Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Video games

SimHealth: The National Health Care Simulation is a management simulation video game, developed by Thinking Tools and published by Maxis with assistance from the Markle Foundation for MS-DOS in 1994. It is a simulation of the U.S. Healthcare system. The game was released during Congressional debates on the Clinton health care plan.

Due to the complexity of the game, SimHealth was seen as being very difficult. Armed with none of the tongue-in-cheek humor that Maxis's prior games were known for, the only real link to the franchise was the SimCity 2000-inspired user interface. The game was seen as more serious than other Maxis games. Noel Fritzinger, who with Lyman Orton first conceptualized CommunityViz, says that his inspiration came from seeing SimHealth and wondering if the same concepts could be applied to real-world land-use planning.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science

SCOOP (Simple Concurrent Object Oriented Programming) is a concurrency model designed for the Eiffel programming language, conceived by Eiffel's creator and designer, Bertrand Meyer.

SCOOP defines a way for an object oriented program to be written without the concept of threads, locks, or other typical multiprogramming methods. This allows the compiler or runtime environment to optimize the amount of concurrency as well as eliminate typical design flaws such as deadlock.

The model was first designed in the early 1990s and published in 1993 in the Communications of the ACM An updated version was described in chapter 30 of the book Object-Oriented Software Construction. A prototype implementation was developed in 1995 by Eiffel Software. An article by Compton and Walker provides an overview of SCOOP and describes another early implementation. Nienaltowski, Arslan and Meyer have published a description of the model as of 2003. Work on SCOOP proceeded at the Chair of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich. SCOOP became available as a standard part of EiffelStudio early in 2011.

🔗 Medicine

In medicine, the hygiene hypothesis states that early childhood exposure to particular microorganisms (such as the gut flora and helminth parasites) protects against allergies by properly tuning the immune system. In particular, a lack of such exposure is thought to lead to poor immune tolerance. The time period for exposure begins before birth and ends at school age.

While early versions of the hypothesis referred to microorganism exposure in general, later versions apply to a specific set of microbes that have co-evolved with humans. The updates have been given various names, including the microbiome depletion hypothesis, the microflora hypothesis, and the "old friends" hypothesis. There is a significant amount of evidence supporting the idea that lack of exposure to these microbes is linked to allergies or other conditions, although it is still rejected by many scientists.

The term "hygiene hypothesis" has been described as a misnomer because people incorrectly interpret it as referring to their own cleanliness. Having worse personal hygiene, such as not washing hands before eating, only increases the risk of infection without affecting the risk of allergies or immune disorders. Hygiene is essential for protecting vulnerable populations such as the elderly from infections, preventing the spread of antibiotic resistance, and combating emerging infectious diseases such as Ebola. The hygiene hypothesis does not suggest that having more infections during childhood would be an overall benefit.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 California 🔗 California/San Francisco Bay Area 🔗 Terrorism 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Politics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Criminal Biography 🔗 Chicago 🔗 United States/FBI 🔗 University of California 🔗 Illinois 🔗 Montana 🔗 Philosophy/Anarchism

Theodore John Kaczynski (; born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber (), is an American domestic terrorist, anarchist, and former mathematics professor. He was a mathematics prodigy, but he abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a more primitive lifestyle. Between 1978 and 1995, he killed three people and injured 23 others in an attempt to start a revolution by conducting a nationwide bombing campaign targeting people involved with modern technology.

In 1971, Kaczynski moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water near Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient. He witnessed the destruction of the wilderness surrounding his cabin and concluded that living in nature was untenable; he began his bombing campaign in 1978. In 1995, he sent a letter to The New York Times and promised to "desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his essay Industrial Society and Its Future, in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary to attract attention to the erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies that require large-scale organization.

Kaczynski was the subject of the longest and most expensive investigation in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Before his identity was known, the FBI used the case identifier UNABOM (University and Airline Bomber) to refer to his case, which resulted in the media naming him the "Unabomber." The FBI and Attorney General Janet Reno pushed for the publication of Industrial Society and Its Future, which led to a tip from Kaczynski's brother David, who recognized the writing style.

