Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 France

Flâneur (French: [flɑnœʁ]) is a French term popularized in the nineteenth-century for a type of urban male "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer". The word has some nuanced additional meanings (including as a loanword into English). Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society with no other purpose than to be an acute observer of industrialized, contemporary life. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier.

The flâneur was first a literary type from 19th-century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. The word carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoisseur of the street. However, the flâneur's origins are to be found in journalism of the Restoration, and the politics of post-revolutionary public space. Drawing on the work of Charles Baudelaire who described the flâneur in his poetry and 1863 essay "The Painter of Modern Life", Walter Benjamin promoted 20th-century scholarly interest in the flâneur as an emblematic archetype of urban, modern (even modernist) experience. Following Benjamin, the flâneur has become an important symbol for scholars, artists, and writers. The classic French female counterpart is the passante, dating to the works of Marcel Proust, though a 21st-century academic coinage is flâneuse, and some English-language writers simply apply the masculine flâneur also to women. The term has acquired an additional architecture and urban planning sense, referring to passers-by who experience incidental or intentional psychological effects from the design of a structure.

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Statistics 🔗 Databases

In data mining and statistics, hierarchical clustering (also called hierarchical cluster analysis or HCA) is a method of cluster analysis that seeks to build a hierarchy of clusters. Strategies for hierarchical clustering generally fall into two categories:

• Agglomerative: This is a "bottom-up" approach: Each observation starts in its own cluster, and pairs of clusters are merged as one moves up the hierarchy.
• Divisive: This is a "top-down" approach: All observations start in one cluster, and splits are performed recursively as one moves down the hierarchy.

In general, the merges and splits are determined in a greedy manner. The results of hierarchical clustering are usually presented in a dendrogram.

Hierarchical clustering has the distinct advantage that any valid measure of distance can be used. In fact, the observations themselves are not required: all that is used is a matrix of distances. On the other hand, except for the special case of single-linkage distance, none of the algorithms (except exhaustive search in ${\displaystyle {\mathcal {O}}(2^{n})}$) can be guaranteed to find the optimum solution.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software

Cyclomatic complexity is a software metric used to indicate the complexity of a program. It is a quantitative measure of the number of linearly independent paths through a program's source code. It was developed by Thomas J. McCabe, Sr. in 1976.

Cyclomatic complexity is computed using the control-flow graph of the program: the nodes of the graph correspond to indivisible groups of commands of a program, and a directed edge connects two nodes if the second command might be executed immediately after the first command. Cyclomatic complexity may also be applied to individual functions, modules, methods or classes within a program.

One testing strategy, called basis path testing by McCabe who first proposed it, is to test each linearly independent path through the program; in this case, the number of test cases will equal the cyclomatic complexity of the program.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Edwin Ray Guthrie (; January 9, 1886 in Lincoln, Nebraska – April 23, 1959 in Seattle, Washington) was a behavioral psychologist. He first worked as a mathematics teacher, and philosopher, but switched to psychology when he was 33. He spent most of his career at the University of Washington, where he became full professor and then emeritus professor in psychology.

Guthrie is best known for his theory that all learning was based on a stimulus–response association. This was variously described as one trial theory, non-reinforcement, and contiguity learning. The theory was:

"A combination of stimuli which has accompanied a movement will on its recurrence tend to be followed by that movement".

One word that his coworkers and students used to describe Guthrie and his theories was "simple", and perhaps he did prefer to use simple terms to illustrate complex ideas. However, "It is undoubtedly true that many reviews of Guthrie in the literature have mistaken incompleteness for simplicity".

His simple nature carried into his teachings where he took great pride in working with and teaching students.

🔗 Evolutionary biology 🔗 Ecology

Island gigantism, or insular gigantism, is a biological phenomenon in which the size of an animal species isolated on an island increases dramatically in comparison to its mainland relatives. Island gigantism is one aspect of the more general "island effect" or "Foster's rule", which posits that when mainland animals colonize islands, small species tend to evolve larger bodies, and large species tend to evolve smaller bodies (insular dwarfism). This is itself one aspect of the more general phenomenon of island syndrome which describes the differences in morphology, ecology, physiology and behaviour of insular species compared to their continental counterparts. Following the arrival of humans and associated introduced predators (dogs, cats, rats, pigs), many giant as well as other island endemics have become extinct (e.g. the dodo and Rodrigues solitaire, giant flightless pigeons related to the Nicobar pigeon). A similar size increase, as well as increased woodiness, has been observed in some insular plants such as the Mapou tree (Cyphostemma mappia) in Mauritius which is also known as the "Mauritian baobab" although it is member of the grape family (Vitaceae).

