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🔗 Germany 🔗 Folklore

In German folklore, a wolpertinger (also called wolperdinger or woiperdinger) is an animal said to inhabit the alpine forests of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg in Germany.

🔗 Religion 🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Books 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Mythology 🔗 Arab world

The "Debate between sheep and grain" or "Myth of cattle and grain" is a Sumerian creation myth, written on clay tablets in the mid to late 3rd millennium BCE.

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

The "gay bomb" and "halitosis bomb" are formal names for two non-lethal psychochemical weapons that a United States Air Force research laboratory speculated about producing. The theories involve discharging female sex pheromones over enemy forces in order to make them sexually attracted to each other.

In 1994 the Wright Laboratory in Ohio, a predecessor to today's United States Air Force Research Laboratory, produced a three-page proposal on a variety of possible nonlethal chemical weapons, which was later obtained by the Sunshine Project through a Freedom of Information Act request.

🔗 Databases 🔗 Databases/Computer science

The object-relational impedance mismatch is a set of conceptual and technical difficulties that are often encountered when a relational database management system (RDBMS) is being served by an application program (or multiple application programs) written in an object-oriented programming language or style, particularly because objects or class definitions must be mapped to database tables defined by a relational schema.

The term object-relational impedance mismatch is derived from the electrical engineering term impedance matching.

User:Diikiw/Wiikid, formerly Wikiid, is an article that was created on the web site Wikipedia in 2008. It is notable in its attempt to become the first Wikipedia page to gain notoriety solely for the fact that it was a page on Wikipedia; this was intended to spark a debate as to whether or not Wikipedia could be considered a source notable enough to allow a page’s permanent entry on the site. It can be looked at both as metahumor and as a piece of postmodern art.

🔗 Sociology 🔗 Finland

Wiio's laws are humoristically formulated observations about how humans communicate.

Wiio's laws are usually summarized with "Human communications usually fail except by accident", which is the main observation made by Professor Osmo Antero Wiio in 1978.

🔗 Psychology

An autostereogram is a single-image stereogram (SIS), designed to create the visual illusion of a three-dimensional (3D) scene from a two-dimensional image. In order to perceive 3D shapes in these autostereograms, one must overcome the normally automatic coordination between accommodation (focus) and horizontal vergence (angle of one's eyes). The illusion is one of depth perception and involves stereopsis: depth perception arising from the different perspective each eye has of a three-dimensional scene, called binocular parallax.

The simplest type of autostereogram consists of horizontally repeating patterns (often separate images) and is known as a wallpaper autostereogram. When viewed with proper convergence, the repeating patterns appear to float above or below the background. The well-known Magic Eye books feature another type of autostereogram called a random dot autostereogram. One such autostereogram is illustrated above right. In this type of autostereogram, every pixel in the image is computed from a pattern strip and a depth map. A hidden 3D scene emerges when the image is viewed with the correct convergence.

Autostereograms are similar to normal stereograms except they are viewed without a stereoscope. A stereoscope presents 2D images of the same object from slightly different angles to the left eye and the right eye, allowing us to reconstruct the original object via binocular disparity. When viewed with the proper vergence, an autostereogram does the same, the binocular disparity existing in adjacent parts of the repeating 2D patterns.

There are two ways an autostereogram can be viewed: wall-eyed and cross-eyed. Most autostereograms (including those in this article) are designed to be viewed in only one way, which is usually wall-eyed. Wall-eyed viewing requires that the two eyes adopt a relatively parallel angle, while cross-eyed viewing requires a relatively convergent angle. An image designed for wall-eyed viewing if viewed correctly will appear to pop out of the background, while if viewed cross-eyed it will instead appear as a cut-out behind the background and may be difficult to bring entirely into focus.

🔗 Companies

PBworks (formerly PBwiki) is a commercial real-time collaborative editing (RTCE) system created by David Weekly, with Ramit Sethi and Nathan Schmidt, who joined shortly thereafter as co-founders. Based in San Mateo, California, United States, the company operates on a freemium basis, offering basic features free of charge and more advanced features for a fee.

PBworks' investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures and the Seraph Group, as well as angel investors Ron Conway and Chris Yeh.

🔗 Economics

The Penn effect is the economic finding that real income ratios between high and low income countries are systematically exaggerated by gross domestic product (GDP) conversion at market exchange rates. It is associated with what became the Penn World Table, and it has been a consistent econometric result since at least the 1950s.

The "Balassa–Samuelson effect" is a model cited as the principal cause of the Penn effect by neo-classical economics, as well as being a synonym of "Penn effect".

🔗 Mammals

Musth or must (an Urdu word, from Persian, lit. drunk) is a periodic condition in bull (male) elephants characterized by highly aggressive behavior and accompanied by a large rise in reproductive hormones.

Testosterone levels in an elephant in musth can be on average 60 times greater than in the same elephant at other times (in specific individuals these testosterone levels can even reach as much as 140 times the normal). However, whether this hormonal surge is the sole cause of musth, or merely a contributing factor, is unknown.

Scientific investigation of musth is problematic because even the most placid elephants become highly violent toward humans and other elephants during musth.