Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Moon 🔗 Solar System

A transient lunar phenomenon (TLP) or lunar transient phenomenon (LTP) is a short-lived light, color, or change in appearance on the surface of the Moon. The term was created by Patrick Moore in his co-authorship of NASA Technical Report R-277 Chronological Catalog of Reported Lunar Events, published in 1968.

Claims of short-lived lunar phenomena go back at least 1,000 years, with some having been observed independently by multiple witnesses or reputable scientists. Nevertheless, the majority of transient lunar phenomenon reports are irreproducible and do not possess adequate control experiments that could be used to distinguish among alternative hypotheses to explain their origins.

Most lunar scientists will acknowledge transient events such as outgassing and impact cratering do occur over geologic time. The controversy lies in the frequency of such events.

🔗 Physics

The X17 particle is a hypothetical subatomic particle proposed by Attila Krasznahorkay and his colleagues to explain certain anomalous measurement results. The particle has been proposed to explain wide angles observed in the trajectory paths of particles produced during a nuclear transition of beryllium-8 atoms and in stable helium atoms. The X17 particle could be the force carrier for a postulated fifth force, possibly connected with dark matter, and has been described as a protophobic (i.e., ignoring protons) X boson with a mass near 17 MeV.

🔗 France 🔗 Novels 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophical literature 🔗 Philosophy/Social and political philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Continental philosophy 🔗 Algeria

The Plague (French: La Peste) is a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran. It asks a number of questions relating to the nature of destiny and the human condition. The characters in the book, ranging from doctors to vacationers to fugitives, all help to show the effects the plague has on a populace.

The novel is believed to be based on the cholera epidemic that killed a large percentage of Oran's population in 1849 following French colonization, but the novel is placed in the 1940s. Oran and its surroundings were struck by disease multiple times before Camus published this novel. According to a research report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Oran was decimated by the plague in 1556 and 1678, but all later outbreaks, in 1921 (185 cases), 1931 (76 cases), and 1944 (95 cases), were very far from the scale of the epidemic described in the novel.

The Plague is considered an existentialist classic despite Camus' objection to the label. The narrative tone is similar to Kafka's, especially in The Trial whose individual sentences potentially have multiple meanings, the material often pointedly resonating as stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition.

Camus included a dim-witted character misreading The Trial as a mystery novel as an oblique homage. The novel has been read as an allegorical treatment of the French resistance to Nazi occupation during World War II. Additionally, he further illustrates the human reaction towards the "absurd". The Plague represents how the world deals with the philosophical notion of the Absurd, a theory that Camus himself helped to define.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Medicine 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Scotland

Scottish man Angus Barbieri (1939 – 7 September 1990) fasted for 382 days, from June 1965 to July 1966. He lived on tea, coffee, soda water, and vitamins while living at home in Tayport, Scotland, and frequently visiting Maryfield Hospital for medical evaluation. He lost 276 pounds (125 kg) and set a record for the length of a fast.

🔗 Alternative Views

The God helmet is an experimental apparatus originally called the Koren helmet (or Koren octopus) after its inventor Stanley Koren. It was developed by Koren and neuroscientist Michael Persinger to study creativity, religious experience and the effects of subtle stimulation of the temporal lobes. Reports by participants of a "sensed presence" while wearing the God helmet brought public attention and resulted in several TV documentaries. The device has been used in Persinger's research in the field of neurotheology, the study of the purported neural correlations of religion and spirituality. The apparatus, placed on the head of an experimental subject, generates very weak magnetic fields, that Persinger refers to as "complex". Like other neural stimulation with low-intensity magnetic fields, these fields are approximately as strong as those generated by a land line telephone handset or an ordinary hair dryer, but far weaker than that of an ordinary refrigerator magnet and approximately a million times weaker than transcranial magnetic stimulation.

Persinger reports that many subjects have reported "mystical experiences and altered states" while wearing the God Helmet. The foundations of his theory have been criticized in the scientific press. Anecdotal reports by journalists, academics and documentarists have been mixed and several effects reported by Persinger have not yet been independently replicated. One attempt at replication published in the scientific literature reported a failure to reproduce Persinger's effects and the authors proposed that the suggestibility of participants, improper blinding of participants or idiosyncratic methodology could explain Persinger's results. Persinger argues that the replication was technically flawed, but the researchers have stood by their replication. Only one group has published a direct replication of one God Helmet experiment. Other groups have reported no effects at all or have generated similar experiences by using sham helmets, or helmets that are not turned on, and have concluded that personality differences in the participants explain these unusual experiences.

🔗 Education 🔗 Engineering

Regulation and licensure in engineering is established by various jurisdictions of the world to encourage public welfare, safety, well-being and other interests of the general public and to define the licensure process through which an engineer becomes authorized to practice engineering and/or provide engineering professional services to the public.

As with many other professions, the professional status and the actual practice of professional engineering is legally defined and protected by law in some jurisdictions. Additionally, some jurisdictions permit only licensed engineers (sometimes called registered engineers) to "practice engineering," which requires careful definition in order to resolve potential overlap or ambiguity with respect to certain other professions which may or may not be themselves regulated (e.g. "scientists," or "architects"). Relatedly, jurisdictions that license according to particular engineering discipline need to define those boundaries carefully as well so that practitioners understand what they are permitted to do.

