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π Prawo Jazdy (Alleged Criminal)
"Prawo Jazdy" was a supposed Polish national who was listed by the Garda SΓochΓ‘na in a police criminal database as having committed more than 50 traffic violations in Ireland. A 2007 memorandum stated that an investigation revealed prawo jazdy [Λpra.vΙ Λjaz.dΙ¨] to be Polish for 'driving licence', with the error arising due to officers mistaking the phrase, printed on Polish driving licenses, to be a personal name while issuing traffic tickets.
π Fourth, fifth, and sixth derivatives of position
In physics, the fourth, fifth and sixth derivatives of position are defined as derivatives of the position vector with respect to time β with the first, second, and third derivatives being velocity, acceleration, and jerk, respectively. Unlike the first three derivatives, the higher-order derivatives are less common, thus their names are not as standardized, though the concept of a minimum snap trajectory has been used in robotics and is implemented in MATLAB.
The fourth derivative is often referred to as snap or jounce. The name "snap" for the fourth derivative led to crackle and pop for the fifth and sixth derivatives respectively, inspired by the Rice Krispies mascots Snap, Crackle, and Pop. These terms are occasionally used, though "sometimes somewhat facetiously".
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- "Fourth, fifth, and sixth derivatives of position" | 2023-02-25 | 27 Upvotes 3 Comments
π X Window System: Principles
The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems.
X provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the display device and interacting with a mouse and keyboard. X does not mandate the user interfaceΒ β this is handled by individual programs. As such, the visual styling of X-based environments varies greatly; different programs may present radically different interfaces.
X originated at the Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at version 11 (hence "X11") since September 1987. The X.Org Foundation leads the X project, with the current reference implementation, X.Org Server, available as free and open source software under the MIT License and similar permissive licenses.
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- "X Window System: Principles" | 2020-05-05 | 32 Upvotes 11 Comments
π Story of a Stolen Boeing
On 25 May 2003, a Boeing 727, registered N844AA, was stolen at Quatro de Fevereiro Airport, Luanda, Angola. Its disappearance prompted a worldwide search by the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). No trace of the aircraft has since been found.
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- "Story of a Stolen Boeing" | 2019-03-01 | 65 Upvotes 25 Comments
- "2003 Boeing 727-223 disappearance" | 2014-03-10 | 109 Upvotes 46 Comments
π Novikov Self-Consistency Principle
The Novikov self-consistency principle, also known as the Novikov self-consistency conjecture and Larry Niven's law of conservation of history, is a principle developed by Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov in the mid-1980s. Novikov intended it to solve the problem of paradoxes in time travel, which is theoretically permitted in certain solutions of general relativity that contain what are known as closed timelike curves. The principle asserts that if an event exists that would cause a paradox or any "change" to the past whatsoever, then the probability of that event is zero. It would thus be impossible to create time paradoxes.
π Hindu units of time
Hindu texts describe units of Kala measurements, from microseconds to Trillions of years. According to these texts, time is cyclic, which repeats itself forever.
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- "Hindu units of time" | 2015-03-23 | 19 Upvotes 7 Comments
π El Ajedrecista
El Ajedrecista (English: The Chess Player) is an automaton built in 1912 by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, one of the first autonomous machines capable of playing chess. As opposed to the human-operated The Turk and Ajeeb, El Ajedrecista was a true automaton built to play chess without human guidance. It played an endgame with three chess pieces, automatically moving a white king and a rook to checkmate the black king moved by a human opponent.
The device could be considered the first computer game in history. It created great excitement when it made its debut, at the University of Paris in 1914. It was first widely mentioned in Scientific American as "Torres and His Remarkable Automatic Devices" on November 6, 1915.
The automaton does not deliver checkmate in the minimum number of moves, nor always within the 50 moves allotted by the fifty-move rule, because of the simple algorithm that calculates the moves. It did, however, checkmate the opponent every time. If an illegal move was made by the opposite player, the automaton would signal it by turning on a light. If the opposing player made three illegal moves, the automaton would stop playing.
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- "El Ajedrecista" | 2022-06-08 | 182 Upvotes 19 Comments
π Golden hat
Golden hats (or Gold hats) (German: GoldhΓΌte, singular: Goldhut) are a very specific and rare type of archaeological artifact from Bronze Age Europe. So far, four such objects ("cone-shaped gold hats of the Schifferstadt type") are known. The objects are made of thin sheet gold and were attached externally to long conical and brimmed headdresses which were probably made of some organic material and served to stabilise the external gold leaf. The following Golden Hats are known as of 2012:
- Golden Hat of Schifferstadt, found in 1835 at Schifferstadt near Speyer, c. 1400β1300 BC.
- Avanton Gold Cone, incomplete, found at Avanton near Poitiers in 1844, c. 1000β900 BC.
- Golden Cone of Ezelsdorf-Buch, found near Ezelsdorf near Nuremberg in 1953, c. 1000β900 BC; the tallest known specimen at c. 90Β cm.
- Berlin Gold Hat, found probably in Swabia or Switzerland, c. 1000β800 BC; acquired by the Museum fΓΌr Vor- und FrΓΌhgeschichte, Berlin, in 1996.
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- "Golden hat" | 2015-04-20 | 87 Upvotes 28 Comments
π Canadian Cross
A cross compiler is a compiler capable of creating executable code for a platform other than the one on which the compiler is running. For example, a compiler that runs on a PC but generates code that runs on Android devices is a cross compiler.
A cross compiler is useful to compile code for multiple platforms from one development host. Direct compilation on the target platform might be infeasible, for example on embedded systems with limited computing resources.
Cross compilers are distinct from source-to-source compilers. A cross compiler is for cross-platform software generation of machine code, while a source-to-source compiler translates from one coding language to another in text code. Both are programming tools.
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- "Canadian Cross" | 2025-07-18 | 12 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Solomon Shereshevsky
Solomon Veniaminovich Shereshevsky (Russian: Π‘ΠΎΠ»ΠΎΠΌΠΎΠ½ ΠΠ΅Π½ΠΈΠ°ΠΌΠΈΠ½ΠΎΠ²ΠΈΡ Π¨Π΅ΡΠ΅ΡΠ΅Π²ΡΠΊΠΈΠΉ; 1886 β 1 May 1958), also known simply as 'Π¨' ('Sh'), 'S.', or Luria's S, was a Soviet journalist and mnemonist active in the 1920s. He was the subject of Alexander Luria's case study The Mind of a Mnemonist (1968).
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- "Solomon Shereshevsky" | 2024-01-03 | 77 Upvotes 11 Comments