🔗 Law 🔗 Indonesia 🔗 Primates 🔗 Animal rights 🔗 Photography

The monkey selfie copyright dispute is a series of disputes about the copyright status of selfies taken by Celebes crested macaques using equipment belonging to the British nature photographer David Slater. The disputes involve Wikimedia Commons and the blog Techdirt, which have hosted the images following their publication in newspapers in July 2011 over Slater's objections that he holds the copyright, and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), who have argued that the macaque should be assigned the copyright.

Slater has argued that he has a valid copyright claim, as he engineered the situation that resulted in the pictures by travelling to Indonesia, befriending a group of wild macaques, and setting up his camera equipment in such a way that a "selfie" picture might come about. The Wikimedia Foundation's 2014 refusal to remove the pictures from its Wikimedia Commons image library was based on the understanding that copyright is held by the creator, that a non-human creator (not being a legal person) cannot hold copyright, and that the images are thus in the public domain.

Slater stated in August 2014 that, as a result of the pictures being available on Wikipedia, he had lost at least GB£10,000 (equivalent to about £11,000 in 2019) in income and his business as a wildlife photographer was being harmed. In December 2014, the United States Copyright Office stated that works created by a non-human, such as a photograph taken by a monkey, are not copyrightable. A number of legal experts in the US and UK have argued that Slater's role in the photographic process may have been sufficient to establish a valid copyright claim, though this decision would have to be made by a court.

In a separate dispute, PETA tried to use the monkey selfies to establish a legal precedent that animals should be declared copyright holders. Slater had published a book containing the photographs through self-publishing company Blurb, Inc. In September 2015, PETA filed a lawsuit against Slater and Blurb, requesting that the monkey be assigned the copyright and that PETA be appointed to administer proceeds from the photos for the endangered species' benefit. In dismissing PETA's case, the court ruled that a monkey cannot own copyright, under US law. PETA appealed, and in September 2017, both PETA and the photographer agreed to a settlement in which Slater would donate a portion of future revenues on the photographs to wildlife organizations. However, the court of appeals declined to dismiss the appeal and declined to vacate the lower court judgment. In April 2018, the appeals court affirmed that animals cannot legally hold copyrights and expressed concern that PETA's motivations had been to promote their own interests rather than to protect the legal rights of animals.

🔗 Architecture 🔗 Japan

Gate Tower Building (ゲートタワービル, gēto tawā biru) is a 16 floor office building in Fukushima-ku, Osaka, Japan. It is notable for the highway offramp at Umeda Exit that passes through the building.

🔗 Psychology 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Media

The Gen Z stare is a generally pejorative phrase coined by social media users to describe a "blank stare that members of younger generations give in situations where a verbal response would be more common" or appropriate. It most commonly occurs in customer service interactions in response to ostensibly simple questions about products, services, or signage in the establishment. Reflecting a generation gap, instead of responding to the customer, the generation Z cohort members have been described as "dumbfounded or disinterested" in these questions.

Kalhan Rosenblatt of NBC News says, "[w]hile there are several definitions for the stare, the most common meaning is a vacant expression a Gen Zer gives in response to a question. The stare occurs in classrooms, restaurants, at work and more settings." The term "Gen Z stare" garnered widespread coverage in the mainstream media in July 2025. The concept of the "Gen Z stare" was first explored in research conducted by Kaiden Jones, who proposed that while the stare shares some similarities with the nonverbal responses of both deadpan humor and stonewalling, it can signal social critique and a refusal to conform to social scripts.

🔗 Internet culture 🔗 Economics

You'll own nothing and be happy (alternatively you'll own nothing and you'll be happy) is a phrase originated by Danish Politician Ida Auken in a 2016 essay for the World Economic Forum. After appearing in a WEF video in 2016, the phrase began to be used by critics of the World Economic Forum (WEF) who accuse the WEF of desiring restrictions on ownership of private property.

🔗 Georgia (U.S. state) 🔗 Georgia (U.S. state)/Atlanta

The Crypt of Civilization is a sealed airtight chamber built between 1937 and 1940 at Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, Georgia, in Metro Atlanta. The 2,000-cubic-foot (57 m³) room contains numerous artifacts and documents, and is designed for opening in the year 8113 AD. During the 50th anniversary year of its sealing, the Guinness Book of World Records cited the crypt as the "first successful attempt to bury a record of this culture for any future inhabitants or visitors to the planet Earth."