Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Rhönrad

Wheel gymnastics (German: Rhönradturnen) is a form of gymnastics which originated in Germany.

Wheel gymnasts do exercises in a large wheel known as the Rhönrad, gymnastics wheel, gym wheel, or German wheel.

There are three core categories of exercise: straight line, spiral, and vault.

Monday, July 30, 2012

Untriseptium

Untriseptium (pronounced /ˌuːntraɪˈsɛptiəm/), also known as eka-dubnium or element 137, is a hypothetical chemical element which has not been observed to occur naturally, nor has it yet been synthesised. Due to drip instabilities, it is not known if this element is physically possible. Its atomic number is 137 and symbol is Uts.

The name untriseptium is a temporary IUPAC systematic element name.


Sunday, July 29, 2012

pest


In ice hockey, a pest is a characterization of player who attempts to antagonize opponent players either by physical play or verbally. Pests employ legal, illegal, or borderline tactics to accomplish their goals. Some common tactics include trash talk or slashing and hooking while referees are not looking. Also, they may sometimes employ the tactic of goading opponents into a fight but then backing off in order to draw a penalty against them. Some pests may not only use these tactics against opposing skaters, but opposing goaltenders as well. Pest and agitator are sometimes used synonymously, as both are usually characterized by short bursts of intensity and speed with the intention of creating havoc. The pest characterization has been used derogatorily, as a player who incites anger in the opposition but is unwilling to directly confront the result of their actions by engaging in fighting.

Saturday, July 28, 2012

Arcturus

Arcturus (α Boo, α Boötis, Alpha Boötis) is the brightest star in the constellation Boötes. To the naked eye, orangey-yellow Arcturus has a visual magnitude of −0.04, making it the brightest star in the northern hemisphere and the fourth brightest star in the night sky, after -1.46 magnitude Sirius, -0.86 magnitude Canopus and -0.27 magnitude Alpha Centauri. However, Alpha Centauri is a bright binary star, whose unresolved components to the naked eye are both fainter than Arcturus. This makes Arcturus the third brightest individual star, just ahead of Alpha Centauri A (α Cen A), whose visual magnitude is −0.01.

Arcturus is visible from both hemispheres in the sky, as it is located less than 20 degrees north of the celestial equator. The star culminates at midnight on about the 30th April, being visible during the northern spring or the southern autumn. From the northern hemisphere, an easy way to find Arcturus is to follow the arc of the handle of the Big Dipper. By continuing in this path, one can find Spica, "Arc to Arcturus, then speed on to Spica." The star is also a member of the Local Interstellar Cloud.

Friday, July 27, 2012

Spetsnaz


Russian Special Purpose Forces or Spetsnaz, Specnaz is an umbrella term for any "special forces" in Russian, literally "force of special purpose". These Russian special forces can specifically refer to any elite or special purpose units under subordination of the Federal Security Service (FSB) or Internal Troops of Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the units controlled by the military intelligence service GRU.

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Materiel

Materiel (from the French "matériel" for equipment or hardware, related to the word material) is a term used in English to refer to the equipment and supplies in military and commercial supply chain management.

In a military context, materiel relates to the specific needs of a force to complete a specific mission. The term is also often used in a general sense ("men and materiel") to describe the needs of a functioning army.

Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Sunday, July 22, 2012

Pluviôse

Pluviôse was the fifth month in the French Republican Calendar. The month was named after the Latin word pluviosus, which means rainy.

Pluviôse was the second month of the winter quarter (mois d'hiver). It started between January 20 and January 22. It ended between February 18 and February 20. It follows the Nivôse and precedes the Ventôse.

Friday, July 20, 2012

Colbertism

Colbertism is an economic and political doctrine of the seventeenth century, created by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the French minister of finance under Louis XIV. Colbertism is a variant of mercantilism and is more a collection of economical practices than a true current of economic thought.

Colbert's central principle was that the wealth and the economy of France should serve the state. Drawing on the ideas of mercantilism, he believed state intervention was needed to secure the largest part of limited resources. To accumulate gold, a country always had to sell more goods abroad than it bought. Colbert sought to build a French economy that sold abroad and bought domestically.

Thursday, July 19, 2012

non-essentialism

In philosophy, non-essentialism is the belief that any given entity or subject cannot be propositionally defined in terms of specified values or characteristics, which that entity must have in order to be defined as that entity. For example, humanists have an idea of what the essence of being human is: there are specific traits which make something human. This is an essentialist theory.

A non-essentialist theory of humanity would believe that there are no essences or traits that make something human (for example, Sartre's theory of existence preceding essence). This view is somewhat problematic, however, as an entity not defined by any specific values or characteristics may lack any meaningful existence to an observer.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

essentialism

In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described. In this view, it follows that terms or words should have a single definition and meaning.

In simple terms, essentialism is a generalization stating that certain properties possessed by a group (e.g. people, things, ideas) are universal, and not dependent on context. For example, the essentialist statement 'all human beings are mortal'.

According to essentialism, a member of a specific group may possess other characteristics that are neither needed to establish its membership nor preclude its membership, but that essences do not simply reflect ways of grouping objects; they also result in properties of the object, as the object can be subjugated to smaller contexts.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Pastel

Pastel is an art medium in the form of a stick, consisting of pure powdered pigment and a binder. The pigments used in pastels are the same as those used to produce all colored art media, including oil paints; the binder is of a neutral hue and low saturation.

Sunday, July 15, 2012

goon

A box wine (or boxed wine, goon, cask wine) is a wine packaged as a Bag-In-Box. Such packages contain a plastic bladder protected by a box, usually made of corrugated fiberboard.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

rainbow table

A rainbow table is a precomputed table for reversing cryptographic hash functions, usually for cracking password hashes. Tables are usually used in recovering the plaintext password, up to a certain length consisting of a limited set of characters. It is a form of time-memory tradeoff, using less CPU at the cost of more storage. Proper key derivation functions employ salt to make this attack infeasible.

Rainbow tables are a refinement of an earlier, simpler algorithm by Martin Hellman that used the inversion of hashes by looking up precomputed hash chains.

Friday, July 13, 2012

praedial

Adjective

praedial (comparative more praedial, superlative most praedial)
  1. Of or pertaining to land or its products.
  2. Coming from or the occupation of land.
  3. Attached to the land (of slavery etc.); having to work on the land or an estate; deriving from the land.

diaspora

A diaspora (from Greek διασπορά, "scattering, dispersion") is "the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland" or "a people dispersed by whatever cause to more than one location", or "people settled far from their ancestral homelands".

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Zhuchengtyrannus

Zhuchengtyrannus (meaning "Zhucheng tyrant") is a genus of carnivorous theropod dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous period. It is a tyrannosaurine tyrannosaurid which lived during the late Cretaceous period in what is now Zhucheng, Shandong Province of China. It is known from a maxilla and associated dentary (lower jaw with teeth) recovered from the Wangshi Group, dating to about 70 million years ago. It was one of the largest known carnivorous theropods, measuring about 11 m (36 ft) in length, 4 metres (13 ft) tall, and 6 tons in weight. The dentary is only a little smaller than the largest Tyrannosaurus rex jawbone found.

The place where the dinosaur has been found was a flood plain in the Cretaceous period and contains one of the highest concentrations of dinosaur bones in the world.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

vargr


In Norse mythology, a vargr (often anglicised as warg or varg) is a wolf and in particular refers to the wolf Fenrir and his sons Sköll and Hati. Based on this, J. R. R. Tolkien in his fiction used the Old English form warg (other O.E. forms being wearg and wearh) to refer to a wolf-like creature of a particularly evil kind.

In Old Norse, vargr is a term for "wolf" (ulfr). The Proto-Germanic *wargaz meant "strangler" (see modern German würgen), and hence "evildoer, criminal, outcast." Varg is still the modern Swedish word for "wolf." Also cognate is Old English warg "large bear". In Dutch wolverines are sometimes called Warg, although the name Veelvraat is more commonly used.

In line 1514 of Beowulf, Grendel's mother is described as a grund-wyrgen or "warg of the depths."

