Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Transformer

A transformer is a tool that transfer electrical power from one route to another by magnetic mixture without require relative action between its parts. It regularly comprises two or more joined windings, and, in most cases, a center to focus magnetic instability.

An irregular voltage applied to one twisting creates a time-varying attractive flux in the center, which induce a electrical energy in the other windings. Varying the relation numeral of turns between major and derived windings determine the ratio of the contribution and production voltages, thus transform the voltage by step it up or down among circuits.

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

Codex


A codex is composed of many books; a book is of one scroll. It is called codex by way of metaphor from the trunks (codex) of trees or vines, as if it were a wooden stock, because it contains in itself a multitude of books, as it were of branches. In schools, in accounting and for taking notes wax tablets was the normal writing material. Wax tablets had the advantage of being reusable: the wax could be melted and a new text carved into the wax. The custom of binding several wax tablets together is a possible precursor for modern books .Also the etymology of the word codex suggests that it may have developed from wooden wax tablets.

Tuesday, May 08, 2007

The Colossus of Rhodes


From its building to its destruction lies a time span of merely 56 years. Yet the colossus earned a place in the famous list of Wonders.But even lying on the ground, it is a marvel, said Pliny the Elder. The Colossus of Rhodes was not only a gigantic statue. It was rather a symbol of unity of the people who inhabited that beautiful Mediterranean island Rhodes.

Let us first clear a misconception about the appearance of the Colossus. It has long been believed that the Colossus stood in front of the Mandraki harbor, one of many in the city of Rhodes, straddling its entrance. Given the height of the statue and the width of the harbor mouth, this picture is rather impossible than improbable. Moreover, the fallen Colossus would have blocked the harbor entrance. Recent studies suggest that it was erected either on the eastern promontory of the Mandraki harbor, or even further inland. Anyway, it did never straddle the harbor entrance.

Sunday, May 06, 2007

Water pollution

Water pollution is a large set of unfavorable belongings upon water bodies such as lakes, rivers, oceans, and groundwater caused by human activities. Although natural phenomena such as volcanoes, algae blooms, storms, and earthquakes also cause main changes in water quality and the environmental status of water, these are not deemed to be pollution. Water pollution has many causes and characteristics. Increases in nutrient loading may lead to eutrophication. Organic wastes such as sewage inflict high oxygen demands on the getting water leading to oxygen depletion with potentially severe impacts on the whole eco-system. Industries discharge a variety of pollutants in their wastewater including grave metals, organic toxins, oils, nutrients, and solids. Discharges can also have thermal effects, especially those from power stations, and these too reduce the available oxygen. Silt-bearing runoff from many activities together with construction sites, deforestation and agriculture can reduce the penetration of sunlight through the water column, restricting photosynthesis and causing blanketing of the lake or river bed, in turn damaging ecological systems.

Pollutants in water consist of a wide spectrum of chemicals, pathogens, and physical chemistry or sensory changes.A lot of the chemical substances are toxic. Pathogens can apparently produce waterborne diseases in either human or animal hosts. Alteration of water's physical chemistry include acidity, conductivity, temperature, and eutrophication. Eutrophication is the fertilisation of surface water by nutrients that were previously scarce. Even many of the municipal water supplies in developed countries can present health risks.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

Cooking

Cooking is the act of preparing food for eating. The term cooking encompasses all methods of food preparation with non-heated methods. It encompasses a huge range of methods, tools and combinations of ingredients to change the taste or digestibility of food. It is the method of select, measuring and combining of ingredients in an planned procedure in an try to get the desired result. Factors affecting the finishing outcome include the inconsistency of ingredients, ambient conditions, tools, and the skill of the person doing the actual cooking.

The variety of cooking universal is a reflection of the many nutritional, aesthetic, agricultural, cultural and religious considerations that crash upon it.

