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🔗 God helmet
The God helmet is an experimental apparatus originally called the Koren helmet (or Koren octopus) after its inventor Stanley Koren. It was developed by Koren and neuroscientist Michael Persinger to study creativity, religious experience and the effects of subtle stimulation of the temporal lobes. Reports by participants of a "sensed presence" while wearing the God helmet brought public attention and resulted in several TV documentaries. The device has been used in Persinger's research in the field of neurotheology, the study of the purported neural correlations of religion and spirituality. The apparatus, placed on the head of an experimental subject, generates very weak magnetic fields, that Persinger refers to as "complex". Like other neural stimulation with low-intensity magnetic fields, these fields are approximately as strong as those generated by a land line telephone handset or an ordinary hair dryer, but far weaker than that of an ordinary refrigerator magnet and approximately a million times weaker than transcranial magnetic stimulation.
Persinger reports that many subjects have reported "mystical experiences and altered states" while wearing the God Helmet. The foundations of his theory have been criticized in the scientific press. Anecdotal reports by journalists, academics and documentarists have been mixed and several effects reported by Persinger have not yet been independently replicated. One attempt at replication published in the scientific literature reported a failure to reproduce Persinger's effects and the authors proposed that the suggestibility of participants, improper blinding of participants or idiosyncratic methodology could explain Persinger's results. Persinger argues that the replication was technically flawed, but the researchers have stood by their replication. Only one group has published a direct replication of one God Helmet experiment. Other groups have reported no effects at all or have generated similar experiences by using sham helmets, or helmets that are not turned on, and have concluded that personality differences in the participants explain these unusual experiences.
Discussed on
- "God Helmet" | 2020-03-23 | 93 Upvotes 49 Comments
- "God helmet" | 2018-10-15 | 39 Upvotes 11 Comments
🔗 A Mathematician’s Apology
A Mathematician's Apology is a 1940 essay by British mathematician G. H. Hardy. It concerns the aesthetics of mathematics with some personal content, and gives the layman an insight into the mind of a working mathematician.
Discussed on
- "A Mathematician’s Apology" | 2020-02-02 | 130 Upvotes 52 Comments
🔗 Gödel, Escher, Bach
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, also known as GEB, is a 1979 book by Douglas Hofstadter. By exploring common themes in the lives and works of logician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach, the book expounds concepts fundamental to mathematics, symmetry, and intelligence. Through illustration and analysis, the book discusses how, through self-reference and formal rules, systems can acquire meaning despite being made of "meaningless" elements. It also discusses what it means to communicate, how knowledge can be represented and stored, the methods and limitations of symbolic representation, and even the fundamental notion of "meaning" itself.
In response to confusion over the book's theme, Hofstadter emphasized that Gödel, Escher, Bach is not about the relationships of mathematics, art, and music—but rather about how cognition emerges from hidden neurological mechanisms. One point in the book presents an analogy about how individual neurons in the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind by comparing it to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants.
The tagline "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll" was used by the publisher to describe the book.
Discussed on
- "Gödel, Escher, Bach" | 2019-11-17 | 56 Upvotes 37 Comments
- "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" | 2014-05-16 | 65 Upvotes 72 Comments
🔗 Wikipedia frequently-encountered sources, color-coded by perceived reliability
This is a non-exhaustive list of sources whose reliability and use on Wikipedia are frequently discussed. This list summarizes prior consensus and consolidates links to the most in-depth and recent discussions from the reliable sources noticeboard and elsewhere on Wikipedia.
- Click here to check the list of sources.
Context matters tremendously, and some sources may or may not be suitable for certain uses depending on the situation. When in doubt, defer to the linked discussions for more detailed information on a particular source and its use. Consensus can change, and if more recent discussions considering new evidence or arguments reach a different consensus, this list should be updated to reflect those changes.
Reliability is an inquiry that takes place pursuant to the verifiability policy and the reliable sources guideline. Note that verifiability is only one of Wikipedia's core content policies, which also include neutral point of view and no original research. These policies work together to determine whether information from reliable sources should be included or excluded.