Monday, July 9, 2012

Capitoline

The Capitoline Hill (pronounced /ˈkæpɨtəlaɪn/ or /kəˈpɪtɵlaɪn/; Latin: Collis Capitōlīnus), between the Forum and the Campus Martius, is one of the seven hills of Rome. By the 16th century, Capitolinus had become Campidoglio in Italian. The English word capitol derives from Capitoline. The Capitoline contains few ancient ground-level ruins, as they are almost entirely covered up by Medieval and Renaissance palaces (now housing the Capitoline Museums) that surround a piazza, a significant urban plan designed by Michelangelo.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Merovingian


The Merovingians (also Merovings) were a Salian Frankish dynasty that came to rule the Franks in a region (known as Francia in Latin) largely corresponding to ancient Gaul from the middle of the 5th century. Their politics involved frequent civil warfare among branches of the family. During the final century of the Merovingian rule, the dynasty was increasingly pushed into a ceremonial role. The Merovingian rule was ended March 752 when Pope Zachary formally deposed Childeric III. Zachary's successor, Pope Stephen II, re-confirmed and crowned Pepin the Short in Childeric's place in 754 beginning the Carolingian monarchy and early introduction of the Holy Roman Empire.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

Toponymy

Toponymy is the scientific study of place names (toponyms), their origins, meanings, use and typology. The word "toponymy" is derived from the Greek words tópos (τόπος) ("place") and ónoma (ὄνομα) ("name"). Toponymy is itself a branch of onomastics, the study of names of all kinds. Toponymy is distinct from, though often confused with etymology, which is the study of the origins of words.

Friday, July 6, 2012

neurocranium

In mammals, the neurocranium or braincase is the back part of the skull and houses the brain. In front of it is the interorbital region. The size of the braincase is variable among mammals. The roof may contain ridges such as the temporal crests. Below the braincase is a complex of foramina (openings) and bones, including the foramen magnum which houses the neural spine. The auditory bullae, located in the same region, aid in hearing. In humans, it is the upper portion of the skull.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Pickleball

Pickleball is a racquet sport which combines elements of badminton, tennis, and table tennis. The sport is played on a court with the same dimensions as a doubles badminton court. The net is lower than most other racquet sports allowing for faster play. The game is played with a hard paddle and a wiffle ball, making the technique required for pickleball different than other sports.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Gruen transfer

In shopping mall design, the Gruen transfer is the moment when a consumer enters a shopping mall and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, loses track of their original intentions. It is named for Austrian architect Victor Gruen (who disavowed such manipulative techniques). The term describes that split second when the mall's intentionally confusing layout makes our eyes glaze and our jaws slacken... the moment when we forget what we came for and become impulse buyers."

Sunday, July 1, 2012

ossify

ossify

  1. (ambitransitive) To transform (or cause to transform) from a softer animal substance into bone; particularly the processes of growth in humans and animals.
    • 1884, Arthur C. Cole, Studies in Microscopical Science, p. 35,
      [] , nor do all bones of the same skeleton ossify during the samе period of time.
  2. (ambitransitive, animate) To become (or cause to become) inflexible and rigid in habits or opinions.
    • 1996, Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View , p. 96,
      Before long, the entire organization ossifies.
    • 2006, Michael S. Jones, Metaphysics of Religion: Lucian Blaga and Contemporary Philosophy , p. 79,
      Possession of absolute knowledge would ossify the human spirit, quenching human creativity;
  3. (ambitransitive, inanimate) To grow (or cause to grow) formulaic and permanent.
    • 1886, Karl Marx, translated by Samuel Moore, Capital, Volume I, Chapter 14,
      This accidental repartition gets repeated, develops advantages of its own, and gradually ossifies into a systematic division of labour.
    • 2001, Alain Finkielkraut, translated by Kevin O'Neill and David Suchoff, The Wisdom of Love , p. 55,
      Now, in turn, we apply a revolutionary critique that [] ossifies into a rhetoric to become "the monstrous Latin of a monstrous church."
    • 2005, Michelle Goldberg, "The war on 'Munich'", Salon.com, December 20, 2005,
      [T]he charge threatens to ossify into conventional wisdom before the movie's audience can get to theaters to see how misguided it is.
  4. (rare) To calcify.

lordosis

  Lordosis is historically defined as an abnormal inward curvature of the lumbar spine.