Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Physics

The Foucault pendulum or Foucault's pendulum is a simple device named after French physicist Léon Foucault and conceived as an experiment to demonstrate the Earth's rotation. The pendulum was introduced in 1851 and was the first experiment to give simple, direct evidence of the earth's rotation. Foucault pendulums today are popular displays in science museums and universities.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Biography/Musicians 🔗 Caribbean 🔗 Reggae 🔗 Record Production 🔗 Caribbean/Jamaica

Lee "Scratch" Perry (born Rainford Hugh Perry; 20/28 March 1936 – 29 August 2021) was a Jamaican record producer and singer noted for his innovative studio techniques and production style. Perry was a pioneer in the 1970s development of dub music with his early adoption of remixing and studio effects to create new instrumental or vocal versions of existing reggae tracks. He worked with and produced for a wide variety of artists, including Bob Marley and the Wailers, Junior Murvin, The Congos, Max Romeo, Adrian Sherwood, Beastie Boys, Ari Up, The Clash, The Orb, and many others.

🔗 Video games

The Compact Disc-Interactive (CD-I, later CD-i) is a digital optical disc data storage format that was mostly developed and marketed by Dutch company Philips. It was created as an extension of CDDA and CD-ROM and specified in the Green Book, co-developed by Philips and Sony, to combine audio, text and graphics. The two companies initially expected to impact the education/training, point of sale, and home entertainment industries, but CD-i eventually became best known for its video games.

CD-i media physically have the same dimensions as CD, but with up to 744 MiB of digital data storage, including up to 72 minutes of full motion video. CD-i players were usually standalone boxes that connect to a standard television; some less common setups included integrated CD-i television sets and expansion modules for personal computers. Most players were created by Philips; the format was licensed by Philips and Microware for use by other manufacturers, notably Sony who released professional CD-i players under the "Intelligent Discman" brand. Unlike CD-ROM drives, CD-i players are complete computer systems centered around dedicated Motorola 68000-based microprocessors and its own operating system called CD-RTOS, which is an acronym for "Compact Disc – Real Time Operating System".

Media released on the format included video games and "edutainment" and multimedia reference titles, such as interactive encyclopedias and museum tours – which were popular before public Internet access was widespread – as well as business software. Philips's CD-i system also implemented Internet features, including subscriptions, web browsing, downloading, e-mail, and online play. Philips's aim with its players was to introduce interactive multimedia content for the general public by combining features of a CD player and game console, but at a lower price than a personal computer with a CD-ROM drive.

Authoring kits for the format were released first in 1988, and the first player aimed for home consumers, Philips's CDI 910/205, at the end of 1991, initially priced around US$1,000 (equivalent to $1,877 in 2019), and capable of playing interactive CD-i discs, Audio CDs, CD+G (CD+Graphics), Photo CDs and Video CDs (VCDs), though the latter required an optional "Digital Video Card" to provide MPEG-1 decoding. Initially marketed to consumers as "home entertainment systems", and in later years as a "gaming platform", CD-i did not manage to find enough success in the market, and was mostly abandoned by Philips in 1996. The format continued to be supported for licensees for a few more years after.

🔗 United States 🔗 Books 🔗 Science Fiction

The Astronautilia (Czech: Hvězdoplavba; full title in Greek: Ποιητοῦ ἀδήλου ΑΣΤΡΟΝΑΥΤΙΛΙΑ ἢ ἡ Μικροοδύσσεια ἡ κοσμική; i.e. "An unknown poet's Starvoyage, or the Cosmic Micro-Odyssey") is the magnum opus, written in 1994 under the hellenised pseudonym Ἰωάννης Πυρεῖα, of Czech poet and writer Jan Křesadlo, one of the most unusual works of twentieth-century Czech literature. It was published shortly after his death, as a commemorative first edition.

While no full English translation exists as yet, there is a sample chapter translation online, and a German translation of the fully transcribed and annotated Greek text is in preparation.

🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 Middle Ages 🔗 Middle Ages/History 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Sports 🔗 Greece/Byzantine world

The Nika riots (Greek: Στάσις τοῦ Νίκα, romanized: Stásis toû Níka), Nika revolt or Nika sedition took place against Byzantine emperor Justinian I in Constantinople over the course of a week in 532 C.E. They are often regarded as the most violent riots in the city's history, with nearly half of Constantinople being burned or destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed.

🔗 Software 🔗 Software/Computing

This is a list of notable software packages which were published as free and open-source software, or into the public domain, but were made proprietary software, or otherwise switched to a license (including source-available licenses) that is not considered to be free and open source.

🔗 United States 🔗 Film 🔗 Library of Congress 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 Film/Silent films 🔗 Film/Documentary films 🔗 United States/Film - American cinema

A Trip Down Market Street is a 13-minute actuality film recorded by placing a movie camera on the front of a cable car as it traveled down San Francisco’s Market Street. The film shows many details of daily life in a major early 20th century American city, including the transportation, fashions and architecture of the era. The film begins at 8th Street and continues eastward to the cable car turntable, at The Embarcadero, in front of the Ferry Building. Landmarks passed in the latter part of the first half include the Call Building (then San Francisco's tallest) and the Palace Hotel (both on the right; Lotta's Fountain is on the left between the two but is in the shade). The film was produced by the four Miles brothers: Harry, Herbert, Earle and Joe. It is notable for capturing San Francisco four days before the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which started on the morning of Wednesday, April 18, 1906.

