Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Statistics

Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. It is a form of selection bias.

Survivorship bias can lead to overly optimistic beliefs because failures are ignored, such as when companies that no longer exist are excluded from analyses of financial performance. It can also lead to the false belief that the successes in a group have some special property, rather than just coincidence (correlation proves causality). For example, if three of the five students with the best college grades went to the same high school, that can lead one to believe that the high school must offer an excellent education. This could be true, but the question cannot be answered without looking at the grades of all the other students from that high school, not just the ones who "survived" the top-five selection process. Another example of a distinct mode of survivorship bias would be thinking that an incident was not as dangerous as it was because everyone you communicate with afterwards survived. Even if you knew that some people are dead, they wouldn't have their voice to add to the conversation, leading to bias in the conversation.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Comedy

A Request for Comments (RFC), in the context of Internet governance, is a type of publication from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the Internet Society (ISOC), usually describing methods, behaviors, research, or innovations applicable to the working of the Internet and Internet-connected systems.

Almost every April Fools' Day (1 April) since 1989, the Internet RFC Editor has published one or more humorous Request for Comments (RFC) documents, following in the path blazed by the June 1973 RFC 527 called ARPAWOCKY, a parody of Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem "Jabberwocky". The following list also includes humorous RFCs published on other dates.

🔗 Energy

A black start is the process of restoring an electric power station or a part of an electric grid to operation without relying on the external electric power transmission network to recover from a total or partial shutdown.

Normally, the electric power used within the plant is provided from the station's own generators. If all of the plant's main generators are shut down, station service power is provided by drawing power from the grid through the plant's transmission line. However, during a wide-area outage, off-site power from the grid is not available. In the absence of grid power, a so-called black start needs to be performed to bootstrap the power grid into operation.

To provide a black start, some power stations have small diesel generators, normally called the black start diesel generator (BSDG), which can be used to start larger generators (of several megawatts capacity), which in turn can be used to start the main power station generators. Generating plants using steam turbines require station service power of up to 10% of their capacity for boiler feedwater pumps, boiler forced-draft combustion air blowers, and for fuel preparation. It is uneconomical to provide such a large standby capacity at each station, so black-start power must be provided over designated tie lines from another station. Often hydroelectric power plants are designated as the black-start sources to restore network interconnections. A hydroelectric station needs very little initial power for starting purposes (just enough to open the intake gates and provide excitation current to the generator field coils), and can put a large block of power on line very quickly to allow start-up of fossil-fuel or nuclear stations. Certain types of combustion turbine can be configured for black start, providing another option in places without suitable hydroelectric plants. In 2017, a utility in Southern California successfully demonstrated the use of a battery-based energy-storage system to provide a black start, firing up a combined-cycle gas turbine from an idle state.

🔗 Constructed languages

Whistled languages use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication. A whistled language is a system of whistled communication which allows fluent whistlers to transmit and comprehend a potentially unlimited number of messages over long distances. Whistled languages are different in this respect from the restricted codes sometimes used by herders or animal trainers to transmit simple messages or instructions. Generally, whistled languages emulate the tones or vowel formants of a natural spoken language, as well as aspects of its intonation and prosody, so that trained listeners who speak that language can understand the encoded message.

Whistled language is rare compared to spoken language, but it is found in cultures around the world. It is especially common in tone languages where the whistled tones transmit the tones of the syllables (tone melodies of the words). This might be because in tone languages the tone melody carries more of the functional load of communication while non-tonal phonology carries proportionally less. The genesis of a whistled language has never been recorded in either case and has not yet received much productive study.

🔗 California

Early on the morning of May 16, 1946, a U.S. Army B-17 Flying Fortress aircraft crashed into White's Hill (also known locally as "White Hill") near Fairfax, California. Two men were killed and six seriously injured. There were reports that the B-17 was carrying nuclear weapons materials for the Operation Crossroads tests at Bikini atoll, but these reports were not confirmed. However, due to the behavior and activities of the military authorities at the crash site and the reports of several credible witnesses, including several of the crewmembers, questions about the plane's cargo remain.

🔗 Death 🔗 Iran 🔗 Archaeology

The Hasanlu Lovers are a pair of human remains found at the Teppe Hasanlu archaeological site, located in the Naqadeh in the West Azerbaijan Province of Iran. Around 800 BCE, the city of Hasanlu, located in north-western Iran, was destroyed by an unknown invader. Inhabitants were slain and left where they fell. In 1973, the lovers were discovered by a team of archaeologists from the University of Pennsylvania led by Robert H. Dyson.

