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🔗 Gravity Hill
A gravity hill, also known as a magnetic hill, mystery hill, mystery spot, gravity road, or anti-gravity hill, is a place where the layout of the surrounding land produces an optical illusion, making a slight downhill slope appear to be an uphill slope. Thus, a car left out of gear will appear to be rolling uphill against gravity. There are hundreds of recognized gravity hills around the world.
The slope of gravity hills is an optical illusion, although sites are often accompanied by claims that magnetic or supernatural forces are at work. The most important factor contributing to the illusion is a completely or mostly obstructed horizon. Without a horizon, it becomes difficult to judge the slope of a surface as a reliable reference is missing. Objects which one would normally assume to be more or less perpendicular to the ground, such as trees, may actually be leaning, offsetting the visual reference.
A 2003 study looked into how the absence of a horizon can skew the perspective on gravity hills by recreating a number of antigravity places in the lab to see how volunteers would react. As a conclusion, researchers from Universities of Padova and Pavia in Italy found that without a true horizon in sight, landmarks such as trees and signs actually played these tricks on the human brain.
The illusion is similar to the Ames room, in which objects can also appear to roll against gravity.
The opposite phenomenon—an uphill road that appears flat—is known in bicycle racing as a "false flat".
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- "Gravity Hill" | 2022-03-19 | 102 Upvotes 33 Comments
🔗 Wikipedians question Wikimedia fundraising ethics after “somewhat-viral” tweet
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- "Wikipedians question Wikimedia fundraising ethics after “somewhat-viral” tweet" | 2022-10-31 | 479 Upvotes 334 Comments
🔗 User: Junnn11
Arthropod enthusiast, mainly focus on Panarthropod head problem, phylogeny across arthropod subphyla and stem lineage, basal chelicerates, dinocaridids and lobopodians. Sometime drawing stuff, not so well in english, mainly active at Japanese Wikipedia.
Japanese: 利用者:Junnn11
Commons: User:Junnn11
Twitter: ni075
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- "User: Junnn11" | 2023-04-19 | 747 Upvotes 101 Comments
🔗 Muphry's Law
Muphry's law is an adage that states: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written." The name is a deliberate misspelling of "Murphy's law".
Names for variations on the principle have also been coined, usually in the context of online communication, including:
- Umhoefer's or Umhöfer's rule: "Articles on writing are themselves badly written." Named after editor Joseph A. Umhoefer.
- Skitt's law: "Any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself." Named after Skitt, a contributor to alt.usage.english on Usenet.
- Hartman's law of prescriptivist retaliation: "Any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror [sic]." Named after editor and writer Jed Hartman.
- The iron law of nitpicking: "You are never more likely to make a grammatical error than when correcting someone else's grammar." Coined by blogger Zeno.
- McKean's law: "Any correction of the speech or writing of others will contain at least one grammatical, spelling, or typographical error."
- Bell's first law of Usenet: "Flames of spelling and/or grammar will have spelling and/or grammatical errors." Named after Andrew Bell, a contributor to alt.sex on Usenet.
Further variations state that flaws in a printed ("Clark's document law") or published work ("Barker's proof") will only be discovered after it is printed and not during proofreading, and flaws such as spelling errors in a sent email will be discovered by the sender only during rereading from the "Sent" box.
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- "Muphry's Law" | 2021-05-26 | 11 Upvotes 1 Comments
🔗 Dilbert Principle
The Dilbert principle is a concept in management developed by Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, which states that companies tend to systematically promote incompetent employees to management to get them out of the workflow. The Dilbert principle is inspired by the Peter principle, which holds that employees are promoted based on success in their current position until they reach their "level of incompetence" and are no longer promoted. Under the Dilbert principle, employees who were never competent are promoted to management to limit the damage they can do. Adams first explained the principle in a 1995 Wall Street Journal article, and expanded upon it in his 1996 business book The Dilbert Principle.
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- "Dilbert Principle" | 2018-06-18 | 19 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Dilbert principle" | 2014-03-18 | 11 Upvotes 1 Comments
🔗 Wireless USB
Wireless USB was a short-range, high-bandwidth wireless radio communication protocol created by the Wireless USB Promoter Group which intended to increase the availability of general USB-based technologies. It is unrelated to Wi-Fi. It was maintained by the WiMedia Alliance which ceased operations in 2009. Wireless USB is sometimes abbreviated as "WUSB", although the USB Implementers Forum discouraged this practice and instead prefers to call the technology Certified Wireless USB to distinguish it from the competing UWB standard.
