Random Articles (Page 63)
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π Saudade
Saudade (European Portuguese: [sΙwΛΓ°aΓ°Ι¨] ; Brazilian Portuguese: [sawΛdadΚi] ; Galician: [sawΛΓ°aΓ°Ιͺ]; Northeast Brazil: [sawΛdadi]). (English: ; plural saudades) in Portuguese and Galician is an emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent someone or something. It derives from the Latin word for solitude. It is often associated with a repressed understanding that one might never encounter the object of longing ever again. It is a recollection of feelings, experiences, places, or events, often elusive, that cause a sense of separation from the exciting, pleasant, or joyous sensations they once caused. Duarte Nunes LeΓ£o defines saudade as, "Memory of something with a desire for it". In Brazil, the day of saudade is officially celebrated on 30 January. It is not a widely acknowledged day in Portugal.
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- "Saudade" | 2026-02-14 | 18 Upvotes 4 Comments
π Cool stuff you can do with netcat
netcat (often abbreviated to nc) is a computer networking utility for reading from and writing to network connections using TCP or UDP. The command is designed to be a dependable back-end that can be used directly or easily driven by other programs and scripts. At the same time, it is a feature-rich network debugging and investigation tool, since it can produce almost any kind of connection its user could need and has a number of built-in capabilities.
Its list of features includes port scanning, transferring files, and port listening, and it can be used as a backdoor.
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- "Cool stuff you can do with netcat" | 2010-11-05 | 126 Upvotes 39 Comments
π PLATO (computer system)
PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations) was the first generalized computer-assisted instruction system. Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois' ILLIAC I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in multi-user computing were originally developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer video games.
PLATO was designed and built by the University of Illinois and functioned for four decades, offering coursework (elementary through university) to UIUC students, local schools, and other universities. Courses were taught in a range of subjects, including Latin, chemistry, education, music, and primary mathematics. The system included a number of features useful for pedagogy, including text overlaying graphics, contextual assessment of free-text answers, depending on the inclusion of keywords, and feedback designed to respond to alternative answers.
Rights to market PLATO as a commercial product were licensed by Control Data Corporation (CDC), the manufacturer on whose mainframe computers the PLATO IV system was built. CDC President William Norris planned to make PLATO a force in the computer world, but found that marketing the system was not as easy as hoped. PLATO nevertheless built a strong following in certain markets, and the last production PLATO system did not shut down until 2006, coincidentally just a month after Norris died.
Discussed on
- "PLATO (computer system)" | 2013-11-04 | 55 Upvotes 23 Comments
π Neskowin Ghost Forest
The Neskowin Ghost Forest is the remnants of a Sitka spruce forest on the Oregon Coast of the United States. The stumps were likely created when an earthquake of the Cascadia subduction zone abruptly lowered the trees, that were then covered by mud from landslides or debris from a tsunami. Many of the stumps are over 2,000 years old.
The stumps were unearthed when turbulent storms swept away sand during the winter of 1997β1998. It is one of over thirty ghost forests along the Oregon and Washington Coast, though many appear as flat roots and not stumps. Most notably, Washington's ghost forest of red cedars was integral to the discovery of the Cascadia fault line. These ghost forests are evidence of significant, rapid changes in coastline β often due to seismic events such as the 1700 Cascadia earthquake.
The stumps at Neskowin are 2,000 years old, according to carbon dating. While living, the trees that make up the Neskowin Ghost Forest were similar to present-day coastal rain forest. They stood 150β200 feet (46β61Β m) high and were at least 200 years old when buried. However, it's difficult to determine when or how the trees died, because it occurred before written history in the region. It was originally believed that these trees died slowly, as the roots were gradually submerged in saltwater due to changes in the sea levels. Yet research by geologists revealed that the soil, still present at the roots of the stumps, was buried abruptly β indicating a more sudden and dramatic event, like an earthquake, as the cause.
