Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Australia 🔗 Law 🔗 Latin 🔗 Australia/Indigenous peoples of Australia 🔗 Australia/Australian law

Terra nullius (, plural terrae nullius) is a Latin expression meaning "nobody's land". It was a principle sometimes used in international law to justify claims that territory may be acquired by a state's occupation of it. It denotes land that has never been a part of a sovereign nation-state, such as Bir Tawil, or for which all claim to sovereign ownership has been relinquished, such as the territory east of the Oder–Neisse line that used to belong to Germany under Prussia.

🔗 Biography

Anthony Peter "Tony" Buzan (; 2 June 1942 – 13 April 2019) was an English author and educational consultant.

Buzan popularised the idea of mental literacy, radiant thinking, and a technique called mind mapping, inspired by techniques used by Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Joseph D. Novak's "concept mapping" techniques.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer graphics

In 3D computer graphics, anisotropic filtering (abbreviated AF) is a method of enhancing the image quality of textures on surfaces of computer graphics that are at oblique viewing angles with respect to the camera where the projection of the texture (not the polygon or other primitive on which it is rendered) appears to be non-orthogonal (thus the origin of the word: "an" for not, "iso" for same, and "tropic" from tropism, relating to direction; anisotropic filtering does not filter the same in every direction).

Like bilinear and trilinear filtering, anisotropic filtering eliminates aliasing effects, but improves on these other techniques by reducing blur and preserving detail at extreme viewing angles.

Anisotropic filtering is relatively intensive (primarily memory bandwidth and to some degree computationally, though the standard space–time tradeoff rules apply) and only became a standard feature of consumer-level graphics cards in the late 1990s. Anisotropic filtering is now common in modern graphics hardware (and video driver software) and is enabled either by users through driver settings or by graphics applications and video games through programming interfaces.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Astronomy

A Jacobi ellipsoid is a triaxial (i.e. scalene) ellipsoid under hydrostatic equilibrium which arises when a self-gravitating, fluid body of uniform density rotates with a constant angular velocity. It is named after the German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi.

🔗 England 🔗 English Royalty

The Groom of the Stool (formally styled: "Groom of the King's Close Stool") was the most intimate of an English monarch's courtiers, responsible for assisting the king in excretion and ablution.

The physical intimacy of the role naturally led to his becoming a man in whom much confidence was placed by his royal master and with whom many royal secrets were shared as a matter of course. This secret information—while it would never have been revealed, for it would have led to the discredit of his honour—in turn led to his becoming feared and respected and therefore powerful within the royal court in his own right. The office developed gradually over decades and centuries into one of administration of the royal finances, and under Henry VII, the Groom of the Stool became a powerful official involved in setting national fiscal policy, under the "chamber system".

Later, the office was renamed Groom of the Stole. The Tudor historian David Starkey classes this change as classic Victorianism: "When the Victorians came to look at this office, they spelt it s-t-o-l-e, and imagined all kinds of fictions about elaborate robes draped around the neck of the monarch at the coronation;" however, the change is in fact seen as early as the 17th century.

🔗 Help

The Stigler diet is an optimization problem named for George Stigler, a 1982 Nobel Laureate in economics, who posed the following problem:

For a moderately active man weighing 154 pounds, how much of each of 77 foods should be eaten on a daily basis so that the man’s intake of nine nutrients will be at least equal to the recommended dietary allowances (RDAs) suggested by the National Research Council in 1943, with the cost of the diet being minimal?

The nutrient RDAs required to be met in Stigler’s experiment were calories, protein, calcium, iron, as well as vitamins A, B₁, B₂, B₃, and C. The result was an annual budget allocated to foods such as evaporated milk, cabbage, dried navy beans, and beef liver at a cost of approximately $0.11 a day in 1939 U.S. dollars.

While the name “Stigler Diet” was applied after the experiment by outsiders, according to Stigler, “No one recommends these diets for anyone, let alone everyone.” The Stigler diet has been much ridiculed for its lack of variety and palatability; however, his methodology has received praise and is considered to be some of the earliest work in linear programming.

🔗 Physics

A nanoscale vacuum-channel transistor (NVCT) is a theoretically visioned transistor in which the electron transport medium is a vacuum. In a traditional solid-state transistor, a semiconductor channel exists between the source and the drain, and the current flows through the semiconductor. However, in a nanoscale vacuum-channel transistor, no material exists between the source and the drain, and therefore, the current flows through the vacuum. However, experimental realization of such a transistor has not been demonstrated.

Theoretically, a vacuum-channel transistor is expected to operate faster than a traditional solid-state transistor, and have higher power output. Moreover, vacuum-channel transistors are expected to operate at higher temperature and radiation level than a traditional transistor making them suitable for space application.

The development of vacuum-channel transistors is still at a very early research stage, and there are only limited study in recent literature such as vertical field-emitter vacuum-channel transistor, gate-insulated planar electrodes vacuum-channel transistor, vertical vacuum-channel transistor, and all-around gate vacuum-channel transistor.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Economics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Virginia 🔗 Chicago 🔗 Virginia/Albemarle County

Ronald Harry Coase (; 29 December 1910 – 2 September 2013) was a British economist and author. He was the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School, where he arrived in 1964 and remained for the rest of his life. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991.

Coase, who believed economists should study real markets and not theoretical ones, established the case for the corporation as a means to pay the costs of operating a marketplace. Coase is best known for two articles in particular: "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), which introduces the concept of transaction costs to explain the nature and limits of firms; and "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960), which suggests that well-defined property rights could overcome the problems of externalities (see Coase theorem). Additionally, Coase's transaction costs approach is currently influential in modern organizational economics, where it was reintroduced by Oliver E. Williamson.

Cupellation is a refining process in metallurgy where ores or alloyed metals are treated under very high temperatures and have controlled operations to separate noble metals, like gold and silver, from base metals, like lead, copper, zinc, arsenic, antimony, or bismuth, present in the ore. The process is based on the principle that precious metals do not oxidise or react chemically, unlike the base metals, so when they are heated at high temperatures, the precious metals remain apart, and the others react, forming slags or other compounds.

Since the Early Bronze Age, the process was used to obtain silver from smelted lead ores. By the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, cupellation was one of the most common processes for refining precious metals. By then, fire assays were used for assaying minerals, that is, testing fresh metals such as lead and recycled metals to know their purity for jewellery and coin making. Cupellation is still in use today.