Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Law 🔗 Geography

The Zone of Death is the name given to the 50 sq mi (129.50 km²) Idaho section of Yellowstone National Park in which, as a result of a purported loophole in the Constitution of the United States, a criminal could theoretically get away with any crime, up to and including murder.

🔗 Brands 🔗 Electronics

The Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) is an analog video disc playback system developed by RCA, in which video and audio could be played back on a TV set using a special needle and high-density groove system similar to phonograph records.

First conceived in 1964, the CED system was widely seen as a technological success which was able to increase the density of a long-playing record by two orders of magnitude. Despite this achievement, the CED system fell victim to poor planning, various conflicts with RCA management, and several technical difficulties that slowed development and stalled production of the system for 17 years—until 1981, by which time it had already been made obsolete by laser videodisc (DiscoVision, later called LaserVision and LaserDisc) as well as Betamax and VHS video cassette formats. Sales for the system were nowhere near projected estimates. In the spring of 1984, RCA announced it was discontinuing player production, but continuing the production of videodiscs until 1986, losing an estimated $600 million in the process. RCA had initially intended to release the SKT425 CED player with their high end Dimensia system in late 1984, but cancelled CED player production prior to the Dimensia system's release.

The format was commonly known as "videodisc", leading to much confusion with the contemporaneous LaserDisc format. LaserDiscs are read optically with a laser beam, whereas CED discs are read physically with a stylus (similar to a conventional gramophone record). The two systems are mutually incompatible.

RCA used the brand "SelectaVision" for the CED system, a name also used for some early RCA brand VCRs, and other experimental projects at RCA.

🔗 Michigan 🔗 Road transport 🔗 U.S. Roads

A Michigan left is an at-grade intersection design that replaces each left turn at an intersection between a (major) divided roadway and a secondary (minor) roadway with the combination of a right turn followed by a U-turn, or a U-turn followed by a right turn, depending on the situation.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Physics 🔗 Rocketry

The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, classical rocket equation, or ideal rocket equation is a mathematical equation that describes the motion of vehicles that follow the basic principle of a rocket: a device that can apply acceleration to itself using thrust by expelling part of its mass with high velocity can thereby move due to the conservation of momentum.

${\displaystyle \Delta v=v_{\text{e}}\ln {\frac {m_{0}}{m_{f}}}=I_{\text{sp}}g_{0}\ln {\frac {m_{0}}{m_{f}}}}$

where:

${\displaystyle \Delta v\ }$ is delta-v – the maximum change of velocity of the vehicle (with no external forces acting).

${\displaystyle m_{0}}$ is the initial total mass, including propellant, also known as wet mass.

${\displaystyle m_{f}}$ is the final total mass without propellant, also known as dry mass.

${\displaystyle v_{\text{e}}=I_{\text{sp}}g_{0}}$ is the effective exhaust velocity, where:

${\displaystyle I_{\text{sp}}}$ is the specific impulse in dimension of time.

${\displaystyle g_{0}}$ is standard gravity.

${\displaystyle \ln }$ is the natural logarithm function.

🔗 Internet culture

Warnock's dilemma, named for its originator Bryan Warnock, is the problem of interpreting a lack of response to a posting in a virtual community. The term originally referred to mailing list discussions, but has been applied to Usenet posts, blogs, web forums, and online content in general. The dilemma arises because a lack of response does not necessarily imply that no one is interested in the topic, but could also mean for example that readers find the content to be exceptionally good (leaving nothing for commenters to add).

On many Internet forums, only around one percent of users create new posts, while nine percent reply and 90 percent are lurkers that do not contribute to the discussion. When no users reply, the original poster has no way of knowing what lurkers think of their contribution.

Warnock's dilemma leads to online writers and publishers adopting more provocative writing strategies in order to ensure that they will get a response. However, this can also lead publishers to avoid producing the kind of content that might fail to generate comments due to its high quality. This problem arises particularly with sites that focus on viral content, such as BuzzFeed and Huffington Post.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry

Improvised firearms (sometimes called zip guns or pipe guns) are firearms manufactured other than by a firearms manufacturer or a gunsmith, and are typically constructed by adapting existing materials to the purpose. They range in quality from crude weapons that are as much a danger to the user as the target to high-quality arms produced by cottage industries using salvaged and repurposed materials.

Improvised firearms are commonly used as tools by criminals and insurgents and are often associated with such groups; other uses include self-defense in lawless areas and hunting game in poor rural areas.

🔗 Cryptography 🔗 Cryptography/Computer science

BB84 is a quantum key distribution scheme developed by Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard in 1984. It is the first quantum cryptography protocol. The protocol is provably secure, relying on the quantum property that information gain is only possible at the expense of disturbing the signal if the two states one is trying to distinguish are not orthogonal (see no-cloning theorem) and an authenticated public classical channel. It is usually explained as a method of securely communicating a private key from one party to another for use in one-time pad encryption.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 Mexico 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 India 🔗 Plants 🔗 United States/Texas 🔗 Science Policy

Norman Ernest Borlaug (; March 25, 1914 – September 12, 2009) was an American agronomist who led initiatives worldwide that contributed to the extensive increases in agricultural production termed the Green Revolution. Borlaug was awarded multiple honors for his work, including the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal.

Borlaug received his B.S. in forestry in 1937 and Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties. During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations.

Borlaug was often called "the father of the Green Revolution", and is credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. According to Jan Douglas, executive assistant to the president of the World Food Prize Foundation, the source of this number is Gregg Easterbrook's 1997 article "Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity." The article states that the "form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths." He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply.

Later in his life, he helped apply these methods of increasing food production in Asia and Africa.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Books

Basic Economics is a non-fiction book by American economist Thomas Sowell published by Basic Books in 2000. The original subtitle was A Citizen's Guide to the Economy, but from the third edition in 2007 on it was subtitled A Common Sense Guide to the Economy.

Basic Economics is focused on how societies create prosperity or poverty for their peoples by the way they organize their economies.

🔗 Music/Music genres

Bardcore (from the Celtic-origin word “bard” meaning ‘poet’ or ‘storyteller’) or tavernwave is a 2020 internet phenomenon consisting of medievalised remakes of hit pop songs.