Random Articles (Page 6)
Have a deep view into what people are curious about.
🔗 Culinary Diplomacy
Culinary diplomacy, gastrodiplomacy or food diplomacy is a type of cultural diplomacy, which itself is a subset of public diplomacy. Its basic premise is that "the easiest way to win hearts and minds is through the stomach". Official government-sponsored culinary diplomacy programs have been established in Taiwan, Thailand, South Korea, Malaysia, Peru, the United States, Cambodia, Japan, Scandinavia, Australia and Uzbekistan.
Discussed on
- "Culinary Diplomacy" | 2021-12-10 | 54 Upvotes 10 Comments
🔗 Bloom's Taxonomy
Bloom's taxonomy is a set of three hierarchical models used to classify educational learning objectives into levels of complexity and specificity. The three lists cover the learning objectives in cognitive, affective and sensory domains. The cognitive domain list has been the primary focus of most traditional education and is frequently used to structure curriculum learning objectives, assessments and activities.
The models were named after Benjamin Bloom, who chaired the committee of educators that devised the taxonomy. He also edited the first volume of the standard text, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals.
🔗 Jimmy Wales outing Snowden on Wikipedia
Discussed on
- "Jimmy Wales outing Snowden on Wikipedia" | 2013-06-25 | 13 Upvotes 5 Comments
🔗 Kristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass”, was 80 years ago tonight
Kristallnacht (German pronunciation: [kʁɪsˈtalnaχt]) or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November Pogrom(s), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by SA paramilitary forces and civilians throughout Nazi Germany on 9–10 November 1938. The German authorities looked on without intervening. The name Kristallnacht ("Crystal Night") comes from the shards of broken glass that littered the streets after the windows of Jewish-owned stores, buildings and synagogues were smashed.
Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as the attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. The rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps. British historian Martin Gilbert wrote that no event in the history of German Jews between 1933 and 1945 was so widely reported as it was happening, and the accounts from foreign journalists working in Germany sent shockwaves around the world. The Times of London observed on 11 November 1938: "No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday."
The pretext for the attacks was the assassination of the Nazi German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris. Estimates of fatalities caused by the attacks have varied. Early reports estimated that 91 Jews had been murdered. Modern analysis of German scholarly sources puts the figure much higher; when deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll climbs into the hundreds, with Richard J. Evans estimating 638 suicide deaths. Historians view Kristallnacht as a prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.
🔗 StretchText
StretchText is a hypertext feature that has not gained mass adoption in systems like the World Wide Web, but gives more control to the reader in determining what level of detail to read at. Authors write content to several levels of detail in a work.
StretchText is similar to outlining, however instead of drilling down lists to greater detail, the current node is replaced with a newer node. This ‘stretching’ to increase the amount of writing, or contracting to decrease it gives the feature its name. This is analogous to zooming in to get more detail.
Ted Nelson coined the term c. 1967.
Conceptually, StretchText is similar to existing hypertexts system where a link provides a more descriptive or exhaustive explanation of something, but there is a key difference between a link and a piece of StretchText. A link completely replaces the current piece of hypertext with the destination, whereas StretchText expands or contracts the content in place. Thus, the existing hypertext serves as context.
Discussed on
- "StretchText" | 2022-07-23 | 111 Upvotes 38 Comments
🔗 LK-99
LK-99 is a proposed ambient pressure and room-temperature superconductor with a gray‒black appearance.: 8 LK-99 has a hexagonal structure slightly modified from lead‒apatite and is claimed to function as a superconductor below 400 K (127 °C; 260 °F).: 1 The material was investigated by a team of Sukbae Lee et al. from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST).: 1 As of 26 July 2023 the discovery of LK-99 has not been peer reviewed or independently replicated.
The chemical composition of LK-99 is approximately Pb9Cu(PO4)6O such that—compared to pure lead-apatite (Pb10(PO4)6O): 5 —approximately one quarter of Pb(2) ions are replaced by Cu(II) ions.: 9 This partial replacement of Pb2+ ions (measuring 133 picometre) with Cu2+ ions (measuring 87 picometre) is said to cause a 0.48% reduction in volume, creating internal stress inside the material.: 8
The internal stress is claimed to cause a heterojunction quantum well between the Pb(1) and oxygen within the phosphate ([PO4]3−) generating a superconducting quantum well (SQW).: 10 Lee et al claim to show LK-99 exhibits a response to a magnetic field (Meissner effect) when chemical vapor deposition is used to apply LK-99 to a non-magnetic copper sample.: 4 Pure lead-apatite is an insulator, but Lee et al claim copper-doped lead-apatite forming LK-99 is a superconductor, or at higher temperatures, a metal.: 5
Discussed on
- "LK-99" | 2023-07-27 | 101 Upvotes 58 Comments
🔗 James-Lange Theory
The James–Lange theory is a hypothesis on the origin and nature of emotions and is one of the earliest theories of emotion within modern psychology. It was developed by philosopher John Dewey and named for two 19th-century scholars, William James and Carl Lange (see modern criticism for more on the theory's origin). The basic premise of the theory is that physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion. Previously people considered emotions as reactions to some significant events or their features, i.e. events come first, and then there is an emotional response. James-Lange theory proposed that the state of the body can induce emotions or emotional dispositions. In other words, this theory suggests that when we feel teary, it generates a disposition for sad emotions; when our heartbeat is out of normality, it makes us feel anxiety. Instead of feeling an emotion and subsequent physiological (bodily) response, the theory proposes that the physiological change is primary, and emotion is then experienced when the brain reacts to the information received via the body's nervous system. It proposes that each specific category of emotion is attached to a unique and different pattern of physiological arousal and emotional behaviour in reaction due to an exciting stimulus.
