Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Aviation

Balloonomania was a strong public interest or fad in balloons that originated in France in the late 18th century and continued into the 19th century, during the advent of balloon flights. The interest began with the first flights of the Montgolfier brothers in 1783 (in a balloon inflated with hot air). Soon afterwards Jacques Alexandre César Charles flew another type of balloon (inflated with hydrogen) and both types of balloon were in use from then on. The fad quickly spread in France and across the channel in England.

🔗 Energy

An energy slave is that quantity of energy (ability to do work) which, when used to construct and drive non-human infrastructure (machines, roads, power grids, fuel, draft animals, wind-driven pumps, etc.) replaces a unit of human labor (actual work). An energy slave does the work of a person, through the consumption of energy in the non-human infrastructure.

🔗 Cognitive science

ACT-R (pronounced /ˌækt ˈɑr/; short for "Adaptive Control of Thought—Rational") is a cognitive architecture mainly developed by John Robert Anderson and Christian Lebiere at Carnegie Mellon University. Like any cognitive architecture, ACT-R aims to define the basic and irreducible cognitive and perceptual operations that enable the human mind. In theory, each task that humans can perform should consist of a series of these discrete operations.

Most of the ACT-R's basic assumptions are also inspired by the progress of cognitive neuroscience, and ACT-R can be seen and described as a way of specifying how the brain itself is organized in a way that enables individual processing modules to produce cognition.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer science

In computer science, an algorithm is called non-blocking if failure or suspension of any thread cannot cause failure or suspension of another thread; for some operations, these algorithms provide a useful alternative to traditional blocking implementations. A non-blocking algorithm is lock-free if there is guaranteed system-wide progress, and wait-free if there is also guaranteed per-thread progress.

The word "non-blocking" was traditionally used to describe telecommunications networks that could route a connection through a set of relays "without having to re-arrange existing calls", see Clos network. Also, if the telephone exchange "is not defective, it can always make the connection", see nonblocking minimal spanning switch.

🔗 Death 🔗 Lists 🔗 Invention

This is a list of inventors whose deaths were in some manner caused by or related to a product, process, procedure, or other innovation that they invented or designed.

🔗 United States 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Lists 🔗 Business

This is a list of the largest United States bank failures with respect to total assets under management at the time of the bank failure (banks with $1.0 billion or more in assets are listed here). Assets of the banks listed here are figures provided by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Computing/Computer science 🔗 Computing/Early computers 🔗 Computing/Networking

Jonathan Bruce Postel (; August 6, 1943 – October 16, 1998) was an American computer scientist who made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. He is known principally for being the Editor of the Request for Comment (RFC) document series, for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and for administering the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) until his death. In his lifetime he was known as the "god of the Internet" for his comprehensive influence on the medium.

The Internet Society's Postel Award is named in his honor, as is the Postel Center at Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California. His obituary was written by Vint Cerf and published as RFC 2468 in remembrance of Postel and his work. In 2012, Postel was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame by the Internet Society. The Channel Islands' Domain Registry building was named after him in early 2016.

🔗 Physics

In stellar physics, the Jeans instability causes the collapse of interstellar gas clouds and subsequent star formation, named after James Jeans. It occurs when the internal gas pressure is not strong enough to prevent gravitational collapse of a region filled with matter. For stability, the cloud must be in hydrostatic equilibrium, which in case of a spherical cloud translates to:

${\displaystyle {\frac {dp}{dr}}=-{\frac {G\rho (r)M_{enc}(r)}{r^{2}}}}$,

where ${\displaystyle M_{enc}(r)}$ is the enclosed mass, ${\displaystyle p}$ is the pressure, ${\displaystyle \rho (r)}$ is the density of the gas (at radius ${\displaystyle r}$), ${\displaystyle G}$ is the gravitational constant, and ${\displaystyle r}$ is the radius. The equilibrium is stable if small perturbations are damped and unstable if they are amplified. In general, the cloud is unstable if it is either very massive at a given temperature or very cool at a given mass; under these circumstances, the gas pressure cannot overcome gravity, and the cloud will collapse.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Computer hardware 🔗 Computing/Early computers

In computer jargon, blinkenlights are diagnostic lights on front panels of old mainframe computers. More recently the term applies to status lights of modern network hardware (modems, network hubs, etc.). Blinkenlights disappeared from more recent computers for a number of reasons, the most important being the fact that with faster CPUs a human can no longer interpret the processes in the computer on the fly. Though more sophisticated UI mechanisms have since been developed, blinkenlights may still be present as additional status indicators and familiar skeuomorphs.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/technology and engineering in Russia 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 Gemology and Jewelry 🔗 Russia/visual arts in Russia 🔗 Gemology and Jewelry/Jewelry

A Fabergé egg (Russian: яйцо Фаберже́, romanized: yaytso Faberzhe) is a jewelled egg created by the jewellery firm House of Fabergé, in Saint Petersburg, Russia. As many as 69 were created, of which 57 survive today. Virtually all were manufactured under the supervision of Peter Carl Fabergé between 1885 and 1917. The most famous are his 52 "Imperial" eggs, 46 of which survive, made for the Russian Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II as Easter gifts for their wives and mothers. Fabergé eggs are worth millions of dollars and have become symbols of opulence.