Wireless USB was based on the (now defunct) WiMedia Alliance's Ultra-WideBand (UWB) common radio platform, which is capable of sending 480 Mbit/s at distances up to 3 metres (9.8 ft) and 110 Mbit/s at up to 10 metres (33 ft). It was designed to operate in the 3.1 to 10.6 GHz frequency range, although local regulatory policies may restrict the legal operating range in some countries.
The standard is now obsolete, and no new hardware has been produced for many years.
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- "Wireless USB" | 2021-04-18 | 34 Upvotes 15 Comments
🔗 Stochastic Terrorism
Stochastic terrorism is a form of political violence instigated by hostile public rhetoric directed at a group or an individual. Unlike incitement to terrorism, stochastic terrorism is accomplished with indirect, vague or coded language, which grants the instigator plausible deniability for any associated violence. A key element of stochastic terrorism is the use of media for propagation, where the person carrying out the violence may not have direct connection to any other users of violent rhetoric.
🔗 Jacobi Ellipsoid
A Jacobi ellipsoid is a triaxial (i.e. scalene) ellipsoid under hydrostatic equilibrium which arises when a self-gravitating, fluid body of uniform density rotates with a constant angular velocity. It is named after the German mathematician Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi.
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- "Jacobi Ellipsoid" | 2025-06-28 | 34 Upvotes 8 Comments
🔗 Shortt–Synchronome free pendulum clock
The Shortt–Synchronome free pendulum clock was a complex precision electromechanical pendulum clock invented in 1921 by British railway engineer William Hamilton Shortt in collaboration with horologist Frank Hope-Jones, and manufactured by the Synchronome Co., Ltd. of London, UK. They were the most accurate pendulum clocks ever commercially produced, and became the highest standard for timekeeping between the 1920s and the 1940s, after which mechanical clocks were superseded by quartz time standards. They were used worldwide in astronomical observatories, naval observatories, in scientific research, and as a primary standard for national time dissemination services. The Shortt was the first clock to be a more accurate timekeeper than the Earth itself; it was used in 1926 to detect tiny seasonal changes in the Earth's rotation rate. Shortt clocks achieved accuracy of around a second per year, although a recent measurement indicated they were even more accurate. About 100 were produced between 1922 and 1956.
Shortt clocks kept time with two pendulums, a master pendulum swinging in a vacuum tank and a slave pendulum in a separate clock, which was synchronized to the master by an electric circuit and electromagnets. The slave pendulum was attached to the timekeeping mechanisms of the clock, leaving the master pendulum virtually free of external disturbances.
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- "Shortt–Synchronome free pendulum clock" | 2020-09-17 | 62 Upvotes 18 Comments
🔗 Tiresias (Typeface) for Impaired Vision
Tiresias is a family of TrueType sans-serif typefaces that were designed with the aim of legibility by people with impaired vision at the Scientific Research Unit of Royal National Institute of Blind People in London. The font was originally designed for the RNIB by Chris Sharville of Laker Sharville Design Associates who was working with John Gill at the time.
The family includes
- Tiresias Infofont – for information labels, optimized for maximum legibility at a distance of 30–100 cm.
- Tiresias Keyfont – for labeling the tops of keys of keyboards, PIN pads, appliances, remote controls (features exaggerated punctuation marks, no descender on the J)
- Tiresias LPfont – for large-print publications. A wedge-serif design.
- Tiresias PCfont – for raster displays
- Tiresias Screenfont – for television subtitling and on-screen user interfaces
- Tiresias Signfont – a more open spacing for use on signs
In late 2007, all Tiresias fonts except Tiresias Screenfont were released under the GNU General Public License version 3 or any later version.
The Tiresias Screenfont was sold by Bitstream Inc., who in 2012 were acquired by Monotype Corporation. The acquiring company continues to market Tiresias on its websites.
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- "Tiresias (Typeface) for Impaired Vision" | 2021-05-22 | 86 Upvotes 27 Comments