Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Fisheries and Fishing 🔗 Food and drink/Desserts

Pumpable ice (PI) technology is a technology to produce and use fluids or secondary refrigerants, also called coolants, with the viscosity of water or jelly and the cooling capacity of ice. Pumpable ice is typically a slurry of ice crystals or particles ranging from 5 micrometers to 1 cm in diameter and transported in brine, seawater, food liquid, or gas bubbles of air, ozone, or carbon dioxide.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Numismatics 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Indonesia 🔗 Japan 🔗 Military history/Asian military history 🔗 Military history/Japanese military history

Japanese invasion money, officially known as Southern Development Bank Notes (Japanese: 大東亜戦争軍票 Dai Tō-A Sensō gunpyō, "Greater East Asia War military scrip"), was currency issued by the Japanese Military Authority, as a replacement for local currency after the conquest of colonies and other states in World War II. In February 1942 in Japan, laws were passed establishing the Wartime Finance Bank and the Southern Development Bank. Both institutions issued bonds to raise funds. The former loaned money primarily to military industries, but also to a wide range of other ventures, including hydroelectric generators, electric power companies, shipbuilding and petroleum. The latter provided financial services in areas occupied by the Japanese military, and Southern Development Bank notes were in fact used as de facto military scrip. In December 1942, the outstanding balance of Southern Development Bank notes stood at more than 470 million; in March 1945, more than 13 billion.

Already engaged in war with China, in 1940 the Japanese expanded the scope of their military operations in Asia and finally entered the Second World War in late 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan invaded various Asian countries, occupying vast territories and setting up military administrations.

Beginning with the capture of the Philippines, the Japanese military confiscated all hard currency, both on a federal and individual level, replacing it with locally printed notes bearing a proclamation of military issue. All notes bore the name of the Imperial Japanese government, and some notes proclaimed the "promises to pay the bearer on demand". Called “Mickey Mouse Money" by local Filipinos, it was valueless after the overthrow of the Japanese, and tons of it were burned. Japanese troops were ordered to destroy bank records and any remaining currency prior to capitulation.

With the end of World War II, the currency circulated bearing the Japanese name immediately lost any value it once possessed and was discarded en masse. Money that was issued included the Philippines, Burma (now Myanmar), Malaya, North Borneo and Sarawak (now Malaysia), Singapore, Brunei, the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and some areas of Oceania (New Guinea and the Solomon and Gilbert islands). Large amounts of the currency were obtained by Allied forces and civilians at the end of the war; many were kept as wartime souvenirs, and are now in both private and museum collections.

🔗 Russia 🔗 Russia/demographics and ethnography of Russia 🔗 Russia/language and literature of Russia 🔗 Russia/politics and law of Russia 🔗 Russia/history of Russia

Russian political jokes are a part of Russian humour and can be grouped into the major time periods: Imperial Russia, Soviet Union and finally post-Soviet Russia. Quite a few political themes can be found among other standard categories of Russian joke, most notably Rabinovich jokes and Radio Yerevan.

🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Books 🔗 Business

War Is a Racket is a speech and a 1935 short book by Smedley D. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit from warfare. He had been appointed commanding officer of the Gendarmerie during the 1915–1934 United States occupation of Haiti.

After Butler retired from the US Marine Corps in October 1931, he made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech "War Is a Racket". The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a short book published in 1935. His work was condensed in Reader's Digest as a book supplement, which helped popularize his message. In an introduction to the Reader's Digest version, Lowell Thomas, who wrote Butler’s oral autobiography, praised Butler's "moral as well as physical courage".

🔗 Electronic music

I am sitting in a room is a sound art piece composed in 1969 and one of composer Alvin Lucier's best known works.

The piece features Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Due to the room's particular size and geometry, certain frequencies of the recording are emphasized while others are attenuated. Eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the characteristic resonant frequencies of the room itself.

In his book on the origins of minimalism, Edward Strickland wrote that "In its repetition and limited means, I am sitting in a room ranks with the finest achievements of Minimal tape music. Furthermore, in its ambient conversion of speech modules into drone frequencies, it unites the two principal structural components of Minimal music in general."

🔗 Companies

PBworks (formerly PBwiki) is a commercial real-time collaborative editing (RTCE) system created by David Weekly, with Ramit Sethi and Nathan Schmidt, who joined shortly thereafter as co-founders. Based in San Mateo, California, United States, the company operates on a freemium basis, offering basic features free of charge and more advanced features for a fee.

PBworks' investors include Mohr Davidow Ventures and the Seraph Group, as well as angel investors Ron Conway and Chris Yeh.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Free and open-source software 🔗 C/C++ 🔗 C/C++/C

Cairo (stylized as cairo) is an open-source graphics library that provides a vector graphics-based, device-independent API for software developers. It provides primitives for two-dimensional drawing across a number of different back ends. Cairo uses hardware acceleration when available.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Espionage 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Physics 🔗 Systems 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Aviation/aerospace biography 🔗 Physics/Biographies 🔗 Physics/Fluid Dynamics 🔗 Systems/Systems engineering 🔗 Pritzker Military Library

Clarence Leonard "Kelly" Johnson (February 27, 1910 – December 21, 1990) was an American aeronautical and systems engineer. He is recognized for his contributions to a series of important aircraft designs, most notably the Lockheed U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird. Besides the first production aircraft to exceed Mach 3, he also produced the first fighter capable of Mach 2, the United States' first operational jet fighter, as well as the first fighter to exceed 400 mph, and many other contributions to various aircraft. As a member and first team leader of the Lockheed Skunk Works, Johnson worked for more than four decades and is said to have been an "organizing genius". He played a leading role in the design of over forty aircraft, including several honored with the prestigious Collier Trophy, acquiring a reputation as one of the most talented and prolific aircraft design engineers in the history of aviation. In 2003, as part of its commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers' flight, Aviation Week & Space Technology ranked Johnson eighth on its list of the top 100 "most important, most interesting, and most influential people" in the first century of aerospace. Hall Hibbard, Johnson's Lockheed boss, referring to Johnson's Swedish ancestry, once remarked to Ben Rich: "That damned Swede can actually see air."