Random Articles (Page 29)
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π Mummy Brown
Mummy brown, also known as Egyptian brown or Caput Mortuum,:β254β is a rich brown bituminous pigment with good transparency, sitting between burnt umber and raw umber in tint. The pigment was made from the flesh of mummies mixed with white pitch and myrrh. Mummy brown was extremely popular from the mid-eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. However, fresh supplies of mummies diminished, and artists were less satisfied with the pigment's permanency and finish. By 1915, demand had significantly declined. Suppliers ceased to offer it by the middle of the twentieth century.:β82β
Mummy brown was one of the favourite colours of the Pre-Raphaelites. It was used by many artists, including Eugene Delacroix, William Beechey, Edward Burne-Jones, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and Martin Drolling.
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- "Mummy Brown" | 2024-05-16 | 40 Upvotes 16 Comments
π Bernoulli Family
The Bernoulli family (German pronunciation: [bΙΚΛnΚli]) of Basel was a patrician family, notable for having produced eight mathematically gifted academics who, among them, contributed substantially to the development of mathematics and physics during the early modern period.
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- "Bernoulli Family" | 2023-06-17 | 22 Upvotes 5 Comments
π Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" is a grammatically correct sentence in American English, often presented as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs through lexical ambiguity. It has been discussed in literature in various forms since 1967, when it appeared in Dmitri Borgmann's Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought.
The sentence employs three distinct meanings of the word buffalo:
- as a proper noun to refer to a specific place named Buffalo, the city of Buffalo, New York, being the most notable;
- as a verb (uncommon in regular usage) to buffalo, meaning "to bully, harass, or intimidate" or "to baffle"; and
- as a noun to refer to the animal, bison (often called buffalo in North America). The plural is also buffalo.
An expanded form of the sentence which preserves the original word order is: "Buffalo bison, that other Buffalo bison bully, also bully Buffalo bison."
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- "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" | 2025-03-01 | 19 Upvotes 3 Comments
- "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" | 2023-09-07 | 178 Upvotes 95 Comments
- "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" | 2023-06-24 | 17 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" | 2023-05-22 | 19 Upvotes 5 Comments
- "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" | 2020-02-10 | 29 Upvotes 19 Comments
- "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" | 2018-11-06 | 18 Upvotes 6 Comments
- "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" | 2016-05-08 | 52 Upvotes 17 Comments
- "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" | 2010-02-03 | 174 Upvotes 69 Comments
π Unusual Wikipedia Articles
Of the over six million articles in the English Wikipedia there are some articles that Wikipedians have identified as being somewhat unusual. These articles are verifiable, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are a bit odd, whimsical, or something one would not expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica. We should take special care to meet the highest standards of an encyclopedia with these articles lest they make Wikipedia appear idiosyncratic. If you wish to add an article to this list, the article in question should preferably meet one or more of these criteria:
- The article is something a reasonable person would not expect to find in a standard encyclopedia.
- The subject is a highly unusual combination of concepts, such as cosmic latte, death from laughter, etc.
- The subject is a clear anomalyβsomething that defies common sense, common expectations or common knowledge, such as Bir Tawil, MΓ€rket, Phineas Gage, Snow in Florida, etc.
- The subject is well-documented for unexpected notoriety or an unplanned cult following at extreme levels, such as AmpelmΓ€nnchen or All your base are belong to us.
- The subject is a notorious hoax, such as the Sokal affair or Mary Toft.
- The subject might be found amusing, though serious.
- The subject is distinct amongst other similar ones.
- The article is a list or collection of articles or subjects meeting the criteria above.
This definition is not precise or absolute; some articles could still be considered unusual even if they do not fit these guidelines.
To keep the list of interest to readers, each entry on this list should be an article on its own (not merely a section in a less unusual article) and of decent quality, and in large meeting Wikipedia's manual of style. For unusual contributions that are of greater levity, see Wikipedia:Silly Things. A star () indicates a featured article. A plus () indicates a good article.