After his arrest in 1996, Kaczynski tried unsuccessfully to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers because they wanted him to plead insanity in order to avoid the death penalty, whereas he did not believe that he was insane. In 1998, a plea bargain was reached under which he pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

🔗 Psychology

In psychology, the four stages of competence, or the "conscious competence" learning model, relates to the psychological states involved in the process of progressing from incompetence to competence in a skill. People may have several skills, some unrelated to each other, and each skill will typically be at one of the stages at a given time. Many skills require practice to remain at a high level of competence.

The four stages suggest that individuals are initially unaware of how little they know, or unconscious of their incompetence. As they recognize their incompetence, they consciously acquire a skill, then consciously use it. Eventually, the skill can be utilized without it being consciously thought through: the individual is said to have then acquired unconscious competence.

🔗 Chemistry

The vanadium redox battery (VRB), also known as the vanadium flow battery (VFB) or vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB), is a type of rechargeable flow battery that employs vanadium ions in different oxidation states to store chemical potential energy. The vanadium redox battery exploits the ability of vanadium to exist in solution in four different oxidation states, and uses this property to make a battery that has just one electroactive element instead of two. For several reasons, including their relative bulkiness, most vanadium batteries are currently used for grid energy storage, i.e., attached to power plants or electrical grids.

The possibility of creating a vanadium flow battery was explored by Pissoort in the 1930s, NASA researchers in the 1970s, and Pellegri and Spaziante in the 1970s, but none of them were successful in demonstrating the technology. The first successful demonstration of the all-vanadium redox flow battery which employed vanadium in a solution of sulfuric acid in each half was by Maria Skyllas-Kazacos at the University of New South Wales in the 1980s. Her design used sulfuric acid electrolytes, and was patented by the University of New South Wales in Australia in 1986.

The main advantages of the vanadium redox battery are that it can offer almost unlimited energy capacity simply by using larger electrolyte storage tanks; it can be left completely discharged for long periods with no ill effects; if the electrolytes are accidentally mixed, the battery suffers no permanent damage; a single state of charge between the two electrolytes avoids the capacity degradation due to a single cell in non-flow batteries; the electrolyte is aqueous and inherently safe and non-flammable; and the generation 3 formulation using a mixed acid solution developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory operates over a wider temperature range allowing for passive cooling. VRFBs can be used at depth of discharge (DOD) around 90% and more, i.e. deeper DODs than solid-state batteries (e.g. lithium-based and sodium-based batteries, which are usually specified with DOD=80%). In addition, VRFBs exhibit very long cycle lives: most producers specify cycle durability in excess of 15,000-20,000 charge/discharge cycles. These values are far beyond the cycle lives of solid-state batteries, which is usually in the order of 4,000-5,000 charge/discharge cycles. Consequently, the levelized cost of energy (LCOE, i.e. the system cost divided by the usable energy, the cycle life, and round-trip efficiency) of present VRFB systems is typically in the order of a few tens of $ cents or € cents, namely much lower than the LCOEs of equivalent solid-state batteries and close to the targets of $0.05 and €0.05, stated by the US Department of Energy and the European Commission Strategic Energy Technology (SET) Plan, respectively.

The main disadvantages with vanadium redox technology are a relatively poor energy-to-volume ratio in comparison with standard storage batteries, and the relatively poor round trip efficiency. Furthermore, the aqueous electrolyte makes the battery heavy and therefore only useful for stationary applications. Another disadvantage is the relatively high toxicity of oxides of vanadium (see vanadium § Safety).

Numerous companies and organizations involved in funding and developing vanadium redox batteries include Avalon Battery, Vionx (formerly Premium Power), UniEnergy Technologies and Ashlawn Energy in the United States; Renewable Energy Dynamics Technology in Ireland; Enerox GmbH (formerly Gildemeister energy storage) in Austria; Cellennium in Thailand; Rongke Power in China; Prudent Energy in China; Sumitomo in Japan; H2, Inc. in South Korea; redT in Britain., Australian Vanadium in Australia, and the now defunct Imergy (formerly Deeya). Lately, also several smaller size vanadium redox flow batteries were brought to market (for residential applications) mainly from StorEn Technologies (USA), Schmid Group, VoltStorage and Volterion (all three from Germany), VisBlue (Denmark) or Pinflow energy storage (Czechia).

