Random Articles

Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

๐Ÿ”— Chapeaugraphy

๐Ÿ”— Theatre ๐Ÿ”— Project-independent assessment

Chapeaugraphy, occasionally anglicised to chapography, is a novelty act and a busking trick in which a ring-shaped piece of felt is manipulated to look like various types of hats. It would often be performed as a quick-change act.

The act originated in 1618 with Parisian street performer Tabarin, the most famous of the charlatans who combined a French version of commedia dell'arte with a quack medicine show. He described his felt hat as "true raw material, indifferent to all forms".

In the 1870s another French comedian, Monsieur Fusier, revived the act and managed 15 hat-twisting styles in his act. The act was first performed in England by the French magician Fรฉlicien Trewey, who performed a tribute act titled "Tabarin, or Twenty-Five Heads under One Hat". An 1899 magazine recounts "one or two smart English performers" of that time, including Alfred Leslie.

Although rarely seen today, it was featured in an episode of Saturday Night Live in 1985, as performed by magician Harry Anderson.

Types of hat that can be created include the following:

  • baseball cap
  • American and British army hats from the Revolutionary War
  • pirate's hat
  • naval captain's hat
  • Mickey Mouse ears
  • Ushanka (a Russian fur hat)
  • mortarboard (a graduation cap)
  • Catholic nun's headwear
  • derby hat

๐Ÿ”— Peer-to-Peer Insurance

๐Ÿ”— Finance & Investment

Peer-to-peer insurance is a reciprocity insurance contract through the Collaborative consumption concept.

Discussed on

๐Ÿ”— Fragments of Olympian Gossip

๐Ÿ”— Poetry

"Fragments of Olympian Gossip" is a poem that Nikola Tesla composed in the late 1920s for his friend the German poet and mystic George Sylvester Viereck. It made fun of the scientific establishment of the day.

While listening on my cosmic phone
I caught words from the Olympus blown.
A newcomer was shown around;
That much I could guess, aided by sound.

"There's Archimedes with his lever
Still busy on problems as ever.
Says: matter and force are transmutable
And wrong the laws you thought immutable."

"Below, on Earth, they work at full blast
And news are coming in thick and fast.
The latest tells of a cosmic gun.
To be pelted is very poor fun.
We are wary with so much at stake,
Those beggars are a pestโ€”no mistake."

"Too bad, Sir Isaac, they dimmed your renown
And turned your great science upside down.
Now a long haired crank, Einstein by name,
Puts on your high teaching all the blame.
Says: matter and force are transmutable
And wrong the laws you thought immutable."

"I am much too ignorant, my son,
For grasping schemes so finely spun.
My followers are of stronger mind
And I am content to stay behind,
Perhaps I failed, but I did my best,
These masters of mine may do the rest.
Come, Kelvin, I have finished my cup.
When is your friend Tesla coming up."

"Oh, quoth Kelvin, he is always late,
It would be useless to remonstrate."

Then silenceโ€”shuffle of soft slippered feetโ€”
I knock andโ€”the bedlam of the street.

Nikola Tesla, Novice

๐Ÿ”— 2000-Watt Society

๐Ÿ”— Climate change ๐Ÿ”— Environment ๐Ÿ”— Switzerland ๐Ÿ”— Urban studies and planning ๐Ÿ”— Energy

The 2000-watt society is an environmental vision, first introduced in 1998 by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zรผrich (ETH Zurich), which pictures the average First World citizen reducing their overall average primary energy usage rate to no more than 2,000 watts (i.e. 2 kWh per hour or 48 kWh per day) by the year 2050, without lowering their standard of living.

The concept addresses not only personal or household energy use, but the total for the whole society, including embodied energy, divided by the population.

Two thousand watts is approximately the current world average rate of total primary energy use. This compared, in 2008, to averages of around 6,000 watts in western Europe, 12,000 watts in the United States, 1,500 watts in China, 1,000 watts in India, 500 watts in South Africa and only 300 watts in Bangladesh. Switzerland itself, then using an average of around 5,000 watts, was last a 2000-watt society in the 1960s.

It is further envisaged that the use of carbon-based fuels would be ultimately cut to no more than 500 watts per person within 50 to 100 years.

The vision was developed in response to concerns about climate change, energy security, and the future availability of energy supplies. It is supported by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, the Association of Swiss Architects and Engineers, and other bodies.

Discussed on

๐Ÿ”— Manned Orbiting Laboratory

๐Ÿ”— Spaceflight ๐Ÿ”— Military history ๐Ÿ”— Military history/Military aviation ๐Ÿ”— Military history/North American military history ๐Ÿ”— Military history/United States military history ๐Ÿ”— Military history/Military science, technology, and theory ๐Ÿ”— Cold War

The Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), originally referred to as the Manned Orbital Laboratory, was a never-flown part of the United States Air Force's human spaceflight program, a successor to the canceled Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar military reconnaissance space plane project. The project was developed from several early Air Force and NASA concepts of crewed space stations to be used for reconnaissance purposes. MOL evolved into a single-use laboratory, with which crews would be launched on 40-day missions and return to Earth using a Gemini B spacecraft, derived from NASA's Project Gemini.

