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π Androgynous Peripheral Attach System
The terms Androgynous Peripheral Attach System (APAS), Androgynous Peripheral Assembly System (APAS) and Androgynous Peripheral Docking System (APDS) are used interchangeably to describe a Russian family of spacecraft docking mechanisms, and are also sometimes used as generic names for any docking system in that family. A system similar to APAS-89/95 is used by the Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft.
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- "Androgynous Peripheral Attach System" | 2024-07-26 | 23 Upvotes 7 Comments
π 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 β 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
π Albert Stevens
Albert Stevens (1887β1966), also known as patient CAL-1, was a victim of a human radiation experiment, and survived the highest known accumulated radiation dose in any human. On May 14, 1945, he was injected with 131 kBq (3.55 Β΅Ci) of plutonium without his knowledge or informed consent.
Plutonium remained present in his body for the remainder of his life, the amount decaying slowly through radioactive decay and biological elimination. Stevens died of heart disease some 20 years later, having accumulated an effective radiation dose of 64 Sv (6400 rem) over that period, i.e. an average of 3 Sv per year or 350Β ΞΌSv/h. The current annual permitted dose for a radiation worker in the United States is 0.05 Sv (or 5 rem), i.e. an average of 5.7 ΞΌSv/h.
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- "Albert Stevens" | 2019-08-22 | 66 Upvotes 3 Comments
π Ocean Temperature
The ocean temperature varies by depth, geographical location and season. Both the temperature and salinity of ocean water differs. Warm surface water is generally saltier than the cooler deep or polar waters; in polar regions, the upper layers of ocean water are cold and fresh. Deep ocean water is cold, salty water found deep below the surface of Earth's oceans. This water has a very uniform temperature, around 0-3Β Β°C. The ocean temperature also depends on the amount of solar radiation falling on its surface. In the tropics, with the Sun nearly overhead, the temperature of the surface layers can rise to over 30Β Β°C (86Β Β°F) while near the poles the temperature in equilibrium with the sea ice is about β2Β Β°C (28Β Β°F). There is a continuous circulation of water in the oceans. Thermohaline circulation (THC) is a part of the large-scale ocean circulation that is driven by global density gradients created by surface heat and freshwater fluxes. Warm surface currents cool as they move away from the tropics, and the water becomes denser and sinks. The cold water moves back towards the equator as a deep sea current, driven by changes in the temperature and density of the water, before eventually welling up again towards the surface.
Ocean temperature as a term is used either for the temperature in the ocean at any depth, or specifically for the ocean temperatures that are not near the surface (in which case it is synonymous with "deep ocean temperature").
It is clear that the oceans are warming as a result of climate change and this rate of warming is increasing.:β9β The upper ocean (above 700 m) is warming fastest, but the warming trend extends throughout the ocean. In 2022, the global ocean was the hottest ever recorded by humans.
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- "Ocean Temperature" | 2023-05-13 | 87 Upvotes 53 Comments
π Hadacol
Hadacol was a patent medicine marketed as a vitamin supplement. Its principal attraction, however, was that it contained 12 percent alcohol (listed on the tonic bottle's label as a "preservative"), which made it quite popular in the dry counties of the southern United States. It was the product of four-term Louisiana State Senator Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Democrat from Erath in Vermilion Parish in southwestern Louisiana. He was not a medical doctor, nor a registered pharmacist, but had a strong talent for self-promotion. Time magazine once described him as "a stem-winding salesman who knows every razzle-dazzle switch in the pitchman's trade".
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- "Hadacol" | 2019-03-16 | 38 Upvotes 8 Comments
π Illegal number
An illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter, propagate, or otherwise transmit in some legal jurisdiction. Any piece of digital information is representable as a number; consequently, if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well.
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- "Illegal number β Represents information which is illegal to possess" | 2021-06-16 | 39 Upvotes 26 Comments
- "Illegal number" | 2019-01-11 | 6 Upvotes 10 Comments
- "Illegal number - Wikipedia" | 2013-10-01 | 14 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Illegal Numbers" | 2012-10-28 | 184 Upvotes 95 Comments
π Mammonart. An Essay on Economic Interpretation (1925)
Mammonart. An Essay on Economic Interpretation is a book of literary criticism from a Socialist point of view of the traditional "great authors" of Western and American literature (along with a few painters and composers). Mammonart was written by the prolific journalist, novelist and Socialist activist Upton Sinclair, and published in 1925.
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- "Mammonart. An Essay on Economic Interpretation (1925)" | 2023-01-15 | 48 Upvotes 12 Comments
π List of Proposed Etymologies of OK
This is a list of etymologies proposed for the word OK or okay. The majority can be easily classified as false etymologies, or possibly folk etymologies. H. L. Mencken, in The American Language, lists serious candidates and "a few of the more picturesque or preposterous". Allen Walker Read surveyed a variety of explanations in a 1964 article titled The Folklore of "O. K." Eric Partridge described O.K. as "an evergreen of the correspondence column."
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- "List of Proposed Etymologies of OK" | 2021-03-31 | 71 Upvotes 24 Comments
π The Pip
The Pip is the nickname given by radio listeners to a shortwave radio station that broadcasts on the frequency 5448Β kHz by day, and 3756Β kHz during the night. It broadcasts short, repeated beeps at a rate of around 50 per minute, for 24 hours per day. The beep signal is occasionally interrupted by voice messages in Russian. The Pip has been active since around 1985, when its distinctive beeping sound was first recorded by listeners.
The station is commonly referred to as "The Pip" among English-speaking radio listeners. In Russia, it is known as ΠΠ°ΠΏΠ»Ρ (Kaplya) "the drop". While its official name or callsign is not known, some of the voice transmissions begin with the code 8S1Shch (Cyrillic: 8Π‘1Π©), which is generally considered to be the name of the station. However, this code may not be a callsign, but instead serve some other purpose. Radioscanner.ru identifies the owner of this station as a North-Caucasian military district communication center with callsign "Akacia" (ex-72nd communication center, Russian "72 ΡΠ·Π΅Π» ΡΠ²ΡΠ·ΠΈ ΡΡΠ°Π±Π° Π‘ΠΠΠ").
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- "The Pip" | 2015-12-02 | 120 Upvotes 24 Comments
π BBC Domesday Project
The BBC Domesday Project was a partnership between Acorn Computers, Philips, Logica and the BBC (with some funding from the European Commission's ESPRIT programme) to mark the 900th anniversary of the original Domesday Book, an 11th-century census of England. It has been cited as an example of digital obsolescence on account of the physical medium used for data storage.
This new multimedia edition of Domesday was compiled between 1984 and 1986 and published in 1986. It included a new "survey" of the United Kingdom, in which people, mostly school children, wrote about geography, history or social issues in their local area or just about their daily lives. Children from over 9,000 schools were involved. This was linked with maps, and many colour photos, statistical data, video and "virtual walks". Over 1 million people participated in the project. The project also incorporated professionally prepared video footage, virtual reality tours of major landmarks and other prepared datasets such as the 1981 census.
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- "BBC Domesday Project" | 2016-02-12 | 47 Upvotes 20 Comments