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🔗 Pemmican
Pemmican (also pemican in older sources) is a mixture of tallow, dried meat, and sometimes dried berries. A calorie-rich food, it can be used as a key component in prepared meals or eaten raw. Historically, it was an important part of indigenous cuisine in certain parts of North America and it is still prepared today. The word comes from the Cree word ᐱᒦᐦᑳᓐ (pimîhkân), which is derived from the word ᐱᒥᕀ (pimî), "fat, grease". The Lakota (or Sioux) word is wasná, originally meaning "grease derived from marrow bones", with the wa- creating a noun, and sná referring to small pieces that adhere to something. It was invented by the Indigenous peoples of North America.
Pemmican was widely adopted as a high-energy food by Europeans involved in the fur trade and later by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, such as Captain Robert Bartlett, Ernest Shackleton, Richard E. Byrd, Fridtjof Nansen, Robert Falcon Scott, George W. DeLong, and Roald Amundsen.
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- "Pemmican" | 2023-10-29 | 33 Upvotes 12 Comments
🔗 Mobile phones on aircraft
In the U.S., Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations prohibit the use of mobile phones aboard aircraft in flight. Contrary to popular misconception, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) does not actually prohibit the use of personal electronic devices (including cell phones) on aircraft. Paragraph (b)(5) of 14 CFR 91.21 leaves it up to the airlines to determine if devices can be used in flight, allowing use of "Any other portable electronic device that the operator of the aircraft has determined will not cause interference with the navigation or communication system of the aircraft on which it is to be used."
In Europe, regulations and technology have allowed the limited introduction of the use of passenger mobile phones on some commercial flights, and elsewhere in the world many airlines are moving towards allowing mobile phone use in flight. Many airlines still do not allow the use of mobile phones on aircraft. Those that do often ban the use of mobile phones during take-off and landing.
Many passengers are pressing airlines and their governments to allow and deregulate mobile phone use, while some airlines, under the pressure of competition, are also pushing for deregulation or seeking new technology which could solve the present problems. On the other hand, official aviation agencies and safety boards are resisting any relaxation of the present safety rules unless and until it can be conclusively shown that it would be safe to do so. There are both technical and social factors which make the issues more complex than a simple discussion of safety versus hazard.
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- "Mobile phones on aircraft" | 2021-08-04 | 48 Upvotes 50 Comments
🔗 Bulgur (Cooking wheat like rice)
Bulgur (from Arabic: برغل bourghoul, "groats") is a cereal food made from the cracked parboiled groats of several different wheat species, most often from durum wheat. It originates in Middle Eastern cuisine.
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- "Bulgur (Cooking wheat like rice)" | 2019-08-28 | 13 Upvotes 5 Comments
🔗 Pecha Kucha: Preventative Medicine for Death By PowerPoint
PechaKucha (Japanese: ぺちゃくちゃ, IPA: [petɕa kɯ̥tɕa], chit-chat) is a storytelling format where a presenter shows 20 slides for 20 seconds of commentary each (6 minutes and 40 seconds total). At a PechaKucha Night, individuals gather at a venue to share personal presentations about their work. The PechaKucha format can be used, for example, in business presentations to clients or staff, as well as in education settings.
Inspired by their desire to "talk less, show more," Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Tokyo's Klein-Dytham Architecture (KDa) created PechaKucha in February 2003. It was a way to attract people to SuperDeluxe, their experimental event space in Roppongi, and to enable young designers to meet, show their work, and exchange ideas in 6 minutes 40 seconds.
In 2004, cities in Europe began hosting PK Nights and days, followed over the years by hundreds of others. As of April 2019, PKNs had been held in more than 1,142 cities worldwide. More than 3 million people have attended a PK Night.
PechaKucha is a registered trademark of PechaKucha, Inc.
In January 2018, PK's Astrid Klein, Mark Dytham, and Sean Smyth established PK, Inc. to create software to expand the PK platform.
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- "Pecha Kucha: Preventative Medicine for Death By PowerPoint" | 2009-08-11 | 10 Upvotes 6 Comments
🔗 Doom released 20 years ago today
Doom may refer to:
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- "Doom released 20 years ago today" | 2013-12-10 | 256 Upvotes 108 Comments
🔗 Pattern theory
Pattern theory, formulated by Ulf Grenander, is a mathematical formalism to describe knowledge of the world as patterns. It differs from other approaches to artificial intelligence in that it does not begin by prescribing algorithms and machinery to recognize and classify patterns; rather, it prescribes a vocabulary to articulate and recast the pattern concepts in precise language. Broad in its mathematical coverage, Pattern Theory spans algebra and statistics, as well as local topological and global entropic properties.
In addition to the new algebraic vocabulary, its statistical approach is novel in its aim to:
- Identify the hidden variables of a data set using real world data rather than artificial stimuli, which was previously commonplace.
- Formulate prior distributions for hidden variables and models for the observed variables that form the vertices of a Gibbs-like graph.
