Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Typography

A pangram or holoalphabetic sentence is a sentence using every letter of a given alphabet at least once. Pangrams have been used to display typefaces, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting, calligraphy, and keyboarding.

Graffiti is an essentially single-stroke shorthand handwriting recognition system used in PDAs based on the Palm OS. Graffiti was originally written by Palm, Inc. as the recognition system for GEOS-based devices such as HP's OmniGo 100 and 120 or the Magic Cap-line and was available as an alternate recognition system for the Apple Newton MessagePad, when NewtonOS 1.0 could not recognize handwriting very well. Graffiti also runs on the Windows Mobile platform, where it is called "Block Recognizer", and on the Symbian UIQ platform as the default recognizer and was available for Casio's Zoomer PDA.

The software is based primarily on a neography of upper-case characters that can be drawn blindly with a stylus on a touch-sensitive panel. Since the user typically cannot see the character as it is being drawn, complexities have been removed from four of the most difficult letters. "A" "F", "K" and "T" all are drawn without any need to match up a cross-stroke.

Some letters can be drawn with strokes other than the "official" ones. Two examples of these alternative strokes are the letters "V" (drawn the same only from right to left) and "X" (drawn the same as the letter "K" except reversed from right to left). These alternative strokes are frequently recognized with greater reliability.

🔗 United States 🔗 Computing 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Microsoft 🔗 United States/American television

“Where do you want to go today?” was the title of Microsoft’s second global image advertising campaign. The broadcast, print and outdoor advertising campaign was launched in November 1994 through the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy. The campaign had Microsoft spending $100 million through July 1995, of which $25 million would be spent during the holiday shopping season ending in December 1994.

Tony Kaye directed a series of television ads filmed in Hong Kong, Prague and New York City that showed a broad range of people using their PCs. The television ads were first broadcast in Australia on November 13, the following day in both the United States and Canada, with Britain, France and Germany seeing the spots in subsequent days. An eight-page print ad described the personal computer as “an open opportunity for everybody” that “[facilitates] the flow of information so that good ideas—wherever they come from—can be shared”, and was placed in mass-market magazines including National Geographic, Newsweek, People, Rolling Stone and Sports Illustrated.

The New York Times described the campaign as taking “a winsome, humanistic approach to demystifying technology”. However, the Times reported in August 1995 that the response to Microsoft’s campaign in the advertising trade press had been “lukewarm” and quoted Brad Johnson of Advertising Age as stating that “Microsoft is on version 1.0 in advertising. Microsoft is not standing still. It will improve its advertising.” Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, then the firm’s executive vice president, acknowledged that the response to the campaign had been “chilly”.

In June 1999, Microsoft announced that it would be ending its nearly five-year-long relationship with Wieden+Kennedy, shifting $100 million (~$166 million in 2022) in billings to McCann Erickson Worldwide Advertising in a split that was described by The New York Times as mutual. Dan Wieden, president and chief creative officer of the advertising agency, characterized the relationship with Microsoft as “intense” and said that it had “run its course”.

🔗 Games

Quantum tic-tac-toe is a "quantum generalization" of tic-tac-toe in which the players' moves are "superpositions" of plays in the classical game. The game was invented by Allan Goff of Novatia Labs, who describes it as "a way of introducing quantum physics without mathematics", and offering "a conceptual foundation for understanding the meaning of quantum mechanics".

🔗 France 🔗 Basque

The Cagots (pronounced [ka.ɡo]) were a persecuted minority found in the west of France and northern Spain: the Navarrese Pyrenees, Basque provinces, Béarn, Aragón, Gascony and Brittany. Their name differed by province and the local language: Cagots, Gézitains, Gahets, and Gafets in Gascony; Agotes, Agotak, and Gafos in Basque country; Capots in Anjou and Languedoc; and Cacons, Cahets, Caqueux, and Caquins in Brittany. Evidence of the group exists back as far as AD 1000.

Cagots were shunned and hated; while restrictions varied by time and place, they were typically required to live in separate quarters in towns, called cagoteries, which were often on the far outskirts of the villages. Cagots were excluded from all political and social rights. They were not allowed to marry non-Cagots, enter taverns, hold cabarets, use public fountains, sell food or wine, touch food in the market, work with livestock, or enter mills. They were allowed to enter a church only by a special door and, during the service, a rail separated them from the other worshippers. Either they were altogether forbidden to partake of the sacrament, or the Eucharist was given to them on the end of a wooden spoon, while a holy water stoup was reserved for their exclusive use. They were compelled to wear a distinctive dress to which, in some places, was attached the foot of a goose or duck (whence they were sometimes called "Canards"). So pestilential was their touch considered that it was a crime for them to walk the common road barefooted or to drink from the same cup as non-Cagots. The Cagots were often restricted to the trades of carpenter, butcher, and rope-maker.

The Cagots were not an ethnic nor a religious group. They spoke the same language as the people in an area and generally kept the same religion as well. Their only distinguishing feature was their descent from families long identified as Cagots. Few consistent reasons were given as to why they were hated; accusations varied from Cagots being cretins, lepers, heretics, cannibals, to simply being intrinsically evil. The Cagots did have a culture of their own, but very little of it was written down or preserved; as a result, almost everything that is known about them relates to their persecution. The repression lasted through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Industrial Revolution, with the prejudice fading only in the 19th and 20th centuries.

