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๐ Hashlife
Hashlife is a memoized algorithm for computing the long-term fate of a given starting configuration in Conway's Game of Life and related cellular automata, much more quickly than would be possible using alternative algorithms that simulate each time step of each cell of the automaton. The algorithm was first described by Bill Gosper in the early 1980s while he was engaged in research at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Hashlife was originally implemented on Symbolics Lisp machines with the aid of the Flavors extension.
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- "HashLife โ A memoized algorithm for Conway's Game of Life and cellular automata" | 2024-01-12 | 80 Upvotes 12 Comments
- "Hashlife" | 2017-06-11 | 10 Upvotes 2 Comments
๐ The Man Behind AMD's Zen Microarchitecture: Jim Keller
Jim Keller (born 1958/1959) is a microprocessor engineer best known for his work at AMD and Apple. He was the lead architect of the AMD K8 microarchitecture (including the original Athlon 64) and was involved in designing the Athlon (K7) and Apple A4/A5 processors. He was also the coauthor of the specifications for the x86-64 instruction set and HyperTransport interconnect. From 2012 to 2015, he returned to AMD to work on the AMD K12 and Zen microarchitectures.
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- "The Man Behind AMD's Zen Microarchitecture: Jim Keller" | 2017-08-11 | 99 Upvotes 42 Comments
๐ Stigler Diet
The Stigler diet is an optimization problem named for George Stigler, a 1982 Nobel Laureate in economics, who posed the following problem:
For a moderately active man weighing 154 pounds, how much of each of 77 foods should be eaten on a daily basis so that the manโs intake of nine nutrients will be at least equal to the recommended dietary allowances (RDAs) suggested by the National Research Council in 1943, with the cost of the diet being minimal?
The nutrient RDAs required to be met in Stiglerโs experiment were calories, protein, calcium, iron, as well as vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, and C. The result was an annual budget allocated to foods such as evaporated milk, cabbage, dried navy beans, and beef liver at a cost of approximately $0.11 a day in 1939 U.S. dollars.
While the name โStigler Dietโ was applied after the experiment by outsiders, according to Stigler, โNo one recommends these diets for anyone, let alone everyone.โ The Stigler diet has been much ridiculed for its lack of variety and palatability; however, his methodology has received praise and is considered to be some of the earliest work in linear programming.
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- "Stigler Diet" | 2018-03-05 | 111 Upvotes 68 Comments
๐ Morrison Shelter
Air raid shelters, also known as bomb shelters, are structures for the protection of non-combatants as well as combatants against enemy attacks from the air. They are similar to bunkers in many regards, although they are not designed to defend against ground attack (but many have been used as defensive structures in such situations).
Prior to World War II, in May 1924, an Air Raid Precautions Committee was set up in the United Kingdom. For years, little progress was made with shelters because of the apparently irreconcilable conflict between the need to send the public underground for shelter and the need to keep them above ground for protection against gas attacks. In February 1936 the Home Secretary appointed a technical Committee on Structural Precautions against Air Attack.
By November 1937, there had only been slow progress, because of a serious lack of data on which to base any design recommendations and the Committee proposed that the Home Office should have its own department for research into structural precautions, rather than relying on research work done by the Bombing Test Committee to support the development of bomb design and strategy. This proposal was eventually implemented in January 1939.
During the Munich crisis, local authorities dug trenches to provide shelter. After the crisis, the British Government decided to make these a permanent feature, with a standard design of precast concrete trench lining. Unfortunately these turned out to perform very poorly. They also decided to issue free to poorer households the Anderson shelter, and to provide steel props to create shelters in suitable basements.
๐ Rolling Coal
Rolling coal (also spelled rollin' coal) is the practice of modifying a diesel engine to emit large amounts of black or grey sooty exhaust fumesโdiesel fuel that has not undergone complete combustion.
Rolling coal is a form of anti-environmentalism. Such modifications may include the intentional removal of the particulate filter. Practitioners often additionally modify their vehicles by installing smoke switches, large exhausts, and smoke stacks. Modifications to a vehicle to enable rolling coal may cost from US$200 to US$5,000.
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- "Rolling Coal" | 2024-05-11 | 10 Upvotes 2 Comments
๐ Eirรดn
In the theatre of ancient Greece, the eirรดn (Ancient Greek: ฮตแผดฯฯฮฝ) was one of three stock characters in comedy. The eirรดn usually succeeded in bringing down his braggart opponent (the alazรดn) by understating his own abilities.
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- "Eirรดn" | 2019-04-28 | 11 Upvotes 1 Comments
๐ Cat Gap
The cat gap is a period in the fossil record of approximately 25 to 18.5 million years ago in which there are few fossils of cats or cat-like species found in North America. The cause of the "cat gap" is disputed, but may have been caused by changes in the climate (global cooling), changes in the habitat and environmental ecosystem, the increasingly hypercarnivorous trend of the cats (especially the nimravids), volcanic activity, evolutionary changes in dental morphology of the Canidae species present in North America, or a periodicity of extinctions called van der Hammen cycles.
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- "Cat Gap" | 2025-12-10 | 216 Upvotes 59 Comments
- "The Cat Gap" | 2022-07-31 | 182 Upvotes 47 Comments
- "Cat Gap" | 2020-10-16 | 315 Upvotes 48 Comments
๐ Flyby anomaly
The flyby anomaly is a discrepancy between current scientific models and the actual increase in speed (i.e. increase in kinetic energy) observed during a planetary flyby (usually of Earth) by a spacecraft. In multiple cases, spacecraft have been observed to gain greater speed than scientists had predicted, but thus far no convincing explanation has been found. This anomaly has been observed as shifts in the S-band and X-band Doppler and ranging telemetry. The largest discrepancy noticed during a flyby has been 13ย mm/s.
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- "Flyby anomaly" | 2016-01-16 | 153 Upvotes 21 Comments
๐ M-DISC: The storage medium that lasts 1000 years
M-DISC (Millennial Disc) is a write-once optical disc technology introduced in 2009 by Millenniata, Inc. and available as DVD and Blu-ray discs.
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- "M-DISC: The storage medium that lasts 1000 years" | 2024-09-18 | 11 Upvotes 2 Comments
๐ ACT-R: A cognitive architecture
ACT-R (pronounced /หรฆkt หษr/; short for "Adaptive Control of ThoughtโRational") is a cognitive architecture mainly developed by John Robert Anderson and Christian Lebiere at Carnegie Mellon University. Like any cognitive architecture, ACT-R aims to define the basic and irreducible cognitive and perceptual operations that enable the human mind. In theory, each task that humans can perform should consist of a series of these discrete operations.
Most of the ACT-R's basic assumptions are also inspired by the progress of cognitive neuroscience, and ACT-R can be seen and described as a way of specifying how the brain itself is organized in a way that enables individual processing modules to produce cognition.
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- "ACT-R: A cognitive architecture" | 2015-12-17 | 20 Upvotes 4 Comments