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π Pig War
The Pig War was a confrontation in 1859 between the United States and United Kingdom over the BritishβU.S. border in the San Juan Islands, between Vancouver Island (present-day Canada) and the State of Washington. The Pig War, so called because it was triggered by the shooting of a pig, is also called the Pig Episode, the Pig and Potato War, the San Juan Boundary Dispute and the Northwestern Boundary Dispute. Aside from the death of one pig, this dispute was a bloodless conflict.
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- "Pig War (1859)" | 2022-10-20 | 25 Upvotes 11 Comments
- "Pig War" | 2019-10-03 | 84 Upvotes 28 Comments
- "Pig War (1859)" | 2017-12-25 | 22 Upvotes 6 Comments
π Community Memory Terminal
Community Memory (CM) was the first public computerized bulletin board system. Established in 1973 in Berkeley, California, it used an SDS 940 timesharing system in San Francisco connected via a 110 baud link to a teleprinter at a record store in Berkeley to let users enter and retrieve messages. Individuals could place messages in the computer and then look through the memory for a specific notice.
While initially conceived as an information and resource sharing network linking a variety of counter-cultural economic, educational, and social organizations with each other and the public, Community Memory was soon generalized to be an information flea market, by providing unmediated, two-way access to message databases through public computer terminals. Once the system became available, the users demonstrated that it was a general communications medium that could be used for art, literature, journalism, commerce, and social chatter.
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- "Community Memory Terminal" | 2019-11-30 | 24 Upvotes 2 Comments
π "Go west, young man!" - Mean population center of the US
The mean center of the United States population is determined by the United States Census Bureau from the results of each national census. The Bureau defines it as follows:
The concept of the center of population as used by the U.S. Census Bureau is that of a balance point. The center of population is the point at which an imaginary, weightless, rigid, and flat (no elevation effects) surface representation of the 50 states (or 48 conterminous states for calculations made prior to 1960) and the District of Columbia would balance if weights of identical size were placed on it so that each weight represented the location on one person. More specifically, this calculation is called the mean center of population.
After moving roughly 600Β mi (966Β km) west by south during the 19th century, the shift in the mean center of population during the 20th century was less pronounced, moving 324Β mi (521Β km) west and 101Β mi (163Β km) south. Nearly 79% of the overall southerly movement happened between 1950 and 2000. Given the strong pull of Texas, Florida, and the Western US, the population center would be heading towards and one day entering Oklahoma.
π PΓ³lya conjecture
In number theory, the PΓ³lya conjecture stated that "most" (i.e., 50% or more) of the natural numbers less than any given number have an odd number of prime factors. The conjecture was posited by the Hungarian mathematician George PΓ³lya in 1919, and proved false in 1958 by C. Brian Haselgrove.
The size of the smallest counterexample is often used to show how a conjecture can be true for many cases, and still be false, providing an illustration for the strong law of small numbers.
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- "PΓ³lya conjecture" | 2009-08-29 | 13 Upvotes 10 Comments
π Curse of knowledge
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand. This bias is also called by some authors the curse of expertise, although that term is also used to refer to various other phenomena.
For example, in a classroom setting, teachers have difficulty teaching novices because they cannot put themselves in the position of the student. A brilliant professor might no longer remember the difficulties that a young student encounters when learning a new subject. This curse of knowledge also explains the danger behind thinking about student learning based on what appears best to faculty members, as opposed to what has been verified with students.
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- "Curse of knowledge" | 2017-04-23 | 92 Upvotes 30 Comments
- "Curse of knowledge" | 2012-03-26 | 74 Upvotes 8 Comments
π Greta Thunberg
Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg (Swedish:Β [ΛΙ‘rΓͺΛta ΛtΚΜΛnbΓ¦rj] (listen); born 3 January 2003) is a Swedish environmental activist who has gained international recognition for promoting the view that humanity is facing an existential crisis arising from climate change. Thunberg is known for her youth and her straightforward speaking manner, both in public and to political leaders and assemblies, in which she criticizes world leaders for their failure to take sufficient action to address the climate crisis.
