Random Articles (Page 3)
Have a deep view into what people are curious about.
π Detention of Mark Bernstein
On 11 March 2022, Mark Izraylevich Bernstein (Russian: ΠΠ°ΡΠΊ ΠΠ·ΡΠ°ΠΉΠ»Π΅Π²ΠΈΡ ΠΠ΅ΡΠ½ΡΡΠ΅ΠΉΠ½), a Belarusian blogger and editor of the Russian-language Wikipedia based in Minsk, was detained by the Belarusian GUBOPiK security force after online accusations of violating the 2022 Russian fake news law for his editing of Wikipedia articles on the topic of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. He was sentenced to 15 days' administrative arrest under Article 24.3 of the Administrative Code of Belarus (for disobedience to police officers).
Discussed on
- "Detention of Mark Bernstein" | 2022-06-23 | 112 Upvotes 21 Comments
π Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is an online service which allows users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Many online bookmark management services have launched since 1996; Delicious, founded in 2003, popularized the terms "social bookmarking" and "tagging". Tagging is a significant feature of social bookmarking systems, allowing users to organize their bookmarks and develop shared vocabularies known as folksonomies.
π Davy Crockett (nuclear device)
The M-28 or M-29 Davy Crockett Weapon System was the tactical nuclear recoilless gun (smoothbore) for firing the M-388 nuclear projectile that was deployed by the United States during the Cold War. It was one of the smallest nuclear weapon systems ever built, with a yield between 10 and 20 tons TNT equivalent (40β80 gigajoules). It is named after American folk hero, soldier, and congressman Davy Crockett.
Discussed on
- "Davy Crockett (nuclear device)" | 2018-09-15 | 58 Upvotes 59 Comments
π Palmer Notation
Palmer notation (sometimes called the "Military System" and named for 19th-century American dentist Dr. Corydon Palmer from Warren, Ohio) is a dental notation (tooth numbering system). Despite the adoption of the FDI World Dental Federation notation (ISO 3950) in most of the world and by the World Health Organization, the Palmer notation continued to be the overwhelmingly preferred method used by orthodontists, dental students and practitioners in the United Kingdom as of 1998.
The notation was originally termed the Zsigmondy system after Hungarian dentist Adolf Zsigmondy, who developed the idea in 1861 using a Zsigmondy cross to record quadrants of tooth positions. Adult teeth were numbered 1 to 8, and the child primary dentition (also called deciduous, milk or baby teeth) were depicted with a quadrant grid using Roman numerals I, II, III, IV, V to number the teeth from the midline. Palmer changed this to A, B, C, D, E, which made it less confusing and less prone to errors in interpretation.
The Palmer notation consists of a symbol (ββΏ ββΎ) designating in which quadrant the tooth is found and a number indicating the position from the midline. Adult teeth are numbered 1 to 8, with deciduous (baby) teeth indicated by a letter A to E. Hence the left and right maxillary central incisor would have the same number, "1", but the right one would have the symbol "β" underneath it, while the left one would have "βΏ".
Discussed on
- "Palmer Notation" | 2022-04-07 | 22 Upvotes 4 Comments
π Fallacies of Distributed Computing
The fallacies of distributed computing are a set of assertions made by L Peter Deutsch and others at Sun Microsystems describing false assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make.
Discussed on
- "Fallacies of Distributed Computing" | 2011-04-21 | 139 Upvotes 48 Comments
π Actuarial Notation
Actuarial notation is a shorthand method to allow actuaries to record mathematical formulas that deal with interest rates and life tables.
Traditional notation uses a halo system where symbols are placed as superscript or subscript before or after the main letter. Example notation using the halo system can be seen below.
Various proposals have been made to adopt a linear system where all the notation would be on a single line without the use of superscripts or subscripts. Such a method would be useful for computing where representation of the halo system can be extremely difficult. However, a standard linear system has yet to emerge.
Discussed on
- "Actuarial Notation" | 2021-09-21 | 78 Upvotes 19 Comments
π Kyshtym Disaster
The Kyshtym disaster, sometimes referred to as the Mayak disaster or Ozyorsk disaster in newer sources, was a radioactive contamination accident that occurred on 29 September 1957 at Mayak, a plutonium production site for nuclear weapons and nuclear fuel reprocessing plant located in the closed city of Chelyabinsk-40 (now Ozyorsk) in Chelyabinsk Oblast, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union.
