Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 United States

The expert wizard amendment was a proposed amendment by New Mexico state senator Duncan Scott, which would require psychologists and psychiatrists to dress up as wizards when they were in court proceedings providing expert testimony regarding a defendant's competency. The amendment, proposed in 1995, passed New Mexico's Senate unanimously. Scott revealed the amendment was satirical prior to a vote in New Mexico House of Representatives following which it was removed and thus never signed into law.

Scott said that he crafted the amendment because he felt that there were an excessive number of mental health practitioners acting as expert witnesses.

🔗 Occupational Safety and Health 🔗 Disability

The DataHand keyboard was introduced in 1995 by DataHand Systems, Inc. It was invented by Dale J. Retter and was produced by Industrial Innovations as early as 1992. The keyboard consists of two completely separate "keyboards", one for the left hand and one for the right, that are molded to rest the user's hands on. This allows the user to place each hand wherever it is most comfortable to them. Each finger activates five buttons, the four compass directions as well as down. The thumbs also have five buttons, one inside and two outside as well as up and down. The button modules in which the fingers rest are adjustable to best fit the user's hands—each side can be independently moved up and down, towards the palm or farther away.

This ergonomic layout allows for all typing to occur without any wrist motion, as well as without any finger extension. The keyboard layout is initially similar to a QWERTY keyboard, but the middle two columns of keys (i.e. H,Y,G...) have been delegated to sideways finger movements, and all of the keys outside of the main three rows are accessed through two additional modes, including a mode for mousing. There are three primary modes all together: letters, number and symbols, and function / mouse mode. Some practice is required. However, eventual typing speedups are possible.

Also of note is the button design—instead of being spring-loaded, the buttons are held in place with magnets and are activated using optical sensors. This was done in order to dramatically reduce the finger workload while optimizing tactile feedback.

This unconventional keyboard was seen in the Jodie Foster movie Contact (1997) as the pilot's controls for the futuristic spaceship; and the spy movie Stormbreaker (2006). The Industrial Innovations version was featured on the television series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. A black model is used by Agent Grasso while searching for Amanda Givens' Jeep in Shadow Conspiracy (1997), starring Charlie Sheen.

After the initial prototype was released in 1995, DataHand has released the Professional and Professional II with new bodies. The Professional II also has extended programming capabilities over the Professional, being able to record macros of keystrokes for convenient use.

DataHand Systems, Inc. announced in early 2008 that it was ceasing to market and sell its keyboards. The company web site states that due to supplier issues, the company will not sell the DataHand keyboard "until a new manufacturer can be identified". However, the company plans a final, limited production run to satisfy existing customers. In January 2009, the company's website started taking orders for a "limited number of new DataHand Pro II units".

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic

Abductive logic programming (ALP) is a high-level knowledge-representation framework that can be used to solve problems declaratively based on abductive reasoning. It extends normal logic programming by allowing some predicates to be incompletely defined, declared as abducible predicates. Problem solving is effected by deriving hypotheses on these abducible predicates (abductive hypotheses) as solutions of problems to be solved. These problems can be either observations that need to be explained (as in classical abduction) or goals to be achieved (as in normal logic programming). It can be used to solve problems in diagnosis, planning, natural language and machine learning. It has also been used to interpret negation as failure as a form of abductive reasoning.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics

In probability theory, the birthday problem or birthday paradox concerns the probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, some pair of them will have the same birthday. By the pigeonhole principle, the probability reaches 100% when the number of people reaches 367 (since there are only 366 possible birthdays, including February 29). However, 99.9% probability is reached with just 70 people, and 50% probability with 23 people. These conclusions are based on the assumption that each day of the year (excluding February 29) is equally probable for a birthday.

Actual birth records show that different numbers of people are born on different days. In this case, it can be shown that the number of people required to reach the 50% threshold is 23 or fewer. For example, if half the people were born on one day and the other half on another day, then any two people would have a 50% chance of sharing a birthday.

It may well seem surprising that a group of just 23 individuals is required to reach a probability of 50% that at least two individuals in the group have the same birthday: this result is perhaps made more plausible by considering that the comparisons of birthday will actually be made between every possible pair of individuals = 23 × 22/2 = 253 comparisons, which is well over half the number of days in a year (183 at most), as opposed to fixing on one individual and comparing his or her birthday to everyone else's. The birthday problem is not a "paradox" in the literal logical sense of being self-contradictory, but is merely unintuitive at first glance.

Real-world applications for the birthday problem include a cryptographic attack called the birthday attack, which uses this probabilistic model to reduce the complexity of finding a collision for a hash function, as well as calculating the approximate risk of a hash collision existing within the hashes of a given size of population.