The ghost forest is near Proposal Rock. It is part of the Neskowin Beach State Recreation Site. The best time to see the stumps is low tide, during winter (due to January, February and March bringing the lowest tides of the year.)
Discussed on
- "Neskowin Ghost Forest" | 2023-10-25 | 34 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Indian Coffee House
Indian Coffee House is a restaurant chain in India, run by a series of worker co-operative societies. It has strong presence across India with nearly 400 coffee houses. It has been a hub for Communist, Socialist and liberal movements for generations. Thus it has played a very important role in Geopolitics of India as most successful political movements began from here. Many governments have been formed by the people who regularly visited here.
Discussed on
- "Indian Coffee House" | 2020-11-30 | 16 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Menger Sponge
In mathematics, the Menger sponge (also known as the Menger cube, Menger universal curve, Sierpinski cube, or Sierpinski sponge) is a fractal curve. It is a three-dimensional generalization of the one-dimensional Cantor set and two-dimensional Sierpinski carpet. It was first described by Karl Menger in 1926, in his studies of the concept of topological dimension.
Discussed on
- "Menger Sponge" | 2020-10-05 | 27 Upvotes 12 Comments
π Tutankhamun's Meteoric Iron Dagger
Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger, also known as Tutankhamun's iron dagger and King Tut's dagger, is an iron-bladed dagger from the tomb of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun (reigned c. 1334β1325 BC). As the blade composition and homogeneity closely correlate with meteorite composition and homogeneity, the material for the blade is determined to have originated by way of a meteoritic landing. The dagger is currently displayed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
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- "Tutankhamun's Meteoric Iron Dagger" | 2022-11-15 | 85 Upvotes 12 Comments
π Auto-Antonym
An auto-antonym or autantonym, also called a contronym, contranym or Janus word, is a word with multiple meanings (senses) of which one is the reverse of another. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This phenomenon is called enantiosemy, enantionymy (enantio- means "opposite"), antilogy or autantonymy. An enantiosemic term is necessarily polysemic.
Discussed on
- "Auto-antonym" | 2015-04-10 | 32 Upvotes 30 Comments
π Karmarkar's algorithm β Patent controversy β can mathematics be patented?
Karmarkar's algorithm is an algorithm introduced by Narendra Karmarkar in 1984 for solving linear programming problems. It was the first reasonably efficient algorithm that solves these problems in polynomial time. The ellipsoid method is also polynomial time but proved to be inefficient in practice.
Denoting as the number of variables and as the number of bits of input to the algorithm, Karmarkar's algorithm requires operations on -digit numbers, as compared to such operations for the ellipsoid algorithm. The runtime of Karmarkar's algorithm is thus
using FFT-based multiplication (see Big O notation).
Karmarkar's algorithm falls within the class of interior-point methods: the current guess for the solution does not follow the boundary of the feasible set as in the simplex method, but moves through the interior of the feasible region, improving the approximation of the optimal solution by a definite fraction with every iteration and converging to an optimal solution with rational data.
π Ondol
Ondol (ON-dol; , Korean:Β μ¨λ; Hanja:Β ζΊ«ηͺ/ζΊ«ε ; Korean pronunciation: [on.dol]) or gudeul (ꡬλ€; [ku.dΙ―l]) in Korean traditional architecture is underfloor heating that uses direct heat transfer from wood smoke to heat the underside of a thick masonry floor. In modern usage, it refers to any type of underfloor heating, or to a hotel or a sleeping room in Korean (as opposed to Western) style.
The main components of the traditional ondol are an agungi (μκΆμ΄; [a.guΕ.i]), a firebox or stove, accessible from an adjoining room (typically kitchen or master bedroom), a raised masonry floor underlain by horizontal smoke passages, and a vertical, freestanding chimney on the opposite exterior wall providing a draft. The heated floor, supported by stone piers or baffles to distribute the smoke, is covered by stone slabs, clay and an impervious layer such as oiled paper.
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- "Ondol" | 2025-10-26 | 12 Upvotes 1 Comments