Random Articles (Page 4)
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π Bell Labs Holmdel Complex
The Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, in Holmdel Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey, United States, functioned for 44 years as a research and development facility, initially for the Bell System and later Bell Labs. The centerpiece of the campus is an Eero Saarinenβdesigned structure that served as the home to over 6,000 engineers and researchers. This modernist building, dubbed "The Biggest Mirror Ever" by Architectural Forum due to its mirror box exterior, was the site of a Nobel Prize discovery, the laser cooling work of Steven Chu.
Restructuring of the company's research efforts reduced the use of the Holmdel Complex, and in 2006 the building was put up for sale. The building has undergone renovations into a multi-purpose living and working space, dubbed Bell Works by its redevelopers. Since 2013 it has been operated by Somerset Development, who redeveloped the building into a mixed-use office for high-tech startup companies. The complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017. A number of movies, television programs, and commercials have been filmed at Bell Works, including Severance, The Crowded Room, and Law & Order: Organized Crime.
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- "Bell Labs Holmdel Complex" | 2025-03-31 | 30 Upvotes 7 Comments
π Pentagramma mirificum
Pentagramma mirificum (Latin for miraculous pentagram) is a star polygon on a sphere, composed of five great circle arcs, all of whose internal angles are right angles. This shape was described by John Napier in his 1614 book Mirifici logarithmorum canonis descriptio (Description of the wonderful rule of logarithms) along with rules that link the values of trigonometric functions of five parts of a right spherical triangle (two angles and three sides). The properties of pentagramma mirificum were studied, among others, by Carl Friedrich Gauss.
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- "Pentagramma mirificum" | 2018-12-29 | 27 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Utility Fog
Utility fog (coined by Dr. John Storrs Hall in 1989) is a hypothetical collection of tiny robots that can replicate a physical structure. As such, it is a form of self-reconfiguring modular robotics.
Discussed on
- "Utility Fog" | 2019-04-20 | 17 Upvotes 3 Comments
π Sputnik virophage
Sputnik virophage (from Russian cΠΏΡΡΠ½ΠΈΠΊ "satellite", Latin "virus" and Greek ΟάγΡιν phagein "to eat") is a subviral agent that reproduces in amoeba cells that are already infected by a certain helper virus; Sputnik uses the helper virus's machinery for reproduction and inhibits replication of the helper virus.
Viruses like Sputnik that depend on co-infection of the host cell by helper viruses are known as satellite viruses. At its discovery in a Paris water-cooling tower in 2008 Sputnik was the first known satellite virus that inhibited replication of its helper virus and thus acted as a parasite of that virus. In analogy to the term bacteriophage it was called a virophage. However, the usage of this term and the relationship between virophages and classical satellite viruses remain controversial.
Sputnik virophages were found infecting giant viruses of Mimiviridae group A. However, they are able to grow in amoebae infected by Mimiviridae of any of the groups A, B, and C.
Discussed on
- "Sputnik virophage" | 2019-08-21 | 15 Upvotes 5 Comments
π The Nine Worthies
The Nine Worthies are nine historical, scriptural, and legendary personages who personify the ideals of chivalry established in the Middle Ages, whose lives were deemed a valuable study for aspirants to chivalric status. All were commonly referred to as 'Princes', regardless of their historical titles. In French they are called Les Neuf Preux or "Nine Valiants", giving a more specific idea of the moral virtues they exemplified: those of soldierly courage and generalship. In Italy they are i Nove Prodi.
The Nine Worthies include three pagans (Hector, Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar), three Jews (Joshua, David and Judas Maccabeus) and three Christians (King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon).
Discussed on
- "The Nine Worthies" | 2022-12-05 | 20 Upvotes 9 Comments
π Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (widely abbreviated and cited as TLP) is the only book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that was published during his lifetime. The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science. Wittgenstein wrote the notes for the Tractatus while he was a soldier during World War I and completed it during a military leave in the summer of 1918. It was originally published in German in 1921 as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (Logical-Philosophical Treatise). In 1922 it was published together with an English translation and a Latin title, which was suggested by G. E. Moore as homage to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670).
The Tractatus is written in an austere and succinct literary style, containing almost no arguments as such, but consists of altogether 525 declarative statements, which are hierarchically numbered.
The Tractatus is recognized by philosophers as one of the most significant philosophical works of the twentieth century and was influential chiefly amongst the logical positivist philosophers of the Vienna Circle, such as Rudolf Carnap and Friedrich Waismann and Bertrand Russell's article "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism".
