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๐ Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?
Who put Bella down the Wych Elm? is graffiti that appeared in 1944 following the 1943 discovery by four children of the skeletonised remains of a woman inside a wych elm in Hagley Wood, Hagley (located in the estate of Hagley Hall), in Worcestershire, England. The victimโwhose murder is approximated to have occurred in 1941โremains unidentified, and the current location of her skeleton and autopsy report is unknown.
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- "Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?" | 2021-02-15 | 21 Upvotes 3 Comments
๐ OK Soda
OK Soda was a soft drink created by The Coca-Cola Company in 1993 that courted the American Generation X demographic with unusual advertising tactics, including neo-noir design, chain letters and deliberately negative publicity. After the soda did not sell well in select test markets, it was officially declared out of production in 1995 before reaching nationwide distribution. The drink's slogan was "Things are going to be OK."
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- "OK Soda" | 2020-04-07 | 254 Upvotes 128 Comments
๐ Wikipedia links to HN
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- "Wikipedia links to HN" | 2013-09-15 | 125 Upvotes 25 Comments
๐ List of photographs considered the most important
This is a list of photographs considered the most important in surveys where authoritative sources review the history of the medium not limited by time period, region, genre, topic, or other specific criteria. These images may be referred to as the most important, most iconic, or most influentialโbut they are all considered key images in the history of photography.
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- "List of photographs considered the most important" | 2023-09-12 | 11 Upvotes 3 Comments
๐ We (Novel)
We (Russian: ะั, romanized:ย My) is a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, written 1920โ1921. The novel was first published as an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York. The novel describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state. George Orwell claimed that Aldous Huxley's 1931 Brave New World must be partly derived from We, but Huxley denied it.
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- "We (Novel)" | 2019-10-19 | 29 Upvotes 6 Comments
๐ Why we're updating the default typography for Wikipedia
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- "Why we're updating the default typography for Wikipedia" | 2014-04-03 | 17 Upvotes 7 Comments
๐ R-tree
R-trees are tree data structures used for spatial access methods, i.e., for indexing multi-dimensional information such as geographical coordinates, rectangles or polygons. The R-tree was proposed by Antonin Guttman in 1984 and has found significant use in both theoretical and applied contexts. A common real-world usage for an R-tree might be to store spatial objects such as restaurant locations or the polygons that typical maps are made of: streets, buildings, outlines of lakes, coastlines, etc. and then find answers quickly to queries such as "Find all museums within 2 km of my current location", "retrieve all road segments within 2 km of my location" (to display them in a navigation system) or "find the nearest gas station" (although not taking roads into account). The R-tree can also accelerate nearest neighbor search for various distance metrics, including great-circle distance.
๐ The Basque-Icelandic Pidgin
The BasqueโIcelandic pidgin was a Basque-based pidgin spoken in Iceland in the 17th century. It consisted of Basque, Germanic and Romance words.
Basque whale hunters who sailed to the Icelandic Westfjords used the pidgin as a means of rudimentary communication with locals. It might have developed in Westfjords, where manuscripts were written in the language, but since it had influences from many other European languages, it is more likely that it was created elsewhere and brought to Iceland by Basque sailors. Basque entries are mixed with words from Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish. The BasqueโIcelandic pidgin is thereby not a mixture between Basque and Icelandic, but between Basque and other languages. It was named from the fact that it was written down in Iceland and translated into Icelandic.
Only a few manuscripts have been found containing BasqueโIcelandic glossary, and knowledge about the pidgin is limited.
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- "BasqueโIcelandic Pidgin" | 2022-04-01 | 99 Upvotes 13 Comments
- "The Basque-Icelandic Pidgin" | 2020-11-16 | 153 Upvotes 48 Comments
๐ Kaktovik Iรฑupiaq Numerals
Kaktovik Iรฑupiaq numerals are a featural positional numeral system created by Alaskan Iรฑupiat.
Arabic numeral notation, which was designed for a base-10 numeral system, is inadequate for the Inuit languages, which use a base-20 numeral system. Students from Kaktovik, Alaska invented a base-20 numeral notation in 1994 to rectify this issue, and this system spread among the Alaskan Iรฑupiat and has been considered in other countries where Inuit languages are spoken.
The image at right shows the digits 0 to 19. Twenty is written as a one and a zero (I0), forty as a two and a zero (V0), four hundred as a one and two zeros (I00), eight hundred as a two and two zeros (V00), etc.
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- "Kaktovik Iรฑupiaq Numerals" | 2020-12-07 | 26 Upvotes 11 Comments
๐ Xinjiang Re-Education Camps
The Xinjiang re-education camps, officially called Vocational Education and Training Centers by the government of the People's Republic of China, are internment camps that have been operated by the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region government for the purpose of indoctrinating Uyghurs since 2017 as part of a "people's war on terror" announced in 2014. The camps were established under General Secretary Xi Jinping's administration and led by party secretary, Chen Quanguo. These camps are reportedly operated outside the legal system; many Uyghurs have reportedly been interned without trial and no charges have been levied against them. Local authorities are reportedly holding hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs in these camps as well as other ethnic minority groups, for the stated purpose of countering extremism and terrorism and promoting sinicization.
As of 2018, it was estimated that the Chinese authorities may have detained hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and other ethnic Turkic Muslims, Christians as well as some foreign citizens such as Kazakhstanis, who are being held in these secretive internment camps which are located throughout the region. In May 2018, Randall Schriver of the United States Department of Defense claimed that "at least a million but likely closer to three million citizens" were imprisoned in detention centers in a strong condemnation of the "concentration camps". In August 2018, a United Nations human rights panel said that it had received many credible reports that 1 million ethnic Uyghurs in China have been held in "re-education camps". There have also been multiple reports from media, politicians and researchers comparing the camps to the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
In 2019, the United Nations ambassadors from 22 nations, including Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom signed a letter condemning China's mass detention of the Uyghurs and other minority groups, urging the Chinese government to close the camps. Conversely, a joint statement was signed by 37 states commending China's counter-terrorism program in Xinjiang, including Algeria, the DR Congo, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, North Korea, Egypt, Nigeria, the Philippines and Sudan.
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- "Xinjiang Re-Education Camps" | 2019-10-03 | 46 Upvotes 24 Comments