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The snail may leave a trail of slime behind him, but a little slime will do a man no harm... whilst if you dance with dragons, you must expect to burn. - George R. R. Martin, The Mystery Knight As any Game of Thrones fan knows, being a knight has its downsides.

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Mathematical Symbols’ Wild History Explained
7 Feb 2025
scientificamerican.com

A mathematician has uncovered the stories behind the symbols used in math

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Ten Thousand Years - 99% Invisible
21 Dec 2024
99percentinvisible.org

In 1990, the federal government invited a group of  geologists, linguists, astrophysicists, architects, artists, and writers to the New Mexico desert, to visit the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. They would be there on assignment. The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) is the nation’s only permanent underground repository for nuclear waste. Radioactive byproducts from nuclear weapons manufacturing and nuclear power plants. WIPP was

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Never Say Wolf
22 Oct 2024
nautil.us

How taboo language turned the wolf into a monster.

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For a younger generation, the once-powerful protest symbol packs about as much of a punch as a smiley face.

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Circles And Slashes
11 Mar 2024
tedium.co

One of the best-known icons of modern society is a classic example of a symbol—it’s easy to spot, but hard to explain. Who came up with it?

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News on Japan, Business News, Opinion, Sports, Entertainment and More article expired

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The world is full of icons that warn us to be afraid — to stay away from this or not do that. And many of these are easy to understand because they represent something recognizable, like a fire, or a person slipping on a wet floor. But some concepts are hard to communicate visually, especially

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For a couple of centuries, the British were in an unlikely frenzy for the exotic fruit.

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The Owl's Right Eye - Unintended Consequences
2 Jan 2021
unintendedconsequenc.es

Why China considers a covered eye to be dangerous. And why people still do it. From the winking owl to the Hong Kong protest eye patch.

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How we evolved to read is a story of one creative species.

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L-System
19 Dec 2020
en.wikipedia.org

An L-system or Lindenmayer system is a parallel rewriting system and a type of formal grammar. An L-system consists of an alphabet of symbols that can be used to make strings, a collection of production rules that expand each symbol into some larger string of symbols, an initial "axiom" string from which to begin construction, and a mechanism for translating the generated strings into geometric structures. L-systems were introduced and developed in 1968 by Aristid Lindenmayer, a Hungarian theoretical biologist and botanist at the University of Utrecht.[1] Lindenmayer used L-systems to describe the behaviour of plant cells and to model the growth processes of plant development. L-systems have also been used to model the morphology of a variety of organisms[2] and can be used to generate self-similar fractals.

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How, exactly, does one go about making a global dictionary of symbols? It is a Herculean task, one few scholars would take on today, not only because of its scope but because the philological approach that gathers and compares artifacts from every culture underwent a correction:

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Why Robot Brains Need Symbols
9 Oct 2019
getpocket.com

We’ll need both deep learning and symbol manipulation to build AI.

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Nautilus is a different kind of science magazine. Our stories take you into the depths of science and spotlight its ripples in our lives and cultures.

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Why Symbols Aren’t Forever
29 Sep 2019
nautil.us

The removal of cultural emblems is not the erasure of history but part of it.

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Many of us now use the word hobo to refer to any homeless individual, but back in the America of the late 19th and early 20th century, to be a hobo meant something more.

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Yard signs featuring this mysterious blue dot are quickly gaining popularity among Nebraska Democrats. Here's what it means.