Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Economics

The Alchian–Allen effect was described in 1964 by Armen Alchian and William R Allen in the book University Economics (now called Exchange and Production). It states that when the prices of two substitute goods, such as high and low grades of the same product, are both increased by a fixed per-unit amount such as a transportation cost or a lump-sum tax, consumption will shift toward the higher-grade product. This is because the added per-unit amount decreases the relative price of the higher-grade product.

Suppose, for example, that high-grade coffee beans are $3/pound and low-grade beans $1.50/pound; in this example, high-grade beans cost twice as much as low-grade beans. Now add a per-pound international shipping cost of $1. The effective prices are now $4 and $2.50; high-grade beans now cost only 1.6 times as much as low-grade beans. This reduced ratio of difference will induce distant coffee-buyers to now choose a higher ratio of high-to-low grade beans than local coffee-buyers.

The effect has been studied as it applies to illegal drugs and it has been shown that the potency of marijuana increased in response to higher enforcement budgets, and there was a similar effect for alcohol in the U.S. during Prohibition. This effect is called iron law of prohibition.

Another example is that Australians drink higher-quality Californian wine than Californians, and vice versa, because it is only worth the transportation costs for the most expensive wine.

Colloquially, the Alchian–Allen theorem is also known as the “shipping the good apples out” theorem (Thomas Borcherding), or as the “third law of demand.”

🔗 Skepticism 🔗 Amphibians and Reptiles

The boiling frog is a fable describing a frog being slowly boiled alive. The premise is that if a frog is put suddenly into boiling water, it will jump out, but if the frog is put in tepid water which is then brought to a boil slowly, it will not perceive the danger and will be cooked to death. The story is often used as a metaphor for the inability or unwillingness of people to react to or be aware of sinister threats that arise gradually rather than suddenly.

While some 19th-century experiments suggested that the underlying premise is true if the heating is sufficiently gradual, according to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out. Indeed, thermoregulation by changing location is a fundamentally necessary survival strategy for frogs and other ectotherms.

🔗 Computing

Icon is a very high-level programming language featuring goal-directed execution and many facilities for managing strings and textual patterns. It is related to SNOBOL and SL5, string processing languages. Icon is not object-oriented, but an object-oriented extension called Idol was developed in 1996 which eventually became Unicon.

Monocular rivalry is a phenomenon of human visual perception that occurs when two different images are optically superimposed. During prolonged viewing, one image becomes clearer than the other for a few moments, then the other image becomes clearer than the first for a few moments. These alternations in clarity continue at random for as long as one looks. Occasionally one image will become exclusively visible and the other image invisible.

In the demonstration, one image is a green grating and the other is a red grating. During prolonged inspection, the viewer can see the green grating as clearer than the red grating for a few moments, then the reverse. Occasionally the green grating will be all that is visible and occasionally the red grating will be all that is visible. Occasionally, at transitions, one will briefly see irregular composites of the two gratings (such as the red and green gratings superimposed but with one or two bars of the green grating invisible).

Monocular rivalry is easier to see when the component stimuli are of opposite colors, but it also occurs when the component stimuli have the same colors. As long as the two component stimuli differ spatiotemporally in some way, such as orientation (as shown), spatial frequency, or direction of movement, monocular rivalry can be seen.

🔗 Polynesia 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Norway 🔗 Archaeology 🔗 South America 🔗 Sailing

The Kon-Tiki expedition was a 1947 journey by raft across the Pacific Ocean from South America to the Polynesian islands, led by Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl. The raft was named Kon-Tiki after the Inca god Viracocha, for whom "Kon-Tiki" was said to be an old name. Kon-Tiki is also the name of Heyerdahl's book, the Academy Award-winning 1950 documentary film chronicling his adventures, and the 2012 dramatized feature film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have reached Polynesia during pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. Although the expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey.

Heyerdahl's hypothesis of a South American origin of the Polynesian peoples, as well as his "drift voyaging" hypothesis, is generally rejected by scientists today. Archaeological, linguistic, cultural, and genetic evidence tends to support a western origin for Polynesians, from Island Southeast Asia, using sophisticated multihull sailing technologies and navigation techniques during the Austronesian expansion. However, there is evidence of some gene flow from South America to Easter Island.

