Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 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.

🔗 United States 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Physics

Project Longshot was a conceptual interstellar spacecraft design. It would have been an unmanned probe, intended to fly to and enter orbit around Alpha Centauri B powered by nuclear pulse propulsion.

🔗 Economics 🔗 Basic Income

Degrowth (French: décroissance) is a political, economic, and social movement based on ecological economics, anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideas. It is also considered an essential economic strategy responding to the limits-to-growth dilemma (see The Path to Degrowth in Overdeveloped Countries and post-growth). Degrowth thinkers and activists advocate for the downscaling of production and consumption – the contraction of economies – arguing that overconsumption lies at the root of long term environmental issues and social inequalities. Key to the concept of degrowth is that reducing consumption does not require individual martyring or a decrease in well-being. Rather, "degrowthers" aim to maximize happiness and well-being through non-consumptive means—sharing work, consuming less, while devoting more time to art, music, family, nature, culture and community.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Anti-war

Julian Jaynes (February 27, 1920 – November 21, 1997) was an American researcher in psychology at Yale and Princeton for nearly 25 years and best known for his 1976 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. His career was dedicated to the problem of consciousness, “…the difference between what others see of us and our sense of our inner selves and the deep feelings that sustain it. … Men have been conscious of the problem of consciousness almost since consciousness began.” Jaynes's solution touches on many disciplines, including neuroscience, linguistics, psychology, archeology, history, religion and analysis of ancient texts.

🔗 New York (state) 🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Numismatics/American currency

The Ithaca HOUR is a local currency formerly used in Ithaca, New York and was one of the longest-running local currency systems, though it is now no longer in circulation. It has inspired other similar systems in Madison, Wisconsin; Santa Barbara, California; Corvallis, Oregon; and a proposed system in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. One Ithaca HOUR is valued at US$10 and is generally recommended to be used as payment for one hour's work, although the rate is negotiable.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Time

Decimal time is the representation of the time of day using units which are decimally related. This term is often used specifically to refer to the French Republican calendar time system used in France from 1794 to 1800, during the French Revolution, which divided the day into 10 decimal hours, each decimal hour into 100 decimal minutes and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds (100000 decimal seconds per day), as opposed to the more familiar standard time, which divides the day into 24 hours, each hour into 60 minutes and each minute into 60 seconds (86400 SI seconds per day).

The main advantage of a decimal time system is that, since the base used to divide the time is the same as the one used to represent it, the representation of hours, minutes and seconds can be handled as a unified value. Therefore, it becomes simpler to interpret a timestamp and to perform conversions. For instance, 1^h23^m45^s is 1 decimal hour, 23 decimal minutes, and 45 decimal seconds, or 1.2345 decimal hours, or 123.45 decimal minutes or 12345 decimal seconds; 3 hours is 300 minutes or 30,000 seconds. This property also makes it straightforward to represent a timestamp as a fractional day, so that 2024-01-15.54321 can be interpreted as five decimal hours and 43 decimal minutes and 21 decimal seconds after the start of that day, or a fraction of 0.54321 (54.321%) through that day (which is shortly after traditional 13:00). It also adjusts well to digital time representation using epochs, in that the internal time representation can be used directly both for computation and for user-facing display.

🔗 Iran 🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Assyria 🔗 Bible 🔗 Syria 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Judaism 🔗 Iraq 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Palestine 🔗 Endangered languages 🔗 Christianity/Jesus 🔗 Lebanon 🔗 Christianity/Oriental Orthodoxy 🔗 Christianity/Syriac Christianity

The Aramaic original New Testament theory is the belief that the Christian New Testament was originally written in Aramaic.

