Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Wine 🔗 Invention

A Pythagorean cup (also known as a Pythagoras cup, Greedy Cup, Tantalus cup or i koupa tis dikaiosynis) is a practical joke device in a form of a drinking cup, credited to Pythagoras of Samos. When it is filled beyond a certain point, a siphoning effect causes the cup to drain its entire contents through the base.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States

Intellipedia is an online system for collaborative data sharing used by the United States Intelligence Community (IC). It was established as a pilot project in late 2005 and formally announced in April 2006. Intellipedia consists of three wikis running on the separate JWICS (Intellipedia-TS), SIPRNet (Intellipedia-S), and DNI-U (Intellipedia-U) networks. The levels of classification allowed for information on the three wikis are Top Secret Sensitive Compartmented Information (TS SCI), Secret (S), and Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU or FOUO) information, respectively. Each of the wikis is used by individuals with appropriate clearances from the 16 agencies of the US intelligence community and other national-security related organizations, including Combatant Commands and other federal departments. The wikis are not open to the public.

Intellipedia is a project of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) Intelligence Community Enterprise Services (ICES) office headquartered in Fort Meade, Maryland. It includes information on the regions, people, and issues of interest to the communities using its host networks. Intellipedia uses MediaWiki, the same software used by the Wikipedia free-content encyclopedia project. To the contrary of mainstream Wikipedia, its intelligence analogue encourages editing that incorporates personal points of view regardless of rank as it was decided that, "much of the self-corrective knowledge in the Intelligence Community resides in personal points of view," and that, "not all good ideas originate at the top."

The Secret version connected to SIPRNet predominantly serves Department of Defense and the Department of State personnel, many of whom do not use the Top Secret JWICS network on a day-to-day basis. Users on unclassified networks can access Intellipedia from remote terminals outside their workspaces via a VPN, in addition to their normal workstations. Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) users share information on the unclassified Intelink-U wiki.

🔗 Books 🔗 Comics 🔗 Comics/DC Comics

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is a 1993 non-fiction work of comics by American cartoonist Scott McCloud. It explores formal aspects of comics, the historical development of the medium, its fundamental vocabulary, and various ways in which these elements have been used. It expounds theoretical ideas about comics as an art form and medium of communication, and is itself written in comic book form.

Understanding Comics received praise from notable comic and graphic novel authors such as Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Garry Trudeau (who reviewed the book for the New York Times). Although the book has prompted debate over many of McCloud’s conclusions, its discussions of "iconic" art and the concept of "closure" between panels have become common reference points in discussions of the medium.

The title of Understanding Comics is an homage to Marshall McLuhan's seminal 1964 work Understanding Media.

🔗 United States 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Law 🔗 History of Science 🔗 United States/Indiana

The Indiana Pi Bill is the popular name for bill #246 of the 1897 sitting of the Indiana General Assembly, one of the most notorious attempts to establish mathematical truth by legislative fiat. Despite its name, the main result claimed by the bill is a method to square the circle, rather than to establish a certain value for the mathematical constant π, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. The bill, written by the crank Edward J. Goodwin, does imply various incorrect values of π, such as 3.2. The bill never became law, due to the intervention of Professor C. A. Waldo of Purdue University, who happened to be present in the legislature on the day it went up for a vote.

The impossibility of squaring the circle using only compass and straightedge constructions, suspected since ancient times, was rigorously proven in 1882 by Ferdinand von Lindemann. Better approximations of π than those implied by the bill have been known since ancient times.

🔗 Computer science

In computing, a zooming user interface or zoomable user interface (ZUI, pronounced zoo-ee) is a type of graphical user interface (GUI) where users can change the scale of the viewed area in order to see more detail or less, and browse through different documents. Information elements appear directly on an infinite virtual desktop (usually created using vector graphics), instead of in windows. Users can pan across the virtual surface in two dimensions and zoom into objects of interest. For example, as you zoom into a text object it may be represented as a small dot, then a thumbnail of a page of text, then a full-sized page and finally a magnified view of the page.

ZUIs use zooming as the main metaphor for browsing through hyperlinked or multivariate information. Objects present inside a zoomed page can in turn be zoomed themselves to reveal further detail, allowing for recursive nesting and an arbitrary level of zoom.

When the level of detail present in the resized object is changed to fit the relevant information into the current size, instead of being a proportional view of the whole object, it's called semantic zooming.

Some consider the ZUI paradigm as a flexible and realistic successor to the traditional windowing GUI, being a Post-WIMP interface.

🔗 Computer science

In computer science, the Knuth–Morris–Pratt string-searching algorithm (or KMP algorithm) searches for occurrences of a "word" W within a main "text string" S by employing the observation that when a mismatch occurs, the word itself embodies sufficient information to determine where the next match could begin, thus bypassing re-examination of previously matched characters.

The algorithm was conceived by James H. Morris and independently discovered by Donald Knuth "a few weeks later" from automata theory. Morris and Vaughan Pratt published a technical report in 1970. The three also published the algorithm jointly in 1977. Independently, in 1969, Matiyasevich discovered a similar algorithm, coded by a two-dimensional Turing machine, while studying a string-pattern-matching recognition problem over a binary alphabet. This was the first linear-time algorithm for string matching.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Whitespace is an esoteric programming language developed by Edwin Brady and Chris Morris at the University of Durham (also developers of the Kaya and Idris programming languages). It was released on 1 April 2003 (April Fool's Day). Its name is a reference to whitespace characters. Unlike most programming languages, which ignore or assign little meaning to most whitespace characters, the Whitespace interpreter ignores any non-whitespace characters. Only spaces, tabs and linefeeds have meaning. A consequence of this property is that a Whitespace program can easily be contained within the whitespace characters of a program written in another language, except possibly in languages which depend on spaces for syntax validity such as Python, making the text a polyglot.

The language itself is an imperative stack-based language. The virtual machine on which the programs run has a stack and a heap. The programmer is free to push arbitrary-width integers onto the stack (currently there is no implementation of floating point numbers) and can also access the heap as a permanent store for variables and data structures.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Perl

Raku rules are the regular expression, string matching and general-purpose parsing facility of Raku, and are a core part of the language. Since Perl's pattern-matching constructs have exceeded the capabilities of formal regular expressions for some time, Raku documentation refers to them exclusively as regexes, distancing the term from the formal definition.

Raku provides a superset of Perl 5 features with respect to regexes, folding them into a larger framework called rules, which provide the capabilities of a parsing expression grammar, as well as acting as a closure with respect to their lexical scope. Rules are introduced with the rule keyword, which has a usage quite similar to subroutine definitions. Anonymous rules can be introduced with the regex (or rx) keyword, or simply be used inline as regexes were in Perl 5 via the m (matching) or s (substitution) operators.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Astronomy

J002E3 is the designation given to an object in space discovered on September 3, 2002, by amateur astronomer Bill Yeung. Initially thought to be an asteroid, it has since been tentatively identified as the S-IVB third stage of the Apollo 12 Saturn V rocket (designated S-IVB-507), based on spectrographic evidence consistent with the titanium dioxide in the paint used on the rockets. The stage was intended to be injected into a permanent heliocentric orbit in November 1969, but is now believed instead to have gone into an unstable high Earth orbit which left Earth's proximity in 1971 and again in June 2003, with an approximately 40-year cycle between heliocentric and geocentric orbit.