Vocabulary: Nouns

The argument is generally phrased along the lines of “is Google Plus a facebook killer?”. This is a somewhat contrived and sensational narrative, so let me try and explain what I think the argument is really about, in perhaps less shrill terms.

I have serious problems with the direction taken by Canadian policy and politics in the last five years. But as a reporter, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath. Every question I asked, every tweet I posted, and even what I said to other journalists and friends had to go through a filter, where my own opinions and values were carefully strained out. Even then I’m not sure I was always successful, but I always knew at the CBC and subsequently at CTV that there were serious consequences for editorial. Within the terms of my employment at CTV, there was a clause in which the corporation (now Bellmedia) literally took ownership of my intellectual property output. If I invented a better mouse trap, they owned the patent. If I wrote a novel, they got a cut. Rhymes on the back of a napkin? Bellmedia is hip to the jive, yo. And if I ever said anything out of line with my position as an “objective” TV reporter, they had grounds to fire me. I had a sinking feeling when I first read that clause, but I signed because I was 23 and I wanted the job. Now I want my opinions back.

The house dust mite, is a cosmopolitan guest in human habitation. Dust mites feed on organic detritus such as flakes of shed human skin and flourish in the stable environment of dwellings.

A bandolier is a pocketed belt for holding ammunition. In its original form, it was common issue to soldiers from the 16th to 18th centuries. A somewhat different form came into use in the 20th century for use with modern cartridges.

The sensation of talking to the two men, however, is surprisingly similar. Normal conversation is like a game of tennis: you talk and I listen, you listen and I talk, and we feel scrutinized by our conversational partner only when the ball is in our court. But Yarbrough and Harms never stop watching, even when they're doing the talking. Yarbrough would comment on my conversational style, noting where I held my hands as I talked, or how long I would wait out a lull in the conversation.

Among those who do very well at face-reading, tellingly, are some aphasics, such as stroke victims who have lost the ability to understand language.

Meet Prussian Blue. The girls, Lynx and Lamb Gaede -- who look barely old enough to play Mario Kart, let alone “awaken their race” -- have their own Web site and are releasing their second CD. They perform mainly covers of existing white supremacist music, though they are adding some ditties of their own.

I am the living death
the memorial day on wheels
I am your Yankee doodle dandy
your John Wayne come home
your Fourth of July firecracker
exploding in the grave

We have recently resolved Bet 117 on Long Bets about the adjusted cost of energy. It was an interesting case where we had very specific criteria for who would win the bet, yet we could not adjudicate it when the time came. The bettors cited the Department of Energy published numbers to resolve their bet. However in the first quarter of 02006 when the DOE posted their numbers, they then quickly retracted them. It turns out they had several years worth of data incorrect due to the deceptive data from the Enron energy kerfuffle. It took the DOE over a year to straighten it all out.

The design remained relatively unknown in the West for almost another 200 years, until an American, Nathanael Herreshoff, began to build catamaran boats of his own design in 1877 (US Pat. No. 189,459), namely 'Amaryllis', which immediately showed her superior performance capabilities, at her maiden regatta (The Centennial Regatta held on June 22, 1876, off the New York Yacht Club's Staten Island station). It was this same event, after being protested by the losers, where Catamarans, as a design, were barred from all the regular classes and they remained barred until the 1970's.

Herb Stempel (born December 19, 1926) is an American teacher who was famous for his celebrity as a television game show contestant -- and for helping to expose what became known as the quiz show scandals after his long run as champion on the 1950s show Twenty One was ended by Columbia University teacher and literary scion Charles Van Doren.

She was Carlotta Monti in the biopic W.C. Fields and Me (1976) and one of her most famous movie roles came as Miss Eve Teschmacher, moll of criminal mastermind Lex Luthor, in Superman (1978). For this role she was nominated for the 1979 Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress.

They also revealed the immense scope of crimes and abuses, which included campaign fraud, political espionage and sabotage, illegal break-ins, improper tax audits, illegal wiretapping on a massive scale, and a secret slush fund laundered in Mexico to pay those who conducted these operations.

