Random Articles

Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

πŸ”— Closed-eye hallucination

πŸ”— Medicine πŸ”— Biology

Closed-eye hallucinations and closed-eye visualizations (CEV) are a distinct class of hallucination. These types of hallucinations generally only occur when one's eyes are closed or when one is in a darkened room. They can be a form of phosphene. Some people report closed-eye hallucinations under the influence of psychedelics. These are reportedly of a different nature than the "open-eye" hallucinations of the same compounds. Similar hallucinations that occur due to loss of vision are called visual release hallucinations.

Discussed on

πŸ”— Smokejumper

πŸ”— Fire Service πŸ”— Forestry πŸ”— Wildfire


Smokejumpers are specially trained wildland firefighters who provide an initial attack response on remote wildland fires. They are inserted at the site of the fire by parachute.

Smokejumpers are trained and experienced wildland firefighters. In addition to performing the initial attack on wildfires, they may also provide leadership for extended attacks on wildland fires. Shortly after smokejumpers touch ground, they are supplied by parachute with food, water, and firefighting tools, making them self-sufficient for 48 hours. Smokejumpers are usually on duty from early spring through late fall.

Discussed on

πŸ”— B.a.t.m.a.n

πŸ”— Telecommunications

The Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networking (B.A.T.M.A.N.) is a routing protocol for multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks which is under development by the German "Freifunk" community and intended to replace the Optimized Link State Routing Protocol (OLSR).

B.A.T.M.A.N.'s crucial point is the decentralization of knowledge about the best route through the networkΒ β€” no single node has all the data. This technique eliminates the need to spread information about network changes to every node in the network. The individual node only saves information about the "direction" it received data from and sends its data accordingly. The data gets passed from node to node, and packets get individual, dynamically created routes. A network of collective intelligence is created.

In early 2007, the B.A.T.M.A.N. developers started experimenting with the idea of routing on layer 2 (Ethernet layer) instead of layer 3. To differentiate from the layer 3 routing daemon, the suffix "adv" (for: advanced) was chosen. Instead of manipulating routing tables based on information exchanged via UDP/IP, it provides a virtual network interface and transparently transports Ethernet packets on its own. The batman-adv kernel module has been part of the official Linux kernel since 2.6.38.

πŸ”— Roseto effect: close-knit communities experience a reduced rate of heart disease

πŸ”— Medicine πŸ”— Sociology πŸ”— Physiology πŸ”— Medicine/Cardiology πŸ”— Medicine/Society and Medicine

The Roseto effect is the phenomenon by which a close-knit community experiences a reduced rate of heart disease. The effect is named for Roseto, Pennsylvania. The Roseto effect was first noticed in 1961 when the local Roseto doctor encountered Dr. Stewart Wolf, then head of Medicine of the University of Oklahoma, and they discussed, over a couple of beers, the unusually low rate of myocardial infarction in the Italian American community of Roseto compared with other locations. Many studies followed, including a 50-year study comparing Roseto to nearby Bangor. As the original authors had predicted, as the Roseto cohort shed their Italian social structure and became more Americanized in the years following the initial study, heart disease rates increased, becoming similar to those of neighboring towns.

From 1954 to 1961, Roseto had nearly no heart attacks for the otherwise high-risk group of men 55 to 64, and men over 65 had a death rate of 1% while the national average was 2%. Widowers outnumbered widows, as well.

These statistics were at odds with a number of other factors observed in the community. They smoked unfiltered stogies, drank wine "with seeming abandon" in lieu of milk and soft drinks, skipped the Mediterranean diet in favor of meatballs and sausages fried in lard with hard and soft cheeses. The men worked in the slate quarries where they contracted illnesses from gases and dust. Roseto also had no crime, and very few applications for public assistance.

Wolf attributed Rosetans' lower heart disease rate to lower stress. "'The community,' Wolf says, 'was very cohesive. There was no keeping up with the Joneses. Houses were very close together, and everyone lived more or less alike.'" Elders were revered and incorporated into community life. Housewives were respected, and fathers ran the families.