🔗 Books 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Japan

The Mariko Aoki phenomenon (青木まりこ現象, Aoki Mariko genshō) is a Japanese expression referring to an urge to defecate that is suddenly felt after entering bookstores. The phenomenon's name derives from the name of the woman who mentioned the phenomenon in a magazine article in 1985. According to Japanese social psychologist Shozo Shibuya, the specific causes that trigger a defecation urge in bookstores are not yet clearly understood (as of 2014). There are also some who are skeptical about whether such a peculiar phenomenon really exists at all, and it is sometimes discussed as one type of urban myth.

The series of processes through which being in a bookstore leads to an awareness of a defecation urge is something that cannot be explained from a medical perspective as a single pathological concept, at least at present. According to a number of discussions on the topic, even if it can be sufficiently found that this phenomenon actually exists, it is a concept that would be difficult to be deemed a specific pathological entity (such as a "Mariko Aoki disease", for example). On the other hand, it is also a fact that a considerable number of the intellectuals (particularly clinicians) who discuss this phenomenon have adopted existing medical terminology such as from diagnostics and pathology. Borrowing from this approach, this article also uses expressions from existing medical terminology for convenience.

🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Psychology

The Barnum effect, also called the Forer effect, or less commonly, the Barnum-Forer effect, is a common psychological phenomenon whereby individuals give high accuracy ratings to descriptions of their personality that supposedly are tailored specifically to them, that are in fact vague and general enough to apply to a wide range of people. This effect can provide a partial explanation for the widespread acceptance of some paranormal beliefs and practices, such as astrology, fortune telling, aura reading, and some types of personality tests.

These characterizations are often used by practitioners as a con-technique to convince victims that they are endowed with a paranormal gift. Because the assessment statements are so vague, people interpret their own meaning, thus the statement becomes "personal" to them. Also, individuals are more likely to accept negative assessments of themselves if they perceive the person presenting the assessment as a high-status professional.

The term "Barnum effect" was coined in 1956 by psychologist Paul Meehl in his essay Wanted – A Good Cookbook, because he relates the vague personality descriptions used in certain "pseudo-successful" psychological tests to those given by showman P. T. Barnum.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Science

A human-based computation game or game with a purpose (GWAP) is a human-based computation technique of outsourcing steps within a computational process to humans in an entertaining way (gamification).

Luis von Ahn first proposed the idea of "human algorithm games", or games with a purpose (GWAPs), in order to harness human time and energy for addressing problems that computers cannot yet tackle on their own. He believes that human intellect is an important resource and contribution to the enhancement of computer processing and human computer interaction. He argues that games constitute a general mechanism for using brainpower to solve open computational problems. In this technique, human brains are compared to processors in a distributed system, each performing a small task of a massive computation. However, humans require an incentive to become part of a collective computation. Online games are used as a means to encourage participation in the process.

The tasks presented in these games are usually trivial for humans, but difficult for computers. These tasks include labeling images, transcribing ancient texts, common sense or human experience based activities, and more. Human-based computation games motivate people through entertainment rather than an interest in solving computation problems. This makes GWAPs more appealing to a larger audience. GWAPs can be used to help build the semantic web, annotate and classify collected data, crowdsource general knowledge, and improving other general computer processes. GWAPs have a vast range of applications in variety of areas such as security, computer vision, Internet accessibility, adult content filtering, and Internet search. In applications such as these, games with a purpose have lowered the cost of annotating data and increased the level of human participation.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Skepticism

Time Cube was a personal web page, founded in 1997 by the self-proclaimed "wisest man on earth," Otis Eugene "Gene" Ray. It was a self-published outlet for Ray's theory of everything, called "Time Cube," which polemically claims that all modern sciences are participating in a worldwide conspiracy to teach lies, by omitting his theory's alleged truth that each day actually consists of four days occurring simultaneously. Alongside these statements, Ray described himself as a "godlike being with superior intelligence who has absolute evidence and proof" for his views. Ray asserted repeatedly and variously that "academia" had not taken Time Cube seriously.

Otis Eugene Ray died on March 18, 2015 at age 87. Ray's website domain names expired in August 2015, and Time Cube was last archived by the Wayback Machine on January 12, 2016. (January 10–14)

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science 🔗 United States/Utah

The Utah Data Center (UDC), also known as the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, is a data storage facility for the United States Intelligence Community that is designed to store data estimated to be on the order of exabytes or larger. Its purpose is to support the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), though its precise mission is classified. The National Security Agency (NSA) leads operations at the facility as the executive agent for the Director of National Intelligence. It is located at Camp Williams near Bluffdale, Utah, between Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake and was completed in May 2019 at a cost of $1.5 billion.

The Utah Data Center, code-named Bumblehive, is the first Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cyber-security Initiative (IC CNCI) data center designed to support the US intelligence community. The "massive data repository" is designed to cope with the large increase in digital data that has accompanied the rise of the global internet.