Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Internet culture

"i am lonely will anyone speak to me" is the title of a thread that was posted on the Internet forum of the video codec downloads site Moviecodec.com, and had become "the web's top hangout for lonely folk". The thread began July 14, 2004; it was the first hit when the phrase "I am lonely" was entered into the Google search engine though it has since dropped.

It was featured in the magazines Wired, Guardian Unlimited, and The New Yorker. Bjarne Lundgren, the webmaster of Moviecodec.com, has stated "Like-minded people tend to flock together and, in this case, Google helped in flocking them together on my site".

Mark Griffiths, a researcher in internet psychology at Nottingham Trent University in the UK, also addressed this question, stating: "There are a lot of lonely people out there. Some people rely heavily on technology and end up treating it as an electronic friend, a sounding board—just writing it down can make you feel better... That doesn't change their psychological world at that moment, but creating a kinship with like-minded people can help. You're all in this virtual space together."

Due to its large community, Bjarne created a new forum entitled "A Lonely Life", for the thread's numerous lonely inhabitants to move to. The original thread is now located on Moviecodec.com's branch site, The Lounge Forums.

As of December 24, 2016, the website the thread is hosted on was shut down and can no longer be accessed.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 International relations 🔗 Law 🔗 Law Enforcement 🔗 United States Public Policy 🔗 Pirate Politics 🔗 International relations/International law 🔗 United States/U.S. Public Policy 🔗 Trade

The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) was a proposed multilateral treaty for the purpose of establishing international standards for intellectual property rights enforcement. The agreement aims to establish an international legal framework for targeting counterfeit goods, generic medicines and copyright infringement on the Internet, and would create a new governing body outside existing forums, such as the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, and the United Nations.

The agreement was signed in October 2011 by Australia, Canada, Japan, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, and the United States. In 2012, Mexico, the European Union and 22 countries that are member states of the European Union signed as well. One signatory (Japan) has ratified (formally approved) the agreement, which would come into force in countries that ratified it after ratification by six countries.

Industrial groups with interests in copyright, trademarks and other types of intellectual property said that ACTA was a response to "the increase in global trade of counterfeit goods and pirated copyright protected works". Organizations such as the Motion Picture Association of America and International Trademark Association are understood to have had a significant influence over the ACTA agenda.

Organisations representing citizens and non-governmental interests argued that ACTA could infringe fundamental rights including freedom of expression and privacy. ACTA has also been criticised by Doctors Without Borders for endangering access to medicines in developing countries. The nature of negotiations was criticized as secretive and has excluded non-governmental organization, developing countries and the general public from the agreement's negotiation process and it has been described as policy laundering by critics including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Entertainment Consumers Association.

The signature of the EU and many of its member states resulted in widespread protests across Europe. European Parliament rapporteur Kader Arif resigned. His replacement, British MEP David Martin, recommended that the Parliament should reject ACTA, stating: "The intended benefits of this international agreement are far outweighed by the potential threats to civil liberties". On 4 July 2012, the European Parliament declined its consent, effectively rejecting it, 478 votes to 39, with 165 abstentions.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Ships

A midget submarine (also called a mini submarine) is any submarine under 150 tons, typically operated by a crew of one or two but sometimes up to 6 or 9, with little or no on-board living accommodation. They normally work with mother ships, from which they are launched and recovered and which provide living accommodation for the crew and support staff.

Both military and civilian midget submarines have been built. Military types work with surface ships and other submarines as mother ships. Civilian and non-combatant military types are generally called submersibles and normally work with surface ships.

Most early submarines would now be considered midget submarines, such as the United States Navy's USS Holland (SS-1) and the British Royal Navy's HMS Holland 1.

🔗 History 🔗 Germany 🔗 Greece 🔗 Austria 🔗 Netherlands 🔗 Christianity 🔗 European history 🔗 Greece/Byzantine world 🔗 Christianity/Catholicism 🔗 Former countries 🔗 Czech Republic 🔗 Frisia 🔗 Former countries/Holy Roman Empire 🔗 Silesia 🔗 Christianity/Lutheranism 🔗 Christianity/Reformed Christianity

The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved on 6 August 1806, when the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, abdicated his title and released all Imperial states and officials from their oaths and obligations to the empire. Since the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman Empire had been recognized by Western Europeans as the legitimate continuation of the ancient Roman Empire due to its emperors having been proclaimed as Roman emperors by the papacy. Through this Roman legacy, the Holy Roman Emperors claimed to be universal monarchs whose jurisdiction extended beyond their empire's formal borders to all of Christian Europe and beyond. The decline of the Holy Roman Empire was a long and drawn-out process lasting centuries. The formation of the first modern sovereign territorial states in the 16th and 17th centuries, which brought with it the idea that jurisdiction corresponded to actual territory governed, threatened the ostensibly universal nature of the Holy Roman Empire.