πŸ”— Great Pyramid of Cholula

πŸ”— Mexico πŸ”— Archaeology πŸ”— Mesoamerica

The Great Pyramid of Cholula, also known as Tlachihualtepetl (Nahuatl for "made-by-hand mountain"), is a complex located in Cholula, Puebla, Mexico. It is the largest archaeological site of a pyramid (temple) in the New World, as well as the largest pyramid by volume known to exist in the world today. The adobe brick pyramid stands 25 metres (82Β ft) above the surrounding plain, which is significantly shorter than the Great Pyramid of Giza's height of 146.6 metres (481Β ft), but much wider, measuring 300 by 315 metres (984 by 1,033Β ft) in its final form, compared to the Great Pyramid's base dimensions of 230.3 by 230.3 metres (756 by 756Β ft). The pyramid is a temple that traditionally has been viewed as having been dedicated to the god Quetzalcoatl. The architectural style of the building was linked closely to that of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico, although influence from the Gulf Coast is evident as well, especially from El TajΓ­n.

Discussed on

πŸ”— List of Lists of Lists

πŸ”— Lists πŸ”— Libraries

This is a list of other articles that are lists of list articles on the English Wikipedia. In other words, each of the articles linked here is an index to multiple lists on a topic. Some of the linked articles are themselves lists of lists of lists. This article is also a list of lists, and also a list itself.

Discussed on

πŸ”— Lumpers and Splitters

πŸ”— Science πŸ”— Tree of Life

Lumpers and splitters are opposing factions in any discipline that has to place individual examples into rigorously defined categories. The lumper–splitter problem occurs when there is the desire to create classifications and assign examples to them, for example schools of literature, biological taxa and so on. A "lumper" is an individual who takes a gestalt view of a definition, and assigns examples broadly, assuming that differences are not as important as signature similarities. A "splitter" is an individual who takes precise definitions, and creates new categories to classify samples that differ in key ways.

Discussed on

πŸ”— Venetian Arsenal

πŸ”— Military history πŸ”— Military history/Military science, technology, and theory πŸ”— Military history/Weaponry πŸ”— Italy πŸ”— Architecture πŸ”— Military history/Early Modern warfare πŸ”— Military history/Maritime warfare πŸ”— Ships πŸ”— Military history/Medieval warfare πŸ”— Industrial design πŸ”— Military history/Italian military history πŸ”— Former countries πŸ”— Military history/European military history πŸ”— Former countries/Italian historical states

The Venetian Arsenal (Italian: Arsenale di Venezia) is a complex of former shipyards and armories clustered together in the city of Venice in northern Italy. Owned by the state, the Arsenal was responsible for the bulk of the Venetian republic's naval power from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period. It was "one of the earliest large-scale industrial enterprises in history".

Discussed on

πŸ”— SCOOP: Simple Concurrent Object Oriented Programming

πŸ”— Computing πŸ”— Computer science

SCOOP (Simple Concurrent Object Oriented Programming) is a concurrency model designed for the Eiffel programming language, conceived by Eiffel's creator and designer, Bertrand Meyer.

SCOOP defines a way for an object oriented program to be written without the concept of threads, locks, or other typical multiprogramming methods. This allows the compiler or runtime environment to optimize the amount of concurrency as well as eliminate typical design flaws such as deadlock.

The model was first designed in the early 1990s and published in 1993 in the Communications of the ACM An updated version was described in chapter 30 of the book Object-Oriented Software Construction. A prototype implementation was developed in 1995 by Eiffel Software. An article by Compton and Walker provides an overview of SCOOP and describes another early implementation. Nienaltowski, Arslan and Meyer have published a description of the model as of 2003. Work on SCOOP proceeded at the Chair of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich. SCOOP became available as a standard part of EiffelStudio early in 2011.

πŸ”— An Atlas of Fantasy

πŸ”— Books πŸ”— Maps

An Atlas of Fantasy, compiled by Jeremiah Benjamin Post, was originally published in 1973 by Mirage Press and revised for a 1979 edition by Ballantine Books. The 1979 edition dropped twelve maps from the first edition and added fourteen new ones. It also included an introduction by Lester del Rey.

To remain of manageable size, the Atlas excludes advertising maps, cartograms, most disproportionate maps, and alternate history ("might have been") maps, focusing instead on imaginary lands derived from literary sources. It purposefully omits "one-to-one" maps such as Thomas Hardy's Wessex (which merely renames places in southwest England), but includes Barsetshire and Yoknapatawpha County, which are evidently considered to be sufficiently fictionalized. The emphasis is on science fiction and fantasy, though Post suggests there exist enough mystery fiction maps to someday create The Detectives' Handy Pocket Atlas. Other maps were omitted due to permission costs or reproduction quality.

The maps are reproduced from many sources, and an Index of Artists is included.

Discussed on