Random Articles (Page 285)
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๐ Gakken Ex-System
The Gakken EX-System is a series of educational electronics kits produced by Gakken in the late 1970s. The kits use denshi blocks (also known as electronic blocks) to allow electronics experiments to be performed easily and safely. Over 25 years after its original release, one of the main kits from the series was reissued in Japan in 2002.
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- "Gakken Ex-System" | 2024-04-06 | 70 Upvotes 22 Comments
๐ Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi High Court
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- "Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi High Court" | 2024-10-25 | 712 Upvotes 480 Comments
๐ Ballistic Recovery Systems
Ballistic Recovery Systems, Inc. (commonly referred to as BRS Aerospace, or simply BRS) is a manufacturer of aircraft ballistic parachutes.
The company was formed in 1980 by Boris Popov of Saint Paul, Minnesota, after he survived a 400-foot (120ย m) fall in a partially collapsed hang glider in 1975. As a result, Popov invented a parachute system that could lower an entire light aircraft to the ground in the event of loss of control, failure of the aircraft structure, or other in-flight emergencies.
Popov was granted a U.S. patent on 26 August 1986 for the so-called Ballistic Recovery System (BRS) - patent US 4607814 A.
The company has two divisions: BRS Aviation and BRS Defense.
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- "Ballistic Recovery Systems" | 2014-03-21 | 43 Upvotes 30 Comments
๐ The Drowned World
The Drowned World is a 1962 science fiction novel by British writer J. G. Ballard. The novel depicts a post-apocalyptic future in which global warming has caused the majority of the Earth to become uninhabitable. The story follows a team of scientists researching ongoing environmental developments in a flooded, abandoned London. The novel is an expansion of a novella of the same title first published in Science Fiction Adventures magazine in January 1962, Vol. 4, No. 24.
In 2010, Time Magazine named The Drowned World one of the top 10 best post-apocalyptic books. The novel has been identified as a founding text in the literary genre known as climate fiction.
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- "The Drowned World" | 2020-01-18 | 14 Upvotes 8 Comments
๐ Dรผrer's Rhinoceros
Dรผrer's Rhinoceros is the name commonly given to a woodcut executed by German painter and printmaker Albrecht Dรผrer in 1515. The image is based on a written description and brief sketch by an unknown artist of an Indian rhinoceros that had arrived in Lisbon in 1515. Dรผrer never saw the actual rhinoceros, which was the first living example seen in Europe since Roman times. In late 1515, the King of Portugal, Manuel I, sent the animal as a gift for Pope Leo X, but it died in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy in early 1516. A live rhinoceros was not seen again in Europe until a second specimen, named Abada, arrived from India at the court of Sebastian of Portugal in 1577, being later inherited by Philip II of Spain around 1580.
Dรผrer's woodcut is not an entirely accurate representation of a rhinoceros. He depicts an animal with hard plates that cover its body like sheets of armour, with a gorget at the throat, a solid-looking breastplate, and what appear to be rivets along the seams. He places a small twisted horn on its back and gives it scaly legs and saw-like rear quarters. None of these features is present in a real rhinoceros, although the Indian rhinoceros does have deep folds in its skin that can look like armor from a distance. Despite its anatomical inaccuracies, Dรผrer's woodcut became very popular in Europe and was copied many times in the following three centuries. It was regarded by Westerners as a true representation of a rhinoceros into the late 18th century. Eventually, it was supplanted by more realistic drawings and paintings, particularly those of Clara the rhinoceros, who toured Europe in the 1740s and 1750s. It has been said of Dรผrer's woodcut: "probably no animal picture has exerted such a profound influence on the arts".
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- "Dรผrer's Rhinoceros" | 2021-09-09 | 68 Upvotes 9 Comments
๐ Old English Wikipedia (or at least I think it is)
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- "Old English Wikipedia (or at least I think it is)" | 2019-08-08 | 23 Upvotes 9 Comments
๐ World Game
World Game, sometimes called the World Peace Game, is an educational simulation developed by Buckminster Fuller in 1961 to help create solutions to overpopulation and the uneven distribution of global resources. This alternative to war games uses Fuller's Dymaxion map and requires a group of players to cooperatively solve a set of metaphorical scenarios, thus challenging the dominant nation-state perspective with a more holistic "total world" view. The idea was to "make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone," thus increasing the quality of life for all people.
๐ Quine
A quine is a computer program which takes no input and produces a copy of its own source code as its only output. The standard terms for these programs in the computability theory and computer science literature are "self-replicating programs", "self-reproducing programs", and "self-copying programs".
A quine is a fixed point of an execution environment, when the execution environment is viewed as a function transforming programs into their outputs. Quines are possible in any Turing complete programming language, as a direct consequence of Kleene's recursion theorem. For amusement, programmers sometimes attempt to develop the shortest possible quine in any given programming language.
The name "quine" was coined by Douglas Hofstadter, in his popular science book Gรถdel, Escher, Bach, in honor of philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine (1908โ2000), who made an extensive study of indirect self-reference, and in particular for the following paradox-producing expression, known as Quine's paradox:
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation" yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation.
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- "Quine (computing)" | 2011-06-11 | 10 Upvotes 3 Comments
๐ Yarn Bombing
Yarn bombing (or yarnbombing) is a type of graffiti or street art that employs colourful displays of knitted or crocheted yarn or fibre rather than paint or chalk. It is also called wool bombing, yarn storming, guerrilla knitting, kniffiti, urban knitting, or graffiti knitting.
๐ Pรณlya conjecture
In number theory, the Pรณlya conjecture stated that "most" (i.e., 50% or more) of the natural numbers less than any given number have an odd number of prime factors. The conjecture was posited by the Hungarian mathematician George Pรณlya in 1919, and proved false in 1958 by C. Brian Haselgrove.
The size of the smallest counterexample is often used to show how a conjecture can be true for many cases, and still be false, providing an illustration for the strong law of small numbers.
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- "Pรณlya conjecture" | 2009-08-29 | 13 Upvotes 10 Comments