Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Japan 🔗 Japan/Culture

Cool Japan (クールジャパン, Kūru Japan) refers to the aspects of Japanese culture that non-Japanese people perceive as "cool". The Cool Japan strategy is part of Japan's overall brand strategy, aiming to disseminate Japan's attractiveness and allure to the world. The target of Cool Japan "encompasses everything from games, manga, anime, and other forms of content, fashion, commercial products, Japanese cuisine, and traditional culture to robots, eco-friendly technologies, and other high-tech industrial products".

Cool Japan has been described as a form of soft power, with the ability to "indirectly influence behavior or interests through cultural or ideological means".

🔗 Aviation 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Military history/Weaponry 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/European military history 🔗 Military history/British military history

A bouncing bomb is a bomb designed to bounce to a target across water in a calculated manner to avoid obstacles such as torpedo nets, and to allow both the bomb's speed on arrival at the target and the timing of its detonation to be pre-determined, in a similar fashion to a regular naval depth charge. The inventor of the first such bomb was the British engineer Barnes Wallis, whose "Upkeep" bouncing bomb was used in the RAF's Operation Chastise of May 1943 to bounce into German dams and explode underwater, with effect similar to the underground detonation of the Grand Slam and Tallboy earthquake bombs, both of which he also invented.

🔗 Business 🔗 Psychology 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Education

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.

As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science

In functional programming, continuation-passing style (CPS) is a style of programming in which control is passed explicitly in the form of a continuation. This is contrasted with direct style, which is the usual style of programming. Gerald Jay Sussman and Guy L. Steele, Jr. coined the phrase in AI Memo 349 (1975), which sets out the first version of the Scheme programming language.John C. Reynolds gives a detailed account of the numerous discoveries of continuations.

A function written in continuation-passing style takes an extra argument: an explicit "continuation"; i.e., a function of one argument. When the CPS function has computed its result value, it "returns" it by calling the continuation function with this value as the argument. That means that when invoking a CPS function, the calling function is required to supply a procedure to be invoked with the subroutine's "return" value. Expressing code in this form makes a number of things explicit which are implicit in direct style. These include: procedure returns, which become apparent as calls to a continuation; intermediate values, which are all given names; order of argument evaluation, which is made explicit; and tail calls, which simply call a procedure with the same continuation, unmodified, that was passed to the caller.

Programs can be automatically transformed from direct style to CPS. Functional and logic compilers often use CPS as an intermediate representation where a compiler for an imperative or procedural programming language would use static single assignment form (SSA). SSA is formally equivalent to a subset of CPS (excluding non-local control flow, which does not occur when CPS is used as intermediate representation). Functional compilers can also use A-normal form (ANF) (but only for languages requiring eager evaluation), rather than with 'thunks' (described in the examples below) in CPS. CPS is used more frequently by compilers than by programmers as a local or global style.

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography

Archie R. McCardell (August 29, 1926 – July 10, 2008) was an American business leader. He was best known for his tenure as chief executive officer, president, and chairman of the board at the International Harvester farm and heavy equipment manufacturing concern from 1977 to 1982. Although Harvester was the nation's fourth-largest company at the time he assumed control, McCardell triggered a strike by unionized employees which ended disastrously for the company and led to its eventual demise.

Bicycle Day is a global holiday on April 19th celebrating the psychedelic revolution and commemorating the first psychedelic trip on LSD by Dr. Albert Hofmann in 1943, in tandem with his famous bicycle ride home from Sandoz Labs. It is commonly celebrated by ingesting psychedelics and riding a bike, sometimes in a parade, and often with psychedelic-themed festivities. The holiday was first named and declared in 1985 by Thomas Roberts, a psychology professor at Northern Illinois University, but has likely been celebrated by psychedelic enthusiasts since the begining of the psychedelic era, and celebrated in popular culture since at least 2004.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Greece 🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Philosophy/Ancient philosophy 🔗 Alternative Views 🔗 Philosophy/Epistemology

The Allegory of the Cave, or Plato's Cave, is an allegory presented by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work Republic (514a–520a) to compare "the effect of education (παιδεία) and the lack of it on our nature". It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter. The allegory is presented after the analogy of the sun (508b–509c) and the analogy of the divided line (509d–511e).

In the allegory "The Cave", Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, while the objects under the sun represent the true forms of objects that we can only perceive through reason. Three higher levels exist: the natural sciences; mathematics, geometry, and deductive logic; and the theory of forms.

Socrates explains how the philosopher is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the shadows on the wall are actually not the direct source of the images seen. A philosopher aims to understand and perceive the higher levels of reality. However, the other inmates of the cave do not even desire to leave their prison, for they know no better life.

Socrates remarks that this allegory can be paired with previous writings, namely the analogy of the sun and the analogy of the divided line.

🔗 Canada 🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Marketing & Advertising 🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Automobiles 🔗 Retailing

Canadian Tire money, officially Canadian Tire 'money' or CTM, is a loyalty program operated by the Canadian retail chain Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC). It consists of both paper coupons introduced in 1958 and used in Canadian Tire stores as scrip, and since 2012 in a digital form introduced as Canadian Tire Money Advantage, rebranded in 2018 as Triangle Rewards. Both forms of the loyalty program remain current as of December 2022. Canadian Tire Money has been noted as the most successful loyalty program in Canadian retail history.

Canadian Tire Money is denominated in Canadian dollars. It is earned based on the pre-tax amount of a purchase, excluding labour and shop supplies costs. The initial rate earned was 5% of the eligible purchase price, but it was lowered to 3%, then to 1.4% and now is 0.4%.

When used to pay for merchandise, CTM is considered to be a cash equivalent and may be used to pay for any part of a purchase, including sales taxes. CTM cannot be exchanged for real Canadian currency.

🔗 Psychoactive and Recreational Drugs

The Marsh Chapel Experiment, also called the "Good Friday Experiment", was a 1962 experiment conducted on Good Friday at Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Walter N. Pahnke, a graduate student in theology at Harvard Divinity School, designed the experiment under the supervision of Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, and the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Pahnke's experiment investigated whether psilocybin (the active principle in psilocybin mushrooms) would act as a reliable entheogen in religiously predisposed subjects.

🔗 Telecommunications

A payphone (alternative spelling: pay phone) is typically a coin-operated public telephone, often located in a telephone booth or in high-traffic outdoor areas, with pre-payment by inserting money (usually coins) or by billing a credit or debit card, or a telephone card. Prepaid calling cards also facilitate establishing a call by first calling the provided toll-free telephone number, entering the card account number and PIN, then the desired telephone number. An equipment usage fee may be charged as additional units, minutes or tariff fee to the collect/third-party, debit, credit, telephone or prepaid calling card when used at payphones. By agreement with the landlord, either the phone company pays rent for the location and keeps the revenue, or the landlord pays rent for the phone and shares the revenue.

Payphones are often found in public places to contribute to the notion of universal access to basic communication services. One thesis, written as early as 2003, recognised this as a digital divide problem.

In the 20th century, payphones in some countries, such as Spain, used token coins, available for sale at a local retailer, to activate pay phones, instead of legal tender coins. In some cases, these were upgraded to use magnetic cards or credit card readers over the years.

In the past, payphones were ubiquitous worldwide, but their prevalence has decreased significantly over the years due to the increasing availability of mobile phones, even though cell phone service is not always available in emergencies.