Wittgenstein's later works, notably the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, criticised many of his ideas in the Tractatus. There are, however, elements to see a common thread in Wittgenstein's thinking, in spite of those criticisms of the Tractatus in later writings. Indeed, the legendary contrast between βearlyβ and βlateβ Wittgenstein has been countered by such scholars as Pears (1987) and Hilmy (1987). For example, a relevant, yet neglected aspect of continuity in Wittgensteinβs central issues concerns βmeaningβ as βuseβ. Connecting his early and later writings on βmeaning as useβ is his appeal to direct consequences of a term or phrase, reflected e.g. in his speaking of language as a βcalculusβ. These passages are rather crucial to Wittgensteinβs view of βmeaning as useβ, though they have been widely neglected in scholarly literature. The centrality and importance of these passages are corroborated and augmented by renewed examination of Wittgensteinβs NachlaΓ, as is done in "From Tractatus to Later Writings and Back - New Implications from the Nachlass" (de Queiroz 2023).
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- "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" | 2023-08-12 | 65 Upvotes 68 Comments
π Wikipedia: Don't Be High-Maintenance
Occasionally, some long-time users come to believe they are more important than other editors, and act in ways to seek regular validation of that belief. Validation is obtained by delivering and obtaining compliance with ultimatums, such as threatening to storm off the project in a huff β a "retirement" or long wikibreak. Other examples including threats to make vexatious claims at noticeboards, or to cease all work in a particular topic area. These dramatics are usually accompanied by a long diatribe about whatever petty issue is driving them away this time.
The writer hopes that this fit of pique will attract a flood of "please don't go" messages, along with plenty of support for their side of the dispute that triggered their round of unreasonable demands. The end result sought is that the "high-maintenance" editing behavior gets the editor exactly what they crave β validation and support β leading to a triumphant return to the project or article, at least until the next petty conflict. Because Wikipedia is not therapy (even if it was, this behavior would be undesirable) or, more importantly, not a soapbox, and most other editors can see through this sort of behavior, such an outcome is unlikely, and becomes decreasingly likely the more times such a door-slamming conniption is attempted, until people hope the editor really quits.
Threats to "leave and never come back" inevitably invite the response: don't let the door hit you on the way out.
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- "Wikipedia: Don't Be High-Maintenance" | 2020-12-16 | 29 Upvotes 15 Comments
π Zone System
The Zone System is a photographic technique for determining optimal film exposure and development, formulated by Ansel Adams and Fred Archer. Adams described the Zone System as "[...] not an invention of mine; it is a codification of the principles of sensitometry, worked out by Fred Archer and myself at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, around 1939β40."
The technique is based on the late 19th century sensitometry studies of Hurter and Driffield. The Zone System provides photographers with a systematic method of precisely defining the relationship between the way they visualize the photographic subject and the final results. Although it originated with black-and-white sheet film, the Zone System is also applicable to roll film, both black-and-white and color, negative and reversal, and to digital photography.
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- "Zone System" | 2022-03-18 | 23 Upvotes 12 Comments
π Corpus Clock (Grasshopper Clock)
The Corpus Clock, also known as the Grasshopper clock, is a large sculptural clock at street level on the outside of the Taylor Library at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University, in the United Kingdom, at the junction of Bene't Street and Trumpington Street, looking out over King's Parade. It was conceived and funded by John C. Taylor, an old member of the college.
It was officially unveiled to the public on 19 September 2008 by Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking. The clock was named one of Time's Best Inventions of 2008.
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- "Corpus Clock (Grasshopper Clock)" | 2021-06-02 | 112 Upvotes 32 Comments
π Cold Boot Attack
In computer security, a cold boot attack (or to a lesser extent, a platform reset attack) is a type of side channel attack in which an attacker with physical access to a computer performs a memory dump of a computer's random access memory by performing a hard reset of the target machine. Typically, cold boot attacks are used to retrieve encryption keys from a running operating system for malicious or criminal investigative reasons. The attack relies on the data remanence property of DRAM and SRAM to retrieve memory contents that remain readable in the seconds to minutes after power has been removed.
An attacker with physical access to a running computer typically executes a cold boot attack by cold-booting the machine and booting a lightweight operating system from a removable disk to dump the contents of pre-boot physical memory to a file. An attacker is then free to analyze the data dumped from memory to find sensitive data, such as the keys, using various forms of key finding attacks. Since cold boot attacks target random access memory, full disk encryption schemes, even with a trusted platform module installed are ineffective against this kind of attack. This is because the problem is fundamentally a hardware (insecure memory) and not a software issue. However, malicious access can be prevented by limiting physical access and using modern techniques to avoid storing sensitive data in random access memory.
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- "Cold Boot Attack" | 2013-09-27 | 33 Upvotes 9 Comments