Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Mathematics

In mathematics, the Gibbs phenomenon, discovered by Henry Wilbraham (1848) and rediscovered by J. Willard Gibbs (1899), is the peculiar manner in which the Fourier series of a piecewise continuously differentiable periodic function behaves at a jump discontinuity. The nth partial sum of the Fourier series has large oscillations near the jump, which might increase the maximum of the partial sum above that of the function itself. The overshoot does not die out as n increases, but approaches a finite limit. This sort of behavior was also observed by experimental physicists, but was believed to be due to imperfections in the measuring apparatus.

This is one cause of ringing artifacts in signal processing.

The WHOIS++ protocol is a distributed directory system, originally designed to provide a "white pages" search mechanism to find humans, but which could actually be used for arbitrary information retrieval tasks. It was developed in the early 1990s by BUNYIP Information Systems and is documented in the IETF.

WHOIS++ was devised as an extension to the pre-existing WHOIS system. WHOIS was an early networked directory service, originally maintained by SRI International for the Defense Data Network. The WHOIS protocol is still widely used to allow domain ownership records in the Internet to be easily queried.

WHOIS++ attempted to address some of the short comings in the original WHOIS protocol that had become apparent over the years. It supported multiple languages and character sets to help with I18N issues, had a more advanced query syntax, and the ability to generate "forward knowledge" in the form of 'centroid' data structures that could be used to route queries from one server to another. The protocol was designed to be backward compatible with the older WHOIS standard, so that WHOIS++ clients could still extract meaningful information from the already deployed WHOIS servers.

Whilst WHOIS++ as a white pages directory service never really took off compared to competitors such as X.500, it did gain a notable amount of use in the United Kingdom as the underlying search and retrieval protocol of a number of subject based gateways funded as part of the Jisc Electronic library programme. This was achieved using software called ROADS that provided WHOIS++ base and index servers and CGI based web interfaces to WHOIS++ clients. The use of centroids to provide forward knowledge and query routing allowed a subject gateway to not only provide resources to academic users from their own database but also point them at other JISC funded subject gateways that might have useful information.

The WHOIS++ protocol is now designated by the IETF as a historic protocol and is no longer deployed in new systems or developed.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Politics

The alt-right pipeline (also called the alt-right rabbit hole) is a conceptual model regarding internet radicalization toward the alt-right movement. It describes a phenomenon in which consuming provocative right-wing political content, such as antifeminist or anti-SJW ideas, gradually increases exposure to the alt-right or similar far-right politics. It posits that this interaction takes place due to the interconnected nature of political commentators and online communities, allowing members of one audience or community to discover more extreme groups. This process is most commonly associated with and has been documented on the video platform YouTube, is also largely faceted by the method in which algorithms on various social media platforms function through the process recommending content that is similar to what users engage with, but can quickly lead users down rabbit-holes.

Many political movements have been associated with the pipeline concept. The intellectual dark web, libertarianism, the men's rights movement, and the alt-lite movement have all been identified as possibly introducing audiences to alt-right ideas. BreadTube has similarly been identified as introducing audiences to far-left politics, though it has been less effective. Audiences that seek out and are willing to accept extreme content in this fashion typically consist of young men, commonly those that experience significant loneliness and seek belonging or meaning. In an attempt to find community and belonging, message boards that are often proliferated with hard right social commentary, such as 4chan and 8chan, have been well documented in their importance in the radicalization process.

The alt-right pipeline may be a contributing factor to domestic terrorism. Many social media platforms have acknowledged this path of radicalization and have taken measures to prevent it, including the removal of extremist figures and rules against hate speech and misinformation.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Books 🔗 Military history/Intelligence 🔗 Military history/Maritime warfare 🔗 Military history/Military historiography

Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (ISBN 0-06-103004-X) by Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew, published in 1998 by PublicAffairs, is a non-fiction book about U.S. Navy submarine operations during the Cold War. Several operations are described in the book, such as the use of USS Parche to tap Soviet undersea communications cables and USS Halibut to do the same in Operation Ivy Bells.

