Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Ancient Egypt 🔗 Greece 🔗 Turkey 🔗 Archaeology

The Late Bronze Age collapse was a dark age transition in a large area covering much of Southeast Europe, West Asia and North Africa (comprising the overlapping regions of the Near East, the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa, with the Balkans, the Aegean, Anatolia, and the Caucasus), which took place from the Late Bronze Age to the emerging Early Iron Age. It was a transition which historians believe was violent, sudden, and culturally disruptive, and involved societal collapse for some civilizations during the 12th century BCE. The palace economy of Mycenaean Greece, the Aegean region and Anatolia that characterized the Late Bronze Age disintegrated, transforming into the small isolated village cultures of the Greek Dark Ages. The Hittite Empire of Anatolia and the Levant collapsed, while states such as the Middle Assyrian Empire in Mesopotamia and the New Kingdom of Egypt survived but were considerably weakened.

Competing and even mutually compatible theories for the ultimate cause of the Late Bronze Age collapse have been made since the 19th century. These include volcanic eruptions, droughts, invasions by the Sea Peoples or migrations of Dorians, economic disruptions due to the rising use of ironworking, and changes in military technology and methods of war that saw the decline of chariot warfare.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Belgium

On 4 July 1989, a pilotless MiG-23 jet fighter of the Soviet Air Forces crashed into a house in Kortrijk, Belgium, killing one person. The pilot had ejected over an hour earlier near Kołobrzeg, Poland, after experiencing technical problems, but the aircraft continued flying for around 900 km (600 mi) before running out of fuel and descending into the ground.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Germany 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Poland 🔗 Current events 🔗 Rivers

The 2022 Oder environmental disaster is a mass die-off of fish, beavers and other wildlife in the Oder river in Poland and Germany, causing a health and environmental crisis in large parts of the country and subsequently a political scandal.

🔗 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.

🔗 Business 🔗 Psychology

Theory X and Theory Y are theories of human work motivation and management. They were created by Douglas McGregor while he was working at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the 1950s, and developed further in the 1960s. McGregor's work was rooted in motivation theory alongside the works of Abraham Maslow, who created the hierarchy of needs. The two theories proposed by McGregor describe contrasting models of workforce motivation applied by managers in human resource management, organizational behavior, organizational communication and organizational development. Theory X explains the importance of heightened supervision, external rewards, and penalties, while Theory Y highlights the motivating role of job satisfaction and encourages workers to approach tasks without direct supervision. Management use of Theory X and Theory Y can affect employee motivation and productivity in different ways, and managers may choose to implement strategies from both theories into their practices.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Iceland

Although Iceland is reliant upon fishing, tourism and aluminium production as the mainstays of its economy, the production of vegetables and fruit in greenhouses is a growing sector. Until the 1960s this included commercial production of bananas.

In 1941, the first bananas in Iceland were produced. They have been produced since that time, about 100 clusters a year each about 5–20 kg (11–44 lb), but are not currently sold. In the wake of World War II, the combination of inexpensive geothermal power (which had recently become available) and high prices for imported fruit led to the construction of a number of greenhouses where bananas were produced commercially from 1945 to as late as 1958 or 1959. In 1960, the government removed import duties on fruit. Domestically grown bananas were no longer able to compete with imported ones and soon disappeared from the market. Icelandic banana production was much slower due to low levels of sunlight; Icelandic bananas took two years to mature, while it only takes a few months near the equator.

The urban myth that Iceland is Europe’s largest producer or exporter of bananas has been propagated in various books and other media. It was mentioned, in an episode of the BBC quiz programme QI, and on a forum connected with the show. According to FAO statistics, the largest European producer of bananas is France (in Martinique and Guadeloupe), followed by Spain (primarily in the Canary Islands). Other banana-producing countries in Europe include Portugal (on Madeira), Greece, and Italy.

Although a small number of banana plants still exist in greenhouses and produce fruit every year, Iceland imports nearly all of the bananas consumed in the country, with imports now amounting to over 18 kg (40 lb) per capita per annum. The Agricultural University of Iceland maintains the last such farm with 600-700 banana plants in its tropical greenhouse, which were received as donations from producers when they shut down (then the Horticultural College). Bananas grown there are consumed by the students and staff and are not sold.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Russia/demographics and ethnography of Russia 🔗 African diaspora 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

Abram Petrovich Gannibal, also Hannibal or Ganibal, or Abram Hannibal or Abram Petrov (Russian: Абра́м Петро́вич Ганниба́л; c. 1696 – 14 May 1781), was a Russian military engineer, major-general, and nobleman of African origin. Kidnapped as a child, Gannibal was taken to Russia and presented as a gift to Peter the Great, where he was freed, adopted and raised in the Emperor's court household as his godson.

Gannibal eventually rose to become a prominent member of the imperial court in the reign of Peter's daughter Elizabeth. He had 11 children, most of whom became members of the Russian nobility; he was a great-grandfather of the author and poet Alexander Pushkin.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Microsoft

Internet Explorer for UNIX is a discontinued graphical web browser that was available free of charge and produced by Microsoft for use in the X Window System on Solaris or HP-UX. Development ended with a version of Internet Explorer 5 in 2001 and support for it was completely discontinued in 2002.

🔗 Computing

OS-9 is a family of real-time, process-based, multitasking, multi-user operating systems, developed in the 1980s, originally by Microware Systems Corporation for the Motorola 6809 microprocessor. It was purchased by Radisys Corp in 2001, and was purchased again in 2013 by its current owner Microware LP.

The OS-9 family was popular for general-purpose computing and remains in use in commercial embedded systems and amongst hobbyists. Today, OS-9 is a product name used by both a Motorola 68000-series machine language OS and a portable (PowerPC, x86, ARM, MIPS, SH4, etc.) version written in C, originally known as OS-9000.