Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Internet

🔗 Time 🔗 Solar System/Mars 🔗 Solar System

Various schemes have been used or proposed for timekeeping on the planet Mars independently of Earth time and calendars.

Mars has an axial tilt and a rotation period similar to those of Earth. Thus, it experiences seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter much like Earth. Coincidentally, the duration of a Martian day is within a few percent of that of an Earth day, which has led to the use of analogous time units. A Mars year is almost twice as long as Earth's, and its orbital eccentricity is considerably larger, which means that the lengths of various Martian seasons differ considerably, and sundial time can diverge from clock time more than on Earth.

🔗 United States 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities

Nutraloaf (also known as Meal Loaf, prison loaf, disciplinary loaf, food loaf, lockup loaf, confinement loaf, seg loaf, grue or special management meal) is a food served in prisons in the United States and formerly Canada to inmates who have misbehaved; for example, assaulting prison guards or fellow prisoners. It is similar to meatloaf in texture, but has a wider variety of ingredients. Prison loaf is usually bland, perhaps even unpleasant, but prison wardens argue that nutraloaf provides enough nutrition to keep prisoners healthy without requiring utensils to be issued.

🔗 Europe/ESA

🔗 Greece 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Turkey 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Catholicism 🔗 Christianity/theology 🔗 Greece/Byzantine world 🔗 Christianity/Eastern Orthodoxy 🔗 Christianity/Oriental Orthodoxy 🔗 Christianity/Syriac Christianity 🔗 Christianity/Christian history

The First Council of Nicaea ( ny-SEE-ə; Ancient Greek: Σύνοδος τῆς Νικαίας, romanized: Sýnodos tês Nikaías) was a council of Christian bishops convened in the Bithynian city of Nicaea (now İznik, Turkey) by the Roman Emperor Constantine I. The Council of Nicaea met from May until the end of July 325.

This ecumenical council was the first of many efforts to attain consensus in the church through an assembly representing all Christendom. Hosius of Corduba may have presided over its deliberations. Its main accomplishments were settlement of the Christological issue of the divine nature of God the Son and his relationship to God the Father, the construction of the first part of the Nicene Creed, mandating uniform observance of the date of Easter, and promulgation of early canon law.

🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Cold War

Operation Ivy Bells was a joint United States Navy, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and National Security Agency (NSA) mission whose objective was to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication lines during the Cold War.

🔗 New Zealand 🔗 India 🔗 India/Tamil Nadu 🔗 Dravidian civilizations 🔗 New Zealand/Māori 🔗 Tamil civilization

The Tamil Bell is a broken bronze bell discovered in approximately 1836 by missionary William Colenso. It was being used as a pot to boil potatoes by Māori women near Whangarei in the Northland Region of New Zealand.

The bell is 13 cm long and 9 cm deep, and has an inscription. The inscription running around the rim of the bell has been identified as old Tamil. Translated, it says "Mohoyiden Buks ship’s bell". Some of the characters in the inscription are of an archaic form no longer seen in modern Tamil script, thus suggesting that the bell could be about 500 years old, possibly from the Later Pandya period. It is thus what is sometimes called an out-of-place artefact.

Indologist V. R. Ramachandra Dikshitar states in his The Origin and Spread of the Tamils that ancient Tamil sea-farers might have had a knowledge of Australia and Polynesia. The discovery of the bell has led to speculation about a possible Tamil presence in New Zealand, but the bell is not in itself proof of early Tamil contact with New Zealand'. Seafarers from Trincomalee may have reached New Zealand during the period of increased trade between the Vanni country and South East Asia. The bell might have been dropped off the shore by a Portuguese ship, whose sailors had been in touch with the Indians. Also, a number of Indian vessels had been captured by the Europeans during the period; thus, another possibility is that the bell might have belonged to such a wrecked vessel, cast away on the New Zealand shores.

The bell was bequeathed by William Colenso to the Dominion Museum – now the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

🔗 Databases

Third normal form (3NF) is a database schema design approach for relational databases which uses normalizing principles to reduce the duplication of data, avoid data anomalies, ensure referential integrity, and simplify data management. It was defined in 1971 by Edgar F. Codd, an English computer scientist who invented the relational model for database management.