The book also contains an extensive list of collisions between Western and Soviet submarines and U.S. submarine awards.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware

Rambus DRAM (RDRAM), and its successors Concurrent Rambus DRAM (CRDRAM) and Direct Rambus DRAM (DRDRAM), are types of synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) developed by Rambus from the 1990s through to the early 2000s. The third-generation of Rambus DRAM, DRDRAM was replaced by XDR DRAM. Rambus DRAM was developed for high-bandwidth applications and was positioned by Rambus as replacement for various types of contemporary memories, such as SDRAM. RDRAM is a serial memory bus.

DRDRAM was initially expected to become the standard in PC memory, especially after Intel agreed to license the Rambus technology for use with its future chipsets. Further, DRDRAM was expected to become a standard for graphics memory. However, RDRAM got embroiled in a standards war with an alternative technology—DDR SDRAM—and quickly lost out on grounds of price and, later, performance. By around 2003, DRDRAM was no longer supported in new personal computers.

🔗 Companies 🔗 Computing 🔗 United Kingdom

Andrews & Arnold Ltd (also known as AAISP) is an Internet service provider based in Bracknell in the United Kingdom founded in 1997 and launched in 1998, primarily serving businesses and "technical" home users.

In 2009 the company was judged the best niche provider in the Thinkbroadband Customer Service Awards, based on customer ratings and again in 2010.

The company's owner, Adrian Kennard (RevK), stated in a blog post that as of October 2010 the company is "xkcd/806" compliant, referring to xkcd comic number 806. This means that technical support callers who say the code word "shibboleet" will be transferred to a technical support representative who knows at least two programming languages, and presumably can offer more useful advice than a standard tech support script.

Andrews & Arnold provides IPv6 to all customers, for no additional charge.

Andrews & Arnold provides optional bonded multiple-link internet access. This allows multiple links to be used together to vastly increase speed and reliability. Special routers distribute individual IP packets between the available links in such a way that even one single download or upload operation will benefit fully from multiple speed, and it is not necessary to have several users, several running programs or computers to gain the speed benefit. Links can be of different types, each needs only to be a pipe that can carry IP packets. Multiple links can either be used together all the time, or some can be brought up as a back up if other links fail, so-called 'failover', or a combination of the two approaches can be set up.

Andrews & Arnold are strong advocates of not censoring Internet connections. Adrian Kennard has several blog posts discussing why Internet censorship as discussed in the UK is not workable, providing background for AAISP's decision.

🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software

🔗 United States 🔗 Politics 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Health and fitness

The ketchup as a vegetable controversy stemmed from proposed regulations of school lunches by the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) in 1981, early in the presidency of Ronald Reagan. The regulations were intended to provide meal planning flexibility to local school lunch administrators coping with cuts to the National School Lunch Program enacted by the Omnibus Reconciliation Acts of 1980 and 1981. The proposed changes allowed administrators to meet nutritional requirements by crediting food items not explicitly listed. While ketchup was not mentioned in the original regulations, pickle relish was used as an example of an item that could count as a vegetable.

A similar controversy arose in 2011, when Congress passed a bill prohibiting the USDA from increasing the amount of tomato paste required to constitute a vegetable; the bill allowed pizza with two tablespoons (30 mL) of tomato paste to qualify as a vegetable.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Time 🔗 Holidays 🔗 Festivals

A solstice is an event occurring when the Sun appears to reach its most northerly or southerly excursion relative to the celestial equator on the celestial sphere. Two solstices occur annually, around June 21 and December 21. In many countries, the seasons of the year are determined by reference to the solstices and the equinoxes.

The term solstice can also be used in a broader sense, as the day when this occurs. The day of a solstice in either hemisphere has either the most sunlight of the year (summer solstice) or the least sunlight of the year (winter solstice) for any place other than the Equator. Alternative terms, with no ambiguity as to which hemisphere is the context, are "June solstice" and "December solstice", referring to the months in which they take place every year.

The word solstice is derived from the Latin sol ("sun") and sistere ("to stand still"), because at the solstices, the Sun's declination appears to "stand still"; that is, the seasonal movement of the Sun's daily path (as seen from Earth) pauses at a northern or southern limit before reversing direction.

🔗 Ships

Storm oil is the deliberate use of oil to calm an area of water. It has been claimed that it has been used to calm seas to facilitate rescues. Oil was usually carried in a bag which would be released onto the water or in a container which would slowly deploy the oil.