Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Economics 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Virginia 🔗 Chicago 🔗 Virginia/Albemarle County

Ronald Harry Coase (; 29 December 1910 – 2 September 2013) was a British economist and author. He was the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School, where he arrived in 1964 and remained for the rest of his life. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991.

Coase, who believed economists should study real markets and not theoretical ones, established the case for the corporation as a means to pay the costs of operating a marketplace. Coase is best known for two articles in particular: "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), which introduces the concept of transaction costs to explain the nature and limits of firms; and "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960), which suggests that well-defined property rights could overcome the problems of externalities (see Coase theorem). Additionally, Coase's transaction costs approach is currently influential in modern organizational economics, where it was reintroduced by Oliver E. Williamson.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Mathematics 🔗 France 🔗 Biography/science and academia

Évariste Galois (; French: [evaʁist ɡalwa]; 25 October 1811 – 31 May 1832) was a French mathematician and political activist. While still in his teens, he was able to determine a necessary and sufficient condition for a polynomial to be solvable by radicals, thereby solving a problem that had been open for 350 years. His work laid the foundations for Galois theory and group theory, two major branches of abstract algebra.

Galois was a staunch republican and was heavily involved in the political turmoil that surrounded the French Revolution of 1830. As a result of his political activism, he was arrested repeatedly, serving one jail sentence of several months. For reasons that remain obscure, shortly after his release from prison, Galois fought in a duel and died of the wounds he suffered.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Climate change 🔗 Women 🔗 Guild of Copy Editors 🔗 Biography/politics and government 🔗 Sweden 🔗 Autism

Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg (Swedish: [ˈɡrêːta ˈtʉ̂ːnbærj] (listen); born 3 January 2003) is a Swedish environmental activist who has gained international recognition for promoting the view that humanity is facing an existential crisis arising from climate change. Thunberg is known for her youth and her straightforward speaking manner, both in public and to political leaders and assemblies, in which she criticizes world leaders for their failure to take sufficient action to address the climate crisis.

Thunberg's activism started after convincing her parents to adopt several lifestyle choices to reduce their own carbon footprint. In August 2018, at age 15, she started spending her school days outside the Swedish parliament to call for stronger action on climate change by holding up a sign reading Skolstrejk för klimatet (School strike for climate). Soon, other students engaged in similar protests in their own communities. Together, they organised a school climate strike movement under the name Fridays for Future. After Thunberg addressed the 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, student strikes took place every week somewhere in the world. In 2019, there were multiple coordinated multi-city protests involving over a million students each. To avoid flying, Thunberg sailed to North America where she attended the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit. Her speech there, in which she exclaimed "how dare you", was widely taken up by the press and incorporated into music.

Her sudden rise to world fame has made her both a leader and a target for critics. Her influence on the world stage has been described by The Guardian and other newspapers as the "Greta effect". She has received numerous honours and awards including: honorary Fellowship of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society; Time magazine's 100 most influential people and the youngest Time Person of the Year; inclusion in the Forbes list of The World's 100 Most Powerful Women (2019) and two consecutive nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize (2019 and 2020).

🔗 Biography 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Biography/arts and entertainment 🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Biography 🔗 Japan/Owarai 🔗 Japan/Gaijin tarento

Jason David Danielson (born April 9, 1986), known professionally as Atsugiri Jason (厚切りジェイソン, Atsugiri Jeison, lit. "Thick-sliced Jason"), is an American comedian based in Japan and associated with Watanabe Entertainment. Danielson's comedic narrative is based on his confusion with kanji, ending with the punchline, "Why Japanese people?!"

🔗 Computing

Jensen's Device is a computer programming technique that exploits call by name. It was devised by Danish computer scientist Jørn Jensen, who worked with Peter Naur at Regnecentralen. They worked on the GIER Algol compiler, one of the earliest correct implementations of ALGOL 60. ALGOL 60 used call by name.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Ireland

Percy Edwin Ludgate (2 August 1883 – 16 October 1922) was an Irish amateur scientist who designed the second analytical engine (general-purpose Turing-complete computer) in history.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Medicine/Ophthalmology

The Purkinje effect or Purkinje phenomenon (Czech: [ˈpurkɪɲɛ] (listen); sometimes called the Purkinje shift, often incorrectly pronounced ) is the tendency for the peak luminance sensitivity of the eye to shift toward the blue end of the color spectrum at low illumination levels as part of dark adaptation. In consequence, reds will appear darker relative to other colors as light levels decrease. The effect is named after the Czech anatomist Jan Evangelista Purkyně. While the effect is often described from the perspective of the human eye, it is well established in a number of animals under the same name to describe the general shifting of spectral sensitivity due to pooling of rod and cone output signals as a part of dark/light adaptation.

This effect introduces a difference in color contrast under different levels of illumination. For instance, in bright sunlight, geranium flowers appear bright red against the dull green of their leaves, or adjacent blue flowers, but in the same scene viewed at dusk, the contrast is reversed, with the red petals appearing a dark red or black, and the leaves and blue petals appearing relatively bright.

The sensitivity to light in scotopic vision varies with wavelength, though the perception is essentially black-and-white. The Purkinje shift is the relation between the absorption maximum of rhodopsin, reaching a maximum at about 500 nanometres (2.0×10⁻⁵ in), and that of the opsins in the longer-wavelength cones that dominate in photopic vision, about 555 nanometres (2.19×10⁻⁵ in) (green).

In visual astronomy, the Purkinje shift can affect visual estimates of variable stars when using comparison stars of different colors, especially if one of the stars is red.

🔗 Physics

The green flash and green ray are meteorological optical phenomena that sometimes occur transiently around the moment of sunset or sunrise. When the conditions are right, a distinct green spot is briefly visible above the upper rim of the Sun's disk; the green appearance usually lasts for no more than two seconds. Rarely, the green flash can resemble a green ray shooting up from the sunset or sunrise point.

Green flashes occur because the earth's atmosphere can cause the light from the Sun to separate out into different colors. Green flashes are a group of similar phenomena that stem from slightly different causes, and therefore, some types of green flashes are more common than others.

🔗 Psychology

The half-life of knowledge or half-life of facts is the amount of time that has to elapse before half of the knowledge or facts in a particular area is superseded or shown to be untrue. These coined terms belong to the field of quantitative analysis of science known as scientometrics.

These ideas of half-life applied to different fields differ from the concept of half-life in physics in that there is no guarantee that the knowledge or facts in areas of study are declining exponentially. It is unclear that there is any way to establish what constitutes "knowledge" in a particular area, as opposed to mere opinion or theory.

An engineering degree went from having a half life of 35 years in ca. 1930 to about 10 years in 1960.

A Delphi Poll showed that the half life of psychology as measured in 2016 ranged from 3.3 to 19 years depending on the specialty, with an average of a little over 7 years.

It has also been used in Christian missiology to increase the effectiveness of their teachings.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics 🔗 Anthropology 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind 🔗 Neuroscience 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of language 🔗 Linguistics/Philosophy of language

The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, part of relativism, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis , or Whorfianism is a principle claiming that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their spoken language.

The principle is often defined in one of two versions: the strong hypothesis, which was held by some of the early linguists before World War II, and the weak hypothesis, mostly held by some of the modern linguists.

• The strong version says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories.
• The weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions.

The principle had been accepted and then abandoned by linguists during the early 20th century following the changing perceptions of social acceptance for the other especially after World War II. The origin of formulated arguments against the acceptance of linguistic relativity are attributed to Noam Chomsky.