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πŸ”— Pauli Effect

πŸ”— Skepticism πŸ”— Parapsychology

The Pauli effect or Pauli's Device Corollary is the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people. The term was coined after mysterious anecdotal stories involving Austrian theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli, describing numerous instances in which demonstrations involving equipment suffered technical problems only when he was present.

The Pauli effect is not related with the Pauli exclusion principle, which is a bona fide physical phenomenon named after Pauli. However the Pauli effect was humorously tagged as a second Pauli exclusion principle, according to which a functioning device and Wolfgang Pauli may not occupy the same room. Pauli himself was convinced that the effect named after him was real. Pauli corresponded with Hans Bender and Carl Jung and saw the effect as an example of the concept of synchronicity.

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πŸ”— You ain't gonna need it

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computing/Software

"You aren't gonna need it" (YAGNI) is a principle of extreme programming (XP) that states a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary. XP co-founder Ron Jeffries has written: "Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them." Other forms of the phrase include "You aren't going to need it" and "You ain't gonna need it".

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πŸ”— Boreout

πŸ”— Psychology

Boredom boreout syndrome is a psychological disorder that causes physical illness, mainly caused by mental underload at the workplace due to lack of either adequate quantitative or qualitative workload. One reason for bore-out could be that the initial job description does not match the actual work.

This theory was first expounded in 2007 in Diagnose Boreout, a book by Peter Werder and Philippe Rothlin, two Swiss business consultants.


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πŸ”— Shotgun clause

πŸ”— Business

A shotgun clause (or Texas Shootout Clause) is a term of art, rather than a legal term. It is a specific type of exit provision that may be included in a shareholders' agreement, and may often be referred to as a buy-sell agreement. The shotgun clause allows a shareholder to offer a specific price per share for the other shareholder(s)' shares; the other shareholder(s) must then either accept the offer or buy the offering shareholder's shares at that price per share.

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πŸ”— MD6 Message-Digest Algorithm

πŸ”— Cryptography πŸ”— Cryptography/Computer science

The MD6 Message-Digest Algorithm is a cryptographic hash function. It uses a Merkle tree-like structure to allow for immense parallel computation of hashes for very long inputs. Authors claim a performance of 28 cycles per byte for MD6-256 on an Intel Core 2 Duo and provable resistance against differential cryptanalysis. The source code of the reference implementation was released under MIT license.

Speeds in excess of 1 GB/s have been reported to be possible for long messages on 16-core CPU architecture.

In December 2008, Douglas Held of Fortify Software discovered a buffer overflow in the original MD6 hash algorithm's reference implementation. This error was later made public by Ron Rivest on 19 February 2009, with a release of a corrected reference implementation in advance of the Fortify Report.

MD6 was submitted to the NIST SHA-3 competition. However, on July 1, 2009, Rivest posted a comment at NIST that MD6 is not yet ready to be a candidate for SHA-3 because of speed issues, a "gap in the proof that the submitted version of MD6 is resistant to differential attacks", and an inability to supply such a proof for a faster reduced-round version, although Rivest also stated at the MD6 website that it is not withdrawn formally. MD6 did not advance to the second round of the SHA-3 competition. In September 2011, a paper presenting an improved proof that MD6 and faster reduced-round versions are resistant to differential attacks was posted to the MD6 website.

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πŸ”— Overengineering – I see this every day, please stop

πŸ”— Technology πŸ”— Engineering

Overengineering (or over-engineering, or over-kill) is the act of designing a product to be more robust or have more features than often necessary for its intended use, or for a process to be unnecessarily complex or inefficient.

Overengineering is often done to increase a factor of safety, add functionality, or overcome perceived design flaws that most users would accept.

Overengineering can be desirable when safety or performance is critical (e.g. in aerospace vehicles and luxury road vehicles), or when extremely broad functionality is required (e.g. diagnostic and medical tools, power users of products), but it is generally criticized in terms of value engineering as wasteful of resources such as materials, time and money.

As a design philosophy, it is the opposite of the minimalist ethos of "less is more" (or: β€œworse is better”) and a disobedience of the KISS principle.

Overengineering generally occurs in high-end products or specialized markets. In one form, products are overbuilt and have performance far in excess of expected normal operation (a city car that can travel at 300Β km/h, or a home video recorder with a projected lifespan of 100 years), and hence are more expensive, bulkier, and heavier than necessary. Alternatively, they may become overcomplicated – the extra functions may be unnecessary, and potentially reduce the usability of the product by overwhelming lesser experienced and technically literate end users, as in feature creep.

Overengineering can decrease the productivity of design teams, because of the need to build and maintain more features than most users need.

A related issue is market segmentation – making different products for different market segments. In this context, a particular product may be more or less suited (and thus considered over- or under-engineered) for a particular market segment.

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πŸ”— SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation

πŸ”— Video games

SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation is a management simulation video game, developed by Thinking Tools and published by Maxis with assistance from the Markle Foundation for MS-DOS in 1994. It is a simulation of the U.S. Healthcare system. The game was released during Congressional debates on the Clinton health care plan.

Due to the complexity of the game, SimHealth was seen as being very difficult. Armed with none of the tongue-in-cheek humor that Maxis's prior games were known for, the only real link to the franchise was the SimCity 2000-inspired user interface. The game was seen as more serious than other Maxis games. Noel Fritzinger, who with Lyman Orton first conceptualized CommunityViz, says that his inspiration came from seeing SimHealth and wondering if the same concepts could be applied to real-world land-use planning.

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πŸ”— Qanat

πŸ”— Civil engineering πŸ”— Water

A qanat or kariz is a gently sloping underground channel to transport water from an aquifer or water well to surface for irrigation and drinking, acting as an underground aqueduct. This is an old system of water supply from a deep well with a series of vertical access shafts. The qanats still create a reliable supply of water for human settlements and irrigation in hot, arid, and semi-arid climates, but the value of this system is directly related to the quality, volume, and regularity of the water flow. Traditionally qanats are built by a group of skilled laborers, muqannΔ«s, with hand labor. The profession historically paid well and was typically handed down from father to son. According to most sources, the qanat technology was developed in ancient Iran by the Persian people sometime in the early 1st millennium BCE, and spread from there slowly westward and eastward. However, some other sources suggest a Southeast Arabian origin.

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πŸ”— The repetitive and boring gameplay in WoW is probably intentional.

πŸ”— Video games

In video games, grinding is performing repetitive tasks, usually for a gameplay advantage or loot but in some cases for purely aesthetic or cosmetic benefits. Many video games use different tactics to implement, or reduce, the amount of grinding in the gameplay. The general use of grinding is for "experience points", or to improve a character's level. In addition, the behavior is sometimes referred to as pushing the bar (leveling up), farming (acquiring loot repeatedly from one source), or catassing.

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πŸ”— The Biggest Star

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