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🔗 Barbara Newhall Follett
Barbara Newhall Follett (March 4, 1914 – disappeared December 7, 1939) was an American child prodigy novelist. Her first novel, The House Without Windows, was published in January 1927, when she was twelve years old. Her next novel, The Voyage of the Norman D.w, received critical acclaim when she was fourteen.
In December 1939, aged 25, Follett reportedly became depressed with her marriage and walked out of her apartment, never to be seen again.
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- "Barbara Newhall Follett" | 2020-02-16 | 60 Upvotes 14 Comments
🔗 Arabic Wikipedia Blackout
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- "Arabic Wikipedia Blackout" | 2024-01-04 | 42 Upvotes 21 Comments
🔗 Kayfabe
In professional wrestling, kayfabe (also called work or worked) is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or predetermined nature of any kind. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.
Kayfabe is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe during a show would be likened to an actor breaking character on-camera. Also, since wrestling is performed in front of a live audience, whose interaction with the show is crucial to its success, kayfabe can be compared to the fourth wall in acting, since hardly any conventional fourth wall exists to begin with. In general, everything in a professional wrestling show is to some extent scripted, or "kayfabe", even though at times it is portrayed as real-life.
Kayfabe was fiercely maintained for decades, but with the advent of the Internet wrestling community, and the sports entertainment movement, the pro wrestling industry has become less concerned with protecting so-called backstage secrets and typically maintains kayfabe only during the shows. Kayfabe is, however, occasionally broken during shows, usually when dealing with genuine injuries during a match or paying tribute to wrestlers.
🔗 Nothing-up-my-sleeve number
In cryptography, nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers are any numbers which, by their construction, are above suspicion of hidden properties. They are used in creating cryptographic functions such as hashes and ciphers. These algorithms often need randomized constants for mixing or initialization purposes. The cryptographer may wish to pick these values in a way that demonstrates the constants were not selected for a nefarious purpose, for example, to create a backdoor to the algorithm. These fears can be allayed by using numbers created in a way that leaves little room for adjustment. An example would be the use of initial digits from the number π as the constants. Using digits of π millions of places after the decimal point would not be considered trustworthy because the algorithm designer might have selected that starting point because it created a secret weakness the designer could later exploit—though even with natural-seeming selections, enough entropy exists in the possible choices that the utility of these numbers has been questioned.
Digits in the positional representations of real numbers such as π, e, and irrational roots are believed to appear with equal frequency (see normal number). Such numbers can be viewed as the opposite extreme of Chaitin–Kolmogorov random numbers in that they appear random but have very low information entropy. Their use is motivated by early controversy over the U.S. Government's 1975 Data Encryption Standard, which came under criticism because no explanation was supplied for the constants used in its S-box (though they were later found to have been carefully selected to protect against the then-classified technique of differential cryptanalysis). Thus a need was felt for a more transparent way to generate constants used in cryptography.
"Nothing up my sleeve" is a phrase associated with magicians, who sometimes preface a magic trick by holding open their sleeves to show they have no objects hidden inside.
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- "Nothing-up-my-sleeve number" | 2024-11-18 | 43 Upvotes 12 Comments
🔗 The Great Debate
The Great Debate, also called the Shapley–Curtis Debate, was held on 26 April 1920 at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis. It concerned the nature of so-called spiral nebulae and the size of the universe; Shapley believed that distant nebulae were relatively small and lay within the outskirts of Earth's home galaxy, while Curtis held that they were in fact independent galaxies, implying that they were exceedingly large and distant.
The two scientists first presented independent technical papers about "The Scale of the Universe" during the day and then took part in a joint discussion that evening. Much of the lore of the Great Debate grew out of two papers published by Shapley and by Curtis in the May 1921 issue of the Bulletin of the National Research Council. The published papers each included counter arguments to the position advocated by the other scientist at the 1920 meeting.
In the aftermath of the public debate, scientists have been able to verify individual pieces of evidence from both astronomers, but on the main point of the existence of other galaxies, Curtis has been proven correct.
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- "Great Debate (Astronomy)" | 2020-04-25 | 62 Upvotes 9 Comments
- "The Great Debate" | 2019-08-21 | 14 Upvotes 2 Comments
🔗 The Edison Disc Record
The Edison Diamond Disc Record is a type of phonograph record marketed by Thomas A. Edison, Inc. on their Edison Record label from 1912 to 1929. They were named Diamond Discs because the matching Edison Disc Phonograph was fitted with a permanent conical diamond stylus for playing them. Diamond Discs were incompatible with lateral-groove disc record players, e.g. the Victor Victrola, the disposable steel needles of which would damage them while extracting hardly any sound. Uniquely, they are just under 1⁄4 in (6.0 mm; 0.235 in) thick.
Edison had previously made only phonograph cylinders but decided to add a disc format to the product line because of the increasingly dominant market share of the shellac disc records (later called 78s because of their typical rotational speed in revolutions per minute) made by competitors such as the Victor Talking Machine Company. Victor and most other makers recorded and played sound by a lateral or side-to-side motion of the stylus in the record groove, while in the Edison system the motion was vertical or up-and-down, known as vertical recording, as used for cylinder records. An Edison Disc Phonograph is distinguished by the diaphragm of the reproducer being parallel to the surface of the record. The diaphragm of a reproducer used for playing lateral records is at a right angle to the surface.
In the late summer and early fall of 1929 Edison also briefly produced a high-quality series of thin electrically recorded lateral-cut "Needle Type" disc records for use on standard record players.
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- "The Edison Disc Record" | 2023-10-26 | 13 Upvotes 3 Comments
🔗 Wikipedia's robots.txt
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- "Wikipedia's Robot.txt" | 2021-03-26 | 17 Upvotes 3 Comments
- "Wikipedia's robots.txt" | 2019-07-16 | 105 Upvotes 38 Comments
- "The wikipedia robots.txt" | 2011-10-28 | 42 Upvotes 3 Comments
🔗 Fearmongering
Fearmongering, or scaremongering, is the act of exploiting feelings of fear by using exaggerated rumors of impending danger, usually for personal gain.
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- "Fearmongering" | 2025-05-18 | 20 Upvotes 1 Comments
🔗 Mundaneum
The Mundaneum was an institution which aimed to gather together all the world's knowledge and classify it according to a system developed called the Universal Decimal Classification. It was developed at the turn of the 20th century by Belgian lawyers Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine. The Mundaneum has been identified as a milestone in the history of data collection and management, and (somewhat more tenuously) as a precursor to the Internet.
In the 21st century, the Mundaneum is a non-profit organisation based in Mons, Belgium that runs an exhibition space, website and archive which celebrate the legacy of the original Mundaneum.
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- "Mundaneum" | 2021-12-05 | 51 Upvotes 31 Comments
- "Mundaneum" | 2015-08-23 | 31 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Mundaneum" | 2015-06-26 | 30 Upvotes 6 Comments
🔗 Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuaki
Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu is a hill near Porangahau, south of Waipukurau in southern Hawke's Bay, New Zealand. The height of the hill is 305 metres (1,001 ft). The hill is notable primarily for its unusually long name, which is of Māori origin; it is often shortened to Taumata for brevity. It has gained a measure of fame as it is the longest place name found in any English-speaking country, and possibly the longest place name in the world; according to World Atlas. The name of the hill (with 85 characters) has also been listed in the Guinness World Records as the longest place name. Other versions of the name, including longer ones, are also sometimes used.
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- "Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuak" | 2020-08-06 | 19 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuaki" | 2018-07-12 | 26 Upvotes 17 Comments