Topic: Project-independent assessment
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π Larry (Cat)
Larry (born c.βJanuary 2007) is a British domestic tabby cat who has served as Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street since 2011. He is cared for by Downing Street staff, and is not the personal property of the prime minister of the United Kingdom. Larry has lived at 10 Downing Street during the premierships of six prime ministers: David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer. He is the first cat to be officially given the title of Chief Mouser, according to the Downing Street government website.
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- "Larry (Cat)" | 2025-07-04 | 350 Upvotes 74 Comments
π List of games that Buddha would not play
The Buddhist games list is a list of games that Gautama Buddha is reputed to have said that he would not play and that his disciples should likewise not play, because he believed them to be a 'cause for negligence'. This list dates from the 6th or 5th century BCE and is the earliest known list of games.
There is some debate about the translation of some of the games mentioned, and the list given here is based on the translation by T. W. Rhys Davids of the BrahmajΔla Sutta and is in the same order given in the original. The list is duplicated in a number of other early Buddhist texts, including the Vinaya Pitaka.
- Games on boards with 8 or 10 rows. This is thought to refer to ashtapada and dasapada respectively, but later Sinhala commentaries refer to these boards also being used with games involving dice.
- The same games played on imaginary boards. Akasam astapadam was an ashtapada variant played with no board, literally "astapadam played in the sky". A correspondent in the American Chess Bulletin identifies this as likely the earliest literary mention of a blindfold chess variant.
- Games of marking diagrams on the floor such that the player can only walk on certain places. This is described in the Vinaya Pitaka as "having drawn a circle with various lines on the ground, there they play avoiding the line to be avoided". Rhys Davids suggests that it may refer to parihΔra-patham, a form of hop-scotch.
- Games where players either remove pieces from a pile or add pieces to it, with the loser being the one who causes the heap to shake (similar to the modern game pick-up sticks).
- Games of throwing dice.
- "Dipping the hand with the fingers stretched out in lac, or red dye, or flour-water, and striking the wet hand on the ground or on a wall, calling out 'What shall it be?' and showing the form requiredβelephants, horses, &c."
- Ball games.
- Blowing through a pat-kulal, a toy pipe made of leaves.
- Ploughing with a toy plough.
- Playing with toy windmills made from palm leaves.
- Playing with toy measures made from palm leaves.
- Playing with toy carts.
- Playing with toy bows.
- Guessing at letters traced with the finger in the air or on a friend's back.
- Guessing a friend's thoughts.
- Imitating deformities.
Although the modern game of chess had not been invented at the time the list was made, earlier chess-like games such as chaturaji may have existed. H.J.R. Murray refers to Rhys Davids' 1899 translation, noting that the 8Γ8 board game is most likely ashtapada while the 10Γ10 game is dasapada. He states that both are race games.
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- "List of games that Buddha would not play" | 2025-06-24 | 13 Upvotes 6 Comments
- "List of games that Buddha would not play" | 2021-12-30 | 199 Upvotes 140 Comments
- "List of games that Buddha would not play" | 2020-08-12 | 24 Upvotes 9 Comments
π Purple Earth Hypothesis
The Purple Earth Hypothesis (PEH) is an astrobiological hypothesis, first proposed by molecular biologist Shiladitya DasSarma in 2007, that the earliest photosynthetic life forms of Early Earth were based on the simpler molecule retinal rather than the more complex porphyrin-based chlorophyll, making the surface biosphere appear purplish rather than its current greenish color. It is estimated to have occurred between 3.5 and 2.4 billion years ago during the Archean eon, prior to the Great Oxygenation Event and Huronian glaciation.
Retinal-containing cell membranes exhibit a single light absorption peak centered in the energy-rich green-yellow region of the visible spectrum, but transmit and reflect red and blue light, resulting in a magenta color. Chlorophyll pigments, in contrast, absorb red and blue light, but little or no green light, which results in the characteristic green reflection of plants, green algae, cyanobacteria and other organisms with chlorophyllic organelles. The simplicity of retinal pigments in comparison to the more complex chlorophyll, their association with isoprenoid lipids in the cell membrane, as well as the discovery of archaeal membrane components in ancient sediments on the Early Earth are consistent with an early appearance of life forms with purple membranes prior to the turquoise of the Canfield ocean and later green photosynthetic organisms.
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- "Purple Earth Hypothesis" | 2025-07-24 | 286 Upvotes 79 Comments
π Iron law of oligarchy
The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties. It asserts that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.
Michels's theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Michels observed that since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise.
Using anecdotes from political parties and trade unions struggling to operate democratically to build his argument in 1911, Michels addressed the application of this law to representative democracy, and stated: "Who says organization, says oligarchy." He went on to state that "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy."
According to Michels all organizations eventually come to be run by a "leadership class", who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons or political strategists for the organization. Far from being "servants of the masses", Michels argues this "leadership class," rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures. By controlling who has access to information, those in power can centralize their power successfully, often with little accountability, due to the apathy, indifference and non-participation most rank and file members have in relation to their organization's decision-making processes. Michels argues that democratic attempts to hold leadership positions accountable are prone to fail, since with power comes the ability to reward loyalty, the ability to control information about the organization, and the ability to control what procedures the organization follows when making decisions. All of these mechanisms can be used to strongly influence the outcome of any decisions made 'democratically' by members.
