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π "Some German bombers landed at UK bases, believing they were back in Germany."
The Battle of the Beams was a period early in the Second World War when bombers of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) used a number of increasingly accurate systems of radio navigation for night bombing in the United Kingdom. British scientific intelligence at the Air Ministry fought back with a variety of their own increasingly effective means, involving jamming and distortion of the radio waves. The period ended when the Wehrmacht moved their forces to the East in May 1941, in preparation for the attack on the Soviet Union.
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- "The Battle of the Beams" | 2026-02-15 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
- ""Some German bombers landed at UK bases, believing they were back in Germany."" | 2010-08-16 | 99 Upvotes 17 Comments
π Nordstrom's 75-word employee handbook
Nordstrom, Inc. () is an American luxury department store chain founded in 1901 by John W. Nordstrom and Carl F. Wallin. It originated as a shoe store, and evolved into a full-line retailer with departments for clothing, footwear, handbags, jewelry, accessories, cosmetics, and fragrances. Some stores feature home furnishings and wedding departments, and several have in-house cafes, restaurants, and espresso bars.
As of 2020, Nordstrom operates 117 stores in 40 U.S. states, three Canadian provinces, and Puerto Rico. The corporate headquarters and flagship store are located in the former Frederick & Nelson building in Seattle, Washington; a second flagship store is located near Columbus Circle in New York City. Its subsidiaries include the off-price department store chain Nordstrom Rack and the members-only online store HauteLook.
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- "Nordstrom's 75-word employee handbook" | 2010-10-25 | 200 Upvotes 68 Comments
π Wang tile
Wang tiles (or Wang dominoes), first proposed by mathematician, logician, and philosopher Hao Wang in 1961, are a class of formal systems. They are modelled visually by square tiles with a color on each side. A set of such tiles is selected, and copies of the tiles are arranged side by side with matching colors, without rotating or reflecting them.
The basic question about a set of Wang tiles is whether it can tile the plane or not, i.e., whether an entire infinite plane can be filled this way. The next question is whether this can be done in a periodic pattern.
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- "Wang tile" | 2018-01-05 | 145 Upvotes 24 Comments
π Capability Based Security
Capability-based security is a concept in the design of secure computing systems, one of the existing security models. A capability (known in some systems as a key) is a communicable, unforgeable token of authority. It refers to a value that references an object along with an associated set of access rights. A user program on a capability-based operating system must use a capability to access an object. Capability-based security refers to the principle of designing user programs such that they directly share capabilities with each other according to the principle of least privilege, and to the operating system infrastructure necessary to make such transactions efficient and secure. Capability-based security is to be contrasted with an approach that uses hierarchical protection domains.
Although most operating systems implement a facility which resembles capabilities, they typically do not provide enough support to allow for the exchange of capabilities among possibly mutually untrusting entities to be the primary means of granting and distributing access rights throughout the system. A capability-based system, in contrast, is designed with that goal in mind.
Capabilities as discussed in this article should not be confused with POSIX 1e/2c "Capabilities". The latter are coarse-grained privileges that cannot be transferred between processes.
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- "Capability Based Security" | 2015-12-06 | 44 Upvotes 35 Comments
π US time zones (1857)
The International Meridian Conference was a conference held in October 1884 in Washington, D.C., in the United States, to determine a prime meridian for international use. The conference was held at the request of U.S. President Chester A. Arthur. The subject to discuss was the choice of "a meridian to be employed as a common zero of longitude and standard of time reckoning throughout the world". It resulted in the recommendation of the Greenwich Meridian as the international standard for zero degrees longitude.
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- "US time zones (1857)" | 2015-07-01 | 81 Upvotes 36 Comments
π International Reply Coupon
An international reply coupon (IRC) is a coupon that can be exchanged for one or more postage stamps representing the minimum postage for an unregistered priority airmail letter of up to twenty grams sent to another Universal Postal Union (UPU) member country. IRCs are accepted by all UPU member countries.