Cooking frequently requires applying heat to a food, which regularly, though not always, chemically transforms it, thus varying its flavor, texture, appearance, and nutritional properties. There is archaeological proof of roasted foodstuffs, both animal and vegetable, in human campsites dating from the initial known use of fire, some 800,000 years ago

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Tourism

Tourism

Tourism is travel for predominantly leisure or relaxation purposes, and also refers to the prerequisite of services in support of this act. Tourists are people who ,travel to and stay in places outside their common environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes not related to work out of an activity remunerated from within the place visited.

Tourism has become an enormously popular, global activity. As a service industry, tourism has frequent tangible and intangible elements. Major tangible elements include transportation, accommodation, and other apparatus of a hospitality industry. Major intangible elements relate to the purpose or inspiration for becoming a tourist, such as rest, relaxation, the opportunity to meet new people and experience other cultures, or simply to do something different and have an adventure.

Tourism is crucial for many countries, due to the income generated by the expenditure of goods and services by tourists, the taxes levied on businesses in the tourism industry, and the prospect for employment and economic advancement by working in the industry.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Edible flowers


Flowers provide less food than other major plants parts but they provide several important foods and spices. Flower vegetables include broccoli, cauliflower and artichoke. The most expensive spice, saffron, consists of dried stigmas of a crocus. Other flower spices are cloves and capers. Hops flowers are used to flavor beer. Marigold flowers are fed to chickens to give their egg yolks a golden yellow color, which consumers find more desirable. Dandelion flowers are often made into wine. Bee Pollen, pollen collected from bees, is considered a health food by some people. Honey consists of bee-processed flower nectar and is often named for the type of flower, e.g. orange blossom honey, clover honey and tupelo honey.

Hundreds of fresh flowers are edible but few are widely marketed as food. They are often used to add color and flavor to salads. Squash flowers are dipped in breadcrumbs and fried. Edible flowers include nasturtium, chrysanthemum, carnation, cattail, honeysuckle, chicory, cornflower, Canna, and sunflower. Some edible flowers are sometimes candied such as daisy and rose.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Kaiser Health Insurance

The Kaiser insurance California is beneficial and has unique features. Under dental insurance pans there are several options available like long term and short term insurance plans, temporary and permanent coverage options and lot more. For business life insurance California too, there are different options available. There are also group health and vision plans available in California. If interested in term life health insurance in California, you can go for the same. There are also options like term life insurance policies available that suits your needs. The california health insurance available is very affordable and compatible. Insurance is the process of securing one’s life by prior insurance with respect to certain terms and conditions. With many health insurance plans, there is a basic premium involved, which is basically how much you pay to buy health insurance coverage.

Monday, April 09, 2007

Manuscripts


The fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century A.D. saw the decline of the culture of ancient Rome. Due to lack of contacts with Egypt the papyrus became difficult to obtain and parchment started to be the main writing material.

In Western Roman Empire mainly monasteries carried on the Latin writing tradition, because first Cassiodorus in the monastery of Vivarium stressed the importance of copying texts, and later also St. Benedict of Nursia, in his Regula Monachorum promoted reading. The Rule of St. Benedict, which set aside certain times for reading, greatly influenced the monastic culture of the Middle Ages, and is one of the reasons why the clergy were the predominant readers of books. At first the tradition and style of the Roman Empire still dominated and only slowly the peculiar medieval book culture emerged.

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Dengue hemorrhagic fever


DHF is a more severe form of dengue. It can be fatal if unrecognized and not properly treated. DHF is caused by infection with the same viruses that cause dengue. With good medical management, mortality due to DHF can be less than 1%.Dengue is transmitted to people by the bite of an Aedes mosquito that is infected with a dengue virus. The mosquito becomes infected with dengue virus when it bites a person who has dengue or DHF and after about a week can transmit the virus while biting a healthy person. Dengue cannot be spread directly from person to person.

The principal symptoms of dengue are high fever, severe headache, backache, joint pains, nausea and vomiting, eye pain, and rash. Generally, younger children have a milder illness than older children and adults.

Sunday, March 11, 2007

Nature

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical universe, material world or material universe. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The term generally does not include manufactured objects and human interaction unless qualified in ways such as, e.g., "human nature" or "the whole of nature". Nature is also generally distinguished from the spiritual or supernatural. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the galactic.

