Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Telecommunications 🔗 Lists

This list ranks the countries of the world by the number of mobile phone numbers in use. Note that it is not the number of phone devices that are being given here, but the number of phone numbers in a country. In some countries, one person might have two mobile phones. Also, some mobile phone numbers may be used by machines as a modem (examples: intrusion detection systems, home automation, leak detection).

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science

occam is a programming language which is concurrent and builds on the communicating sequential processes (CSP) process algebra, and shares many of its features. It is named after philosopher William of Ockham after whom Occam's razor is named.

occam is an imperative procedural language (such as Pascal). It was developed by David May and others at Inmos (trademark INMOS), advised by Tony Hoare, as the native programming language for their transputer microprocessors, but implementations for other platforms are available. The most widely known version is occam 2; its programming manual was written by Steven Ericsson-Zenith and others at Inmos.

🔗 Statistics

The bean machine, also known as the Galton Board or quincunx, is a device invented by Sir Francis Galton to demonstrate the central limit theorem, in particular that with sufficient sample size the binomial distribution approximates a normal distribution. Among its applications, it afforded insight into regression to the mean or "regression to mediocrity".

🔗 Languages 🔗 Melanesia 🔗 Melanesia/Papua New Guinea

Manam is a Kairiru–Manam language spoken mainly on the volcanic Manam Island, northeast of New Guinea.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Australia 🔗 Crime 🔗 Australia/Australian crime 🔗 South Africa 🔗 Zimbabwe

Paul Calder Le Roux (born 24 December 1972) is a former programmer, former criminal cartel boss and informant to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

In 1999, he created E4M, a free and open-source disk encryption software program for Microsoft Windows, and is sometimes credited for open-source TrueCrypt, which is based on E4M's code, though he denies involvement with TrueCrypt.

He was arrested on 26 September 2012 for conspiracy to import narcotics into the United States, and agreed to cooperate with authorities in exchange for a lesser sentence and immunity to any crimes he might admit to afterwards. He subsequently admitted to arranging or participating in seven murders, carried out as part of an extensive illegal business empire.

Le Roux was sentenced to 25 years in prison in June 2020.

🔗 Books

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state control.

Postman's book has been translated into eight languages and sold some 200,000 copies worldwide. In 2005, Postman's son Andrew reissued the book in a 20th anniversary edition.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Travel and Tourism

Sabre Global Distribution System, owned by Sabre Corporation, is used by travel agents and companies around the world to search, price, book, and ticket travel services provided by airlines, hotels, car rental companies, rail providers and tour operators. Sabre aggregates airlines, hotels, online and offline travel agents and travel buyers.

🔗 Politics 🔗 Socialism 🔗 Holidays 🔗 Organized Labour 🔗 Neopaganism

May Day is a public holiday in some regions, usually celebrated on 1 May or the first Monday of May. It is an ancient festival marking the first day of summer, and a current traditional spring holiday in many European cultures. Dances, singing, and cake are usually part of the festivities.

In 1889, May Day was chosen as the date for International Workers' Day by the socialists and communists of the Second International, as well as anarchists, labor activists, and leftists in general around the world, to commemorate the Haymarket affair in Chicago and the struggle for an eight-hour working day. International Workers' Day is also called "May Day", but it is a different celebration from the traditional May Day.

🔗 Writing systems 🔗 Writing

Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content", or "without the smallest unit of meaning". With the non-specificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning, which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would deduce meaning from an abstract work of art. Where asemic writing distinguishes itself among traditions of abstract art is in the asemic author's use of gestural constraint, and the retention of physical characteristics of writing such as lines and symbols. Asemic writing is a hybrid art form that fuses text and image into a unity, and then sets it free to arbitrary subjective interpretations. It may be compared to free writing or writing for its own sake, instead of writing to produce verbal context. The open nature of asemic works allows for meaning to occur across linguistic understanding; an asemic text may be "read" in a similar fashion regardless of the reader's natural language. Multiple meanings for the same symbolism are another possibility for an asemic work, that is, asemic writing can be polysemantic or have zero meaning, infinite meanings, or its meaning can evolve over time. Asemic works leave for the reader to decide how to translate and explore an asemic text; in this sense, the reader becomes co-creator of the asemic work.

In 1997, visual poets Tim Gaze and Jim Leftwich first applied the word asemic to name their quasi-calligraphic writing gestures. They then began to distribute them to poetry magazines both online and in print. The authors explored sub-verbal and sub-letteral forms of writing, and textual asemia as a creative option and as an intentional practice. Since the late 1990s, asemic writing has blossomed into a worldwide literary/art movement. It has especially grown in the early part of the 21st century, though there is an acknowledgement of a long and complex history, which precedes the activities of the current asemic movement, especially with regards to abstract calligraphy, wordless writing, and verbal writing damaged beyond the point of legibility. Jim Leftwich has recently stated that an asemic condition of an asemic work is an impossible goal, and that it is not possible to create an art/literary work entirely without meaning. He has begun to use the term "pansemic" too. He also explained (in 2020): "The term 'pansemia' didn't replace the term 'asemia' in my thinking (nor did 'pansemic' replace 'asemic'); it merely assisted me in expanding my understanding of the theory and practice of asemic writing". Others such as author Travis Jeppesen have found the term asemic to be problematic because "it seems to infer writing with no meaning."