Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

The Cyrix 6x86 is a line of sixth-generation, 32-bit x86 microprocessors designed and released by Cyrix in 1995. Cyrix, being a fabless company, had the chips manufactured by IBM and SGS-Thomson. The 6x86 was made as a direct competitor to Intel's Pentium microprocessor line, and was pin compatible. During the 6x86's development, the majority of applications (office software as well as games) performed almost entirely integer operations. The designers foresaw that future applications would most likely maintain this instruction focus. So, to optimize the chip's performance for what they believed to be the most likely application of the CPU, the integer execution resources received most of the transistor budget. This would later prove to be a strategic mistake, as the popularity of the P5 Pentium caused many software developers to hand-optimize code in assembly language, to take advantage of the P5 Pentium's tightly pipelined and lower latency FPU. For example, the highly anticipated first-person shooter Quake used highly optimized assembly code designed almost entirely around the P5 Pentium's FPU. As a result, the P5 Pentium significantly outperformed other CPUs in the game.

🔗 Chicago 🔗 Women's sport 🔗 Softball

16-inch softball (sometimes called clincher, mushball, cabbageball, puffball, blooperball, smushball, and Chicago ball) is a variant of softball, but using a larger ball that gradually becomes softer the more the ball is hit, and played with no gloves or mitts on the fielders. It more closely resembles the original game as developed in Chicago in the 19th century by George Hancock, and today it remains most popular in Chicago, New Orleans, Atlanta, and Portland, Oregon (where leagues have existed since the 1960s). It also saw some popularity in Nashville, Tennessee, in the early 1980s.

The first set of rules was published in 1937 by the Amateur Softball Association, in the same manual as the rules for fastpitch softball.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Italy 🔗 Architecture 🔗 Military history/Early Modern warfare 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Ships 🔗 Military history/Medieval warfare 🔗 Industrial design 🔗 Military history/Italian military history 🔗 Former countries 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Former countries/Italian historical states

The Venetian Arsenal (Italian: Arsenale di Venezia) is a complex of former shipyards and armories clustered together in the city of Venice in northern Italy. Owned by the state, the Arsenal was responsible for the bulk of the Venetian republic's naval power from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period. It was "one of the earliest large-scale industrial enterprises in history".

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction

Dune: The Butlerian Jihad is a 2002 science fiction novel by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, set in the fictional Dune universe created by Frank Herbert. It is the first book in the Legends of Dune prequel trilogy, which takes place over 10,000 years before the events of Frank Herbert's celebrated 1965 novel Dune. The series chronicles the fictional Butlerian Jihad, a crusade by the last free humans in the universe against the thinking machines, a violent and dominating force led by the sentient computer Omnius.

Dune: The Butlerian Jihad rose to #7 on The New York Times Best Seller list in its second week of publication.

🔗 Environment

An automated vacuum waste collection system, also known as pneumatic refuse collection, or automated vacuum collection (AVAC), transports waste at high speed through underground pneumatic tubes to a collection station where it is compacted and sealed in containers. When the container is full, it is transported away and emptied. The system helps facilitate separation and recycling of waste.

The process begins with the deposit of trash into intake hatches, called portholes, which may be specialized for waste, recycling, or compost. Portholes are located in public areas and on private property where the owner has opted in. The waste is then pulled through an underground pipeline by air pressure difference created by large industrial fans, in response to porthole sensors that indicate when the trash needs to be emptied and help ensure that only one kind of waste material is travelling through the pipe at a time. The pipelines converge on a central processing facility that uses automated software to direct the waste to the proper container, from there to be trucked to its final location, such as a landfill or composting plant.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Human rights 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 United States/FBI

Main Core is the code name of an American governmental database that is believed to have been in existence since the 1980s. It is believed that Main Core is a federal database containing personal and financial data of millions of United States citizens believed to be threats to national security.

🔗 Numbers 🔗 Canada 🔗 Arctic 🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America 🔗 Canada/Canadian Territories 🔗 Alaska

Kaktovik numerals are a featural positional numeral system created by Alaskan Iñupiat.

Arabic numeral notation, which was designed for a base-10 numeral system, is inadequate for the Inuit languages, which use a base-20 numeral system. Students in Kaktovik, Alaska, invented a base-20 numeral notation in 1994 to rectify this issue, and this system spread among the Alaskan Iñupiat and has been considered in other countries where Inuit languages are spoken.

The image at right shows the digits 0 to 19. Twenty is written as a one and a zero (\ɤ), forty as a two and a zero (Vɤ), four hundred as a one and two zeros (\ɤɤ), eight hundred as a two and two zeros (Vɤɤ), etc.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Military history/Middle Eastern military history

Project Babylon was a space gun project commissioned by then Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. It involved building a series of "superguns". The design was based on research from the 1960s Project HARP led by the Canadian artillery expert Gerald Bull. There were most likely four different devices in the program.

The project began in 1988; it was halted in 1990 after Bull was assassinated, and parts of the superguns were seized in transit around Europe. The components that remained in Iraq were destroyed by the United Nations after the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

🔗 Biography

Albert Stevens (1887–1966), also known as patient CAL-1, was a victim of a human radiation experiment, and survived the highest known accumulated radiation dose in any human. On May 14, 1945, he was injected with 131 kBq (3.55 µCi) of plutonium without his knowledge or informed consent.

Plutonium remained present in his body for the remainder of his life, the amount decaying slowly through radioactive decay and biological elimination. Stevens died of heart disease some 20 years later, having accumulated an effective radiation dose of 64 Sv (6400 rem) over that period, i.e. an average of 3 Sv per year or 350 μSv/h. The current annual permitted dose for a radiation worker in the United States is 0.05 Sv (or 5 rem), i.e. an average of 5.7 μSv/h.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Environment 🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Chemicals 🔗 Sociology

The dihydrogen monoxide parody involves calling water by an unfamiliar chemical name, most often "dihydrogen monoxide" (DHMO), and listing some of water's well-known effects in a particularly alarming manner, such as accelerating corrosion and causing suffocation. The parody often calls for dihydrogen monoxide to be banned, regulated, or labeled as dangerous. It demonstrates how a lack of scientific literacy and an exaggerated analysis can lead to misplaced fears.

The parody has been used with other chemical names, including "dihydrogen oxide", "hydroxyl acid", and "hydroxylic acid".