Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Politics

The politician's syllogism, also known as the politician's logic or the politician's fallacy, is a logical fallacy of the form:

1. We must do something
2. This is something
3. Therefore, we must do this.

The politician's fallacy was identified in a 1988 episode of the BBC television political sitcom Yes, Prime Minister titled "Power to the People", and has taken added life on the Internet. The syllogism, invented by fictional British civil servants, has been quoted in the real British Parliament. The syllogism has also been quoted in American political discussion.

In Yes, Prime Minister, the term is discussed between two high-ranking civil servants who are concerned that the prime minister wants to implement a scheme to reform local government due to political opposition there. In this issue, as with many other issues humorously explored by the show, the civil servants believe that doing anything is worse than doing nothing because actions tend to undermine the dominance of the civil service. They identify the politician's logic as a fallacious categorical syllogism:

1. All cats have four legs
2. My dog has four legs
3. Therefore, my dog is a cat.

This invalid form of argument, labeled AAA-2 among syllogisms, commits the fallacy of the undistributed middle: it says nothing about all things having four legs (the middle term) and thus the conclusion does not logically follow from the premises, even if the premises are true. The politician's syllogism similarly says nothing about all known "somethings" that could be done. As is common with fallacious undistributed middle arguments, it can also be seen as the fallacy of affirming the consequent when restated as an equivalent hypothetical syllogism:

1. To improve things, things must change
2. We are changing things
3. Therefore, we are improving things.

🔗 Psychology

The behavioral immune system is a phrase coined by the psychological scientist Mark Schaller to refer to a suite of psychological mechanisms that allow individual organisms to detect the potential presence of disease-causing parasites in their immediate environment, and to engage in behaviors that prevent contact with those objects and individuals.

These mechanisms include sensory processes through which cues connoting the presence of parasitic infections are perceived (e.g., the smell of a foul odor, the sight of pox or pustules), as well as stimulus–response systems through which these sensory cues trigger a cascade of aversive affective, cognitive, and behavioral reactions (e.g., arousal of disgust, automatic activation of cognitions that connote the threat of disease, behavioral avoidance).

The existence of a behavioral immune system has been documented across many animal species, including humans. It is theorized that the mechanisms that comprise the behavioral immune system evolved as a crude first line of defense against disease-causing pathogens.

🔗 New Zealand 🔗 Maps

New Zealand has often been omitted from maps of the world, which has caught the attention of New Zealanders. It is considered that this is because of the widespread use of the Mercator projection, a map projection putting Europe in the center which leaves New Zealand in the bottom right-hand corner of maps, sometimes making it go overlooked by mapmakers, easily removed by an accidental crop, or simply not added for convenience, ignorance or laziness.

New Zealand has been excluded from maps at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. in the United States, in IKEA stores, on the map of the board games Pandemic and Risk, on the map of the 2014 Nuclear Security Summit in which Prime Minister of New Zealand John Key participated, at a world map seal at the United Nations Office at Geneva in Switzerland, on the newspaper Daily Mail, on Government Executive's newsletter Defense One, on the magazine Forbes, on the digital media platform Mashable, on the Pyongyang International Airport in North Korea and on the logo of the Flat Earth Society. It was also excluded from maps promoting the 2015 Rugby World Cup even though New Zealand was the then world champion.

This recurrent occurrence has become a meme for New Zealanders. There is a community on Tumblr titled World Maps Without New Zealand and a Reddit community known as r/MapsWithoutNZ both focused on this issue with 10,000 and 30,000 members respectively as of 2017. In 2019, a user in r/MapsWithoutNZ noticed that a map, "BJÖRKSTA world map", on sale for 30 dollars at an IKEA store on Washington, D.C., did not portray New Zealand. Subsequently, IKEA apologized and removed the product from its stores. On Reddit, there also are communities about the omission of Flevoland in the Netherlands, Hawaii in the United States and Tasmania in Australia from world maps.

The New Zealand Government has acknowledged this phenomenon, and it features a map of the world in which the country is deliberately not included on the 404 error page of its official website; the page states that "something's missing". Furthermore, in 2018, a tourism campaign video was published in which the Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern and the New Zealander actor and comedian Rhys Darby discussed why New Zealand was being left off world maps. On the video, Darby jokingly said that it was the result of a conspiracy against New Zealand. The video promoted the hashtag #getnzonthemap.

🔗 Mathematics

The Berry paradox is a self-referential paradox arising from an expression like "The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters" (a phrase with fifty-seven letters).

Bertrand Russell, the first to discuss the paradox in print, attributed it to G. G. Berry (1867–1928), a junior librarian at Oxford's Bodleian Library. Russell called Berry "the only person in Oxford who understood mathematical logic". The paradox was called "Richard's paradox" by Jean-Yves Gerard".

