Have a deep view into what people are curious about.

🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Hawaii

Lāhainā Noon is a semi-annual tropical solar phenomenon when the Sun culminates at the zenith at solar noon, passing directly overhead (above the subsolar point). The term "lāhainā noon" was coined by the Bishop Museum in Hawaiʻi.

🔗 Medicine 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Medicine/Toxicology 🔗 Pharmacology 🔗 Medicine/Society and Medicine

Some fruit juices and fruits can interact with numerous drugs, in many cases causing adverse effects. The effect was first discovered accidentally, when a test of drug interactions with alcohol used grapefruit juice to hide the taste of the ethanol.

The effect is most studied with grapefruit and grapefruit juice, but similar effects have been observed with certain other citrus fruits. One medical review advises patients to avoid all citrus juices until further research clarifies the risks. Effects have been observed with apple juice, but their clinical significance is not yet known.

One whole grapefruit, or a small glass (200 mL (6.8 US fl oz)) of grapefruit juice, can cause drug overdose toxicity. Fruit consumed three days before the medicine can still have an effect. The relative risks of different types of citrus fruit have not been systematically studied. Affected drugs typically have an auxiliary label saying “Do not take with grapefruit” on the container, and the interaction is elaborated upon in the package insert. People are also advised to ask their physician or pharmacist about drug interactions.

The effects are caused by furanocoumarins (and, to a lesser extent, flavonoids). These chemicals inhibit key drug metabolizing enzymes, such as cytochrome P450 3A4 (CYP3A4). CYP3A4 is a metabolizing enzyme for almost 50% of drugs, and is found in the liver and small intestinal epithelial cells. As a result, many drugs are affected. Inhibition of enzymes can have two different effects, depending on whether the drug is either

1. metabolized by the enzyme to an inactive metabolite, or
2. activated by the enzyme to an active metabolite.

In the first instance, inhibition of drug-metabolizing enzymes results in elevated concentrations of an active drug in the body, which may cause adverse effects. Conversely, if the medication is a prodrug, it needs to be metabolised to be converted to the active drug. Compromising its metabolism lowers concentrations of the active drug, reducing its therapeutic effect, and risking therapeutic failure.

Low drug concentrations can also be caused when the fruit suppresses drug absorption from the intestine.

🔗 Typography

Word spacing in typography is space between words, as contrasted with letter-spacing (space between letters of words) and sentence spacing (space between sentences). Typographers may modify the spacing of letters or words in a body of type to aid readability and copy fit, or for aesthetic effect. In web browsers and standardized digital typography, word spacing is controlled by the CSS1 word-spacing property.

🔗 Cognitive science 🔗 Neuroscience

Sparse distributed memory (SDM) is a mathematical model of human long-term memory introduced by Pentti Kanerva in 1988 while he was at NASA Ames Research Center. It is a generalized random-access memory (RAM) for long (e.g., 1,000 bit) binary words. These words serve as both addresses to and data for the memory. The main attribute of the memory is sensitivity to similarity, meaning that a word can be read back not only by giving the original write address but also by giving one close to it, as measured by the number of mismatched bits (i.e., the Hamming distance between memory addresses).

SDM implements transformation from logical space to physical space using distributed data representation and storage, similarly to encoding processes in human memory. A value corresponding to a logical address is stored into many physical addresses. This way of storing is robust and not deterministic. A memory cell is not addressed directly. If input data (logical addresses) are partially damaged at all, we can still get correct output data.

The theory of the memory is mathematically complete and has been verified by computer simulation. It arose from the observation that the distances between points of a high-dimensional space resemble the proximity relations between concepts in human memory. The theory is also practical in that memories based on it can be implemented with conventional RAM-memory elements.