The theory has been criticized and modified over the course of time, as one of several competing theories of emotion. Modern theorists have built on its ideas by proposing that the experience of emotion is modulated by both physiological feedback and other information, rather than consisting solely of bodily changes, as James suggested. Psychologist Tim Dalgleish states that most modern affective neuroscientists would support such a viewpoint. In 2002, a research paper on the autonomic nervous system stated that the theory has been "hard to disprove".
Discussed on
- "James-Lange Theory" | 2023-12-01 | 38 Upvotes 12 Comments
🔗 Curry's paradox: "If this sentence is true, then Santa Claus exists."
Curry's paradox is a paradox in which an arbitrary claim F is proved from the mere existence of a sentence C that says of itself "If C, then F", requiring only a few apparently innocuous logical deduction rules. Since F is arbitrary, any logic having these rules proves everything. The paradox may be expressed in natural language and in various logics, including certain forms of set theory, lambda calculus, and combinatory logic.
The paradox is named after the logician Haskell Curry. It has also been called Löb's paradox after Martin Hugo Löb, due to its relationship to Löb's theorem.
Discussed on
- "Curry's paradox: "If this sentence is true, then Santa Claus exists."" | 2008-05-01 | 23 Upvotes 12 Comments
🔗 DCF77
DCF77 is a German longwave time signal and standard-frequency radio station. It started service as a standard-frequency station on 1 January 1959. In June 1973 date and time information was added. Its primary and backup transmitter are located at 50°0′56″N 9°00′39″E in Mainflingen, about 25 km south-east of Frankfurt am Main, Germany. The transmitter generates a nominal power of 50 kW, of which about 30 to 35 kW can be radiated via a T-antenna.
DCF77 is controlled by the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Germany's national physics laboratory and transmits in continuous operation (24 hours). It is operated by Media Broadcast GmbH (previously a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom AG), on behalf of the PTB. With Media Broadcast GmbH, a temporal transmission availability of at least 99.7% per year or under 26.28 hours of annual downtime has been agreed upon. Most service interruptions are short-term disconnections of under two minutes. Longer lasting transmission service interruptions are generally caused by strong winds, freezing rain or snow-induced T-antenna movement. This manifests itself in electrical detuning of the antenna resonance circuit and hence a measurable phase modulation of the received signal. When the maladjustment is too large, the transmitter is taken out of service temporarily. In the year 2002, almost 99.95% availability, or just over 4.38 hours of downtime, was realized. The timestamp sent is either in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)+1 or UTC+2 depending on daylight saving time.
The highly accurate 77.5 kHz (approximately 3868.3 m wavelength) carrier signal is generated from local atomic clocks that are linked with the German master clocks at the PTB in Braunschweig. The DCF77 time signal is used for the dissemination of the German national legal time to the public.
Radio clocks and watches have been very popular in Europe since the late 1980s and, in mainland Europe, most of them use the DCF77 signal to set their time automatically. Further industrial time-keeping systems at railway stations, in the field of telecommunication and information technology, and at radio and TV stations are radio-controlled by DCF77 as well as tariff change-over clocks of energy supply companies and clocks in traffic-light facilities.
Discussed on
- "DCF77" | 2021-06-30 | 67 Upvotes 37 Comments
🔗 The Hedonic Treadmill
The hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of happiness despite major positive or negative events or life changes. According to this theory, as a person makes more money, expectations and desires rise in tandem, which results in no permanent gain in happiness. Brickman and Donald T. Campbell coined the term in their essay "Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society" (1971). The concept dates back centuries, to such writers as St. Augustine, cited in Robert Burton's 1621 Anatomy of Melancholy: "A true saying it is, Desire hath no rest, is infinite in itself, endless, and as one calls it, a perpetual rack, or horse-mill."
The hedonic (or happiness) set point has gained interest throughout the field of positive psychology where it has been developed and revised further. Given that hedonic adaptation generally demonstrates that a person's long-term happiness is not significantly affected by otherwise impacting events, positive psychology has concerned itself with the discovery of things that can lead to lasting changes in happiness levels.
Discussed on
- "The Hedonic Treadmill" | 2019-06-21 | 78 Upvotes 39 Comments
- "The Hedonic Treadmill" | 2010-03-27 | 22 Upvotes 12 Comments