The Miles brothers had been producing films in New York including films shot in San Francisco. In September 1905 they shot the fight between Oscar "Battling" Nelson and Jimmy Britt in Colma, California, just south of San Francisco city limits. The Miles brothers established a studio at 1139 Market Street in San Francisco in early 1906. They shot a railroad descent down Mount Tamalpais as well as the Market Street film. On April 17, Harry and Joe Miles boarded a train for New York, taking the two films with them, but they heard about the earthquake and sent the films to New York while they boarded another train headed back to San Francisco. The Turk Street house of Earle Miles survived the earthquake and subsequent catastrophic fire but the studio did not. The Miles brothers based their business out of Earle's home, and shot more film of post-earthquake scenes; some of this footage, including that of a second trip down a now devastated Market Street, reemerged in 2016. It is likely that the Market Street film survives today because it was sent away before the fire.

Several 35mm prints exist with slight changes in footage. Copies are held at the Library of Congress and the Prelinger Archives. A digital version is viewable online at Internet Archive, YouTube and Wikimedia Commons. In 2010, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

🔗 Classical Greece and Rome 🔗 Greece 🔗 Theatre

In the theatre of ancient Greece, the eirôn (Ancient Greek: εἴρων) was one of three stock characters in comedy. The eirôn usually succeeded in bringing down his braggart opponent (the alazôn) by understating his own abilities.

🔗 Video games 🔗 Science Fiction

The Battle of B-R5RB or the Bloodbath of B-R5RB ( (listen)) was a massive-scale virtual battle fought in the MMORPG space game EVE Online in January 2014 (YC 116 in-game), possibly the largest player-versus-player battle in history at the time. The 21-hour-long conflict pitted the Clusterfuck Coalition and Russian alliances (CFC/Rus) against the N3 and Pandemic Legion (N3/PL), and involved over 7,548 player characters with a maximum of 2,670 players in the B-R5RB system at one time. The in-game cost of the losses totalled over 11 trillion Interstellar Kredit (ISK), an estimated theoretical real-world value of $300,000 to $330,000 USD derived from the value of PLEX, an item purchasable with real currency that can be redeemed either for subscription time or traded for in-game currency.

Part of a larger conflict known as the Halloween War, the fight started after a single player controlling a space station in the N3/PL-controlled star system B-R5RB accidentally failed to make a scheduled in-game routine maintenance payment, which made the star system open to capture. Being a key staging area used by N3/PL in the war, the CFC and Russian coalitions began pouring players into the system in a swift offensive, and N3/PL moved in a large fleet of players as a response as well. A massive battle erupted in the system, and numerous smaller engagements occurred throughout the game universe as players attempted to block reinforcements from joining the battle. CFC/Rus gained a clear win by inflicting heavy losses on N3/PL and successfully capturing B-R5RB. The losses totalled 576 capital ships including 75 Titans (the largest ships available to players), along with thousands of smaller vessels.

To commemorate the sheer size and cost of the battle, the game's creators, CCP Games, erected a permanent monument in the system B-R5RB named "The Titanomachy", consisting of non-salvageable capital ship wrecks.

🔗 United States 🔗 Linguistics 🔗 Linguistics/Applied Linguistics 🔗 Education

A 2019 report by the National Center for Education Statistics determined that mid to high literacy in the United States is 79% with 21% of American adults categorized as having "low level English literacy," including 4.1% classified as "functionally illiterate" and an additional 4% that could not participate. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 54% of adults in the United States have prose literacy below the 6th-grade level.

In many nations, the ability to read a simple sentence suffices as literacy, and was the previous standard for the U.S. The definition of literacy has changed greatly; the term is presently defined as the ability to use printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one's goals, and to develop one's knowledge and potential.

The United States Department of Education assesses literacy in the general population through its National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL). The NAAL survey defines three types of literacy:

• prose literacy: the knowledge and skills needed to search, comprehend, and use continuous texts. Examples include editorials, news stories, brochures, and instructional materials.
• document literacy: the knowledge and skills needed to search, comprehend, and use non-continuous texts in various formats. Examples include job applications, payroll forms, transportation schedules, maps, tables, and drug and food labels.
• quantitative literacy: the knowledge and skills required to identify and perform computations, either alone or sequentially, using numbers embedded in printed materials. Examples include balancing a checkbook, figuring out tips, completing an order form, or determining an amount.

Modern jobs often demand a high level of literacy, and its lack in adults and adolescents has been studied extensively.

According to a 1992 survey, about 40 million adults had Level 1 literary competency, the lowest level, comprising understanding only basic written instructions. A number of reports and studies are published annually to monitor the nation's status, and initiatives to improve literacy rates are funded by government and external sources.