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🔗 Soviet Pilot Escapes from POW Camp by Stealing a German Bomber and Flying Home
Mikhail Petrovich Devyatayev (Russian: Михаил Петрович Девятаев; Moksha/Erzya: Михаил Петрович Девятаев; 8 July 1917 – 24 November 2002) was a Soviet fighter pilot known for his incredible escape from a Nazi concentration camp on the island of Usedom, in the Baltic Sea.
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- "Soviet Pilot Escapes from POW Camp by Stealing a German Bomber and Flying Home" | 2021-01-18 | 75 Upvotes 33 Comments
🔗 Solomon Shereshevsky
Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky (Russian: Соломон Вениаминович Шерешевский; 1886 – 1 May 1958), also known simply as 'Ш' ('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
🔗 Monobloc chair
The Monobloc (From mono- (“one”) + bloc (“block”), meaning an object forged in a single piece) chair is a lightweight stackable polypropylene chair, usually white in colour, often described as the world's most common plastic chair.
Based on original designs by the Canadian designer D.C. Simpson in 1946, variants of the one-piece plastic chair went into production with Allibert Group and Grosfillex Group in the 1970s. They were inspired by the Chair Universal 4867 design by Joe Colombo in 1965, but no patents were filed for a monobloc chair design. Since then, millions have been manufactured in countries including Russia, Taiwan, Australia, Mexico, the United States, Italy, France, Germany, Morocco, Turkey, Israel, India and China. The Monobloc chair is named because it is injection moulded from thermoplastic polypropylene, the granules being heated to about 220 degrees Celsius, and the melt injected into a mold. The gate of the mould is usually located in the seat, so ensuring smooth flow to all parts of the tool.
Close to a billion Monoblocs have been sold in Europe alone, with one Italian manufacturer producing over ten million a year. Many design variants of the basic idea exist. The chairs cost approximately $3.50 to produce, making them affordable across the world. The stackable design aids setting up large gatherings and storage of the chairs afterwards. In developing countries with high population growth, monoblocs are used to seat thousands of church attendees at a time. Social theorist Ethan Zuckerman describes the chair as having achieved a cultural global ubiquity.
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- "Monobloc chair" | 2020-02-22 | 381 Upvotes 117 Comments
🔗 --All You Zombies--
" '—All You Zombies—' " is a science fiction short story by American writer Robert A. Heinlein. It was written in one day, July 11, 1958, and first published in the March 1959 issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine after being rejected by Playboy.
The story involves a number of paradoxes caused by time travel. In 1980, it was nominated for the Balrog Award for short fiction.
"'—All You Zombies—'" further develops themes explored by the author in a previous work: "By His Bootstraps", published some 18 years earlier. Some of the same elements also appear later in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls (1985), including the Circle of Ouroboros and the Temporal Corps.
The unusual title of the story, which includes both the quotation marks and dashes shown above, is a quotation from a sentence near the end of the story; the quotation is taken from the middle of the sentence, hence the dashes indicating edited text before and after the title.
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- "All You Zombies" | 2022-02-25 | 111 Upvotes 51 Comments
- "--All You Zombies--" | 2009-12-19 | 30 Upvotes 13 Comments
- "All You Zombies— The most craziest of the time travel paradoxes" | 2008-10-10 | 42 Upvotes 21 Comments
🔗 Wikipedia's “moderate yet systematic” liberal citation bias
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- "Wikipedia's “moderate yet systematic” liberal citation bias" | 2023-02-10 | 42 Upvotes 19 Comments
🔗 Assassination of Kim Jong-Nam
On 13 February 2017, the eldest son of Kim Jong-il and half-brother of Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-nam, was attacked with the nerve agent VX at Kuala Lumpur International Airport in Malaysia. He had been exiled from North Korea in 2003 and had been living abroad.
Following his visit to the resort island Langkawi, Kim Jong-nam had arrived at terminal 2 sometime before 9:00 a.m. to take a 10:50 a.m. AirAsia flight to Macau. At approximately 9:00 a.m., two women attacked Kim Jong-nam with the VX nerve agent. He died about 15 to 20 minutes later.