Michels stated that the official goal of representative democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that representative democracy is a faΓ§ade legitimizing the rule of a particular elite, and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable. Later Michels migrated to Italy and joined Benito Mussolini's Fascist Party, as he believed this was the next legitimate step of modern societies. The thesis became popular once more in post-war America with the publication of Union Democracy: The Internal Politics of the International Typographical Union (1956) and during the red scare brought about by McCarthyism.
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- "Iron Law of Oligarchy" | 2025-07-29 | 26 Upvotes 11 Comments
- "Iron law of oligarchy" | 2015-11-26 | 72 Upvotes 88 Comments
π $100 Hamburger
$100 hamburger ("hundred-dollar hamburger") is aviation slang for the excuse a general aviation pilot might use to fly.
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- "$100 Hamburger" | 2025-06-14 | 139 Upvotes 52 Comments
π Mumps (Programming Language)
MUMPS ("Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System"), or M, is an imperative, high-level programming language with an integrated transaction processing keyβvalue database. It was originally developed at Massachusetts General Hospital for managing patient medical records and hospital laboratory information systems.
MUMPS technology has since expanded as the predominant database for health information systems and electronic health records in the United States. MUMPS-based information systems, such as Epic Systems', provide health information services for over 78% of patients across the U.S.
A unique feature of the MUMPS technology is its integrated database language, allowing direct, high-speed read-write access to permanent disk storage.
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- "Mumps (Programming Language)" | 2025-06-13 | 103 Upvotes 71 Comments
π Wirth's Law
Wirth's law is an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.
The adage is named after Niklaus Wirth, who discussed it in his 1995 article "A Plea for Lean Software".
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- "Wirth's Law" | 2025-07-26 | 19 Upvotes 6 Comments
- "Wirth's Law" | 2024-11-14 | 12 Upvotes 2 Comments
- "Wirth's Law" | 2022-07-17 | 15 Upvotes 8 Comments
- "Wirth's Law - Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster" | 2016-10-16 | 40 Upvotes 8 Comments
- "Wirth's law" | 2016-03-20 | 10 Upvotes 3 Comments
π Jove (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs)
JOVE (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs) is an open-source, Emacs-like text editor, primarily intended for Unix-like operating systems. It also supports MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. JOVE was inspired by Gosling Emacs but is much smaller and simpler, lacking Mocklisp. It was originally created in 1983 by Jonathan Payne while at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in Massachusetts, United States on a PDP-11 minicomputer. JOVE was distributed with several releases of BSD Unix, including 2.9BSD, 4.3BSD-Reno and 4.4BSD-Lite2.
As of 2022, the latest development release of JOVE is version 4.17.4.4; the stable version is 4.16. Unlike GNU Emacs, JOVE does not support UTF-8.
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- "Jove (Jonathan's Own Version of Emacs)" | 2025-07-17 | 72 Upvotes 46 Comments
π Great Oxidation Event
The Great Oxidation Event (GOE), sometimes also called the Great Oxygenation Event, Oxygen Catastrophe, Oxygen Crisis, Oxygen Holocaust, or Oxygen Revolution, was a time period when the Earth's atmosphere and the shallow ocean experienced a rise in oxygen, approximately 2.4Β billion years ago (2.4Β Ga) to 2.1β2.0 Ga during the Paleoproterozoic era. Geological, isotopic, and chemical evidence suggests that biologically induced molecular oxygen (dioxygen, O2) started to accumulate in Earth's atmosphere and changed Earth's atmosphere from a weakly reducing atmosphere to an oxidizing atmosphere, causing almost all life on Earth to go extinct. The cyanobacteria producing the oxygen caused the event which enabled the subsequent development of multicellular forms.
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- "Great Oxidation Event" | 2025-07-26 | 21 Upvotes 5 Comments
- "Great Oxidation Event" | 2019-07-21 | 64 Upvotes 24 Comments
π Clashes between web and X11 colors in the CSS color scheme
In computing, on the X Window System, X11 color names are represented in a simple text file, which maps certain strings to RGB color values. It was traditionally shipped with every X11 installation, hence the name, and is usually located in <X11root>/lib/X11/rgb.txt
. The web colors list is descended from it but differs for certain color names.
Color names are not standardized by Xlib or the X11 protocol. The list does not show continuity either in selected color values or in color names, and some color triplets have multiple names. Despite this, graphic designers and others got used to them, making it practically impossible to introduce a different list. In earlier releases of X11 (prior to the introduction of Xcms), server implementors were encouraged to modify the RGB values in the reference color database to account for gamma correction.
As of X.Org Release 7.4 rgb.txt is no longer included in the roll up release, and the list is built directly into the server. The optional module xorg/app/rgb contains the stand-alone rgb.txt file.
The list first shipped with X10 release 3 (X10R3) on 7 June 1986, having been checked into RCS by Jim Gettys in 1985. The same list was in X11R1 on 18 September 1987. Approximately the full list as is available today shipped with X11R4 on 29 January 1989, with substantial additions by Paul Ravelling (who added colors based on Sinclair Paints samples), John C. Thomas (who added colors based on a set of 72 Crayola crayons he had on hand) and Jim Fulton (who reconciled contributions to produce the X11R4 list). The project was running DEC VT240 terminals at the time, so would have worked to that device.
In some applications multipart names are written with spaces, in others joined together, often in camel case. They are usually matched insensitive of case and the X Server source code contains spaced aliases for most entries; this article uses spaces and uppercase initials except where variants with spaces are not specified in the actual code.
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- "Clashes between web and X11 colors in the CSS color scheme" | 2025-07-13 | 66 Upvotes 28 Comments