A database relation (e.g. a database table) is said to meet third normal form standards if all the attributes (e.g. database columns) are functionally dependent on solely the primary key. Codd defined this as a relation in second normal form where all non-prime attributes depend only on the candidate keys and do not have a transitive dependency on another key.

A hypothetical example of a failure to meet third normal form would be a hospital database having a table of patients which included a column for the telephone number of their doctor. The phone number is dependent on the doctor, rather than the patient, thus would be better stored in a table of doctors. The negative outcome of such a design is that a doctor's number will be duplicated in the database if they have multiple patients, thus increasing both the chance of input error and the cost and risk of updating that number should it change (compared to a third normal form-compliant data model that only stores a doctor's number once on a doctor table).

Codd later realized that 3NF did not eliminate all undesirable data anomalies and developed a stronger version to address this in 1974, known as Boyce–Codd normal form.

🔗 Mathematics

Graham's number is an immense number that arises as an upper bound on the answer of a problem in the mathematical field of Ramsey theory. It is named after mathematician Ronald Graham, who used the number in conversations with popular science writer Martin Gardner as a simplified explanation of the upper bounds of the problem he was working on. In 1977, Gardner described the number in Scientific American, introducing it to the general public. At the time of its introduction, it was the largest specific positive integer ever to have been used in a published mathematical proof. The number was published in the 1980 Guinness Book of World Records, adding to its popular interest. Other specific integers (such as TREE(3)) known to be far larger than Graham's number have since appeared in many serious mathematical proofs, for example in connection with Harvey Friedman's various finite forms of Kruskal's theorem. Additionally, smaller upper bounds on the Ramsey theory problem from which Graham's number derived have since been proven to be valid.

Graham's number is much larger than many other large numbers such as Skewes' number and Moser's number, both of which are in turn much larger than a googolplex. As with these, it is so large that the observable universe is far too small to contain an ordinary digital representation of Graham's number, assuming that each digit occupies one Planck volume, possibly the smallest measurable space. But even the number of digits in this digital representation of Graham's number would itself be a number so large that its digital representation cannot be represented in the observable universe. Nor even can the number of digits of that number—and so forth, for a number of times far exceeding the total number of Planck volumes in the observable universe. Thus Graham's number cannot be expressed even by power towers of the form ${\displaystyle a^{b^{c^{\cdot ^{\cdot ^{\cdot }}}}}}$.

However, Graham's number can be explicitly given by computable recursive formulas using Knuth's up-arrow notation or equivalent, as was done by Graham. As there is a recursive formula to define it, it is much smaller than typical busy beaver numbers. Though too large to be computed in full, the sequence of digits of Graham's number can be computed explicitly through simple algorithms. The last 12 digits are ...262464195387. With Knuth's up-arrow notation, Graham's number is ${\displaystyle g_{64}}$, where

🔗 Germany 🔗 Jewish history 🔗 Adoption, fostering, orphan care and displacement

The Kindertransport (German for "children's transport") was an organised rescue effort of children from Nazi-controlled territory that took place in 1938–1939 during the nine months prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. The United Kingdom took in nearly 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Free City of Danzig. The children were placed in British foster homes, hostels, schools, and farms. Often they were the only members of their families who survived the Holocaust that was to come. The programme was supported, publicised, and encouraged by the British government, which waived the visa immigration requirements that were not within the ability of the British Jewish community to fulfil. The British government placed no numerical limit on the programme; it was the start of the Second World War that brought it to an end, by which time about 10,000 kindertransport children had been brought to the country.

Smaller numbers of children were taken in via the programme by the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Sweden, and Switzerland. The term "kindertransport" may also be applied to the rescue of mainly Jewish children from Nazi German territory to the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. An example is the 1,000 Chateau de La Hille children who went to Belgium. However, most often the term is restricted to the organised programme of the United Kingdom.

The Central British Fund for German Jewry (now World Jewish Relief) was established in 1933 to support in whatever way possible the needs of Jews in Germany and Austria.

In the United States, the Wagner–Rogers Bill was introduced in Congress, which would have increased the quota of immigrants by bringing to the U.S. a total of 20,000 refugee children, but it did not pass.