UPU member postal services are obliged to exchange an IRC for postage, but are not obliged to sell them.
The purpose of the IRC is to allow a person to send someone in another country a letter, along with the cost of postage for a reply. If the addressee is within the same country, there is no need for an IRC because a self-addressed stamped envelope (SASE) or return postcard will suffice; but if the addressee is in another country an IRC removes the necessity of acquiring foreign postage or sending appropriate currency.
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- "International Reply Coupon" | 2024-07-07 | 57 Upvotes 13 Comments
π Yiddish Words Used in English
Yiddish words used in the English language include both words that have been assimilated into English - used by both Yiddish and English speakers - and many that have not. An English sentence that uses either may be described by some as Yinglish (or Hebronics), though a secondary sense of the term Yinglish describes the distinctive way certain Jews in English-speaking countries add many Yiddish words into their conversation, beyond general Yiddish words and phrases used by English speakers.
In this meaning, Yinglish is not the same as Yeshivish, which is spoken by many Orthodox Jews, though the two share many parallels.
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- "Yiddish Words Used in English" | 2021-12-05 | 13 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Ogham
Ogham (Modern Irish: [ΛoΛ(Ι)mΛ ]; Middle Irish: ogum, ogom, later ogam [ΛΙΙ£ΙmΛ ]) is an Early Medieval alphabet used primarily to write the early Irish language (in the "orthodox" inscriptions, 4th to 6th centuries AD), and later the Old Irish language (scholastic ogham, 6th to 9th centuries). There are roughly 400 surviving orthodox inscriptions on stone monuments throughout Ireland and western Britain, the bulk of which are in southern Munster. The largest number outside Ireland are in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
The vast majority of the inscriptions consist of personal names.
According to the High Medieval BrΓatharogam, the names of various trees can be ascribed to individual letters. For this reason, ogam is sometimes known as the Celtic tree alphabet.
The etymology of the word ogam or ogham remains unclear. One possible origin is from the Irish og-ΓΊaim 'point-seam', referring to the seam made by the point of a sharp weapon.
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- "Ogham" | 2022-12-31 | 64 Upvotes 14 Comments
π Emacs Pinky
Emacs or EMACS (Editor MACroS) is a family of text editors that are characterized by their extensibility. The manual for the most widely used variant, GNU Emacs, describes it as "the extensible, customizable, self-documenting, real-time display editor". Development of the first Emacs began in the mid-1970s, and work on its direct descendant, GNU Emacs, continues actively as of 2020.
Emacs has over 10,000 built-in commands and its user interface allows the user to combine these commands into macros to automate work. Implementations of Emacs typically feature a dialect of the Lisp programming language that provides a deep extension capability, allowing users and developers to write new commands and applications for the editor. Extensions have been written to manage email, files, outlines, and RSS feeds, as well as clones of ELIZA, Pong, Conway's Life, Snake and Tetris.
The original EMACS was written in 1976 by Carl Mikkelsen, David A. Moon and Guy L. Steele Jr. as a set of Editor MACroS for the TECO editor. It was inspired by the ideas of the TECO-macro editors TECMAC and TMACS.
The most popular, and most ported, version of Emacs is GNU Emacs, which was created by Richard Stallman for the GNU Project. XEmacs is a variant that branched from GNU Emacs in 1991. GNU Emacs and XEmacs use similar Lisp dialects and are for the most part compatible with each other.
Emacs is, along with vi, one of the two main contenders in the traditional editor wars of Unix culture. Emacs is among the oldest free and open source projects still under development.
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- "Emacs Pinky" | 2011-06-02 | 33 Upvotes 28 Comments
π List of Largest US Bank Failures
This is a list of the largest United States bank failures with respect to total assets under management at the time of the bank failure (banks with $1.0 billion or more in assets are listed here). Assets of the banks listed here are figures provided by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
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- "List of Largest US Bank Failures" | 2023-03-11 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments