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Tabletop fantasy role-playing game
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The Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game is a role-playing game created and written by Erick Wujcik, set in the fictional universe created by author Roger Zelazny for his Chronicles of Amber. The game is unusual in that no dice are used in resolving conflicts or player actions; instead a simple diceless system of comparative ability, and narrative description of the action by the players and gamemaster, is used to determine how situations are resolved.
Amber DRPG was created in the 1980s, and is much more focused on relationships and roleplaying than most of the roleplaying games of that era. Most Amber characters are members of the two ruling classes in the Amber multiverse, and are much more advanced in matters of strength, endurance, psyche, warfare and sorcery than ordinary beings. This often means that the only individuals who are capable of opposing a character are from his or her family, a fact that leads to much suspicion and intrigue.
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Person engaged in creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art
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An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, the term is also often used in the entertainment business, especially in a business context, for musicians and other performers (although less often for actors). "Artiste" (French for artist) is a variant used in English in this context, but this use has become rare. Use of the term "artist" to describe writers is valid, but less common, and mostly restricted to contexts like used in criticism.
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Philosophy in the ancient world
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This page lists some links to ancient philosophy, namely philosophical thought extending as far as early post-classical history ().
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Shortened form of a word or phrase
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An abbreviation (from Latin brevis, meaning short) is a shortened form of a word or phrase, by any method. It may consist of a group of letters or words taken from the full version of the word or phrase; for example, the word abbreviation can itself be represented by the abbreviation abbr., abbrv., or abbrev.; NPO, for nil (or nothing) per (by) os (mouth) is an abbreviated medical instruction. It may also consist of initials only, a mixture of initials and words, or words or letters representing words in another language (for example, e.g., i.e. or RSVP). Some types of abbreviations are acronyms (some pronounceable, some initialisms) or grammatical contractions or crasis.
An abbreviation is a shortening by any of these or other methods.
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English novelist
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Alan Garner (born 17 October 1934) is an English novelist best known for his children's fantasy novels and his retellings of traditional British folk tales. Much of his work is rooted in the landscape, history and folklore of his native county of Cheshire, North West England, being set in the region and making use of the native Cheshire dialect.
Born in Congleton, Garner grew up around the nearby town of Alderley Edge, and spent much of his youth in the wooded area known locally as "The Edge", where he gained an early interest in the folklore of the region. Studying at Manchester Grammar School and then briefly at Oxford University, in 1957 he moved to the village of Blackden, where he bought and renovated an Early Modern Period (circa 1590) building known as Toad Hall. His first novel, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, was published in 1960. A children's fantasy novel set on the Edge, it incorporated elements of local folklore in its plot and characters. Garner wrote a sequel, The Moon of Gomrath (1963), and a third book, Boneland (2012). He wrote several fantasy novels, including Elidor (1965), The Owl Service (1967) and Red Shift (1973).
Turning away from fantasy as a genre, Garner produced The Stone Book Quartet (1979), a series of four short novellas detailing a day in the life of four generations of his family. He also published a series of British folk tales which he had rewritten in a series of books entitled Alan Garner's Fairy Tales of Gold (1979), Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (1984) and A Bag of Moonshine (1986). In his subsequent novels, Strandloper (1996) and Thursbitch (2003), he continued writing tales revolving around Cheshire, although without the fantasy elements which had characterised his earlier work.
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Species of plant
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The almond (Prunus amygdalus, syn. Prunus dulcis) is a species of tree native to Iran and surrounding countries, including the Levant. The almond is also the name of the edible and widely cultivated seed of this tree. Within the genus Prunus, it is classified with the peach in the subgenus Amygdalus, distinguished from the other subgenera by corrugations on the shell (endocarp) surrounding the seed.
The fruit of the almond is a drupe, consisting of an outer hull and a hard shell with the seed, which is not a true nut. Shelling almonds refers to removing the shell to reveal the seed. Almonds are sold shelled or unshelled. Blanched almonds are shelled almonds that have been treated with hot water to soften the seedcoat, which is then removed to reveal the white embryo. Once almonds are cleaned and processed, they can be stored over time. Almonds are used in many food cuisines, often featuring prominently in desserts, such as marzipan.
The almond tree prospers in a moderate Mediterranean climate with cool winter weather. California produces over half of the world's almond supply. Due to high acreage and water demand for almond cultivation, and need for pesticides, California almond production may be unsustainable, especially during the persistent drought and heat from climate change in the 21st century. Droughts in California have caused some producers to leave the industry, leading to lower supply and increased prices.
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External territory of Australia in the Indian Ocean
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The Territory of Ashmore and Cartier Islands is an uninhabited external territory of Australia consisting of four low-lying tropical islands in two separate reefs, and the territorial sea generated by the islands. The territory is located in the Indian Ocean situated on the edge of the continental shelf, about off the northwest coast of Australia and south of the Indonesian island of Rote.
Ashmore Reef is called Pulau Pasir by Indonesians and Nusa Solokaek in the Rotenese language. Both names have the meaning "sand island".
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Military commander and king of Macedon
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Alexander III of Macedon (; 20/21 July 356 BC – 10/11 June 323 BC), commonly known as Alexander the Great, was a king of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon. He succeeded his father Philip II to the throne in 336 BC at the age of 20, and spent most of his ruling years conducting a lengthy military campaign throughout Western Asia and Egypt. By the age of thirty, he had created one of the largest empires in history, stretching from Greece to northwestern India.Bloom, Jonathan M.; Blair, Sheila S. (2009) The Grove Encyclopedia of Islamic Art and Architecture: Mosul to Zirid, Volume 3. (Oxford University Press Incorporated, 2009), 385; "[Khojand, Tajikistan]; As the easternmost outpost of the empire of Alexander the Great, the city was renamed Alexandria Eschate ("furthest Alexandria") in 329 BCE."Golden, Peter B. Central Asia in World History (Oxford University Press, 2011), 25;"[...] his campaigns in Central Asia brought Khwarazm, Sogdia and Bactria under Graeco-Macedonian rule. As elsewhere, Alexander founded or renamed a number of cities, such as Alexandria Eschate ("Outernmost Alexandria", near modern Khojent in Tajikistan)." He was undefeated in battle and is widely considered to be one of history's greatest and most successful military commanders. "Alexander the Great was one of the greatest military strategists and leaders in world history."
Until the age of 16, Alexander was tutored by Aristotle. In 335 BC, shortly after his assumption of kingship over Macedon, he campaigned in the Balkans and reasserted control over Thrace and Illyria before marching on the city of Thebes, which was subsequently destroyed in battle. Alexander then led the League of Corinth, and used his authority to launch the pan-Hellenic project envisaged by his father, assuming leadership over all Greeks in their conquest of Persia.
In 334 BC, he invaded the Achaemenid Persian Empire and began a series of campaigns that lasted for 10 years. Following his conquest of Asia Minor, Alexander broke the power of Achaemenid Persia in a series of decisive battles, including those at Issus and Gaugamela; he subsequently overthrew Darius III and conquered the Achaemenid Empire in its entirety. After the fall of Persia, the Macedonian Empire held a vast swath of territory between the Adriatic Sea and the Indus River. Alexander endeavored to reach the "ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea" and invaded India in 326 BC, achieving an important victory over Porus, an ancient Indian king of present-day Punjab, at the Battle of the Hydaspes. Due to the demand of his homesick troops, he eventually turned back at the Beas River and later died in 323 BC in Babylon, the city of Mesopotamia that he had planned to establish as his empire's capital. Alexander's death left unexecuted an additional series of planned military and mercantile campaigns that would have begun with a Greek invasion of Arabia. In the years following his death, a series of civil wars broke out across the Macedonian Empire, eventually leading to its disintegration at the hands of the Diadochi.
With his death marking the start of the Hellenistic period, Alexander's legacy includes the cultural diffusion and syncretism that his conquests engendered, such as Greco-Buddhism and Hellenistic Judaism. He founded more than twenty cities that bore his name, with the most prominent being the city of Alexandria in Egypt. Alexander's settlement of Greek colonists and the resulting spread of Greek culture led to the overwhelming dominance of Hellenistic civilization and influence as far east as the Indian subcontinent. The Hellenistic period developed through the Roman Empire into modern Western culture; the Greek language became the lingua franca of the region and was the predominant language of the Byzantine Empire up until its collapse in the mid-15th century AD. Greek-speaking communities in central Anatolia and in far-eastern Anatolia survived until the Greek genocide of the 1910s and early 1920s as well as the Greek–Turkish population exchange of the mid-1920s. Alexander became legendary as a classical hero in the mould of Achilles, featuring prominently in the historical and mythical traditions of both Greek and non-Greek cultures. His military achievements and unprecedented enduring successes in battle made him the measure against which many later military leaders would compare themselves, and his tactics remain a significant subject of study in military academies worldwide.
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Mixture or metallic solid solution composed of two or more elements
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An alloy is a mixture of chemical elements of which at least one is a metal. Unlike chemical compounds with metallic bases, an alloy will retain all the properties of a metal in the resulting material, such as electrical conductivity, ductility, opacity, and luster, but may have properties that differ from those of the pure metals, such as increased strength or hardness. In some cases, an alloy may reduce the overall cost of the material while preserving important properties. In other cases, the mixture imparts synergistic properties to the constituent metal elements such as corrosion resistance or mechanical strength.
Alloys are defined by a metallic bonding character.Callister, W.D. "Materials Science and Engineering: An Introduction" 2007, 7th edition, John Wiley and Sons, Inc. New York, Section 4.3 and Chapter 9. The alloy constituents are usually measured by mass percentage for practical applications, and in atomic fraction for basic science studies. Alloys are usually classified as substitutional or interstitial alloys, depending on the atomic arrangement that forms the alloy. They can be further classified as homogeneous (consisting of a single phase), or heterogeneous (consisting of two or more phases) or intermetallic. An alloy may be a solid solution of metal elements (a single phase, where all metallic grains (crystals) are of the same composition) or a mixture of metallic phases (two or more solutions, forming a microstructure of different crystals within the metal).
Examples of alloys include red gold (gold and copper) white gold (gold and silver), sterling silver (silver and copper), steel or silicon steel (iron with non-metallic carbon or silicon respectively), solder, brass, pewter, duralumin, bronze, and amalgams.
Alloys are used in a wide variety of applications, from the steel alloys, used in everything from buildings to automobiles to surgical tools, to exotic titanium alloys used in the aerospace industry, to beryllium-copper alloys for non-sparking tools.
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Political philosophy supporting rural society
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Agrarianism is a political and social philosophy that has promoted subsistence agriculture, smallholdings, and egalitarianism, with agrarian political parties normally supporting the rights and sustainability of small farmers and poor peasants against the wealthy in society. In highly developed and industrial nations or regions, it can denote use of financial and social incentives for self-sustainability, more community involvement in food production (such as allotment gardens) and smart growth that avoids urban sprawl, and also what many of its advocates contend are risks of human overpopulation; when overpopulation occurs, the available resources become too limited for the entire population to survive comfortably or at all in the long term.
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Branch of physics involving mechanical waves
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Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics technology may be called an acoustical engineer. The application of acoustics is present in almost all aspects of modern society with the most obvious being the audio and noise control industries.
Hearing is one of the most crucial means of survival in the animal world and speech is one of the most distinctive characteristics of human development and culture. Accordingly, the science of acoustics spreads across many facets of human society—music, medicine, architecture, industrial production, warfare and more. Likewise, animal species such as songbirds and frogs use sound and hearing as a key element of mating rituals or for marking territories. Art, craft, science and technology have provoked one another to advance the whole, as in many other fields of knowledge. Robert Bruce Lindsay's "Wheel of Acoustics" is a well accepted overview of the various fields in acoustics.
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American poet and writer (1926–1997)
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Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions.
Ginsberg is best known for his poem "Howl", in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. San Francisco police and US Customs seized "Howl" in 1956, and it attracted widespread publicity in 1957 when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it described heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made (male) homosexual acts a crime in every state. The poem reflected Ginsberg's own sexuality and his relationships with a number of men, including Peter Orlovsky, his lifelong partner. Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that "Howl" was not obscene, asking: "Would there be any freedom of press or speech if one must reduce his vocabulary to vapid innocuous euphemisms?"
Ginsberg was a Buddhist who extensively studied Eastern religious disciplines. He lived modestly, buying his clothing in second-hand stores and residing in apartments in New York City's East Village. One of his most influential teachers was Tibetan Buddhist Chögyam Trungpa, the founder of the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.Miles, pp. 440–44. At Trungpa's urging, Ginsberg and poet Anne Waldman started The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics there in 1974.Miles, pp. 454–55.
Ginsberg took part in decades of political protest against everything from the Vietnam War to the War on Drugs.Ginsberg, Allen, Deliberate Prose, the foreword by Edward Sanders, p. xxi. His poem "September on Jessore Road" called attention to the plight of Bengali refugees which was caused by the 1971 Genocide and it exemplifies what literary critic Helen Vendler described as Ginsberg's persistence in protesting against "imperial politics" and "persecution of the powerless".Vendler, Helen (January 13, 1986), "Books: A Lifelong Poem Including History", The New Yorker, p. 81. His collection The Fall of America shared the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1974. In 1979, he received the National Arts Club gold medal and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Miles, p. 484. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1995 for his book Cosmopolitan Greetings: Poems 1986–1992.
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Capital and most populous city of the Netherlands
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Amsterdam ( , , , lit. The Dam on the River Amstel) is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban area and 2,480,394 in the metropolitan area. Located in the Dutch province of North Holland, Amsterdam is colloquially referred to as the "Venice of the North", for its large number of canals, now designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Amsterdam was founded at the mouth of the Amstel River that was dammed to control flooding; the city's name derives from the Amstel dam. Originally a small fishing village in the late 12th century, Amsterdam became a major world port during the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century, when the Netherlands was an economic powerhouse. Amsterdam the leading center for finance and trade, as well as a hub of production of secular art.Cambridge.org, Capitals of Capital -A History of International Financial Centres – 1780–2005, Youssef Cassis, In the 19th and 20th centuries, the city expanded and many new neighborhoods and suburbs were planned and built. Along with the 17th-century canals of Amsterdam, which are on the UNESCO World Heritage List, so is the 19–20th century Defence Line of Amsterdam. Sloten, annexed in 1921 by the municipality of Amsterdam, is the oldest part of the city, dating to the 9th century. The city has a long tradition of openness, liberalism, and tolerance.Shorto, Russell. Amsterdam: A History of the World's Most Liberal City. New York: Vintage Books 2014. Cycling is key to the city's modern character, and there are numerous biking paths and lanes spread throughout the entire city.Nello-Deakin, Samuel, and Anna Nikolaeva. "The human infrastructure of a cycling city: Amsterdam through the eyes of international newcomers." Urban Geography 42.3 (2021): 289-311.Feddes, Fred, Marjolein de Lange, and Marco te Brömmelstroet. "Hard work in paradise. The contested making of Amsterdam as a cycling city." The Politics of Cycling Infrastructure. Policy Press, 2020. 133-156.
Amsterdam's main attractions include its historic canals, the Rijksmuseum, the state museum with a vast collection Dutch Gold Age art; the Van Gogh Museum; the Dam Square, where the Royal Palace of Amsterdam and former city hall (stadhuis) are located; the Amsterdam Museum; Stedelijk Museum, with modern art; Hermitage Amsterdam, the Concertgebouw concert hall; the Anne Frank House; the Scheepvaartmuseum, the Heineken Experience, the Natura Artis Magistra; Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam, NEMO, the red-light district and many cannabis coffee shops. The city is also well known for its nightlife and festival activity; with several of its nightclubs (Melkweg, Paradiso) among the world's most famous. Primarily known for its artistic heritage, elaborate canal system and narrow canal houses with gabled façades; well-preserved legacies of the city's 17th-century Golden Age, and the establishment of the Van Gogh Museum, displaying the work of the Netherlands' most famous modern artist, have attracted millions of visitors to Amsterdam annually.
The Amsterdam Stock Exchange is considered the oldest "modern" securities market stock exchange in the world. As the commercial capital of the Netherlands and one of the top financial centres in Europe, Amsterdam is considered an alpha world city by the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) study group. The city is also the cultural capital of the Netherlands.After Athens in 1888 and Florence in 1986, Amsterdam was in 1986 chosen as the European Capital of Culture, confirming its eminent position in Europe and the Netherlands. See EC.europa.eu for an overview of the European cities and capitals of culture over the years. Many large Dutch institutions have their headquarters in the city, including: the Philips conglomerate, AkzoNobel, Booking.com, TomTom, and ING.Forbes.com, Forbes Global 2000 Largest Companies – Dutch rankings. Many of the world's largest companies are based in Amsterdam or have established their European headquarters in the city, such as leading technology companies Uber, Netflix and Tesla. In 2022, Amsterdam was ranked the ninth best city in the world to live in by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and 12th globally on quality of living for environment and infrastructure by Mercer. The city was ranked 4th place globally as top tech hub in the Savills Tech Cities 2019 report (2nd in Europe), and 3rd in innovation by Australian innovation agency 2thinknow in their Innovation Cities Index 2009. The Port of Amsterdam is the fifth largest in Europe. The KLM hub and Amsterdam's main airport, Schiphol, is the Netherlands' busiest airport as well as the third busiest in Europe and 11th busiest airport in the world. The Dutch capital is considered one of the most multicultural cities in the world, with at least 177 nationalities represented. Immigration and ethnic segregation in Amsterdam is a current issue.Musterd, Sako. "Immigration and ethnic segregation in the Netherlands with a special focus on Amsterdam." Ethnic Minorities and Inter-Ethnic Relations in Context. Routledge, 2017. 287-303.
A few of Amsterdam's notable residents throughout its history include painters Rembrandt and Van Gogh, seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the Holocaust diarist Anne Frank.
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Semitic language and lingua franca of the Arab world
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Arabic (, ; , or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin/Boston, 2011. Having emerged in the 1st century, it is named after the Arab people; the term "Arab" was initially used to describe those living in the Arabian Peninsula, as perceived by geographers from ancient Greece.
Since the 7th century, Arabic has been characterized by diglossia, with an opposition between a standard prestige language—i.e., Literary Arabic: Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) or Classical Arabic—and diverse vernacular varieties, which serve as mother tongues. Colloquial dialects vary significantly from MSA, impeding mutual intelligibility. MSA is only acquired through formal education and is not spoken natively. It is the language of literature, official documents, and formal written media. In spoken form, MSA is used in formal contexts, news bulletins and for prayers. This variety is the lingua franca of the Arab world and the liturgical language of Islam. It is an official language of 26 states and 1 disputed territory, the third most after English and French. It is also one of six official languages of the United Nations.
Spoken varieties are the usual medium of communication in all other domains. They are not standardized and vary significantly, some of them being mutually unintelligible. The International Organization for Standardization assigns language codes to 33 varieties of Arabic, including MSA. Arabic vernaculars do not descend from MSA or Classical Arabic. Combined, Arabic dialects have 362 million native speakers, while MSA is spoken by 274 million L2 speakers, making it the sixth most spoken language in the world.
Arabic is traditionally written with the Arabic alphabet, a right-to-left abjad. This alphabet is the official script for MSA. Colloquial varieties were traditionally not written, however, with the emergence of social media, the amount of written dialects has significantly increased online. Besides the Arabic alphabet, dialects are also often written in Latin from left to right or in Hebrew characters (in Israel) with no standardized orthography. Maltese is the only colloquial variety officially written in a Latin alphabet.
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Greek mythical character
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Actaeon (; Aktaion),He was sometimes called Actaeus (), as in the poetic fragment quoted at Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3.4.4: "then [they] killed Actaeus at Zeus's instigation", in Greek mythology, son of the priestly herdsman Aristaeus and Autonoe in Boeotia, was a famous Theban hero.Through his mother he was a member of the ruling House of Cadmus. Like Achilles in a later generation, he was trained by the centaur Chiron.
He fell to the fatal wrath of Artemis,Later his myth was attached to her Roman counterpart Diana. but the surviving details of his transgression vary: "the only certainty is in what Aktaion suffered, his pathos, and what Artemis did: the hunter became the hunted; he was transformed into a stag, and his raging hounds, struck with a 'wolf's frenzy' (Lyssa), tore him apart as they would a stag."Walter Burkert, Homo Necans (1972), translated by Peter Bing (University of California Press) 1983, p 111. This is the iconic motif by which Actaeon is recognized, both in ancient art and in Renaissance and post-Renaissance depictions.
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Academy Award which recognizes achievement for art direction in film
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The Academy Award for Best Production Design recognizes achievement for art direction in film. The category's original name was Best Art Direction, but was changed to its current name in 2012 for the 85th Academy Awards. This change resulted from the Art Directors' branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) being renamed the Designers' branch. Since 1947, the award is shared with the set decorator(s). It is awarded to the best interior design in a film.
The films below are listed with their production year (for example, the 2000 Academy Award for Best Art Direction is given to a film from 1999). In the lists below, the winner of the award for each year is shown first, followed by the other nominees in alphabetical order.
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Pre-Socratic Ionian philosopher
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Anaximander (; Anaximandros; ) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher who lived in Miletus,"Anaximander" in Chambers's Encyclopædia. London: George Newnes, 1961, Vol. 1, p. 403. a city of Ionia (in modern-day Turkey). He belonged to the Milesian school and learned the teachings of his master Thales. He succeeded Thales and became the second master of that school where he counted Anaximenes and, arguably, Pythagoras amongst his pupils.
Little of his life and work is known today. According to available historical documents, he is the first philosopher known to have written down his studies,Themistius, Oratio 26, §317 although only one fragment of his work remains. Fragmentary testimonies found in documents after his death provide a portrait of the man.
Anaximander was an early proponent of science and tried to observe and explain different aspects of the universe, with a particular interest in its origins, claiming that nature is ruled by laws, just like human societies, and anything that disturbs the balance of nature does not last long.Park, David (2005) The Grand Contraption, Princeton University Press Like many thinkers of his time, Anaximander's philosophy included contributions to many disciplines. In astronomy, he attempted to describe the mechanics of celestial bodies in relation to the Earth. In physics, his postulation that the indefinite (or apeiron) was the source of all things led Greek philosophy to a new level of conceptual abstraction. His knowledge of geometry allowed him to introduce the gnomon in Greece. He created a map of the world that contributed greatly to the advancement of geography. He was also involved in the politics of Miletus and was sent as a leader to one of its colonies.
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Transportation methods in Antarctica
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Transport in Antarctica has transformed from explorers crossing the isolated remote area of Antarctica by foot to a more open era due to human technologies enabling more convenient and faster transport, predominantly by air and water, but also by land as well.
Transportation technologies on a remote area like Antarctica need to be able to deal with extremely low temperatures and continuous winds to ensure the travelers' safety. Due to the fragility of the Antarctic environment, only a limited amount of transport movements can take place and sustainable transportation technologies have to be used to reduce the ecological footprint.
The infrastructure of land, water and air transport needs to be safe and sustainable.
Currently thousands of tourists and hundreds of scientists a year depend on the Antarctic transportation system.
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Combined military forces of Armenia
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The Armed Forces of Armenia (), sometimes referred to as the Armenian Army (), is the national military of Armenia. It consists of personnel branches under the General Staff of the Armenian Armed Forces, which can be divided into two general branches: the Ground Forces, and the Air Force and Air Defense Forces. Though it was partially formed out of the former Soviet Army forces stationed in the Armenian SSR (mostly units of the 7th Guards Army of the Transcaucasian Military District), the military of Armenia can be traced back to the founding of the First Republic of Armenia in 1918. Being a landlocked country, Armenia has no navy.
The Commander-in-Chief of the military is the Prime Minister of Armenia, Nikol Pashinyan. The Ministry of Defence is in charge of political leadership, headed by Suren Papikyan, while military command remains in the hands of the general staff, headed by the Chief of Staff, who is Major-General Eduard Asryan. Border guards subject to the Ministry of Defence until 2001, patrol Armenia's borders with Georgia and Azerbaijan, while Russian troops continue to monitor its borders with Iran and Turkey. Since 2002, Armenia has been a member of the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Armenia signed a military cooperation plan with Lebanon on 27 November 2015.
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Country straddling Western Asia and Eastern Europe in the Caucusus
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Azerbaijan (, ;
; ), officially the Republic of Azerbaijan, is a transcontinental country located at the boundary of Eastern Europe and Western Asia.While often politically aligned with Europe, Azerbaijan is generally considered to be at least mostly in Southwest Asia geographically with its northern part bisected by the standard Asia–Europe divide, the Greater Caucasus. The United Nations classification of world regions places Azerbaijan in Western Asia; the CIA World Factbook places it mostly in Southwest Asia and Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary places it in both; NationalGeographic.com, and Encyclopædia Britannica also place Georgia in Asia. Conversely, some sources place Azerbaijan in Europe such as Worldatlas.com. It is a part of the South Caucasus region, and is bounded by the Caspian Sea to the east, Russia (Republic of Dagestan) to the north, Georgia to the northwest, Armenia and Turkey to the west, and Iran to the south. Baku is the capital and largest city.
The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic proclaimed its independence from the Transcaucasian Democratic Federative Republic in 1918 and became the first secular democratic Muslim-majority state. In 1920, the country was incorporated into the Soviet Union as the Azerbaijan SSR.
The modern Republic of Azerbaijan proclaimed its independence on 30 August 1991,
shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the same year. In September 1991, the ethnic Armenian majority of the Nagorno-Karabakh region formed the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh.
The region and seven surrounding districts are internationally recognized as part of Azerbaijan pending a solution to the status of the Nagorno-Karabakh through negotiations facilitated by the OSCE, although became de facto independent with the end of the First Nagorno-Karabakh War in 1994.
Following the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, the seven districts and parts of Nagorno-Karabakh were returned to Azerbaijani control.
Azerbaijan is a unitary semi-presidential republic. It is one of six independent Turkic states and an active member of the Organization of Turkic States and the TÜRKSOY community. Azerbaijan has diplomatic relations with 182 countries and holds membership in 38 international organizations, including the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the Non-Aligned Movement, the OSCE, and the NATO PfP program. It is one of the founding members of GUAM, the CIS,
and the OPCW. Azerbaijan is also an observer state of the WTO.
The vast majority of the country's population (97%) is nominally Muslim,
but the constitution does not declare an official religion and all major political forces in the country are secularist. Azerbaijan is a developing country and ranks 88th on the Human Development Index. It has a high rate of economic development,
literacy, and a low rate of unemployment. However, the ruling New Azerbaijan Party, in power since 1993, has been accused of authoritarian leadership and the deterioration of the country's human rights record, including increasing restrictions on civil liberties, particularly on press freedom and political repression.
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In geometry, property of being directionally dependent
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Anisotropy () is the property of a material which allows it to change or assume different properties in different directions, as opposed to isotropy. It can be defined as a difference, when measured along different axes, in a material's physical or mechanical properties (absorbance, refractive index, conductivity, tensile strength, etc.).
An example of anisotropy is light coming through a polarizer. Another is wood, which is easier to split along its grain than across it.
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Bellows-driven free-reed aerophone musical instrument
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Accordions (from 19th-century German Akkordeon, from Akkord—"musical chord, concord of sounds")accordion, entry in Online Etymology Dictionary are a family of box-shaped musical instruments of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone type (producing sound as air flows past a reed in a frame), colloquially referred to as a squeezebox. A person who plays the accordion is an accordionist. The concertina , harmoneon and bandoneón are related. The harmonium and American reed organ are in the same family, but are typically larger than an accordion and sit on a surface or the floor.
The accordion is played by compressing or expanding the bellows while pressing buttons or keys, causing pallets to open, which allow air to flow across strips of brass or steel, called reeds. These vibrate to produce sound inside the body. Valves on opposing reeds of each note are used to make the instrument's reeds sound louder without air leaking from each reed block.For the accordion's place among the families of musical instruments, see Henry Doktorski's Taxonomy of Musical Instruments (The Classical Free-Reed, Inc.) Also on this page is Diarmuid Pigott's The Free-Reed Family of Aerophones The performer normally plays the melody on buttons or keys on the right-hand side (referred to as the manual), and the accompaniment on bass or pre-set chord buttons on the left-hand side.
The accordion is widely spread across the world because of the waves of immigration from Europe to the Americas and other regions. In some countries (for example: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Panama) it is used in popular music (for example: chamamé in Argentina; gaucho, forró, and sertanejo in Brazil; vallenato in Colombia; merengue in the Dominican Republic; and norteño in Mexico), whereas in other regions (such as Europe, North America, and other countries in South America) it tends to be more used for dance-pop and folk music.
In Europe and North America, some popular music acts also make use of the instrument. Additionally, the accordion is used in cajun, zydeco, jazz, and klezmer music, and in both solo and orchestral performances of classical music. The piano accordion is the official city instrument of San Francisco, California. Many conservatories in Europe have classical accordion departments. The oldest name for this group of instruments is harmonika, from the Greek harmonikos, meaning "harmonic, musical". Today, native versions of the name accordion are more common. These names refer to the type of accordion patented by Cyrill Demian, which concerned "automatically coupled chords on the bass side".Dyremose, Jeanette & Lars, Det levende bælgspil (2003), p.133
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Prime minister of Canada from 1873 to 1878
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Alexander Mackenzie (January 28, 1822 – April 17, 1892) was a Canadian politician who served as the second prime minister of Canada, in office from 1873 to 1878.
Mackenzie was born in Logierait, Perthshire, Scotland. He left school at the age of 13, following his father's death to help his widowed mother, and trained as a stonemason. Mackenzie immigrated to Canada when he was 19, settling in what became Ontario. His masonry business prospered, allowing him to pursue other interests – such as the editorship of a pro-Reformist newspaper called the Lambton Shield. Mackenzie was elected to the Legislative Assembly of the Province of Canada in 1862, as a supporter of George Brown.
In 1867, Mackenzie was elected to the new House of Commons of Canada for the Liberal Party. He became leader of the party (thus Leader of the Opposition) in mid-1873, and a few months later succeeded John A. Macdonald as prime minister, following Macdonald's resignation in the aftermath of the Pacific Scandal. Mackenzie and the Liberals won a clear majority at the 1874 election. He was popular among the general public for his humble background and apparent democratic tendencies.
As prime minister, Mackenzie continued the nation-building programme that had been begun by his predecessor. His government established the Supreme Court of Canada and Royal Military College of Canada, and created the District of Keewatin to better administer Canada's newly acquired western territories. However, it made little progress on the transcontinental railway, and struggled to deal with the aftermath of the Panic of 1873. At the 1878 election, Mackenzie's government suffered a landslide defeat. He remained leader of the Liberal Party for another two years, and continued on as a Member of Parliament (MP) until his death, due to a stroke.
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Type of radioactive decay
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Alpha decay or α-decay is a type of radioactive decay in which an atomic nucleus emits an alpha particle (helium nucleus) and thereby transforms or 'decays' into a different atomic nucleus, with a mass number that is reduced by four and an atomic number that is reduced by two. An alpha particle is identical to the nucleus of a helium-4 atom, which consists of two protons and two neutrons. It has a charge of and a mass of . For example, uranium-238 decays to form thorium-234.
While alpha particles have a charge , this is not usually shown because a nuclear equation describes a nuclear reaction without considering the electrons – a convention that does not imply that the nuclei necessarily occur in neutral atoms.
Alpha decay typically occurs in the heaviest nuclides. Theoretically, it can occur only in nuclei somewhat heavier than nickel (element 28), where the overall binding energy per nucleon is no longer a maximum and the nuclides are therefore unstable toward spontaneous fission-type processes. In practice, this mode of decay has only been observed in nuclides considerably heavier than nickel, with the lightest known alpha emitters being the lightest isotopes (mass numbers 104–109) of tellurium (element 52). Exceptionally, however, beryllium-8 decays to two alpha particles.
Alpha decay is by far the most common form of cluster decay, where the parent atom ejects a defined daughter collection of nucleons, leaving another defined product behind. It is the most common form because of the combined extremely high nuclear binding energy and relatively small mass of the alpha particle. Like other cluster decays, alpha decay is fundamentally a quantum tunneling process. Unlike beta decay, it is governed by the interplay between both the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force.
Alpha particles have a typical kinetic energy of 5 MeV (or ≈ 0.13% of their total energy, 110 TJ/kg) and have a speed of about 15,000,000 m/s, or 5% of the speed of light. There is surprisingly small variation around this energy, due to the strong dependence of the half-life of this process on the energy produced. Because of their relatively large mass, the electric charge of and relatively low velocity, alpha particles are very likely to interact with other atoms and lose their energy, and their forward motion can be stopped by a few centimeters of air.
Approximately 99% of the helium produced on Earth is the result of the alpha decay of underground deposits of minerals containing uranium or thorium. The helium is brought to the surface as a by-product of natural gas production.
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National economy
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The economy of Azerbaijan has completed its post-Soviet transition into a major oil-based economy (with the completion of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan Pipeline), from one where the state played the major role. The transition to oil production led to remarkable growth figures as projects came online; reaching 26.4% in 2005 (second highest GDP growth in the world in 2005 only to Equatorial Guinea) and 34.6% in 2006 (world highest) before subsiding to 10.8% and 9.3% in 2008 and 2009 respectively. The real GDP growth rate for 2011 was expected at 3.7% but had dropped to 0.1%.
Large oil reserves are a major contributor to Azerbaijan's economy. The national currency, the Azerbaijani manat, was stable in 2000, depreciating 3.8% against the dollar. The budget deficit equaled 1.3% of GDP in 2000.
Progress on economic reform has generally lagged behind macroeconomic stabilization. The government has undertaken regulatory reforms in some areas, including the substantial opening of trade policy, but inefficient public administration in which commercial and regulatory interests are co-mingled limit the impact of these reforms. The government has largely completed privatization of agricultural lands and small and medium-sized enterprises. In August 2000, the government launched a second-stage privatization program, in which many large state enterprises will be privatized. Since 2001, the economic activity in the country is regulated by the Ministry of Economy of Azerbaijan Republic.
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Figure formed by two rays meeting at a common point
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In Euclidean geometry, an angle is the figure formed by two rays, called the sides of the angle, sharing a common endpoint, called the vertex of the angle.
Angles formed by two rays lie in the plane that contains the rays. Angles are also formed by the intersection of two planes. These are called dihedral angles. Two intersecting curves may also define an angle, which is the angle of the rays lying tangent to the respective curves at their point of intersection.
Angle is also used to designate the measure of an angle or of a rotation. This measure is the ratio of the length of a circular arc to its radius. In the case of a geometric angle, the arc is centered at the vertex and delimited by the sides. In the case of a rotation, the arc is centered at the center of the rotation and delimited by any other point and its image by the rotation.
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Mexican filmmaker
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Alfonso Cuarón Orozco ( , ; born 28 November 1961) is a Mexican filmmaker. He is known for directing films in a variety of genres including the family drama A Little Princess (1995), the romantic drama Great Expectations (1998), the coming of age road film Y tu mamá también (2001), the fantasy film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), the science fiction films Children of Men (2006) and Gravity (2013), the semi-autobiographical drama Roma (2018), and the 2009 short I Am Autism.
Cuarón has received 10 Academy Award nominations, winning four including Best Director for Gravity and Roma, Best Film Editing for Gravity, and Best Cinematography for Roma. He is the first Mexico-born filmmaker to win the Best Director award, and one of only four people to have been nominated for Academy Awards in six different categories.
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Military forces of Azerbaijan
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The Azerbaijani Armed Forces () were re-established according to the Law of the Republic of Azerbaijan on the Armed Forces from 9 October 1991. The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (ADR) had originally formed its own armed forces from 26 June 1918 but were dissolved after Azerbaijan was absorbed into the Soviet Union as the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic from 28 April 1920. After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991–92, the armed forces were reformed based on Soviet bases and equipment left on Azerbaijani soil.
The armed forces have three branches: the Azerbaijani Land Forces, the Azerbaijani Air and Air Defence Force, and the Azerbaijani Navy. Associated forces include the Azerbaijani National Guard, the Internal Troops of Azerbaijan, and the State Border Service, which can be involved in state defense under certain circumstances.
According to the Azerbaijani media sources the military expenditures of Azerbaijan for 2009 were set at US$2.46 billion, however according to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, only $1.473 billion was spent in that year.Stockholm International Peace Research Institute The SIPRI Military Expenditure Database IISS also suggests that the defence budget in 2009 was $1.5 billion. The Ministry of Defence Industry of Azerbaijan supervises the design, manufacturing, regulation and maintenance of military equipment. In the future, Azerbaijan hopes to start building tanks, armored vehicles, military planes and military helicopters. and
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Female superior of a community of nuns, often an abbey
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An abbess (Latin: abbatissa), also known as a mother superior, is the female superior of a community of Catholic nuns in an abbey.
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Geographical features of Alabama
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right|frame|Physiographic regions in Alabama
The geography of Alabama describes a state in the Southeastern United States in North America. It extends from high mountains to low valleys and sandy beaches.
Alabama is 30th in size and borders four U.S. states: Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida. It also borders the Gulf of Mexico.
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Geographic features of Antarctica
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The geography of Antarctica is dominated by its south polar location and, thus, by ice. The Antarctic continent, located in the Earth's southern hemisphere, is centered asymmetrically around the South Pole and largely south of the Antarctic Circle. It is washed by the Southern (or Antarctic) Ocean or, depending on definition, the southern Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans. It has an area of more than 14 million km2. Antarctica is the largest ice desert in the world
Some 98% of Antarctica is covered by the Antarctic ice sheet, the world's largest ice sheet and also its largest reservoir of fresh water. Averaging at least 1.6 km thick, the ice is so massive that it has depressed the continental bedrock in some areas more than 2.5 km below sea level; subglacial lakes of liquid water also occur (e.g., Lake Vostok). Ice shelves and rises populate the ice sheet on the periphery. The present Antarctic ice sheet accounts for 90 percent of Earth's total ice volume and 70 percent of its fresh water. It houses enough water to raise global sea level by 200 ft.
In September 2018, researchers at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency released a high resolution terrain map (detail down to the size of a car, and less in some areas) of Antarctica, named the "Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica" (REMA).
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Anglo-American baseball player (1869–1954)
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Alfred William Lawson (March 24, 1869 – November 29, 1954) was a professional baseball player, aviator and utopian philosopher. He was a baseball player, manager, and league promoter from 1887 through 1916 and went on to play a pioneering role in the U.S. aircraft industry. He published two early aviation trade journals.
He is frequently cited as the inventor of the airliner and was awarded several of the first air mail contracts, which he ultimately could not fulfill. He founded the Lawson Aircraft Company in Green Bay, Wisconsin, to build military training aircraft and later the Lawson Airplane Company in South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to build airliners.Wisconsin Aviation Hall of Fame. Hall of Fame Inductee: Alfred W. Lawson.
The crash of his ambitious Lawson L-4 "Midnight Liner" during its trial flight takeoff on May 8, 1921, ended his best chance for commercial aviation success.
In 1904, he wrote a utopian novel, Born Again,Alfred Lawson. Born Again. Wox & Conrad: New York, 1904. (Online at Project Gutenberg) in which he developed the philosophy which later became Lawsonomy.
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Compound containing rings with delocalized pi electrons
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Heteroarenes are closely related, since at least one carbon atom of CH group is replaced by one of the heteroatoms oxygen, nitrogen, or sulfur. Examples of non-benzene compounds with aromatic properties are furan, a heterocyclic compound with a five-membered ring that includes a single oxygen atom, and pyridine, a heterocyclic compound with a six-membered ring containing one nitrogen atom. Hydrocarbons without an aromatic ring are called aliphatic.
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Size of a two-dimensional surface
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Area is the quantity that expresses the extent of a region on the plane or on a curved surface. The area of a plane region or plane area refers to the area of a shape or planar lamina, while surface area refers to the area of an open surface or the boundary of a three-dimensional object. Area can be understood as the amount of material with a given thickness that would be necessary to fashion a model of the shape, or the amount of paint necessary to cover the surface with a single coat. It is the two-dimensional analogue of the length of a curve (a one-dimensional concept) or the volume of a solid (a three-dimensional concept).
The area of a shape can be measured by comparing the shape to squares of a fixed size. In the International System of Units (SI), the standard unit of area is the square metre (written as m2), which is the area of a square whose sides are one metre long. A shape with an area of three square metres would have the same area as three such squares. In mathematics, the unit square is defined to have area one, and the area of any other shape or surface is a dimensionless real number.
There are several well-known formulas for the areas of simple shapes such as triangles, rectangles, and circles. Using these formulas, the area of any polygon can be found by dividing the polygon into triangles. For shapes with curved boundary, calculus is usually required to compute the area. Indeed, the problem of determining the area of plane figures was a major motivation for the historical development of calculus.
For a solid shape such as a sphere, cone, or cylinder, the area of its boundary surface is called the surface area. Formulas for the surface areas of simple shapes were computed by the ancient Greeks, but computing the surface area of a more complicated shape usually requires multivariable calculus.
Area plays an important role in modern mathematics. In addition to its obvious importance in geometry and calculus, area is related to the definition of determinants in linear algebra, and is a basic property of surfaces in differential geometry.do Carmo, Manfredo (1976). Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces. Prentice-Hall. p. 98, In analysis, the area of a subset of the plane is defined using Lebesgue measure,Walter Rudin (1966). Real and Complex Analysis, McGraw-Hill, . though not every subset is measurable.Gerald Folland (1999). Real Analysis: modern techniques and their applications, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., p. 20, In general, area in higher mathematics is seen as a special case of volume for two-dimensional regions.
Area can be defined through the use of axioms, defining it as a function of a collection of certain plane figures to the set of real numbers. It can be proved that such a function exists.
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International cricket series
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The Ashes is a Test cricket series played between England and Australia. The term originated in a satirical obituary published in a British newspaper, The Sporting Times, immediately after Australia's 1882 victory at The Oval, its first Test win on English soil. The obituary stated that English cricket had died, and "the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia". The mythical ashes immediately became associated with the 1882–83 series played in Australia, before which the English captain Ivo Bligh had vowed to "regain those ashes". The English media therefore dubbed the tour the quest to regain the Ashes.
After England had won two of the three Tests on the tour, a small urn was presented to Bligh by a group of Melbourne women including Florence Morphy, whom Bligh married within a year.Summary of Events The Illustrated Australian News, 20 February 1884, (foot of column 2) at Trove The contents of the urn are reputed to be the ashes of a wooden bail, and were humorously described as "the ashes of Australian cricket".Cricket Hobart Mercury, 4 June 1908, p.8, at Trove It is not clear whether that "tiny silver urn" is the same as the small terracotta urn given to the MCC by Bligh's widow after his death in 1927.
The urn has never been the official trophy of the Ashes series, having been a personal gift to Bligh. However, replicas of the urn are often held aloft by victorious teams as a symbol of their victory in an Ashes series. Since the 1998–99 Ashes series, a Waterford Crystal representation of the Ashes urn (called the Ashes Trophy) has been presented to the winners of an Ashes series as the official trophy of that series. Irrespective of which side holds the tournament, the original urn remains in the MCC Museum at Lord's; it has, however, been taken to Australia to be put on touring display on two occasions: as part of the Australian Bicentenary celebrations in 1988 and to accompany the Ashes series in 2006–07.
An Ashes series traditionally consists of five Tests, hosted in turn by England and Australia at least once every two years. The Ashes are regarded as being held by the team that most recently won the series. If the series is drawn, the team that currently holds the Ashes retains the trophy.
There have been 72 Ashes series: Australia have won 34, England have won 32 and six series have been drawn.
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Mean distance between Earth and the Sun
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The astronomical unit (symbol: au, or or AU) is a unit of length, roughly the distance from Earth to the Sun and approximately equal to or 8.3 light-minutes. The actual distance from Earth to the Sun varies by about 3% as Earth orbits the Sun, from a maximum (aphelion) to a minimum (perihelion) and back again once each year. The astronomical unit was originally conceived as the average of Earth's aphelion and perihelion; however, since 2012 it has been defined as exactly (see below for several conversions).
The astronomical unit is used primarily for measuring distances within the Solar System or around other stars. It is also a fundamental component in the definition of another unit of astronomical length, the parsec.
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Demonym for the Americas
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The meaning of the word American in the English language varies according to the historical, geographical, and political context in which it is used. American is derived from America, a term originally denoting all of the Americas (also called the Western Hemisphere). In some expressions, it retains this Pan-American sense, but its usage has evolved over time and, for various historical reasons, the word came to denote people or things specifically from the United States of America.
In modern English, American generally refers to persons or things related to the United States of America; among native English speakers this usage is almost universal, with any other use of the term requiring specification. View at Bartleby However, some linguists in the past have argued that "American" should be widened to also include people or things from anywhere in the American continents.
The word can be used as either an adjective or a noun (viz. a demonym). In adjectival use, it means "of or relating to the United States"; for example, "Elvis Presley was an American singer" or "the man prefers American English". In its noun form, the word generally means a resident or citizen of the U.S., but is also used for someone whose ethnic identity is simply "American". The noun is rarely used in English to refer to people not connected to the United States when intending a geographical meaning. When used with a grammatical qualifier, the adjective American can mean "of or relating to the Americas", as in Latin American or Indigenous American. Less frequently, the adjective can take this meaning without a qualifier, as in "American Spanish dialects and pronunciation differ by country", or the name of the Organization of American States. A third use of the term pertains specifically to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, for instance, "In the 16th century, many Americans died from imported diseases during the European conquest", though this usage is rare, as "indigenous", "First Nations" or "Amerindian" are considered less confusing and generally more appropriate.
Compound constructions which indicate a minority ethnic group, such as "African-Americans" likewise refer exclusively to people in or from the United States of America, as does the prefix "Americo-". For instance, the Americo-Liberians and their language Merico derive their name from the fact that they are descended from African-American settlers, i.e. Blacks who were formerly enslaved in the United States of America.
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Public park system in Barcelona, Spain
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Parc Güell ( ; ) is a privatized park system composed of gardens and architectural elements located on Carmel Hill, in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Carmel Hill belongs to the mountain range of Collserola – the Parc del Carmel is located on the northern face. Park Güell is located in La Salut, a neighborhood in the Gràcia district of Barcelona. With urbanization in mind, Eusebi Güell assigned the design of the park to Antoni Gaudí, a renowned architect and the face of Catalan modernism.
The park was built from 1900 to 1914 and was officially opened as a public park in 1926. In 1984, UNESCO declared the park a World Heritage Site under "Works of Antoni Gaudí".
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English mystery and detective writer (1890–1976)
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Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, (; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictional detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. She also wrote the world's longest-running play, the murder mystery The Mousetrap, which has been performed in the West End since 1952. A writer during the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", Christie has been called the "Queen of Crime". She also wrote six novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott. In 1971, she was made a Dame (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II for her contributions to literature. Guinness World Records lists Christie as the best-selling fiction writer of all time, her novels having sold more than two billion copies.
Christie was born into a wealthy upper middle class family in Torquay, Devon, and was largely home-schooled. She was initially an unsuccessful writer with six consecutive rejections, but this changed in 1920 when The Mysterious Affair at Styles, featuring detective Hercule Poirot, was published. Her first husband was Archibald Christie; they married in 1914 and had one child before divorcing in 1928. Following the breakdown of her marriage in 1926 she made international headlines by going missing for eleven days. During both World Wars, she served in hospital dispensaries, acquiring a thorough knowledge of the poisons that featured in many of her novels, short stories, and plays. Following her marriage to archaeologist Max Mallowan in 1930, she spent several months each year on digs in the Middle East and used her first-hand knowledge of this profession in her fiction.
According to UNESCO's Index Translationum, she remains the most-translated individual author. Her novel And Then There Were None is one of the top-selling books of all time, with approximately 100 million copies sold. Christie's stage play The Mousetrap holds the world record for the longest initial run. It opened at the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End on 25 November 1952, and by September 2018 there had been more than 27,500 performances. The play was temporarily closed in March 2020 because of COVID-19 lockdowns in London before it reopened in May 2021.
In 1955, Christie was the first recipient of the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award. Later that year, Witness for the Prosecution received an Edgar Award for best play. In 2013, she was voted the best crime writer and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd the best crime novel ever by 600 professional novelists of the Crime Writers' Association. In September 2015, And Then There Were None was named the "World's Favourite Christie" in a vote sponsored by the author's estate. Many of Christie's books and short stories have been adapted for television, radio, video games, and graphic novels. More than 30 feature films are based on her work.
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Sign language used predominately in the United States
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American Sign Language (ASL) is a natural languageAbout American Sign Language, Deaf Research Library, Karen Nakamura that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States of America and most of Anglophone Canada. ASL is a complete and organized visual language that is expressed by employing both manual and nonmanual features. Besides North America, dialects of ASL and ASL-based creoles are used in many countries around the world, including much of West Africa and parts of Southeast Asia. ASL is also widely learned as a second language, serving as a lingua franca. ASL is most closely related to French Sign Language (LSF). It has been proposed that ASL is a creole language of LSF, although ASL shows features atypical of creole languages, such as agglutinative morphology.
ASL originated in the early 19th century in the American School for the Deaf (ASD) in West Hartford, Connecticut, from a situation of language contact. Since then, ASL use has been propagated widely by schools for the deaf and Deaf community organizations. Despite its wide use, no accurate count of ASL users has been taken. Reliable estimates for American ASL users range from 250,000 to 500,000 persons, including a number of children of deaf adults and other hearing individuals.
ASL signs have a number of phonemic components, such as movement of the face, the torso, and the hands. ASL is not a form of pantomime although iconicity plays a larger role in ASL than in spoken languages. English loan words are often borrowed through fingerspelling, although ASL grammar is unrelated to that of English. ASL has verbal agreement and aspectual marking and has a productive system of forming agglutinative classifiers. Many linguists believe ASL to be a subject–verb–object (SVO) language. However, there are several alternative proposals to account for ASL word order.
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Proposed mechanical general-purpose computer
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The Analytical Engine was a proposed mechanical general-purpose computer designed by English mathematician and computer pioneer Charles Babbage. It was first described in 1837 as the successor to Babbage's difference engine, which was a design for a simpler mechanical calculator.
The Analytical Engine incorporated an arithmetic logic unit, control flow in the form of conditional branching and loops, and integrated memory, making it the first design for a general-purpose computer that could be described in modern terms as Turing-complete. In other words, the structure of the Analytical Engine was essentially the same as that which has dominated computer design in the electronic era. The Analytical Engine is one of the most successful achievements of Charles Babbage.
Babbage was never able to complete construction of any of his machines due to conflicts with his chief engineer and inadequate funding. It was not until 1941 that Konrad Zuse built the first general-purpose computer, Z3, more than a century after Babbage had proposed the pioneering Analytical Engine in 1837.
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American rapper
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Kim Renard Nazel (born June 17, 1965), better known by his stage names Arabian Prince or Professor X, is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, record producer, and DJ. He is best known as a founding member of N.W.A.
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Extinct suborder of mammals
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Ancylopoda is a group of browsing, herbivorous, mammals in the Perissodactyla that show long, curved and cleft claws. Morphological evidence indicates the Ancylopoda diverged from the tapirs, rhinoceroses and horses (Euperissodactyla) after the Brontotheria, however earlier authorities such as Osborn sometimes considered the Ancylopoda to be outside Perissodactyla or, as was popular more recently, to be related to Brontotheriidae.
Macrotherium, which is typically from the middle Miocene of Sansan, in Gers, France, may indicate a distinct genus. Limb-bones resembling those of Macrotherium, but relatively stouter, have been described from the Pliocene beds of Attica and Samos as Ancylotherium. In the Americas, the names Morothorium and Moropus have been applied to similar bones, in the belief that they indicated Xenarthrans. Macrotherium magnum must have been an animal of about nine feet in length.
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British rock band
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The Alan Parsons Project was a British rock band active between 1975 and 1990, whose core membership consisted of producer, audio engineer, musician and composer Alan Parsons and singer, songwriter and pianist Eric Woolfson. They were accompanied by varying session musicians and some relatively consistent session players such as guitarist Ian Bairnson, arranger Andrew Powell, bassist and vocalist David Paton, drummer Stuart Elliott, and vocalists Lenny Zakatek and Chris Rainbow. Parsons and Woolfson shared writing credits on almost all of the Project's songs, with Parsons producing or co-producing all of the band's recordings.
The Alan Parsons Project released eleven studio albums in its 15-year career, the most successful being I Robot (1977) and Eye in the Sky (1982). Many of their albums are conceptual in nature and focus on science fiction, supernatural, literary and sociological themes. Among the group's most popular songs are "I Wouldn't Want to Be Like You", "Games People Play", "Time", "Sirius"/"Eye in the Sky" and "Don't Answer Me".
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Genre of speculative fiction, where one or more historical events occur differently
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Alternate history (also alternative history, althist, AH) is a genre of speculative fiction of stories in which one or more historical events occur and are resolved differently than they were in real life.Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction (Oxford University Press, 2007) notes the preferred usage is "Alternate History", which was coined in 1954; "Alternative History" was first used in 1977, pp. 4–5. As conjecture based upon historical fact, alternative history stories propose What if? scenarios about crucial events in human history, and present outcomes very different from the historical record. Alternate history also is a subgenre of literary fiction, science fiction, and historical fiction; as literature, alternate history uses the tropes of the genre to answer the What if? speculations of the story.
Since the 1950s, as a subgenre of science fiction, alternative history stories feature the tropes of time travel between histories, and the psychic awareness of the existence of an alternative universe, by the inhabitants of a given universe; and time travel that divides history into various timestreams. In the Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, and Galician languages, the terms Uchronie, ucronia, ucronía, and Uchronie identify the alternate history genre, from which derives the English term Uchronia, composed of the Greek prefix ("not", "not any", and "no") and the Greek word () "time", to describe a story that occurs "[in] no time"; analogous to a story that occurs in utopia, "[in] no place". The term Uchronia also is the name of the list of alternate-history books, uchronia.net. Moreover, Allohistory (other history) is another term for the genre of alternative history.
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Political philosophy and economic theory
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Anarcho-capitalism (or, colloquially, ancap) is an anti-statist, libertarian, and anti-political philosophy and economic theory that seeks to abolish centralized states in favor of stateless societies with systems of private property enforced by private agencies, the non-aggression principle, free markets and the right-libertarian interpretation of self-ownership, which extends the concept to include control of private property as part of the self. In the absence of statute, anarcho-capitalists hold that society tends to contractually self-regulate and civilize through participation in the free market, which they describe as a voluntary society involving the voluntary exchange of services and goods. In a theoretical anarcho-capitalist society, the system of private property would still exist and be enforced by private defense agencies and/or insurance companies selected by customers which would operate competitively in a market and fulfill the roles of courts and the police. The word "anarchy" is the literal antithesis of hierarchy. Therefore, "anarcho-capitalism" is primarily a co-opted term with no philosophical similarities to true anarchism, as an ancap society would inherently contain hierarchy.
According to its proponents, various historical theorists have espoused philosophies similar to anarcho-capitalism,Hoppe, Hans-Hermann (31 December 2001). "Anarcho-Capitalism: An Annotated Bibliography". Lew Rockwell.com. Retrieved 5 July 2020. but the first person to use the term anarcho-capitalism was Murray Rothbard, in the 1940s. Rothbard, a leading figure in the 20th century American libertarian movement, synthesized elements from the Austrian School, classical liberalism and 19th-century American individualist anarchists and mutualists Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker while rejecting the labor theory of value. Rothbard's anarcho-capitalist society would operate under a mutually agreed-upon "legal code which would be generally accepted, and which the courts would pledge themselves to follow". This legal code would recognize contracts between individuals, private property, self-ownership and tort law in keeping with the non-aggression principle. Rothbard views the power of the state as unjustified, arguing that it restricts individual rights and prosperity, and creates social and economic problems.
Anarcho-capitalists and right-libertarians cite several historical precedents of what they believe to be examples of anarcho-capitalism, including the Republic of Cospaia, Anglo‐Saxon England, the Free cities of medieval Europe, Medieval Iceland, the American Old West, Gaelic Ireland, Somalia from 1991 to 2006, and law merchant, admiralty law, and early common law.
Anarcho-capitalism is distinguished from minarchism, which advocates a night-watchman state limited to protecting individuals from aggression and enforcing private property. Anarcho-capitalism is also distinguished from anarchism, an anti-capitalist movement that opposes unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, and social anarchism, a branch of anarchism that sees individual freedom as interrelated with mutual aid. Unlike anarchists, anarcho-capitalists support private property and private institutions. Anarcho-capitalists also reject the libertarian socialist economic theories of anarchism, arguing that they are inherently authoritarian or require authoritarianism to achieve, while believing that there is no coercion under capitalism. Despite its name, anarcho-capitalism lies outside the tradition of anarchism and is more closely affiliated with capitalism, right-libertarianism, and liberalism. Traditional anarchist schools of thought oppose and reject capitalism, and consider "anarcho-capitalism" to be a contradiction in terms, although some, including anarcho-capitalists and right-libertarians, have argued that anarcho-capitalism is a form of anarchism. Anarcho-capitalism is usually seen as part of the New Right.
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Building by Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona, Spain
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Casa Batlló () is a building in the center of Barcelona. It was designed by Antoni Gaudí, and is considered one of his masterpieces. A remodel of a previously built house, it was redesigned in 1904 by Gaudí and has been refurbished several times after that. Gaudí's assistants Domènec Sugrañes i Gras, Josep Canaleta and Joan Rubió also contributed to the renovation project.
The local name for the building is Casa dels ossos (House of Bones), as it has a visceral, skeletal organic quality. It is located on the Passeig de Gràcia in the Eixample district, and forms part of a row of houses known as the Illa de la Discòrdia (or Mansana de la Discòrdia, the "Block of Discord"), which consists of four buildings by noted Modernista architects of Barcelona.
Like everything Gaudí designed, Casa Batlló is only identifiable as Modernisme or Art Nouveau in the broadest sense. The ground floor, in particular, has unusual tracery, irregular oval windows and flowing sculpted stone work. There are few straight lines, and much of the façade is decorated with a colorful mosaic made of broken ceramic tiles (trencadís). The roof is arched and was likened to the back of a dragon or dinosaur. A common theory about the building is that the rounded feature to the left of centre, terminating at the top in a turret and cross, represents the lance of Saint George (patron saint of Catalonia, Gaudí's home), which has been plunged into the back of the dragon.
In 2005, Casa Batlló became an UNESCO World Heritage Site among the other Works of Antoni Gaudí, and is visited by people from around the world.
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Particle with opposite charges
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In particle physics, every type of particle is associated with an antiparticle with the same mass but with opposite physical charges (such as electric charge). For example, the antiparticle of the electron is the positron (also known as an antielectron). While the electron has a negative electric charge, the positron has a positive electric charge, and is produced naturally in certain types of radioactive decay. The opposite is also true: the antiparticle of the positron is the electron.
Some particles, such as the photon, are their own antiparticle. Otherwise, for each pair of antiparticle partners, one is designated as the normal particle (the one that occurs in matter usually interacted with in daily life). The other (usually given the prefix "anti-") is designated the antiparticle.
Particle–antiparticle pairs can annihilate each other, producing photons; since the charges of the particle and antiparticle are opposite, total charge is conserved. For example, the positrons produced in natural radioactive decay quickly annihilate themselves with electrons, producing pairs of gamma rays, a process exploited in positron emission tomography.
The laws of nature are very nearly symmetrical with respect to particles and antiparticles. For example, an antiproton and a positron can form an antihydrogen atom, which is believed to have the same properties as a hydrogen atom. This leads to the question of why the formation of matter after the Big Bang resulted in a universe consisting almost entirely of matter, rather than being a half-and-half mixture of matter and antimatter. The discovery of charge parity violation helped to shed light on this problem by showing that this symmetry, originally thought to be perfect, was only approximate.
Because charge is conserved, it is not possible to create an antiparticle without either destroying another particle of the same charge (as is for instance the case when antiparticles are produced naturally via beta decay or the collision of cosmic rays with Earth's atmosphere), or by the simultaneous creation of both a particle and its antiparticle, which can occur in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
Although particles and their antiparticles have opposite charges, electrically neutral particles need not be identical to their antiparticles. The neutron, for example, is made out of quarks, the antineutron from antiquarks, and they are distinguishable from one another because neutrons and antineutrons annihilate each other upon contact. However, other neutral particles are their own antiparticles, such as photons, Z0 bosons, mesons, and hypothetical gravitons and some hypothetical WIMPs.
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Standard for the encryption of electronic data
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The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001.
AES is a variant of the Rijndael block cipher developed by two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, who submitted a proposal to NIST during the AES selection process. Rijndael is a family of ciphers with different key and block sizes. For AES, NIST selected three members of the Rijndael family, each with a block size of 128 bits, but three different key lengths: 128, 192 and 256 bits.
AES has been adopted by the U.S. government. It supersedes the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which was published in 1977. The algorithm described by AES is a symmetric-key algorithm, meaning the same key is used for both encrypting and decrypting the data.
In the United States, AES was announced by the NIST as U.S. FIPS PUB 197 (FIPS 197) on November 26, 2001. This announcement followed a five-year standardization process in which fifteen competing designs were presented and evaluated, before the Rijndael cipher was selected as the most suitable.See Advanced Encryption Standard process for more details.
AES is included in the ISO/IEC 18033-3 standard. AES became effective as a U.S. federal government standard on May 26, 2002, after approval by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. AES is available in many different encryption packages, and is the first (and only) publicly accessible cipher approved by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) for top secret information when used in an NSA approved cryptographic module.See Security of AES below.
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High-level programming language first released in 1980
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Ada is a structured, statically typed, imperative, and object-oriented high-level programming language, extended from Pascal and other languages. It has built-in language support for design by contract (DbC), extremely strong typing, explicit concurrency, tasks, synchronous message passing, protected objects, and non-determinism. Ada improves code safety and maintainability by using the compiler to find errors in favor of runtime errors. Ada is an international technical standard, jointly defined by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). , the standard, called Ada 2012 informally, is ISO/IEC 8652:2012.
Ada was originally designed by a team led by French computer scientist Jean Ichbiah of CII Honeywell Bull under contract to the United States Department of Defense (DoD) from 1977 to 1983 to supersede over 450 programming languages used by the DoD at that time. Ada was named after Ada Lovelace (1815–1852), who has been credited as the first computer programmer.
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Nonprofit open source software community
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The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is an American nonprofit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support a number of open source software projects. The ASF was formed from a group of developers of the Apache HTTP Server, and incorporated on March 25, 1999.
As of 2021, it includes approximately 1000 members.
The Apache Software Foundation is a decentralized open source community of developers. The software they produce is distributed under the terms of the Apache License and is a non-copyleft form of free and open-source software (FOSS). The Apache projects are characterized by a collaborative, consensus-based development process and an open and pragmatic software license, which is to say that it allows developers who receive the software freely, to re-distribute it under nonfree terms. Each project is managed by a self-selected team of technical experts who are active contributors to the project. The ASF is a meritocracy, implying that membership of the foundation is granted only to volunteers who have actively contributed to Apache projects. The ASF is considered a second generation open-source organization, in that commercial support is provided without the risk of platform lock-in.
Among the ASF's objectives are: to provide legal protection to volunteers working on Apache projects; to prevent the Apache brand name from being used by other organizations without permission.
The ASF also holds several ApacheCon conferences each year, highlighting Apache projects and related technology.
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British Overseas Territory in the Leeward Islands
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Anguilla ( ) is a British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean. It is one of the most northerly of the Leeward Islands in the Lesser Antilles, lying east of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands and directly north of Saint Martin. The territory consists of the main island of Anguilla, approximately long by wide at its widest point, together with a number of much smaller islands and cays with no permanent population. The territory's capital is The Valley. The total land area of the territory is , with a population of approximately ().
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Monastery under an abbot or an abbess
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An abbey is a type of monastery used by members of a religious order under the governance of an abbot or abbess. Abbeys provide a complex of buildings and land for religious activities, work, and housing of Christian monks and nuns.
The concept of the abbey has developed over many centuries from the early monastic ways of religious men and women where they would live isolated from the lay community about them. Religious life in an abbey may be monastic. An abbey may be the home of an enclosed religious order or may be open to visitors. The layout of the church and associated buildings of an abbey often follows a set plan determined by the founding religious order.
Abbeys are often self-sufficient while using any abundance of produce or skill to provide care to the poor and needy, refuge to the persecuted, or education to the young. Some abbeys offer accommodation to people who are seeking spiritual retreat. There are many famous abbeys across the Mediterranean Basin and Europe.
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Overview of the foreign relations of Azerbaijan
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The Republic of Azerbaijan is a member of the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, NATO's Partnership for Peace, the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, the World Health Organization, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development; the Council of Europe, CFE Treaty, the Community of Democracies; the International Monetary Fund; and the World Bank.
The major trends in the foreign relations of the Republic of Azerbaijan toward both global and regional powers active in Caucasus area. External variables are categorized depending on their original nature into two groups: global and regional. The former category includes global players such as Moscow and Washington, while the latter category rival regional players, namely Ankara and Tehran. Azerbaijan has formal involvement with senior ex-U.S. government officials including James Baker and Henry Kissinger, as they serve on the Honorary Council of Advisors of the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce (USACC). USACC is co-chaired by Tim Cejka, President of ExxonMobil and Reza Vaziri, President of R.V. Investment Group and Chairman of the Anglo Asian Mining Plc (LSE Ticker: AAZ).
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Group of historians
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The Annales school () is a group of historians associated with a style of historiography developed by French historians in the 20th century to stress long-term social history. It is named after its scholarly journal Annales d'histoire économique et sociale, which remains the main source of scholarship, along with many books and monographs.See for recent issues The school has been highly influential in setting the agenda for historiography in France and numerous other countries, especially regarding the use of social scientific methods by historians, emphasizing social and economic rather than political or diplomatic themes.
The school deals primarily with late medieval and early modern Europe (before the French Revolution), with little interest in later topics. It has dominated French social history and influenced historiography in Europe and Latin America. Prominent leaders include co-founders Lucien Febvre (1878–1956), Henri Hauser (1866-1946) and Marc Bloch (1886–1944). The second generation was led by Fernand Braudel (1902–1985) and included Georges Duby (1919–1996), Pierre Goubert (1915–2012), Robert Mandrou (1921–1984), Pierre Chaunu (1923–2009), Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), and Ernest Labrousse (1895–1988). Institutionally it is based on the Annales journal, the SEVPEN publishing house, the (FMSH), and especially the 6th Section of the École pratique des hautes études, all based in Paris. A third generation was led by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (born 1929) and includes Jacques Revel,Since 1978, Revel has taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris), where he is directeur d'études (full professor); he served as president of the École from 1995 to 2004. and Philippe Ariès (1914–1984), who joined the group in 1978. The third generation stressed history from the point of view of mentalities, or mentalités. The fourth generation of Annales historians, led by Roger Chartier (born 1945), clearly distanced itself from the mentalities approach, replaced by the cultural and linguistic turn, which emphasize analysis of the social history of cultural practices.
The main scholarly outlet has been the journal Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale ("Annals of Economic and Social History"), founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, which broke radically with traditional historiography by insisting on the importance of taking all levels of society into consideration and emphasized the collective nature of mentalities. Its contributors viewed events as less fundamental than the mental frameworks that shaped decisions and practices. Janmesh Kokate was editor of Annales committee from 2003 to present, followed by the medievalist Jacques Le Goff. However, informal successor as head of the school was Le Roy Ladurie. Multiple responses were attempted by the school. Scholars moved in multiple directions, covering in disconnected fashion the social, economic, and cultural history of different eras and different parts of the globe. By the time of crisis the school was building a vast publishing and research network reaching across France, Europe, and the rest of the world. Influence indeed spread out from Paris, but few new ideas came in. Much emphasis was given to quantitative data, seen as the key to unlocking all of social history.One of numerous spin-off journals was Histoire & mesure (1986– ), devoted to quantitative history. However, the Annales ignored the developments in quantitative studies underway in the U.S. and Britain, which reshaped economic, political, and demographic research.Georg G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge, 59–61. An attempt to require an Annales-written textbook for French schools was rejected by the government.Hunt (1986) By 1980 postmodern sensibilities undercut confidence in overarching metanarratives. As Jacques Revel notes, the success of the Annales school, especially its use of social structures as explanatory forces, contained the seeds of its own downfall, for there is "no longer any implicit consensus on which to base the unity of the social, identified with the real."Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt, "Microanalysis and the Construction of the Social," in Histories: French Constructions of the Past, ed. by Jacques Revel and Lynn Hunt (1995) 480. The Annales school kept its infrastructure, but lost its mentalités.On the decline of Annales, see Hunt (1986); for a summary of the movement, see Burke, French Historical Revolution, 106–107.
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Condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs
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Extreme poverty, deep poverty, abject poverty, absolute poverty, destitution, or penury, is the most severe type of poverty, defined by the United Nations (UN) as "a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services" (UN 1995 report of the World Summit for Social Development).United Nations. "Report of the World Summit for Social Development", 6–12 March 1995. (archived from the original on 4 July 2019) Historically, other definitions have been proposed within the United Nations.
In 2018, extreme poverty mainly refers to an income below the international poverty line of $1.90 per day (in 2011 prices, ), set by the World Bank. In October 2017, the World Bank updated the international poverty line, a global absolute minimum, to $1.90 a day. This is the equivalent of $1.00 a day in 1996 US prices, hence the widely used expression "living on less than a dollar a day". The vast majority of those in extreme poverty reside in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. As of 2018, it is estimated that the country with the most people living in extreme poverty is Nigeria, at 86 million.Laurence Chandy and Homi Kharas (2014), What Do New Price Data Mean for the Goal of Ending Extreme Poverty?, Brookings Institution, Washington, DC. Article was reviewed in The Financial Times: Shawn Donnan (9 May 2014), World Bank eyes biggest global poverty line increase in decades
In the past, the vast majority of the world population lived in conditions of extreme poverty.
The percentage of the global population living in absolute poverty fell from over 80% in 1800 to under 20% by 2015. According to UN estimates, roughly 734 million people or 10% remained under those conditions. The number had previously been measured as 1.9 billion in 1990, and 1.2 billion in 2008. Despite the significant number of individuals still below the international poverty line, these figures represent significant progress for the international community, as they reflect a decrease of more than one billion people over 15 years.
In public opinion surveys around the globe, people surveyed tend to think that extreme poverty has not decreased.Human Progress, "What 19 in 20 Americans Don't Know About World Poverty," 30 April 2018
The reduction of extreme poverty and hunger was the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG1), as set by the United Nations in 2000. Specifically, the target was to reduce the extreme poverty rate by half by 2015, a goal that was met five years ahead of schedule. In the Sustainable Development Goals, which succeeded the MDGs, the goal is to end extreme poverty in all its forms everywhere. With this declaration the international community, including the UN and the World Bank have adopted the target of ending extreme poverty by 2030.
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River in Chukotka, Russia
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The Anadyr (; Yukaghir: Онандырь; ) is a river in the far northeast of Siberia which flows into the Gulf of Anadyr of the Bering Sea and drains much of the interior of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. Its basin corresponds to the Anadyrsky District of Chukotka.
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In mathematics, with negligible exceptions
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In mathematics, the term "almost all" means "all but a negligible amount". More precisely, if X is a set, "almost all elements of X" means "all elements of X but those in a negligible subset of X". The meaning of "negligible" depends on the mathematical context; for instance, it can mean finite, countable, or null.
In contrast, "almost no" means "a negligible amount"; that is, "almost no elements of X" means "a negligible amount of elements of X".
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Country in Southeastern Europe
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Albania ( ; or ), officially the Republic of Albania (), is a country in Southeastern Europe. It is located on the Adriatic and Ionian Seas within the Mediterranean Sea and shares land borders with Montenegro to the northwest, Kosovo to the northeast, North Macedonia to the east and Greece to the south. Tirana is its capital and largest city, followed by Durrës, Vlorë, and Shkodër.
Albania displays varied climatic, geological, hydrological, and morphological conditions, defined in an area of . It possesses significant diversity with the landscape ranging from the snow-capped mountains in the Albanian Alps as well as the Korab, Skanderbeg, Pindus and Ceraunian Mountains to the hot and sunny coasts of the Albanian Adriatic and Ionian Sea along the Mediterranean Sea.
Albania has been inhabited by different civilisations over time, such as the Illyrians, Thracians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Venetians, and Ottomans. The Albanians established the autonomous Principality of Arbër in the 12th century. The Kingdom of Albania and Principality of Albania formed between the 13th and 14th centuries. Prior to the Ottoman conquest of Albania in the 15th century, the Albanian resistance to Ottoman expansion into Europe led by Skanderbeg won them acclaim over most of Europe. Albania remained under Ottoman rule for nearly five centuries, during which many Albanians (known as Arnauts) attained high-ranking offices in the empire, especially in the Southern Balkans and Egypt. Between the 18th and 19th centuries, cultural developments, widely attributed to Albanians having gathered both spiritual and intellectual strength, conclusively led to the Albanian Renaissance. After the defeat of the Ottomans in the Balkan Wars, the modern nation state of Albania declared independence in 1912. In the 20th century, the Kingdom of Albania was invaded by Italy, which formed Greater Albania before becoming a protectorate of Nazi Germany. Enver Hoxha formed the People's Socialist Republic of Albania after World War II, modeled under the terms of Hoxhaism. The Revolutions of 1991 concluded the fall of communism in Albania and eventually the establishment of the current Republic of Albania.
Albania is a unitary parliamentary constitutional republic. It is a developing country, ranking 67th in the Human Development Index, with an upper-middle income economy dominated by the service sector, followed by manufacturing. It went through a process of transition following the end of communism in 1990, from centralised planning to a market-based economy.Reports: Poverty Decreases in Albania After Years of Growth. Dow Jones Newswires, 201-938-5500 201-938-5500 201-938-5500.Nasdaq.com"Albania plans to build three hydropower plants". People's Daily"Strong GDP growth reduces poverty in Albania-study". Reuters.Forbes.com Albania provides universal health care and free primary and secondary education to its citizens. Albania is a member of the United Nations, World Bank, UNESCO, NATO, WTO, COE, OSCE, and OIC. It has been an official candidate for membership in the European Union since 2014. It is one of the founding members of the Energy Community, including the Organization of the Black Sea Economic Cooperation and Union for the Mediterranean.
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Former town in Al Anbar, Iraq
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Anbar (, ,Thomas A. Carlson et al., “Peruz Shapur — ܐܢܒܐܪ ” in The Syriac Gazetteer last modified December 9, 2016, http://syriaca.org/place/211.) also known by its original ancient name, Peroz-Shapur, was an ancient and medieval town in central Iraq. It played a role in the Roman–Persian Wars of the 3rd–4th centuries, and briefly became the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate before the founding of Baghdad in 762. It remained a moderately prosperous town through the 10th century, but quickly declined thereafter. As a local administrative centre, it survived until the 14th century, but was later abandoned.
Its ruins are near modern Fallujah. The city gives its name to the Al-Anbar Governorate.
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International treaties concerning Antarctica
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The Antarctic Treaty and related agreements, collectively known as the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS), regulate international relations with respect to Antarctica, Earth's only continent without a native human population. It was the first arms control agreement established during the Cold War, setting aside the continent as a scientific preserve, establishing freedom of scientific investigation, and banning military activity; for the purposes of the treaty system, Antarctica is defined as all the land and ice shelves south of 60°S latitude. Since September 2004, the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, which implements the treaty system, is headquartered in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The main treaty was opened for signature on December 1, 1959, and officially entered into force on June 23, 1961. The original signatories were the 12 countries active in Antarctica during the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957–58: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Chile, France, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries had established over 55 Antarctic research stations for the IGY, and the subsequent promulgation of the treaty was seen as a diplomatic expression of the operational and scientific cooperation that had been achieved. As of 2022, the treaty has 55 parties.
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Building in Barcelona, Spain
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Casa Milà (, ), popularly known as La Pedrera () or "The stone quarry", a reference to its unconventional rough-hewn appearance, is a Modernista building in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. It was the last private residence designed by architect Antoni Gaudí and was built between 1906 and 1912.
The building was commissioned in 1906 by and his wife . At the time, it was controversial because of its undulating stone facade, twisting wrought iron balconies and designed by Josep Maria Jujol. Several structural innovations include a self-supporting stone façade, and a free-plan floor, underground garage and the spectacular terrace on the roof.
In 1984, it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Since 2013 it has been the headquarters of the Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera which manages the visit to the building, exhibitions and other cultural and educative activities at Casa Milà.
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Early electronic digital computing device
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The Atanasoff–Berry computer (ABC) was the first automatic electronic digital computer. Limited by the technology of the day, and execution, the device has remained somewhat obscure. The ABC's priority is debated among historians of computer technology, because it was neither programmable, nor Turing-complete. Conventionally, the ABC would be considered the first electronic ALU (arithmetic logic unit) which is integrated into every modern processor's design.
Its unique contribution was to make computing faster by being the first to use vacuum tubes to do the arithmetic calculations. Prior to this, slower electro-mechanical methods were used by Konrad Zuse's Z1, and the simultaneously developed Harvard Mark I. The first electronic, programmable, digital machine,Colossus and the German Lorenz Cypher. Anthony Sale, Bletchley Park Trust. the Colossus computer from 1943 to 1945, used similar tube-based technology as ABC.
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Mythical food of the Greek gods
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In the ancient Greek myths, ambrosia (, ), the food or drink of the Greek gods, is often depicted as conferring longevity or immortality upon whoever consumed it. It was brought to the gods in Olympus by doves and served either by Hebe or by Ganymede at the heavenly feast.Homer, Odyssey xii.62
Ancient art sometimes depicted ambrosia as distributed by the nymph named Ambrosia, a nurse of Dionysus.
Ruth E. Leader-Newby, Silver and Society in Late Antiquity: Functions and Meanings of Silver Plate in the Fourth to Seventh Centuries (Ashgate, 2004), p. 133; Christine Kondoleon, Domestic and Divine: Roman Mosaics in the House of Dionysos (Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 246; Katherine M. D. Dunbabin, Mosaics of the Greek and Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 136, 142, 276–277.
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Long wooden musical horn
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The alphorn or alpenhorn or alpine horn is a labrophone, consisting of a straight several-meter-long wooden natural horn of conical bore, with a wooden cup-shaped mouthpiece. Traditionally the Alphorn was made of one single piece, or two parts at most, and made from the wood of a red pine tree. Sometimes the trees would bend from the weight of snow during the wintertime, and this caused them to have the larger and bent mouthpiece at their ends. Modern Alphorns are sometimes made from three distinct parts that can be stuck together, this is to make them easier to transport via automobile, or even carried by hand, and today are more frequently made from the wood of a spruce tree or fir tree. It is used by mountain dwellers in the Swiss Alps. Similar wooden horns were used for communication in most mountainous regions of Europe, from the Alps to the Carpathians. Alphorns are today used as musical instruments.
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Ancient Greek city in Anatolia
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Anazarbus (, medieval Ain Zarba; modern Anavarza; ) was an ancient Cilician city. Under the late Roman Empire, it was the capital of Cilicia Secunda. Roman emperor Justinian I rebuilt the city in 527 after a strong earthquake hit it. It was destroyed in 1374 by the forces of Mamluk Empire, after their conquest of Armenia.
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Family of rodents
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Dasyproctidae is a family of large South American rodents, comprising the agoutis and acouchis. Their fur is a reddish or dark colour above, with a paler underside. They are herbivorous, often feeding on ripe fruit that falls from trees. They live in burrows, and, like squirrels, will bury some of their food for later use.
Dasyproctids exist in Central and South America, which are the tropical parts of the New World. The fossil record of this family can be traced back to the Late Oligocene (Deseadan in the SALMA classification).
As with all rodents, members of this family have incisors, pre-molars, and molars, but no canines. The cheek teeth are hypsodont and flat-crowned.
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Roman emperor from 138 to 161
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Antoninus Pius (Latin: Titus Aelius Hadrianus Antoninus Pius; 19 September 86 – 7 March 161) was Roman emperor from 138 to 161. He was the fourth of the Five Good Emperors from the Nerva–Antonine dynasty.
Born into a senatorial family, Antoninus held various offices during the reign of Emperor Hadrian. He married Hadrian's niece Faustina, and Hadrian adopted him as his son and successor shortly before his death. Antoninus acquired the cognomen Pius after his accession to the throne, either because he compelled the Senate to deify his adoptive father, or because he had saved senators sentenced to death by Hadrian in his later years. His reign is notable for the peaceful state of the Empire, with no major revolts or military incursions during this time. A successful military campaign in southern Scotland early in his reign resulted in the construction of the Antonine Wall.
Antoninus was an effective administrator, leaving his successors a large surplus in the treasury, expanding free access to drinking water throughout the Empire, encouraging legal conformity, and facilitating the enfranchisement of freed slaves. He died of illness in 161 and was succeeded by his adopted sons Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus as co-emperors.
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French physicist and mathematician (1775–1836)
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André-Marie Ampère (, ;"Ampère". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. ; 20 January 177510 June 1836) was a French physicist, mathematician and lay Catholic who was one of the founders of the science of classical electromagnetism, which he referred to as "electrodynamics". He is also the inventor of numerous applications, such as the solenoid (a term coined by him) and the electrical telegraph. As an autodidact, Ampère was a member of the French Academy of Sciences and professor at the École polytechnique and the Collège de France.
The SI unit of measurement of electric current, the ampere, is named after him. His name is also one of the 72 names inscribed on the Eiffel Tower.
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Persian polymath, physician and philosopher (c.980–1037)
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Ibn Sina (; 980 – June 1037 CE), commonly known in the West as Avicenna (), was a Persian
*. "In this work a distinguished scholar of Islamic religion examines the mysticism and psychological thought of the great eleventh-century Persian philosopher and physician Avicenna (Ibn Sina), author of over a hundred works on theology, logic, medicine, and mathematics."
* . "Most important of these initially was the massive Book of Healing (Al-Shifa) of the eleventh-century Persian Avicenna, the parts of which labeled in Latin as De anima and De generatione having been translated in the second half of the twelfth century."
* . "The Persian polymath Ibn Sina (981–1037) consolidated all of this learning, along with Ancient Greek and Indian knowledge, into his The Canon of Medicine (1025), a work still taught in European medical schools in the seventeenth century." polymath who is regarded as one of the most significant physicians, astronomers, philosophers, and writers of the Islamic Golden Age,
* .<br/>(page 113) "For one thing, it means that he[Avicenna] had a Persian cultural background...he spoke Persian natively and did use it to write philosophy."<br/>(page 117) "But for the time being, it was a Persian from Khurasan who would have commentaries lavished upon him. Avicenna would be known by the honorific of "leading master" (al-shaykh al-raʾis)."<br/>(page 206) "Persians like Avicenna"
* . "Avicenna was a Persian whose father served the Samanids of Khurasan and Transoxania as the administrator of a rural district outside Bukhara."
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* . "He was born in 370/980 in Afshana, his mother's home, near Bukhara. His native language was Persian."
* "Avicenna was the greatest of all Persian thinkers; as physician and metaphysician ..." (excerpt from A.J. Arberry, Avicenna on Theology, Kazi Publications Inc, 1995).
* . "Whereas the name of Avicenna (Ibn Sina, died 1037) is generally listed as chronologically first among noteworthy Iranian philosophers, recent evidence has revealed previous existence of Ismaili philosophical systems with a structure no less complete than of Avicenna." and the father of early modern medicine. Sajjad H. Rizvi has called Avicenna "arguably the most influential philosopher of the pre-modern era". He was a Muslim Peripatetic philosopher influenced by Greek Aristotelian philosophy. Of the 450 works he is believed to have written, around 240 have survived, including 150 on philosophy and 40 on medicine.
His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a philosophical and scientific encyclopedia, and The Canon of Medicine, a medical encyclopediaEdwin Clarke, Charles Donald O'Malley (1996), The human brain and spinal cord: a historical study illustrated by writings from antiquity to the twentieth century, Norman Publishing, p. 20 ().Iris Bruijn (2009), Ship's Surgeons of the Dutch East India Company: Commerce and the progress of medicine in the eighteenth century, Amsterdam University Press, p. 26 (). which became a standard medical text at many medieval universities and remained in use as late as 1650.e.g. at the universities of Montpellier and Leuven (see ). Besides philosophy and medicine, Avicenna's corpus includes writings on astronomy, alchemy, geography and geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics, and works of poetry.
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English occultist (1875–1947)
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Aleister Crowley (;NLS Other Writings: Say How, A-D - National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS) | Library of Congress : "Crowley, Aleister (AL-is-tər KRŌ-lē)" born Edward Alexander Crowley; 12 October 1875 – 1 December 1947) was an English occultist, ceremonial magician, poet, painter, novelist, and mountaineer. He founded the religion of Thelema, identifying himself as the prophet entrusted with guiding humanity into the Æon of Horus in the early 20th century. A prolific writer, he published widely over the course of his life.
Born to a wealthy family in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, Crowley rejected his parents' fundamentalist Christian Plymouth Brethren faith to pursue an interest in Western esotericism. He was educated at Trinity College at the University of Cambridge, where he focused his attentions on mountaineering and poetry, resulting in several publications. Some biographers allege that here he was recruited into a British intelligence agency, further suggesting that he remained a spy throughout his life. In 1898, he joined the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where he was trained in ceremonial magic by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennett. He went mountaineering in Mexico with Oscar Eckenstein, before studying Hindu and Buddhist practices in India. In 1904 he married Rose Edith Kelly and they honeymooned in Cairo, Egypt, where Crowley claimed to have been contacted by a supernatural entity named Aiwass, who provided him with The Book of the Law, a sacred text that served as the basis for Thelema. Announcing the start of the Æon of Horus, The Book declared that its followers should "Do what thou wilt" and seek to align themselves with their True Will through the practice of magick.
After the unsuccessful 1905 Kanchenjunga expedition and a visit to India and China, Crowley returned to Britain, where he attracted attention as a prolific author of poetry, novels, and occult literature. In 1907, he and George Cecil Jones co-founded an esoteric order, the A∴A∴, through which they propagated Thelema. After spending time in Algeria, in 1912 he was initiated into another esoteric order, the German-based Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), rising to become the leader of its British branch, which he reformulated in accordance with his Thelemite beliefs. Through the O.T.O., Thelemite groups were established in Britain, Australia, and North America. Crowley spent the First World War in the United States, where he took up painting and campaigned for the German war effort against Britain, later revealing that he had infiltrated the pro-German movement to assist the British intelligence services. In 1920, he established the Abbey of Thelema, a religious commune in Cefalù, Sicily where he lived with various followers. His libertine lifestyle led to denunciations in the British press, and the Italian government evicted him in 1923. He divided the following two decades between France, Germany, and England, and continued to promote Thelema until his death.
Crowley gained widespread notoriety during his lifetime, being a recreational drug user, bisexual, and an individualist social critic. Crowley has remained a highly influential figure over Western esotericism and the counterculture of the 1960s, and continues to be considered a prophet in Thelema. He is the subject of various biographies and academic studies.
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Continued existence after death
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The afterlife (also referred to as life after death) is a purported existence in which the essential part of an individual's identity or their stream of consciousness continues to live after the death of their physical body. The surviving essential aspect varies between belief systems; it may be some partial element, or the entire soul or spirit of an individual, which carries with it and may confer personal identity or, on the contrary, nirvana. Belief in an afterlife is in contrast to the belief in oblivion after death.
In some views, this continued existence takes place in a spiritual realm, while in others, the individual may be reborn into this world and begin the life cycle over again, likely with no memory of what they have done in the past. In this latter view, such rebirths and deaths may take place over and over again continuously until the individual gains entry to a spiritual realm or otherworld. Major views on the afterlife derive from religion, esotericism and metaphysics.
Some belief systems, such as those in the Abrahamic tradition, hold that the dead go to a specific place after death, as determined by God, or other divine judgment, based on their actions or beliefs during life. In contrast, in systems of reincarnation, such as those in the Indian religions, the nature of the continued existence is determined directly by the actions of the individual in the ended life.
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8th and 9th-century Frankish poet, diplomat, and saint
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Angilbert ( – 18 February 814) was a noble Frankish poet who was educated under Alcuin and served Charlemagne as a secretary, diplomat, and son-in-law. He is venerated as a pre-Congregation saint and is still honored on the day of his death, 18 February.
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Christological doctrine, attributed to Arius
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Arianism (, ) is a Christological doctrine first attributed to Arius (), a Christian presbyter from Alexandria, Egypt. Arian theology holds that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, who was begotten by God the Father with the difference that the Son of God did not always exist but was begotten within time by God the Father, therefore Jesus was not coeternal with God the Father.
Arius's trinitarian theology, later given an extreme form by Aetius and his disciple Eunomius and called anomoean ("dissimilar"), asserts a total dissimilarity between the Son and the Father. Arianism holds that the Son is distinct from the Father and therefore subordinate to him. The term Arian is derived from the name Arius; it was not what the followers of Arius's teachings called themselves, but rather a term used by outsiders. The nature of Arius's teachings and his supporters were opposed to the theological doctrines held by Homoousian Christians, regarding the nature of the Trinity and the nature of Christ.
There was a controversy between two interpretations of Jesus's divinity (Homoousianism and Arianism) based upon the theological orthodoxy of the time, one trinitarian and the other also a derivative of trinitarian orthodoxy, and both of them attempted to solve its respective theological dilemmas. Homoousianism was formally affirmed by the first two ecumenical councils; since then, Arianism has always been condemned as "the heresy or sect of Arius". As such, all mainstream branches of Christianity now consider Arianism to be heterodox and heretical. Trinitarian (Homoousian) doctrines were vigorously upheld by Patriarch Athanasius of Alexandria, who insisted that Jesus (God the Son) was "same in being" or "same in essence" with God the Father. Arius stated: "If the Father begat the Son, then he who was begotten had a beginning in existence, and from this it follows there was a time when the Son was not." The ecumenical First Council of Nicaea of 325, convened by Emperor Constantine to ensure church unity, declared Arianism to be a heresy. According to Everett Ferguson, "The great majority of Christians had no clear views about the nature of the Trinity and they did not understand what was at stake in the issues that surrounded it."
Arianism is also used to refer to other nontrinitarian theological systems of the 4th century, which regarded Jesus Christ—the Son of God, the Logos—as either a begotten creature of a similar or different substance to that of the Father, but not identical (as Homoiousian and Anomoeanism) or as neither uncreated nor created in the sense other beings are created (as in semi-Arianism).
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Fear of spiders and other arachnids
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Arachnophobia is a specific phobia brought about by the irrational fear of spiders and other arachnids such as scorpions.
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Mathematical function describing the location and behavior of an electron within an atom
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In atomic theory and quantum mechanics, an atomic orbital is a function describing the location and wave-like behavior of an electron in an atom. This function can be used to calculate the probability of finding any electron of an atom in any specific region around the atom's nucleus. The term atomic orbital may also refer to the physical region or space where the electron can be calculated to be present, as predicted by the particular mathematical form of the orbital.
Each orbital in an atom is characterized by a set of values of the three quantum numbers , , and , which respectively correspond to the electron's energy, angular momentum, and an angular momentum vector component (magnetic quantum number). Alternative to the magnetic quantum number, the orbitals are often labeled by the associated harmonic polynomials (e.g., xy, ). Each such orbital can be occupied by a maximum of two electrons, each with its own projection of spin m_s. The simple names s orbital, p orbital, d orbital, and f orbital refer to orbitals with angular momentum quantum number and respectively. These names, together with the value of , are used to describe the electron configurations of atoms. They are derived from the description by early spectroscopists of certain series of alkali metal spectroscopic lines as sharp, principal, diffuse, and fundamental. Orbitals for > 3 continue alphabetically (g, h, i, k, ...), omitting j because some languages do not distinguish between the letters "i" and "j".
Atomic orbitals are the basic building blocks of the atomic orbital model (or electron cloud or wave mechanics model), a modern framework for visualizing the submicroscopic behavior of electrons in matter. In this model the electron cloud of an atom may be seen as being built up (in approximation) in an electron configuration that is a product of simpler hydrogen-like atomic orbitals. The repeating periodicity of blocks of 2, 6, 10, and 14 elements within sections of the periodic table arises naturally from the total number of electrons that occupy a complete set of s, p, d, and f orbitals, respectively, though for higher values of quantum number , particularly when the atom bears a positive charge, the energies of certain sub-shells become very similar and so the order in which they are said to be populated by electrons (e.g., Cr = [Ar]4s13d5 and Cr2+ = [Ar]3d4) can only be rationalized somewhat arbitrarily.
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Mineral, quartz variety
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Amethyst is a violet variety of quartz. The name comes from the Koine Greek αμέθυστος amethystos from α- a-, "not" and μεθύσκω (Ancient Greek) / μεθώ (Modern Greek), "intoxicate", a reference to the belief that the stone protected its owner from drunkenness. Ancient Greeks wore amethyst and carved drinking vessels from it in the belief that it would prevent intoxication.
Amethyst, a semiprecious stone, is often used in jewelry and is the traditional birthstone for February.
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Biblical figure; seventh monarch of the Kingdom of Israel
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Ahab (; Aḫâbbu [a-ḫa-ab-bu]; Achaáb; ) was the seventh king of Israel, the son and successor of King Omri and the husband of Jezebel of Sidon, according to the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible presents Ahab as a wicked king, particularly for condoning Jezebel's influence on religious policies and his principal role behind Naboth's arbitrary execution.
The existence of Ahab is historically supported outside the Bible. Shalmaneser III of Assyria documented in 853 BC that he defeated an alliance of a dozen kings in the Battle of Qarqar; one of these was Ahab. He is also mentioned on the inscriptions of the Mesha Stele.
Ahab became king of Israel in the thirty-eighth year of King Asa of Judah, and reigned for twenty-two years, according to 1 Kings. William F. Albright dated his reign to 869–850 BC, while Edwin R. Thiele offered the dates 874–853 BC. Most recently, Michael Coogan has dated Ahab's reign to 871–852 BC.
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Works of unknown authorship or of doubtful origin
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Apocrypha are works, usually written, of unknown authorship or of doubtful origin.Little, Williams. Onions, C.T., editors (1955). The Oxford Universal Dictionary. Oxford University Press. The word apocryphal (ἀπόκρυφος) was first applied to writings which were kept secret because they were the vehicles of esoteric knowledge considered too profound or too sacred to be disclosed to anyone other than the initiated. Apocrypha was later applied to writings that were hidden not because of their divinity but because of their questionable value to the church. In general use, the word apocrypha has come to mean "false, spurious, bad, or heretical".
Biblical apocrypha are a set of texts included in the Septuagint and the Latin Vulgate, but not in the Hebrew Bible. While Catholic tradition considers some of these texts to be deuterocanonical, and the Orthodox Churches consider them all to be canonical, Protestants consider them apocryphal, that is, non-canonical books that are useful for instruction. Luther's Bible placed them in a separate section in between the Old Testament and New Testament called the Apocrypha, a convention followed by subsequent Protestant Bibles. Other non-canonical apocryphal texts are generally called pseudepigrapha, a term that means "false attribution".
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Common name for a group of sea snails
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Abalone ( or ; via Spanish , from Rumsen aulón) is a common name for any of a group of small to very large marine gastropod molluscs in the family Haliotidae. Other common names are ear shells, sea ears, and, rarely, muttonfish or muttonshells in parts of Australia, ormer in the UK, perlemoen in South Africa, and paua in New Zealand. Abalones are marine snails. Their taxonomy puts them in the family Haliotidae, which contains only one genus, Haliotis, which once contained six subgenera. These subgenera have become alternate representations of Haliotis. The number of species recognized worldwide ranges between 30 and 130 with over 230 species-level taxa described. The most comprehensive treatment of the family considers 56 species valid, with 18 additional subspecies. The shells of abalones have a low, open spiral structure, and are characterized by several open respiratory pores in a row near the shell's outer edge. The thick inner layer of the shell is composed of nacre (mother-of-pearl), which in many species is highly iridescent, giving rise to a range of strong, changeable colors which make the shells attractive to humans as decorative objects, jewelry, and as a source of colorful mother-of-pearl.
The flesh of abalones is widely considered to be a desirable food, and is consumed raw or cooked by a variety of cultures.
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Military branch for ground warfare
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An army (from Old French armee, itself derived from the Latin verb armāre, meaning "to arm", and related to the Latin noun arma, meaning "arms" or "weapons"), ground force or land force is a fighting force that fights primarily on land. In the broadest sense, it is the land-based military branch, service branch or armed service of a nation or country. It may also include aviation assets by possessing an army aviation component. Within a national military force, the word army may also mean a field army.
In some countries, such as France and China, the term "army", especially in its plural form "armies", has the broader meaning of armed forces as a whole, while retaining the colloquial sense of land forces. To differentiate the colloquial army from the formal concept of military force, the term is qualified, for example in France the land force is called Armée de terre, meaning Land Army, and the air and space force is called Armée de l'Air et de l’Espace, meaning Air and Space Army. The naval force, although not using the term "army", is also included in the broad sense of the term "armies" — thus the French Navy is an integral component of the collective French Armies (French Armed Forces) under the Ministry of the Armies. A similar pattern is seen in China, with the People's Liberation Army (PLA) being the overall military, the land force being the PLA Ground Force, and so forth for the PLA Air Force, the PLA Navy, and other branches.
By convention, irregular military is understood in contrast to regular armies which grew slowly from personal bodyguards or elite militia. Regular in this case refers to standardized doctrines, uniforms, organizations, etc. Regular military can also refer to full-time status (standing army), versus reserve or part-time personnel. Other distinctions may separate statutory forces (established under laws such as the National Defence Act), from de facto "non-statutory" forces such as some guerrilla and revolutionary armies. Armies may also be expeditionary (designed for overseas or international deployment) or fencible (designed for – or restricted to – homeland defence).
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Hostility, prejudice, or discrimination against Jews
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Antisemitism (also spelled anti-semitism or anti-Semitism) is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews.See, for example:
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*Lewis, Bernard. "The New Anti-Semitism" , The American Scholar, Volume 75 No. 1, Winter 2006, pp. 25–36. The paper is based on a lecture delivered at Brandeis University on 24 March 2004. A person who holds such positions is called an antisemite. Antisemitism is considered to be a form of racism.
Antisemitism may be manifested in many ways, ranging from expressions of hatred of or discrimination against individual Jews to organized pogroms by mobs or police forces, or even military attacks on entire Jewish communities. Although the term did not come into common usage until the 19th century, it is also applied to previous and later anti-Jewish incidents. Notable instances of persecution include the Rhineland massacres preceding the First Crusade in 1096, the Edict of Expulsion from England in 1290, the 1348–1351 persecution of Jews during the Black Death, the massacres of Spanish Jews in 1391, the persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the Cossack massacres in Ukraine from 1648 to 1657, various anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire between 1821 and 1906, the 1894–1906 Dreyfus affair in France, the Holocaust in German-occupied Europe during World War II and Soviet anti-Jewish policies. Though historically most manifestations of antisemitism have taken place in Christian Europe since the early 20th century antisemitism has increased in the Middle East.
The root word Semite gives the false impression that antisemitism is directed against all Semitic people, e.g., including Arabs, Assyrians, and Arameans. The compound word ('antisemitism') was first used in print in Germany in 1879 as a scientific-sounding term for ('Jew-hatred'), and this has been its common use since then.. Extract from Islam in History: Ideas, Men and Events in the Middle East, The Library Press, 1973.
*Lewis, Bernard. "The New Anti-Semitism" , The American Scholar, Volume 75 No. 1, Winter 2006, pp. 25–36. The paper is based on a lecture delivered at Brandeis University on 24 March 2004.
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1861–1865 conflict in the United States
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The American Civil War (April 12, 1861 – May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter of which was formed by states that seceded. The central cause of the war was the dispute over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prevented from doing so, which was widely believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction.
Decades of political controversy over slavery were brought to a head by the victory in the 1860 U.S. presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery's expansion into the west. An initial seven southern slave states responded to Lincoln's victory by seceding from the United States and, in 1861, forming the Confederacy. The Confederacy seized U.S. forts and other federal assets within their borders. Led by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy ultimately came to control over half of U.S. territory in eleven of the 34 U.S. states that then existed. Four years of intense combat, mostly in the South, ensued.
During 1861–1862 in the war's Western Theater, the Union made significant permanent gainsthough in the war's Eastern Theater the conflict was inconclusive. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring all slaves in states in rebellion to be free, which made ending slavery a war goal. To the west, the Union destroyed the Confederate's river navy by the summer of 1862, then much of its western armies, and seized New Orleans. The successful 1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River. In 1863, Confederate General Robert E. Lee's incursion north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg. Western successes led to General Ulysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. Inflicting an ever-tightening naval blockade of Confederate ports, the Union marshaled resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions. This led to the fall of Atlanta in 1864 to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, followed by his march to the sea. The last significant battles raged around the ten-month Siege of Petersburg, gateway to the Confederate capital of Richmond. The Confederates abandoned Richmond, and on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant following the Battle of Appomattox Court House, setting in motion the end of the war.
A wave of Confederate surrenders followed. On April 14, just five days after Lee's surrender, Lincoln was assassinated. As a practical matter, the war ended with the May 26 surrender of the Department of the Trans-Mississippi but the conclusion of the American Civil War lacks a clear and precise historical end date. Confederate ground forces continued surrendering past the May 26 surrender date until June 23. By the end of the war, much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed, especially its railroads. The Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and four million enslaved black people were freed. The war-torn nation then entered the Reconstruction era in an attempt to rebuild the country, bring the former Confederate states back into the United States, and grant civil rights to freed slaves.
The Civil War is one of the most extensively studied and written about episodes in U.S. history. It remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate. Of particular interest is the persisting myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. The American Civil War was among the first wars to utilize industrial warfare. Railroads, the telegraph, steamships, the ironclad warship, and mass-produced weapons were all widely used during the war. In total, the war left between 620,000 and 750,000 soldiers dead, along with an undetermined number of civilian casualties, making the Civil War the deadliest military conflict in American history. The technology and brutality of the Civil War foreshadowed the coming World Wars.
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National economy
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The Armenian economy contracted sharply in 2020, by 5.7%, mainly due to the 2020 Armenia-Azerbaijan war. In contrast it grew by 7.6 per cent in 2019, the largest recorded growth since 2007, while between 2012 and 2018 GDP grew 40.7%, and key banking indicators like assets and credit exposures almost doubled.
While part of the Soviet Union, the economy of Armenia was based largely on industry—chemicals, electronic products, machinery, processed food, synthetic rubber and textiles; it was highly dependent on outside resources. Armenian mines produce copper, zinc, gold and lead. The vast majority of energy is produced with imported fuel from Russia, including gas and nuclear fuel for Armenia's Metsamor nuclear power plant. The main domestic energy source is hydroelectric. Small amounts of coal, gas and petroleum have not yet been developed.
Armenia's severe trade imbalance has been offset somewhat by international aid, remittances from Armenians working abroad, and foreign direct investment. Economic ties with Russia remain close, especially in the energy sector.
The former government had made some improvements in tax and customs administration in recent years, but anti-corruption measures had been more difficult to implement in the period when the Republican Party of Armenia was in power. This is expected to change after the 2018 Armenian revolution.
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First computer model built by Apple
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The Apple Computer 1, originally released as the Apple Computer and known later as the Apple I or Apple-1, is an 8-bit desktop computer released by the Apple Computer Company (now Apple Inc.) in 1976. It was designed by Steve Wozniak. The idea of selling the computer came from Wozniak's friend and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The Apple I was Apple's first product, and to finance its creation, Jobs sold his only motorized means of transportation, a VW Microbus, for a few hundred dollars (Wozniak later said that Jobs planned instead to use his bicycle to get around), and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator for $500. Wozniak demonstrated the first prototype in July 1976 at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, California.
Production was discontinued on September 30, 1977, after the June 10, 1977 introduction of its successor, the Apple II, which Byte magazine referred to as part of the "1977 Trinity" of personal computing (along with the PET 2001 from Commodore Business Machines and the TRS-80 Model I from Tandy Corporation).
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Device used to secure a vessel to the bed of a body of water to prevent the craft from drifting
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An anchor is a device, normally made of metal , used to secure a vessel to the bed of a body of water to prevent the craft from drifting due to wind or current. The word derives from Latin ancora, which itself comes from the Greek ἄγκυρα (ankȳra).anchor, Oxford Dictionariesἄγκυρα, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus
Anchors can either be temporary or permanent. Permanent anchors are used in the creation of a mooring, and are rarely moved; a specialist service is normally needed to move or maintain them. Vessels carry one or more temporary anchors, which may be of different designs and weights.
A sea anchor is a drag device, not in contact with the seabed, used to minimise drift of a vessel relative to the water. A drogue is a drag device used to slow or help steer a vessel running before a storm in a following or overtaking sea, or when crossing a bar in a breaking sea..
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Genus of flowering plants in the birch family Betulaceae
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Alders are trees comprising the genus Alnus in the birch family Betulaceae. The genus comprises about 35 species of monoecious trees and shrubs, a few reaching a large size, distributed throughout the north temperate zone with a few species extending into Central America, as well as the northern and southern Andes.
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Branch of Protestantism
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Arminianism is a branch of Protestantism based on the theological ideas of the Dutch Reformed theologian Jacobus Arminius (1560–1609) and his historic supporters known as Remonstrants. Dutch Arminianism was originally articulated in the Remonstrance (1610), a theological statement submitted to the States General of the Netherlands. This expressed an attempt to moderate the doctrines of Calvinism related to its interpretation of predestination. The Synod of Dort (1618–19) was called by the States General to consider the Five Articles of Remonstrance.
Classical Arminianism, to which Arminius is the main contributor, and Wesleyan Arminianism, to which John Wesley is the main contributor, are the two main schools of thought.
