Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Law

In legal parlance, a peppercorn is a metaphor for a very small cash payment or other nominal consideration, used to satisfy the requirements for the creation of a legal contract. It is featured in Chappell & Co Ltd v Nestle Co Ltd ([1960] AC 87), which stated that "a peppercorn does not cease to be good consideration if it is established that the promisee does not like pepper and will throw away the corn". However, the cited passage is mere dicta, and not the basis for the decision.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Oregon 🔗 Perl

Randal L. Schwartz (born November 22, 1961), also known as merlyn, is an American author, system administrator and programming consultant.

He is known for his expertise in the Perl programming language, his promotional role within the Perl community, as a co-host of FLOSS Weekly, and for a controversial felony conviction resulting from State of Oregon vs. Randal Schwartz, later officially expunged.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/Southeast Asian military history 🔗 Vietnam

Operation Popeye (Project Controlled Weather Popeye / Motorpool / Intermediary-Compatriot) was a highly classified weather modification program in Southeast Asia during 1967–1972. The cloud seeding operation during the Vietnam War ran from March 20, 1967 until July 5, 1972 in an attempt to extend the monsoon season, specifically over areas of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The operation was used to induce rain and extend the East Asian Monsoon season in support of U.S. government efforts related to the War in Southeast Asia.

The former U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, was aware that there might be objections raised by the international scientific community but said in a memo to the president that such objections had not in the past been a basis for prevention of military activities considered to be in the interests of U.S. national security.

The chemical weather modification program was conducted from Thailand over Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam and allegedly sponsored by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and CIA without the authorization of then Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird who had categorically denied to Congress that a program for modification of the weather for use as a tactical weapon even existed.

🔗 Georgia (U.S. state) 🔗 Caves

Ellison's Cave is a pit cave located in Walker County, on Pigeon Mountain in the Appalachian Plateaus of Northwest Georgia. It is the 12th deepest cave in the United States and features the deepest, unobstructed pit in the continental US named Fantastic Pit. The cave is over 12 miles long and extends 1063 feet vertically.

🔗 Africa 🔗 Africa/Ghana 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Africa/Ivory Coast 🔗 Africa/French Africa

Child labour is a recurring issue in cocoa production. Cote d’Ivoire (also known in English as Ivory Coast) and Ghana, together produce nearly 60% of the world's cocoa each year. During the 2018/19 cocoa-growing season, research commissioned by the U.S. Department of Labor was conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago in these two countries and found that 1.48 million children are engaged in hazardous work on cocoa farms including working with sharp tools and agricultural chemicals and carrying heavy loads. That number of children is significant, representing 43 percent of all children living in agricultural households in cocoa growing areas. During the same period cocoa production in Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana increased 62 percent while the prevalence of child labour in cocoa production among all agricultural households increased 14 percentage points. Attention on this subject has focused on West Africa, which collectively supplies 69% of the world's cocoa, and Côte d'Ivoire, supplying 35%, in particular. The 2016 Global Estimates of Child Labour indicate that one-fifth of all African children are involved in child labour. Nine percent of African children are in hazardous work. It is estimated that more than 1.8 million children in West Africa are involved in growing cocoa. A 2013–14 survey commissioned by the Department of Labor and conducted by Tulane University found that an estimated 1.4 million children aged 5 years old to 11 years old worked in agriculture in cocoa-growing areas, while approximately 800,000 of them were engaged in hazardous work, including working with sharp tools and agricultural chemicals and carrying heavy loads. According to the NORC study, methodological differences between the 2018/9 survey and earlier ones, together with errors in the administration of the 2013/4 survey have made it challenging to document changes in the number of children engaged in child labour over the past five years.

A major study of the issue, published in Fortune magazine in the U.S. in March 2016, concluded that approximately 2.1 million children in West Africa "still do the dangerous and physically taxing work of harvesting cocoa". The report was doubtful as to whether the situation can be improved significantly.

🔗 Science Fiction

Since the advent of the cyberpunk genre, a number of derivatives of cyberpunk have become recognized in their own right as distinct subgenres in speculative fiction, especially in science fiction.

Rather than necessarily sharing the digitally- and mechanically-focused setting of cyberpunk, these derivatives can display other futuristic, or even retrofuturistic, qualities that are drawn from or analogous to cyberpunk: a world built on one particular technology that is extrapolated to a highly sophisticated level (this may even be a fantastical or anachronistic technology, akin to retrofuturism), a gritty transreal urban style, or a particular approach to social themes.

Steampunk, one of the most well-known of these subgenres, has been defined as a "kind of technological fantasy;" others in this category sometimes also incorporate aspects of science fantasy and historical fantasy. Scholars have written of the stylistic place of these subgenres in postmodern literature, as well as their ambiguous interaction with the historical perspective of postcolonialism.

🔗 Mathematics

In mathematics before the 1970s, the term umbral calculus referred to the surprising similarity between seemingly unrelated polynomial equations and certain "shadowy" techniques used to "prove" them. These techniques were introduced by John Blissard (1861) and are sometimes called Blissard's symbolic method. They are often attributed to Édouard Lucas (or James Joseph Sylvester), who used the technique extensively.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Plants 🔗 Alternative medicine 🔗 Women's Health

Silphium (also known as silphion, laserwort, or laser) was a plant that was used in classical antiquity as a seasoning, perfume, as an aphrodisiac, or as a medicine. It also was used as a contraceptive by ancient Greeks and Romans. It was the essential item of trade from the ancient North African city of Cyrene, and was so critical to the Cyrenian economy that most of their coins bore a picture of the plant. The valuable product was the plant's resin (laser, laserpicium, or lasarpicium).

Silphium was an important species in prehistory, as evidenced by the Egyptians and Knossos Minoans developing a specific glyph to represent the silphium plant. It was used widely by most ancient Mediterranean cultures; the Romans who mentioned the plant in poems or songs, considered it "worth its weight in denarii" (silver coins), or even gold. Legend said that it was a gift from the god Apollo.

The exact identity of silphium is unclear. It is commonly believed to be a now-extinct plant of the genus Ferula, perhaps a variety of "giant fennel". The still-extant plants Margotia gummifera and Ferula tingitana have been suggested as other possibilities. Another plant, asafoetida, was used as a cheaper substitute for silphium, and had similar enough qualities that Romans, including the geographer Strabo, used the same word to describe both.

🔗 Film 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Comedy 🔗 Chicago

Windy City Heat is a made-for-TV reality film produced by Comedy Central. It first aired on October 12, 2003.

🔗 Ships

The Voith Schneider propeller (VSP), also known as a cycloidal drive is a specialized marine propulsion system (MPS). It is highly maneuverable, being able to change the direction of its thrust almost instantaneously. It is widely used on tugs and ferries.