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🔗 Milk Bag
A milk bag is a plastic bag that contains milk. Usually one of the corners is cut off to allow for pouring, and the bag is stored in a pitcher or jug.
A typical milk bag contains approximately 1 L (1.8 imp pt) of milk in South America, Iran, Israel, and continental European countries, while in Canada they contain 1+1⁄3 litres (2.3 imp pt), and in India, 0.5 L (0.9 imp pt).
In the Baltic rim countries, e.g., Estonia, and some Eastern European countries, the similar bags may also be seen used for packaging yogurt or kefir.
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- "Milk Bag" | 2023-08-28 | 71 Upvotes 125 Comments
🔗 Animal Welfare in Nazi Germany
There was widespread support for animal welfare in Nazi Germany (German: Tierschutz im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland) among the country's leadership. Adolf Hitler and his top officials took a variety of measures to ensure animals were protected.
Several Nazis were environmentalists, and species protection and animal welfare were significant issues in the Nazi regime. Heinrich Himmler made an effort to ban the hunting of animals. Hermann Göring was a professed animal lover and conservationist, who, on instructions from Hitler, committed Germans who violated Nazi animal welfare laws to concentration camps. In his private diaries, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels described Hitler as a vegetarian whose hatred of the Jewish religion in large part stemmed from the ethical distinction this faith drew between the value of humans and the value of other animals; Goebbels also mentions that Hitler planned to ban slaughterhouses in the German Reich following the conclusion of World War II. Nevertheless, animal testing was common in Nazi Germany.
The current animal welfare laws in Germany were initially introduced by the Nazis.
🔗 Abstract Nonsense
In mathematics, abstract nonsense, general abstract nonsense, generalized abstract nonsense, and general nonsense are nonderogatory terms used by mathematicians to describe long, theoretical parts of a proof they skip over when readers are expected to be familiar with them. These terms are mainly used for abstract methods related to category theory and homological algebra. More generally, "abstract nonsense" may refer to a proof that relies on category-theoretic methods, or even to the study of category theory itself.
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- "Abstract Nonsense" | 2023-08-26 | 19 Upvotes 4 Comments
🔗 East German Balloon Escape
The East German balloon escape occurred on 16 September 1979, when eight people in two families escaped the Eastern Bloc country of East Germany by crossing the border to the Western Bloc's West Germany in a homemade hot air balloon at around 2:00 a.m. The escape plot was carried out over one and a half years, including a previously unsuccessful attempt, three different balloons, and various modifications. One failed crossing alerted the government to the plot, but the police were not able to identify the suspects before their flight to the West.
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- "East German Balloon Escape" | 2023-08-26 | 36 Upvotes 6 Comments
🔗 Untouchable Number
An untouchable number is a positive integer that cannot be expressed as the sum of all the proper divisors of any positive integer (including the untouchable number itself). That is, these numbers are not in the image of the aliquot sum function. Their study goes back at least to Abu Mansur al-Baghdadi (circa 1000 AD), who observed that both 2 and 5 are untouchable.
Discussed on
- "Untouchable Number" | 2023-08-25 | 108 Upvotes 57 Comments
🔗 Robert's Rules of Order
Robert's Rules of Order, often simply referred to as Robert's Rules, is a manual of parliamentary procedure by U.S. Army officer Henry Martyn Robert. "The object of Rules of Order is to assist an assembly to accomplish the work for which it was designed [...] Where there is no law [...] there is the least of real liberty". The term "Robert's Rules of Order" is also used more generically to refer to any of the more recent editions, by various editors and authors, based on any of Robert's original editions, and the term is used more generically in the United States to refer to parliamentary procedure.
Robert's manual was first published in 1876 as an adaptation of the rules and practice of the United States Congress to the needs of non-legislative societies. Robert's Rules is the most widely used manual of parliamentary procedure in the United States. It governs the meetings of a diverse range of organizations—including church groups, county commissions, homeowners associations, nonprofit associations, professional societies, school boards, and trade unions—that have adopted it as their parliamentary authority. Robert published four editions of the manual before his death in 1923, the last being the thoroughly revised and expanded Fourth Edition published as Robert's Rules of Order Revised in May 1915.
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- "Robert's Rules of Order" | 2023-08-25 | 49 Upvotes 32 Comments
🔗 Resistor–Transistor Logic (RTL)
Resistor–transistor logic (RTL) (sometimes also transistor–resistor logic (TRL)) is a class of digital circuits built using resistors as the input network and bipolar junction transistors (BJTs) as switching devices. RTL is the earliest class of transistorized digital logic circuit; it was succeeded by diode–transistor logic (DTL) and transistor–transistor logic (TTL).
RTL circuits were first constructed with discrete components, but in 1961 it became the first digital logic family to be produced as a monolithic integrated circuit. RTL integrated circuits were used in the Apollo Guidance Computer, whose design begun in 1961 and which first flew in 1966.
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- "Resistor–Transistor Logic (RTL)" | 2023-08-23 | 84 Upvotes 34 Comments
🔗 Height in Sports
Height can significantly influence success in sports, depending on how the design of the sport is linked to factors that are height-biased due to physics and biology. The balance of the intricate array of links will determine the degree to which height plays a role in success, if any.
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- "Height in Sports" | 2023-08-22 | 13 Upvotes 1 Comments
🔗 Kullback–Leibler Divergence
In mathematical statistics, the Kullback–Leibler divergence (also called relative entropy and I-divergence), denoted , is a type of statistical distance: a measure of how one probability distribution P is different from a second, reference probability distribution Q. A simple interpretation of the KL divergence of P from Q is the expected excess surprise from using Q as a model when the actual distribution is P. While it is a distance, it is not a metric, the most familiar type of distance: it is not symmetric in the two distributions (in contrast to variation of information), and does not satisfy the triangle inequality. Instead, in terms of information geometry, it is a type of divergence, a generalization of squared distance, and for certain classes of distributions (notably an exponential family), it satisfies a generalized Pythagorean theorem (which applies to squared distances).
In the simple case, a relative entropy of 0 indicates that the two distributions in question have identical quantities of information. Relative entropy is a nonnegative function of two distributions or measures. It has diverse applications, both theoretical, such as characterizing the relative (Shannon) entropy in information systems, randomness in continuous time-series, and information gain when comparing statistical models of inference; and practical, such as applied statistics, fluid mechanics, neuroscience and bioinformatics.
Discussed on
- "Kullback–Leibler Divergence" | 2023-08-21 | 177 Upvotes 74 Comments
🔗 Weierstrass Function
In mathematics, the Weierstrass function is an example of a real-valued function that is continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere. It is an example of a fractal curve. It is named after its discoverer Karl Weierstrass.
The Weierstrass function has historically served the role of a pathological function, being the first published example (1872) specifically concocted to challenge the notion that every continuous function is differentiable except on a set of isolated points. Weierstrass's demonstration that continuity did not imply almost-everywhere differentiability upended mathematics, overturning several proofs that relied on geometric intuition and vague definitions of smoothness. These types of functions were denounced by contemporaries: Henri Poincaré famously described them as "monsters" and called Weierstrass' work "an outrage against common sense", while Charles Hermite wrote that they were a "lamentable scourge". The functions were difficult to visualize until the arrival of computers in the next century, and the results did not gain wide acceptance until practical applications such as models of Brownian motion necessitated infinitely jagged functions (nowadays known as fractal curves).
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- "Weierstrass Function" | 2023-08-22 | 21 Upvotes 2 Comments