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π 1 + 2 + 3 + .. = -1/12
Ramanujan summation is a technique invented by the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan for assigning a value to divergent infinite series. Although the Ramanujan summation of a divergent series is not a sum in the traditional sense, it has properties which make it mathematically useful in the study of divergent infinite series, for which conventional summation is undefined.
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- "1 + 2 + 3 + .. = -1/12" | 2014-01-14 | 13 Upvotes 19 Comments
π Potoooooooo
Potoooooooo or variations of Pot-8-Os (1773 β November 1800) was an 18th-century thoroughbred racehorse who won over 30 races and defeated some of the greatest racehorses of the time. He went on to be a sire. He is now best known for the unusual spelling of his name, pronounced 'Potatoes'.
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- "Potoooooooo" | 2025-01-16 | 104 Upvotes 42 Comments
- "Potoooooooo" | 2021-07-28 | 128 Upvotes 32 Comments
π Beach theft
Sand theft or unauthorised or illegal sand mining leads to a widely unknown global example of natural and non-renewable resource depletion problem comparable in extent to global water scarcity. Beach theft is illegal removal of large quantities of sand from a beach leading to full or partial disappearance of the beach.
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- "Beach theft" | 2014-06-12 | 50 Upvotes 23 Comments
π Baumol Effect
Baumol's cost disease (or the Baumol effect) is the rise of salaries in jobs that have experienced no or low increase of labor productivity, in response to rising salaries in other jobs that have experienced higher labor productivity growth. This pattern seemingly goes against the theory in classical economics in which real wage growth is closely tied to labor productivity changes. The phenomenon was described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s.
The rise of wages in jobs without productivity gains is from the requirement to compete for employees with jobs that have experienced gains and so can naturally pay higher salaries, just as classical economics predicts. For instance, if the retail sector pays its managers 19th-century-style salaries, the managers may decide to quit to get a job at an automobile factory, where salaries are higher because of high labor productivity. Thus, managers' salaries are increased not by labor productivity increases in the retail sector but by productivity and corresponding wage increases in other industries.
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- "Baumol Effect" | 2020-10-17 | 123 Upvotes 99 Comments
- "Baumol Effect" | 2019-07-15 | 91 Upvotes 62 Comments
- "Baumol's Cost Disease: Why Artists are Always Poor" | 2009-12-02 | 39 Upvotes 14 Comments
π Winsorized Mean
A winsorized mean is a winsorized statistical measure of central tendency, much like the mean and median, and even more similar to the truncated mean. It involves the calculation of the mean after winsorizing β replacing given parts of a probability distribution or sample at the high and low end with the most extreme remaining values, typically doing so for an equal amount of both extremes; often 10 to 25 percent of the ends are replaced. The winsorized mean can equivalently be expressed as a weighted average of the truncated mean and the quantiles at which it is limited, which corresponds to replacing parts with the corresponding quantiles.
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- "Winsorized Mean" | 2023-10-17 | 108 Upvotes 53 Comments
π The "If By Whiskey" speech
Judge Noah S. "Soggy" Sweat, Jr. (October 2, 1922Β β February 23, 1996) was a judge, law professor, and state representative in the U.S. state of Mississippi, notable for his 1952 speech on the floor of the Mississippi state legislature concerning whiskey. Reportedly the speech took Sweat two and a half months to write. The speech is renowned for the grand rhetorical terms in which it seems to come down firmly and decisively on both sides of the question. The speech gave rise to the phrase if-by-whiskey, used to illustrate such equivocation in argument.
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- "The "If By Whiskey" speech" | 2010-09-25 | 83 Upvotes 6 Comments
π Shatranj, the predecessor of modern chess
Shatranj (Arabic: Ψ΄Ψ·Ψ±ΩΨ¬β; Persian: Ψ΄ΨͺΨ±ΩΪ―β; from Middle Persian chatrang) is an old form of chess, as played in the Sasanian Empire. Its origins are in the Indian game of chaturaαΉ ga. Modern chess gradually developed from this game, as it was introduced to the western world via contacts in Muslim Andalusia (modern Spain) and in Sicily in the 10th century.
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- "Shatranj, the predecessor of modern chess" | 2015-01-26 | 47 Upvotes 10 Comments
π Obesity in US 1985-2006
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- "Obesity in US 1985-2006" | 2010-12-26 | 14 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Base58
Base58 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes used to represent large integers as alphanumeric text, introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto for use with Bitcoin. It has since been applied to other cryptocurrencies and applications. It is similar to Base64 but has been modified to avoid both non-alphanumeric characters and letters which might look ambiguous when printed. It is therefore designed for human users who manually enter the data, copying from some visual source, but also allows easy copy and paste because a double-click will usually select the whole string.
Compared with Base64, the following similar-looking letters are omitted: 0 (zero), O (capital o), I (capital i) and l (lower case L) as well as the non-alphanumeric characters + (plus) and / (slash). In contrast with Base64, the digits of the encoding do not line up well with byte boundaries of the original data. For this reason, the method is well-suited to encode large integers, but not designed to encode longer portions of binary data. The actual order of letters in the alphabet depends on the application, which is the reason why the term βBase58β alone is not enough to fully describe the format. A variant, Base56, excludes 1 (one) and o (lowercase o) compared with Base 58.
Base58Check is a Base58 encoding format that unambiguously encodes the type of data in the first few characters and includes an error detection code in the last few characters.
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- "Base58" | 2018-11-08 | 95 Upvotes 43 Comments
π Mars Monolith
The Mars monolith is a rectangular object (possibly a boulder) discovered on the surface of Mars. It is located near the bottom of a cliff, from which it likely fell. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of it from orbit, roughly 180 miles (300Β km) away.
Around the same time, the Phobos monolith made international news.