L'appel du vide

Translates literally as “call of the void”. The urge some people get to jump from high places when they encounter them, for example when close to the edge of cliffs.

Tags: language french psychology intrusive thoughts
Added: 2012-03-18T11:19:47Z by anders
Presidential Limo contains emergency blood

Comes with bottles of blood compatible with the President%u2019s blood

Tags: trivia blood emergency preparedness
Added: 2012-03-17T22:18:23Z by anders
sendmail's config syntax was designed for a small parser

The parser had to fit entirely within a 16-bit address space (alongside the rest of the program) so the syntax was designed to allow that.

Tags: unix email sendmail parsers
Added: 2012-03-17T22:05:02Z by anders
one factor of spam backscatter

Certain MTAs (other than sendmail) do not return immediately on RCPT of undeliverable addresses and exacerbate the spam backscatter problem.

Tags: unix email sendmail smtp spam backscatter
Added: 2012-03-17T22:03:11Z by anders
LDAP uses ASN.1 syntax

it was a simplification of X.500, the directory service from OSI whose X.400 was a competing standard to SMTP (and also used ASN.1)

Tags: unix email sendmail smtp asn.1 standards
Added: 2012-03-17T22:01:21Z by anders
early email address delimiters had different associativities

@,!, and : each had different right/left associativities which made them a real pain to parse and rewrite properly.

Tags: unix email sendmail uucp smtp berknet
Added: 2012-03-17T21:58:24Z by anders
"!%@:"

A book was published called “!%@:: A Directory of Electronic Mail Addressing and Networks” was published

Tags: unix email sendmail uucp smtp berknet
Added: 2012-03-17T21:53:38Z by anders
sendmail was developed at UC Berkeley

as a side project by an INGRES developer in 1979 to connect to Arpanet.

Tags: unix email sendmail
Added: 2012-03-17T21:51:32Z by anders
paper use actually declining

for the last ten years, it’s actually been decreasing in offices.

Source: forbes
Tags: paper paperless office technology
Added: 2012-03-17T11:29:07Z by anders
financial speculators now account for 64% of oil contracts

previously financial speculators historically accounted for about 30 percent of oil contracts. This is a large part of why oil prices are rising.

Tags: oil economics politics wall street regulation speculation
Added: 2012-03-16T16:14:40Z by anders
SSD can write in small blocks (4K) but deletes in larger blocks (512K)

Makes random-access writes potentially much slower than sequential append-only. (the drive does internal garbage collection to handle write-leveling and fragmentation).

Tags: ssd storage performance
Added: 2012-03-16T13:27:42Z by anders
female fruit flies temporarily lose interest in sex after mating due to sex peptide

females flies lose their interest in sex for a time because of the influence of a substance known as sex peptide, which males inject along with sperm at the culmination of the encounter. This causes them to reject the advances of the male flies.

Tags: biology neurochemistry evolution
Added: 2012-03-16T10:18:34Z by anders
sex-deprived male fruit flies drink more alcohol
Beijing Fashion Week

Chinese microbloggers use code to criticize party leaders.

“Beijing Fashion Week” is a thinly veiled, sarcastic commentary on the Communist Party’s annual summit

Tags: china censorship politics dissent
Added: 2012-03-16T09:50:17Z by anders
adherer effect

people who comply with their doctors’ orders when given a prescription are different and healthier than people who don’t.

Tags: medicine science statistics
Added: 2012-03-15T23:39:05Z by anders
Enki assisted humans in surviving the Deluge designed to kill them

Enki explains that Enlil is unfair to punish the guiltless

Tags: mythology middle-eastern deluge myth sumerian enki flood
Added: 2012-03-15T15:55:43Z by anders
memoizing fixed-point combinator

If you convert a recursive function to fixed-point with a Y-combinator, you can then add memoization to the combinator.

Tags: programming computer science combinators memoization
Added: 2012-03-15T15:49:56Z by anders
λ-calculus core

At it’s core, the lambda calculus contains only: variable references, single-argument anonymous functions and function calls.

Tags: programming computer science computability lambda calculus programming languages
Added: 2012-03-15T15:43:43Z by anders
Dross

a mass of solid impurities floating on a molten metal

Tags: engineering manufacturing metals definition
Added: 2012-03-15T13:54:46Z by anders
Sprue

the passage through which liquid material is introduced into a mold. Eg, the bits holding the pieces in a plastic model kit.

Source: wikipedia
Tags: manufacturing engineering definition
Added: 2012-03-15T12:17:40Z by anders