Standard paper sizes like ISO A4 are widely used all over the world today. This text explains the ISO 216 paper size system and the ideas behind its design.
is, perhaps, the oldest written story on Earth. It comes to us from Ancient Sumeria, and was originally written on 12 clay tablets in cunieform script. It is about the adventures of the historical King of Uruk (somewhere between 2750 and 2500 BCE).
Alan Mathison Turing, OBE (June 23, 1912 – June 7, 1954) was an English mathematician, logician, and cryptographer. Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science.
MIT Archives & Special Collections - (With some of the solutions provided) - The english portion is actually more of history/geography/and literature section
A PAL -- a "Permissive Action Link" -- is the box that is supposed to prevent unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon. It's supposed to be impossible to "hot-wire" a nuclear weapon. Is it?
a celebration of fascinating devices that don't work. It houses diverse examples of the perverse genius of inventors who refused to let their thinking be intimidated by the laws of nature, remaining optimistic in the face of repeated failures.
Numbers for Fantasy Worlds, a distillation of broad possibilities drawn from a variety of historical reference points, from periods ranging from the 11th to 15th centuries as a good model for a trad-fantasy gameworld.
"The most effective way to restrict democracy is to transfer decision-making from the public arena to unaccountable institutions: kings and princes, priestly castes, military juntas, party dictatorships, or modern corporations."
"Human subtlety...will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does nature, because in her inventions nothing is lacking, and nothing is superfluous."
* No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself."
"I have found no better expression than "religious" for confidence in the rational nature of reality, insofar as it is accessible to human reason. Whenever this feeling is absent, science degenerates into uninspired empiricism."
"It should be borne in mind that electrical energy obtained by harnessing a waterfall is probably fifty times more effective than fuel energy. Since this is the most perfect way of rendering the sun's energy available, the direction of the future material
Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. On January 15, Michael Shank interviewed him on the latest developments in U.S. policy toward Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan.
Guy Steele's keynote at the 1998 ACM OOPSLA conference on "Growing a Language" (mostly about JAVA) discusses the importance of and issues associated with designing a programming language that can be grown by its users.
on these pages you will find many screen shots of various desktop computer Graphical User Interfaces and operating systems. Many different people have had different ideas of how a GUI should work and these screen shots show many of the more popular ones.
"Still, there was a romantic innocence about the 20th century's view of the future. It was a sort of plastic Camelot; in both senses of the term. So, settle on your jetpack, hitch up your blaster, and tune in the videotron as we tour Future Past!"
Vintage Japanese WWII Air Raid Defense Posters made in 1938, by the Japanese Red Cross working with government authorities to create a series of posters to teach the public about the new Anti-Aircraft Defense Law, which was enacted in seeming anticipation of air strikes following the outbreak of the Japan-China War (1937-1945).