Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Languages 🔗 Constructed languages 🔗 Taoism

Toki Pona is a philosophical artistic constructed language known for its small vocabulary. It was created by Canadian linguist and translator Sonja Lang for the purpose of simplifying thoughts and communication. It was first published online in 2001 as a draft, and later in complete form in the book Toki Pona: The Language of Good in 2014. A small community of speakers developed in the early 2000s. The community grew after the release of the official book and has continued to grow larger since its publication. While activity mostly takes place online in chat rooms, on social media, and in other groups, there were a few organized in-person meetings during the 2010s.

The underlying feature of Toki Pona is minimalism. It focuses on simple universal concepts, making use of very little to express the most. The language is isolating and has 120–125 root words and 14 phonemes that are easy to pronounce across different languages. However, it was not created to be an international auxiliary language. Inspired by Taoist philosophy, the language is designed to help users concentrate on basic things and to promote positive thinking, in accordance with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Despite the small vocabulary, speakers are able to understand and communicate with each other, mainly relying on context and combinations of several words to express more specific meanings.

🔗 Korea 🔗 China 🔗 East Asia 🔗 Languages 🔗 Korea/one or more inactive working groups

The Sinosphere, also known as the East Asian cultural sphere, or the Sinic world, encompasses multiple countries in East Asia and Southeast Asia that historically were heavily influenced by Chinese culture, norms and traditions. According to academic consensus, the Sinosphere comprises four entities: Greater China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. Other definitions may include Mongolia and Singapore, largely due to limited historical Chinese influences or increasing modern-day Chinese diaspora. The Sinosphere is not to be confused with Sinophone, which indicates countries where a Chinese-speaking population is dominant.

Imperial China was a major regional power in Eastern Asia and had exerted influence on tributary states and neighboring states, among which were Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. These interactions brought ideological and cultural influences rooted in Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. During classical history, the four cultures shared a common imperial system under respective emperors. Chinese inventions influenced, and were in turn influenced by, innovations of the other cultures in governance, philosophy, science, and the arts. Written Classical Chinese became the regional lingua franca for literary and scientific exchange, and Chinese characters (Hanzi) became locally adapted in Japan as Kanji, Korea as Hanja, and Vietnam as chữ Hán.

In late classical history, the literary importance of classical Chinese diminished as Japan, Korea, and Vietnam each adopted their own literary device. Japan developed the Katakana and Hiragana scripts, Korea created Hangul, and Vietnam developed chữ Nôm (which is now rarely used; the modern Vietnamese alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet). Classical literature written in Chinese characters nonetheless remains an important legacy of Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese cultures. In the 21st century, ideological and cultural influences of Confucianism and Buddhism remain visible in high culture and social doctrines.

🔗 Korea 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Korea/North Korea

North Korea has several restaurants serving pizza. Most people in the country cannot afford pizza, and it is mostly available for the elite. Pyongyang has five restaurants that serve pizza, including Pizza Restaurant on Kwangbok Street and Italy Pizza on Mirae Scientists Street. Kim Jong Il hired Italian chefs to train North Koreans in pizza making and introduced it to the country.

🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Paranormal

Nobel disease or Nobelitis is the embracing of strange or scientifically unsound ideas by some Nobel Prize winners, usually later in life. It has been argued that the effect results, in part, from a tendency for Nobel winners to feel empowered by the award to speak on topics outside their specific area of expertise, although it is unknown whether Nobel Prize winners are more prone to this tendency than other individuals. Paul Nurse, co-winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, warned later laureates against "believing you are expert in almost everything, and being prepared to express opinions about most issues with great confidence, sheltering behind the authority that the Nobel Prize can give you". Nobel disease has been described as a "tongue in cheek" term.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history

Operation Dark Winter was the code name for a senior-level bio-terrorist attack simulation conducted from June 22–23, 2001. It was designed to carry out a mock version of a covert and widespread smallpox attack on the United States. Tara O'Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies (CCBS) / Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic Services were the principal designers, authors, and controllers of the Dark Winter project.

Dark Winter was focused on evaluating the inadequacies of a national emergency response during the use of a biological weapon against the American populace. The exercise was solely intended to establish preventive measures and response strategies by increasing governmental and public awareness of the magnitude and potential of such a threat posed by biological weapons.

Dark Winter's simulated scenario involved an initial localized smallpox attack on Oklahoma City, Oklahoma with additional smallpox attack cases in Georgia and Pennsylvania. The simulation was then designed to spiral out of control. This would create a contingency in which the National Security Council struggles to determine both the origin of the attack as well as deal with containing the spreading virus. By not being able to keep pace with the disease's rate of spread, a new catastrophic contingency emerges in which massive civilian casualties would overwhelm America's emergency response capabilities.

The disastrous contingencies that would result in the massive loss of civilian life were used to exploit the weaknesses of the U.S. health care infrastructure and its inability to handle such a threat. The contingencies were also meant to address the widespread panic that would emerge and which would result in mass social breakdown and mob violence. Exploits would also include the many difficulties that the media would face when providing American citizens with the necessary information regarding safety procedures.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Video games/indie

Chants of Sennaar is a 2023 adventure video game developed by Rundisc and published by Focus Entertainment. Players solve puzzles and minigames to translate fictional languages.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics

Simpson's paradox, which goes by several names, is a phenomenon in probability and statistics, in which a trend appears in several different groups of data but disappears or reverses when these groups are combined. This result is often encountered in social-science and medical-science statistics and is particularly problematic when frequency data is unduly given causal interpretations. The paradox can be resolved when causal relations are appropriately addressed in the statistical modeling.

Simpson's paradox has been used as an exemplar to illustrate to the non-specialist or public audience the kind of misleading results mis-applied statistics can generate. Martin Gardner wrote a popular account of Simpson's paradox in his March 1976 Mathematical Games column in Scientific American.

Edward H. Simpson first described this phenomenon in a technical paper in 1951, but the statisticians Karl Pearson et al., in 1899, and Udny Yule, in 1903, had mentioned similar effects earlier. The name Simpson's paradox was introduced by Colin R. Blyth in 1972.

It is also referred to as or Simpson's reversal, Yule–Simpson effect, amalgamation paradox, or reversal paradox.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Books

Basic Economics is a non-fiction book by American economist Thomas Sowell published by Basic Books in 2000. The original subtitle was A Citizen's Guide to the Economy, but from the third edition in 2007 on it was subtitled A Common Sense Guide to the Economy.

Basic Economics is focused on how societies create prosperity or poverty for their peoples by the way they organize their economies.

🔗 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 regular 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.