Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Italy 🔗 Musical Instruments 🔗 Classical music

Intonarumori are experimental musical instruments invented and built by the Italian futurist Luigi Russolo between roughly 1910 and 1930. There were 27 varieties of intonarumori in total with different names.

🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Brands 🔗 Graffiti

Reverse graffiti is a method of creating temporary or semi-permanent images on walls or other surfaces by removing dirt from a surface. It can also be done by simply removing dirt with the fingertip from windows or other dirty surfaces, such as writing "wash me" on a dirty vehicle. Others, such as graffiti artist Moose, use a cloth or a high-power washer to remove dirt on a larger scale.

Reverse graffiti has been used as a form of advertising, although this usage has been controversial, as its legality varies depending on jurisdiction.

🔗 India 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 India/Kerala

The Padmanabhaswamy temple treasure is a collection of valuable objects including gold thrones, crowns, coins, statues and ornaments, diamonds and other precious stones. It was discovered in some of the subterranean vaults of the Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram, in the Indian state of Kerala, when five of its six (or possibly eight) vaults were opened on 27 June 2011. The vaults were opened on the orders of the Supreme Court of India, which was hearing a private petition seeking transparency in the running of the temple. The discovery of the treasure attracted widespread national and international media attention as it is considered to be the largest collection of items of gold and precious stones in the recorded history of the world. On the possibility of future appropriation of the wealth, for the need of a new management and proper inventorisation of the articles in the vaults, a public interest petition was registered with Supreme court of India. In 2020, the royal family won the rights to manage the temple, as well all its financial aspects. The Supreme Court of India overruled the Kerala High Court's legal jurisprudence based on regional facts and recognition of the nullified princely agreement based on "Ruler of Travancore."

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 C/C++ 🔗 C/C++/C

The GLib Object System, or GObject, is a free software library providing a portable object system and transparent cross-language interoperability. GObject is designed for use both directly in C programs to provide object-oriented C-based APIs and through bindings to other languages to provide transparent cross-language interoperability, e.g. PyGObject.

🔗 Finance & Investment

A credit card imprinter, colloquially known as a ZipZap machine, click-clack machine or Knuckle Buster, is a manual device that was used by merchants to record payment card transactions before the advent of payment terminals.

The device works by placing the customer’s credit card into a bed in the machine, then layering carbon paper forms over the card. A bar is slid back and forth over the paper to create an impression of the embossed card data and the merchant information on the imprinter. The customer signs these paper forms, with one copy as the customer receipt and the other kept by the merchant.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of language 🔗 Linguistics/Philosophy of language

The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, part of relativism, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis , or Whorfianism is a principle claiming that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.

The principle is often defined in one of two versions: the strong hypothesis, which was held by some of the early linguists before World War II, and the weak hypothesis, mostly held by some of the modern linguists.

• The strong version says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories.
• The weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions.

The principle had been accepted and then abandoned by linguists during the early 20th century following the changing perceptions of social acceptance for the other especially after World War II. The origin of formulated arguments against the acceptance of linguistic relativity are attributed to Noam Chomsky.

🔗 China 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Eastern philosophy

Mohism or Moism (Chinese: 墨家; pinyin: Mòjiā; literally: 'School of Mo') was an ancient Chinese philosophy of logic, rational thought and science developed by the academic scholars who studied under the ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi (c. 470 BC – c. 391 BC) and embodied in an eponymous book: the Mozi. It evolved at about the same time as Confucianism, Taoism and Legalism, and was one of the four main philosophic schools from around 770–221 BC (during the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods). During that time, Mohism was seen as a major rival to Confucianism. Although its influence endured, Mohism all but disappeared as an independent school of thought.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Books 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Color 🔗 Physics/Publications

Theory of Colours (German: Zur Farbenlehre) is a book by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe about the poet's views on the nature of colours and how these are perceived by humans. It was published in German in 1810 and in English in 1840. The book contains detailed descriptions of phenomena such as coloured shadows, refraction, and chromatic aberration.

The work originated in Goethe's occupation with painting and mainly exerted an influence on the arts (Philipp Otto Runge, J. M. W. Turner, the Pre-Raphaelites, Wassily Kandinsky). The book is a successor to two short essays entitled "Contributions to Optics".

Although Goethe's work was rejected by physicists, a number of philosophers and physicists have concerned themselves with it, including Thomas Johann Seebeck, Arthur Schopenhauer (see: On Vision and Colors), Hermann von Helmholtz, Rudolf Steiner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Werner Heisenberg, Kurt Gödel, and Mitchell Feigenbaum.

Goethe's book provides a catalogue of how colour is perceived in a wide variety of circumstances, and considers Isaac Newton's observations to be special cases. Unlike Newton, Goethe's concern was not so much with the analytic treatment of colour, as with the qualities of how phenomena are perceived. Philosophers have come to understand the distinction between the optical spectrum, as observed by Newton, and the phenomenon of human colour perception as presented by Goethe—a subject analyzed at length by Wittgenstein in his comments on Goethe's theory in Remarks on Colour.

🔗 Electronics

A Wallace tree is an efficient hardware implementation of a digital circuit that multiplies two integers. It was devised by the Australian computer scientist Chris Wallace in 1964.

The Wallace tree has three steps:

1. Multiply (that is – AND) each bit of one of the arguments, by each bit of the other, yielding ${\displaystyle n^{2}}$ results. Depending on position of the multiplied bits, the wires carry different weights, for example wire of bit carrying result of ${\displaystyle a_{4}b_{3}}$ is 128 (see explanation of weights below).
2. Reduce the number of partial products to two by layers of full and half adders.
3. Group the wires in two numbers, and add them with a conventional adder.

The second step works as follows. As long as there are three or more wires with the same weight add a following layer:-

• Take any three wires with the same weights and input them into a full adder. The result will be an output wire of the same weight and an output wire with a higher weight for each three input wires.
• If there are two wires of the same weight left, input them into a half adder.
• If there is just one wire left, connect it to the next layer.

The benefit of the Wallace tree is that there are only ${\displaystyle O(\log n)}$ reduction layers, and each layer has ${\displaystyle O(1)}$ propagation delay. As making the partial products is ${\displaystyle O(1)}$ and the final addition is ${\displaystyle O(\log n)}$, the multiplication is only ${\displaystyle O(\log n)}$, not much slower than addition (however, much more expensive in the gate count). Naively adding partial products with regular adders would require ${\displaystyle O(\log ^{2}n)}$ time. From a complexity theoretic perspective, the Wallace tree algorithm puts multiplication in the class NC¹.

These computations only consider gate delays and don't deal with wire delays, which can also be very substantial.

The Wallace tree can be also represented by a tree of 3/2 or 4/2 adders.

It is sometimes combined with Booth encoding.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Women scientists 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 New York (state) 🔗 LGBT studies/LGBT Person 🔗 LGBT studies

Lynn Ann Conway (January 2, 1938 - June 9, 2024) was an American computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist.

She worked at IBM in the 1960s and invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance. She initiated the Mead–Conway VLSI chip design revolution in very large scale integrated (VLSI) microchip design. That revolution spread rapidly through the research universities and computing industries during the 1980s, incubating an emerging electronic design automation industry, spawning the modern 'foundry' infrastructure for chip design and production, and triggering a rush of impactful high-tech startups in the 1980s and 1990s.