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πŸ”— Closed city

πŸ”— Soviet Union πŸ”— Russia πŸ”— Law πŸ”— Politics πŸ”— Cities πŸ”— Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history πŸ”— Russia/politics and law of Russia πŸ”— Russia/human geography of Russia

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°ΠΊΡ€Ρ‹Ρ‚Ρ‹Π΅ административно-Ρ‚Π΅Ρ€Ρ€ΠΈΡ‚ΠΎΡ€ΠΈΠ°Π»ΡŒΠ½Ρ‹Π΅ образования, zakrytye administrativno-territorial'nye obrazovaniya, or Π—ΠΠ’Πž ZATO for short).

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πŸ”— Vim, 25 years since initial release

πŸ”— Apple Inc. πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computing/Software πŸ”— Computing/Free and open-source software πŸ”— Linux πŸ”— Perl

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.

πŸ”— 999-Year Lease

πŸ”— Law πŸ”— Lists

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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πŸ”— Anna Karenina Principle

πŸ”— Statistics πŸ”— Sociology

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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πŸ”— List of Topics Categorized as Pseudoscience

πŸ”— Physics πŸ”— Lists πŸ”— Skepticism πŸ”— History of Science πŸ”— Alternative Views πŸ”— Science πŸ”— Alternative medicine πŸ”— Paranormal πŸ”— Creationism

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 practicesβ€”efforts 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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πŸ”— International Talk Like a Pirate Day

πŸ”— Oregon πŸ”— Holidays πŸ”— Piracy

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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πŸ”— The Free Will Theorem

πŸ”— Physics

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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πŸ”— Asus Eee PC

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Linux

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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πŸ”— Soundex – a phonetic algorithm for indexing names by sound

πŸ”— Computer science πŸ”— Linguistics πŸ”— Linguistics/Applied Linguistics

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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