Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 United States 🔗 Companies 🔗 Business 🔗 Philately

The American Letter Mail Company was started by Lysander Spooner in 1844, competing with the presumed legal monopoly of the United States Post Office (USPO, now the USPS).

🔗 Robotics 🔗 Transhumanism

Utility fog (coined by Dr. John Storrs Hall in 1989) is a hypothetical collection of tiny robots that can replicate a physical structure. As such, it is a form of self-reconfiguring modular robotics.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Common User Access (CUA) is a standard for user interfaces to operating systems and computer programs. It was developed by IBM and first published in 1987 as part of their Systems Application Architecture. Used originally in the MVS/ESA, VM/CMS, OS/400, OS/2 and Microsoft Windows operating systems, parts of the CUA standard are now implemented in programs for other operating systems, including variants of Unix. It is also used by Java AWT and Swing.

🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing 🔗 Hong Kong

KaiOS is a mobile operating system based on Linux, developed by KaiOS Technologies, a US-based company. It is forked from B2G OS (Boot to Gecko OS), an open source community-driven fork of Firefox OS, which was discontinued by Mozilla in 2016.

The primary features of KaiOS bring support for 4G LTE E, VoLTE, GPS and Wi-Fi with HTML5-based apps and longer battery life to non-touch devices with optimized user interface, less memory and energy consumption. It also features over-the-air updates. A dedicated app marketplace (KaiStore) enables users to download applications. Some services are preloaded as HTML5 applications, including Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. The operating system is comparatively lightweight on hardware resource usage, and is able to run on devices with just 256 MB of memory.

The operating system first appeared in 2017 and is developed by KaiOS Technologies Inc., a San Diego, California-based company headed by CEO Sebastien Codeville with offices in other countries. In June 2018, Google invested US$22 million in the operating system. India-based telecom operator Reliance Jio also invested $7 million in cash to pick up a 16% stake in the company.

In market share study results announced in May 2018, KaiOS beat Apple's iOS for second place in India, while Android dominates with 71%, albeit down by 9%. KaiOS growth is being largely attributed to popularity of the competitively-priced Jio Phone. In Q1 2018, 23 million KaiOS devices were shipped.

KaiOS is also the name of an unrelated Linux project, dating from 2014 and targeted at embedded systems.

🔗 Books 🔗 Typography

The printer’s key, also known as the number line, is a line of text printed on the copyright page (often the verso of the title page, especially in English-language publishing) of books, used to indicate the print run. Publishers began this convention about the middle of the 20th century.

An example follows:

This is how the printer's key will appear in the first print run of a book. Numbers are removed with subsequent printings, so if "1" is seen then the book is the first printing of that edition. If it is the second printing then the "1" is removed, meaning that the lowest number seen will be "2".

A hydraulic telegraph (Greek: υδραυλικός τηλέγραφος) is either of two different hydraulic-telegraph telecommunication systems. The earliest one was developed in 4th-century BC Greece, while the other was developed in 19th-century AD Britain. The Greek system was deployed in combination with semaphoric fires, while the latter British system was operated purely by hydraulic fluid pressure.

Although both systems employed water in their sending and receiver devices, their transmission media were completely different. The ancient Greek system transmitted its semaphoric information to the receiver visually, which limited its use to line-of-sight distances in good visibility weather conditions only. The 19th-century British system used water-filled pipes to effect changes to the water level in the receiver unit (similar to a transparent water-filled flexible tube used as a level indicator), thus limiting its range to the hydraulic pressure that could be generated at the transmitter's device.

While the Greek device was extremely limited in the codes (and hence the information) it could convey, the British device was never deployed in operation other than for very short-distance demonstrations. Although the British device could be used in any visibility within its range of operation, it could not work in sub-zero temperatures without additional infrastructure to heat the pipes. This contributed to its impracticality.

🔗 Pharmacology

Eroom's law is the observation that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology (such as high-throughput screening, biotechnology, combinatorial chemistry, and computational drug design), a trend first observed in the 1980s. The cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years (inflation-adjusted). In order to highlight the contrast with the exponential advancements of other forms of technology (such as transistors) over time, the law was deliberately spelled as Moore's law spelled backwards.

The article proposing and naming the law attributes it to four main causes.