In many cases, only a state or provincial licensed/registered engineer has the authority to take legal responsibility for engineering work or projects (typically via a seal or stamp on the relevant design documentation). Regulations may require that only a licensed or registered engineer can sign, seal or stamp technical documentation such as reports, plans, engineering drawings and calculations for study estimate or valuation or carry out design analysis, repair, servicing, maintenance or supervision of engineering work, process or project. In cases where public safety, property or welfare is concerned, it may be required that an engineer be licensed or registered – though some jurisdictions have an "industrial exemption" that permits engineers to work internally for an organization without licensure so long as they are not making final decisions to release product to the public or offering engineering services directly to the public (e.g. consultant).

Expert witness or opinion in courts or before government committees or commissions can be provided by experts in the respective field, which is sometimes given by a registered or licensed engineer in some jurisdictions.

🔗 Marketing & Advertising

Ad creep is the "creep" of advertising into previously ad-free spaces.

The earliest verified appearance of the term "ad creep" is in a 1996 article "Creeping Commercials: Ads Worming Way Into TV Scripts" by Steve Johnson for the Chicago Tribune, however it may have been coined by a subscriber to Stay Free! magazine, according to another source.

While the virtues of advertising can be debated, ad-creep often especially refers to advertising which is invasive and coercive, such as ads in schools, doctor's offices and hospitals, restrooms, elevators, on ATMs, on garbage cans, on vehicles, on restaurant menus, and countless other items. In Steve Johnson's piece referenced above, he criticizes product placement and "creative advertising enhancements" as "one more manifestation of an environment in which the commercial assault is almost nonstop". Commercial Alert, a nonprofit organization founded by Public Citizen "to keep the commercial culture within its proper sphere, and to prevent it from exploiting children and subverting the higher values of family, community, environmental integrity and democracy" also characterizes "ad creep" as an assault, with ad companies fighting a "relentless battle to claim every waking moment, and what one executive called, with chilling candor, mind share". A 2017 Daily Express story in the UK suggests "the creeping incursion of adverts in Windows 10" has been an issue.

On the other hand, modern advertisers are compelled to react to changes in consumer habits. An article in The New York Times notes that "consumers’ viewing and reading habits are so scattershot now that many advertisers say the best way to reach time-pressed consumers is to try to catch their eye at literally every turn." And, the article suggests that ad agencies believe that as long as ads are entertaining, people may not mind the saturation. As people have turned from traditional media, advertisers have not only struggled to create brand awareness, but there is also a move to "microtarget people at precisely timed moments" as well, according to an article in Stay Free!.

Occasionally, the term "Ad Creep" has been used to describe a process of slowly infusing more ads into places where ads have been expected (television shows, for example) such as in a 2011 Advertising Age article describing the increase in both the time devoted to ads and the number of ad messages in the Super Bowl. This is not a standard use of the term, but it is related. A 2017 blog post by the chief global analyst of Kantar Millward Brown, a marketing firm, notes "that average ad loads on national television in the U.S. continued to creep upwards from 10.4 minutes per hour in December 2014, to 10.9 minutes in December 2016". Although the increase is less than 5%, he suggests "marketers should be concerned because the evidence suggests that more clutter is a bad thing for brands."

🔗 Mathematics

Fractional calculus is a branch of mathematical analysis that studies the several different possibilities of defining real number powers or complex number powers of the differentiation operator D

${\displaystyle Df(x)={\frac {d}{dx}}f(x)\,,}$

and of the integration operator J

${\displaystyle Jf(x)=\int _{0}^{x}f(s)\,ds\,,}$

and developing a calculus for such operators generalizing the classical one.

In this context, the term powers refers to iterative application of a linear operator D to a function f, that is, repeatedly composing D with itself, as in ${\displaystyle D^{2}(f)=(D\circ D)(f)=D(D(f))}$.

For example, one may ask for a meaningful interpretation of:

${\displaystyle {\sqrt {D}}=D^{\frac {1}{2}}}$

as an analogue of the functional square root for the differentiation operator, that is, an expression for some linear operator that when applied twice to any function will have the same effect as differentiation. More generally, one can look at the question of defining a linear functional

${\displaystyle D^{a}}$

for every real-number a in such a way that, when a takes an integer value n ∈ ℤ, it coincides with the usual n-fold differentiation D if n > 0, and with the −nth power of J when n < 0.

One of the motivations behind the introduction and study of these sorts of extensions of the differentiation operator D is that the sets of operator powers { D^a |a ∈ ℝ } defined in this way are continuous semigroups with parameter a, of which the original discrete semigroup of { Dⁿ | n ∈ ℤ } for integer n is a denumerable subgroup: since continuous semigroups have a well developed mathematical theory, they can be applied to other branches of mathematics.

Fractional differential equations, also known as extraordinary differential equations, are a generalization of differential equations through the application of fractional calculus.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software

This is a list of notable lexer generators and parser generators for various language classes.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Death 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece

The Nekromanteion (Greek: Νεκρομαντεῖον) was an ancient Greek temple of necromancy devoted to Hades and Persephone. According to tradition, it was located on the banks of the Acheron river in Epirus, near the ancient city of Ephyra. This site was believed by devotees to be the door to Hades, the realm of the dead. The site is at the meeting point of the Acheron, Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus rivers, believed to flow through and water the kingdom of Hades. The meaning of the names of the rivers has been interpreted to be "joyless", "burning coals" and "lament", respectively.

A site in Mesopotamos, Epirus was proposed as the site of the Necromanteion in 1958, but this identification is now questioned.