🔗 Birds 🔗 Animal rights 🔗 Veterinary medicine

Abnormal behavior of birds in captivity has been found to occur among both domesticated and wild birds. Abnormal behavior can be defined in several ways. Statistically, 'abnormal' is when the occurrence, frequency or intensity of a behaviour varies statistically significantly, either more or less, from the normal value. This means that theoretically, almost any behaviour could become 'abnormal' in an individual. Less formally, 'abnormal' includes any activity judged to be outside the normal behaviour pattern for captive birds of that particular class or age. For example, running rather than flying may be a normal behaviour and regularly observed in one species, however, in another species it might be normal but becomes 'abnormal' if it reaches a high frequency, or in another species it is rarely observed and any incidence is considered 'abnormal'. This article does not include 'one-off' behaviours performed by individual birds that might be considered abnormal for that individual, unless these are performed repeatedly by other individuals in the species and are recognised as part of the ethogram of that species.

Most abnormal behaviours can be categorised collectively (e.g., eliminative, ingestive, stereotypies), however, many abnormal behaviours fall debatably into several of these categories and categorisation is therefore not attempted in this article. Abnormal behaviours here are considered to be related to captive housing but may also be due to medical conditions. The article does not include behaviours in birds that are genetically modified to express abnormal behaviour.

🔗 United States 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Plan 9

The AT&T Hobbit is a microprocessor design that AT&T Corporation developed in the early 1990s. It was based on the company's CRISP (C-language Reduced Instruction Set Processor) design, which in turn grew out of Bell Labs' C Machine design of the late 1980s. C Machine, CRISP and Hobbit were optimized for running the C programming language. The design concentrated on fast instruction decoding, indexed array access and procedure calls. Its processor was partially RISC-like. The project ended in 1994 because the Hobbit failed to achieve commercially viable sales.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Christianity

Mandaeism or Mandaeanism (Arabic: مَنْدَائِيَّة‎, Mandāʾīyah), also known as Sabaeanism (Arabic: صَابِئِيَّة‎, Ṣābiʾīyah), is a monotheistic and gnostic religion with a strongly dualistic cosmology. Its adherents, the Mandaeans, revere Adam, Abel, Seth, Enos, Noah, Shem, Aram, and especially John the Baptist. The Mandaeans have been counted among the Semites and speak a dialect of Eastern Aramaic known as Mandaic. The name 'Mandaean' is said to come from the Aramaic manda meaning "knowledge", as does Greek gnosis. Within the Middle East, but outside of their community, the Mandaeans are more commonly known as the Ṣubba (singular: Ṣubbī) or Sabians. The term Ṣubba is derived from the Aramaic root related to baptism, the neo-Mandaic is Ṣabi. In Islam, the "Sabians" (Arabic: الصَّابِئُون‎, aṣ-Ṣābiʾūn) are described several times in the Quran as People of the Book, alongside Jews and Christians. Occasionally, Mandaeans are called "Christians of Saint John".

According to most scholars, Mandaeaism originated sometime in the first three centuries AD, in either southwestern Mesopotamia or the Syro-Palestinian area. However, some scholars take the view that Mandaeanism is older and dates from pre-Christian times.

The religion has been practised primarily around the lower Karun, Euphrates and Tigris and the rivers that surround the Shatt-al-Arab waterway, part of southern Iraq and Khuzestan Province in Iran. There are thought to be between 60,000 and 70,000 Mandaeans worldwide. Until the Iraq War, almost all of them lived in Iraq. Many Mandaean Iraqis have since fled their country because of the turmoil created by the 2003 invasion of Iraq and subsequent occupation by U.S. armed forces, and the related rise in sectarian violence by Muslim extremists. By 2007, the population of Mandaeans in Iraq had fallen to approximately 5,000.

The Mandaeans have remained separate and intensely private. Reports of them and of their religion have come primarily from outsiders: particularly from Julius Heinrich Petermann, an Orientalist as well as from Nicolas Siouffi, a Syrian Christian who was the French vice-consul in Mosul in 1887, and British cultural anthropologist Lady E. S. Drower. There is an early if highly prejudiced account by the French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier from the 1650s.

🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Typography

The long s (ſ) is an archaic form of the lower case letter s. It replaced the single s, or the first s in a double s (e.g. "ſinfulneſs" for "sinfulness" and "ſucceſs" for "success"). The long s is the basis of the first half of the grapheme or the German alphabet ligature letter ß, which is known as the Eszett. The modern letterform is known as the short, terminal, or round s.