Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Sociology

A collective action problem or social dilemma is a situation in which all individuals would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because of conflicting interests between individuals that discourage joint action. The collective action problem has been addressed in political philosophy for centuries, but was most clearly established in 1965 in Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action.

Problems arise when too many group members choose to pursue individual profit and immediate satisfaction rather than behave in the group's best long-term interests. Social dilemmas can take many forms and are studied across disciplines such as psychology, economics, and political science. Examples of phenomena that can be explained using social dilemmas include resource depletion and low voter turnout. The collective action problem can be understood through the analysis of game theory and the free-rider problem, which results from the provision of public goods. Additionally, the collective problem can be applied to numerous public policy concerns that countries across the world currently face.

🔗 Canada 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Canada/British Columbia

The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) is an interferometric radio telescope at the Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory in British Columbia, Canada which consists of four antennas consisting of 100 x 20 metre cylindrical parabolic reflectors (roughly the size and shape of snowboarding half-pipes) with 1024 dual-polarization radio receivers suspended on a support above them. The antenna receives radio waves from hydrogen in space at frequencies in the 400–800 MHz range. The telescope's low-noise amplifiers are built with components adapted from the cellphone industry and its data are processed using a custom-built FPGA electronic system and 1000-processor high-performance GPGPU cluster. The telescope has no moving parts and observes half of the sky each day as the Earth turns. It has also turned out to be a superior instrument for observing the recently discovered phenomenon of fast radio bursts (FRBs).

CHIME is a partnership between the University of British Columbia, McGill University, the University of Toronto and the Canadian National Research Council's Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory. A first light ceremony was held on 7 September 2017 to inaugurate the commissioning phase.

🔗 California 🔗 Companies 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Video games

Zynga Inc. is an American social game developer running social video game services and founded in April 2007 with headquarters in San Francisco, California, United States. The company primarily focuses on mobile and social networking platforms. Zynga states its mission as "connecting the world through games."

Zynga launched its best-known game, FarmVille, on Facebook in June 2009, reaching 10 million daily active users (DAU) within six weeks. As of August 2017, Zynga had 30 million monthly active users (MAU). In 2017 its most successful games were Zynga Poker and Words with Friends 2, with about 57 million games being played at any given moment; and CSR Racing 2, the most popular racing game on mobile devices.

Zynga began trading on NASDAQ December 16, 2011, under the ticker ZNGA.

🔗 Companies

Geneva Freeport (French: Ports Francs et Entrepôts de Genève SA) is a warehouse complex in Geneva, Switzerland, for the storage of art and other valuables and collectibles. The free port has been described as the "premier place" to store valuable works of art, and users "come for the security and stay for the tax treatment."

It is the oldest and largest freeport facility, and the one with the most artworks, with an estimated art collection value of US$100 billion. According to Jean-René Saillard of the British Fine Art Fund, "It would be probably the best museum in the world if it was a museum."

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Ireland

Percy Edwin Ludgate (2 August 1883 – 16 October 1922) was an Irish amateur scientist who designed the second analytical engine (general-purpose Turing-complete computer) in history.

🔗 Computer science

In computer science, corecursion is a type of operation that is dual to recursion. Whereas recursion works analytically, starting on data further from a base case and breaking it down into smaller data and repeating until one reaches a base case, corecursion works synthetically, starting from a base case and building it up, iteratively producing data further removed from a base case. Put simply, corecursive algorithms use the data that they themselves produce, bit by bit, as they become available, and needed, to produce further bits of data. A similar but distinct concept is generative recursion which may lack a definite "direction" inherent in corecursion and recursion.

Where recursion allows programs to operate on arbitrarily complex data, so long as they can be reduced to simple data (base cases), corecursion allows programs to produce arbitrarily complex and potentially infinite data structures, such as streams, so long as it can be produced from simple data (base cases) in a sequence of finite steps. Where recursion may not terminate, never reaching a base state, corecursion starts from a base state, and thus produces subsequent steps deterministically, though it may proceed indefinitely (and thus not terminate under strict evaluation), or it may consume more than it produces and thus become non-productive. Many functions that are traditionally analyzed as recursive can alternatively, and arguably more naturally, be interpreted as corecursive functions that are terminated at a given stage, for example recurrence relations such as the factorial.

Corecursion can produce both finite and infinite data structures as results, and may employ self-referential data structures. Corecursion is often used in conjunction with lazy evaluation, to produce only a finite subset of a potentially infinite structure (rather than trying to produce an entire infinite structure at once). Corecursion is a particularly important concept in functional programming, where corecursion and codata allow total languages to work with infinite data structures.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry

The M65 atomic cannon, often called "Atomic Annie", was an artillery piece built by the United States and capable of firing a nuclear device. It was developed in the early 1950s, at the beginning of the Cold War, and fielded, between April 1955 and December 1962, in West Germany, South Korea and on Okinawa.

🔗 Internet culture

Eternal September or the September that never ended is Usenet slang for a period beginning in September 1993, the month that Internet service provider America Online (AOL) began offering Usenet access to its many users, overwhelming the existing culture for online forums.

Before then, Usenet was largely restricted to colleges, universities, and other research institutions. Every September, many incoming students would acquire access to Usenet for the first time, taking time to become accustomed to Usenet's standards of conduct and "netiquette". After a month or so, these new users would either learn to comply with the networks' social norms or tire of using the service.

Whereas the regular September student influx would quickly settle down, the influx of new users from AOL did not end and Usenet's existing culture did not have the capacity to integrate the sheer number of new users. The influx was exacerbated by the aggressive direct mailing campaign by AOL Chief Marketing Officer Jan Brandt, which most notably involved distributing millions of floppy disks and CD-ROMs with free trials of AOL.

Since then the popularity of the Internet has led to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the point of view of the early Usenet, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.

Dave Fischer appears to have coined the term in a January 1994 post to alt.folklore.computers: "It's moot now. September 1993 will go down in net history as the September that never ended."

🔗 Birds

Crop milk is a secretion from the lining of the crop of parent birds in some species that is regurgitated to young birds. It is found among all pigeons and doves where it is also referred to as pigeon milk. Crop milk is also secreted from the crop of flamingos and the male emperor penguin, suggesting independent evolution of this trait. Unlike in mammals where only females produce milk, crop milk is produced by both males and females in pigeons and flamingos; and in penguins, only by the male. Lactation in birds is controlled by prolactin, which is the same hormone that causes lactation in mammals. Crop milk is a holocrine secretion, unlike in mammals where milk is an exocrine secretion. Crop milk contains both fat and protein, as with mammalian milk, but unlike mammalian milk, it contains no carbohydrates.