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🔗 Wikipedia: Imminent Death of Wikipedia Predicted
...film at 11.
It's often said that Wikipedia is dying. This is the latest in a long line of technological deaths. Earlier, the WikiWikiWeb died. Before that, Usenet died.
Reasons why Wikipedia is dying include and may not be limited to:
- most of the major editors are leaving
- most edits are now made by robots
- article syntax is too complicated for readers and new editors
- pop culture articles are longer than science or history articles
- power-hungry administrators are warring against content creators so they can delete everything and rule a perfect, empty wiki [Is this right? -- Ed.]
- the people with the most time to edit are also those with the most time and inclination to argue in perpetuity
- the Great Space Wombat said it is dying
- bias is going to destroy the entire neutral point of view we uphold so much
- vandalism.
No elaboration required. - the WMF is more corrupt than governments
- discussion here is more toxic than on Twitter
- nobody is donating (why else do they keep asking for money?)
- people will stop visiting the main site and just get blurbs from search engines or chatbots instead
- insert additional reasons here
Wikipedia has been dying since at least 100 years ago.
Discussed on
- "Wikipedia: Imminent Death of Wikipedia Predicted" | 2023-07-23 | 19 Upvotes 3 Comments
🔗 Artist's Shit
Artist's Shit (Italian: Merda d'artista) is a 1961 artwork by the Italian artist Piero Manzoni. The work consists of 90 tin cans, each reportedly filled with 30 grams (1.1 oz) of faeces, and measuring 4.8 by 6.5 centimetres (1.9 in × 2.6 in), with a label in Italian, English, French, and German stating:
Artist's Shit
Contents 30 gr net
Freshly preserved
Produced and tinned
in May 1961
Discussed on
- "Artist's Shit" | 2021-04-24 | 19 Upvotes 4 Comments
🔗 Fred Fish (Fish Disks)
Fred Fish (November 4, 1952 – April 20, 2007) was a computer programmer notable for work on the GNU Debugger and his series of freeware disks for the Amiga.
The Amiga Library Disks – colloquially referred to as Fish Disks (a term coined by Perry Kivolowitz at a Jersey Amiga User Group meeting) – became the first national rallying point, a sort of early postal system. Fish would distribute his disks around the world in time for regional and local user group meetings, which in turn duplicated them for local distribution. Typically, only the cost of materials changed hands. The Fish Disk series ran from 1986 to 1994. In it, one can chart the growing sophistication of Amiga software and see the emergence of many software trends.
The Fish Disks were distributed at computer stores and Amiga enthusiast clubs. Contributors submitted applications and source code and the best of these each month were assembled and released as a diskette. Since the Internet was not yet in popular usage outside military and university circles, this was a primary way for enthusiasts to share work and ideas. He also initiated the "GeekGadgets" project, a GNU standard environment for AmigaOS and BeOS.
Fish worked for Cygnus Solutions in the 1990s before he left for Be Inc. in 1998.
In 1978, he self-published User Survival Guide for TI-58/59 Master Library, which was advertised in enthusiast newsletters covering the TI-59 programmable calculator.
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- "Fred Fish (Fish Disks)" | 2023-08-16 | 169 Upvotes 44 Comments
🔗 Ragnarök
In Norse mythology, Ragnarök ( (listen); Old Norse: Ragnarǫk) is a series of events, including a great battle, foretelling the death of numerous great figures (including the gods Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdallr, and Loki), natural disasters, and the submersion of the world in water. After these events, the world will rise again, cleansed and fertile, the surviving and returning gods will meet and the world will be repopulated by two human survivors. Ragnarök is an important event in Norse mythology and has been the subject of scholarly discourse and theory in the history of Germanic studies.
The event is attested primarily in the Poetic Edda, compiled in the 13th century from earlier traditional sources, and the Prose Edda, written in the 13th century by Snorri Sturluson. In the Prose Edda and in a single poem in the Poetic Edda, the event is referred to as Ragnarøkkr (Old Norse for 'Twilight of the Gods'), a usage popularised by 19th-century composer Richard Wagner with the title of the last of his Der Ring des Nibelungen operas, Götterdämmerung (1876), which is "Twilight of the Gods" in German.
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- "Ragnarök" | 2022-10-04 | 23 Upvotes 7 Comments
🔗 Hello
Hello is a salutation or greeting in the English language. It is first attested in writing from 1826.
