Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Canada 🔗 Business

Herbert Henry Dow (February 26, 1866 – October 15, 1930) was a Canadian-born American chemical industrialist, best known as the founder of the American multinational conglomerate Dow Chemical. He was a graduate of Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, Ohio. He was a prolific inventor of chemical processes, compounds, and products, and was a successful businessman.

🔗 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.

🔗 Mass surveillance 🔗 Film 🔗 Germany 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Film/German cinema

The Lives of Others (German: Das Leben der Anderen, pronounced [das ˈleːbm̩ deːɐ̯ ˈʔandəʁən] ) is a 2006 German drama film written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck marking his feature film directorial debut. The plot is about the monitoring of East Berlin residents by agents of the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. It stars Ulrich Mühe as Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, Ulrich Tukur as his superior Anton Grubitz, Sebastian Koch as the playwright Georg Dreyman, and Martina Gedeck as Dreyman's lover, a prominent actress named Christa-Maria Sieland.

The film was released by Buena Vista International in Germany on 23 March 2006. At the same time, the screenplay was published by Suhrkamp Verlag. The Lives of Others won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. The film had earlier won seven Deutscher Filmpreis awards—including those for best film, best director, best screenplay, best actor, and best supporting actor—after setting a new record with 11 nominations. It also won the BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language and European Film Award for Best Film, while it was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Lives of Others cost US$2 million and grossed more than US$77 million worldwide.

Released 17 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, marking the end of the German Democratic Republic, it was the first notable drama film about the subject after a series of comedies such as Good Bye, Lenin! and Sonnenallee. This approach was widely applauded in Germany, and the film was complimented for its accurate tone despite some criticism that Wiesler's character was depicted unrealistically and with undue sympathy. The film's authenticity was considered praiseworthy given that the director grew up outside of East Germany and was 16 when the Berlin Wall fell.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Television

A Nipkow disk (sometimes Anglicized as Nipkov disk; patented in 1884), also known as scanning disk, is a mechanical, rotating, geometrically operating image scanning device, patented in 1885 by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow. This scanning disk was a fundamental component in mechanical television through the 1920s and 1930s.

🔗 Electronics 🔗 Electrical engineering

The trancitor as the combined word of a "transfer-capacitor" is to be considered as another active-device category besides the transistor as a "transfer-resistor". As observed in the table shown, four kinds of active devices are theoretically deduced. Among them, trancitors are missing to be the third and fourth kinds, whereas transistors, such as bipolar junction transistor (BJT) and field-effect transistor (FET), were already invented as the first and second kinds, respectively. Unlike the transistor switching the current at its output (i.e., current source), the trancitor transfers its input to the voltage output (i.e., voltage source), so an inverse relationship with each other.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Meteorology 🔗 Radio

A whistler is a very low frequency or VLF electromagnetic (radio) wave generated by lightning. Frequencies of terrestrial whistlers are 1 kHz to 30 kHz, with a maximum amplitude usually at 3 kHz to 5 kHz. Although they are electromagnetic waves, they occur at audio frequencies, and can be converted to audio using a suitable receiver. They are produced by lightning strikes (mostly intracloud and return-path) where the impulse travels along the Earth's magnetic field lines from one hemisphere to the other. They undergo dispersion of several kHz due to the slower velocity of the lower frequencies through the plasma environments of the ionosphere and magnetosphere. Thus they are perceived as a descending tone which can last for a few seconds. The study of whistlers categorizes them into Pure Note, Diffuse, 2-Hop, and Echo Train types.

Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft detected whistler-like activity in the vicinity of Jupiter known as "Jovian Whistlers", implying the presence of lightning there.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics

The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. According to this theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness. Brickman and Donald T. Campbell coined the term in their essay "Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society" (1971). The concept dates back centuries, to such writers as St. Augustine, cited in Robert Burton's 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy: "A true saying it is, Desire hath no rest, is infinite in itself, endless, and as one calls it, a perpetual rack, or horse-mill."

The hedonic (or happiness) set point has gained interest throughout the field of positive psychology where it has been developed and revised further. Given that hedonic adaptation generally demonstrates that a person's long-term happiness is not significantly affected by otherwise impacting events, positive psychology has concerned itself with the discovery of things that can lead to lasting changes in happiness levels.

🔗 Books 🔗 Business

The 48 Laws of Power (1998) is a non-fiction book by American author Robert Greene. The book is a bestseller, selling over 1.2 million copies in the United States, and is popular with prison inmates and celebrities.

🔗 Statistics

A winsorized mean is a winsorized statistical measure of central tendency, much like the mean and median, and even more similar to the truncated mean. It involves the calculation of the mean after winsorizing — replacing given parts of a probability distribution or sample at the high and low end with the most extreme remaining values, typically doing so for an equal amount of both extremes; often 10 to 25 percent of the ends are replaced. The winsorized mean can equivalently be expressed as a weighted average of the truncated mean and the quantiles at which it is limited, which corresponds to replacing parts with the corresponding quantiles.

🔗 Video games

Painstation is an art object and arcade game based on Pong developed by the artists' group "/////////fur//// art entertainment interfaces", with pain feedback.