of modified copies "under the GNU GPL version 2 or any later version".
Since its release for the Amiga, cross-platform development has made it available on many other systems. In 2006, it was voted the most popular editor amongst Linux Journal readers; in 2015 the Stack Overflow developer survey found it to be the third most popular text editor, and the fifth most popular development environment in 2019.
π 999-Year Lease
A 999-year lease, under historic common law, is an essentially permanent lease of property. The lease locations are mainly in Britain, its former colonies, and the Commonwealth.
A former colony, the Republic of Mauritius (The Raphael Fishing Company Ltd v. The State of Mauritius & Anor (Mauritius) [2008] UKPC 43 (30 July 2008)) established legal precedent on 30 July 2008 in respect of a 'permanent lease' on St. Brandon.
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- "999-Year Lease" | 2019-07-18 | 39 Upvotes 28 Comments
π Anna Karenina Principle
The Anna Karenina principle states that a deficiency in any one of a number of factors dooms an endeavor to failure. Consequently, a successful endeavor (subject to this principle) is one where every possible deficiency has been avoided.
The name of the principle derives from Leo Tolstoy's book Anna Karenina, which begins:
All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
In other words: happy families share a common set of attributes which lead to happiness, while any of a variety of attributes can cause an unhappy family. This concept has been generalized to apply to several fields of study.
In statistics, the term Anna Karenina principle is used to describe significance tests: there are any number of ways in which a dataset may violate the null hypothesis and only one in which all the assumptions are satisfied.
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- "Anna Karenina Principle" | 2019-08-30 | 299 Upvotes 126 Comments
π List of Topics Categorized as Pseudoscience
This is a list of topics that have, at one point or another in their history, been characterized as pseudoscience by academics or researchers. Detailed discussion of these topics may be found on their main pages. These characterizations were made in the context of educating the public about questionable or potentially fraudulent or dangerous claims and practicesβefforts to define the nature of science, or humorous parodies of poor scientific reasoning.
Criticism of pseudoscience, generally by the scientific community or skeptical organizations, involves critiques of the logical, methodological, or rhetorical bases of the topic in question. Though some of the listed topics continue to be investigated scientifically, others were only subject to scientific research in the past, and today are considered refuted but resurrected in a pseudoscientific fashion. Other ideas presented here are entirely non-scientific, but have in one way or another impinged on scientific domains or practices.
Many adherents or practitioners of the topics listed here dispute their characterization as pseudoscience. Each section here summarizes the alleged pseudoscientific aspects of that topic.
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- "List of Topics Categorized as Pseudoscience" | 2019-07-12 | 14 Upvotes 8 Comments
- "List of topics characterized as pseudoscience" | 2019-01-24 | 11 Upvotes 2 Comments
π International Talk Like a Pirate Day
International Talk Like a Pirate Day is a parodic holiday created in 1995 by John Baur (Ol' Chumbucket) and Mark Summers (Cap'n Slappy), of Albany, Oregon, U.S., who proclaimed September 19 each year as the day when everyone in the world should talk like a pirate. An observer of this holiday would greet friends not with "Hello, everyone!" but with "Ahoy, maties!" or "Ahoy, me hearties!" The holiday, and its observance, springs from a romanticized view of the Golden Age of Piracy.
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- "Today Is International Talk Like a Pirate Day" | 2023-09-19 | 21 Upvotes 7 Comments
- "International Talk Like a Pirate Day" | 2021-09-19 | 13 Upvotes 2 Comments
π The Free Will Theorem
The free will theorem of John H. Conway and Simon B. Kochen states that if we have a free will in the sense that our choices are not a function of the past, then, subject to certain assumptions, so must some elementary particles. Conway and Kochen's paper was published in Foundations of Physics in 2006. In 2009 they published a stronger version of the theorem in the Notices of the AMS. Later, in 2017, Kochen elaborated some details.
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- "The Free Will Theorem" | 2010-07-24 | 33 Upvotes 37 Comments
π Asus Eee PC
The ASUS Eee PC is a netbook computer line from Asus, and a part of the ASUS Eee product family. At the time of its introduction in late 2007, it was noted for its combination of a lightweight, Linux-based operating system, solid-state drive (SSD), and relatively low cost. Newer models added the options of Microsoft Windows operating system and rotating media hard disk drives (HDD), and initially retailed for up to 500 euros.
The first Eee PC was a milestone in the personal computer business, launching the netbook category of small, low-cost laptops in the West (in Japan, subnotebooks had long been a staple in computing). According to Asus, the name Eee derives from "the three Es", an abbreviation of its advertising slogan for the device: "Easy to learn, Easy to work, Easy to play".
In January 2013, ASUS officially ended production of their Eee PC series, citing declining sales due to consumers favoring tablets and Ultrabooks over netbooks. However, they subsequently restarted the line with the release of the EeeBook series in 2015.
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- "Asus Eee PC" | 2025-03-08 | 38 Upvotes 19 Comments
π Soundex β a phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound
Soundex is a phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound, as pronounced in English. The goal is for homophones to be encoded to the same representation so that they can be matched despite minor differences in spelling. The algorithm mainly encodes consonants; a vowel will not be encoded unless it is the first letter. Soundex is the most widely known of all phonetic algorithms (in part because it is a standard feature of popular database software such as DB2, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, Ingres, MS SQL Server and Oracle.) Improvements to Soundex are the basis for many modern phonetic algorithms.
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- "Soundex β a phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound" | 2019-10-20 | 106 Upvotes 41 Comments
- "Soundex" | 2018-05-25 | 95 Upvotes 26 Comments