Discussed on
- "Hello" | 2023-07-26 | 25 Upvotes 7 Comments
🔗 Original Antigenic Sin
Original antigenic sin, also known as antigenic imprinting or the Hoskins effect, refers to the propensity of the body's immune system to preferentially utilize immunological memory based on a previous infection when a second slightly different version of that foreign pathogen (e.g. a virus or bacterium) is encountered. This leaves the immune system "trapped" by the first response it has made to each antigen, and unable to mount potentially more effective responses during subsequent infections. Antibodies or T-cells induced during infections with the first variant of the pathogen are subject to a form of original antigenic sin, termed repertoire freeze.
The phenomenon of original antigenic sin has been described in relation to influenza virus, dengue fever, human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and to several other viruses.
This phenomenon was first described in 1960 by Thomas Francis Jr. in the article "On the Doctrine of Original Antigenic Sin". It is named by analogy to the theological concept of original sin. According to Francis as cited by Richard Krause:
"The antibody of childhood is largely a response to dominant antigen of the virus causing the first type A influenza infection of the lifetime. [...] The imprint established by the original virus infection governs the antibody response thereafter. This we have called the Doctrine of the Original Antigenic Sin."
🔗 Rotary Woofer
A rotary woofer is a subwoofer-style loudspeaker which reproduces very low frequency content by using a conventional speaker voice coil's motion to change the pitch (angle) of the blades of an impeller rotating at a constant speed. The pitch of the fan blades is controlled by the audio signal presented to the voice coil, and is able to swing both positive and negative, with respect to a zero pitch spinning blade position. Since the audio amplifier only changes the pitch of the blades, it takes much less power, per dB of generated acoustic sound level, to drive a rotary woofer than to power a conventional subwoofer, which uses a moving electromagnet (voice coil) placed within the field of a stationary permanent magnet to drive a cone which then displaces air. Rotary woofers excel at producing sounds below 20 Hz, below the normal hearing range; when installed in the wall of a sealed room, they can produce audio frequencies down to 0 Hz, a static pressure differential, by simply compressing the air in the sealed room.
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- "Rotary Woofer" | 2023-09-15 | 24 Upvotes 2 Comments
🔗 Chaitin's Constant
In the computer science subfield of algorithmic information theory, a Chaitin constant (Chaitin omega number) or halting probability is a real number that, informally speaking, represents the probability that a randomly constructed program will halt. These numbers are formed from a construction due to Gregory Chaitin.
Although there are infinitely many halting probabilities, one for each method of encoding programs, it is common to use the letter Ω to refer to them as if there were only one. Because Ω depends on the program encoding used, it is sometimes called Chaitin's construction instead of Chaitin's constant when not referring to any specific encoding.
Each halting probability is a normal and transcendental real number that is not computable, which means that there is no algorithm to compute its digits. Indeed, each halting probability is Martin-Löf random, meaning there is not even any algorithm which can reliably guess its digits.
Discussed on
- "Chaitin's Constant" | 2020-01-20 | 81 Upvotes 38 Comments
🔗 Marree Man
The Marree Man, or Stuart's Giant, is a modern geoglyph the circumstances of whose creation have not been ascertained. It appears to depict an indigenous Australian man hunting with a boomerang or stick. It lies on a plateau at Finnis Springs 60 km (37 mi) west of the township of Marree in central South Australia. It is just outside the 127,000-square-kilometre (49,000 sq mi) Woomera Prohibited Area. The figure is 2.7 km (1.7 mi) tall with a perimeter of 28 km (17 mi), extending over an area of about 2.5 km2 (620 acres). Although it is one of the largest geoglyphs in the world (arguably second to the Sajama Lines), its origin remains a mystery, with no one claiming responsibility for its creation nor any eye-witness having been found, notwithstanding the scale of the operation required to form the outline on the plateau floor. The description "Stuart's Giant" was used in anonymous faxes sent to media as "Press Releases" in July 1998, in a reference to the explorer John McDouall Stuart. It was discovered fortuitously by a charter pilot in an overflight on 26 June 1998.
Shortly after its discovery, the site was closed by the South Australian government following legal action taken in late July by native title claimants, but flights over the site were not forbidden as native title fell under federal government jurisdiction.
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- "Marree Man" | 2019-08-24 | 103 Upvotes 27 Comments
🔗 Rhythm 0
Rhythm 0 was a six-hour work of performance art by Serbian artist Marina Abramović in Naples in 1974. The work involved Abramović standing still while the audience was invited to do to her whatever they wished, using one of 72 objects she had placed on a table. These included a rose, feather, perfume, honey, bread, grapes, wine, scissors, a scalpel, nails, a metal bar, a gun, and a bullet.
There were no separate stages. Abramović and the visitors stood in the same space, making it clear that the latter were part of the work. The purpose of the piece, she said, was to find out how far the public would go: "What is the public about and what are they going to do in this kind of situation?"
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- "Rhythm 0" | 2023-09-25 | 388 Upvotes 269 Comments