🔗 Department of Fun

An article about or described by any of the following can be safely assumed to fit into the set of unnecessary articles:

1. You, your family, or the organization you work for.
2. Your band, which has only sold 47 copies of its one album. Even if you think it will sell 48. Or maybe 49! Or, if you get really lucky, you can pay off the record store owner so that he may buy one and your sales will have gone up to fifty!!! Keep dreamin', brotha.
3. Your imaginary friend or your imaginary friends that don't even exist.
4. The religion, language or even country that you made up with your friends in school one day.
5. The street you live on, unless it is on a Monopoly board. But since it is highly unlikely that you live on a Monopoly game board, we suggest that you not even try.
6. Any one of the 16 distinct regions in the Pokémon video game series or lieking mudkipz, or hering dat someon lieks mudkipz. Remember, not everyone is a Pokémon fanatic.
7. A stunt or trick only you have ever attempted, probably unsuccessfully.
8. Any movie you made yourself which has never been seen by more people at one time than can fit in your basement. Even if you have a really big basement.
9. Individual songs that have never been released as a single nor seen radio play, unless they're twenty minutes long or have led to a phone number becoming unusable or even have questioned the essence of music itself.
10. "(Anything) in popular culture." Anything at all.
11. Likewise "Hysterical Realism in the Works of (insert neither hysterical nor realistic author here)".
12. Your dormitory, university residence, or any suite therein.
13. Stuff nobody but that guy who changes his Spock ears more often than his underpants cares about, or the equivalent thereto. For example, a song about a custom map of a video game, unless you are famous and the song managed to release as a single.
14. Anything about which you cannot be buggered to write one complete sent
15. Subjects that cannot be studied, or the knowledge of which amounts only to the fact that it pertains to another topic. A favourite line from a movie or catchy lyric, a potent phrase used in argument, juicy facts of interest to fans, a punch-line or zinger; these are all very interesting, but usually all that can be informatively written about topic "X" is: "X is a _______ found in _______."
16. Just about everything listed on Wikipedia:Millionth topic pool.
17. For that matter, Wikipedia:Millionth topic pool.
18. Anything about your cat or dog and how cute it is (or your hamster, degu, or chinchilla).
19. Exploding Whales, or indeed Exploding Wales, or even Exploding Wales. Or blowing up any other animals, for example, exploding mice, or even exploding Velociraptor, for that matter. Most things that implode are pretty much off the list too, with a few exceptions.
20. Anything written under the influence of recreational substances or while tired and emotional.
21. An article about another article, written after the use of aforementioned substances.
22. A fork of an existing article for the sole purpose of adding some humor.
23. The weather in London. Not even a redirect. (Wowee).
24. Your guild in World of Warcraft or similar time wasters. Just because you have no life a personally fascinating hobby doesn't mean you get to tell the world about it. And don't write about this guy in your guild who wiped your raid, either.
25. Something you just saw on YouTube and, possibly, laughed at.
26. Something you just put on YouTube.
27. An article that haz badly grammar and/or speelling. Including, bad punctuation!!
28. Any meme, no matter how popular or important.
29. Anything you don't know the title of.
30. Your wiki or blog. It's probably not internationally famous. If it is, well go ahead, but let's face it; your blog of cute cats is not internationally famous (three readers is not fame).
31. Your new invention or research paper that will change the world. It will undoubtedly fail.
32. Anything about your cat named Bubba or your dog named Max. No one cares. Trust us.
33. Your nomination for the Noble (or even Nobel) Peace Prize.
34. Anything about how you were abducted by aliens.
35. An article on the dream you had last night. No matter how long you describe it, it will never be interesting: Even if dreaming that you were the inventor of the chalk board who had to overcome obstacles from the evil book binding lobbyists deeply moved you to tears upon waking up.
36. An article on the person that knocked on your door while you was writing the article about your dream last night, causing you to forget about the dream (but I’ll be honest, I feel for you).
37. An article about Wikpiedia, Wikipaedia, Wiokipedia, Wikipeedia, Wikipeadia, or any other Wikis that appear to be Wikipedia but aren't.
38. An article about the media response to the Wikipedia article about the barely notable thing that shouldn't even have an article (recursivity has its limits, even here).
39. The difference between Hoagy Carmichael and Stokely Carmichael.
40. An entry promoting your hilarious web series about Wikipedia.
41. Recreating this dumb list.
42. Anything about hashtags. #IHateHashtags
43. Anything about how fat you are or how much weight you're losing (trust us; no one cares).
44. Headlight flashing – I know, it's preposterous, even for Wikipedia. But when you're done laughing and/or crying, follow the link. It really exists.
45. Assumptions about the conclusions of scientific publications that you have seen the titles of, but not read.
46. Your self-published book.
47. McGannahan Skjellyfetti.
48. An article about your friend's latest selfie. Or, for that matter, selfie stick. They are banned in most places anyway.
49. Lists of times at which commercial breaks occurred during a sporting event.
50. Your personal opinions about your boyfriend or girlfriend.
51. An article on discussing the differences between you and your close friends. It does not matter to most people in the world.
52. An article about how Tyson Foods is run by a bunch of chicken fuckers because the main article is protected from vandalism by the legions of Internet trolls.
53. Yet another list of Google doodles.
54. A new sex position that you and your boys theory-crafted one night.
55. Times Scooby-Doo has defied the laws of reality.
56. A list of celebrity couples names for couples that you wish would get together but as of now haven't.
57. Your stupid esoteric programming language you made up to 'test the boundaries of computer programming language design'.
58. Any article related to odorous gas clouds, but particularly smelly farts.
59. Your youtube channel, unless you have millions of fangirls.
60. Your opinion and/or fascination about outer space, even if there are lots of unusual exoplanets out there. Yes, we know. They're weird. No need to tell us that.
61. Your opinion on time traveling to have dinner with the members of Bone Symphony or Bone Thugs-n-Harmony or Boney M. or The Right Honourable Bonar Law
62. The time you laughed about someone eating a red 5-pound gummy skull while wearing a jetpack while driving a limousine at 5 a.m. on a Tuesday in August 2018.
63. An article that uses templates to perform math for no apparent reason besides your entertainment
64. Your anus and how it had very good funny time with girl.
65. The time you laughed at someone living in Fortnite (Chapter 1), even though I get that they were eaten by a Black hole. Oh well, they came back!
66. Posting a video of yourself saying the n-word.
67. Posting an image of yourself falling off the Burj Khalifa.
68. Singing any Cardi B song.
69. Posting 69 (nice) useless messages made by bored editors of Wikipedia.
70. Your low-effort school play of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!"
71. A list of times you pinged @everyone on your Discord server.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software

