Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 United States 🔗 Companies 🔗 Law 🔗 United States/Delaware

The Corporation Trust Center, 1209 North Orange Street, is a single-story building located in the Brandywine neighborhood of Wilmington, Delaware, USA, operated by CT Corporation, a subsidiary of Dutch multinational services firm Wolters Kluwer. This is CT Corporation's location in the state of Delaware for providing "registered agent services." In 2012 it was the registered agent address of at least 285,000 separate businesses.

Many companies are incorporated in Delaware for its business-friendly General Corporation Law and it was estimated in 2012 that 9.5 billion dollars of potential taxes had not been levied over the past decade, due to an arrangement known as the "Delaware loophole." Companies formed in Delaware are required to have an address in the state at which process may be served. Therefore, Delaware entities with no physical office in the state must have a registered agent with a Delaware address. Notable companies represented by CT at this location include Google, American Airlines, Apple Inc., General Motors, The Coca-Cola Company, Walmart, Yum! Brands, Verizon, and about 430 of Deutsche Bank's more than 2,000 subsidiary companies and special purpose companies. Both Former President of the United States Donald Trump, and his opponent in the 2016 United States presidential election, Hillary Clinton, have registered companies at the center.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History

A steam cannon is a cannon that launches a projectile using only heat and water, or using a ready supply of high-pressure steam from a boiler. The first steam cannon was designed by Archimedes during the Siege of Syracuse. Leonardo Da Vinci was also known to have designed one (see the Architonnerre).

The early device would consist of a large metal tube, preferably copper due to its high thermal conductivity, which would be placed in a furnace. One end of the tube would be capped and the other loaded with a projectile. Once the tube reached a high enough temperature, a small amount of water would be injected in behind the projectile. In theory, Leonardo da Vinci believed, the water would rapidly expand into vapour, blasting the projectile out the front of the barrel.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Poetry 🔗 United Kingdom

The person from Porlock was an unwelcome visitor to Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his composition of the poem Kubla Khan in 1797. Coleridge claimed to have perceived the entire course of the poem in a dream (possibly an opium-induced haze), but was interrupted by this visitor from Porlock while in the process of writing it. Kubla Khan, only 54 lines long, was never completed. Thus "person from Porlock", "man from Porlock", or just "Porlock" are literary allusions to unwanted intruders who disrupt inspired creativity.

...film at 11.

It's often said that Wikipedia is dying. This is the latest in a long line of technological deaths. Earlier, the WikiWikiWeb died. Before that, Usenet died.

Reasons why Wikipedia is dying include and may not be limited to:

• most of the major editors are leaving
• most edits are now made by robots
• article syntax is too complicated for readers and new editors
• pop culture articles are longer than science or history articles
• power-hungry administrators are warring against content creators so they can delete everything and rule a perfect, empty wiki [Is this right? -- Ed.]
• the people with the most time to edit are also those with the most time and inclination to argue in perpetuity
• the Great Space Wombat said it is dying
• bias is going to destroy the entire neutral point of view we uphold so much
• vandalism. No elaboration required.
• the WMF is more corrupt than governments
• discussion here is more toxic than on Twitter
• nobody is donating (why else do they keep asking for money?)
• people will stop visiting the main site and just get blurbs from search engines or chatbots instead
• insert additional reasons here

Wikipedia has been dying since at least 100 years ago.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Biology

The blue field entoptic phenomenon is an entoptic phenomenon characterized by the appearance of tiny bright dots (nicknamed blue-sky sprites) moving quickly along undulating pathways in the visual field, especially when looking into bright blue light such as the sky. The dots are short-lived, visible for about one second or less, and traveling short distances along seemingly random, undulating paths. Some of them seem to follow the same path as other dots before them. The dots may appear elongated along the path, like tiny worms. The dots' rate of travel appears to vary in synchrony with the heartbeat: they briefly accelerate at each beat. The dots appear in the central field of view, within 15 degrees from the fixation point. The left and right eye see different, seemingly random, dot patterns; a person viewing through both eyes sees a combination of both left and right visual field disturbances. While seeing the phenomenon, lightly pressing inward on the sides of the eyeballs at the lateral canthus causes the movement to stop being fluid and the dots to move only when the heart beats.

