Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Switzerland 🔗 Genealogy

The Bernoulli family (German pronunciation: [bɛʁˈnʊli]) of Basel was a patrician family, notable for having produced eight mathematically gifted academics who, among them, contributed substantially to the development of mathematics and physics during the early modern period.

🔗 Video games

Don't Buy This (also known as Don't Buy This: Five of the Worst Games Ever) is a compilation of video games for the ZX Spectrum released on 1 April 1985. As described on the box, it contains five of the poorest games submitted to publisher Firebird. Instead of rejecting the submissions, they decided to mock the original developers by releasing them together and publicly brand it as "unoriginal" and "awful". Firebird even disowned all their copyright to the game and encouraged buyers to pirate it at will.

Reviews for the game were universally negative, with critics questioning how to critique the game due to its publicity being based on it being a collection of bad games. Despite the negative reception, the game was a commercial success.

🔗 Pharmacology

Human anti-mouse antibody or human anti-murine antibody (HAMA) is an antibody found in humans which reacts to immunoglobins found in mice.

🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Culture 🔗 Textile Arts

Shibori (しぼり / 絞り) is a Japanese manual resist dyeing technique, which produces a number of different patterns on fabric.

🔗 Dogs

The eastern coyote (Canis latrans var.) is a wild North American canine of both coyote and wolf parentage. The hybridization likely first occurred in the Great Lakes region, as western coyotes moved east. It was first noticed during the early 1930s to the late 1940s, and likely originated in the aftermath of the extirpation of the gray wolf in southeastern Ontario, Labrador and Quebec, thus allowing coyotes to colonize the former wolf ranges and mix with the remnant wolf populations. This hybrid is smaller than the eastern wolf and holds smaller territories, but is larger and holds more extensive home ranges than the typical western coyote.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Systems 🔗 Systems/Scientific modeling

Jackson structured programming (JSP) is a method for structured programming developed by British software consultant Michael A. Jackson and described in his 1975 book Principles of Program Design. The technique of JSP is to analyze the data structures of the files that a program must read as input and produce as output, and then produce a program design based on those data structures, so that the program control structure handles those data structures in a natural and intuitive way.

JSP describes structures (of both data and programs) using three basic structures – sequence, iteration, and selection (or alternatives). These structures are diagrammed as (in effect) a visual representation of a regular expression.

🔗 Physics

The Magdeburg hemispheres are a pair of large copper hemispheres, with mating rims. They were used to demonstrate the power of atmospheric pressure. When the rims were sealed with grease and the air was pumped out, the sphere contained a vacuum and could not be pulled apart by teams of horses. The Magdeburg hemispheres were invented by German scientist and mayor of Magdeburg, Otto von Guericke, to demonstrate the air pump that he had invented, and the concept of atmospheric pressure. The first artificial vacuum had been produced a few years earlier by Evangelista Torricelli, and had inspired Guericke to design the world's first vacuum pump, which consisted of a piston and cylinder with one-way flap valves. The hemispheres became popular in physics lectures as an illustration of the strength of air pressure, and are still used in education. A pair of the original hemispheres are preserved in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology

In the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionism, or neointuitionism (opposed to preintuitionism), is an approach where mathematics is considered to be purely the result of the constructive mental activity of humans rather than the discovery of fundamental principles claimed to exist in an objective reality. That is, logic and mathematics are not considered analytic activities wherein deep properties of objective reality are revealed and applied, but are instead considered the application of internally consistent methods used to realize more complex mental constructs, regardless of their possible independent existence in an objective reality.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Astronomy/Astronomical objects

Tabby's Star (also known as Boyajian's Star and WTF Star, and designated KIC 8462852 in the Kepler Input Catalog) is an F-type main-sequence star in the constellation Cygnus approximately 1,470 light-years (450 pc) from Earth. Unusual light fluctuations of the star, including up to a 22% dimming in brightness, were discovered by citizen scientists as part of the Planet Hunters project. In September 2015, astronomers and citizen scientists associated with the project posted a preprint of an article describing the data and possible interpretations. The discovery was made from data collected by the Kepler space telescope, which observed changes in the brightness of distant stars to detect exoplanets.

Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the star's large irregular changes in brightness as measured by its light curve, but none to date fully explain all aspects of the curve. One explanation is that an "uneven ring of dust" orbits Tabby's Star. In another explanation, the star's luminosity is modulated by changes in the efficiency of heat transport to its photosphere, so no external obscuration is required. A third hypothesis, based on a lack of observed infrared light, posits a swarm of cold, dusty comet fragments in a highly eccentric orbit; however, the notion that disturbed comets from such a cloud could exist in high enough numbers to obscure 22% of the star's observed luminosity has been doubted. Another hypothesis is that a large number of small masses in "tight formation" are orbiting the star. Furthermore, spectroscopic study of the system has found no evidence for coalescing material or hot close-in dust or circumstellar matter from an evaporating or exploding planet within a few astronomical units of the mature central star. It has also been hypothesized that the changes in brightness could be signs of activity associated with intelligent extraterrestrial life constructing a Dyson swarm; however, further analysis based on data through the end of 2017 showed wavelength-dependent dimming consistent with dust but not an opaque object such as an alien megastructure, which would block all wavelengths of light equally.

Tabby's Star is not the only star that has large irregular dimmings, but other such stars include young stellar objects called YSO dippers, which have different dimming patterns. An example of such an object is EPIC 204278916.

New fluctuations ran from mid-May 2017 until July 2018, assuming their continuance in late-December 2017 to mid-February 2018 when obscured by the Sun.

In September 2019, astronomers reported that the observed dimmings of Tabby's Star may have been produced by fragments resulting from the disruption of an orphaned exomoon. An overall study of other similar stars has been presented. In January 2021, a distant stellar-mass companion was reported, making Tabby's Star a binary stellar system.

🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Novels 🔗 Books 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Freedom of speech 🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism

Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often published as 1984, is a dystopian novel by English novelist George Orwell. It was published in June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. The story was mostly written at Barnhill, a farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura, at times while Orwell suffered from severe tuberculosis. Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of government over-reach, totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of all persons and behaviours within society.

The story takes place in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, historical negationism, and propaganda. Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, has become a province of a superstate named Oceania that is ruled by the Party who employ the Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking. Big Brother, the leader of the Party, enjoys an intense cult of personality despite the fact that he may not exist. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent and skillful rank-and-file worker and Party member who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. He enters a forbidden relationship with a co-worker, Julia.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. Many terms used in the novel have entered common usage, including Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Room 101, telescreen, 2 + 2 = 5, prole, and memory hole. Nineteen Eighty-Four also popularised the adjective "Orwellian", connoting things such as official deception, secret surveillance, brazenly misleading terminology, and manipulation of recorded history by a totalitarian or authoritarian state. Time included it on its 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. It was placed on the Modern Library's 100 Best Novels, reaching No. 13 on the editors' list and No. 6 on the readers' list. In 2003, the novel was listed at No. 8 on The Big Read survey by the BBC. Parallels have been drawn between the novel's subject matter and real life instances of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and violations of freedom of expression among other themes.