The Arthashastra (Sanskrit: अर्थशास्त्रम्, IAST: Arthaśāstram; transl. Economics) is an Ancient Indian Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, political science, economic policy and military strategy. Chanakya, also identified as Vishnugupta and Kautilya, is traditionally credited as the author of the text. Chanakya was a scholar at Taxila, the teacher and guardian of Mauryan emperor Chandragupta Maurya. Some scholars believe the three to be the same person, while a few have questioned this identification. The text is likely the work of several authors over centuries. Composed, expanded and redacted between...

Singerie is the name given to a visual arts genre depicting monkeys imitating human behavior, often fashionably attired, intended as a diverting sight, using satire. The term is derived from the French word for "Monkey Trick". Though it has a long history, the height of the genre was in the 18th century, in the Rococo. == History == The practise can be traced as far back as Ancient Egypt; Cyril Aldred detected a love of singerie that he found characteristic of the late Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt; Throughout the medieval period in Europe, monkeys were seen "as a symbol of downgraded humanity...

To hear the shape of a drum is to infer information about the shape of the drumhead from the sound it makes, i.e., from the list of overtones, via the use of mathematical theory. "Can One Hear the Shape of a Drum?" is the title of a 1966 article by Mark Kac in the American Mathematical Monthly which made the question famous, though this particular phrasing originates with Lipman Bers. Similar questions can be traced back all the way to physicist Arthur Schuster in 1882. For his paper, Kac was given the Lester R. Ford Award in 1967 and the Chauvenet Prize in 1968. The frequencies at which a drumhead...

Dogs Playing Poker, by Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, refers collectively to an 1894 painting, a 1903 series of sixteen oil paintings commissioned by Brown & Bigelow to advertise cigars, and a 1910 painting. All eighteen paintings in the overall series feature anthropomorphized dogs, but the eleven in which dogs are seated around a card table have become well known in the United States as examples of kitsch art in home decoration. Depictions and reenactments of the series have appeared in many films, television shows, theater productions, and other popular culture art forms. Critic Annette Ferrara...

The bouba/kiki effect, or kiki/bouba effect, is a non-arbitrary mental association between certain speech sounds and certain visual shapes. Most narrowly, it is the tendency for people, when presented with the nonsense words bouba and kiki , to associate bouba with a rounded shape and kiki with a spiky shape. Its discovery dates back to the 1920s, when psychologists documented experimental participants as connecting nonsense words to shapes in consistent ways. There is a strong general tendency towards the effect worldwide; it has been robustly confirmed across a majority of cultures and languages...