Random Articles (Page 3)
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๐ Idaho Stop
The Idaho stop is the common name for laws that allow cyclists to treat a stop sign as a yield sign, and a red light as a stop sign. It first became law in Idaho in 1982, but was not adopted elsewhere until Delaware adopted a limited stop-as-yield law, the "Delaware Yield", in 2017. Arkansas was the second state to legalize both stop-as-yield and red light-as-stop in April 2019. Studies in Delaware and Idaho have shown significant decreases in crashes at stop-controlled intersections.
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- "Idaho Stop" | 2022-11-05 | 131 Upvotes 293 Comments
๐ Intel Skulltrail
Intel's Skulltrail is an enthusiast gaming platform that was released on February 19, 2008. It is based on the company's 5400 "Seaburg" workstation chipset. The primary difference between Skulltrail and Intel's current and past enthusiast chipsets is a dual CPU socket design that allows two processors to operate on the same motherboard. Therefore, Skulltrail can operate eight processing cores on one system. The platform supports two Core 2 Extreme QX9775 processors (commonly mistaken for the Core 2 Extreme QX9770, which is the LGA775 counterpart), which operate at 3.2ย GHz.
Skulltrail was one of the first platforms to support SLI on chipsets not designed by Nvidia. It achieves this by including two NVIDIA nForce 100 PCIe 1.1 switch (two x16 to one x16) chips. The implementation of SLI supports Quad SLI technology, which is achieved through the use of two dual-GPU graphics cards from NVIDIA, including the GeForce 9800 GX2. This gives a total of four graphics processors. Owners of Skulltrail systems can also make use of up to four ATI graphics cards using ATI CrossFireX technology, which made SkullTrail the only platform (other than Intel X58 and P55 Chipset) to support both SLI and CrossFire with public drivers at the time of release. The HP Firebird 803 also supported SLI on one (proprietary, MXM) motherboard at the time, but the drivers were special and only available for Firebird hardware.
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- "Intel Skulltrail" | 2023-05-08 | 13 Upvotes 13 Comments
๐ Wootz steel
Wootz steel is a crucible steel characterized by a pattern of bands. These bands are formed by sheets of microscopic carbides within a tempered martensite or pearlite matrix in higher carbon steel, or by ferrite and pearlite banding in lower carbon steels. It was a pioneering steel alloy developed in Southern India (Tamilakam present day Tamil Nadu and Kerala) and Sri Lanka in the 6th century BC and exported globally. It was also known in the ancient world by many different names including ukku, Hindvi steel, Hinduwani steel, Teling steel and seric iron.
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- "Wootz steel" | 2019-06-19 | 61 Upvotes 45 Comments
๐ Chindลgu
Chindลgu (็้ๅ ท) is the practice of inventing ingenious everyday gadgets that seem to be ideal solutions to particular problems, but which may cause more problems than they solve. The term is of Japanese origin.
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- "Chindลgu" | 2023-05-14 | 15 Upvotes 4 Comments
๐ Lithops
Lithops is a genus of succulent plants in the ice plant family, Aizoaceae. Members of the genus are native to southern Africa. The name is derived from the Ancient Greek words ฮปฮฏฮธฮฟฯ (lรญthos), meaning "stone," and แฝฯ (รณps), meaning "face," referring to the stone-like appearance of the plants. They avoid being eaten by blending in with surrounding rocks and are often known as pebble plants or living stones. The formation of the name from the Ancient Greek "-ops" means that even a single plant is called a Lithops.
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- "Lithops" | 2022-02-24 | 91 Upvotes 18 Comments
๐ Lynn Conway Has Died
Lynn Ann Conway (January 2, 1938 - June 9, 2024) was an American computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist.
She worked at IBM in the 1960s and invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance. She initiated the MeadโConway VLSI chip design revolution in very large scale integrated (VLSI) microchip design. That revolution spread rapidly through the research universities and computing industries during the 1980s, incubating an emerging electronic design automation industry, spawning the modern 'foundry' infrastructure for chip design and production, and triggering a rush of impactful high-tech startups in the 1980s and 1990s.
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- "Lynn Conway Has Died" | 2024-06-11 | 1667 Upvotes 328 Comments
๐ List of spacecraft in the Culture series
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- "List of spacecraft in the Culture series" | 2016-11-21 | 115 Upvotes 83 Comments
๐ Levenshtein Distance
In information theory, linguistics and computer science, the Levenshtein distance is a string metric for measuring the difference between two sequences. Informally, the Levenshtein distance between two words is the minimum number of single-character edits (insertions, deletions or substitutions) required to change one word into the other. It is named after the Soviet mathematician Vladimir Levenshtein, who considered this distance in 1965.
Levenshtein distance may also be referred to as edit distance, although that term may also denote a larger family of distance metrics known collectively as edit distance. It is closely related to pairwise string alignments.
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- "Levenshtein Distance" | 2019-08-22 | 215 Upvotes 126 Comments
๐ Thought-Terminating Cliche
A thought-terminating clichรฉ (also known as a semantic stop-sign, a thought-stopper, bumper sticker logic, or clichรฉ thinking) is a form of loaded language, commonly used to quell cognitive dissonance. Depending on context in which a phrase (or clichรฉ) is used, it may actually be valid and not qualify as thought-terminating; it does qualify as such when its application intends to dismiss dissent or justify fallacious logic. Its only function is to stop an argument from proceeding further, in other words "end the debate with a cliche... not a point." The term was popularized by Robert Jay Lifton in his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, who called the use of the clichรฉ, along with "loading the language", as "The language of Non-thought".
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- "Thought-Terminating Clichรฉ" | 2023-07-08 | 40 Upvotes 25 Comments
- "Thought-Terminating Clichรฉ" | 2021-08-20 | 138 Upvotes 138 Comments
- "Thought-Terminating Cliche" | 2020-06-14 | 18 Upvotes 10 Comments
๐ Abraham Lempel (LZ77) has died
Abraham Lempel (Hebrew: ืืืจืื ืืืคื, 10 February 1936 โ 4 February 2023) was an Israeli computer scientist and one of the fathers of the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms.
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- "RIP Abraham Lempel โ one of the fathers of the LZ(ZIP) compression algorithms" | 2023-02-06 | 12 Upvotes 2 Comments