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🔗 Statistics

A set of dice is nontransitive if it contains three dice, A, B, and C, with the property that A rolls higher than B more than half the time, and B rolls higher than C more than half the time, but it is not true that A rolls higher than C more than half the time. In other words, a set of dice is nontransitive if the binary relation – X rolls a higher number than Y more than half the time – on its elements is not transitive.

It is possible to find sets of dice with the even stronger property that, for each die in the set, there is another die that rolls a higher number than it more than half the time. Using such a set of dice, one can invent games which are biased in ways that people unused to nontransitive dice might not expect (see Example).

🔗 Sociology

Xennials or xennials (also known as the Oregon Trail Generation and Generation Catalano) are the micro-generation of people on the cusp of the Generation X and Millennial demographic cohorts. Researchers and popular media use birth years from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Xennials are described as having had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood.

In 2020, xennial was included in the Oxford Dictionary of English.

🔗 Politics

The Democracy Index is an index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a UK-based company. It intends to measure the state of democracy in 167 countries, of which 166 are sovereign states and 164 are UN member states.

The index was first published in 2006, with updates for 2008, 2010 and later years. The index is based on 60 indicators grouped in five different categories, measuring pluralism, civil liberties and political culture. In addition to a numeric score and a ranking, the index categorises each country in one of four regime types: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Books 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Poland 🔗 Food and drink/Foodservice 🔗 Ukraine

The Scottish Café (Polish: Kawiarnia Szkocka) was a café in Lwów, Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine) where, in the 1930s and 1940s, mathematicians from the Lwów School of Mathematics collaboratively discussed research problems, particularly in functional analysis and topology.

Stanislaw Ulam recounts that the tables of the café had marble tops, so they could write in pencil, directly on the table, during their discussions. To keep the results from being lost, and after becoming annoyed with their writing directly on the table tops, Stefan Banach's wife provided the mathematicians with a large notebook, which was used for writing the problems and answers and eventually became known as the Scottish Book. The book—a collection of solved, unsolved, and even probably unsolvable problems—could be borrowed by any of the guests of the café. Solving any of the problems was rewarded with prizes, with the most difficult and challenging problems having expensive prizes (during the Great Depression and on the eve of World War II), such as a bottle of fine brandy.

For problem 153, which was later recognized as being closely related to Stefan Banach's "basis problem", Stanisław Mazur offered the prize of a live goose. This problem was solved only in 1972 by Per Enflo, who was presented with the live goose in a ceremony that was broadcast throughout Poland.

The café building now houses the Szkocka Restaurant & Bar (named for the original Scottish Café) and the Atlas Deluxe hotel at the street address of 27 Taras Shevchenko Prospekt.

🔗 Internet

Cicada 3301 is a nickname given to an organization that on three occasions has posted a set of puzzles to recruit codebreakers from the public. The first internet puzzle started on January 4, 2012 on 4chan and ran for approximately one month. A second round began one year later on January 4, 2013, and then a third round following the confirmation of a fresh clue posted on Twitter on January 4, 2014. The stated intent was to recruit "intelligent individuals" by presenting a series of puzzles which were to be solved. No new puzzles were published on January 4, 2015. However, a new clue was posted on Twitter on January 5, 2016. In April 2017 a verified PGP-signed message was found: Beware false paths. Always verify PGP signature from 7A35090F. That message explicitly denies the validity of any unsigned puzzle, as recently as April 2017.

The puzzles focused heavily on data security, cryptography, steganography, internet anonymity, and surveillance.

It has been called "the most elaborate and mysterious puzzle of the internet age" and is listed as one of the "top 5 eeriest, unsolved mysteries of the internet", and much speculation exists as to its function. Many have speculated that the puzzles are a recruitment tool for the NSA, CIA, MI6, a "Masonic conspiracy" or a cyber mercenary group. Others have claimed Cicada 3301 is an alternate reality game. No company or individual has taken credit for it or attempted to monetize it, however.

🔗 Psychology

The James–Lange theory is a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions and is one of the earliest theories of emotion within modern psychology. It was developed by philosopher John Dewey and named for two 19th-century scholars, William James and Carl Lange (see modern criticism for more on the theory's origin). The basic premise of the theory is that physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion. Previously people considered emotions as reactions to some significant events or their features, i.e. events come first, and then there is an emotional response. James-Lange theory proposed that the state of the body can induce emotions or emotional dispositions. In other words, this theory suggests that when we feel teary, it generates a disposition for sad emotions; when our heartbeat is out of normality, it makes us feel anxiety. Instead of feeling an emotion and subsequent physiological (bodily) response, the theory proposes that the physiological change is primary, and emotion is then experienced when the brain reacts to the information received via the body's nervous system. It proposes that each specific category of emotion is attached to a unique and different pattern of physiological arousal and emotional behaviour in reaction due to an exciting stimulus.

The theory has been criticized and modified over the course of time, as one of several competing theories of emotion. Modern theorists have built on its ideas by proposing that the experience of emotion is modulated by both physiological feedback and other information, rather than consisting solely of bodily changes, as James suggested. Psychologist Tim Dalgleish states that most modern affective neuroscientists would support such a viewpoint. In 2002, a research paper on the autonomic nervous system stated that the theory has been "hard to disprove".

🔗 China 🔗 Languages 🔗 Hong Kong

"Add oil" is a Hong Kong English expression used as an encouragement and support to a person. Derived from the Chinese phrase Gayau (or Jiayou; Chinese: 加油), the expression is literally translated from the Cantonese phrase. It is originated in Hong Kong and is commonly used by bilingual Hong Kong speakers.

"Add oil" can be roughly translated as "Go for it". Though it is often described as "the hardest to translate well", the literal translation is the result of Chinglish and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018.

🔗 United States 🔗 United States/Texas 🔗 U.S. Roads/U.S. Route 66

Cadillac Ranch is a public art installation and sculpture in Amarillo, Texas, US. It was created in 1974 by Chip Lord, Hudson Marquez and Doug Michels, who were a part of the art group Ant Farm.

The installation consists of ten Cadillacs (1949–1963) buried nose-first in the ground. Installed in 1974, the cars were either older running, used or junk cars — together spanning the successive generations of the car line — and the defining evolution of their tailfins. The cars are inclined at the same angle as the pyramids at Giza.

🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Culture 🔗 Collections Care

Kintsugi (金継ぎ, "golden joinery"), also known as kintsukuroi (金繕い, "golden repair"), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.