Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Psychology

Type A and Type B personality hypothesis describes two contrasting personality types. In this hypothesis, personalities that are more competitive, highly organized, ambitious, impatient, highly aware of time management and/or aggressive are labeled Type A, while more relaxed, less 'neurotic', 'frantic', 'explainable', personalities are labeled Type B.

The two cardiologists who developed this theory came to believe that Type A personalities had a greater chance of developing coronary heart disease. Following the results of further studies and considerable controversy about the role of the tobacco industry funding of early research in this area, some reject, either partially or completely, the link between Type A personality and coronary disease. Nevertheless, this research had a significant effect on the development of the health psychology field, in which psychologists look at how an individual's mental state affects physical health.

🔗 Typography

The Paige Compositor was an invention developed by James W. Paige (1842–1917) between 1872 and 1888. It was designed to replace the human typesetter of a lead type-composed printing form with a mechanical arm. In the early 1890s, a group of inventors signed a contract with Towner K. Webster in Chicago to produce 3000 compositors. However, the machine was not nearly as precise as it should have been and never turned a profit because of its complexity and continual need for adjustment based upon trial and error. As a result, it was the Linotype typesetting machine, which composed in a hot metal typesetting process, that became the new popular typesetting machine.

The Paige typesetting machine is notable for substantial investment that the prominent writer Mark Twain made into the failed endeavor: $300,000 ($6,000,000 today). Twain, a former printer, invested not only the bulk of his book profits but also a large portion of the inheritance of Olivia Clemens, his wife. Many point to his over-investment in the Paige typesetting machine and other inventions as the cause of not only his family's financial decline but also the decline of his wit and humor.

Webster Manufacturing made fewer than six machines costing $15,000 apiece, over three times as much as the initial production estimates. One was donated by Cornell University for a scrap metal drive during World War II. The only surviving machine is displayed at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Mathematics

Codd's cellular automaton is a cellular automaton (CA) devised by the British computer scientist Edgar F. Codd in 1968. It was designed to recreate the computation- and construction-universality of von Neumann's CA but with fewer states: 8 instead of 29. Codd showed that it was possible to make a self-reproducing machine in his CA, in a similar way to von Neumann's universal constructor, but never gave a complete implementation.

🔗 Plants

An albino redwood is a redwood tree which is unable to produce chlorophyll, and has white needles instead of the normal green. It survives by obtaining sugar through the connections between its roots and those of neighboring normal redwood(s), usually the parent tree from whose base it has sprouted. Sap exchange through roots is a general phenomenon among redwoods. About 400 are known. They can be found in Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park, Humboldt Redwoods State Park, San Francisco Botanical Garden, Huddart Park, and The Santa Lucia Preserve, with eleven trees in the first. The exact locations are not publicized to protect the rare trees. They reach a maximum height of about 20 m (66 ft). Other conifers lack the ability to graft their roots, so 'albino' mutants of other species do not survive to become sizable trees.

The trees were important to Native Americans and were recorded in their legends. For example, the Pomo people used them in their cleansing ceremonies.

Albino redwoods are generally regarded as parasitic plants, but as of 2016 one researcher speculates that they are supported by other trees for their role in storing toxic heavy metals. Albinos apparently accumulate more metals than normal trees because of defective stomata, which cause them to lose more water through transpiration, forcing them to compensate by taking up more water through their roots.

Six phenotypes of albino redwood have been classified: white, bright yellow, cellular virescent green, pale green, mottled and nonchimeric variegated. Such mutants can be either basal (growing from a burl at the base of a tree) or aerial (branching off from a tree above the ground). The bright yellow form is exclusively aerial and is thought to be associated with excess xanthophyll production. The pale green form lacks just one specific type of chlorophyll and is almost always basal. Cellular virescent green trees have a few normal cells (whose abundance may vary over time) interspersed among the mutant cells.

Ten cases are known of chimeric redwoods that have a mosaic of albino and normal tissues. Only a single chimeric redwood is known to produce cones. Formerly threatened by the Sonoma–Marin Area Rail Transit rail development, it has since been replanted.

Three phenotypes of chimeric redwoods have been noted: sectorial, mericlinal and periclinal. In sectorial mutants, albino cells are present vertically through all cell layers, with genotype boundaries usually parallel to the stem. Mericlinal trees have mutant cells in only some cell layers and have an unstable phenotype; the albino cells can disappear and reappear in successive years. A periclinal chimera has both mutant and normal cells distributed horizontally across the tip of each bud propagating at equal rates, leading to a very stable phenotype.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Business 🔗 England 🔗 Invention 🔗 Professional sound production

Kane Kramer is a British inventor and businessman. He is credited with the initial invention of the digital audio player, in 1979.

🔗 Law 🔗 English Language

"The exception that proves the rule" (sometimes "the exception proves the rule") is a saying whose meaning is contested. Henry Watson Fowler's Modern English Usage identifies five ways in which the phrase has been used, and each use makes some sort of reference to the role that a particular case or event takes in relation to a more general rule.

Two original meanings of the phrase are usually cited. The first, preferred by Fowler, is that the presence of an exception applying to a specific case establishes ("proves") that a general rule exists. A more explicit phrasing might be "the exception that proves the existence of the rule." Most contemporary uses of the phrase emerge from this origin, although often in a way which is closer to the idea that all rules have their exceptions. The alternative origin given is that the word "prove" is used in the archaic sense of "test". In this sense, the phrase does not mean that an exception demonstrates a rule to be true or to exist, but that it tests the rule, thereby proving its value. There is little evidence of the phrase being used in this second way.

🔗 California 🔗 Mexico 🔗 Geography 🔗 Mythology 🔗 Islands

The Island of California refers to a long-held European misconception, dating from the 16th century, that the Baja California Peninsula was not part of mainland North America but rather a large island (spelled on early maps as Cali Fornia) separated from the continent by a strait now known as the Gulf of California.

One of the most famous cartographic errors in history, it was propagated on many maps during the 17th and 18th centuries, despite contradictory evidence from various explorers. The legend was initially infused with the idea that California was a terrestrial paradise, like the Garden of Eden or Atlantis.

🔗 Agriculture 🔗 Indigenous peoples of North America

The Three Sisters are the three main agricultural crops of various Indigenous peoples of North America: squash, maize ("corn"), and climbing beans (typically tepary beans or common beans). In a technique known as companion planting, the maize and beans are often planted together in mounds formed by hilling soil around the base of the plants each year; squash is typically planted between the mounds. The cornstalk serves as a trellis for climbing beans, the beans fix nitrogen in their root nodules and stabilize the maize in high winds, and the wide leaves of the squash plant shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and helping prevent the establishment of weeds.

Indigenous peoples throughout North America cultivated different varieties of the Three Sisters, adapted to varying local environments. The individual crops and their use in polyculture originated in Mesoamerica; where squash was domesticated first, followed by maize and then beans, over a period of 5,000–6,500 years. European records from the sixteenth century describe highly productive Indigenous agriculture based on cultivation of the Three Sisters throughout what are now the Eastern United States and Canada, where the crops were used for both food and trade. Geographer Carl O. Sauer described the Three Sisters as "a symbiotic plant complex of North and Central America without an equal elsewhere".

🔗 Spaceflight

Mercury-Redstone 1 (MR-1) was the first Mercury-Redstone unmanned flight test in Project Mercury and the first attempt to launch a Mercury spacecraft with the Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle. Intended to be an unmanned sub-orbital spaceflight, it was launched on November 21, 1960 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The launch failed in a peculiar fashion which has been referred to as the "four-inch flight".