Culture questions

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732 Rohrau - 1809 Vienna) was an Austrian composer of the Classical era and one of the three "Viennese classics" (the oldest). His younger brother, Johann Michael, was also a highly regarded composer, active mainly in Salzburg.

A quipu usually consisted of cotton or camelid fiber strings. The Inca people used them for collecting data and keeping records, monitoring tax obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, and for military organization.

A-ha is a Norwegian band formed in Oslo in 1982. Founded by Paul Waaktaar-Savoy (guitars), Magne Furuholmen (keyboards, guitars) and Morten Harket (vocals), the band rose to fame during the mid-1980s and continued its global success in the 1990s and the 21st century. A-ha achieved their biggest success with their debut album Hunting High and Low in 1985. That album peaked at number one in their native Norway, number 2 in the UK, and number 15 on the US Billboard album chart.

While a lot of sources on wiktionary for instance agree that "kitsch" comes from dialectal german word "kitschen", the meaning of this word is different between wikitionary pages (in the french wiktionary, "kitschen" is said to be "pick up garbage", for instance).

Lithography (from Ancient Greek meaning 'stone`) is a method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. Lithography originally used an image drawn with oil, fat, or wax onto the surface of a smooth, level lithographic limestone plate. The stone was treated with a mixture of acid and gum arabic, etching the portions of the stone that were not protected by the grease-based image.

Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales (1966) is an American Internet entrepreneur. He is known as a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the for-profit web hosting company Wikia

Mona Lisa is famous for an optical illusion aka 'the mysterious smile'. The illusion is caused due to peripheral vision as the focus of the viewer shifts from the eyes of the portrait to the lips of the portrait.

Bastet was a goddess of ancient Egyptian religion, worshiped as early as the Second Dynasty (2890 BCE). Her name also is rendered as B'sst, Baast, Ubaste, and Baset.[3] In ancient Greek religion, she was known as Ailuros("cat"). Bastet was worshipped in Bubastis in Lower Egypt, originally as a lioness goddess, a role shared by other deities such as Sekhmet. Eventually Bastet and Sekhmet were characterized as two aspects of the same goddess, with Sekhmet representing the powerful warrior and protector aspect and Bastet, who increasingly was depicted as a cat, representing a gentler aspect

HAL 9000 is an entirely fictional machine and yet it seems to stir something in the soul of the computer scientist. Why? The machine is the soft spoken anti-hero in Arthur C Clarke's novel “2001: A Space Odyssey” which was related to the screenplay for the film of the same name, directed by Stanley Kubrick.

The classic video game Super Mario Bros. has more than a few similarities to the iconic novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland including magic mushrooms, anthropomorphic animals, mysterious portals and passageways, and an all around sort of suspension of reality as we know it that marks both trips through the game and the novel. The comparison isn’t merely the parlor talk of video game geeks though, as Super Mario Bros. creator Miyamoto himself cited the influence of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in an interview with Business Week magazine.