Discussed on
- "Wikipedia's List of Reliable Sources" | 2022-12-27 | 12 Upvotes 4 Comments
- "Wikipedia: Reliable Sources/Perennial Sources" | 2022-04-29 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "Wikipedia frequently-encountered sources, color-coded by perceived reliability" | 2021-01-08 | 99 Upvotes 79 Comments
🔗 List of Lists of Lists
This is a list of other articles that are lists of list articles on the English Wikipedia. In other words, each of the articles linked here is an index to multiple lists on a topic. Some of the linked articles are themselves lists of lists of lists. This article is also a list of lists, and also a list itself.
Discussed on
- "List of Lists of Lists" | 2021-09-22 | 114 Upvotes 20 Comments
- "List of Lists of Lists" | 2021-07-14 | 13 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "List of Lists of Lists" | 2020-10-25 | 16 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "List of Lists of Lists – Wikipedia" | 2020-06-24 | 14 Upvotes 5 Comments
- "List of Lists of Lists" | 2019-10-29 | 18 Upvotes 7 Comments
- "Wikipedia: List of lists of lists" | 2018-05-03 | 112 Upvotes 16 Comments
- "List of lists of lists" | 2016-07-28 | 16 Upvotes 5 Comments
- "Wikipedia's list of lists of lists" | 2012-02-02 | 195 Upvotes 50 Comments
🔗 Zhou Qunfei
Zhou Qunfei (Chinese: 周群飞; born 1970) is a Chinese entrepreneur who founded the major touchscreen maker Lens Technology. After the public listing of her company on the Shenzhen ChiNext market in March 2015, her net worth reached US$10 billion, making her the richest woman in China. In 2018, she was named the world's richest self-made woman, with a net worth of $9.8 billion.
Discussed on
- "Zhou Qunfei" | 2016-08-24 | 124 Upvotes 10 Comments
🔗 Master–Slave Morality
Master–slave morality (German: Herren- und Sklavenmoral) is a central theme of Friedrich Nietzsche's works, particularly in the first essay of his book, On the Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche argued that there were two fundamental types of morality: "master morality" and "slave morality". Master morality values pride and power, while slave morality values kindness, empathy, and sympathy. Master morality judges actions as good or bad (e.g. the classical virtues of the noble man versus the vices of the rabble), unlike slave morality, which judges by a scale of good or evil intentions (e. g. Christian virtues and vices, Kantian deontology).
For Nietzsche, a morality is inseparable from the culture which values it, meaning that each culture's language, codes, practices, narratives, and institutions are informed by the struggle between these two moral structures.
Discussed on
- "Master–Slave Morality" | 2019-11-26 | 47 Upvotes 62 Comments
🔗 Ménage Problem
In combinatorial mathematics, the ménage problem or problème des ménages asks for the number of different ways in which it is possible to seat a set of male-female couples at a round dining table so that men and women alternate and nobody sits next to his or her partner. This problem was formulated in 1891 by Édouard Lucas and independently, a few years earlier, by Peter Guthrie Tait in connection with knot theory. For a number of couples equal to 3, 4, 5, ... the number of seating arrangements is
- 12, 96, 3120, 115200, 5836320, 382072320, 31488549120, ... (sequence A059375 in the OEIS).
Mathematicians have developed formulas and recurrence equations for computing these numbers and related sequences of numbers. Along with their applications to etiquette and knot theory, these numbers also have a graph theoretic interpretation: they count the numbers of matchings and Hamiltonian cycles in certain families of graphs.
Discussed on
- "Ménage Problem" | 2022-12-26 | 98 Upvotes 65 Comments
🔗 List of Epidemics
This article is a list of deaths caused by an infectious disease. Widespread non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer are not included.
Discussed on
- "List of Epidemics" | 2020-01-26 | 78 Upvotes 38 Comments
🔗 Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester
The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester is a quantum mechanics thought experiment that uses interaction-free measurements to verify that a bomb is functional without having to detonate it. It was conceived in 1993 by Avshalom Elitzur and Lev Vaidman. Since their publication, real-world experiments have confirmed that their theoretical method works as predicted.
The bomb tester takes advantage of two characteristics of elementary particles, such as photons or electrons: nonlocality and wave-particle duality. By placing the particle in a quantum superposition, it is possible for the experiment to verify that the bomb works without triggering its detonation, although there is still a 50% chance that the bomb will detonate in the effort.
Discussed on
- "Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester" | 2018-01-06 | 55 Upvotes 6 Comments
- "The bomb-testing problem in quantum mechanics" | 2008-01-24 | 25 Upvotes 4 Comments