Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Archaeology

Onfim (Old Novgorodian: онѳиме, Onfime; also, Anthemius of Novgorod) was a boy who lived in Novgorod in the 13th century. He left his notes and homework exercises scratched in soft birch bark (beresta) which was preserved in the clay soil of Novgorod. Onfim, who was six or seven at the time, wrote in Old Novgorodian; besides letters and syllables, he drew "battle scenes and drawings of himself and his teacher".

🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Computing 🔗 Korea 🔗 Korea/North Korea

Kwangmyong (literally “Bright Light”) is a North Korean "walled garden" national intranet service opened in 2000.

The network uses domain names under the .kp top level domain that are not accessible from the global Internet. As of 2016 the network uses IPv4 addresses reserved for private networks in the 10.0.0.0/8 range. North Koreans often find it more convenient to access sites by their IP address rather than by URL using Latin characters. Like the global Internet, the network hosts content accessible with web browsers, and provides an internal web search engine. It also provides email services and news groups.

Only foreigners and a small number of government officials/scholars/elites are allowed to use the global Internet in North Korea, making Kwangmyong the only computer network available to most North Korean citizens. It is a free service for public use.

🔗 United States 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Crime 🔗 Lists 🔗 Politics 🔗 Schools 🔗 Politics/American politics 🔗 United States/U.S. history 🔗 Politics/Gun politics

This chronological list of school shootings in the United States includes any school shootings that occurred at a K-12 public or private school, as well as at colleges and universities, and on school buses. Excluded from this list are the following:

1. Incidents that occurred during wars
2. Incidents that occurred as a result of police actions
3. Murder-suicides by rejected suitors or estranged spouses
4. Suicides or suicide attempts involving only one person.

Shootings by school staff, where the only victims are other employees, are covered at workplace killings.

🔗 Spaceflight

OSCAR I (aka OSCAR 1) is the first amateur radio satellite launched by Project OSCAR into low Earth orbit. OSCAR I was launched December 12, 1961, by a Thor-DM21 Agena B launcher from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Lompoc, California. The satellite, a rectangular box (30 x 25 x 12 cm) weighing 10 kg., was launched as a secondary payload (ballast) for Corona 9029, also known as Discoverer 36, the eighth and final launch of a KH-3 satellite.

The satellite had a battery-powered 140 mW transmitter operating in the 2-meter band (144.983 MHz), employed a monopole transmitting antenna 60 cm long extended from the center of the convex surface, but had no attitude control system. Like Sputnik 1, Oscar 1 carried only a simple beacon. For three weeks it transmitted its Morse Code message "HI". To this day, many organizations identify their Morse-transmitting satellites with "HI", which also indicates laughter in amateur telegraphy.

OSCAR I lasted 22 days ceasing operation on January 3, 1962, and re-entered January 31, 1962.

The uniqueness of the OSCAR-1 spacecraft was not only that it was built by amateurs, only about four years after the launch of Sputnik-1, but that it was the world's first piggyback satellite and the world's first private non-government spacecraft.

Immediately following the launch of OSCAR-1, United States vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson, honored it with a congratulatory telegram to the group sponsoring this momentous event in the history of Amateur Radio. It read: “For me this project is symbolic of the type of freedom for which this country stands — freedom of enterprise and freedom of participation on the part of individuals throughout the world.”

The original backup of OSCAR-1 has been restored and is fully operational, running off AC power. As of 2011 it is on display at ARRL HQ in Newington, Connecticut and continues to broadcast "HI" in Morse Code at 145 MHz.

🔗 Freedom of speech 🔗 Journalism 🔗 Singapore

"Disneyland with the Death Penalty" is a 4,500-word article about Singapore written by William Gibson. His first major piece of non-fiction, it was first published as the cover story for Wired magazine's September/October 1993 issue (1.4).

The article follows Gibson's observations of the architecture, phenomenology and culture of Singapore, and the clean, bland and conformist impression the city-state conveys during his stay. Its title and central metaphor—Singapore as Disneyland with the death penalty—is a reference to the authoritarian artifice the author perceives the city-state to be. Singapore, Gibson details, is lacking any sense of creativity or authenticity, absent of any indication of its history or underground culture. He finds the government to be pervasive, corporatist and technocratic, and the judicial system rigid and draconian. Singaporeans are characterized as consumerists of insipid taste. The article is accentuated by local news reports of criminal trials by which the author illustrates his observations, and bracketed by contrasting descriptions of the Southeast Asian airports he arrives and leaves by.

Though Gibson's first major piece of non-fiction, the article had an immediate and lasting impact. The Singaporean government banned Wired upon the publication of the issue. The phrase "Disneyland with the death penalty" came to stand internationally for an authoritarian and austere reputation that the city-state found difficult to shake off.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Computing/Early computers

Whirlwind I was a Cold War-era vacuum tube computer developed by the MIT Servomechanisms Laboratory for the U.S. Navy. Operational in 1951, it was among the first digital electronic computers that operated in real-time for output, and the first that was not simply an electronic replacement of older mechanical systems.

It was one of the first computers to calculate in bit-parallel (rather than bit-serial), and was the first to use magnetic-core memory.

Its development led directly to the Whirlwind II design used as the basis for the United States Air Force SAGE air defense system, and indirectly to almost all business computers and minicomputers in the 1960s, particularly because of the mantra "short word length, speed, people."

🔗 Companies 🔗 Brands 🔗 Retailing 🔗 Spain

El Corte Inglés S.A. (Spanish pronunciation: [el ˈkoɾte iŋˈɡles]), headquartered in Madrid, is the biggest department store group in Europe and ranks third worldwide. El Corte Inglés is Spain's only remaining department store chain. El Corte Inglés has been a member of the International Association of department stores since 1998.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 Poland

The method of Zygalski sheets was a cryptologic technique used by the Polish Cipher Bureau before and during World War II, and during the war also by British cryptologists at Bletchley Park, to decrypt messages enciphered on German Enigma machines.

The Zygalski-sheet apparatus takes its name from Polish Cipher Bureau mathematician–cryptologist Henryk Zygalski, who invented it about October 1938.

🔗 Athletics

The Fosbury flop is a jumping style used in the track and field sport of high jump. It was popularized and perfected by American athlete Dick Fosbury, whose gold medal in the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City brought it to the world's attention. The flop became the dominant style of the event; before Fosbury, most elite jumpers used the straddle technique, Western Roll, Eastern cut-off, or scissors jump to clear the bar. Though the backwards flop technique had been known for years before Fosbury, landing surfaces had been sandpits or low piles of matting and high jumpers had to land on their feet or at least land carefully to prevent injury. With the advent of deep foam matting, high jumpers were able to be more adventurous in their landing styles and hence more experimental with jumping styles.

🔗 Lists

The car crash song emerged as a popular pop and rock music teenage tragedy song during the 1950s and 1960s at a time when the number of people being killed in vehicle collisions was rising rapidly in many countries. In the United Kingdom, the number of fatalities on UK roads rose to a peace-time peak of 7,985 in 1966 before then falling to a new low of 2,222 in 2009. The theme also appears in country and other music styles.