The word "nature" derives from the Latin word natura, or "the course of things, natural character."Natura was a Latin translation of the Greek word physis, which originally related to the innate way in which plants and animals grow of their own accord, and to the Greek word for plants generally.The concept of nature as a whole, the physical universe, is a more recent development that gained increasingly wide use with the advent of modern scientific method in the last several centuries.

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

2D computer graphics

The first advance in computer graphics was in the use of CRTs. There are two approaches to 2D computer graphics: vector and raster graphics. Vector graphics stores precise geometric data, topology and style such as: coordinate positions of points, the relations between points , and the color, thickness, and possible fill of the shapes. Most vector graphic systems can also use primitives of standard shapes such as circles, rectangles, etc.

Early vector-graphics displays were monochrome CRTs where the picture was drawn by the cathode ray being motivated about the screen along the required path.On a scanning display, a vector graphic image has to be transformed to a raster image to be viewed. Raster graphics is a uniform 2-dimensional grid of pixels. Each pixel has a specific value such as, for instance, brightness, color, transparency, or a combination of such values. A raster image has a finite resolution of a specific number of rows and columns. Standard computer displays shows a raster image of resolutions such as 1280 columnsx1024 rows of pixels. Today, one often combines raster and vector graphics in complex file formats.

Sunday, February 18, 2007

Wildlife

The term wildlife refers to living organisms that are not in any way artificial or domesticated and which survive in natural habitats. Wildlife can refer to flora but more usually refers to fauna. Wildlife is a very general term for life in ecosystems. Deserts, rainforests, plains, and other areas including the most built-up urban sites all have distinct forms of wildlife.

Humans have historically tended to split civilization from wildlife in a number of ways; besides the obvious difference in vocabulary, there are differing expectations in the legal, social, and moral sense. This has been a reason for debate during recorded history. Religions have often declared certain animals to be sacred, and in modern times concern for the environment has aggravated activists to protest the exploitation of wildlife for human benefit or entertainment. Literature has also made use of the traditional human separation from wildlife.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Sound

Sound is an interruption of mechanical energy that propagates through matter as a wave. Sound is characterized by the properties of sound waves which are frequency, wavelength, period, amplitude and velocity or speed. Noise and sound often mean the same thing; when they differ, a noise is a useless sound. In science and engineering, noise is an undesirable component that obscures a signal.

Humans perceive sound by the sense of hearing. By sound, we usually mean the vibrations that travel through air and can be heard by humans. However, scientists and engineers use a wider description of sound that includes low and high frequency vibrations in air that cannot be heard by humans, and vibrations that travel through all forms of matter, gases, liquids and solids. The matter that supports the sound is called the medium. Sound propagates as waves of irregular pressure, causing local regions of compression and rarefaction. Particles in the medium are displaced by the wave and oscillate. The scientific study of sound is called acoustics.

Friday, February 02, 2007

Heat wave

A heat wave is a prolonged period of extremely hot weather, which may be accompanied by high humidity. There is no universal definition of a heat wave the term is relative to the usual weather in the area. Temperatures that people from a hotter climate believe normal can be termed a heat wave in a cooler area if they are outside the normal climate pattern for that area.
The term is applied both to routine weather variation and to extraordinary spells of heat which may occur only once a century. Severe heat waves have caused catastrophic crop failures, thousands of deaths from hyperthermia, and widespread power outages due to increased use of air conditioning.

Heat waves often occur for the period of the Dog Days of summer; indeed the French term canicule, denoting the general phenomenon of a heat wave, derives from the Italian canicula applied to the star Sirius, also known as the "Dog Star." Some regions of the globe are more susceptible to heat waves than others, such as Mediterranean-type climates with a summer dry spell which becomes much hotter than usual during certain years

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Surreal humour

Surreal humour is a form of humour, stylistically linked to the artistic ambitions of the Surrealists, based on bizarre juxtapositions, absurd situations, and nonsense logic. A general element of surreal humour is the non-sequitur, in which one statement is followed by another with no logical progression.

