Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Palaeontology 🔗 Animals

St. Cuthbert's beads (or Cuddy's beads) are fossilised portions of the "stems" of crinoids from the Carboniferous period. Crinoids are a kind of marine echinoderm which are still extant, and which are sometimes known as "sea lilies". These bead-like fossils are washed out onto the beach and in medieval Northumberland were strung together as necklaces or rosaries, and became associated with St Cuthbert.

In other parts of England, circular crinoid columnals were known as "fairy money." Pentagonal crinoid columnals were known as "star stones", and moulds of the stems left impressions which were known as screwstones. In Germany, the columnals were known as Bonifatius pfennige (St Boniface's pennies) and in America they are known as Indian beads.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software

Unums (universal numbers) are a family of number formats and arithmetic for implementing real numbers on a computer, proposed by John L. Gustafson in 2015. They are designed as an alternative to the ubiquitous IEEE 754 floating-point standard. The latest version is known as posits.

🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics

A garden-path sentence is a grammatically correct sentence that starts in such a way that a reader's most likely interpretation will be incorrect; the reader is lured into a parse that turns out to be a dead end or yields a clearly unintended meaning. "Garden path" refers to the saying "to be led down [or up] the garden path", meaning to be deceived, tricked, or seduced. In A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Fowler describes such sentences as unwittingly laying a "false scent".

Such a sentence leads the reader toward a seemingly familiar meaning that is actually not the one intended. It is a special type of sentence that creates a momentarily ambiguous interpretation because it contains a word or phrase that can be interpreted in multiple ways, causing the reader to begin to believe that a phrase will mean one thing when in reality it means something else. When read, the sentence seems ungrammatical, makes almost no sense, and often requires rereading so that its meaning may be fully understood after careful parsing.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction

Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future is a "future history" science fiction novel written in 1930 by the British author Olaf Stapledon. A work of unprecedented scale in the genre, it describes the history of humanity from the present onwards across two billion years and eighteen distinct human species, of which our own is the first. The book employs a narrative conceit that, under subtle inspiration, the novelist has unknowingly been dictated a channelled text from the last human species.

Stapledon's conception of history is based on the Hegelian Dialectic, following a repetitive cycle with many varied civilisations rising from and descending back into savagery over millions of years, but it is also one of progress, as the later civilisations rise to far greater heights than the first. The book anticipates the science of genetic engineering, and is an early example of the fictional supermind; a consciousness composed of many telepathically linked individuals.

In 1932, Stapledon followed Last and First Men with the far less acclaimed Last Men in London. Another Stapledon novel, Star Maker (1937), could also be considered a sequel to Last and First Men (mentioning briefly man's evolution on Neptune), but is even more ambitious in scope, being a history of the entire universe.

It is the 11th title in the SF Masterworks series.

🔗 Chess 🔗 India

Shatranj (Arabic: شطرنج‎; Persian: شترنگ‎; from Middle Persian chatrang) is an old form of chess, as played in the Sasanian Empire. Its origins are in the Indian game of chaturaṅga. Modern chess gradually developed from this game, as it was introduced to the western world via contacts in Muslim Andalusia (modern Spain) and in Sicily in the 10th century.

🔗 Languages

The Dolgopolsky list is a word list compiled by Aharon Dolgopolsky in 1964. It lists the 15 lexical items that have the most semantic stability, i.e. they are the 15 words least likely to be replaced by other words as a language evolves. It was based on a study of 140 languages from across Eurasia.

The words, with the first being the most stable, are:

1. I/me
2. two/pair
3. you (singular, informal)
4. who/what
5. tongue
6. name
7. eye
8. heart
9. tooth
10. no/not
11. nail (finger-nail)
12. louse/nit
13. tear/teardrop
14. water
15. dead

The first item in the list, I/me, has been replaced in none of the 140 languages during their recorded history; the fifteenth, dead, has been replaced in 25% of the languages.

The twelfth item, louse/nit, is well kept in the North Caucasian languages, Dravidian and Turkic, but not in other proto-languages.

🔗 United States 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Food and drink/Foodservice 🔗 Retailing

The Waffle House Index is an informal metric named after the Waffle House restaurant chain and is used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine the effect of a storm and the likely scale of assistance required for disaster recovery.

🔗 Environment 🔗 Books 🔗 Futures studies 🔗 Molecular Biology 🔗 Molecular Biology/Genetics

The Population Bomb is a 1968 book co-authored by former Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich and former Stanford senior researcher in conservation biology Anne H. Ehrlich. From the opening page, it predicted worldwide famines due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a "population explosion" existed in the mid-20th century baby boom years, but the book and its authors brought the idea to an even wider audience.

The book has been criticized since its publication for an alarmist tone, and over the subsequent decades, for inaccurate assertions and failed predictions. For instance, regional famines have occurred since the publication of the book, but not world famines. The Ehrlichs themselves still stand by the book despite the flaws identified by its critics, with Paul stating in 2009 that "perhaps the most serious flaw in The Bomb was that it was much too optimistic about the future," despite having predicted catastrophic global famines that never came to pass. They believe that it achieved their goals because "it alerted people to the importance of environmental issues and brought human numbers into the debate on the human future."

🔗 Shakespeare

The Shakespeare Programming Language (SPL) is an esoteric programming language designed by Jon Åslund and Karl Hasselström. Like the Chef programming language, it is designed to make programs appear to be something other than programs; in this case, Shakespearean plays.

A character list in the beginning of the program declares a number of stacks, naturally with names like "Romeo" and "Juliet". These characters enter into dialogue with each other in which they manipulate each other's topmost values, push and pop each other, and do I/O. The characters can also ask each other questions which behave as conditional statements. On the whole, the programming model is very similar to assembly language but much more verbose.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Computing

Nuclear Gandhi is an Internet meme and an urban legend about the video game Civilization. According to the legend, there was a bug in Civilization that eventually forced the pacifist leader Mahatma Gandhi to be extremely aggressive and to use nuclear weapons heavily.

The bug was first mentioned in 2012, two years after the release of Civilization V, and eventually became one of the most recognizable video game glitches; it has been used as an example of integer overflow in computer science and was included in other Civilization games as an easter egg.

In 2020, Sid Meier contradicted the urban legend, stating there had never been a bug of this sort in the original 1991 game. Nuclear Gandhi was first implemented in Civilization V (2010) as a joke.