Irish famine - When the potato crop, attacked by a blight new to Europe, failed for three years in a row, the subsistence farmers of Ireland (at that time united with England) starved by the hundreds of thousands. Although some initial efforts at aid were made, proponents of laissez faire capitalism prevented the government from interfering, either by feeding the people or by restricting the landlords in any way. A quarter of the population died or emigrated.
The politics of the Great Starvation
Darwinian principles, racism, and anti-Irish prejudice
Pictures and documents from the famine

Iterative process - A process for calculating a result by performing a series of steps repeatedly, enabling a digital computer to obtain an approximate solution, starting from a guess and repeating iterations (or successive approximations, or cycles of the process) until an answer of the desired accuracy is reached.

The Difference Dictionary was first published
in slightly different form in Science Fiction Eye, Issue #8.
Text copyright 1990, 1996, 2000, 2003,
by Eileen K. Gunn.