Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Germany 🔗 Literature 🔗 Linguistics

"The Awful German Language" is an 1880 essay by Mark Twain published as Appendix D in A Tramp Abroad. The essay is a humorous exploration of the frustrations a native speaker of English has with learning German as a second language.

🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Lists 🔗 Politics

This is a list of people and organisations named in the Paradise Papers as connected to offshore companies. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists stated in their politicians database, as a disclaimer, "There are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts. We do not intend to suggest or imply that any people, companies or other entities included in the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly."

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Sociology

The friendship paradox is the phenomenon first observed by the sociologist Scott L. Feld in 1991 that most people have fewer friends than their friends have, on average. It can be explained as a form of sampling bias in which people with greater numbers of friends have an increased likelihood of being observed among one's own friends. In contradiction to this, most people believe that they have more friends than their friends have.

The same observation can be applied more generally to social networks defined by other relations than friendship: for instance, most people's sexual partners have had (on the average) a greater number of sexual partners than they have.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history

Millennium Challenge 2002 (MC02) was a major war game exercise conducted by the United States Armed Forces in mid-2002. The exercise, which ran from 24 July to 15 August and cost US$250 million (equivalent to about $355M in 2019), involved both live exercises and computer simulations. MC02 was meant to be a test of future military "transformation"—a transition toward new technologies that enable network-centric warfare and provide more effective command and control of current and future weaponry and tactics. The simulated combatants were the United States, referred to as "Blue", and a fictitious state in the Persian Gulf, "Red", often characterized as Iran or Iraq.

🔗 Physics

A Klemperer rosette is a gravitational system of heavier and lighter bodies orbiting in a regular repeating pattern around a common barycenter. It was first described by W. B. Klemperer in 1962, and is a special case of a central configuration.

Klemperer described the system as follows:

Such symmetry is also possessed by a peculiar family of geometrical configurations which may be described as 'rosettes'. In these an even number of 'planets' of two (or more) kinds, one (or some) heavier than the other, but all of each set of equal mass, are placed at the corners of two (or more) interdigitating regular polygons so that the lighter and heavier ones alternate (or follow each other in a cyclic manner).

The simplest rosette would be a series of four alternating heavier and lighter bodies, 90 degrees from one another, in a rhombic configuration [Heavy, Light, Heavy, Light], where the two larger bodies have the same mass, and likewise the two smaller bodies have the same mass. The number of "mass types" can be increased, so long as the arrangement pattern is cyclic: e.g. [ 1,2,3 ... 1,2,3 ], [ 1,2,3,4,5 ... 1,2,3,4,5 ], [ 1,2,3,3,2,1 ... 1,2,3,3,2,1 ], etc.

Klemperer also mentioned octagonal and rhombic rosettes. While all Klemperer rosettes are vulnerable to destabilization, the hexagonal rosette has extra stability because the "planets" sit in each other's L4 and L5 Lagrangian points.

🔗 Food and drink

Gastronorm (GN), sometimes spelled Gastro-Norm, is a European standard for kitchenware tray and container sizes that is commonly seen worldwide in the catering and professional food industry, as well as in certain parts of the high-end consumer market. Gastronorm is generally used worldwide except in most of the United States and Canada, which have their own domestic systems. The Gastronorm standard was first introduced in Switzerland in 1964 and became an official European standard in 1993 with the EN 631 standard.

The basic format is called "GN 1/1" and measures 530×325 mm, with other Gastronorm sizes being multiples and fractions of this basic module size. Gastronorm containers allow for flexible, place efficient, and compatible storage, transport, processing, and serving and can be adapted for shelving, transport on trolleys and conveyor belts, secure temporary placement in compatible sinks, working tables, refrigerators, freezers, ovens, hot water baths, and compatible dishwashers, or display. Other products that have adopted the Gastronorm format include cutting boards and non-stick mats. Many professional food products are even packaged for optimal compatibility with Gastronorm containers, such as pizza base sizes, pre-baked breads, or frozen vegetables.

The most commonly used materials for the containers are stainless steel and (transparent or non-transparent) plastic. Stackable baking trays and stainless steel containers are commonly used for cooking in an oven, while polycarbonate and polypropylene variants are suited for storage of cold foods. Porcelain or melamine containers are used for display.

🔗 China 🔗 Languages 🔗 Hong Kong

"Add oil" is a Hong Kong English expression used as an encouragement and support to a person. Derived from the Chinese phrase Gayau (or Jiayou; Chinese: 加油), the expression is literally translated from the Cantonese phrase. It is originated in Hong Kong and is commonly used by bilingual Hong Kong speakers.

"Add oil" can be roughly translated as "Go for it". Though it is often described as "the hardest to translate well", the literal translation is the result of Chinglish and was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018.

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Cold War

The Manned Orbiting Laboratory (MOL), originally referred to as the Manned Orbital Laboratory, was a never-flown part of the United States Air Force's human spaceflight program, a successor to the canceled Boeing X-20 Dyna-Soar military reconnaissance space plane project. The project was developed from several early Air Force and NASA concepts of crewed space stations to be used for reconnaissance purposes. MOL evolved into a single-use laboratory, with which crews would be launched on 40-day missions and return to Earth using a Gemini B spacecraft, derived from NASA's Project Gemini.

The MOL program was announced to the public on 10 December 1963 as an inhabited platform to prove the utility of putting people in space for military missions. Astronauts selected for the program were later told of the reconnaissance mission for the program. The contractor for the MOL was the Douglas Aircraft Company. The Gemini B was externally similar to NASA's Gemini spacecraft, although it underwent several modifications, including the addition of a circular hatch through the heat shield, which allowed passage between the spacecraft and the laboratory.

MOL was canceled in 1969, during the height of the Apollo program, when it was shown that uncrewed reconnaissance satellites could achieve the same objectives much more cost-effectively. U.S. space station development was instead pursued with the civilian NASA Skylab (Apollo Applications Program) which flew in the mid-1970s.

In the 1970s, the Soviet Union launched three Almaz military space stations, similar in intent to the MOL, but cancelled the program in 1977 for the same reasons.

There is a MOL space suit on display at the Oklahoma City Science Museum, presumably never used.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Russia/Russian, Soviet, and CIS military history 🔗 Military history/Russian, Soviet and CIS military history 🔗 Aviation/Soviet aviation

The Tupolev Tu-4 (Russian: Туполев Ту-4; NATO reporting name: Bull) is a piston-engined Soviet strategic bomber that served the Soviet Air Force from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s. The aircraft was a copy of the American Boeing B-29 Superfortress, having been reverse-engineered from seized aircraft that had made emergency landings in the USSR.

🔗 Animal anatomy 🔗 Comics 🔗 Comics/Comic strips 🔗 Dinosaurs

A thagomizer () is the distinctive arrangement of four spikes on the tails of stegosaurine dinosaurs. These spikes are believed to have been a defensive measure against predators.

The arrangement of spikes originally had no distinct name; cartoonist Gary Larson invented the name "thagomizer" in 1982 as a joke in his comic strip The Far Side, and it was gradually adopted as an informal term used within scientific circles, research, and education.