Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 United States/U.S. Government 🔗 United States 🔗 Cold War 🔗 Conservatism 🔗 United States/U.S. history 🔗 United States/United States Presidents

"We begin bombing in five minutes" is the last sentence of a controversial, off-the-record joke made by U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1984, during the Cold War.

While preparing for a scheduled radio address from his vacation home in California, President Reagan joked with those present about outlawing and bombing Russia. This joke was not broadcast live, but was recorded and later leaked to the public. The Soviet Union criticized the president's joke, as did Reagan's opponent in the 1984 United States presidential election, Walter Mondale.

🔗 Computer science

Hashlife is a memoized algorithm for computing the long-term fate of a given starting configuration in Conway's Game of Life and related cellular automata, much more quickly than would be possible using alternative algorithms that simulate each time step of each cell of the automaton. The algorithm was first described by Bill Gosper in the early 1980s while he was engaged in research at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Hashlife was originally implemented on Symbolics Lisp machines with the aid of the Flavors extension.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Michigan

The Michigan Terminal System (MTS) is one of the first time-sharing computer operating systems. Developed in 1967 at the University of Michigan for use on IBM S/360-67, S/370 and compatible mainframe computers, it was developed and used by a consortium of eight universities in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom over a period of 33 years (1967 to 1999).

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography

Archie R. McCardell (August 29, 1926 – July 10, 2008) was an American business leader. He was best known for his tenure as chief executive officer, president, and chairman of the board at the International Harvester farm and heavy equipment manufacturing concern from 1977 to 1982. Although Harvester was the nation's fourth-largest company at the time he assumed control, McCardell triggered a strike by unionized employees which ended disastrously for the company and led to its eventual demise.

🔗 Computing

Modelica is an object-oriented, declarative, multi-domain modeling language for component-oriented modeling of complex systems, e.g., systems containing mechanical, electrical, electronic, hydraulic, thermal, control, electric power or process-oriented subcomponents. The free Modelica language is developed by the non-profit Modelica Association. The Modelica Association also develops the free Modelica Standard Library that contains about 1360 generic model components and 1280 functions in various domains, as of version 3.2.1.

🔗 United States 🔗 Companies 🔗 Law 🔗 United States/Delaware

The Corporation Trust Center, 1209 North Orange Street, is a single-story building located in the Brandywine neighborhood of Wilmington, Delaware, USA, operated by CT Corporation, a subsidiary of Dutch multinational services firm Wolters Kluwer. This is CT Corporation's location in the state of Delaware for providing "registered agent services." In 2012 it was the registered agent address of at least 285,000 separate businesses.

Many companies are incorporated in Delaware for its business-friendly General Corporation Law and it was estimated in 2012 that 9.5 billion dollars of potential taxes had not been levied over the past decade, due to an arrangement known as the "Delaware loophole." Companies formed in Delaware are required to have an address in the state at which process may be served. Therefore, Delaware entities with no physical office in the state must have a registered agent with a Delaware address. Notable companies represented by CT at this location include Google, American Airlines, Apple Inc., General Motors, The Coca-Cola Company, Walmart, Yum! Brands, Verizon, and about 430 of Deutsche Bank's more than 2,000 subsidiary companies and special purpose companies. Both Former President of the United States Donald Trump, and his opponent in the 2016 United States presidential election, Hillary Clinton, have registered companies at the center.

🔗 Physics 🔗 Greece 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Spirits

The ouzo effect (also louche effect and spontaneous emulsification) is a milky (louche) oil-in-water emulsion that is formed when water is added to ouzo and other anise-flavored liqueurs and spirits, such as pastis, rakı, arak, sambuca and absinthe. Such emulsions occur with only minimal mixing and are highly stable.

🔗 Geographical coordinates 🔗 Microformats

Geohash is a public domain geocode system invented in 2008 by Gustavo Niemeyer and (similar work in 1966) G.M. Morton, which encodes a geographic location into a short string of letters and digits. It is a hierarchical spatial data structure which subdivides space into buckets of grid shape, which is one of the many applications of what is known as a Z-order curve, and generally space-filling curves.

Geohashes offer properties like arbitrary precision and the possibility of gradually removing characters from the end of the code to reduce its size (and gradually lose precision). As a consequence of the gradual precision degradation, nearby places will often (but not always) present similar prefixes. While in rare cases nearby places may have very short shared prefixes, the longer their shared prefix is, the closer two places are guaranteed to be.

🔗 Iran 🔗 London 🔗 British Museum 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Sculpture

The Oxus treasure (Persian: گنجینه آمودریا) is a collection of about 180 surviving pieces of metalwork in gold and silver, the majority rather small, plus perhaps about 200 coins, from the Achaemenid Persian period which were found by the Oxus river about 1877-1880. The exact place and date of the find remain unclear, and it is likely that many other pieces from the hoard were melted down for bullion; early reports suggest there were originally some 1500 coins, and mention types of metalwork that are not among the surviving pieces. The metalwork is believed to date from the sixth to fourth centuries BC, but the coins show a greater range, with some of those believed to belong to the treasure coming from around 200 BC. The most likely origin for the treasure is that it belonged to a temple, where votive offerings were deposited over a long period. How it came to be deposited is unknown.

As a group, the treasure is the most important survival of what was once an enormous production of Achaemenid work in precious metal. It displays a very wide range of quality of execution, with the many gold votive plaques mostly crudely executed, some perhaps by the donors themselves, while other objects are of superb quality, presumably that expected by the court.

The British Museum now has nearly all the surviving metalwork, with one of the pair of griffin-headed bracelets on loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum, and displays them in Room 52. The group arrived at the museum by different routes, with many items bequeathed to the nation by Augustus Wollaston Franks. The coins are more widely dispersed, and more difficult to firmly connect with the treasure. A group believed to come from it is in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, and other collections have examples.

🔗 Internet

The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP) is a facetious communication protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots. It is specified in RFC 2324, published on 1 April 1998 as an April Fools' Day RFC, as part of an April Fools prank. An extension, HTCPCP-TEA, was published as RFC 7168 on 1 April 2014 to support brewing teas, which is also an April Fools' Day RFC.