Random Articles (Page 2)
Have a deep view into what people are curious about.
🔗 Blue Peacock
Blue Peacock, renamed from Blue Bunny and originally Brown Bunny, was a British tactical nuclear weapon project in the 1950s.
The project's goal was to store a number of ten-kiloton nuclear mines in Germany, to be placed on the North German Plain and, in the event of Soviet invasion from the east, detonated by wire or an eight-day timer to:
... not only destroy facilities and installations over a large area, but ... deny occupation of the area to an enemy for an appreciable time due to contamination ...
Discussed on
- "Blue Peacock" | 2019-09-23 | 56 Upvotes 8 Comments
🔗 Potoooooooo
Potoooooooo or variations of Pot-8-Os (1773 – November 1800) was an 18th-century thoroughbred racehorse who won over 30 races and defeated some of the greatest racehorses of the time. He went on to be a sire. He is now best known for the unusual spelling of his name, pronounced 'Potatoes'.
Discussed on
- "Potoooooooo" | 2025-01-16 | 104 Upvotes 42 Comments
- "Potoooooooo" | 2021-07-28 | 128 Upvotes 32 Comments
🔗 Kardashev Scale
The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy they are able to use. The measure was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964. The scale has three designated categories:
- A Type I civilization, also called a planetary civilization—can use and store all of the energy available on its planet.
- A Type II civilization, also called a stellar civilization—can use and control energy at the scale of its stellar system.
- A Type III civilization, also called a galactic civilization—can control energy at the scale of its entire host galaxy.
Discussed on
- "Kardashev Scale" | 2024-05-11 | 34 Upvotes 28 Comments
- "Kardashev Scale" | 2021-10-13 | 14 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Kardashev Scale" | 2019-08-03 | 74 Upvotes 31 Comments
- "Kardashev scale" | 2011-02-05 | 72 Upvotes 15 Comments
🔗 Lördagsgodis (Saturday Sweets)
Lördagsgodis (Swedish) or lørdagsgodis and lørdagsgodteri (Norwegian), (English: "Saturday sweets" or "Saturday candy") is a Norwegian and Swedish tradition of children eating candy or sweets mainly or only on Saturdays.
The tradition started as a health recommendation in 1959 following the government-funded Vipeholm experiments, where patients of Vipeholm Hospital for the intellectually disabled in Lund, Sweden, were unknowingly fed large amounts of sweets to see whether a high-sugar diet would cause tooth decay.
Over time, what was once a recommendation has turned into a routine for both children and adults to eat candy on Saturdays, as an event to look forward to during the week. It is common for Swedes to buy lördagsgodis by weight from candy walls in grocery stores. Candy consumption started increasing in 1980s and by 2010s, Sweden had the highest per capita candy consumption in the world. As of 2015, the Swedish government, facing high candy consumption and in effort to improve public health was considering enforcing Saturday candy. Such deliberations were being met with criticism from groups who instead supported a cap on consumption.
Discussed on
- "Lördagsgodis (Saturday Sweets)" | 2025-08-09 | 32 Upvotes 47 Comments
🔗 Dagen H – the day Sweden switched to driving on the right
Dagen H (H day), today usually called "Högertrafikomläggningen" ("The right-hand traffic diversion"), was the day on 3 September 1967, in which the traffic in Sweden switched from driving on the left-hand side of the road to the right. The "H" stands for "Högertrafik", the Swedish word for "right traffic". It was by far the largest logistical event in Sweden's history.
Discussed on
- "Högertrafikomläggningen" | 2024-06-09 | 175 Upvotes 185 Comments
- "Dagen H – the day Sweden switched to driving on the right" | 2013-05-17 | 13 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Dagen H: The day Sweden switched to the right hand side of the road" | 2010-07-19 | 50 Upvotes 19 Comments
🔗 Jiggle syphon
A jiggle syphon (or siphon) is the combination of a syphon pipe and a simple priming pump that uses mechanical shaking action to pump enough liquid up the pipe to reach the highest point, and thus start the syphoning action.
Discussed on
- "Jiggle syphon" | 2019-01-27 | 14 Upvotes 2 Comments
🔗 A man died yesterday. He had a huge impact on our lives. Fred Shuttlesworth.
Frederick Lee "Fred" Shuttlesworth (born Fred Lee Robinson, March 18, 1922 – October 5, 2011) was a U.S. civil rights activist who led the fight against segregation and other forms of racism as a minister in Birmingham, Alabama. He was a co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, initiated and was instrumental in the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, and continued to work against racism and for alleviation of the problems of the homeless in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he took up a pastorate in 1961. He returned to Birmingham after his retirement in 2007. He helped Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement.
The Birmingham–Shuttlesworth International Airport was named in his honor in 2008.
The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Fred L. Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award is bestowed annually in his name.
Discussed on
- "A man died yesterday. He had a huge impact on our lives. Fred Shuttlesworth." | 2011-10-06 | 270 Upvotes 16 Comments
🔗 Wells and Wellington Affair
The Wells and Wellington affair was a dispute about the publication of three papers in the Australian Journal of Herpetology in 1983 and 1985. The publication was established in 1981 as a peer-reviewed scientific journal focusing on the study of amphibians and reptiles (herpetology). Its first two issues were published under the editorship of Richard W. Wells, a first-year biology student at Australia's University of New England. Wells then ceased communicating with the journal's editorial board for two years before suddenly publishing three papers without peer review in the journal in 1983 and 1985. Coauthored by himself and high school teacher Cliff Ross Wellington, the papers reorganized the taxonomy of all of Australia's and New Zealand's amphibians and reptiles and proposed over 700 changes to the binomial nomenclature of the region's herpetofauna.
Members of the herpetological community reacted strongly to the pair's actions and eventually brought a case to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature to suppress the scientific names they had proposed. After four years of arguments, the commission opted not to vote on the case because it hinged largely on taxonomic arguments rather than nomenclatural ones, leaving some of Wells and Wellington's names available. The case's outcome highlighted the vulnerability to the established rules of biological nomenclature that desktop publishing presented. As of 2020, 24 of the specific names assigned by Wells and Wellington remained valid senior synonyms.
Discussed on
- "Wells and Wellington Affair" | 2021-03-18 | 16 Upvotes 1 Comments
🔗 Gödel's Completeness Theorem
Gödel's completeness theorem is a fundamental theorem in mathematical logic that establishes a correspondence between semantic truth and syntactic provability in first-order logic. It makes a close link between model theory that deals with what is true in different models, and proof theory that studies what can be formally proven in particular formal systems.
It was first proved by Kurt Gödel in 1929. It was then simplified in 1947, when Leon Henkin observed in his Ph.D. thesis that the hard part of the proof can be presented as the Model Existence Theorem (published in 1949). Henkin's proof was simplified by Gisbert Hasenjaeger in 1953.
Discussed on
- "Gödel's Completeness Theorem" | 2019-09-04 | 55 Upvotes 71 Comments
🔗 Yuan Longping has died
Yuan Longping (Chinese: 袁隆平; September 7, 1930 – May 22, 2021) was a Chinese agronomist, member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, known for developing the first hybrid rice varieties in the 1970s.
Hybrid rice has since been grown in dozens of countries in Africa, America, and Asia—providing a robust food source in areas with a high risk of famine. For his contributions, Yuan is always called the "Father of Hybrid Rice" by the Chinese media. On May 22, 2021, Yuan Longping died of multiple organ failure at the age of 90.
Discussed on
- "Yuan Longping has died" | 2021-05-23 | 164 Upvotes 60 Comments