Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 London 🔗 Visual arts

The Ambassadors (1533) is a painting by Hans Holbein the Younger. Also known as Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, it was created in the Tudor period, in the same year Elizabeth I was born. As well as being a double portrait, the painting contains a still life of several meticulously rendered objects, the meaning of which is the cause of much debate. It also incorporates a much-cited example of anamorphosis in painting. It is part of the collection at the National Gallery in London.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science

Ousterhout's dichotomy is computer scientist John Ousterhout's categorization that high-level programming languages tend to fall into two groups, each with distinct properties and uses: system programming languages and scripting languages – compare programming in the large and programming in the small. This distinction underlies the design of his language Tcl.

System programming languages (or applications languages) usually have the following properties:

• They are typed statically
• They support creating complex data structures
• Programs in them are compiled into machine code
• Programs in them are meant to operate largely independently of other programs

System programming languages tend to be used for components and applications with large amounts of internal functionality such as operating systems, database servers, and Web browsers. These applications typically employ complex algorithms and data structures and require high performance. Prototypical examples of system programming languages include C and Modula-2.

By contrast, scripting languages (or glue languages) tend to have the following properties:

• They are typed dynamically
• They have little or no provision for complex data structures
• Programs in them (scripts) are interpreted

Scripting languages tend to be used for applications where most of the functionality comes from other programs (often implemented in system programming languages); the scripts are used to glue together other programs or add additional layers of functionality on top of existing programs. Ousterhout claims that scripts tend to be short and are often written by less sophisticated programmers, so execution efficiency is less important than simplicity and ease of interaction with other programs. Common applications for scripting include Web page generation, report generation, graphical user interfaces, and system administration. Prototypical examples of scripting languages include AppleScript, C shell, DOS batch files, and Tcl.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Time

In computer science, time formatting and storage bugs are a class of software bugs which may cause time and date calculation or display to be improperly handled. These are most commonly manifestations of arithmetic overflow, but can also be the result of other issues. The most well-known consequence of bugs of this type is the Y2K problem, but many other milestone dates or times exist that have caused or will cause problems depending on various programming deficiencies.

🔗 Novels 🔗 Novels/19th century 🔗 Novels/Science fiction 🔗 New Zealand 🔗 Sociology

Erewhon: or, Over the Range () is a novel by English writer Samuel Butler, first published anonymously in 1872, set in a fictional country discovered and explored by the protagonist. The book is a satire on Victorian society.

The first few chapters of the novel dealing with the discovery of Erewhon are in fact based on Butler's own experiences in New Zealand, where, as a young man, he worked as a sheep farmer on Mesopotamia Station for about four years (1860–64), and explored parts of the interior of the South Island and wrote about in his A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863).

The novel is one of the first to explore ideas of artificial intelligence, as influenced by Darwin's recently published On the Origin of Species (1859) and the machines developed out of the Industrial Revolution (late 18th to early 19th centuries). Specifically, it concerns itself, in the three-chapter "Book of the Machines", with the potentially dangerous ideas of machine consciousness and self-replicating machines.

🔗 Biography 🔗 France 🔗 Architecture 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Craft

Ferdinand Cheval (19 April 1836 – 19 August 1924) was a French postman who spent thirty-three years of his life building Le Palais idéal (the "Ideal Palace") in Hauterives. The Palace is regarded as an extraordinary example of naïve art architecture.

🔗 Internet culture

Italian brainrot is a series of surrealist Internet memes that emerged in early 2025 characterized by absurd photos of AI-generated creatures with pseudo-Italian names. The phenomenon quickly spread across social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, owing to its combination of synthesized "Italian" voiceovers, grotesque, funny visuals, and nonsensical narrative.

🔗 United States 🔗 California 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Oregon 🔗 United States/Utah 🔗 Weather 🔗 Weather/Non-tropical storms 🔗 Weather/Floods

The Great Flood of 1862 was the largest flood in the recorded history of Oregon, Nevada, and California, occurring from December 1861 to January 1862. It was preceded by weeks of continuous rains and snows in the very high elevations that began in Oregon in November 1861 and continued into January 1862. This was followed by a record amount of rain from January 9–12, and contributed to a flood that extended from the Columbia River southward in western Oregon, and through California to San Diego, and extended as far inland as Idaho in the Washington Territory, Nevada and Utah in the Utah Territory, and Arizona in the western New Mexico Territory. The event dumped an equivalent of 10 feet (3.0 m) of water in California, in the form of rain and snow, over a period of 43 days. Immense snowfalls in the mountains of far western North America caused more flooding in Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, as well as in Baja California and Sonora, Mexico the following spring and summer, as the snow melted.

The event was capped by a warm intense storm that melted the high snow load. The resulting snow-melt flooded valleys, inundated or swept away towns, mills, dams, flumes, houses, fences, and domestic animals, and ruined fields. It has been described as the worst disaster ever to strike California. The storms caused approximately $100 million (1861 USD) in damage, approximately equal to $3.117 billion (2021 USD). The governor, state legislature, and state employees were not paid for a year and a half. At least 4,000 people were estimated to have been killed in the floods in California, which was roughly 1% of the state population at the time.

🔗 Companies 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Lists 🔗 Business 🔗 Business/Accounting

This page lists the largest annual and quarterly earnings and losses in corporate history. In general terms the oil and gas industry is the one generating both largest annual and quarterly earnings. In contrast, both the annual and quarterly losses are more distributed across industries.

🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Numismatics/Cryptocurrency 🔗 Cryptocurrency

A proof-of-work (PoW) system (or protocol, or function) is a consensus mechanism. It deters denial-of-service attacks and other service abuses such as spam on a network by requiring some work from the service requester, usually meaning processing time by a computer. The concept was invented by Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor as presented in a 1993 journal article. The term "proof of work" was first coined and formalized in a 1999 paper by Markus Jakobsson and Ari Juels.

A key feature of these schemes is their asymmetry: the work must be moderately hard (yet feasible) on the requester side but easy to check for the service provider. This idea is also known as a CPU cost function, client puzzle, computational puzzle, or CPU pricing function. It is distinct from a CAPTCHA, which is intended for a human to solve quickly, while being difficult to solve for a computer.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Crime 🔗 Death 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Discrimination 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics 🔗 Soviet Union/history of Russia 🔗 Soviet Union/Russia 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Ethnic groups

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомо́р, romanized: Holodomór; derived from морити голодом, moryty holodom, 'to kill by starvation'), also known as the Terror-Famine and sometimes referred to as the Great Famine was a famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. The term Holodomor emphasises the famine's man-made and intentional aspects such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs and restriction of population movement. As part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33 which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.

Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly. According to higher estimates, up to 12 million ethnic Ukrainians were said to have perished as a result of the famine. A United Nations joint statement signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7–10 million perished. Research has since narrowed the estimates to between 3.3 and 7.5 million. According to the findings of the Court of Appeal of Kyiv in 2010, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million direct famine deaths, and a further 6.1 million birth deficits.

Whether the Holodomor was genocide is still the subject of academic debate, as are the causes of the famine and intentionality of the deaths. Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement.