Random Articles (Page 6)
Have a deep view into what people are curious about.
๐ Why shaken, not stirred?
"Shaken, not stirred" is a catchphrase of Ian Fleming's fictional British Secret Service agent James Bond and describes his preference for the preparation of his martini cocktail.
The phrase first appears in the novel Diamonds Are Forever (1956), though Bond himself does not actually say it until Dr. No (1958), where his exact words are "shaken and not stirred." In the film adaptations of Fleming's novels, the phrase is first uttered by the villain, Dr. Julius No, when he offers the drink in Dr. No (1962), and it is not uttered by Bond himself (played by Sean Connery) until Goldfinger (1964). It is used in numerous Bond films thereafter with the notable exceptions of You Only Live Twice (1967), in which the drink is wrongly offered as "stirred, not shaken", to Bond's response "Perfect", and Casino Royale (2006) in which Bond, after losing millions of dollars in a game of poker, is asked if he wants his martini shaken or stirred and snaps, "Do I look like I give a damn?"
Discussed on
- "Why shaken, not stirred?" | 2010-12-05 | 39 Upvotes 35 Comments
๐ A pair of pants is a special two-dimensional surface
Trousers or pants (American English) are an item of clothing that might have originated in Central Asia, worn from the waist to the ankles, covering both legs separately (rather than with cloth extending across both legs as in robes, skirts, and dresses).
Outside North America, the word pants generally means underwear and not trousers. Shorts are similar to trousers, but with legs that come down only to around the area of the knee, higher or lower depending on the style of the garment. To distinguish them from shorts, trousers may be called "long trousers" in certain contexts such as school uniform, where tailored shorts may be called "short trousers", especially in the UK.
The oldest known trousers were found at the Yanghai cemetery in Turpan, Xinjiang, western China and dated to the period between the 10th and the 13th centuries BC. Made of wool, the trousers had straight legs and wide crotches and were likely made for horseback riding.
In most of Europe, trousers have been worn since ancient times and throughout the Medieval period, becoming the most common form of lower-body clothing for adult males in the modern world. Breeches were worn instead of trousers in early modern Europe by some men in higher classes of society. Distinctive formal trousers are traditionally worn with formal and semi-formal day attire. Since the mid-20th century, trousers have increasingly been worn by women as well.
Jeans, made of denim, are a form of trousers for casual wear widely worn all over the world by both sexes. Shorts are often preferred in hot weather or for some sports and also often by children and adolescents. Trousers are worn on the hips or waist and are often held up by buttons, elastic, a belt or suspenders (braces).
๐ Lakes of Wada
In mathematics, the lakes of Wada (ๅ็ฐใฎๆน, Wada no mizuumi) are three disjoint connected open sets of the plane or open unit square with the counterintuitive property that they all have the same boundary. In other words, for any point selected on the boundary of one of the lakes, the other two lakes' boundaries also contain that point.
More than two sets with the same boundary are said to have the Wada property; examples include Wada basins in dynamical systems. This property is rare in real-world systems.
The lakes of Wada were introduced by Kunizล Yoneyamaย (1917,โpage 60), who credited the discovery to Takeo Wada. His construction is similar to the construction by Brouwer (1910) of an indecomposable continuum, and in fact it is possible for the common boundary of the three sets to be an indecomposable continuum.
Discussed on
- "Lakes of Wada" | 2018-10-07 | 66 Upvotes 15 Comments
๐ Erlang Shen
Erlang Shen (ไบ้็ฅ), or Erlang is a Chinese God with a third truth-seeing eye in the middle of his forehead.
Er-lang Shen may be a deified version of several semi-mythical folk heroes who help regulate China's torrential floods dating variously from the Qin, Sui, and Jin dynasties. A later Buddhist source identifies him as the second son of the Northern Heavenly King Vaishravana.
In the Ming semi-mythical novels Creation of the Gods and Journey to the West, Erlang Shen is the nephew of the Jade Emperor. In the former, he assists the Zhou army in defeating the Shang. In the latter, he is the second son of a mortal and Jade emperor's sister. In the legend, he is known as the greatest warrior god of heaven.
Discussed on
- "Erlang Shen" | 2009-03-11 | 127 Upvotes 6 Comments
๐ Pรณlya Urn Model
In statistics, a Pรณlya urn model (also known as a Pรณlya urn scheme or simply as Pรณlya's urn), named after George Pรณlya, is a type of statistical model used as an idealized mental exercise framework, unifying many treatments.
In an urn model, objects of real interest (such as atoms, people, cars, etc.) are represented as colored balls in an urn or other container. In the basic Pรณlya urn model, the urn contains x white and y black balls; one ball is drawn randomly from the urn and its color observed; it is then returned in the urn, and an additional ball of the same color is added to the urn, and the selection process is repeated. Questions of interest are the evolution of the urn population and the sequence of colors of the balls drawn out.
This endows the urn with a self-reinforcing property sometimes expressed as the rich get richer.
Note that in some sense, the Pรณlya urn model is the "opposite" of the model of sampling without replacement, where every time a particular value is observed, it is less likely to be observed again, whereas in a Pรณlya urn model, an observed value is more likely to be observed again. In both of these models, the act of measurement has an effect on the outcome of future measurements. (For comparison, when sampling with replacement, observation of a particular value has no effect on how likely it is to observe that value again.) In a Pรณlya urn model, successive acts of measurement over time have less and less effect on future measurements, whereas in sampling without replacement, the opposite is true: After a certain number of measurements of a particular value, that value will never be seen again.
