Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Chemicals

Aluminium oxynitride (marketed under the name ALON by Surmet Corporation) is a transparent ceramic composed of aluminium, oxygen and nitrogen. ALON is optically transparent (≥ 80%) in the near-ultraviolet, visible, and midwave-infrared regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. It is four times as hard as fused silica glass, 85% as hard as sapphire, and nearly 115% as hard as magnesium aluminate spinel. Since it has a cubic spinel structure, it can be fabricated to transparent windows, plates, domes, rods, tubes, and other forms using conventional ceramic powder processing techniques.

ALON is the hardest polycrystalline transparent ceramic available commercially. Because of its relatively low weight, distinctive optical and mechanical properties, and resistance to oxidation or radiation, it shows promise for applications such as bulletproof, blast-resistant, and optoelectronic windows. ALON-based armor has been shown to stop multiple armor-piercing projectiles of up to .50 BMG.

ALON is commercially available in sizes as large as 18-by-35-inch (460 mm × 890 mm; 46 cm × 89 cm) monolithic windows.

🔗 Photography 🔗 Photography/History of photography 🔗 Gemology and Jewelry

A stanhope or stanho-scope is an optical device that enables the viewing of microphotographs without using a microscope. They were invented by René Dagron in 1857. Dagron bypassed the need for an expensive microscope to view the microscopic photographs by attaching the microphotograph at the end of a modified Stanhope lens. He called the devices bijoux photo-microscopiques or microscopic photo-jewelry.

🔗 Physics

The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester is a quantum mechanics thought experiment that uses interaction-free measurements to verify that a bomb is functional without having to detonate it. It was conceived in 1993 by Avshalom Elitzur and Lev Vaidman. Since their publication, real-world experiments have confirmed that their theoretical method works as predicted.

The bomb tester takes advantage of two characteristics of elementary particles, such as photons or electrons: nonlocality and wave-particle duality. By placing the particle in a quantum superposition, it is possible for the experiment to verify that the bomb works without triggering its detonation, although there is still a 50% chance that the bomb will detonate in the effort.

🔗 Mathematics

Langton's ant is a two-dimensional universal Turing machine with a very simple set of rules but complex emergent behavior. It was invented by Chris Langton in 1986 and runs on a square lattice of black and white cells. The universality of Langton's ant was proven in 2000. The idea has been generalized in several different ways, such as turmites which add more colors and more states.

This page displays the current size of a hypothetical print edition of the English Wikipedia (without images) in print volumes, per mathematical calculation.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Books 🔗 Politics 🔗 Women writers 🔗 Jewish history 🔗 Israel

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil is a 1963 book by political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the major organizers of the Holocaust, for The New Yorker. A revised and enlarged edition was published in 1964.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Time 🔗 Holidays 🔗 Festivals

A solstice is an event occurring when the Sun appears to reach its most northerly or southerly excursion relative to the celestial equator on the celestial sphere. Two solstices occur annually, around June 21 and December 21. In many countries, the seasons of the year are determined by reference to the solstices and the equinoxes.

The term solstice can also be used in a broader sense, as the day when this occurs. The day of a solstice in either hemisphere has either the most sunlight of the year (summer solstice) or the least sunlight of the year (winter solstice) for any place other than the Equator. Alternative terms, with no ambiguity as to which hemisphere is the context, are "June solstice" and "December solstice", referring to the months in which they take place every year.

The word solstice is derived from the Latin sol ("sun") and sistere ("to stand still"), because at the solstices, the Sun's declination appears to "stand still"; that is, the seasonal movement of the Sun's daily path (as seen from Earth) pauses at a northern or southern limit before reversing direction.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 JavaScript

Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform, JavaScript runtime environment that executes JavaScript code outside of a web browser. Node.js lets developers use JavaScript to write command line tools and for server-side scripting—running scripts server-side to produce dynamic web page content before the page is sent to the user's web browser. Consequently, Node.js represents a "JavaScript everywhere" paradigm, unifying web-application development around a single programming language, rather than different languages for server- and client-side scripts.

Though .js is the standard filename extension for JavaScript code, the name "Node.js" doesn't refer to a particular file in this context and is merely the name of the product. Node.js has an event-driven architecture capable of asynchronous I/O. These design choices aim to optimize throughput and scalability in web applications with many input/output operations, as well as for real-time Web applications (e.g., real-time communication programs and browser games).

The Node.js distributed development project was previously governed by the Node.js Foundation, and has now merged with the JS Foundation to form the OpenJS Foundation, which is facilitated by the Linux Foundation's Collaborative Projects program.

Corporate users of Node.js software include GoDaddy, Groupon, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Netflix, PayPal, Rakuten, SAP, Voxer, Walmart, and Yahoo!.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Technology 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Organizations 🔗 Organized Labour

A tech union is a trade union for tech workers typically employed in high tech or information and communications technology sectors. Due to the evolving nature of technology and work, different government agencies have conflicting definitions for who is a tech worker. Most definitions include computer scientists, people working in IT, telecommunications, media and video gaming. Broader definitions include all workers required for a tech company to operate, including on-site service staff, contractors, and platform economy workers.

🔗 Computing

In computing, a pizza box is a style of case design for desktop computers or network switches. Pizza box cases tend to be wide and flat, normally 1.5 to 4 inches or 4 to 10 centimetres in height, resembling pizza delivery boxes and thus the name. This is in contrast to a tower system, whose case height is much greater than the width and has an "upright" appearance. In modern usage, the term "pizza box" is normally reserved for very flat cases with height no more than 2 inches (51 mm), while those taller than 2 inches are referred to as desktop cases instead.

The common setup of a pizza box system is to have the display monitor placed directly on top of the case, which serves as a podium to elevate the monitor more towards the user's eye level, and to have other peripherals placed in front and alongside the case. Occasionally, the pizza box may be laid on its sides in a tower-like orientation.

Data General's Aviion Unix server was the first to coin the expression when it advertised in 1991 with the tagline "Who just fit mainframe power in a pizza box?", but most computers generally referred to as pizza box systems were high-end desktop systems such as Sun Microsystems workstations sold in the 1990s, most notably the SPARCstation 1 and SPARCstation 5. Other notable examples have been among the highest-performing desktop computers of their generations, including the SGI Indy, the NeXTstation, and the Amiga 1000, but the form factor was also seen in budget and lower-end lines such as the Macintosh LC family.

The original SPARCstation 1 design included an expansion bus technology, SBus, expressly designed for the form factor; expansion cards were small, especially in comparison to other expansion cards in use at the time such as VMEbus, and were mounted horizontally instead of vertically. PC-compatible computers in this type of case typically use the PCI expansion bus and are usually either a) limited to one or two horizontally placed expansion cards or b) require special low-profile expansion cards, shorter than the PCI cards regular PCs use.

The density of computing power and stackability of pizza box systems also made them attractive for use in data centers. Systems originally designed for desktop use were placed on shelves inside of 19-inch racks, sometimes requiring that part of their cases be cut off for them to fit. Since the late 1990s, pizza boxes have been a common form factor in office cubicles, data centers or industrial applications, where desktop space, rack room and density are critical. Servers in this form factor, as well as higher-end Ethernet switches, are now designed for rack mounting. Rack mount 1U computers come in all types of configurations and depths.

The pizza box form factor for smaller personal systems and thin clients remains in use well into the 21st century, though it is increasingly being superseded by laptops, nettops or All-in-One PC designs that embed the already size-reduced computer onto the keyboard or display monitor.