Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Occupational Safety and Health

A saddle chair uses the same principles in its design as an equestrian saddle. It is equipped with a chair base on casters and a gas cylinder for adjusting the correct sitting height. The casters enable moving around and reaching out for objects while sitting. Some saddle chairs have backrests, but most do not.

Riding-like sitting on a saddle chair differs from sitting on a conventional chair. Saddle chair users sit 20–30 cm higher, which puts the hips and the knees into a 135° angle, compared to the 90° angle typically associated with sitting on a traditional chair.

Because the saddle chair is higher than a normal office chair, the desk has to be higher as well. For this purpose there are desks that can be electronically or mechanically adjusted to fit the user. A saddle chair can also be used with a normal office desk, but then the desk has to be lifted up with height extension pieces.

The saddle chair seat is either solid or divided. A divided seat reduces pressure on the perineum and lowers the temperature in the genital area. A divided seat is thought to be healthier, especially for men, than a solid seat.

Some saddle chairs include not only height adjustments but also a tilt mechanism. There is also a divided saddle chair model on the market that has an adjustable gap between the two seat parts. Accessories, such as elbow and wrist supports, are available for saddle chairs to make different work tasks easier.

Adapting to a saddle chair takes time and requires a new kind of attitude towards sitting. The most common reason for using a saddle chair is that the users feel it is healthier for the back and legs than a standard chair. An intervention study on schoolchildren found that initially saddle chairs were liked better, but the difference leveled off over time.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Religion 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Systems/Cybernetics 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Buddhism 🔗 Religion/Interfaith 🔗 Chile

Francisco Javier Varela García (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001) was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology, and for co-founding the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialog between science and Buddhism.

🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Culture 🔗 Collections Care

Kintsugi (金継ぎ, "golden joinery"), also known as kintsukuroi (金繕い, "golden repair"), is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum, a method similar to the maki-e technique. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Energy

A solar pond is a pool of saltwater which collects and stores solar thermal energy. The saltwater naturally forms a vertical salinity gradient also known as a "halocline", in which low-salinity water floats on top of high-salinity water. The layers of salt solutions increase in concentration (and therefore density) with depth. Below a certain depth, the solution has a uniformly high salt concentration.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Physiology

The axial twist theory (a.k.a. axial twist hypothesis) is a proposed scientific theory to explain a range of unusual aspects of the body plan of vertebrates (including humans). It states that the rostral part of the head is "turned around" regarding the rest of the body. This end-part consists of the face (eyes, nose, and mouth) as well as part of the brain (cerebrum and thalamus). According to the theory, the vertebrate body has a left-handed chirality.

The axial twist theory competes with a number of other proposals that focus on more limited, specific aspects, most of which explain contralateral forebrain organization, the phenomenon that the left side of the brain mainly controls the right side of the body and vice versa. None of the proposed theories explaining this phenomenon, including axial twist theory, have gained general recognition. The genetic basis underlying the proposed developmental twist is not yet understood.

The axial twist theory would explain various anatomical phenomena, and addresses how and when the proposed twist between the end of the head and the rest of the body develops. It also addresses the possible evolutionary history. One prediction of the theory was the aurofacial asymmetry, which was then found empirically, albeit by one of the authors of the original theory.

Phenomena the theory can explain include:

• Contralateral organization of the brain
• Left-sided orientation of the heart
• Asymmetric position of the gastrointestinal tract, the liver, and the pancreas
• Optic chiasm
• Chiasm of the trochlear nerve
• Non-crossed olfactory tract
• Aurofacial asymmetry
• Yakovlevian torque
• Asymmetry of the thoracal vertebra

According to the axial twist developmental model, the anterior part of the head turns against the rest of the body, except for the inner organs. Due to this twist, the forebrain and face are turned around such that left and right, but also anterior and posterior are flipped in the adult vertebrate.

🔗 Business 🔗 Politics 🔗 Psychology

In the Abilene paradox, a group of people collectively decide on a course of action that is counter to the preferences of many or all of the individuals in the group. It involves a common breakdown of group communication in which each member mistakenly believes that their own preferences are counter to the group's and, therefore, does not raise objections. A common phrase relating to the Abilene paradox is a desire not to "rock the boat". This differs from groupthink in that the Abilene paradox is characterized by an inability to manage agreement.

🔗 Companies 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Media 🔗 Philadelphia 🔗 Pennsylvania

N. W. Ayer & Son was a Philadelphia advertising agency founded in 1869. It called itself the oldest advertising agency in the United States. Named after Francis Ayer's father N. W. Ayer, it ventured into advertising in 1884. It created a number of memorable slogans for firms such as De Beers, AT&T and the U.S. Army. The company started to decline in the 1960s and, after a series of mergers, was closed in 2002 with its assets sold to the Publicis Groupe.

🔗 Volcanoes 🔗 Biology 🔗 Africa 🔗 Geology 🔗 Ethiopia

Dallol is a unique, terrestrial hydrothermal system around a cinder cone volcano in the Danakil Depression, northeast of the Erta Ale Range in Ethiopia. It is known for its unearthly colors and mineral patterns, and the very acidic fluids that discharge from its hydrothermal springs.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Law 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software

Beerware is a somewhat tongue-in-cheek term for software released under a very relaxed license (beerware licensed software). It provides the end user with the right to use a particular program (or do anything else with the source code).

🔗 Chess

El Ajedrecista (English: The Chess Player) is an automaton built in 1912 by Leonardo Torres y Quevedo, one of the first autonomous machines capable of playing chess. As opposed to the human-operated The Turk and Ajeeb, El Ajedrecista was a true automaton built to play chess without human guidance. It played an endgame with three chess pieces, automatically moving a white king and a rook to checkmate the black king moved by a human opponent.

The device could be considered the first computer game in history. It created great excitement when it made its debut, at the University of Paris in 1914. It was first widely mentioned in Scientific American as "Torres and His Remarkable Automatic Devices" on November 6, 1915.

The automaton does not deliver checkmate in the minimum number of moves, nor always within the 50 moves allotted by the fifty-move rule, because of the simple algorithm that calculates the moves. It did, however, checkmate the opponent every time. If an illegal move was made by the opposite player, the automaton would signal it by turning on a light. If the opposing player made three illegal moves, the automaton would stop playing.