Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 International relations 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Soviet Union 🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/history of Russia 🔗 English Language

In political jargon, a useful idiot is a derogatory term for a person perceived as propagandizing for a cause without fully comprehending the cause's goals, and who is cynically used by the cause's leaders. The term was originally used during the Cold War to describe non-communists regarded as susceptible to communist propaganda and manipulation. The term has often been attributed to Vladimir Lenin, but this attribution is unsubstantiated.

🔗 United States 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 United States/Military history - U.S. military history 🔗 Physics

Project Longshot was a conceptual interstellar spacecraft design. It would have been an unmanned probe, intended to fly to and enter orbit around Alpha Centauri B powered by nuclear pulse propulsion.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Canada 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Disability

Krista and Tatiana Hogan (born October 25, 2006) are Canadians who are conjoined craniopagus twins. They are joined at the head and share a skull and a brain. They were born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and are the only unseparated conjoined twins of that type currently alive in Canada. They live with their mother, Felicia Simms, in Vernon, British Columbia, have two sisters and a brother and often travel to Vancouver for care at BC Children's Hospital and Sunny Hill Health Centre for Children.

🔗 Film 🔗 Military history 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Cold War 🔗 Military history/War films

Colossus: The Forbin Project (originally released as Colossus) is a 1970 American science-fiction thriller film from Universal Pictures, produced by Stanley Chase, directed by Joseph Sargent, and starring Eric Braeden, Susan Clark, Gordon Pinsent, and William Schallert. It is based on the 1966 science-fiction novel Colossus by Dennis Feltham Jones.

The film is about an advanced American defense system, named Colossus, which becomes sentient. After being given full control, Colossus' draconian logic expands on its original nuclear defense directives to assume total control of the world and end all warfare for the good of humankind, despite its creators' orders to stop.

🔗 Internet 🔗 Computing 🔗 Brands 🔗 Microsoft 🔗 Home Living

The iLoo (short for Internet loo) was a cancelled Microsoft project to develop a Wi-Fi Internet-enabled portable toilet. The iLoo, which was to debut at British summer festivals, was described as being a portable toilet with wireless broadband Internet, an adjustable plasma screen, a membrane wireless keyboard, a six-channel speaker system, and toilet paper embossed with popular web site addresses. The iLoo was also to have an extra screen and keyboard on the outside, and was to be guarded. It was intended as the next in a series of successful initiatives by MSN UK which sought to introduce the internet in unusual locations, including MSN Street, MSN Park Bench and MSN Deckchair.

The project was announced by MSN UK on April 30, 2003, and was widely ridiculed before being declared a hoax by Microsoft on May 12. On May 13, another Microsoft press release stated that although the project had not been a hoax, it had been cancelled because it would do little to promote the MSN brand. There has since been speculation as to whether the project was cancelled for fear of being sued by Andrew Cubitt, who had invented the similarly named product "i-Loo". The iLoo was described as a public relations "debacle" by Online Journalism Review.

🔗 Video games

Bertie the Brain is one of the first games developed during the early history of video games. It was built in Toronto by Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. The four meter (13 foot) tall computer allowed exhibition attendees to play a game of tic-tac-toe against an algorithm, presented by its creators as artificial intelligence. The player entered a move on a keypad in the form of a three-by-three grid, and the game played out on a grid of lights overhead. The machine had an adjustable difficulty level. After two weeks on display by Rogers Majestic, the machine was disassembled at the end of the exhibition and largely forgotten as a curiosity.

Kates built the game to showcase his additron tube, a miniature version of the vacuum tube, though the transistor overtook it in computer development shortly thereafter. Patent issues prevented the additron tube from being used in computers besides Bertie before it was no longer useful. Bertie the Brain is a candidate for the first video game, as it was potentially the first computer game to have any sort of visual display of the game. It appeared only three years after the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game to use an electronic display. Bertie's use of light bulbs rather than a screen with real-time visual graphics, however, much less moving graphics, does not meet some definitions of a video game.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Automobiles

MISRA C is a set of software development guidelines for the C programming language developed by The MISRA Consortium. Its aims are to facilitate code safety, security, portability and reliability in the context of embedded systems, specifically those systems programmed in ISO C / C90 / C99.

There is also a set of guidelines for MISRA C++ not covered by this article.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Russia/demographics and ethnography of Russia 🔗 Lithuania 🔗 Ukraine 🔗 Food and drink/Beverages 🔗 Beer

Kvass is a fermented cereal-based non-alcoholic or low alcoholic (0.5–1.0% or 1–2 proof) beverage with a slightly cloudy appearance, light-dark brown colour and sweet-sour taste. It may be flavoured with berries, fruits, herbs, honey

🔗 Computing

The Alternate Instruction Set (AIS) is a second 32-bit instruction set architecture found in some x86 CPUs made by VIA Technologies. On these VIA C3 processors, the second hidden processor mode is accessed by executing the x86 instruction ALTINST (0F 3F). If AIS mode has been enabled, the processor will perform a JMP EAX and begin executing AIS instructions at the address of the EAX register. Using AIS allows native access to the Centaur Technology-designed RISC core inside the processor.

🔗 Home Living

An antimacassar is a small cloth placed over the backs or arms of chairs, or the head or cushions of a sofa, to prevent soiling of the permanent fabric underneath. The name also refers to the cloth flap 'collar' on a sailor's shirt or top, used to keep macassar oil off the uniform.

Macassar oil was an unguent for the hair commonly used by men in the early 19th century, and reputed to have been manufactured from ingredients purchased in the port of Makassar in the Dutch East Indies. The poet Byron called it "thine incomparable oil, Macassar". The fashion for oiled hair became so widespread in the Victorian and the Edwardian period that housewives began to cover the arms and backs of their chairs with washable cloths to prevent the fabric coverings from being soiled. Around 1850, these started to be known as antimacassars. They were also installed in theatres, from 1865.

They came to have elaborate patterns, often in matching sets for the various items of parlour furniture; they were either made at home using a variety of techniques such as crochet or tatting, or purchased. The original antimacassars were usually made of stiff white crochet-work, but in the third quarter of the 19th century they became simpler and softer, usually fabric embroidered with a simple pattern in wool or silk.

By the beginning of the 20th century, antimacassars had become so associated in people's minds with the Victorian period that the word briefly became a figurative term for it. For example, antimacassars are suggestive of old-fashioned, Victorian-era women in Rebecca West's novel The Return of the Soldier.

Antimacassars are also used on the seat headrests of commercial passenger transport vehicles, such as trains, buses and, especially, aircraft, to prevent the transmission of hair dressings and conditions between passengers, simplify maintenance, and extend the life of fabrics.