This type of advertising isn't exactly Google's bailiwick, but the Big Dog in search probably feels a need to respond in some fashion to Microsoft, whose recent slew of Bing advertisements suggest that the poor signal-to-noise ratio of today's search engines is frustrating to users. Microsoft is also trying to create the impression that Google's keyword-based search business model is to blame.

After spending two years as a darling of the digerati, Apple's iPhone has started getting some hate mail. And it's not coming from people happy with other devices who resent the fuss over this one gadget, but from folks who had until recently used or admired the iPhone.

So back in February, influential tech blogger Om Malik switched from AT&T to T-Mobile, citing "static, the dropped calls and above all the shoddy call quality." Others have followed; the TechCrunch blog has been particularly vituperative about what it sees as AT&T's inadequacies.

It was a quiet winter night three days after Christmas. My almost 14 year old self was lying in bed unable to fall asleep. As I did a couple of times before, I quietly went to my sister's desk and stole a pen she no longer used. I went back to bed, lay down on my stomach and (probably after wetting it in saliva) inserted the smooth end of the pen inside my ass. I didn't know why I frequently got an urge to do this. It just felt like something I needed to do. It filled me with excitement because it was taboo. It also made me a bit ashamed and humiliated that I felt I wanted to do it. As I lay there, sticking my butt up and moving it so that the other end of the pen would I rub against the duvet, stimulating me, I also circled my clitoral glans with my finger.

But outside the den of self-interest that is an FCC docket, academics were also pondering the question. In 2009, for instance, well-respected University of Minnesota scholar Andrew Odlyzko suggested that net neutrality (which he favored) might then “open the way for other players, such as Google, then emerge from that open and competitive arena as big winners, to become choke points. So it would be wise to prepare to monitor what happens, and be ready to intervene by imposing neutrality rules on them when necessary.”

In 2005, Beauchamp and his colleagues proved that cats, tigers and other felines can't taste sweetness because they lack a functional gene for sweetness taste receptors. But they do have genes for the receptors that detect the umami flavor of wide array of amino acids in protein. So Cashew [her cat] and any other mushroom-craving cats are really on a vain hunt for protein, not for fungi, he says.

Fifty Shades of Grey is a 2011 erotic novel by British author E. L. James. Set largely in Seattle, it is the first installment in a trilogy that traces the deepening relationship between a college graduate, Anastasia Steele, and a young business magnate, Christian Grey. It is notable for its explicitly erotic scenes featuring elements of sexual practices involving bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, sadism/masochism (BDSM).

The Ministry of Magic is the government of the fictional Magical community of Britain in J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. First mentioned in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the Ministry makes its first proper appearance in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Throughout the books, it is depicted as either corrupt, incompetent or both, its high officials blind to actual events and dangers in the wizarding world, reaching a nadir of corruption during the uprising of the antagonist Lord Voldemort.

I own the whole Gor series, and so far have only read to Book 10. I believe that anyone who tries to read all 25 novels in a row may experience burnout. “Tarnsman,” though, keeps you asking for more. You'll find that the first 4 novels are actually parts of a fascinating story arc that introduces Tarl Cabot to this violent yet fascinating world. Through Cabot's eyes we get to observe the different societies on Gor, their customs and rituals, and also we meet the mysterious Priest-Kings who hold sway over it all. The consistency in the writing is truly remarkable and satisfying.

A pamphlet is an unbound booklet (that is, without a hard cover or binding). It may consist of a single sheet of paper that is printed on both sides and folded in half, in thirds, or in fourths (called a leaflet), or it may consist of a few pages that are folded in half and saddle stapled at the crease to make a simple book. In order to count as a pamphlet, UNESCO requires a publication (other than a periodical) to have “at least 5 but not more than 48 pages exclusive of the cover pages”; a longer item is a book.

The adverb pamphlet for a small work (opuscule) issued by itself without covers came into Middle English ca 1387 as pamphilet or panflet, generalized from a twelfth-century amatory comic poem with an old flavor, Pamphilus, seu de Amore (“Pamphilus: or, Concerning Love”), written in Latin. Pamphilus's name was derived from Greek, meaning “friend of everyone”. The poem was popular and widely copied and circulated on its own, forming a slim codex. The pamphlet form of literature has been used for centuries as an economical vehicle for the broad distribution of information.