The MOL program was announced to the public on 10 December 1963 as an inhabited platform to prove the utility of putting people in space for military missions. Astronauts selected for the program were later told of the reconnaissance mission for the program. The contractor for the MOL was the Douglas Aircraft Company. The Gemini B was externally similar to NASA's Gemini spacecraft, although it underwent several modifications, including the addition of a circular hatch through the heat shield, which allowed passage between the spacecraft and the laboratory.

MOL was canceled in 1969, during the height of the Apollo program, when it was shown that uncrewed reconnaissance satellites could achieve the same objectives much more cost-effectively. U.S. space station development was instead pursued with the civilian NASA Skylab (Apollo Applications Program) which flew in the mid-1970s.

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union launched three Almaz military space stations, similar in intent to the MOL, but cancelled the program in 1977 for the same reasons.

There is a MOL space suit on display at the Oklahoma City Science Museum, presumably never used.

Discussed on

๐Ÿ”— Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (Hi-MEMS)

๐Ÿ”— Technology ๐Ÿ”— Aviation ๐Ÿ”— Military history ๐Ÿ”— Military history/North American military history ๐Ÿ”— Military history/United States military history ๐Ÿ”— Military history/Military science, technology, and theory ๐Ÿ”— Aviation/aircraft

Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (HI-MEMS) is a project of DARPA, a unit of the United States Department of Defense. Created in 2006, the unit's goal is the creation of tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis. After implantation, the "insect cyborgs" could be controlled by sending electrical impulses to their muscles. The primary application is surveillance. The project was created with the ultimate goal of delivering an insect within 5 meters of a target located 100 meters away from its starting point. In 2008, a team from the University of Michigan demonstrated a cyborg unicorn beetle at an academic conference in Tucson, Arizona. The beetle was able to take off and land, turn left or right, and demonstrate other flight behaviors. Researchers at Cornell University demonstrated the successful implantation of electronic probes into tobacco hornworms in the pupal stage.

Discussed on

๐Ÿ”— Zhou Qunfei

๐Ÿ”— Biography ๐Ÿ”— China ๐Ÿ”— Business ๐Ÿ”— Women

Zhou Qunfei (Chinese: ๅ‘จ็พค้ฃž; born 1970) is a Chinese entrepreneur who founded the major touchscreen maker Lens Technology. After the public listing of her company on the Shenzhen ChiNext market in March 2015, her net worth reached US$10 billion, making her the richest woman in China. In 2018, she was named the world's richest self-made woman, with a net worth of $9.8 billion.

Discussed on

๐Ÿ”— Hwasong Concentration Camp

๐Ÿ”— Human rights ๐Ÿ”— Korea ๐Ÿ”— Correction and Detention Facilities ๐Ÿ”— Korea/North Korea

Hwasong concentration camp (Chosลn'gลญl: ํ™”์„ฑ ์ œ16ํ˜ธ ๊ด€๋ฆฌ์†Œ, also spelled Hwasลng or Hwaseong) is a labor camp in North Korea for political prisoners. The official name is Kwan-li-so (Penal-labor colony) No. 16.

๐Ÿ”— Chandraโ€“Toueg consensus algorithm

The Chandraโ€“Toueg consensus algorithm, published by Tushar Deepak Chandra and Sam Toueg in 1996, is an algorithm for solving consensus in a network of unreliable processes equipped with an eventually strong failure detector. The failure detector is an abstract version of timeouts; it signals to each process when other processes may have crashed. An eventually strong failure detector is one that never identifies some specific non-faulty process as having failed after some initial period of confusion, and, at the same time, eventually identifies all faulty processes as failed (where a faulty process is a process which eventually fails or crashes and a non-faulty process never fails). The Chandraโ€“Toueg consensus algorithm assumes that the number of faulty processes, denoted by f, is less than n/2 (i.e. the minority), i.e. it assumes f < n/2, where n is the total number of processes.

๐Ÿ”— Evercookie

๐Ÿ”— Internet ๐Ÿ”— Computing ๐Ÿ”— Computing/Software ๐Ÿ”— Websites ๐Ÿ”— Websites/Computing ๐Ÿ”— Computing/Computer Security ๐Ÿ”— Computing/Websites

Evercookie is a JavaScript-based application created by Samy Kamkar that produces zombie cookies in a web browser that are intentionally difficult to delete. In 2013, a top-secret NSA document was leaked by Edward Snowden, citing Evercookie as a method of tracking Tor users.

Discussed on