| Bryoxiphium madeirense | ||||||||||||||||
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 Endangered (IUCN 2.3) |
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| Bryoxiphium madeirense A. Löve & D. Löve |
Bryoxiphium madeirense is a species of moss in the Bryoxiphiaceae family. It is endemic to Portugal. Its natural habitat is temperate forests. It is threatened by habitat loss.
| Ballencrieff | |
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Ballencrieff shown within Scotland |
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| OS grid reference | |
|---|---|
| Council area | West Lothian |
| Lieutenancy area | West Lothian |
| Constituent country | Scotland |
| Sovereign state | United Kingdom |
| Postcode district | EH48 |
| Dialling code | 01506 |
| Police | Lothian and Borders |
| Fire | Lothian and Borders |
| Ambulance | Scottish |
| European Parliament | Scotland |
| UK Parliament | Linlithgow and East Falkirk |
| Scottish Parliament | Linlithgow |
| Lothians | |
| List of places: UK • Scotland | |
Coordinates:
Ballencrieff is a settlement in West Lothian, Scotland, situated equidistant between the towns of Bathgate and Torphichen and seven miles south of Linlithgow. Neighbouring towns are Blackburn, Armadale, Whitburn, Livingston and Stoneyburn. Edinburgh Airport is 16 miles (25 km) away, to the East. Ballencrieff is very close to the Neolithic burial site at Cairnpapple Hill, and the surrounding area shows signs of habitation since about 3500 BC. The name Ballencrieff comes from the Scottish Gaelic Baile na Craoibhe meaning “Farm by the tree”.
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Possibly one of the earliest references to it dates from 1349 when King David II granted Maurice Murray the lands of Gosford lying within the barony of ‘Balnacref’, in the county of Edinburgh, and the constabulary of Haddington. In 1599, on the 25th of January, Alexander Hamilton became the first Baron of Ballencrieff (and his wife Christine the Baroness), by Crown Charter from King James VI.
The area is dominated by agriculture and is home to farms and fisheries, such as Ballencrieff Farm. The Ballencrieff Fishery is well-known for it’s trout, and welcomes fly anglers in their hundreds every year. In addition, tourists are also attracted by West Lothian’s famous Standing Stones monuments, which surround Ballencrieff. The quarterly magazine Lothian Life - formerly known as ‘West Lothian Life’ - is produced at Ballencrieff Toll.
| Appointment with Death | |
| Written by | Agatha Christie |
|---|---|
| Date premiered | January 29, 1945 |
| Original language | English |
| This box: view • talk • edit | |
Appointment with Death is a 1945 play by crime writer Agatha Christie. It is based on her 1938 novel of the same name.
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Christie is silent on the writing of both the book and the play in her autobiography. Her biography states that she started writing the play in a burst of enthusiasm after being involved in the preparations for Murder on the Nile which was being presented by her actor friend Francis L. Sullivan. The writing was completed by March 1944 and preparations were made towards the end of the year for an opening in Glasgow before transferring to the West End theatre. Christie wrote to her agent, Edmund Cork, the month before that “it really seems quite impossible that the play can be ready for Glasgow!” Nevertheless the play did open there at the King’s Theatre on January 29, 1945 and then opened in the West End on March 31, 1945 at the Piccadilly Theatre. The play was not well-received by the critics although box office receipts at the start were better than those for And Then There Were None eighteen months earlier. The play was directed by Terence de Marney who had played Philip Lombard in And Then There Were None. The play closed on May 5 after just 42 performances.
The original West End production is most noticeable for the appearance of Joan Hickson in the role of Miss Pryce. Christie was so taken with her performance that she wrote to Hickson and stated that she hoped she would one day play the character of Miss Marple. Hickson was later cast in this role in 1984 in the BBC television series.
The time - the present.
ACT I
ACT II
ACT III
The Observer was not overly-impressed in its review of April 8, 1945 when it said, “Mrs. Agatha Christie suns library or lounge-hall. Unhappily, her people, with one exception, are less surprising than their surroundings. As a thriller – how did Mrs. Boynton die? – the play is tepid and far too talkative. But it does give Miss Mary Clare a strong scene or two as the woman of the gimlet gaze, and Miss Carla Lehmann and Mr. Owen Reynolds both help pleasantly.”