Discussed on
- "Wikipedia:Unusual articles" | 2017-06-11 | 27 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "List of unusual Wikipedia articles" | 2010-01-02 | 55 Upvotes 13 Comments
π Solomon Shereshevsky
Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky (Russian: Π‘ΠΎΠ»ΠΎΠΌΠΎΠ½ ΠΠ΅Π½ΠΈΠ°ΠΌΠΈΠ½ΠΎΠ²ΠΈΡ Π¨Π΅ΡΠ΅ΡΠ΅Π²ΡΠΊΠΈΠΉ; 1886 β 1 May 1958), also known simply as 'Π¨' ('Sh'), 'S.', or Luria's S, was a Soviet journalist and mnemonist active in the 1920s. He was the subject of Alexander Luria's case study The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968).
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- "Solomon Shereshevsky" | 2024-01-03 | 77 Upvotes 11 Comments
π SuperH
SuperH (or SH) is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Hitachi and currently produced by Renesas. It is implemented by microcontrollers and microprocessors for embedded systems.
At the time of introduction, SuperH was notable for having fixed-length 16-bit instructions in spite of its 32-bit architecture. This was a novel approach; at the time, RISC processors always used an instruction size that was the same as the internal data width, typically 32-bits. Using smaller instructions had consequences, the register file was smaller and instructions were generally two-operand format. But for the market the SuperH was aimed at, this was a small price to pay for the improved memory and processor cache efficiency.
Later versions of the design, starting with SH-5, included both 16- and 32-bit instructions, with the 16-bit versions mapping onto the 32-bit version inside the CPU. This allowed the machine code to continue using the shorter instructions to save memory, while not demanding the amount of instruction decoding logic needed if they were completely separate instructions. This concept is now known as a compressed instruction set and is also used by other companies, the most notable example being ARM for its Thumb instruction set.
As of 2015, many of the original patents for the SuperH architecture are expiring and the SH-2 CPU has been reimplemented as open source hardware under the name J2.
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- "SuperH" | 2021-12-04 | 147 Upvotes 68 Comments
π A function that represents all primes
In number theory, a formula for primes is a formula generating the prime numbers, exactly and without exception. No such formula which is efficiently computable is known. A number of constraints are known, showing what such a "formula" can and cannot be.
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- "A function that represents all primes" | 2019-10-05 | 16 Upvotes 8 Comments
π List of countries by mobile phones in use
This list ranks the countries of the world by the number of mobile phone numbers in use. Note that it is not the number of phone devices that are being given here, but the number of phone numbers in a country. In some countries, one person might have two mobile phones. Also, some mobile phone numbers may be used by machines as a modem (examples: intrusion detection systems, home automation, leak detection).
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- "List of countries by mobile phones in use" | 2019-09-05 | 54 Upvotes 27 Comments
π Induced Demand Is Real
Induced demand β related to latent demand and generated demand β is the phenomenon that after supply increases, price declines and more of a good is consumed. This is entirely consistent with the economic theory of supply and demand; however, this idea has become important in the debate over the expansion of transportation systems, and is often used as an argument against increasing roadway traffic capacity as a cure for congestion. This phenomenon, more correctly called "induced traffic" or consumption of road capacity, may be a contributing factor to urban sprawl. City planner Jeff Speck has called induced demand "the great intellectual black hole in city planning, the one professional certainty that everyone thoughtful seems to acknowledge, yet almost no one is willing to act upon."
The inverse effect, or reduced demand, is also observed (see Β§Β Reduced demand).
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- "Induced Demand Is Real" | 2022-04-07 | 31 Upvotes 60 Comments
π Core War
Core War is a 1984 programming game created by D. G. Jones and A. K. Dewdney in which two or more battle programs (called "warriors") compete for control of a virtual computer. These battle programs are written in an abstract assembly language called Redcode.
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- "Core War, a very old game about programming" | 2023-08-14 | 66 Upvotes 14 Comments
- "Core War" | 2022-02-11 | 236 Upvotes 50 Comments