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ten things tagged “wikipedia

Netsuke

Summary of Wikipedia article: Japanese kimono didn’t have pockets. They needed something to store their stuff in. So they made containers that they hung from their kimonos’ sashes1. The part that secured the container to the sash at the top was called a netsuke (“root attached”.) Here’s a really cut…

The Kobayashi Maru Test

[…] the simulation takes place on a replica of a starship bridge, with the test-taker as captain and other Starfleet members, officers or other cadets, in other key positions. […] the cadet receives a distress signal stating that the civilian freighter Kobayashi Maru has struck a gravitic mine in…

Stop Words

In computing, stop words are words which are filtered out before or after processing of natural language data (text). Though “stop words” usually refers to the most common words in a language, there is no single universal list of stop words used by all natural language processing tools, and indeed…

The Scunthorpe Problem

The Scunthorpe problem (or the Clbuttic Mistake) is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Wikipedia Example…

Reaganomics: The Rest of You Shall Eat Shit

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith noted that “trickle-down economics” had been tried before in the United States in the 1890s under the name “horse-and-sparrow theory”, writing: Mr. David Stockman has said that supply-side economics was merely a cover for the trickle-down approach to economic…

TIL that the US Department of Defense is the largest employer in the World (3.2M)

Followed by the Chinese Army (2.3M), Walmart (2.1M), McDonald’s (1.9M), and the NHS (1.7M). The Indian Railways comes in eighth with 1.4M people.…

That material between a speaker and their microphone is called a “pop filter”.

It helps minimize or eliminate popping sounds (“aspirated plosives”) like when you say ‘pop’ or ‘pepper’ or ‘pots’!…

Those patterns on a thimble are called ‘Guilloché’

Via AS as we were discussing Audemars Piguet’s “petite tapisserie”…