Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Greece 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Spirits

The ouzo effect (also louche effect and spontaneous emulsification) is a milky (louche) oil-in-water emulsion that is formed when water is added to ouzo and other anise-flavored liqueurs and spirits, such as pastis, rakı, arak, sambuca and absinthe. Such emulsions occur with only minimal mixing and are highly stable.

🔗 Brands 🔗 Automobiles

The Isetta is an Italian-designed microcar built under license in a number of different countries, including Argentina, Spain, Belgium, France, Brazil, Germany, and the United Kingdom. Because of its egg shape and bubble-like windows, it became known as a bubble car, a name also given to other similar vehicles.

In 1955, the BMW Isetta became the world's first mass-production car to achieve a fuel consumption of 3 L/100 km (94 mpg_‑imp; 78 mpg_‑US). It was the top-selling single-cylinder car in the world, with 161,728 units sold.

Initially manufactured by the Italian firm Iso SpA, the name Isetta is the Italian diminutive form of Iso, meaning "little Iso".

🔗 United States 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Law Enforcement

LOVEINT is the practice of intelligence service employees making use of their extensive monitoring capabilities to spy on their love interest or spouse. The term was coined in resemblance to intelligence terminology such as SIGINT, COMINT or HUMINT.

🔗 Fisheries and Fishing

Trout tickling is the art of rubbing the underbelly of a trout with fingers. If done properly, the trout will go into a trance after a minute or so, and can then easily be thrown onto the nearest bit of dry land.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Ships 🔗 Mills

A rotor ship is a type of ship designed to use the Magnus effect for propulsion. The ship is propelled, at least in part, by large powered vertical rotors, sometimes known as rotor sails. German engineer Anton Flettner was the first to build a ship that attempted to tap this force for propulsion, and ships using his type of rotor are sometimes known as Flettner ships.

The Magnus effect is a force acting on a spinning body in a moving airstream, which produces a force perpendicular to both the direction of the airstream and the axis of the rotor.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 European history 🔗 Royalty and Nobility 🔗 Germany/Holy Roman Empire

In July 1184, Henry VI, King of Germany (later Holy Roman Emperor), held court at a Hoftag in the Petersberg Citadel in Erfurt. On the morning of 26 July, the combined weight of the assembled nobles caused the wooden second story floor of the building to collapse and most of them fell through into the latrine cesspit below the ground floor, where about 60 of them drowned in liquid excrement. This event is called Erfurter Latrinensturz (lit. 'Erfurt latrine fall') in several German sources.

🔗 Computer science

The man or boy test was proposed by computer scientist Donald Knuth as a means of evaluating implementations of the ALGOL 60 programming language. The aim of the test was to distinguish compilers that correctly implemented "recursion and non-local references" from those that did not.

There are quite a few ALGOL60 translators in existence which have been designed to handle recursion and non-local references properly, and I thought perhaps a little test-program may be of value. Hence I have written the following simple routine, which may separate the man-compilers from the boy-compilers.

🔗 Computing

In computer programming, program slicing is the computation of the set of program statements, the program slice, that may affect the values at some point of interest, referred to as a slicing criterion. Program slicing can be used in debugging to locate source of errors more easily. Other applications of slicing include software maintenance, optimization, program analysis, and information flow control.

Slicing techniques have been seeing a rapid development since the original definition by Mark Weiser. At first, slicing was only static, i.e., applied on the source code with no other information than the source code. Bogdan Korel and Janusz Laski introduced dynamic slicing, which works on a specific execution of the program (for a given execution trace). Other forms of slicing exist, for instance path slicing.

🔗 Books 🔗 Sociology

The Power Elite is a 1956 book by sociologist C. Wright Mills, in which Mills calls attention to the interwoven interests of the leaders of the military, corporate, and political elements of society and suggests that the ordinary citizen in modern times is a relatively powerless subject of manipulation by those three entities.

🔗 Television 🔗 Japan 🔗 Television/Television game shows

Takeshi's Castle (Japanese: 風雲!たけし城, Hepburn: Fūun! Takeshi-jō) is a Japanese game show that aired between 1986 and 1990 on the Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS). It features the Japanese comedian Takeshi Kitano (also known as Beat Takeshi) as a count who sets up difficult physical challenges that players (or a volunteer army) must overcome in order to reach him in his castle.

The show became a cult television hit around the world. It was highly influential in global popular culture, inspiring a genre of game shows involving physical challenges and painful entertainment, as well as other media. On 2 April 2005, a special live "revival" was broadcast for TBS's 50th anniversary celebrations. A reboot of the show was released on Amazon Prime Video on 21 April 2023. German-Japanese actor Subaru Kimura joined the returning Tani as co-leader of the contestants.