The Guardian’s issue of April 2, 1945 contained a review by “LH” in which he praised the character of Mrs Boynton but said that, “her death leaves the last act colourless. The business of spotting which of the many interested hands held the fatal hypodermic syringe is commonplace. It is not the flies caught in the web, but the spider in the middle, that is the evening’s strength. Apart from thus pulling down the roof-tree in the second interval, Miss Christie has built up her house of mystery with her usual skill.”
The Daily Mirror’s short review of April 3, 1945 by Bernard Buckham said, “Has a strong dash of comedy, which it can do with!”
Director: Terence de Marney
Cast of London Production:
The play was first published as a paperback by Samuel French Ltd on June 29, 1956, priced at four shillings. It was first published in hardback in The Mousetrap and Other Plays by Dodd, Mead and Company in 1993 (ISBN 0-39-607631-9) and in the UK by Harper Collins in 1993 (ISBN 0-00-243344-X).
| Crash Goes the Hash | |
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| Directed by | Jules White |
| Produced by | Jules White |
| Written by | Felix Adler |
| Starring | Moe Howard Larry Fine Curly Howard Bud Jamison Dick Curtis Symona Boniface Vernon Dent Victor Travers |
| Cinematography | George Meehan |
| Editing by | Charles Hochberg |
| Distributed by | Columbia Pictures |
| Release date(s) |  February 4, 1944 |
| Running time | 17′ 36″ |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Preceded by | A Gem of a Jam |
| Followed by | Busy Buddies |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Crash Goes the Hash is the 77th short subject starring American slapstick comedy team the Three Stooges. The trio made a total of 190 shorts for Columbia Pictures between 1934 and 1959.
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The Stooges are shirt pressers who are mistaken as reporters for the Starr Press. Fuller Bull (Vernon Dent), the head of an ailing competing newspaper, quickly hires the Stooges to get a picture of visiting Prince Shaam of Ubeedarn (Dick Curtis). Word has it that Shaam has plans to marry local wealthy socialite Mrs. Van Bustle (Symona Boniface). The trio disguise themselves as servants, and work their way into a party being held at Mrs. Van Bustle’s home in the honor of the prince.
Naturally, they all but sabotage the festivity. The inept trio serve hors d’œuvres consisting of peas and dog biscuits, and a turkey stuffed with a live parrot. The prince leaves in disgust, with the butler (Bud Jamison) following close behind. Undaunted, the Stooges manage to expose both the prince and butler as crooks who were planning to rob the house. As a result of their findings, Fuller Bull gives the boys a large bonus.
Crash Goes the Hash was supporting actor Bud Jamison’s final appearance in a Stooge film. A Type 2 diabetic in his later years, Jamison appeared in 16 more films before his untimely death in September 1944. As he was a devout Christian Scientist, Jamison refused to take insulin when the symptoms of his diabetes acted up. As a result, he went into diabetic shock and died at age 50.
Marker noting Satterlee Hospital in West Philadelphia.
Satterlee U.S.A. General Hospital, which existed from 1862 to 1865 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was one of the largest Union Army hospitals of the Civil War.
Founded in 1862 by order of Surgeon-General William Alexander Hammond, the hospital was built in the sparsely developed West Philadelphia neighborhood near the intersection of 42nd Street and Baltimore Avenue. Its 15-acre grounds ran north to 45th and Pine Streets. It was the second-largest hospital in the country, with 21 wood-frame wards and hundreds of tents containing 4,500 beds. The hospital featured a library, reading room, barber shop and a printing office that printed its newspaper, The Hospital Register.
It was commanded by Dr. Isaac Israel Hayes, surgeon, C.S.V. and famed Arctic explorer. Nursing was carried out by the Sisters of Charity, who lived in a convent on the grounds.
By May 1864, Satterlee had treated more than 12,000 patients and suffered only 260 deaths, a remarkable accomplishment considering the sanitary conditions of the day.
After the war ended in 1865, the hospital was closed and the buildings razed. In the 1890s, much of the site was covered with residential housing. The lower portion of the hospital grounds survive as Clark Park.
