Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 France 🔗 Languages

Verlan (French pronunciation: ​[vɛʁlɑ̃]), (verlan is the reverse of the expression "l'envers") is a type of argot in the French language, featuring inversion of syllables in a word, and is common in slang and youth language. It rests on a long French tradition of transposing syllables of individual words to create slang words. The name verlan itself is an example: it is derived from inverting the sounds of the syllables in l'envers ([lɑ̃vɛʁ], "the inverse", frequently used in the sense of "back-to-front").

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (original Spanish title: "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote") is a short story by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

It originally appeared in Spanish in the Argentine journal Sur in May 1939. The Spanish-language original was first published in book form in Borges's 1941 collection El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), which was included in his much-reprinted Ficciones (1944).

🔗 Linguistics

A Wanderwort (German: [ˈvandɐˌvɔɐt], 'wandering word', plural Wanderwörter; capitalized like all German nouns) is a word that has spread as a loanword among numerous languages and cultures, especially those that are far away from one another, usually in connection with trade. As such, Wanderwörter are a curiosity in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics within a wider study of language contact. At a sufficient time depth, it can be very difficult to establish in which language or language family it originated and in which it was borrowed.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Freedom of speech 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer Security 🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 Lincolnshire

The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of websites, e-mails, forum posts or search results by a spam filter or search engine because their text contains a string of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.

The problem arises since computers can easily identify strings of text within a document, but interpreting words of this kind requires considerable ability to interpret a wide range of contexts, possibly across many cultures, which is an extremely difficult task. As a result, broad blocking rules may result in false positives affecting innocent phrases.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Buddhism 🔗 Asia

The Greco-Buddhist art or Gandhara art is the artistic manifestation of Greco-Buddhism, a cultural syncretism between Ancient Greek art and Buddhism. It had mainly evolved in the ancient region of Gandhara, located in the northwestern fringe of the Indian subcontinent.

The series of interactions leading to Gandhara art occurred over time, beginning with Alexander the Great's brief incursion into the area, followed by the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka converting the region to Buddhism. Buddhism became the prominent religion in the Indo-Greek Kingdoms. However, Greco-Buddhist art truly flowered and spread under the Kushan Empire, when the first surviving devotional images of the Buddha were created during the 1st-3rd centuries CE. Gandhara art reached its zenith from the 3rd-5th century CE, when most surviving motifs and artworks were produced.

Gandhara art is characterized by Buddhist subject matter, sometimes adapting Greco-Roman elements, rendered in a style and forms that are heavily influenced by Greco-Roman art. It has the strong idealistic realism and sensuous description of Hellenistic art, and it is believed to have produced the first representations of Gautama Buddha in human form, ending the early period of aniconism in Buddhism.

The representation of the human form in large sculpture had a considerable influence, both to the south in the rest of India, and to the east, where the spread of Buddhism carried its influence as far as Japan.

🔗 India 🔗 Numismatics 🔗 India/Indian politics workgroup

A zero-rupee note is a banknote imitation issued in India as a means of helping to fight systemic political corruption. The notes are "paid" in protest by angry citizens to government functionaries who solicit bribes in return for services which are supposed to be free. Zero-rupee notes, which are made to resemble the old 50-rupee banknote of India, are the creation of a non-governmental organization known as 5th Pillar which has, since their inception in 2007, distributed over 2.5 million notes as of August 2014. The notes remain in current use and thousands of notes are distributed every month.

🔗 Mathematics

Fractional calculus is a branch of mathematical analysis that studies the several different possibilities of defining real number powers or complex number powers of the differentiation operator D

${\displaystyle Df(x)={\frac {d}{dx}}f(x)\,,}$

and of the integration operator J

${\displaystyle Jf(x)=\int _{0}^{x}f(s)\,ds\,,}$

and developing a calculus for such operators generalizing the classical one.

In this context, the term powers refers to iterative application of a linear operator D to a function f, that is, repeatedly composing D with itself, as in ${\displaystyle D^{2}(f)=(D\circ D)(f)=D(D(f))}$.

For example, one may ask for a meaningful interpretation of:

${\displaystyle {\sqrt {D}}=D^{\frac {1}{2}}}$

as an analogue of the functional square root for the differentiation operator, that is, an expression for some linear operator that when applied twice to any function will have the same effect as differentiation. More generally, one can look at the question of defining a linear functional

${\displaystyle D^{a}}$

for every real-number a in such a way that, when a takes an integer value n ∈ ℤ, it coincides with the usual n-fold differentiation D if n > 0, and with the −nth power of J when n < 0.

One of the motivations behind the introduction and study of these sorts of extensions of the differentiation operator D is that the sets of operator powers { D^a |a ∈ ℝ } defined in this way are continuous semigroups with parameter a, of which the original discrete semigroup of { Dⁿ | n ∈ ℤ } for integer n is a denumerable subgroup: since continuous semigroups have a well developed mathematical theory, they can be applied to other branches of mathematics.

Fractional differential equations, also known as extraordinary differential equations, are a generalization of differential equations through the application of fractional calculus.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

This is a list of notable software packages which were published as free and open-source software, or into the public domain, but were made proprietary software, or otherwise switched to a license (including source-available licenses) that is not considered to be free and open source.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Computing 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Russia/mass media in Russia 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 New York City 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Ilya Zhitomirskiy (12 October 1989 – 12 November 2011) was a Russian-American software developer and entrepreneur. Zhitomirskiy was a co-founder and developer of the Diaspora social network and the Diaspora free software that powers it.

The Object Oriented Role Analysis and Modeling (OOram) is a method, based on the concept of role, for performing object-oriented modeling.

Originally (1989) coined Object Oriented Role Analysis, Synthesis and Structuring (OORASS), the method focuses on describing patterns of interaction without connecting the interaction to particular objects/instances. OOram was originally developed by Trygve Reenskaug (1996), a professor at the University of Oslo and the founder of the Norwegian IT company Taskon. The use of "roles" in OOram is similar in application to that of Agent-oriented programming.

Enterprise models created according to OOram may have a number of views, with each view presenting certain aspects of a model. The following ten views are proposed:

1. Area of concern view: Textual description of a phenomenon represented in the role model.
2. Stimulus-response view: Describes how environment roles may trigger activities in the organization (stimulus), together with the effect (response).
3. Role list view: List describing all roles of a role model together with attributes and textual explanation.
4. Semantic view: Describes meaning of roles and relationships between roles.
5. Collaboration view: Describes patterns of roles and message paths.
6. Interface view: Describes all messages that can be sent along a message path.
7. Scenario view: Provides a sample sequence of messages flowing between roles (a concrete example).
8. Process view: Describes data flow between roles and associated activities performed by the roles.
9. State diagram view: For each role, the legal states can be described together with messages that trigger transitions.
10. Method specification view: Describes what messages to send for each method belonging to a role. May also specify procedures to perform.

OOram suggests a varied mix of formal and informal notations and languages for representing and communicating models. Which view to use depends upon the needs in a particular situation.