Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 California 🔗 Mexico 🔗 Geography 🔗 Mythology 🔗 Islands

The Island of California refers to a long-held European misconception, dating from the 16th century, that the Baja California Peninsula was not part of mainland North America but rather a large island (spelled on early maps as Cali Fornia) separated from the continent by a strait now known as the Gulf of California.

One of the most famous cartographic errors in history, it was propagated on many maps during the 17th and 18th centuries, despite contradictory evidence from various explorers. The legend was initially infused with the idea that California was a terrestrial paradise, like the Garden of Eden or Atlantis.

🔗 Business 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Languages 🔗 Anthroponymy

Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names. The term was first used in the magazine New Scientist in 1994, after the magazine's humorous Feedback column noted several studies carried out by researchers with remarkably fitting surnames. These included a book on polar explorations by Daniel Snowman and an article on urology by researchers named Splatt and Weedon. These and other examples led to light-hearted speculation that some sort of psychological effect was at work. Since the term appeared, nominative determinism has been an irregularly recurring topic in New Scientist, as readers continue to submit examples. Nominative determinism differs from the related concept aptronym, and its synonyms aptonym, namephreak, and Perfect Fit Last Name, in that it focuses on causality. "Aptronym" merely means the name is fitting, without saying anything about why it has come to fit.

The idea that people are drawn to professions that fit their name was suggested by psychologist Carl Jung, citing as an example Sigmund Freud who studied pleasure and whose surname means "joy". A few recent empirical studies have indicated that certain professions are disproportionately represented by people with appropriate surnames (and sometimes given names), though the methods of these studies have been challenged. One explanation for nominative determinism is implicit egotism, which states that humans have an unconscious preference for things they associate with themselves. An alternative explanation is genetic: a person might be named Smith or Taylor because that was originally their occupation, and they would pass on their genes to their descendants, including an aptitude for activities involving strength in the case of Smith, or dexterity in the case of Taylor.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/South Asian military history 🔗 Afghanistan

The Granai airstrike, sometimes called the Granai massacre, refers to the killing of approximately 86 to 147 Afghan civilians by an airstrike by a US Air Force B-1 Bomber on May 4, 2009, in the village of Granai (sometimes spelled Garani or Gerani) in Farah Province, south of Herat, Afghanistan.

The United States admitted significant errors were made in carrying out the airstrike, stating "the inability to discern the presence of civilians and avoid and/or minimize accompanying collateral damage resulted in the unintended consequence of civilian casualties".

The Afghan government has said that around 140 civilians were killed, of whom 22 were adult males and 93 were children. Afghanistan's top rights body has said 97 civilians were killed, most of them children. Other estimates range from 86 to 147 civilians killed. An earlier probe by the US military had said that 20–30 civilians were killed along with 60–65 insurgents. A partially released American inquiry stated "no one will ever be able conclusively to determine the number of civilian casualties that occurred". The Australian has said that the airstrike resulted in "one of the highest civilian death tolls from Western military action since foreign forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001".

🔗 Education 🔗 Homeschooling 🔗 Alternative education

Unschooling is an informal learning that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. Unschooling students learn through their natural life experiences including play, household responsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective classes, family, mentors, and social interaction. Unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, believing that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood and therefore useful it is to the child. While courses may occasionally be taken, unschooling questions the usefulness of standard curricula, conventional grading methods, and other features of traditional schooling in the education of each unique child.

The term "unschooling" was coined in the 1970s and used by educator John Holt, widely regarded as the father of unschooling. While unschooling is often considered a subset of homeschooling and homeschooling has been subject to widespread public debate, little media attention has been given to unschooling in particular.

Critics of unschooling see it as an extreme educational philosophy, with concerns that unschooled children will lack the social skills, structure, and motivation of their schooled peers, while proponents of unschooling say exactly the opposite is true: that self-directed education in a natural environment better equips a child to handle the "real world."

🔗 Climate change 🔗 Geography

The Third Pole, also known as the Hindu Kush-Karakoram-Himalayan system (HKKH), is a mountainous region located in the west and south of the Tibetan Plateau. Part of High-Mountain Asia, it spreads over an area of more than 4.2 million square kilometres (1.6 million square miles) across nine countries, i.e. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan and Tajikistan, bordering ten countries. The area is nicknamed the "Third Pole" because its mountain glaciers and snowfields store more frozen water than anywhere else in the world after the Arctic and Antarctic polar caps. With the world's loftiest mountains, comprising all 14 peaks above 8,000 metres (26,000 ft), it is the source of 10 major rivers and forms a global ecological buffer.

