Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Books 🔗 Comics 🔗 Comics/DC Comics

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art is a 1993 non-fiction work of comics by American cartoonist Scott McCloud. It explores formal aspects of comics, the historical development of the medium, its fundamental vocabulary, and various ways in which these elements have been used. It expounds theoretical ideas about comics as an art form and medium of communication, and is itself written in comic book form.

Understanding Comics received praise from notable comic and graphic novel authors such as Art Spiegelman, Will Eisner, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Garry Trudeau (who reviewed the book for the New York Times). Although the book has prompted debate over many of McCloud’s conclusions, its discussions of "iconic" art and the concept of "closure" between panels have become common reference points in discussions of the medium.

The title of Understanding Comics is an homage to Marshall McLuhan's seminal 1964 work Understanding Media.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

"You aren't gonna need it" (YAGNI) is a principle of extreme programming (XP) that states a programmer should not add functionality until deemed necessary. XP co-founder Ron Jeffries has written: "Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them." Other forms of the phrase include "You aren't going to need it" and "You ain't gonna need it".

🔗 United States 🔗 Biography 🔗 California 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Biography/science and academia 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Biography/military biography 🔗 LGBT studies 🔗 Aviation/aerospace biography 🔗 Chemistry 🔗 Military history/World War II 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Libertarianism 🔗 California/Southern California 🔗 California/Los Angeles area 🔗 Thelema 🔗 Occult

John Whiteside Parsons (born Marvel Whiteside Parsons; October 2, 1914 – June 17, 1952) was an American rocket engineer, chemist, and Thelemite occultist. Associated with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), Parsons was one of the principal founders of both the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and the Aerojet Engineering Corporation. He invented the first rocket engine to use a castable, composite rocket propellant, and pioneered the advancement of both liquid-fuel and solid-fuel rockets.

Born in Los Angeles, Parsons was raised by a wealthy family on Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena. Inspired by science fiction literature, he developed an interest in rocketry in his childhood and in 1928 began amateur rocket experiments with school friend Edward S. Forman. He dropped out of Pasadena Junior College and Stanford University due to financial difficulties during the Great Depression, and in 1934 he united with Forman and graduate Frank Malina to form the Caltech-affiliated Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (GALCIT) Rocket Research Group, supported by GALCIT chairman Theodore von Kármán. In 1939 the GALCIT Group gained funding from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to work on Jet-Assisted Take Off (JATO) for the U.S. military. After the U.S. entered World War II, they founded Aerojet in 1942 to develop and sell JATO technology; the GALCIT Group became JPL in 1943.

Following some brief involvement with Marxism in 1939, Parsons converted to Thelema, the new religious movement founded by the English occultist Aleister Crowley. Together with his first wife, Helen Northrup, Parsons joined the Agape Lodge, the Californian branch of the Thelemite Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.) in 1941. At Crowley's bidding, Parsons replaced Wilfred Talbot Smith as its leader in 1942 and ran the Lodge from his mansion on Orange Grove Boulevard. Parsons was expelled from JPL and Aerojet in 1944 owing to the Lodge's infamous reputation and to his hazardous workplace conduct.

In 1945, Parsons separated from Helen, after having an affair with her sister Sara; when Sara left him for L. Ron Hubbard, Parsons conducted the Babalon Working, a series of rituals intended to invoke the Thelemic goddess Babalon on Earth. He and Hubbard continued the working with Marjorie Cameron, whom Parsons married in 1946. After Hubbard and Sara defrauded him of his life savings, Parsons resigned from the O.T.O., then held various jobs while acting as a consultant for Israel's rocket program. Amid McCarthyism, Parsons was accused of espionage and left unable to work in rocketry. In 1952 Parsons died at the age of 37 in a home laboratory explosion that attracted national media attention; the police ruled it an accident, but many associates suspected suicide or murder.

Parsons's libertarian and occult writings were published posthumously. Historians of Western esoteric tradition cite him as one of the more prominent figures in propagating Thelema across North America. Although academic interest in his scientific career was negligible, historians have come to recognize Parsons's contributions to rocket engineering. For these innovations, his advocacy of space exploration and human spaceflight, and his role in founding JPL and Aerojet, Parsons is regarded as among the most important figures in the history of the U.S. space program. He has been the subject of several biographies and fictionalized portrayals.

🔗 Death 🔗 Plants

Coconuts falling from their trees and striking individuals can cause serious injury to the back, neck, shoulders and head, and are occasionally fatal.

Following a 1984 study on "Injuries Due to Falling Coconuts", exaggerated claims spread concerning the number of deaths by falling coconuts. Falling coconuts, according to urban legend, kill a few people a year. This legend gained momentum after the 2002 work of a noted expert on shark attacks was characterized as saying that falling coconuts kill 150 people each year worldwide. This statistic has often been contrasted with the number of shark-caused deaths per year, which is around five.

Concern about the risk of fatality due to falling coconuts led local officials in Queensland, Australia, to remove coconut trees from beaches in 2002. One newspaper dubbed coconuts "the killer fruit". Historical reports of actual death by coconut nonetheless date back to the 1770s.

Another way to "die by coconut" is to suffer sudden cardiac death as a result of hyperkalemia, after consuming moderate to large quantities of coconut water, due to the high levels of potassium in coconut water.

🔗 Elements

Alternative periodic tables are tabulations of chemical elements differing in their organization from the traditional depiction of the periodic system.

Over a thousand have been devised, often for didactic reasons, as not all correlations between the chemical elements are effectively captured by the standard periodic table.

🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Ancient Near East 🔗 Archaeology

YBC 7289 is a Babylonian clay tablet notable for containing an accurate sexagesimal approximation to the square root of 2, the length of the diagonal of a unit square. This number is given to the equivalent of six decimal digits, "the greatest known computational accuracy ... in the ancient world". The tablet is believed to be the work of a student in southern Mesopotamia from some time in the range from 1800–1600 BC, and was donated to the Yale Babylonian Collection by J. P. Morgan.

🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Food and drink/Foodservice

An automat is a fast food restaurant where simple foods and drink are served by vending machines. The world's first automat was named Quisisana, which opened in Berlin, Germany in 1895.

🔗 Psychology

Transactional analysis (TA) is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social transactions are analyzed to determine the ego state of the patient (whether parent-like, childlike, or adult-like) as a basis for understanding behavior. In transactional analysis, the patient is taught to alter the ego state as a way to solve emotional problems. The method deviates from Freudian psychoanalysis which focuses on increasing awareness of the contents of unconsciously held ideas. Eric Berne developed the concept and paradigm of transactional analysis in the late 1950s.

🔗 Highways 🔗 Road transport 🔗 Wiltshire 🔗 Highways/United Kingdom Roads

The Magic Roundabout in Swindon, England, is a ring junction constructed in 1972 consisting of five mini-roundabouts arranged in a circle around a sixth, central circle. Located near the County Ground, home of Swindon Town F.C., its name comes from the popular children's television series The Magic Roundabout. In 2009 it was voted the fourth scariest junction in Britain.

🔗 Comedy

Meta-joke refers to several somewhat different, but related categories: joke templates, self-referential jokes, and jokes about jokes (also known as meta-humor).