Its modern connotations of a tract concerning a contemporary issue was a product of the heated arguments leading to the English Civil War; this sense appeared in 1642. In some European languages other than English, this secondary connotation, of a disputaceous tract, has come to the fore: compare libelle, from the Latin libellus, denoting a “little book”.

In Spanish, panfleto is a brief writing or libel generally aggressive or defamatory. By extension, it is used for political propaganda writings. Not to be confused with the English term pamphlet, from which it derives, as it does not contain the negative connotations of the Spanish word and is translated more correctly as folleto.

Pamphlets can contain anything from information on kitchen appliances to medical information and religious treatises. Pamphlets are very important in marketing as they are cheap to produce and can be distributed easily to customers. Pamphlets have also long been an important tool of political protest and political campaigning for similar reasons.

Alas, many of the people who are highly visible and active can best be characterized as “toxic”. These are people who, because of the nature of their personalities and attitudes, have a consistently negative emotional effect on the people they interact with. Without necessarily intending to do so, they have created a constant miasma of disrespect, nitpicking, defensiveness, discouragement, and intolerance. This toxic atmosphere permeates the entire culture, gradually driving less toxic people into seclusion or to other languages, or souring their moods such that they become toxic as well. This leaves an even higher concentration of toxicity, affecting even more people, on and on.

Lee: seems Google Plus social network is winding down. Everybody got tired of it.
Craig: Yeah. I'm sucking on the dregs now, but they ain't tasty.

“Pagan Poetry” has been highly praised by critics, with many citing it as a highlight of the album. Allmusic said of “Pagan Poetry” that it “shares a spacious serenity with the album's quietest moments” and included this song as a track pick. Rolling Stone said: “In ‘Pagan Poetry’, she deploys the implied heaven of Zeena Parkins harp and a flotilla of music boxes with an Asian-teahouse touch.” Blender said “‘Pagan Poetry’ sounds like the prelude to a particularly exotic sexual interlude.” In March 2006, in the number 77 of the Spanish edition of Rolling Stone, “Pagan Poetry” was ranked number 38 by Spanish music professionals and experts on a list of the best songs of the 21st century. Slant Magazine said of the album: “Vespertine delicately traces the cycle of said relationship” and called the song “loss of personal identity and full possessive entrapment”. Pitchfork Media placed the song at number 227 on its list of “The Top 500 Tracks of the 2000s”.

Theodicy (play /θiːˈɒdɪsi/ from Greek theos - “god” + dike - “justice”) is a theological and philosophical study which attempts to prove God's intrinsic or foundational nature of omnibenevolence (all-loving), omniscience (all-knowing), and omnipotence (all-powerful). Theodicy is usually concerned with the God of the Abrahamic religions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, due to the relevant assertions of their respective holy texts. The fundamental dilemma of theodicy is the problem of evil: its continuing existence and God's apparent inability or unwillingness to eradicate it.

A tort, in common law jurisdictions, is a wrong that involves a breach of a civil duty (other than a contractual duty) owed to someone else. It is differentiated from a crime, which involves a breach of a duty owed to society in general. Though many acts are both torts and crimes, prosecutions for crime are mostly the responsibility of the state, private prosecutions being rarely used; whereas any party who has been injured may bring a lawsuit for tort. It is also differentiated from equity, in which a petitioner complains of a violation of some right. One who commits a tortious act is called a tortfeasor. The equivalent of tort in civil law jurisdictions is delict. Tort may be defined as a personal injury; or as “a civil action other than a breach of contract.”

I. Exordium

What is a living creature? It responds to things, and it multiplies. From the perspective of computing, it's an entity that is capable of input and output, with a manner of self-propagation.