• the 'better than the Beatles' problem: the sense that new drugs only have modest incremental benefit over drugs already widely considered as successful, such as Lipitor, and treatment effects on top of already effective treatments are smaller than treatment effects versus placebo. The smaller size of these treatment effects mandates an increase in clinical trial sizes to show the same level of efficacy. This problem was phrased as "better than the Beatles" to highlight the fact that it would be difficult to come up with new successful pop songs if all new songs had to be better than the Beatles.
• the 'cautious regulator' problem: the progressive lowering of risk tolerance seen by drug regulatory agencies that makes R&D both costlier and harder. After older drugs (such as Thalidomide or Vioxx) are removed from the market due to safety reasons, the bar on safety for new drugs is increased.
• the 'throw money at it' tendency: the tendency to add human resources and other resources to R&D, which may lead to project overrun.
• the 'basic research–brute force' bias: the tendency to overestimate the ability of advances in basic research and brute force screening methods to show a molecule as safe and effective in clinical trials. From the 1960s to the 1990s (and later), drug discovery has shifted from whole-animal classical pharmacology testing methods (phenotypic screening) to reverse pharmacology target-approaches that result in the discovery of drugs that may tightly bind with high-affinity to target proteins, but which still often fail in clinical trials due to an under-appreciation of the complexity of the whole organism. Furthermore, drug discovery techniques have shifted from small-molecule and iterative low-throughput search strategies to target-based high-throughput screening (HTS) of large compound libraries. But despite being faster and cheaper, HTS approaches may be less productive.

While some suspect a lack of "low-hanging fruit" as a significant contribution to Eroom's law, this may be less important than the four main causes, as there are still many decades' worth of new potential drug targets relative to the number of targets which already have been exploited, even if the industry exploits 4 to 5 new targets per year. There is also space to explore selectively non-selective drugs (or "dirty drugs") that interact with several molecular targets, and which may be particularly effective as central nervous system (CNS) therapeutics, even though few of them have been introduced in the last few decades.

🔗 France 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Brands 🔗 Military history/French military history 🔗 Military history/Military land vehicles 🔗 Military history/Italian military history 🔗 Military history/European military history

The Vespa 150 TAP was an anti-tank scooter made in the 1950s from a Vespa scooter for use with French paratroops (troupes aéroportées, TAP). Introduced in 1956 and updated in 1959, the scooter was produced by Ateliers de Construction de Motocycles et Automobiles (ACMA), the licensed assembler of Vespas in France at the time. Modifications from the civilian Vespa included a reinforced frame and a 75 mm (3.0 in) recoilless rifle mounted to the scooter.

The 150 TAPs mounted a M20 75 mm recoilless rifle, a U.S.-made light anti-armour weapon. It was very light in comparison to a standard 75 mm (3.0 in) cannon but was still able to penetrate 100 mm (3.9 in) of armour with its HEAT warhead. The recoil was counteracted by venting propellant gases out the rear of the weapon which eliminated the need for a mechanical recoil system or heavy mount.

The scooters would be parachute-dropped in pairs, accompanied by a two-man team. The gun was carried on one scooter, while the ammunition was loaded on the other. Due to the lack of any kind of aiming devices the recoilless rifle was never designed to be fired from the scooter; the gun was mounted on a M1917 Browning machine gun tripod, which was also carried by the scooter, before being fired. However, in an emergency it could be fired while in the frame, and while the scooter was moving.

The "Bazooka Vespa" was relatively cheap: Vespas cost roughly US$500 at the time, and the M20s were plentiful. 600 of them were produced, between 1956 and 1959. It had a cart, and also came with two cans of fuel.

The scooter themselves were original civilian produced VB1T models, 150 cc capacity engine. The engine was two stroke, top speed of 60 km/h (37 mph), enough speed to ram any vehicles if needed in an emergency, or move the user from the drop site to the area where the paratrooper was needed.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Law 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Bible 🔗 Islam 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of religion 🔗 Judaism 🔗 Atheism 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Bahá'í Faith 🔗 Spirituality 🔗 Theology 🔗 Sikhism 🔗 Zoroastrianism

Lawsuits against God have occurred in real life and in fiction. Issues debated in the actions include the problem of evil and harmful "acts of God".

🔗 Geology

The Chesapeake Bay impact crater was formed by a bolide that impacted the eastern shore of North America about 35.5 ± 0.3 million years ago, in the late Eocene epoch. It is one of the best-preserved "wet-target" impact craters in the world.

Continued slumping of sediments over the rubble of the crater has helped shape the Chesapeake Bay.