The disaster was the second worst nuclear incident (by radioactivity released) after the Chernobyl disaster. It measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale (INES), making it the third highest on the INES (which ranks by population impact), behind Chernobyl (evacuated 335,000 people) and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (evacuated 154,000 people) which are both Level 7 on the INES. At least twenty-two villages were exposed to radiation from the Kyshtym disaster, with a total population of around 10,000 people evacuated. Some were evacuated after a week, but it took almost two years for evacuations to occur at other sites.
The disaster spread hot particles over more than 52,000 square kilometres (20,000Β sqΒ mi), where at least 270,000 people lived. Since Chelyabinsk-40 (later renamed Chelyabinsk-65 until 1994) was not marked on maps, the disaster was named after Kyshtym, the nearest known town.
Discussed on
- "Kyshtym Disaster" | 2021-10-13 | 60 Upvotes 37 Comments
π Amiga Unix
Amiga Unix (informally known as Amix) is a discontinued full port of AT&T Unix System V Release 4 operating system developed by Commodore-Amiga, Inc. in 1990 for the Amiga computer family as an alternative to AmigaOS, which shipped by default. Bundled with the Amiga 3000UX, Commodore's Unix was one of the first ports of SVR4 to the 68k architecture. The Amiga A3000UX model even got the attention of Sun Microsystems, though ultimately nothing came of it.
Unlike Apple's A/UX, Amiga Unix contained no compatibility layer to allow AmigaOS applications to run under Unix. With few native applications available to take advantage of the Amiga's significant multimedia capabilities, it failed to find a niche in the quite-competitive Unix workstation market of the early 1990s. The A3000UX's price tag of $4,998 (equivalent to $9,382 in 2019) was also not very attractive compared to other Unix workstations at the time, such as the NeXTstation ($5,000 for a base system, with a full API and many times the number of applications available), the SGI Indigo (starting at $8,000), or the Personal DECstation 5000 Model 25 (starting at $5,000). Sun, HP, and IBM had similarly priced systems. The A3000UX's 68030 was noticeably underpowered compared to most of its RISC-based competitors.
Unlike typical commercial Unix distributions of the time, Amiga Unix included the source code to the vendor-specific enhancements and platform-dependent device drivers (essentially any part that wasn't owned by AT&T), allowing interested users to study or enhance those parts of the system. However this source code was subject to the same license terms as the binary part of the systemΒ β it was not free software. Amiga Unix also incorporated and depended upon many open source components, such as the GNU C Compiler and X Window System, and included their source code.
Like many other proprietary Unix variants with small market shares, Amiga Unix vanished into the mists of computer history when its vendor, Commodore, went out of business. Today, Unix-like operating systems such as Minix, NetBSD, and Linux are available for the Amiga platform.
Discussed on
- "Amiga Unix" | 2013-06-23 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Pixel Art Scaling Algorithms
Pixel-art scaling algorithms are graphical filters that are often used in video game console emulators to enhance hand-drawn 2D pixel art graphics. The re-scaling of pixel art is a specialist sub-field of image rescaling.
As pixel-art graphics are usually in very low resolutions, they rely on careful placing of individual pixels, often with a limited palette of colors. This results in graphics that rely on a high amount of stylized visual cues to define complex shapes with very little resolution, down to individual pixels. This makes image scaling of pixel art a particularly difficult problem.
A number of specialized algorithms have been developed to handle pixel-art graphics, as the traditional scaling algorithms do not take such perceptual cues into account.
Since a typical application of this technology is improving the appearance of fourth-generation and earlier video games on arcade and console emulators, many are designed to run in real time for sufficiently small input images at 60 frames per second. This places constraints on the type of programming techniques that can be used for this sort of real-time processing. Many work only on specific scale factors: 2Γ is the most common, with 3Γ, 4Γ, 5Γ and 6Γ also present.
Discussed on
- "Pixel Art Scaling Algorithms" | 2010-12-23 | 208 Upvotes 32 Comments
π The βFinancializationβ of Society
Financialization (or financialisation in British English) is a term sometimes used to describe the development of financial capitalism during the period from 1980 to present, in which debt-to-equity ratios increased and financial services accounted for an increasing share of national income relative to other sectors.
Financialization describes an economic process by which exchange is facilitated through the intermediation of financial instruments. Financialization may permit real goods, services, and risks to be readily exchangeable for currency, and thus make it easier for people to rationalize their assets and income flows.
Discussed on
- "The βFinancializationβ of Society" | 2021-11-01 | 37 Upvotes 1 Comments