Ah, propagation… Therein lies the interesting element–the growth of a population. Consider a hypothetical case, where you start out on a desert island with a pair of male and female creatures; each female produces just one female offspring per generation, and stops reproducing after two generation. Assume the male is immortal, and massive incest occurs to create all subsequent generations, all females. The heritage diagram of sorts would look something like this: …

While not quite new, the concept is recent - largely confined to Twenty-First Century films such as “Saw” and its sequels, and Roth's earlier films “Cabin Fever” and “Hostel.” In addition, “Captivity,” which premiered last Friday, June 13, has attracted the “torture porn” label - with its billboards becoming especially controversial. How long will it be before the MPAA follows the lead of movie reviewers in labeling films “torture porn”? (Meanwhile, in the context of television, Senator Sam Brownback may well succeed in convincing the FCC to move aggressively against depictions of violence, especially explicit ones - a move that has led to significant blowback from the ACLU.)

Beginning April 29, 1957, visitors were able to walk through the castle and view several dioramas depicting the story of Sleeping Beauty. The original dioramas were designed in the style of Eyvind Earle, production designer for Disney's 1959 film Sleeping Beauty, and were then redone in 1977 to resemble the window displays on Main Street, U.S.A.. The walkthrough was closed for unspecified reasons in October 2001; popular belief claims the September 11th attacks and the potential danger that ensued played a major factor in the closing.

In the 1970s, she became well-known internationally for her humanitarian work and advocacy for the rights of the poor and helpless, which was documented by Malcolm Muggeridge in his documentary and subsequent book Something Beautiful for God. Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity continued to grow during her life-time, and at the time of her death, they had 610 missions in 123 countries, including hospices and homes for people with HIV/AIDS, leprosy and tuberculosis, soup kitchens, children's and family counselling programs, orphanages, and schools.

Miasma means an infectious or noxious vapor, especially from putrescent organic matter, which pollutes the atmosphere. The word “miasma” came from ancient Greek and meant “pollution.”. At first, people didn't have a complete notion of miasma, and they just had known an obscure picture of it. But after several decades, more and more medical researches on miasma had appeared and made the notion of miasma become popular among human society. The miasma theory, also called the miasmatic theory, was believed holding diseases in itself, and was considered to be a noxious form of “bad air”, which had the same meaning of malaria. Miasma was also suggested to be a poisonous vapor or mist filled with particles from decomposed matter (miasmata) that caused illnesses.

Venom in many snakes, such as pitvipers, affects virtually every organ system in the human body and can be a combination of many toxins, including cytotoxins [cell], hemotoxins [blood], neurotoxins [nerves], and myotoxins, allowing for an enormous variety of symptoms. Earlier, the venom of a particular snake was considered to be one kind only i.e. either hemotoxic or neurotoxic, and this erroneous belief may still persist wherever the updated literature is hard to access. Although there is much known about the protein compositions of venoms from Asian and American snakes, comparatively little is known of Australian snakes.

Most snakebites, whether by a venomous snake or not, will have some type of local effect. There is minor pain and redness in over 90% of cases, although this varies depending on the site. Bites by vipers and some cobras may be extremely painful, with the local tissue sometimes becoming tender and severely swollen within 5 minutes. This area may also bleed and blister and can eventually lead to tissue necrosis.

…

Application of a tourniquet to the bitten limb is generally not recommended.

Joke: Girl in Hotel with Amenities

a pretty girl is checking out in a hotel, the bill is $800. She complains it's too much. Manager says its standard fare, hotel features swimming pool, gym, and wifi. The girl said she didn't use any of it. Manager says: but it's provided. The girl proceeds to make a payment, but deduct $700 for bedding with manager, so pays only $100. Manager panicked and said: when did i? Girl said: but it's provided.

Even so, there are many titles we couldn't fit here that we're still anguishing over. Djuna Barnes' Nightwood dropped in and out. Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point hovered for a while at the edges. There were writers we had to admit we love more for their short stories than their novels -- Donald Barthelme, Annie Proulx, Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty. We could agree that some of Gore Vidal's novels are an essential pleasure, but it's his non-fiction that's essential period. Then there was the intellectual massif of Norman Mailer, indisputably one of the great writers of our time, but his supreme achievements are his headlong reconfigurations of the whole idea of non-fiction, books like Armies of the Night and The Executioner's Song. Dawn Powell, Mordechai Richler, Thomas Wolfe, Peter Carey, J.F. Powers, Mary McCarthy, Edmund White, Larry McMurtry, Katherine Ann Porter, Amy Tan, John Dos Passos, Oscar Hijuelos -- we looked over our bookcases and many more than 100 names laid down a claim. This means you, Stephen King.