The history of the problem is obscure. W. W. Rouse Ball indicated (without citation) that it was first discussed by Harold Davenport. However, Richard von Mises proposed an earlier version of what is considered today to be the birthday problem.

🔗 Technology

Tensegrity, tensional integrity or floating compression is a structural principle based on a system of isolated components under compression inside a network of continuous tension, and arranged in such a way that the compressed members (usually bars or struts) do not touch each other while the prestressed tensioned members (usually cables or tendons) delineate the system spatially.

The term was coined by Buckminster Fuller in the 1960s as a portmanteau of "tensional integrity". The other denomination of tensegrity, floating compression, was used mainly by the constructivist artist Kenneth Snelson.

🔗 Automobiles 🔗 Cycling

The Twike (a portmanteau of the words twin and bike) is a human-electric hybrid vehicle (HEHV) designed to carry two passengers and cargo. Essentially a velomobile with an electrical hybrid engine, it can be driven in electric-only mode or electric + pedal power mode. Pedaling warms the user, making electric heating in winter unnecessary, extends the range of the vehicle but does not substantially add to the vehicle's top speed.

Constructed of lightweight materials such as aluminium (frame) and plastic (shell), the 246 kg (542 lb) (unladen, varying with battery weight) tricycle vehicle first used NiCd batteries, later Li-Mn, LiFePO₄ and LiIon. Typically ranges reach from 50 to over 500 km depending on battery size, type, status on one side and speed and altitude profile and load on the other. Energy is reclaimed while driving through regenerative braking, and load is removed from the electric system by use of the pedalling system which transfers its input directly to the drivetrain (i.e., both systems operate in parallel, not in series).

🔗 United States 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Korea 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Ships 🔗 Pritzker Military Library 🔗 Korea/North Korea 🔗 United States/Colorado

USS Pueblo (AGER-2) is a Banner-class environmental research ship, attached to Navy intelligence as a spy ship, which was attacked and captured by North Korean forces on 23 January 1968, in what is known today as the "Pueblo incident" or alternatively, as the "Pueblo crisis".

The seizure of the U.S. Navy ship and her 83 crew members, one of whom was killed in the attack, came less than a week after President Lyndon B. Johnson's State of the Union address to the United States Congress, a week before the start of the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War and three days after 31 men of North Korea's KPA Unit 124 had crossed the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) and killed 26 South Koreans in an attempt to attack the South Korean Blue House (executive mansion) in the capital Seoul. The taking of Pueblo and the abuse and torture of her crew during the subsequent 11-month prisoner drama became a major Cold War incident, raising tensions between western and eastern powers.

North Korea stated that Pueblo deliberately entered their territorial waters 7.6 nautical miles (14 km) away from Ryo Island, and that the logbook shows that they intruded several times. However, the United States maintains that the vessel was in international waters at the time of the incident and that any purported evidence supplied by North Korea to support its statements was fabricated. Pueblo, still held by North Korea today, officially remains a commissioned vessel of the United States Navy. Since early 2013, the ship has been moored along the Pothong River in Pyongyang and used there as a museum ship at the Victorious War Museum. Pueblo is the only ship of the U.S. Navy still on the commissioned roster currently being held captive.

🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Cybernetics 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Culture

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) was an experimental cultural theorist collective formed in late 1995 at Warwick University, England and gradually separated from academia until it dissolved in 2003. It garnered reputation for its idiosyncratic and surreal "theory-fiction" which incorporated cyberpunk and Gothic horror, and its work has since had an online cult following related to the rise in popularity of accelerationism. Warwick University maintains that the CCRU was never a sanctioned academic project, with some faculty going so far as to assert that the CCRU "has never existed". The CCRU are strongly associated with their former leading members, Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher and Nick Land.

🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Anatomy 🔗 Anatomy/Neuroanatomy

Yakovlevian torque (also known as occipital bending (OB) or counterclockwise brain torque) is the tendency of the right side of the human brain to be warped slightly forward relative to the left and the left side of the human brain to be warped slightly backward relative to the right. This is responsible for certain asymmetries, such as how the lateral sulcus of the human brain is often longer and less curved on the left side of the brain relative to the right. Stated in another way, Yakovlevian Torque can be defined by the existence of right-frontal and left-occipital petalias, which are protrusions of the surface of one hemisphere relative to the other. It is named for Paul Ivan Yakovlev (1894–1983), a Russian-American neuroanatomist from Harvard Medical School.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 China

PAS-22, previously known as AsiaSat 3 and then HGS-1, was a geosynchronous communications satellite, which was salvaged from an unusable geosynchronous transfer orbit by means of the Moon's gravity.