The Third Pole area is rich with natural resources and consists of all or some of four global biodiversity hotspots. The mountain resources administer a wide range of ecosystem benefits and are the base for the drinking water, food production and livelihoods of the 220 million inhabitants of the region, as well as indirectly to the 1.5 billion people — one sixth of the world's population — living in the downstream river basins. Billions of people benefit from the food and energy produced in these river basins whose headwaters rely on meltwaters and precipitations that run off these mountains.

Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, offline use or database queries (such as for Wikipedia:Maintenance). All text content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License (CC-BY-SA), and most is additionally licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Images and other files are available under different terms, as detailed on their description pages. For our advice about complying with these licenses, see Wikipedia:Copyrights.

Some of the many ways to read Wikipedia while offline:

• Kiwix: (§ Kiwix) – index of images (2024)
• XOWA: (§ XOWA) – index of images (2015)
• WikiTaxi: § WikiTaxi (for Windows)
• aarddict: § Aard Dictionary / Aard 2
• BzReader: § BzReader and MzReader (for Windows)
• WikiFilter: § WikiFilter
• Wikipedia on rockbox: § Wikiviewer for Rockbox
• Selected Wikipedia articles as a printed document: Help:Printing

Some of them are mobile applications – see "List of Wikipedia mobile applications".

🔗 Sociology

In sociology and economics, the precariat () is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which means existing without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term is a portmanteau merging precarious with proletariat.

Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labor to live, members of the precariat are only partially involved in labor and must undertake extensive unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings. Classic examples of such unpaid activities include continually having to search for work (including preparing for and attending job interviews), as well as being expected to be perpetually responsive to calls for "gig" work (yet without being paid an actual wage for being "on call").

The hallmark of the precariat class is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence. The emergence of this class has been ascribed to the entrenchment of neoliberal capitalism.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Systems 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science 🔗 Systems/Systems engineering

Conway's law is an adage stating that organizations design systems that mirror their own communication structure. It is named after computer programmer Melvin Conway, who introduced the idea in 1967. His original wording was:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

The law is based on the reasoning that in order for a software module to function, multiple authors must communicate frequently with each other. Therefore, the software interface structure of a system will reflect the social boundaries of the organization(s) that produced it, across which communication is more difficult. Conway's law was intended as a valid sociological observation, although sometimes it's used in a humorous context. It was dubbed Conway's law by participants at the 1968 National Symposium on Modular Programming.

In colloquial terms, it means software or automated systems end up "shaped like" the organizational structure they are designed in or designed for. Some interpretations of the law say this organizational pattern mirroring is a helpful feature of such systems, while other interpretations say it's merely a result of human nature or organizational bias.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why and how sentient organisms have qualia or phenomenal experiences—how and why it is that some internal states are subjective, felt states, such as heat or pain, rather than merely nonsubjective, unfelt states, as in a thermostat or a toaster. The philosopher David Chalmers, who introduced the term "hard problem" of consciousness, contrasts this with the "easy problems" of explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, focus attention, and so forth. Easy problems are (relatively) easy because all that is required for their solution is to specify a mechanism that can perform the function. That is, regardless of how complex or poorly understood the phenomena of the easy problems may be, they can eventually be understood by relying entirely on standard scientific methodologies. Chalmers claims that the problem of experience is distinct from this set and will "persist even when the performance of all the relevant functions is explained".

The existence of a "hard problem" is controversial. It has been accepted by philosophers of mind such as Joseph Levine, Colin McGinn, and Ned Block and cognitive neuroscientists such as Francisco Varela, Giulio Tononi, and Christof Koch. However, its existence is disputed by philosophers of mind such as Daniel Dennett, Massimo Pigliucci, and Keith Frankish and cognitive neuroscientists such as Stanislas Dehaene and Bernard Baars.

🔗 Wiltshire

The Salisbury cathedral clock is a large iron-framed tower clock without a dial, in Salisbury Cathedral, England. Supposedly dating from about 1386, it is a well-preserved example of the earliest type of mechanical clock, called verge and foliot clocks, and is said to be the oldest working clock in the world, although similar claims are made for other clocks. Previously in a bell-tower which was demolished in 1790, the clock was restored to working condition in 1956 and is on display in the North nave aisle of the cathedral, close to the West front.