Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Dogs 🔗 Russia/science and education in Russia 🔗 Genetics 🔗 Russia/physical geography of Russia 🔗 Russia/economy of Russia

The Russian domesticated red fox is a form of the wild red fox (Vulpes vulpes) which has been domesticated to an extent, under laboratory conditions. They are the result of an experiment which was designed to demonstrate the power of selective breeding to transform species, as described by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species. The experiment was purposely designed to replicate the process that had produced dogs from wolves, by recording the changes in foxes, when in each generation only the most tame foxes were allowed to breed. In short order, the descendant foxes became tamer and more dog-like in their behavior.

The program was started in 1959 in the Soviet Union by zoologist Dmitry Belyayev and it has been in continuous operation since. Today, the experiment is under the supervision of Lyudmila Trut, in Russia, at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Norway 🔗 Arctic 🔗 Sweden

Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition of 1897 was an effort to reach the North Pole in which all three Swedish expedition members – S. A. Andrée, Knut Frænkel, and Nils Strindberg – perished. Andrée, the first Swedish balloonist, proposed a voyage by hydrogen balloon from Svalbard to either Russia or Canada, which was to pass, with luck, straight over the North Pole on the way. The scheme was received with patriotic enthusiasm in Sweden, a northern nation that had fallen behind in the race for the North Pole.

Andrée ignored many early signs of the dangers associated with his balloon plan. Being able to steer the balloon to some extent was essential for a safe journey, but there was much evidence that the drag-rope steering technique he had invented was ineffective. Worse, the polar balloon Örnen (Eagle) was delivered directly to Svalbard from its manufacturer in Paris without being tested. When measurements showed it to be leaking more than expected, Andrée failed to acknowledge the risk.

After Andrée, Strindberg, and Frænkel lifted off from Svalbard in July 1897, the balloon lost hydrogen quickly and crashed on the pack ice after only two days. The explorers were unhurt but faced a grueling trek back south across the drifting icescape. Inadequately clothed, equipped, and prepared, and shocked by the difficulty of the terrain, they did not make it to safety. As the Arctic winter closed in on them in October, the group ended up exhausted on the deserted Kvitøya (White Island) in Svalbard and died there. For 33 years the fate of the expedition remained one of the unsolved riddles of the Arctic. The chance discovery in 1930 of the expedition's last camp created a media sensation in Sweden, where the dead men had been mourned and idolized.

Andrée's motives and mindset have been the subject of extensive fictional and historical discussion, particularly inspired by his apparent foolhardiness. An early example is Per Olof Sundman's fictionalized bestseller novel of 1967, The Flight of the Eagle, which portrays Andrée as weak and cynical, at the mercy of his sponsors and the media. Modern writers have been generally critical of Andrée.

🔗 Human rights 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Crime 🔗 Death 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Discrimination 🔗 Philosophy/Ethics 🔗 Soviet Union/history of Russia 🔗 Soviet Union/Russia 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Ethnic groups

The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомо́р; Голодомо́р в Украї́ні; derived from морити голодом, "to kill by starvation") was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians. It is also known as the Terror-Famine and Famine-Genocide in Ukraine, and sometimes referred to as the Great Famine or the Ukrainian Genocide of 1932–33. It was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33, which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country. During the Holodomor, millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 15 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.

Early estimates of the death toll by scholars and government officials varied greatly. According to higher estimates, up to 12 million ethnic Ukrainians were said to have perished as a result of the famine. A U.N. joint statement signed by 25 countries in 2003 declared that 7–10 million perished. Research has since narrowed the estimates to between 3.3 and 7.5 million. According to the findings of the Court of Appeal of Kiev in 2010, the demographic losses due to the famine amounted to 10 million, with 3.9 million direct famine deaths, and a further 6.1 million birth deficits.

The term Holodomor emphasises the famine's man-made and intentional aspects, such as rejection of outside aid, confiscation of all household foodstuffs, and restriction of population movement. Whether the Holodomor was genocide is still the subject of academic debate, as are the causes of the famine and intentionality of the deaths. Some scholars believe that the famine was planned by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. The loss of life has been compared to that of the Holocaust. However, some historians dispute its characterization as a genocide.

🔗 Industrial design

In industrial design, preferred numbers (also called preferred values or preferred series) are standard guidelines for choosing exact product dimensions within a given set of constraints. Product developers must choose numerous lengths, distances, diameters, volumes, and other characteristic quantities. While all of these choices are constrained by considerations of functionality, usability, compatibility, safety or cost, there usually remains considerable leeway in the exact choice for many dimensions.

Preferred numbers serve two purposes:

1. Using them increases the probability of compatibility between objects designed at different times by different people. In other words, it is one tactic among many in standardization, whether within a company or within an industry, and it is usually desirable in industrial contexts (unless the goal is vendor lock-in or planned obsolescence)
2. They are chosen such that when a product is manufactured in many different sizes, these will end up roughly equally spaced on a logarithmic scale. They therefore help to minimize the number of different sizes that need to be manufactured or kept in stock.