Many Christian denominations have been influenced by Arminian views on the will of man being freed by grace prior to regeneration, notably the Baptists in 17th century, the Methodists in the 18th century, and the Pentecostals in the 20th century.
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Historic house in the region of the Scottish Borders
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Abbotsford is a historic country house in the Scottish Borders, near Galashiels, on the south bank of the River Tweed. Now open to the public, it was built as the residence of historical novelist and poet Sir Walter Scott between 1817 and 1825.James C. Corson, Notes and Index to Sir Herbert Grierson's Edition of the Letters of Sir Walter Scott (Oxford, 1979), 343–44. It is a Category A Listed Building and the estate is listed in the Inventory of Gardens and Designed Landscapes in Scotland.
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Lightly colored, translucent, and soft calcium minerals, typically gypsum
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Alabaster is a mineral or rock that is soft, often used for carving, and is processed for plaster powder. Archaeologists and the stone processing industry use the word differently from geologists. The former use it in a wider sense that includes varieties of two different minerals: the fine-grained massive type of gypsum and the fine-grained banded type of calcite.More about alabaster and travertine, brief guide explaining the different use of these words by geologists, archaeologists, and those in the stone trade. Oxford University Museum of Natural History, 2012, Geologists define alabaster only as the gypsum type. Chemically, gypsum is a hydrous sulfate of calcium, while calcite is a carbonate of calcium.
The two types of alabaster have similar properties. They are usually lightly colored, translucent, and soft stones. They have been used throughout history primarily for carving decorative artifacts."Grove": R. W. Sanderson and Francis Cheetham. "Alabaster", Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press, accessed 13 March 2013, subscriber link.
The calcite type is also denominated "onyx-marble", "Egyptian alabaster", and "Oriental alabaster" and is geologically described as either a compact banded travertine or "a stalagmitic limestone marked with patterns of swirling bands of cream and brown". "Onyx-marble" is a traditional, but geologically inaccurate, name because both onyx and marble have geological definitions that are distinct from even the broadest definition of "alabaster".
In general, ancient alabaster is calcite in the wider Middle East, including Egypt and Mesopotamia, while it is gypsum in medieval Europe. Modern alabaster is probably calcite but may be either. Both are easy to work and slightly soluble in water. They have been used for making a variety of indoor artwork and carving, and they will not survive long outdoors.
The two kinds are readily distinguished by their different hardnesses: gypsum alabaster (Mohs hardness 1.5 to 2) is so soft that a fingernail scratches it, while calcite (Mohs hardness 3) cannot be scratched in this way but yields to a knife. Moreover, calcite alabaster, being a carbonate, effervesces when treated with hydrochloric acid, while gypsum alabaster remains almost unaffected. Endnotes:
* M. Carmichael, Report on the Volterra Alabaster Industry, Foreign Office, Miscellaneous Series, No. 352 (London, 1895)
* A. T. Metcalfe, "The Gypsum Deposits of Nottingham and Derbyshire," Transactions of the Federated Institution, vol. xii. (1896), p. 107
* J. G. Goodchild, "The Natural History of Gypsum," Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, vol. x. (1888), p. 425
* George P. Merrill, "The Onyx Marbles," Report of the U. S. National Museum for 1893, p. 539.
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Goddess of wisdom and war in ancient Greek religion and mythology
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Athena or Athene, often given the epithet Pallas, is an ancient Greek goddess associated with wisdom, warfare, and handicraft who was later syncretized with the Roman goddess Minerva. Athena was regarded as the patron and protectress of various cities across Greece, particularly the city of Athens, from which she most likely received her name. The Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens is dedicated to her. Her major symbols include owls, olive trees, snakes, and the Gorgoneion. In art, she is generally depicted wearing a helmet and holding a spear.
From her origin as an Aegean palace goddess, Athena was closely associated with the city. She was known as Polias and Poliouchos (both derived from polis, meaning "city-state"), and her temples were usually located atop the fortified acropolis in the central part of the city. The Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis is dedicated to her, along with numerous other temples and monuments. As the patron of craft and weaving, Athena was known as Ergane. She was also a warrior goddess, and was believed to lead soldiers into battle as Athena Promachos. Her main festival in Athens was the Panathenaia, which was celebrated during the month of Hekatombaion in midsummer and was the most important festival on the Athenian calendar.
In Greek mythology, Athena was believed to have been born from the forehead of her father Zeus. In some versions of the story, Athena has no mother and is born from Zeus' forehead by parthenogenesis. In others, such as Hesiod's Theogony, Zeus swallows his consort Metis, who was pregnant with Athena; in this version, Athena is first born within Zeus and then escapes from his body through his forehead. In the founding myth of Athens, Athena bested Poseidon in a competition over patronage of the city by creating the first olive tree. She was known as Athena Parthenos "Athena the Virgin," but in one archaic Attic myth, the god Hephaestus tried and failed to rape her, resulting in Gaia giving birth to Erichthonius, an important Athenian founding hero. Athena was the patron goddess of heroic endeavor; she was believed to have aided the heroes Perseus, Heracles, Bellerophon, and Jason. Along with Aphrodite and Hera, Athena was one of the three goddesses whose feud resulted in the beginning of the Trojan War.
She plays an active role in the Iliad, in which she assists the Achaeans and, in the Odyssey, she is the divine counselor to Odysseus. In the later writings of the Roman poet Ovid, Athena was said to have competed against the mortal Arachne in a weaving competition, afterward transforming Arachne into the first spider; Ovid also describes how she transformed Medusa into a Gorgon after witnessing her being raped by Poseidon in her temple. Since the Renaissance, Athena has become an international symbol of wisdom, the arts, and classical learning. Western artists and allegorists have often used Athena as a symbol of freedom and democracy.
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Realm of the Elves
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In Norse cosmology, Álfheimr (Old Norse: , "Land of the Elves" or "Elfland"; anglicized as Alfheim), also called "Ljósálfheimr" ( , "home of the Light Elves"), is home of the Light Elves.
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River in Switzerland
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The Aare () or Aar () is a tributary of the High Rhine and the longest river that both rises and ends entirely within Switzerland.
Its total length from its source to its junction with the Rhine comprises about , during which distance it descends , draining an area of , almost entirely within Switzerland, and accounting for close to half the area of the country, including all of Central Switzerland.
There are more than 40 hydroelectric plants along the course of the Aare.
The river's name dates to at least the La Tène period, and it is attested as Nantaror "Aare valley" in the Berne zinc tablet.
The name was Latinized as Arula/Arola/Araris.
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Organic compounds of the form RC(=O)NR′R″
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In organic chemistry, an amide, also known as an organic amide or a carboxamide, is a compound with the general formula , where R, R', and R″ represent organic groups or hydrogen atoms. The amide group is called a peptide bond when it is part of the main chain of a protein, and an isopeptide bond when it occurs in a side chain, such as in the amino acids asparagine and glutamine. It can be viewed as a derivative of a carboxylic acid () with the hydroxyl group () replaced by an amine group (); or, equivalently, an acyl (alkanoyl) group () joined to an amine group.
Common examples of amides are acetamide (), benzamide (), and dimethylformamide ().
Amides are qualified as primary, secondary, and tertiary according to whether the amine subgroup has the form , , or , where R and R' are groups other than hydrogen.
The core of amides is called the amide group (specifically, carboxamide group).
Amides are pervasive in nature and technology. Proteins and important plastics like Nylons, Aramid, Twaron, and Kevlar are polymers whose units are connected by amide groups (polyamides); these linkages are easily formed, confer structural rigidity, and resist hydrolysis. Amides include many other important biological compounds, as well as many drugs like paracetamol, penicillin and LSD. Low-molecular-weight amides, such as dimethylformamide, are common solvents.
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Western calendar era
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The terms (AD) and before Christ (BC) are used to label or number years in the Julian and Gregorian calendars. The term is Medieval Latin and means 'in the year of the Lord', but is often presented using "our Lord" instead of "the Lord", "since AD stands for anno Domini, 'in the year of (Our) Lord'" taken from the full original phrase "anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi", which translates to 'in the year of our Lord Jesus Christ'. The form "BC" is specific to English and equivalent abbreviations are used in other languages: the Latin form is but is rarely seen.
This calendar era is based on the traditionally reckoned year of the conception or birth of Jesus, AD counting years from the start of this epoch and BC denoting years before the start of the era. There is no year zero in this scheme; thus the year AD 1 immediately follows the year 1 BC. This dating system was devised in 525 by Dionysius Exiguus, but was not widely used until the 9th century.
Traditionally, English follows Latin usage by placing the "AD" abbreviation before the year number, though it is also found after the year.Chicago Manual of Style 2010, pp. 476–7; Goldstein 2007, p. 6. In contrast, BC is always placed after the year number (for example: AD 70, but 70 BC), which preserves syntactic order. The abbreviation AD is also widely used after the number of a century or millennium, as in "fourth century AD" or "second millennium AD" (although conservative usage formerly rejected such expressions).Chicago Manual of Style, 1993, p. 304. Because BC is the English abbreviation for Before Christ, it is sometimes incorrectly concluded that AD means After Death, i.e., after the death of Jesus, which would mean that the approximate 33 years commonly associated with the life of Jesus would be included in neither the BC nor the AD time scales.Donald P. Ryan, (2000), 15.
Terminology that is viewed by some as being more neutral and inclusive of non-Christian people is to call this the Current or Common Era (abbreviated as CE), with the preceding years referred to as Before the Common or Current Era (BCE). Astronomical year numbering and ISO 8601 avoid words or abbreviations related to Christianity, but use the same numbers for AD years (but not for BC years in the case of astronomical years; e.g., 1 BC is year 0, 45 BC is year −44).
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Material composed of antiparticles of the corresponding particles of ordinary matter
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In modern physics, antimatter is defined as matter composed of the antiparticles (or "partners") of the corresponding particles in "ordinary" matter. Antimatter occurs in natural processes like cosmic ray collisions and some types of radioactive decay, but only a tiny fraction of these have successfully been bound together in experiments to form antiatoms. Minuscule numbers of antiparticles can be generated at particle accelerators; however, total artificial production has been only a few nanograms. No macroscopic amount of antimatter has ever been assembled due to the extreme cost and difficulty of production and handling.
Theoretically, a particle and its antiparticle (for example, a proton and an antiproton) have the same mass, but opposite electric charge, and other differences in quantum numbers.
A collision between any particle and its anti-particle partner leads to their mutual annihilation, giving rise to various proportions of intense photons (gamma rays), neutrinos, and sometimes less-massive particleantiparticle pairs. The majority of the total energy of annihilation emerges in the form of ionizing radiation. If surrounding matter is present, the energy content of this radiation will be absorbed and converted into other forms of energy, such as heat or light. The amount of energy released is usually proportional to the total mass of the collided matter and antimatter, in accordance with the notable mass–energy equivalence equation, .
Antimatter particles bind with each other to form antimatter, just as ordinary particles bind to form normal matter. For example, a positron (the antiparticle of the electron) and an antiproton (the antiparticle of the proton) can form an antihydrogen atom. The nuclei of antihelium have been artificially produced, albeit with difficulty, and are the most complex anti-nuclei so far observed. Physical principles indicate that complex antimatter atomic nuclei are possible, as well as anti-atoms corresponding to the known chemical elements.
There is strong evidence that the observable universe is composed almost entirely of ordinary matter, as opposed to an equal mixture of matter and antimatter. This asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the visible universe is one of the great unsolved problems in physics. The process by which this inequality between matter and antimatter particles developed is called baryogenesis.
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Family of crocodilians including alligators, caimans and kin
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The family Alligatoridae of crocodylians includes alligators, caimans and their extinct relatives.
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Organic compounds containing amine and carboxylic groups
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Amino acids are organic compounds that contain both amino and carboxylic acid functional groups. Although hundreds of amino acids exist in nature, by far the most important are the alpha-amino acids, which comprise proteins. Only 22 alpha amino acids appear in the genetic code.
Amino acids can be classified according to the locations of the core structural functional groups, as alpha- (α-), beta- (β-), gamma- (γ-) or delta- (δ-) amino acids; other categories relate to polarity, ionization, and side chain group type (aliphatic, acyclic, aromatic, containing hydroxyl or sulfur, etc.). In the form of proteins, amino acid residues form the second-largest component (water being the largest) of human muscles and other tissues. Beyond their role as residues in proteins, amino acids participate in a number of processes such as neurotransmitter transport and biosynthesis. It is thought that they played a key role in enabling life on Earth and its emergence.
Amino acids are formally named by the IUPAC-IUBMB Joint Commission on Biochemical Nomenclature in terms of the fictitious "neutral" structure shown in the illustration. For example, the systematic name of alanine is 2-aminopropanoic acid, based on the formula . The Commission justified this approach as follows:
The systematic names and formulas given refer to hypothetical forms in which amino groups are unprotonated and carboxyl groups are undissociated. This convention is useful to avoid various nomenclatural problems but should not be taken to imply that these structures represent an appreciable fraction of the amino-acid molecules.
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Chemical compounds and groups containing nitrogen with a lone pair (:N)
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{| class="wikitable" style="margin:auto 1em auto 1em; float:right; text-align:center;"
|- id="amino_group_connectivity_table"
! Primary (1°) amine !! Secondary (2°) amine !! Tertiary(3°) amine
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| 100px|primary amine
| 100px|secondary amine
| 100px|tertiary amine
|}
In chemistry, amines (, ) are compounds and functional groups that contain a basic nitrogen atom with a lone pair. Amines are formally derivatives of ammonia (), wherein one or more hydrogen atoms have been replaced by a substituent such as an alkyl or aryl group (these may respectively be called alkylamines and arylamines; amines in which both types of substituent are attached to one nitrogen atom may be called alkylarylamines). Important amines include amino acids, biogenic amines, trimethylamine, and aniline; see :Category:Amines for a list of amines. Inorganic derivatives of ammonia are also called amines, such as monochloramine ().
The substituent is called an amino group.
Compounds with a nitrogen atom attached to a carbonyl group, thus having the structure , are called amides and have different chemical properties from amines.
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8th-century Northumbrian scholar, clergyman, poet, and teacher
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Alcuin of York (; ; 735 – 19 May 804) – also called Ealhwine, Alhwin, or Alchoin – was scholar, clergyman, poet, and teacher from York, Northumbria. He was born around 735 and became the student of Archbishop Ecgbert at York. At the invitation of Charlemagne, he became a leading scholar and teacher at the Carolingian court, where he remained a figure in the 780s and 790s. "The most learned man anywhere to be found", according to Einhard's Life of Charlemagne (–833), he is considered among the most important intellectual architects of the Carolingian Renaissance. Among his pupils were many of the dominant intellectuals of the Carolingian era.
During this period, he perfected Carolingian minuscule, an easily read manuscript hand using a mixture of upper- and lower-case letters. Latin paleography in the eighth century leaves little room for a single origin of the script, and sources contradict his importance as no proof has been found of his direct involvement in the creation of the script. Carolingian minuscule was already in use before Alcuin arrived in Francia. Most likely he was responsible for copying and preserving the script while at the same time restoring the purity of the form.
Alcuin wrote many theological and dogmatic treatises, as well as a few grammatical works and a number of poems. In 796, he was made abbot of Marmoutier Abbey, in Tours, where he remained until his death.
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