Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Crime 🔗 Death

The 2022 Russian businessmen mystery deaths are a series of unusual deaths of Russian-connected businessmen in 2022. Most of the deaths were officially declared to be suicides, but a number of commentators have suggested that the circumstances of the suicides appear to be suspicious and may have been staged.

🔗 Science

The Ortega hypothesis holds that average or mediocre scientists contribute substantially to the advancement of science. According to this hypothesis, scientific progress occurs mainly by the accumulation of a mass of modest, narrowly specialized intellectual contributions. On this view, major breakthroughs draw heavily upon a large body of minor and little-known work, without which the major advances could not happen.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History

A steam cannon is a cannon that launches a projectile using only heat and water, or using a ready supply of high-pressure steam from a boiler. The first steam cannon was designed by Archimedes during the Siege of Syracuse. Leonardo Da Vinci was also known to have designed one (see the Architonnerre).

The early device would consist of a large metal tube, preferably copper due to its high thermal conductivity, which would be placed in a furnace. One end of the tube would be capped and the other loaded with a projectile. Once the tube reached a high enough temperature, a small amount of water would be injected in behind the projectile. In theory, Leonardo da Vinci believed, the water would rapidly expand into vapour, blasting the projectile out the front of the barrel.

🔗 International relations 🔗 China 🔗 East Asia 🔗 Politics 🔗 Taiwan

The "One-China policy" is a policy asserting that there is only one sovereign state under the name China, as opposed to the idea that there are two states, the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC), whose official names incorporate "China". Many states follow a one China policy, but the meanings are not the same. The PRC exclusively uses the term "One China Principle" in its official communications.

The One China concept is also different from the "One China principle", which is the principle that insists both Taiwan and mainland China are inalienable parts of a single "China". A modified form of the "One China" principle known as the "1992 Consensus" is the current policy of the PRC government. Under this "consensus", both governments "agree" that there is only one sovereign state encompassing both mainland China and Taiwan, but disagree about which of the two governments is the legitimate government of this state. An analogous situation existed with West and East Germany in 1950–1970, North and South Korea, and more recently, the Syrian government and Syrian opposition.

The One-China principle faces opposition from supporters of the Taiwan independence movement, which pushes to establish the "Republic of Taiwan" and cultivate a separate identity apart from China called "Taiwanization". Taiwanization's influence on the government of the ROC implies the change of self-identity among Taiwan citizens: after the Communist Party of China expelled the ROC in the Chinese Civil War from most of Chinese territory in 1949 and founded the PRC, the ROC's Chinese Nationalist government, which still held Taiwan, continued to claim legitimacy as the government of all of China. Under former President Lee Teng-hui, additional articles were appended to the ROC constitution in 1991 so that it applied effectively only to the Taiwan Area prior to national unification. However, former ROC president Ma Ying-jeou re-asserted claims on mainland China as late as 2008.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Futures studies

Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment which states that an otherwise benevolent artificial superintelligence (AI) in the future would be incentivized to create a virtual reality simulation to torture anyone who knew of its potential existence but did not directly contribute to its advancement or development. It originated in a 2010 post at discussion board LessWrong, a technical forum focused on analytical rational enquiry. The thought experiment's name derives from the poster of the article (Roko) and the basilisk, a mythical creature capable of destroying enemies with its stare.

While the theory was initially dismissed as nothing but conjecture or speculation by many LessWrong users, LessWrong co-founder Eliezer Yudkowsky reported users who described symptoms such as nightmares and mental breakdowns upon reading the theory, due to its stipulation that knowing about the theory and its basilisk made one vulnerable to the basilisk itself. This led to discussion of the basilisk on the site to be banned for five years. However, these reports were later dismissed as being exaggerations or inconsequential, and the theory itself was dismissed as nonsense, including by Yudkowsky himself. Even after the post's discreditation, it is still used as an example of principles such as Bayesian probability and implicit religion. It is also regarded as a modern version of Pascal's wager. In the field of artificial intelligence, Roko's basilisk has become notable as an example that raises the question of how to create an AI which is simultaneously moral and intelligent.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Sociology

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person. This number was first proposed in the 1990s by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and average social group size. By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. Dunbar explained it informally as "the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar".

Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150. Dunbar's number states the number of people one knows and keeps social contact with, and it does not include the number of people known personally with a ceased social relationship, nor people just generally known with a lack of persistent social relationship, a number which might be much higher and likely depends on long-term memory size.

Dunbar theorised that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size [...] the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained". On the periphery, the number also includes past colleagues, such as high school friends, with whom a person would want to reacquaint himself or herself if they met again.

🔗 Economics 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Retailing

In economics, shrinkflation is the process of items shrinking in size or quantity, or even sometimes reformulating or reducing quality while their prices remain the same or increase. The word is a portmanteau of the words shrink and inflation. First usage of the term has been attributed to both Pippa Malmgren and Brian Domitrovic.

🔗 Library of Congress 🔗 Classical music 🔗 Albums

In C is a musical piece composed by Terry Riley in 1964 for an indefinite number of performers. He suggests "a group of about 35 is desired if possible but smaller or larger groups will work". A series of short melodic fragments that can be repeated at the discretion of musicians, In C is often cited as the first minimalist composition to make a significant impact on the public consciousness.

The piece was first performed by Steve Reich, Jon Gibson, Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Morton Subotnick and others at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. It received its first recorded release in 1968 on CBS Records. Subsequent performances have been recorded many times since.

In 2022, the 1968 LP recording of In C was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Recording Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.".

🔗 Philately 🔗 Netherlands

A postzegelcode is a hand-written method of franking in the Netherlands. It consists of a code containing nine numbers and letters that customers can purchase online from PostNL and write directly on their piece of mail within five days as proof-of-payment in place of a postage stamp.

For mail within the Netherlands the nine letters and numbers are written as a grid of 3x3. For international mail there is fourth additional row that contains P, N, L.

The system was started in 2013. Initially the postzegelcode was more expensive than a stamp because additional handling systems were required. Then for a while the postzegelcode was cheaper. Eventually the tariffs were set to the same price.

In December 2020, 590,000 people sent cards with postzegelcodes.

🔗 Mathematics

Von Neumann's elephant is a problem in recreational mathematics, consisting of constructing a planar curve in the shape of an elephant from only four fixed parameters. It originated from a discussion between physicists John von Neumann and Enrico Fermi.