The Kon-Tiki expedition was funded by private loans, along with donations of equipment from the United States Army. Heyerdahl and a small team went to Peru, where, with the help of dockyard facilities provided by the Peruvian authorities, they constructed the raft out of balsa logs and other native materials in an indigenous style as recorded in illustrations by Spanish conquistadores. The trip began on April 28, 1947. Heyerdahl and five companions sailed the raft for 101 days over 6,900 km (4,300 miles) across the Pacific Ocean before smashing into a reef at Raroia in the Tuamotus on August 7, 1947. The crew made successful landfall and all returned safely.

Thor Heyerdahl's book about his experience became a bestseller. It was published in Norwegian in 1948 as The Kon-Tiki Expedition: By Raft Across the South Seas, later reprinted as Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft. It appeared with great success in English in 1950, also in many other languages. A documentary motion picture about the expedition, also called Kon-Tiki, was produced from a write-up and expansion of the crew's filmstrip notes and won an Academy Award in 1951. It was directed by Heyerdahl and edited by Olle Nordemar. The voyage was also chronicled in the documentary TV-series The Kon-Tiki Man: The Life and Adventures of Thor Heyerdahl, directed by Bengt Jonson.

The original Kon-Tiki raft is now on display in the Kon-Tiki Museum at Bygdøy in Oslo.

🔗 Cuba

Organopónicos or organoponics is a system of urban agriculture using organic gardens. It originated in Cuba and is still mostly focused there. It often consists of low-level concrete walls filled with organic matter and soil, with lines of drip irrigation laid on the surface of the growing media. Organopónicos is a labour-intensive form of local agriculture.

Organopónico farmers employ a wide variety of agroecological techniques including integrated pest management, polyculture, and crop rotation. Most organic materials are also produced within the gardens through composting. This allows production to take place with few petroleum-based inputs.

Organopónicos first arose as a community response to lack of food security during the Special Period after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is publicly functioning in terms of ownership, access, and management, but heavily subsidized and supported by the Cuban government.

🔗 Electronics 🔗 Electrical engineering

The trancitor as the combined word of a "transfer-capacitor" is to be considered as another active-device category besides the transistor as a "transfer-resistor". As observed in the table shown, four kinds of active devices are theoretically deduced. Among them, trancitors are missing to be the third and fourth kinds, whereas transistors, such as bipolar junction transistor (BJT) and field-effect transistor (FET), were already invented as the first and second kinds, respectively. Unlike the transistor switching the current at its output (i.e., current source), the trancitor transfers its input to the voltage output (i.e., voltage source), so an inverse relationship with each other.

🔗 United States 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities

Nutraloaf (also known as Meal Loaf, prison loaf, disciplinary loaf, food loaf, lockup loaf, confinement loaf, seg loaf, grue or special management meal) is a food served in prisons in the United States and formerly Canada to inmates who have misbehaved; for example, assaulting prison guards or fellow prisoners. It is similar to meatloaf in texture, but has a wider variety of ingredients. Prison loaf is usually bland, perhaps even unpleasant, but prison wardens argue that nutraloaf provides enough nutrition to keep prisoners healthy without requiring utensils to be issued.

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Disaster management 🔗 Aviation/Aviation accident 🔗 Lists

This list of missing aircraft includes all of the aircraft that have disappeared in flight for reasons that have never been definitely determined. According to Annex 13 of the International Civil Aviation Organization, an aircraft is considered to be missing "when the official search has been terminated and the wreckage has not been located". However, there still remains a "grey area" on how much wreckage needs to be found for a plane to be declared "recovered". This list does not include every aviator, or air passenger that has ever gone missing as these are separate categories.

In the tables below, each missing aircraft is defined (in the Aircraft column) using one or more identifying features. If the aircraft was known by a custom or personalized name (e.g. Pathfinder), that name is presented first (in italics) followed by the aircraft type (in parentheses). The make of aircraft, although not necessarily a unique identifier, is also provided where appropriate. Aircraft registrations began to be used in the early 20th century for individual identification, so this is also included in the later tables (in parentheses).