Random Articles (Page 6)
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π Speed Tape
Speed tape is an aluminium pressure-sensitive tape used to perform minor repairs on aircraft and racing cars. It is used as a temporary repair material until a more permanent repair can be carried out. It has an appearance similar to duct tape, for which it is sometimes mistaken, but its adhesive is capable of sticking on an airplane fuselage or wing at high speeds, hence the name.
π Amarna Letters
The Amarna letters (; sometimes referred to as the Amarna correspondence or Amarna tablets, and cited with the abbreviation EA, for "El Amarna") are an archive, written on clay tablets, primarily consisting of diplomatic correspondence between the Egyptian administration and its representatives in Canaan and Amurru, or neighboring kingdom leaders, during the New Kingdom, spanning a period of no more than thirty years between c. 1360β1332 BC (see here for dates). The letters were found in Upper Egypt at el-Amarna, the modern name for the ancient Egyptian capital of Akhetaten, founded by pharaoh Akhenaten (1350sβ1330sΒ BC) during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. The Amarna letters are unusual in Egyptological research, because they are written not in the language of ancient Egypt, but in cuneiform, the writing system of ancient Mesopotamia. Most are in a variety of Akkadian sometimes characterised as a mixed language, Canaanite-Akkadian; one especially long letterβabbreviated EA 24βwas written in a late dialect of Hurrian, and is the longest contiguous text known to survive in that language.
The known tablets total 382, of which 358 have been published by the Norwegian Assyriologist JΓΈrgen Alexander Knudtzon in his work, Die El-Amarna-Tafeln, which came out in two volumes (1907 and 1915) and remains the standard edition to this day. The texts of the remaining 24 complete or fragmentary tablets excavated since Knudtzon have also been made available.
The Amarna letters are of great significance for biblical studies as well as Semitic linguistics because they shed light on the culture and language of the Canaanite peoples in this time period. Though most are written in Akkadian, the Akkadian of the letters is heavily colored by the mother tongue of their writers, who probably spoke an early form of Proto-Canaanite, the language(s) which would later evolve into the daughter languages of Hebrew and Phoenician. These "Canaanisms" provide valuable insights into the proto-stage of those languages several centuries prior to their first actual manifestation.
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- "Amarna Letters" | 2023-01-14 | 51 Upvotes 6 Comments
π The Morris Worm was released 35 years ago today
The Morris worm or Internet worm of November 2, 1988, is one of the oldest computer worms distributed via the Internet, and the first to gain significant mainstream media attention. It resulted in the first felony conviction in the US under the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It was written by a graduate student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris, and launched on 8:30 pm November 2, 1988, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology network.
Clifford Stoll of Harvard wrote that "Rumors have it that [Morris] worked with a friend or two at Harvard's computing department (Harvard student Paul Graham sent him mail asking for 'Any news on the brilliant project')."
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- "The Morris Worm was released 35 years ago today" | 2023-11-02 | 134 Upvotes 49 Comments
π Inventors killed by their own inventions
This is a list of inventors whose deaths were in some manner caused by or related to a product, process, procedure, or other innovation that they invented or designed.
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- "List of Inventors Killed by Their Own Inventions" | 2021-02-07 | 73 Upvotes 22 Comments
- "Inventors killed by their own inventions" | 2019-06-06 | 273 Upvotes 149 Comments
- "List of inventors killed by their own inventions" | 2019-06-05 | 16 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Inventors killed by their own inventions" | 2016-12-19 | 67 Upvotes 27 Comments
- "List of Inventors Killed By Their Own Inventions" | 2009-09-02 | 109 Upvotes 59 Comments
π Hundredth monkey effect
The hundredth monkey effect is a hypothetical phenomenon in which a new behaviour or idea is said to spread rapidly by unexplained means from one group to all related groups once a critical number of members of one group exhibit the new behaviour or acknowledge the new idea.
One of the primary factors in the promulgation of the story is that many authors quote secondary, tertiary or post-tertiary sources which have themselves misrepresented the original observations.
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- "Hundredth monkey effect" | 2012-12-24 | 11 Upvotes 6 Comments
π Reification (Computer Science)
Reification is the process by which an abstract idea about a computer program is turned into an explicit data model or other object created in a programming language. A computable/addressable objectβa resourceβis created in a system as a proxy for a non computable/addressable object. By means of reification, something that was previously implicit, unexpressed, and possibly inexpressible is explicitly formulated and made available to conceptual (logical or computational) manipulation. Informally, reification is often referred to as "making something a first-class citizen" within the scope of a particular system. Some aspect of a system can be reified at language design time, which is related to reflection in programming languages. It can be applied as a stepwise refinement at system design time. Reification is one of the most frequently used techniques of conceptual analysis and knowledge representation.
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- "Reification (Computer Science)" | 2017-10-09 | 12 Upvotes 2 Comments
π Chaitin's Constant
In the computer science subfield of algorithmic information theory, a Chaitin constant (Chaitin omega number) or halting probability is a real number that, informally speaking, represents the probability that a randomly constructed program will halt. These numbers are formed from a construction due to Gregory Chaitin.
Although there are infinitely many halting probabilities, one for each method of encoding programs, it is common to use the letter Ξ© to refer to them as if there were only one. Because Ξ© depends on the program encoding used, it is sometimes called Chaitin's construction instead of Chaitin's constant when not referring to any specific encoding.
Each halting probability is a normal and transcendental real number that is not computable, which means that there is no algorithm to compute its digits. Indeed, each halting probability is Martin-LΓΆf random, meaning there is not even any algorithm which can reliably guess its digits.
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- "Chaitin's Constant" | 2020-01-20 | 81 Upvotes 38 Comments
π The ADE 651 is a fake bomb detector, sold for up to US$60k each
The ADE 651 is a fake bomb detector produced by the British company Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd (ATSC). Its manufacturer claimed it could detect bombs, guns, ammunition, and more from kilometers away. However, it was a scam, and the device was little more than a dowsing rod. The device was sold for up to US$60,000 each, despite costing almost nothing to produce. It was widely used in the Middle East, and may have led to numerous deadly bombings in Iraq due to its inability to detect explosives. Its inventor, James McCormick, was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 2013 for fraud.
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- "The ADE 651 is a fake bomb detector, sold for up to US$60k each" | 2021-09-08 | 127 Upvotes 85 Comments
π Wikipedia chooses Lua as its new template/macro language
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- "Wikipedia chooses Lua as its new template/macro language " | 2012-01-31 | 25 Upvotes 1 Comments