Preferred numbers represent preferences of simple numbers (such as 1, 2, and 5) multiplied by the powers of a convenient basis, usually 10.

🔗 Computer science

Bead sort, also called gravity sort, is a natural sorting algorithm, developed by Joshua J. Arulanandham, Cristian S. Calude and Michael J. Dinneen in 2002, and published in The Bulletin of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science. Both digital and analog hardware implementations of bead sort can achieve a sorting time of O(n); however, the implementation of this algorithm tends to be significantly slower in software and can only be used to sort lists of positive integers. Also, it would seem that even in the best case, the algorithm requires O(n²) space.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Denmark 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Beer

Free Beer, originally known as Vores øl - An open source beer (Danish for: Our Beer), is the first brand of beer with an "open"/"free" brand and recipe. The recipe and trademark elements are published under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA license.

The beer was created in 2004 by students at the IT University in Copenhagen together with artist collective Superflex, to illustrate how concepts of the FOSS movement might be applied outside the digital world. The "Free Beer" concept illustrates also the connection between the long tradition of freely sharing cooking recipes with the FOSS movement, which tries to establish this sharing tradition also for the "recipes" of software, the source code. The "Free beer" concept received an overall positive reception from international press and media for the political message, was presented on many exhibitions and conferences, and inspired many breweries in adopting the concept.

🔗 Death 🔗 Glass

Defenestration (from Old French fenestre, inherited from Latin fenestra) is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window. The term was coined around the time of an incident in Prague Castle in the year 1618 which became the spark that started the Thirty Years' War. This was done in "good Bohemian style"; this referred to the defenestration which had occurred in Prague's City Hall almost 200 years earlier (July 1419), which also on that occasion led to war: the Hussite war. The word comes from the New Latin de- (down from) and fenestra (window or opening). Likewise, it can also refer to the condition of being thrown out of a window, as in "The Defenestration of Ermintrude Inch".

While the act of defenestration connotes the forcible or peremptory removal of an adversary, and the term is sometimes used in just that sense, it also suggests breaking the windows in the process (de- also means removal).

🔗 Physics 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Metaphysics

The Boltzmann brain argument suggests that it is more likely for a single brain to spontaneously and briefly form in a void (complete with a false memory of having existed in our universe) than it is for our universe to have come about in the way modern science thinks it actually did. It was first proposed as a reductio ad absurdum response to Ludwig Boltzmann's early explanation for the low-entropy state of our universe.

In this physics thought experiment, a Boltzmann brain is a fully formed brain, complete with memories of a full human life in our universe, that arises due to extremely rare random fluctuations out of a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. Theoretically over a period of time on the order of hundreds of billions of years, by sheer chance atoms in a void could spontaneously come together in such a way as to assemble a functioning human brain. Like any brain in such circumstances, it would almost immediately stop functioning and begin to deteriorate.

The idea is ironically named after the Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), who in 1896 published a theory that tried to account for the fact that we find ourselves in a universe that is not as chaotic as the budding field of thermodynamics seemed to predict. He offered several explanations, one of them being that the universe, even one that is fully random (or at thermal equilibrium), would spontaneously fluctuate to a more ordered (or low-entropy) state. One criticism of this "Boltzmann universe" hypothesis is that the most common thermal fluctuations are as close to equilibrium overall as possible; thus, by any reasonable criterion, actual humans in the actual universe would be vastly less likely than "Boltzmann brains" existing alone in an empty universe.

Boltzmann brains gained new relevance around 2002, when some cosmologists started to become concerned that, in many existing theories about the Universe, human brains in the current Universe appear to be vastly outnumbered by Boltzmann brains in the future Universe who, by chance, have exactly the same perceptions that we do; this leads to the conclusion that statistically we ourselves are likely to be Boltzmann brains. Such a reductio ad absurdum argument is sometimes used to argue against certain theories of the Universe. When applied to more recent theories about the multiverse, Boltzmann brain arguments are part of the unsolved measure problem of cosmology. Boltzmann brains remain a thought experiment; physicists do not believe that we are actually Boltzmann brains, but rather use the thought experiment as a tool for evaluating competing scientific theories.

🔗 Media 🔗 Journalism

State media are typically understood as media outlets that are owned, operated, or significantly influenced by the government. They are sometimes distinguished from public service media, which are designed to serve the public interest, operate independently of government control, and are financed through a combination of public funding, licensing fees, and sometimes advertising. The crucial difference lies in the level of independence from government influence and the commitment to building trust and serving a broad public interest rather than the interests of a specific political party or government agenda.

State media serve as tools for public diplomacy and narrative shaping. These media outlets can broadcast via television, radio, print, and increasingly on social media, to convey government viewpoints to domestic and international audiences. The approach to using state media can vary, focusing on positive narratives, adjusting narratives retroactively, or spreading misinformation through sophisticated social media campaigns.

Public or state media may be financed through different sources, such as direct government funding, a licence fee paid by television viewers, donations, and commercial advertising.