There are several versions of the New Testament in Aramaic languages:

1. the Vetus Syra (Old Syriac), a translation from Greek into early Classical Syriac, containing most—but not all—of the text of the 4 Gospels, and represented in the Curetonian Gospels and the Sinaitic Palimpsest
2. the Christian Palestinian Aramaic Lectionary fragments represented in such manuscripts as Codex Climaci Rescriptus, Codex Sinaiticus Rescriptus, and later lectionary codices (Vatican sir. 19 [A]; St Catherine’s Monastery B, C, D)
3. the Classical Syriac Peshitta, a rendering in Aramaic of the Hebrew (and some Aramaic, e.g. in Daniel and Ezra) Old Testament, plus the New Testament purportedly in its original Aramaic, and still the standard in most Syriac churches
4. the Harklean, a strictly literal translation by Thomas of Harqel into Classical Syriac from Greek
5. the Assyrian Modern Version, a new translation into Assyrian Neo-Aramaic from the Greek published in 1997 and mainly in use among Protestants
6. and a number of other scattered versions in various dialects

The traditional New Testament of the Peshitta has 22 books, lacking the Second Epistle of John, the Third Epistle of John, the Second Epistle of Peter, the Epistle of Jude and the Book of Revelation, which are books of the Antilegomena. Closure of the Church of the East's New Testament Canon occurred before the 'Western Five' books could be incorporated. Its Gospels text also lacks the verses known as Jesus and the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–8:11) and Luke 22:17–18, but does have the 'long ending of Mark.'

🔗 Chess

Quiescence search is an algorithm typically used to extend search at unstable nodes in minimax game trees in game-playing computer programs. It is an extension of the evaluation function to defer evaluation until the position is stable enough to be evaluated statically, that is, without considering the history of the position or future moves from the position. It mitigates the effect of the horizon problem faced by AI engines for various games like chess and Go.

Human players usually have enough intuition to decide whether to abandon a bad-looking move, or search a promising move to a great depth. A quiescence search attempts to emulate this behavior by instructing a computer to search "volatile" positions to a greater depth than "quiet" ones to make sure there are no hidden traps and to get a better estimate of its value.

Any sensible criterion may be used to distinguish "quiet" positions from "volatile" positions. One common criterion is that moves exist in the position that can dramatically change the valuation of the position, such as captures in chess or Go. As the main motive of quiescence search is to get a stable value out of a static evaluation function, it may also make sense to detect wide fluctuations in values returned by a simple heuristic evaluator over several ply, i.e. a history criterion. The quiescence search continues as along as the position remains volatile according to the criterion. In order to get the quiescence search to terminate, plies are usually restricted to moves that deal directly with the threat, such as moves that capture and recapture (often called a 'capture search') in chess. In highly "unstable" games like Go and reversi, a rather large proportion of computer time may be spent on quiescence searching.

🔗 Databases

Third normal form (3NF) is a database schema design approach for relational databases which uses normalizing principles to reduce the duplication of data, avoid data anomalies, ensure referential integrity, and simplify data management. It was defined in 1971 by Edgar F. Codd, an English computer scientist who invented the relational model for database management.

A database relation (e.g. a database table) is said to meet third normal form standards if all the attributes (e.g. database columns) are functionally dependent on solely the primary key. Codd defined this as a relation in second normal form where all non-prime attributes depend only on the candidate keys and do not have a transitive dependency on another key.

A hypothetical example of a failure to meet third normal form would be a hospital database having a table of patients which included a column for the telephone number of their doctor. The phone number is dependent on the doctor, rather than the patient, thus would be better stored in a table of doctors. The negative outcome of such a design is that a doctor's number will be duplicated in the database if they have multiple patients, thus increasing both the chance of input error and the cost and risk of updating that number should it change (compared to a third normal form-compliant data model that only stores a doctor's number once on a doctor table).

Codd later realized that 3NF did not eliminate all undesirable data anomalies and developed a stronger version to address this in 1974, known as Boyce–Codd normal form.

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Some of the many ways to read Wikipedia while offline:

• Kiwix: (§ Kiwix) – index of images (2024)
• XOWA: (§ XOWA) – index of images (2015)
• WikiTaxi: § WikiTaxi (for Windows)
• aarddict: § Aard Dictionary / Aard 2
• BzReader: § BzReader and MzReader (for Windows)
• WikiFilter: § WikiFilter
• Wikipedia on rockbox: § Wikiviewer for Rockbox
• Selected Wikipedia articles as a printed document: Help:Printing

Some of them are mobile applications – see "List of Wikipedia mobile applications".