Gettysburg Stone marking hospital site
The Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France is a French radio orchestra providing music for Radio France. It specializes in contemporary music and was founded in 1937.
| Needle-clawed bushbabies | ||||||||||||
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| Otogale pallida Gray, 1863 |
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Euoticus elegantulus |
The needle-clawed bushbabies are the two species in the genus Euoticus, which is in the family Galagidae. Galagidae is sometimes included as a subfamily within the Lorisidae (or Loridae).
 USCGC Winnebago (WHEC-40) |
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| Career |  |
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| Builder: | Western Pipe & Steel |
| Christened: | Winnebago |
| Commissioned: | 21 June 1945 |
| Decommissioned: | 27 February 1973 |
| Reclassified: | WPG-40 to WHEC-40 |
| Fate: | Sold for scrap, 7 October 1974 |
| Notes: | WPS Hull No. 146 |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | Owasco-class cutter |
| Displacement: | 1,342 light (1966), 1,978 fully loaded (1966) |
| Length: | 254 ft |
| Beam: | 43 ft 1 in |
| Draft: | 17 ft 3″ (1966) |
| Propulsion: | 1 x Westinghouse electric motor driven by a turbine, shaft horsepower 4,000 (1945) |
| Speed: | 17 knots |
| Range: | 6,157-mile radius @17 knots, 10,376 mile radius @10 knots (1966) |
| Complement: | Crew: 10 officers, 3 warrants, 130 men (1966) |
| Armament: | 1945: 2 x twin 5 inch/38 cal. dual purpose gun mounts, one fore and one aft, 2 x quad 40mm AA gun mounts, 2 x depth charge tracks; 6 x “K” gun depth charge projectors, 1 x hedgehog A/S projector. 1966: 1 x 5 inch/38 cal. dual purpose gun mount, 1 x Hedgehog antisubmarine projector. |
USCG Winnebago (WHEC-40) was an Owasco class high endurance cutter which served with the US Coast Guard from 1945 to 1973. Originally intended for World War II service, she was commissioned only weeks before the end of the war and consequently did not see combat until her deployment in the Vietnam War more than 20 years later.
Winnebago was built by Western Pipe & Steel at the company’s San Pedro shipyard. Named after Winnebago Lake, Wisconsin, she was commissioned as a patrol gunboat with ID number WPG-40 on 21 June 1945. In the postwar period, her ID was changed to WHEC-40 (HEC for “High Endurance Cutter” - the “W” signifies a Coast Guard vessel).
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Winnebago was home ported in Miami, Florida, from 1945 to April 1946 and used for law enforcement, ocean station, and search and rescue operations. From April 1946 to February 1948 she was performing similar duties from her new base at Boston, Massachusetts. She was subsequently laid up at the Coast Guard Yard, Curtis Bay, Maryland, until September 1948. She was then stationed at Honolulu, Hawaii, from November 1949 to March 1972. She was again used for law enforcement, ocean station, and search and rescue operations. While on ocean station duty, the cutter’s crew took hourly weather observations, provided communications, air navigation and meteorological information to commercial and military aircraft and merchant ships. She stood ready to respond to any requests for assistance from aircraft or ships in distress. Ocean Station Victor, her primary station, was located about half-way between Midway Island and Japan and covered 210-square miles. Typically Ocean Station patrols lasted 72 days. Three cutters alternated duty on the station. It took seven days to reach the station from Honolulu. After a 21-day patrol the cutter was relieved and then steamed to Yokosuka, Japan, for two weeks of rest and replenishment. She then returned to the ocean station for another 21-day patrol before returning to Honolulu.
Run aground at Pearl Harbor
On 26 March 1962 while making the entrance to Pearl Harbor Winnebago ran aground and became stranded on Tripod Reef. The cutter was extricated within a few days by Navy tugboats.
Rescue operations
In November 1963, while serving on Ocean Station Victor, Winnebago steamed to the assistance of the disabled M/V Green Mountain State. The cutter rendezvoused with the flooding merchantman and removed her crew. Winnebago’s crew managed to stop the flooding and got the merchantman under tow. The cutter then towed the merchantman 810 miles to Midway Island. For this rescue the crew was awarded the Coast Guard Unit Commendation Ribbon. On 26 December 1964 the British M/V Southbank was tossed by a 40-foot wave onto a reef 400 yards off Washington Island in the South Pacific. On board were two women, 57 crewmen, and 49 Gilbertese laborers bound for Fanning Island, 60 miles distant. Using lifeboats the shipwrecked women and men escaped safely to the beach where the Washington Island natives cared for them until they were rescued by Winnebago.