Most people are able to see this phenomenon in the sky, although it is relatively weak in most instances; many will not notice it until asked to pay attention. The dots are highly conspicuous against any monochromatic blue background of a wavelength of around 430 nm in place of the sky. The phenomenon is also known as Scheerer's phenomenon, after the German ophthalmologist Richard Scheerer, who first drew clinical attention to it in 1924.

🔗 Computer science

In computing, a zooming user interface or zoomable user interface (ZUI, pronounced zoo-ee) is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) where users can change the scale of the viewed area in order to see more detail or less, and browse through different documents. Information elements appear directly on an infinite virtual desktop (usually created using vector graphics), instead of in windows. Users can pan across the virtual surface in two dimensions and zoom into objects of interest. For example, as you zoom into a text object it may be represented as a small dot, then a thumbnail of a page of text, then a full-sized page and finally a magnified view of the page.

ZUIs use zooming as the main metaphor for browsing through hyperlinked or multivariate information. Objects present inside a zoomed page can in turn be zoomed themselves to reveal further detail, allowing for recursive nesting and an arbitrary level of zoom.

When the level of detail present in the resized object is changed to fit the relevant information into the current size, instead of being a proportional view of the whole object, it's called semantic zooming.

Some consider the ZUI paradigm as a flexible and realistic successor to the traditional windowing GUI, being a Post-WIMP interface.

🔗 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.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Automobiles

A gyrocar is a two-wheeled automobile. The difference between a bicycle or motorcycle and a gyrocar is that in a bike, dynamic balance is provided by the rider, and in some cases by the geometry and mass distribution of the bike itself, and the gyroscopic effects from the wheels. Steering a motorcycle is done by precessing the front wheel. In a gyrocar, balance was provided by one or more gyroscopes, and in one example, connected to two pendulums by a rack and pinion.

The concept was originally described in fiction in 1911 "Two Boys in a Gyrocar: The story of a New York to Paris Motor Race" by Kenneth Brown, (Houghton Mifflin Co). However the first prototype Gyrocar, The Shilovski Gyrocar, was commissioned in 1912 by the Russian Count Pyotr Shilovsky, a lawyer and member of the Russian royal family. It was manufactured to his design by the Wolseley Tool and Motorcar Company in 1914 and demonstrated in London the same year. The gyrocar was powered by a modified Wolseley C5 engine of 16–20 hp, with a bore of 90 mm and a stroke of 121 mm. It was mounted ahead of the radiator, driving the rear wheel through a conventional clutch and gear box. A transmission brake was fitted after the gearbox – there were no brakes on the wheels themselves. The weight of the vehicle was 2.75 tons and it had a very large turning radius.

In 1927 Louis Brennan, funded to the tune of £12,000 (plus a £2000 per year) by John Cortauld built a rather more successful gyrocar. Two contra-rotating gyros were housed under the front seats, spun in a horizontal plane at 3500 rpm by 24V electric motors powered from standard car batteries. This was the greatest speed obtainable with the electric motors available, and meant that each rotor had to weigh 200 lb (91 kg) to generate sufficient forces. Precession was in the vertical fore-aft plane. The car had a Morris Oxford engine, engine mountings, and gearbox. Two sidewheels (light aircraft tailwheels were used) were manually lowered on stopping; if the driver forgot and switched off the gyros and walked away, the car would continue to balance itself using the gyro momentum for a few minutes, and then the wheels would automatically be dropped to stop tipping.

🔗 Typography

A fleuron (;), also known as printers' flower, is a typographic element, or glyph, used either as a punctuation mark or as an ornament for typographic compositions. Fleurons are stylized forms of flowers or leaves; the term derives from the Old French: floron ("flower"). Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style calls the forms "horticultural dingbats". A commonly-encountered fleuron is the ❦, the floral heart or hedera (ivy leaf). It is also known as an aldus leaf (after Italian Renaissance printer Aldus Manutius).