Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Chess

The Immortal Game was a chess game played by Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky on 21 June 1851 in London, during a break of the first international tournament. The bold sacrifices made by Anderssen to secure victory have made it one of the most famous chess games of all time. Anderssen gave up both rooks and a bishop, then his queen, checkmating his opponent with his three remaining minor pieces. In 1996, Bill Hartston called the game an achievement "perhaps unparalleled in chess literature".

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

Word2vec is a technique for natural language processing (NLP) published in 2013. The word2vec algorithm uses a neural network model to learn word associations from a large corpus of text. Once trained, such a model can detect synonymous words or suggest additional words for a partial sentence. As the name implies, word2vec represents each distinct word with a particular list of numbers called a vector. The vectors are chosen carefully such that they capture the semantic and syntactic qualities of words; as such, a simple mathematical function (cosine similarity) can indicate the level of semantic similarity between the words represented by those vectors.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology

The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases. This effect, discovered by French agricultural engineer Maximilien Ringelmann (1861–1931), illustrates the inverse relationship that exists between the size of a group and the magnitude of group members’ individual contribution to the completion of a task. While studying the relationship between process loss (i.e., reductions in performance effectiveness or efficiency) and group productivity, Ringelmann (1913) found that having group members work together on a task (e.g., pulling a rope) actually results in significantly less effort than when individual members are acting alone. Ringelmann discovered that as more and more people are added to a group, the group often becomes increasingly inefficient, ultimately violating the notion that group effort and team participation reliably leads to increased effort on behalf of the members.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 Spectroscopy 🔗 Blades

Tutankhamun's meteoric iron dagger, also known as Tutankhamun's iron dagger and King Tut's dagger, is an iron-bladed dagger from the tomb of the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun (reigned c. 1334–1325 BC). As the blade composition and homogeneity closely correlate with meteorite composition and homogeneity, the material for the blade is determined to have originated by way of a meteoritic landing. The dagger is currently displayed at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

🔗 Chemicals 🔗 Dentistry

Tin(II) fluoride, commonly referred to commercially as stannous fluoride (from Latin stannum, 'tin'), is a chemical compound with the formula SnF₂. It is a colourless solid used as an ingredient in toothpastes.

🔗 Novels

In the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), by George Orwell, the Two Minutes Hate is the daily, public period during which members of the Outer Party of Oceania must watch a film depicting the enemies of the state, specifically Emmanuel Goldstein and his followers, to openly and loudly express hatred for them. The political purpose of the Two Minutes Hate is to allow the citizens of Oceania to vent their existential anguish and personal hatreds towards politically expedient enemies: Goldstein and the enemy superstate of the moment. In re-directing the members' subconscious feelings away from the Party's government of Oceania, and towards non-existent external enemies, the Party minimises thoughtcrime and the consequent, subversive behaviours of thoughtcriminals.

🔗 Geography

The First Law of Geography, according to Waldo Tobler, is "everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things." This first law is the foundation of the fundamental concepts of spatial dependence and spatial autocorrelation and is utilized specifically for the inverse distance weighting method for spatial interpolation and to support the regionalized variable theory for kriging. It is a modern formulation of David Hume's principle of contiguity.

Tobler first presented his seminal idea during a meeting of the International Geographical Union's Commission on Qualitative Methods held in 1969 and later published by him in 1970. Though simple in its presentation, this idea is profound. Without it, "the full range of conditions anywhere on the Earth's surface could in principle be found packed within any small area. There would be no regions of approximately homogeneous conditions to be described by giving attributes to area objects. Topographic surfaces would vary chaotically, with slopes that were everywhere infinite, and the contours of such surfaces would be infinitely dense and contorted. Spatial analysis, and indeed life itself, would be impossible."

Less well known is his second law, which complements the first: "The phenomenon external to an area of interest affects what goes on inside".

🔗 Video games

Polybius is an urban legend that emerged in early 2000. It has served as inspiration for several free and commercial games by the same name.

The legend describes the game as part of a government-run crowdsourced psychology experiment based in Portland, Oregon, during 1981. Gameplay supposedly produced intense psychoactive and addictive effects in the player. These few publicly staged arcade machines were said to have been visited periodically by men in black for the purpose of data-mining the machines and analyzing these effects. Eventually, all of these Polybius arcade machines allegedly disappeared from the arcade market.

Polybius is also the name of a Greek historian born in Arcadia, who was, coincidentally, known for his assertion that historians should never report what they cannot verify through interviews with witnesses.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 United States/Vermont

Ronald James Read (October 23, 1921 – June 2, 2014) was an American philanthropist, investor, janitor, and gas station attendant. Read grew up in Dummerston, Vermont, in an impoverished farming household. He walked or hitchhiked 4 mi (6.4 km) daily to his high school and was the first high school graduate in his family. He enlisted in the United States Army during World War II, serving in Italy as a military policeman. Upon an honorable discharge from the military in 1945, Read returned to Brattleboro, Vermont, where he worked as a gas station attendant and mechanic for about 25 years. Read retired for one year and then took a part-time janitor job at J. C. Penney where he worked for 17 years until 1997.

Read died in 2014. He received media coverage in numerous newspapers and magazines after bequeathing US$1.2 million to Brooks Memorial Library and $4.8 million to Brattleboro Memorial Hospital. Read amassed a fortune of almost $8 million by investing in dividend-producing stocks, avoiding the stocks of companies he did not understand such as technology companies, living frugally, and being a buy and hold investor in a diversified portfolio of stocks with a heavy concentration in blue chip companies.

🔗 Mathematics

In knot theory, Conway notation, invented by John Horton Conway, is a way of describing knots that makes many of their properties clear. It composes a knot using certain operations on tangles to construct it.