As her losses mounted to more than $200, Budz fed the machine $5 tokens, pressing the Spin button almost rhythmically. No serious slot player touches the pull handle on a one-armed bandit.

Now the veneer of credibility, already bruised by allegations of tamper-prone data, secret food caches and smuggled supplies, has cracked. … The Biospherians will soldier on, but their two-year experiment in self- sufficiency is starting to look less like science and more like a $150 million stunt.

Rayment, 30, and his twin brother Adrian feature in the upcoming sequel Matrix Reloaded, as a pair of kung-fu fighting villains. The menacing twins play rogue virii, roaming the Matrix in all-white attire and silver dreadlocks.

Her gift for words and the cultural predicament of her time drove her to poetry instead of antimacassars …

there are lots of sultans in Arabian Nights. The leaders of different cultures throughout times have different names. There are: king, czar, emperor, sultan, chairman, president, chieftain …

Even without hard answers from the labs, boomers -- and the people who market to them -- have begun taking matters into their own hands. Bookstores bulge with memory-improvement guides. The Web is awash in memory sites, and numerous hospitals and private therapists teach memory courses. There are even over-the-counter memory nostrums available in health-food stores. To find out whether any of these work, I decided to spend a couple of weeks talking to the memory savants and sampling the memory cures. Total recall might be too much to ask, but total immersion was the only way to find out.

Take a group of passionate, obsessive, suspicious and Web-inclined individuals (both journalists and Mac lovers qualify). Tell them that there is a secret deal between two organizations about which they are passionate and obsessive. They will then stay up all night speculating about who sold his soul to whom, and will exhaust their vocabularies pillorying the apparent soul-sellers.

Lecter draws “Golgotha After the Deposition” and Starling's inquiry leads into a running religious discussion.

If you are a fan of Star Wars movie, you must have heard of Darth Maul. Darth Maul is a Sith lord apprentice, who wields an double-sided light saber -- the bane of Jedi Knights. The name isn't picked randomly, of course. Darth imparts “dark” or “death”, and maul means heavy hammer or injury by such hammer.

Lemming, the rodent known for mass migration sometimes resulted mass drowning, misunderstood as mass suicide.

Lackey is not a common word today, but i it appeared in children's story such as Cinderella. A lackey is a liveried male servant, while livery means a uniform. In Alice in Wonderland: Chapter 6: Pig and Pepper, there's also this passage about a footman wearing livery:

For a minute or two she stood looking at the house, and wondering what to do next, when suddenly a footman in livery came running out of the wood -- (she considered him to be a footman because he was in livery: otherwise, judging by his face only, she would have called him a fish) -- and rapped loudly at the door with his knuckles. It was opened by another footman in livery, with a round face, and large eyes like a frog; and both footmen, Alice noticed, had powdered hair that curled all over their heads. She felt very curious to know what it was all about, and crept a little way out of the wood to listen.

For the purpose of determining maximum length a river's “true source” is considered to be the source of whichever tributary is farthest from the mouth. This tributary may or may not have the same name as the main stem river. For example, the source of the Mississippi River is normally said to be Lake Itasca in the U.S. state of Minnesota, but the most distant source in the Mississippi system is that of the Jefferson River in the state of Montana, a tributary of the Missouri River which in turn is a tributary of the Mississippi. When the Mississippi is measured from mouth to this farthest source, it is called the Mississippi-Missouri-Jefferson. Furthermore, it is sometimes hard to state exactly where a river begins, especially rivers that are formed by ephemeral streams, swamps, or changing lakes. In this article, length means the length of the longest continuous river channel in a given river system, regardless of name.

in typography, ligature is certain glyphs that are made up of combined letters. for example, fi for fi, and æ for ae.