Humour which we might now think surreal has been around at least since the nineteenth century. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass both use illogic and absurdity for humorous effect. Many of Edward Lear's nonsense stories and poems are also principally surreal in approach. Thus, Lear's "The Story of the Four Little Children Who Went Round the World," is filled with contradictory statements and odd images planned to provoke amusement.

"After a time they saw some land at a distance; and when they came to it, they found it was an island made of water quite bounded by earth. Besides that, it was bordered by evanescent isthmuses with a great Gulf-stream running about all over it, so that it was perfectly beautiful, and contained only a single tree, 503 feet high."

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Pulmonology

In medicine, pulmonology is the specialty that deals with diseases of the lungs and the respiratory tract. It is called chest medicine and respiratory medicine in some countries and areas. Pulmonology is generally considered a branch of internal medicine, although it is closely related to intensive care medicine when dealing with patients requiring mechanical ventilation. Surgery of the respiratory tract is generally performed by specialists in cardiothoracic surgery . Chest medicine is not a specialty in itself but is an inclusive term which pertains to the treatment of diseases of the chest and contains the fields of pulmonology, thoracic surgery, and intensive care medicine. Pulmonology is concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of lung diseases, as well as secondary prevention.Physicans specializing in this area are called pulmonologists.

Surgical treatment in generally performed by the thoracic surgeon, generally after primary evaluation by a pulmonologist.Medication is the most important treatment of most diseases of pulmonology, either by inhalation or in oral form.Oxygen therapy is often necessary in severe respiratory disease.When this is insufficient, the patient might require mechanical ventilation.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Oral tradition and notation

Music is often conserved in memory and performance only, handed down orally, or aurally. Then the composer of music is no longer known this music is often classified as "traditional". Different musical traditions have dissimilar attitudes towards how and where to make changes to the original source material, from quite strict, to those which demand improvisation or modification to the music. In the Gambia, West Africa, the history of the country is passed orally through song.

When music is written down, it is generally notated so that there are instructions regarding what should be heard by listeners, and what the musician should do to perform the music. This is referred to as musical information, and the study of how to read notation involves music theory, harmony, the study of performance practice, and in some cases and understanding of historical presentation methods. Written notation varies with style and period of music. In Western Art music, the most common types of written notation are scores, which include all the music parts of an ensemble piece, and parts, which are the music notation for the individual performers or singers. In popular music, jazz, and blues, the regular musical notation is the lead sheet, which notates the melody, chords, lyrics, and structure of the music. Nonetheless, scores and parts are also used in popular music and jazz, mainly in large ensembles such as jazz "big bands."

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Nature

Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical universe, material world or material universe. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. The term generally does not include manufactured objects and human interaction unless qualified in ways such as, e.g., "human nature" or "the whole of nature". Nature is also generally distinguished from the spiritual or supernatural. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the galactic.

The word "nature" derives from the Latin word natura, or "the course of things, natural character."Natura was a Latin translation of the Greek word physis, which originally related to the innate way in which plants and animals grow of their own accord, and to the Greek word for plants generally.The concept of nature as a whole, the physical universe, is a more recent development that gained increasingly wide use with the advent of modern scientific method in the last several centuries.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Climate determinants

Over historic time spans there are a number of static variables that determine climate, including: latitude, altitude, proportion of land to water,and proximity to oceans and mountains. Other climate determinants are more dynamic: The thermohaline circulation of the ocean distributes heat energy between the equatorial and polar regions; other ocean currents do the same between land and water on a more regional scale.

Degree of vegetation coverage affects solar heat absorption, water retention, and rainfall on a regional level. Alteration in the quantity of atmospheric greenhouse gases determines the amount of solar energy retained by the planet, leading to global warming or global cooling. The variables which determine climate are numerous and the interactions complex, but there is general agreement that the broad outlines are understood, at least in so far as the determinants of historical climate change are concerned.