Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Singapore

No U-Turn Syndrome (NUTS) is a term first coined by Singaporean entrepreneur Sim Wong Hoo to prominently describe the social behaviour of Singaporeans having a mindset of compliance to higher authorities before proceeding with any action. He makes a comparison of traffic rules in Singapore to those found overseas, to describe the phenomenon. In Singapore, drivers are not allowed to make a U-turn unless a sign specifically allows them to do so, while in some other countries drivers may make U-turns freely so long as a "No U-turn" sign is not present. Following that, this analogy is used to explain the red tape he has encountered with hard-nosed bureaucrats, which in turn stifles the very creativity that the Singaporean government has been trying to promote in the recent years.

NUTS is also considered as one of the major criticisms of the rigid Singapore education system, where students are taught from a young age to obey instructions in an unquestioning manner, in a society where grades and paper certification are emphasised at the expense of some life skills.

In 2003, the term was referred to by Singaporean MPs during discussions about encouraging entrepreneurship. Five MPs said that "the biggest hurdle for Singaporeans in creating a pro-enterprise environment is the Nuts mentality."

🔗 Climate change 🔗 Environment 🔗 Plants 🔗 Arctic 🔗 Palaeontology 🔗 Geology

The Azolla event is a scenario hypothesized to have occurred in the middle Eocene epoch, around 49 million years ago, when blooms of the freshwater fern Azolla are thought to have happened in the Arctic Ocean. As they sank to the stagnant sea floor, they were incorporated into the sediment; the resulting draw-down of carbon dioxide has been speculated to have helped transform the planet from a "greenhouse Earth" state, hot enough for turtles and palm trees to prosper at the poles, to the current icehouse Earth known as the Late Cenozoic Ice Age.

🔗 Computer science

Boids is an artificial life program, developed by Craig Reynolds in 1986, which simulates the flocking behaviour of birds. His paper on this topic was published in 1987 in the proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH conference. The name "boid" corresponds to a shortened version of "bird-oid object", which refers to a bird-like object. Incidentally, "boid" is also a New York Metropolitan dialect pronunciation for "bird".

As with most artificial life simulations, Boids is an example of emergent behavior; that is, the complexity of Boids arises from the interaction of individual agents (the boids, in this case) adhering to a set of simple rules. The rules applied in the simplest Boids world are as follows:

• separation: steer to avoid crowding local flockmates
• alignment: steer towards the average heading of local flockmates
• cohesion: steer to move towards the average position (center of mass) of local flockmates

More complex rules can be added, such as obstacle avoidance and goal seeking.

The basic model has been extended in several different ways since Reynolds proposed it. For instance, Delgado-Mata et al. extended the basic model to incorporate the effects of fear. Olfaction was used to transmit emotion between animals, through pheromones modelled as particles in a free expansion gas. Hartman and Benes introduced a complementary force to the alignment that they call the change of leadership. This steer defines the chance of the boid to become a leader and try to escape.

The movement of Boids can be characterized as either chaotic (splitting groups and wild behaviour) or orderly. Unexpected behaviours, such as splitting flocks and reuniting after avoiding obstacles, can be considered emergent.

The boids framework is often used in computer graphics, providing realistic-looking representations of flocks of birds and other creatures, such as schools of fish or herds of animals. It was for instance used in the 1998 video game Half-Life for the flying bird-like creatures seen at the end of the game on Xen, named "boid" in the game files.

The Boids model can be used for direct control and stabilization of teams of simple Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) or Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) in swarm robotics. For stabilization of heterogeneous UAV-UGV teams, the model was adapted for using onboard relative localization by Saska et al.

At the time of proposal, Reynolds' approach represented a giant step forward compared to the traditional techniques used in computer animation for motion pictures. The first animation created with the model was Stanley and Stella in: Breaking the Ice (1987), followed by a feature film debut in Tim Burton's film Batman Returns (1992) with computer generated bat swarms and armies of penguins marching through the streets of Gotham City.

The boids model has been used for other interesting applications. It has been applied to automatically program Internet multi-channel radio stations. It has also been used for visualizing information and for optimization tasks.

🔗 Brazil 🔗 Brands 🔗 Automobiles 🔗 Brazil/Transportation in Brazil

The Gurgel Itaipu E150 is an electric car, produced by the Brazilian automobile manufacturer Gurgel. The Itaipu was presented at the Salão do Automóvel in 1974, with an intended production start in December 1975. Only a few of these cars were produced and is today a collector's item. Top speed was of the first prototypes were of approximately 30 km/h (19 mph) and the latest models reached up to 60 km/h (37 mph). While about twenty pre-series cars were built, it was never commercialized. It was the first electric car built in Latin America, and, its specifications were comparable to similar models of the time (see CitiCar). The car was named after the hydro-electric dam and power plant on the border of Brazil and Paraguay.

The car's design was unique, a very compact trapezoidal two-seater. The car itself weighed a mere 460 kg (1,014 lb), with the remaining 320 kg (705 lb) consisting of batteries. The name "Itaipu" was brought back for a larger commercial vehicle in 1980, called the Itaipu E400. This was based on the Volkswagen-engined Gurgel G800.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 Africa/Angola 🔗 Africa

On 25 May 2003, a Boeing 727, registered N844AA, was stolen at Quatro de Fevereiro Airport, Luanda, Angola. Its disappearance prompted a worldwide search by the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). No trace of the aircraft has since been found.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Religion 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Systems/Cybernetics 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophers 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Buddhism 🔗 Religion/Interfaith 🔗 Chile

Francisco Javier Varela García (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001) was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist who, together with his mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology, and for co-founding the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialog between science and Buddhism.

In mathematics and computing, Fibonacci coding is a universal code which encodes positive integers into binary code words. It is one example of representations of integers based on Fibonacci numbers. Each code word ends with "11" and contains no other instances of "11" before the end.

The Fibonacci code is closely related to the Zeckendorf representation, a positional numeral system that uses Zeckendorf's theorem and has the property that no number has a representation with consecutive 1s. The Fibonacci code word for a particular integer is exactly the integer's Zeckendorf representation with the order of its digits reversed and an additional "1" appended to the end.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing 🔗 Databases 🔗 Databases/Computer science

Cyc (pronounced SYKE, ) is a long-living artificial intelligence project that aims to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base that spans the basic concepts and rules about how the world works. Hoping to capture common sense knowledge, Cyc focuses on implicit knowledge that other AI platforms may take for granted. This is contrasted with facts one might find somewhere on the internet or retrieve via a search engine or Wikipedia. Cyc enables AI applications to perform human-like reasoning and be less "brittle" when confronted with novel situations.

Douglas Lenat began the project in July 1984 at MCC, where he was Principal Scientist 1984–1994, and then, since January 1995, has been under active development by the Cycorp company, where he is the CEO.

🔗 Linguistics

In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect (sometimes called oronyms). The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original but plausible in the same context, such as "old-timers' disease" for "Alzheimer's disease". An eggcorn can be described as an intra-lingual phono-semantic matching, a matching in which the intended word and substitute are from the same language.