- Study the randomness and variability of these graphs.
- Create the basic classes of stochastic models applied by listing the deformations of the patterns.
- Synthesize (sample) from the models, not just analyze signals with them.
The Brown University Pattern Theory Group was formed in 1972 by Ulf Grenander. Many mathematicians are currently working in this group, noteworthy among them being the Fields Medalist David Mumford. Mumford regards Grenander as his "guru" in Pattern Theory.
🔗 Jimmy Carter UFO Incident
Jimmy Carter, United States president from 1977 until 1981, reported seeing an unidentified flying object while at Leary, Georgia, in 1969. While serving as governor of Georgia, Carter was asked (on September 14, 1973) by the International UFO Bureau in Oklahoma City to file a report of the sighting, and he filed a statement on September 18, mailed September 20. Since its writing, the report has been discussed several times by both ufologists and by members of the mainstream media.
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- "Jimmy Carter UFO Incident" | 2024-04-28 | 122 Upvotes 152 Comments
🔗 List of device bandwidths
This is a list of interface bit rates, is a measure of information transfer rates, or digital bandwidth capacity, at which digital interfaces in a computer or network can communicate over various kinds of buses and channels. The distinction can be arbitrary between a computer bus, often closer in space, and larger telecommunications networks. Many device interfaces or protocols (e.g., SATA, USB, SAS, PCIe) are used both inside many-device boxes, such as a PC, and one-device-boxes, such as a hard drive enclosure. Accordingly, this page lists both the internal ribbon and external communications cable standards together in one sortable table.
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- "List of device bandwidths" | 2008-01-18 | 11 Upvotes 3 Comments
🔗 Strč Prst Skrz Krk
Strč prst skrz krk (pronounced [str̩tʃ pr̩st skr̩s kr̩k] (listen)) is a Czech and Slovak tongue-twister meaning "stick a finger through the throat".
The sentence is well known for being a semantically and syntactically valid clause without a single vowel, the nucleus of each syllable being a syllabic r, a common feature among many Slavic languages. It is often used as an example of such a phrase when learning Czech or Slovak as a foreign language.
In fact, both Czech and Slovak have two syllabic liquid consonants, the other being syllabic l. (There is also the syllabic bilabial nasal m in sedm in Czech.) As a result, there are plenty of words without vowels. Examples of long words of this type are scvrnkls, čtvrthrst, and čtvrtsmršť, the latter two being artificial occasionalisms.
There are other examples of vowelless sentences in Czech and Slovak, such as prd krt skrz drn, zprv zhlt hrst zrn, meaning "a mole farted through grass, having swallowed a handful of grains".
The longest Czech vowelless sentence (with 25 words and 82 consonants) as of 2013 is Škrt plch z mlh Brd pln skvrn z mrv prv hrd scvrnkl z brzd skrz trs chrp v krs vrb mls mrch srn čtvrthrst zrn. The meaning of the sentence is: Stingy dormouse from Brdy mountains fogs full of manure spots firstly proudly shrank a quarter of handful seeds, a delicacy for mean does, from brakes through bunch of Centaurea flowers into scrub of willows. IPA pronunciation of this sentence is [ʃkr̩t pl̩x zml̩x br̩t pl̩n skvr̩n zmr̩f pr̩f ɦr̩t st͡svrn̩kl̩ zbr̩st skr̩s tr̩s xr̩p fkr̩s vr̩p ml̩s mr̩x sr̩n t͡ʃtvrdɦr̩st zr̩n].
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- "Strč Prst Skrz Krk" | 2022-02-09 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
🔗 Full employment theorem
In computer science and mathematics, a full employment theorem is a term used, often humorously, to refer to a theorem which states that no algorithm can optimally perform a particular task done by some class of professionals. The name arises because such a theorem ensures that there is endless scope to keep discovering new techniques to improve the way at least some specific task is done.
For example, the full employment theorem for compiler writers states that there is no such thing as a provably perfect size-optimizing compiler, as such a proof for the compiler would have to detect non-terminating computations and reduce them to a one-instruction infinite loop. Thus, the existence of a provably perfect size-optimizing compiler would imply a solution to the halting problem, which cannot exist. This also implies that there may always be a better compiler since the proof that one has the best compiler cannot exist. Therefore, compiler writers will always be able to speculate that they have something to improve. A similar example in practical computer science is the idea of no free lunch in search and optimization, which states that no efficient general-purpose solver can exist, and hence there will always be some particular problem whose best known solution might be improved.
Similarly, Gödel's incompleteness theorems have been called full employment theorems for mathematicians. In theoretical computer science this field of study is known as Kolmogorov complexity, or the smallest program which outputs a given string.
Tasks such as virus writing and detection, and spam filtering and filter-breaking are also subject to Rice's theorem.
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- "Full employment theorem" | 2010-12-24 | 58 Upvotes 20 Comments