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๐ Known-Plaintext Attack
The known-plaintext attack (KPA) is an attack model for cryptanalysis where the attacker has access to both the plaintext (called a crib), and its encrypted version (ciphertext). These can be used to reveal further secret information such as secret keys and code books. The term "crib" originated at Bletchley Park, the British World War II decryption operation, where it was defined as:
A plain language (or code) passage of any length, usually obtained by solving one or more cipher or code messages, and occurring or believed likely to occur in a different cipher or code message, which it may provide a means of solving.
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- "Known-Plaintext Attack" | 2021-05-29 | 50 Upvotes 19 Comments
๐ Houdini of FL: autistic savant sentenced for taking tools he inherited
Mark DeFriest (born August 18, 1960), known as the Houdini of Florida, is an American man known for his repeated escapes from prison, having successfully done so 7 times. Born in rural Florida, he was arrested for the first time in 1978, serving for a year. In 1980, DeFriest was sentenced to four years in prison for violating probation via illegal firearms possession, having initially been arrested for retrieving work tools that his recently deceased father had willed him before the will had completed probate. His sentence has since been repeatedly extended for having attempted to escape 13 times (including one count of armed robbery during one attempt), as well as collecting hundreds of disciplinary reports for minor infractions, leading to a cumulative stay of 34 years in prison.
DeFriest has cumulatively spent 27 years in solitary confinement. Following publicity, DeFriest was granted parole and released on 5 February 2019. Ten days later, he was rearrested as he checked into a mental health facility.
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- "Houdini of FL: autistic savant sentenced for taking tools he inherited" | 2025-07-21 | 32 Upvotes 6 Comments
๐ SkySails
SkySails GmbH & Co. KG is a Hamburg-based company that sells kite rigs to propel cargo ships, large yachts and fishing vessels by wind energy. Ships are pulled by an automatically-controlled foil kite of some hundreds of square meters. For multiple reasons, they give many times the thrust per unit area of conventional mast-mounted sails.
The systems save fuel, and reduce carbon emissions and shipping costs, but have not been widely adopted.
Discussed on
- "SkySails" | 2019-07-04 | 126 Upvotes 42 Comments
๐ 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.
Discussed on
- "List of Largest US Bank Failures" | 2023-03-11 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
๐ Seven Bridges of Kรถnigsberg
The Seven Bridges of Kรถnigsberg is a historically notable problem in mathematics. Its negative resolution by Leonhard Euler in 1736 laid the foundations of graph theory and prefigured the idea of topology.
The city of Kรถnigsberg in Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) was set on both sides of the Pregel River, and included two large islandsโKneiphof and Lomseโwhich were connected to each other, or to the two mainland portions of the city, by seven bridges. The problem was to devise a walk through the city that would cross each of those bridges once and only once.
By way of specifying the logical task unambiguously, solutions involving either
- reaching an island or mainland bank other than via one of the bridges, or
- accessing any bridge without crossing to its other end
are explicitly unacceptable.
Euler proved that the problem has no solution. The difficulty he faced was the development of a suitable technique of analysis, and of subsequent tests that established this assertion with mathematical rigor.
Discussed on
- "Seven Bridges of Kรถnigsberg" | 2020-05-09 | 92 Upvotes 30 Comments
- "Seven Bridges of Kรถnigsberg" | 2009-12-23 | 17 Upvotes 6 Comments
๐ Comb Sort - Just As Good As Quick Sort
Comb sort is a relatively simple sorting algorithm originally designed by Wลodzimierz Dobosiewicz and Artur Borowy in 1980, later rediscovered by Stephen Lacey and Richard Box in 1991. Comb sort improves on bubble sort.
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- "Comb Sort - Just As Good As Quick Sort" | 2010-04-20 | 31 Upvotes 9 Comments
๐ Cecil Kelley criticality accident
A criticality accident occurred on December 30, 1958, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the United States. It is one of 60 known criticality events that have occurred outside the controlled conditions of a nuclear reactor or test, though it was the third such event that took place in 1958 after events on June 16 at the Y-12 Plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and on October 15 at the Vinฤa Nuclear Institute in Vinฤa, Yugoslavia. The accident involved plutonium compounds dissolved in liquid chemical reagents; within 35 hours, it killed chemical operator Cecil Kelley by severe radiation poisoning.
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- "Cecil Kelley criticality accident" | 2023-07-28 | 73 Upvotes 6 Comments
๐ List of things named after Carl Friedrich Gauss
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777โ1855) is the eponym of all of the topics listed below. There are over 100 topics all named after this German mathematician and scientist, all in the fields of mathematics, physics, and astronomy. The English eponymous adjective Gaussian is pronounced GOWSS-ee-ษn.
๐ Atari Transputer Workstation
- "ABAQ" redirects here. ABAQ is also the callsign for TV station ABQ in Alpha, Queensland.
The Atari Transputer Workstation (also known as ATW-800, or simply ATW) is a workstation class computer released by Atari Corporation in the late 1980s, based on the INMOS transputer. It was introduced in 1987 as the Abaq, but the name was changed before sales began. Sales were almost non-existent, and the product was canceled after only a few hundred units had been produced.
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- "Atari Transputer Workstation" | 2016-11-19 | 63 Upvotes 28 Comments
๐ The knowledge argument
The knowledge argument (also known as Mary's room or Mary the super-scientist) is a philosophical thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson in his article "Epiphenomenal Qualia" (1982) and extended in "What Mary Didn't Know" (1986). The experiment is intended to argue against physicalismโthe view that the universe, including all that is mental, is entirely physical. The debate that emerged following its publication became the subject of an edited volumeโThere's Something About Mary (2004)โwhich includes replies from such philosophers as Daniel Dennett, David Lewis, and Paul Churchland.
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- "The knowledge argument" | 2015-03-19 | 31 Upvotes 54 Comments