Creative Writer is a word processor released by Microsoft Kids in 1993. Using this program, which is specifically targeted at children, it is possible to create documents such as letters, posters, flyers and stories complete with different fonts, Clip art, WordArt and effects. The interface and environment is especially targeted towards children and is set in Imaginopolis with the main helper being a character known as McZee. A sequel, Creative Writer 2, was released in 1996. Both are now discontinued, but can still be acquired from online stores and auction websites such as eBay.

The original Creative Writer was announced by Microsoft on 7 December 1993 and was released in 1994. It ran on both MS-DOS 3.2 and the Windows 3.1 operating system. A version was also released for the Apple Macintosh, compatible with computers running the classic Mac OS from the System 6 version up to Mac OS 9.

The program took place in the fictional place of Imaginopolis and had several levels of a building each with a different topic (e.g. one for plain writing, one for story templates, one for poster templates). The design of the program was very similar to that of its sister program Fine Artist. The program runs full screen and creates an all-inclusive environment. The interface was similar to a later product called Microsoft Bob.

Creative Writer featured many of the features found on Microsoft's Word for Windows product, including the WordArt feature used to create titles and headlines and the ability to add clip art. Creative Writer also used sounds heavily where each tool would make a different noise. Examples of this include a vacuum cleaner suction to delete and an explosion to denote deleting everything from a page.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Computing/Software

Unums (universal numbers) are a family of number formats and arithmetic for implementing real numbers on a computer, proposed by John L. Gustafson in 2015. They are designed as an alternative to the ubiquitous IEEE 754 floating-point standard. The latest version is known as posits.