One of the reasons for interest in this particular rather elaborate urn model (i.e. with duplication and then replacement of each ball drawn) is that it provides an example in which the count (initially x black and y white) of balls in the urn is not concealed, which is able to approximate the correct updating of subjective probabilities appropriate to a different case in which the original urn content is concealed while ordinary sampling with replacement is conducted (without the Pรณlya ball-duplication). Because of the simple "sampling with replacement" scheme in this second case, the urn content is now static, but this greater simplicity is compensated for by the assumption that the urn content is now unknown to an observer. A Bayesian analysis of the observer's uncertainty about the urn's initial content can be made, using a particular choice of (conjugate) prior distribution. Specifically, suppose that an observer knows that the urn contains only identical balls, each coloured either black or white, but he does not know the absolute number of balls present, nor the proportion that are of each colour. Suppose that he holds prior beliefs about these unknowns: for him the probability distribution of the urn content is well approximated by some prior distribution for the total number of balls in the urn, and a beta prior distribution with parameters (x,y) for the initial proportion of these which are black, this proportion being (for him) considered approximately independent of the total number. Then the process of outcomes of a succession of draws from the urn (with replacement but without the duplication) has approximately the same probability law as does the above Pรณlya scheme in which the actual urn content was not hidden from him. The approximation error here relates to the fact that an urn containing a known finite number m of balls of course cannot have an exactly beta-distributed unknown proportion of black balls, since the domain of possible values for that proportion are confined to being multiples of , rather than having the full freedom to assume any value in the continuous unit interval, as would an exactly beta distributed proportion. This slightly informal account is provided for reason of motivation, and can be made more mathematically precise.
This basic Pรณlya urn model has been enriched and generalized in many ways.
Discussed on
- "Pรณlya Urn Model" | 2022-03-18 | 59 Upvotes 3 Comments
๐ Battery Nomenclature
Standard battery nomenclature describes portable dry cell batteries that have physical dimensions and electrical characteristics interchangeable between manufacturers. The long history of disposable dry cells means that many different manufacturer-specific and national standards were used to designate sizes, long before international standards were reached. Technical standards for battery sizes and types are set by standards organizations such as International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and American National Standards Institute (ANSI). Popular sizes are still referred to by old standard or manufacturer designations, and some non-systematic designations have been included in current international standards due to wide use.
The complete nomenclature for the battery will fully specify the size, chemistry, terminal arrangements and special characteristics of a battery. The same physically interchangeable cell size may have widely different characteristics; physical interchangeability is not the sole factor in substitution of batteries.
National standards for dry cell batteries have been developed by ANSI, JIS, British national standards, and others. Civilian, commercial, government and military standards all exist. Two of the most prevalent standards currently in use are the IEC 60086 series and the ANSI C18.1 series. Both standards give dimensions, standard performance characteristics, and safety information.
Modern standards contain both systematic names for cell types that give information on the composition and approximate size of the cells, as well as arbitrary numeric codes for cell size.
Discussed on
- "Battery Nomenclature" | 2019-07-14 | 16 Upvotes 3 Comments
๐ Cosmic Latte
Cosmic latte is the average color of the universe, found by a team of astronomers from Johns Hopkins University. In 2001, Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry determined that the average color of the universe was a greenish white, but they soon corrected their analysis in a 2002 paper in which they reported that their survey of the light from over 200,000 galaxies averaged to a slightly beigeish white. The hex triplet value for cosmic latte is #FFF8E7.
Discussed on
- "Cosmic Latte" | 2020-12-29 | 26 Upvotes 1 Comments
๐ Chess Boxing
Chess boxing, or chessboxing, is a hybrid that combines two traditional pastimes: chess, a cerebral board game, and boxing, a physical sport. The competitors fight in alternating rounds of chess and boxing. Chessboxing was invented by French comic book artist Enki Bilal and adapted by Dutch performance artist Iepe Rubingh as an art performance and has subsequently grown into a competitive sport. Chessboxing is particularly popular in Germany, the United Kingdom, India, and Russia.
Discussed on
- "Chess boxing" | 2018-05-15 | 219 Upvotes 110 Comments
- "Chess boxing" | 2010-10-13 | 44 Upvotes 37 Comments
๐ Recursive Islands and Lakes
A recursive island or lake is an island or lake that is itself within an island or lake.
Discussed on
- "Recursive Islands and Lakes" | 2022-02-08 | 11 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Recursive Islands and Lakes" | 2020-06-12 | 10 Upvotes 2 Comments
๐ Chomski virtual machine
pattern parsing virtual machine (previously called 'chomski' after Noam Chomsky) and pp (the pattern parser, also a provisional name) refer to both a command line computer language and utility (interpreter for that language) which can be used to parse and transform text patterns and (formal mathematical) languages. The utility reads input files character by character (sequentially), applying the operation which has been specified via the command line or a pp script, and then outputs the line. It was developed from 2006 in the C language. Pp has derived a number of ideas and syntax elements from Sed, a command line text stream editor.
Discussed on
- "Chomski virtual machine" | 2015-11-17 | 49 Upvotes 2 Comments