The two human skeletons were found together in a bin during excavations, seemingly embracing at the time of death, with no other objects except a stone slab under the head of one skeleton. They died together around 800 BCE, during the last destruction of the Hasanlu. Approximately 246 skeletons were found at the site altogether. How the lovers died and ended up in the bin is still under speculation but both skeletons lack evidence of injury near the time of death and possibly died of asphyxiation. They were exhibited at the Penn Museum from 1974 until the mid-1980s.

The right skeleton, referred to as HAS 73-5-799 (SK 335), is lying on its back and the left skeleton, referred to as HAS 73-5-800 (SK 336), is lying on its left side facing SK 335. When excavated, the skeletons were tested to determine various characteristics. Dental evidence suggest SK 335 was a young adult, possibly 19–22 years of age. Researchers identified the skeleton as male largely based on the pelvis. The skeleton had no apparent evidence of disease or healed lifetime injuries. Skeleton SK 336 appeared to have been healthy in life; the skeleton had no apparent evidence of healed lifetimes injuries, and was estimated to have been aged to about 30–35 years. Sex determination of the left skeleton was less definitive. Evidence suggests SK 336 was also male after being originally identified as female. The skeletons have been a subject of debate since they were first excavated.

🔗 Cycling 🔗 Motorcycling

Countersteering is used by single-track vehicle operators, such as cyclists and motorcyclists, to initiate a turn toward a given direction by momentarily steering counter to the desired direction ("steer left to turn right"). To negotiate a turn successfully, the combined center of mass of the rider and the single-track vehicle must first be leaned in the direction of the turn, and steering briefly in the opposite direction causes that lean. The rider's action of countersteering is sometimes referred to as "giving a steering command".^: 15

The scientific literature does not provide a clear and comprehensive definition of countersteering. In fact, "a proper distinction between steer torque and steer angle ... is not always made."

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Sociology

The friendship paradox is the phenomenon first observed by the sociologist Scott L. Feld in 1991 that most people have fewer friends than their friends have, on average. It can be explained as a form of sampling bias in which people with greater numbers of friends have an increased likelihood of being observed among one's own friends. In contradiction to this, most people believe that they have more friends than their friends have.

The same observation can be applied more generally to social networks defined by other relations than friendship: for instance, most people's sexual partners have had (on the average) a greater number of sexual partners than they have.

🔗 Internet

Do Not Track (DNT) was a proposed HTTP header field, designed to allow internet users to opt-out of tracking by websites—which includes the collection of data regarding a user's activity across multiple distinct contexts, and the retention, use, or sharing of data derived from that activity outside the context in which it occurred.

The Do Not Track header was originally proposed in 2009 by researchers Christopher Soghoian, Sid Stamm, and Dan Kaminsky. Efforts to standardize Do Not Track by the W3C in the Tracking Preference Expression (DNT) Working Group did not make it past the Candidate Recommendation stage and ended in September 2018 due to insufficient deployment and support.Mozilla Firefox became the first browser to implement the feature, while Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari, Opera and Google Chrome all later added support.

DNT is not widely adopted by the industry, with companies citing the lack of legal mandates for its use, as well as unclear standards and guidelines for how websites are to interpret the header. Thus, it is not guaranteed that enabling DNT will actually have any effect at all. The W3C disbanded its DNT working group in January 2019, citing insufficient support and adoption. Apple discontinued support for DNT the following month.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Literature 🔗 Poland 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment

Stanisław Herman Lem (Polish: [staˈɲiswaf ˈlɛm] (listen); 12 or 13 September 1921 – 27 March 2006) was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy, and satire. Lem's books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 45 million copies. From the 1950s to 2000s, he published many books, both science fiction and philosophical/futurological. Worldwide, he is best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has been made into a feature film three times. In 1976, Theodore Sturgeon wrote that Lem was the most widely read science fiction writer in the world. The total print of Lem's books is over 30 million copies.

Lem's works explore philosophical themes through speculation on technology, the nature of intelligence, the impossibility of communication with and understanding of alien intelligence, despair about human limitations, and humanity's place in the universe. They are sometimes presented as fiction, but others are in the form of essays or philosophical books.

Translating his works is difficult due to passages with elaborate word formation, idiomatic wordplay, alien or robotic poetry, and puns.