The women were identified as Siti Aisyah, an Indonesian and Đoàn Thị Hương, a Vietnamese. Both were charged with the murder of Kim Jong-nam. The charges were dropped, although Hương pled guilty to "voluntarily causing hurt by dangerous weapons or means" and received a sentence of three years and four months. Four North Korean suspects left the airport shortly after the assassination and reached Pyongyang without being arrested. Other North Koreans were arrested but were released without charge.
It is widely believed that Kim Jong-nam was murdered on the orders of Kim Jong-un.
🔗 Silkie Chickens
The Silkie (also known as the Silky or Chinese silk chicken) is a breed of chicken named for its atypically fluffy plumage, which is said to feel like silk and satin. The breed has several other unusual qualities, such as black skin and bones, blue earlobes, and five toes on each foot, whereas most chickens only have four. They are often exhibited in poultry shows, and also appear in various colors. In addition to their distinctive physical characteristics, Silkies are well known for their calm, friendly temperament. It is among the most docile of poultry. Hens are also exceptionally broody, and care for young well. Although they are fair layers themselves, laying only about three eggs a week, they are commonly used to hatch eggs from other breeds and bird species due to their broody nature.
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- "Silkie Chickens" | 2023-01-27 | 14 Upvotes 1 Comments
🔗 Triple Fault
On the x86 computer architecture, a triple fault is a special kind of exception generated by the CPU when an exception occurs while the CPU is trying to invoke the double fault exception handler, which itself handles exceptions occurring while trying to invoke a regular exception handler.
x86 processors beginning with the 80286 will cause a shutdown cycle to occur when a triple fault is encountered. This typically causes the motherboard hardware to initiate a CPU reset, which, in turn, causes the whole computer to reboot.
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- "Triple Fault" | 2023-01-11 | 12 Upvotes 1 Comments
🔗 South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands (SGSSI) is a British Overseas Territory in the southern Atlantic Ocean. It is a remote and inhospitable collection of islands, consisting of South Georgia Island and a chain of smaller islands known as the South Sandwich Islands. South Georgia is 165 kilometres (103 mi) long and 35 kilometres (22 mi) wide and is by far the largest island in the territory. The South Sandwich Islands lie about 700 kilometres (430 mi) southeast of South Georgia. The territory's total land area is 3,903 km2 (1,507 sq mi). The Falkland Islands are about 1,300 kilometres (810 mi) west from its nearest point.
No permanent native population lives in the South Sandwich Islands, and a very small non-permanent population resides on South Georgia. There are no scheduled passenger flights or ferries to or from the territory, although visits by cruise liners to South Georgia are increasingly popular, with several thousand visitors each summer.
The United Kingdom claimed sovereignty over South Georgia in 1775 and the South Sandwich Islands in 1908. The territory of "South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands" was formed in 1985; previously, it had been governed as part of the Falkland Islands Dependencies. Argentina claimed South Georgia in 1927 and claimed the South Sandwich Islands in 1938.
Argentina maintained a naval station, Corbeta Uruguay, on Thule Island in the South Sandwich Islands from 1976 until 1982 when it was closed by the Royal Navy. The Argentine claim over South Georgia contributed to the 1982 Falklands War, during which Argentine forces briefly occupied the island. Argentina continues to claim sovereignty over South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands.
Toothfish are vital to the islands' economy; as a result, Toothfish Day is celebrated on 4 September as a bank holiday in the territory.
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- "South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands" | 2021-08-16 | 18 Upvotes 18 Comments
🔗 Koomey's law
Koomey's law describes a trend in the history of computing hardware: for about a half-century, the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated doubled about every 1.57 years. Professor Jonathan Koomey described the trend in a 2010 paper in which he wrote that "at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half."
This trend had been remarkably stable since the 1950s (R2 of over 98%). But in 2011, Koomey re-examined this data and found that after 2000, the doubling slowed to about once every 2.6 years. This is related to the slowing of Moore's Law, the ability to build smaller transistors; and the end around 2005 of Dennard scaling, the ability to build smaller transistors with constant power density.
"The difference between these two growth rates is substantial. A doubling every year and a half results in a 100-fold increase in efficiency every decade. A doubling every two and a half years yields just a 16-fold increase", Koomey wrote.
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- "Koomey's law" | 2017-03-31 | 128 Upvotes 55 Comments