Thunberg's activism started after convincing her parents to adopt several lifestyle choices to reduce their own carbon footprint. In August 2018, at age 15, she started spending her school days outside the Swedish parliament to call for stronger action on climate change by holding up a sign reading Skolstrejk fΓΆr klimatet (School strike for climate). Soon, other students engaged in similar protests in their own communities. Together, they organised a school climate strike movement under the name Fridays for Future. After Thunberg addressed the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, student strikes took place every week somewhere in the world. In 2019, there were multiple coordinated multi-city protests involving over a million students each. To avoid flying, Thunberg sailed to North America where she attended the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit. Her speech there, in which she exclaimed "how dare you", was widely taken up by the press and incorporated into music.
Her sudden rise to world fame has made her both a leader and a target for critics. Her influence on the world stage has been described by The Guardian and other newspapers as the "Greta effect". She has received numerous honours and awards including: honorary Fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society; Time magazine's 100 most influential people and the youngest Time Person of the Year; inclusion in the Forbes list of The World's 100 Most Powerful Women (2019) and two consecutive nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize (2019 and 2020).
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- "Greta Thunberg" | 2019-05-26 | 32 Upvotes 18 Comments
π Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
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- "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" | 2023-12-03 | 37 Upvotes 16 Comments
- "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" | 2023-08-25 | 17 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" | 2020-05-20 | 170 Upvotes 118 Comments
- "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish" | 2019-07-15 | 12 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Miraculin
Miraculin is a taste modifier, a glycoprotein extracted from the fruit of Synsepalum dulcificum. The berry, also known as the miracle fruit, was documented by explorer Chevalier des Marchais, who searched for many different fruits during a 1725 excursion to its native West Africa.
Miraculin itself does not taste sweet. When taste buds are exposed to miraculin, the protein binds to the sweetness receptors. This causes normally sour-tasting acidic foods, such as citrus, to be perceived as sweet. The effect can last for one or two hours.
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- "Miraculin" | 2023-05-06 | 13 Upvotes 5 Comments
π Henry Kissinger turns 100 today
Henry Alfred Kissinger (; German: [ΛkΙͺsΙͺΕΙ]; born Heinz Alfred Kissinger, May 27, 1923) is an American diplomat, political theorist, geopolitical consultant, and politician who served as United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under the presidential administrations of Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. For his actions negotiating a ceasefire in Vietnam, Kissinger received the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize under controversial circumstances.
Kissinger was a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938. Upon arriving in the United States, he excelled academically and graduated from Harvard College in 1950, where he studied under William Yandell Elliott. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees at Harvard University in 1951 and 1954, respectively.
A practitioner of Realpolitik, Kissinger played a prominent role in United States foreign policy between 1969 and 1977, pioneering the policy of dΓ©tente with the Soviet Union, orchestrating an opening of relations with the People's Republic of China, engaging in what became known as shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East to end the Yom Kippur War, and negotiating the Paris Peace Accords, which ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. Kissinger has also been associated with such controversial policies as the U.S. bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, U.S. involvement in the 1973 Chilean military coup, a "green light" to Argentina's military junta for their Dirty War, and U.S. support for Pakistan during the Bangladesh Liberation War despite a genocide being perpetrated by Pakistan. After leaving government, he formed Kissinger Associates, an international geopolitical consulting firm. Kissinger has written over a dozen books on diplomatic history and international relations.
Kissinger remains a controversial and polarizing figure in U.S. politics, both venerated by some as a highly effective U.S. Secretary of State and condemned by others for allegedly tolerating or supporting war crimes committed by allied nation states during his tenure. A 2015 survey of top international relations scholars, conducted by College of William & Mary, ranked Kissinger as the most effective U.S. secretary of state in the 50 years to 2015. A centenarian, Kissinger is the oldest living former U.S. Cabinet member and the last surviving member of Nixon's Cabinet. The previous oldest cabinet member was George Shultz, who died at the age of 100 in February 2021.
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- "Henry Kissinger turns 100 today" | 2023-05-27 | 39 Upvotes 34 Comments
π Heilmeier's Catechism: questions for every startup, every project.
George Harry Heilmeier (May 22, 1936 β April 21, 2014) was an American engineer, manager, and a pioneering contributor to liquid crystal displays (LCDs), for which he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Heilmeier's work is an IEEE Milestone.