🔗 Fisheries and Fishing

Trout tickling is the art of rubbing the underbelly of a trout with fingers. If done properly, the trout will go into a trance after a minute or so, and can then easily be thrown onto the nearest bit of dry land.

🔗 United States 🔗 Video games 🔗 Computing 🔗 Film 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Film/American cinema 🔗 United States/Film - American cinema 🔗 Science Fiction 🔗 Computer Security 🔗 Computer Security/Computing 🔗 Military history/Cold War 🔗 Cold War 🔗 United States/Washington - Seattle 🔗 United States/Washington 🔗 Film/War films 🔗 Military history/War films

WarGames is a 1983 American science fiction techno-thriller film written by Lawrence Lasker and Walter F. Parkes and directed by John Badham. The film, which stars Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Wood, and Ally Sheedy, follows David Lightman (Broderick), a young hacker who unwittingly accesses a United States military supercomputer programmed to simulate, predict and execute nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

WarGames was a critical and commercial success, grossing $125 million worldwide against a $12 million budget. The film was nominated for three Academy Awards.

🔗 Extinction 🔗 Birds 🔗 Scottish Islands

The great auk (Pinguinus impennis) is a species of flightless alcid that became extinct in the mid-19th century. It was the only modern species in the genus Pinguinus. It is not closely related to the birds now known as penguins, which were discovered later by Europeans and so named by sailors because of their physical resemblance to the great auk.

It bred on rocky, remote islands with easy access to the ocean and a plentiful food supply, a rarity in nature that provided only a few breeding sites for the great auks. When not breeding, they spent their time foraging in the waters of the North Atlantic, ranging as far south as northern Spain and along the coastlines of Canada, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Ireland, and Great Britain.

The great auk was 75 to 85 centimetres (30 to 33 inches) tall and weighed about 5 kilograms (11 pounds), making it the largest alcid to survive into the modern era, and the second-largest member of the alcid family overall (the prehistoric Miomancalla was larger). It had a black back and a white belly. The black beak was heavy and hooked, with grooves on its surface. During summer, great auk plumage showed a white patch over each eye. During winter, the great auk lost these patches, instead developing a white band stretching between the eyes. The wings were only 15 cm (6 in) long, rendering the bird flightless. Instead, the great auk was a powerful swimmer, a trait that it used in hunting. Its favourite prey were fish, including Atlantic menhaden and capelin, and crustaceans. Although agile in the water, it was clumsy on land. Great auk pairs mated for life. They nested in extremely dense and social colonies, laying one egg on bare rock. The egg was white with variable brown marbling. Both parents participated in the incubation of the egg for around 6 weeks before the young hatched. The young left the nest site after 2–3 weeks, although the parents continued to care for it.

The great auk was an important part of many Native American cultures, both as a food source and as a symbolic item. Many Maritime Archaic people were buried with great auk bones. One burial discovered included someone covered by more than 200 great auk beaks, which are presumed to be the remnants of a cloak made of great auks' skins. Early European explorers to the Americas used the great auk as a convenient food source or as fishing bait, reducing its numbers. The bird's down was in high demand in Europe, a factor that largely eliminated the European populations by the mid-16th century. Scientists soon began to realize that the great auk was disappearing and it became the beneficiary of many early environmental laws, but this proved ineffectual.

Its growing rarity increased interest from European museums and private collectors in obtaining skins and eggs of the bird. On 3 June 1844, the last two confirmed specimens were killed on Eldey, off the coast of Iceland, ending the last known breeding attempt. Later reports of roaming individuals being seen or caught are unconfirmed. A record of one great auk in 1852 is considered by some to be the last sighting of a member of the species. The great auk is mentioned in several novels, and the scientific journal of the American Ornithological Society was named The Auk (now Ornithology) in honour of the bird until 2021.