Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Science

In communication theory, the Allen curve is a graphical representation that reveals the exponential drop in frequency of communication between engineers as the distance between them increases. It was discovered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Thomas J. Allen in the late 1970s.

A related and highly significant finding of Allen's was his identification of the key role of information gatekeepers. Often such interlocutors were poorly recognized by management and yet conveyed vital concepts from just the right people to just the right other people in the organization.

🔗 Sociology 🔗 Organizations 🔗 Media 🔗 Culture 🔗 Sociology/social movements 🔗 Toys

The Barbie Liberation Organization or BLO, sponsored by RTMark, were a group of artists and activists involved in culture jamming. They gained notoriety in 1993 after switching voice boxes in talking G.I. Joes and Barbie dolls. The BLO performed "surgery" on a reported 300–500 dolls from retail and returned them to shelves, an action they refer to as shopgiving. Thus, Teen Talk Barbie dolls would say phrases such as "Vengeance is mine", while G.I. Joe dolls would say phrases such as "The beach is the place for summer!"

🔗 Aviation

A cyclorotor, cycloidal rotor, cycloidal propeller or cyclogiro, is a fluid propulsion device that converts shaft power into the acceleration of a fluid using a rotating axis perpendicular to the direction of fluid motion. It uses several blades with a spanwise axis parallel to the axis of rotation and perpendicular to the direction of fluid motion. These blades are cyclically pitched twice per revolution to produce force (thrust or lift) in any direction normal to the axis of rotation. Cyclorotors are used for propulsion, lift, and control on air and water vehicles. An aircraft using cyclorotors as the primary source of lift, propulsion, and control is known as a cyclogyro or cyclocopter. A unique aspect is that it can change the magnitude and direction of thrust without the need of tilting any aircraft structures. The patented application, used on ships with particular actuation mechanisms both mechanical or hydraulic, is named after German company Voith Turbo.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Websites 🔗 Websites/Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer Security 🔗 Computing/Websites

Evercookie is a JavaScript-based application created by Samy Kamkar that produces zombie cookies in a web browser that are intentionally difficult to delete. In 2013, a top-secret NSA document was leaked by Edward Snowden, citing Evercookie as a method of tracking Tor users.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Pakistan

Osama bin Laden's compound, known locally as the Waziristan Haveli (Urdu: وزیرستان حویلی‎), was an upper-class mansion that was used as a safe house for militant Islamist Osama bin Laden, who was shot and killed there by U.S. forces on May 2, 2011. The compound was located at the end of a dirt road 1,300 metres (0.8 mi) southwest of the Pakistan Military Academy in Bilal Town, Abbottabad, Pakistan, a suburb housing many retired military officers. Bin Laden was reported to have evaded capture by living in a section of the house for at least five years, having no Internet or phone connection, and hiding away from the public, who were allegedly unaware of his presence.

Completed in 2005, the main buildings in the compound lay on a 3,500-square-metre (38,000 sq ft) plot of land, much larger than those of nearby houses. Its perimeter was 3.7- to 5.5-metre (12 to 18 ft) concrete walls topped with barbed wire, and there were two security gates. The compound had very few windows. Little more than five years old, the compound's ramshackle buildings were badly in need of repainting. The grounds contained a well-kept vegetable garden, rabbits, some 100 chickens and a cow. The house itself did not stand out architecturally from others in the neighbourhood, except for its size and exaggerated security measures; for example, the third-floor balcony had a 2-metre (7 ft) privacy wall. Photographs inside the house showed excessive clutter and modest furnishings. After the American mission, there was extensive interest in and reporting about the compound and its design. To date, the Pakistani government has not responded to any allegations as to who had built the structure.

After the September 11 attacks in 2001, the U.S. searched for bin Laden for nearly 10 years. By tracking his courier Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti to the compound, U.S. officials surmised that bin Laden was hiding there. During a raid on May 2, 2011, 24 members of the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group arrived by helicopter, breached a wall using explosives, and entered the compound in search of bin Laden. After the operation was completed and bin Laden was killed, Pakistan demolished the structure in February 2012.

Tilt! How to get bias into a Wikipedia article

To all you budding propagandists in Wikiland: too many of you are working like a bunch of amateurs. Sorry to be so negative, but you have to understand that getting bias into the Wikipedia is a skill; it requires practice, finesse and imagination. It has to be learned; it is not a natural thing, though some have more talent for it than others.

I have been following the Middle East Wikipedia battleground for a few years now, and have been very impressed with the skill of some editors in introducing bias into articles. To ingenuous editors, some of these techniques may seem innocuous enough; in many cases, it is hard to see how proposed edits are biasing an article one way or another. It is, in fact, only in the last few months that I have been able to define what these techniques are and how they work to introduce bias.

The first thing you need to know as a budding propagandist is this: there are two levels at which bias is introduced into the Wikipedia: at the article level, and at the topic level. You need to set your sights high: you don't want to merely bias a single article, you want the entire Wikipedia on your side. Without understanding the importance of topic bias, it is hard to understand many of the article-level techniques, so I will start with the topic level.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 United Kingdom

A toast sandwich is a sandwich made with two slices of bread in which the filling is a thin slice of toasted bread, which can be heavily buttered. An 1861 recipe says to add salt and pepper to taste.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Glass

A teasmade is a machine for making tea automatically, which was once common in the United Kingdom and some British Commonwealth countries. Teasmades generally include an analogue alarm clock and are designed to be used at the bedside, to ensure tea is ready first thing in the morning. Although crude versions existed in Victorian times, they only became practical with the availability of electric versions in the 1930s. They reached their peak in popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, since when their use has declined, but they are now enjoying a revival, partly as a retro novelty item.

The name teasmade is an example of a genericised trademark, now commonly used to refer to any automatic tea-making appliance.

🔗 Poetry

A clerihew () is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem's subject, usually a famous person put in an absurd light, or revealing something unknown or spurious about them. The rhyme scheme is AABB, and the rhymes are often forced. The line length and metre are irregular. Bentley invented the clerihew in school and then popularized it in books. One of his best known is this (1905):

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

The transputer is a series of pioneering microprocessors from the 1980s, featuring integrated memory and serial communication links, intended for parallel computing. They were designed and produced by Inmos, a semiconductor company based in Bristol, United Kingdom.

For some time in the late 1980s, many considered the transputer to be the next great design for the future of computing. While Inmos and the transputer did not achieve this expectation, the transputer architecture was highly influential in provoking new ideas in computer architecture, several of which have re-emerged in different forms in modern systems.