🔗 Architecture

Ruin value (German: Ruinenwert) is the concept that a building be designed such that if it eventually collapsed, it would leave behind aesthetically pleasing ruins that would last far longer without any maintenance at all. The idea was pioneered by German architect Albert Speer while planning for the 1936 Summer Olympics and published as "The Theory of Ruin Value" (Die Ruinenwerttheorie), although he was not its original inventor. The intention did not stretch only to the eventual collapse of the buildings, but rather assumed such buildings were inherently better designed and more imposing during their period of use.

The idea was supported by Adolf Hitler, who planned for such ruins to be a symbol of the greatness of the Third Reich, just as Ancient Greek and Roman ruins were symbolic of those civilisations.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Law 🔗 Politics 🔗 Popular Culture 🔗 Donald Trump

The Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement Act (COVFEFE Act) is a bill introduced into the United States House of Representatives in 2017 (on June 12), during the 115th United States Congress.

The bill would amend the Presidential Records Act to preserve Twitter posts and other social media interactions of the President of the United States, and to require the National Archives to store such items.

U.S. Representative Mike Quigley, Democrat of Illinois, introduced the legislation in the wake of Donald Trump's routine use of Twitter, stating "In order to maintain public trust in government, elected officials must answer for what they do and say; this includes 140-character tweets. If the president is going to take to social media to make sudden public policy proclamations, we must ensure that these statements are documented and preserved for future reference." If enacted, the bill "would bar the prolifically tweeting president from deleting his posts, as he has sometimes done."

If the bill were enacted, it would see US law treat US presidents' personal social media accounts (such as Trump's "@realDonaldTrump" Twitter account) the same as "official" social media accounts (such as the "@POTUS" Twitter account).

🔗 Computing 🔗 Crime 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing 🔗 Business 🔗 Computing/Software

A scandal erupted in 2005 regarding Sony BMG's implementation of copy protection measures on about 22 million CDs. When inserted into a computer, the CDs installed one of two pieces of software that provided a form of digital rights management (DRM) by modifying the operating system to interfere with CD copying. Neither program could easily be uninstalled, and they created vulnerabilities that were exploited by unrelated malware. One of the programs would install and "phone home" with reports on the user's private listening habits, even if the user refused its end-user license agreement (EULA), while the other was not mentioned in the EULA at all. Both programs contained code from several pieces of copylefted free software in an apparent infringement of copyright, and configured the operating system to hide the software's existence, leading to both programs being classified as rootkits.

Sony BMG initially denied that the rootkits were harmful. It then released an uninstaller for one of the programs that merely made the program's files visible while also installing additional software that could not be easily removed, collected an email address from the user and introduced further security vulnerabilities.

Following public outcry, government investigations and class-action lawsuits in 2005 and 2006, Sony BMG partially addressed the scandal with consumer settlements, a recall of about 10% of the affected CDs and the suspension of CD copy-protection efforts in early 2007.

🔗 Highways 🔗 Road transport 🔗 Wiltshire 🔗 Highways/United Kingdom Roads

The Magic Roundabout in Swindon, England, is a ring junction constructed in 1972 consisting of five mini-roundabouts arranged in a circle around a sixth, central circle. Located near the County Ground, home of Swindon Town F.C., its name comes from the popular children's television series The Magic Roundabout. In 2009 it was voted the fourth scariest junction in Britain.

🔗 Judaism

Tza'ar ba'alei chayim (Hebrew: צער בעלי חיים‎), literally "suffering of living creatures", is a Jewish commandment which bans causing animals unnecessary suffering. This concept is not clearly enunciated in the written Torah, but was accepted by the Talmud as being a biblical mandate. It is linked in the Talmud from the biblical law requiring people to assist in unloading burdens from animals (Exodus 23:5).

🔗 Technology

Deep borehole disposal (DBD) is the concept of disposing high-level radioactive waste from nuclear reactors in extremely deep boreholes instead of in more traditional deep geological repositories that are excavated like mines. Deep borehole disposal seeks to place the waste as much as five kilometres (3.1 mi) beneath the surface of the Earth and relies primarily on the thickness of the natural geological barrier to safely isolate the waste from the biosphere for a very long period of time so that it should not pose a threat to humans and the environment. The concept was originally developed in the 1970s, but in 2014 a proposal for a first experimental borehole was proposed by a consortium headed by Sandia National Laboratories.

The waste would be put into the lower mile of such a hole, within crystalline rock to isolate it from the environment. The upper two miles of the borehole would be filled with protective layers including asphalt, bentonite, concrete and crushed rock that are expected to protect the environment during geologic time, and the hole would be lined with steel casing.

A pair of proposed test boreholes in the United States were cancelled due to public opposition and lack of funding in 2016 and 2017.