The Holy Roman Empire by the time of the 18th century was widely regarded by contemporaries, both inside and outside the empire, as a highly "irregular" monarchy and "sick," having an "unusual" form of government. The empire lacked both a central standing army and a central treasury and its monarchs, formally elective rather than hereditary, could not exercise effective central control. Even then, most contemporaries believed that the empire could be revived and modernized. For example, the Reichstag passed the Imperial Recess as late as 1803.

The Holy Roman Empire finally began its true terminal decline during and after its involvement in the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. Although the empire defended itself quite well initially, war with France and Napoleon proved catastrophic. In 1804, Napoleon proclaimed himself as the Emperor of the French, which Francis II responded to by proclaiming himself the Emperor of Austria, in addition to already being the Holy Roman Emperor, an attempt at maintaining parity between France and Austria while also illustrating that the Holy Roman title outranked them both. Austria's defeat at the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805 and the secession of a large number of Francis II's German vassals in July 1806 to form the Confederation of the Rhine, a French satellite state, effectively meant the end of the Holy Roman Empire. The abdication in August 1806, combined with a dissolution of the entire Imperial hierarchy and its institutions, was seen as necessary to prevent the possibility of Napoleon proclaiming himself Holy Roman Emperor, something which would have reduced Francis II to Napoleon's vassal.

Reactions to the empire's dissolution ranged from indifference to despair. The populace of Vienna, capital of the Habsburg monarchy, were horrified at the loss of the empire. Many of Francis II's former subjects questioned the legality of his actions; though his abdication was agreed to be perfectly legal, the dissolution of the empire and the release of all its vassals were seen as beyond the emperor's authority. As such, many of the empire's princes and subjects refused to accept that the empire was gone, with some commoners going so far as to believe that news of its dissolution was a plot by their local authorities. In Germany, the dissolution was widely compared to the ancient and legendary Fall of Troy and some associated the end of the Holy Roman Empire with the end times and the apocalypse.

🔗 Insects 🔗 Insects/Ant

An ant mill is an observed phenomenon in which a group of army ants are separated from the main foraging party, lose the pheromone track and begin to follow one another, forming a continuously rotating circle, commonly known as a "death spiral" because the ants might eventually die of exhaustion. It has been reproduced in laboratories and has been produced in ant colony simulations. The phenomenon is a side effect of the self-organizing structure of ant colonies. Each ant follows the ant in front of it, which works until a slight deviation begins to occur, typically by an environmental trigger, and an ant mill forms. An ant mill was first described in 1921 by William Beebe, who observed a mill 1200 ft (~370 m) in circumference. It took each ant 2.5 hours to make one revolution. Similar phenomena have been noted in processionary caterpillars and fish.

🔗 Military history/United States military history

🔗 Computing 🔗 Denmark 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Beer

Free Beer, originally known as Vores øl - An open source beer (Danish for: Our Beer), is the first brand of beer with an "open"/"free" brand and recipe. The recipe and trademark elements are published under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license.

The beer was created in 2004 by students at the IT University in Copenhagen together with artist collective Superflex, to illustrate how concepts of the FOSS movement might be applied outside the digital world. The "Free Beer" concept illustrates also the connection between the long tradition of freely sharing cooking recipes with the FOSS movement, which tries to establish this sharing tradition also for the "recipes" of software, the source code. The "Free beer" concept received an overall positive reception from international press and media for the political message, was presented on many exhibitions and conferences, and inspired many breweries in adopting the concept.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Medieval warfare 🔗 Martial arts 🔗 Military history/Spanish military history 🔗 Spain 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Fencing

La Verdadera Destreza is the conventional term for the Spanish tradition of fencing of the early modern period. The word destreza literally translates to 'dexterity' or 'skill, ability', and thus la verdadera destreza to 'the true skill' or 'the true art'.

While destreza is primarily a system of swordsmanship, it is intended to be a universal method of fighting, applicable to all weapons in principle, but in practice dedicated to the rapier specifically, or the rapier combined with a defensive weapon such as a cloak, a buckler or a parrying dagger, besides other weapons such as the late-renaissance two-handed montante; the flail; and polearms such as the pike and halberd.

Its precepts are based on reason, geometry, and tied to intellectual, philosophical, and moral ideals, incorporating various aspects of a well-rounded Renaissance humanist education, with a special focus on the writings of classical authors such as Aristotle, Euclid, and Plato.

The tradition is documented in scores of fencing manuals, but centers on the works of two primary authors, Jerónimo Sánchez de Carranza (Hieronimo de Carança, died c. 1608) and his student Luis Pacheco de Narváez (1570–1640).

🔗 Psychology

In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect occurs when an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled. It postulates that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. In Gestalt psychology, the Zeigarnik effect has been used to demonstrate the general presence of Gestalt phenomena: not just appearing as perceptual effects, but also present in cognition.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Philosophy

The principle of least astonishment (POLA), also called the principle of least surprise (alternatively a "law" or "rule") applies to user interface and software design. A typical formulation of the principle, from 1984, is: "If a necessary feature has a high astonishment factor, it may be necessary to redesign the feature."

More generally, the principle means that a component of a system should behave in a way that most users will expect it to behave; the behavior should not astonish or surprise users.