Medical procedures
On 27 May 1965, Winnebago medevaced a disabled seaman from the Japanese F/V Tsuru Maru No. 8 650 miles south of Honolulu. In May 1966, her medical officer, a U.S. Public Health Service officer, performed an appendectomy on a Winnebago crewmen. Winnebago then rendezvoused with the USS Navasota where Winnebago’s medical officer performed another appendectomy on a Navasota crewman. Later in the same month, Winnebago rendezvoused with the Japanese M/V Shoei Maru where the doctor amputated the foot of a 17-year old seaman. In May 1967, she medevaced an injured crewman from the Shoeu Maru and transferred him to the Texas Maru.
Winnebago was assigned to Coast Guard Squadron Three, Vietnam, from 20 September 1968 to 19 July 1969 as part of Operation Market Time. Her commanding officer during the deployment was CDR Bruce W. Dewing.
While serving in Vietnamese waters, Winnebago’s gun crews destroyed or damaged 42 enemy bunkers, two observation towers, and a large base and several staging areas. In addition, her gunners hit an enemy “infiltration trail and a complex of enemy tunneling that connected underground storage facilities”, that also caused heavy secondary explosions and fires. The cutter “investigated more than 1,500 vessels for infiltrators and enemy arms shipments”. Her medical staff also treated over 50 South Vietnamese “for a variety of ailments”. She participated in four search-and-rescue operations as well, including rescuing “eight Vietnamese, 17 Greeks, and 35 Filipinos” who were rescued from their “sinking ships” during the cutter’s deployment.
On 25 February 1970, Winnebago transferred a medical team to assist MV Sylvia Lykes near Midway Island. Eventually, Winnebago was stationed at Wilmington, North Carolina, from March 1972 to 27 February 1973 and used for law enforcement, ocean station, and search and rescue. She visited Curaçao from 6 to 8 March 1972 “for the purpose of goodwill and rest and recreation” while she was shifting her home ports.
Winnebago was decommissioned on 27 February 1973 and sold for scrap the following year.
Real-time computer graphics is the subfield of computer graphics focused on producing and analyzing images in real time. The term is most often used in reference to interactive 3D computer graphics, typically using a GPU, with video games the most noticeable users. The term can also refer to anything from rendering an application’s GUI to real-time image processing and image analysis.
Although computers have been known from the beginning (e.g. Bressenham’s line drawing algorithm) to be capable of generating 2D images in real-time involving simple lines, images and polygons - 3D computer graphics has always been a daunting task for traditional Von Neumann architecture-based systems to keep up with the speed necessary for generating fast, good quality 3D computer images onto a display screen. The rest of this article concentrates on this widely-accepted aspect of real-time graphics rather than expanding on the principles of real-time 2D computer graphics.
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The goal of computer graphics is to generate a computer generated image using certain desired metrics. This image is often called a frame. How fast these images or frames are generated in a given second determines the method’s real-timeliness.
One interesting aspect of real-time computer graphics is the way in which it differs from traditional off-line rendering systems (and hence, these are the non-real-time graphics systems); non-real-time graphics typically rely on ray-tracing where the expensive operation of tracing rays from the camera to the world is allowed and can take as much as hours or even days for a single frame. On the other hand, in the case of real-time graphics, the system has less than 1/30th of a second per image. In order to do that, the current systems cannot afford shooting millions or even billions of rays; instead, they rely on the technique of z-buffer triangle rasterization. In this technique, every object is decomposed into individual primitives - the most popular and common one is the triangle. These triangles are then ‘drawn’ or rendered onto the screen one by one. Each of these triangles get positioned, rotated and scaled on the screen and a special hardware (or in the case of an emulator, the software rasterizer) called rasterizer generates the pixels inside each of these triangles. These triangles are then decomposed into further smaller atomic units called pixels (or in computer graphics terminology, aptly called fragments) that are suitable for displaying on a display screen. The pixels are then drawn on the screen using a certain color; current systems are capable of deciding the color that results in these triangles - for e.g. a texture can be used to ‘paint’ onto a triangle, which is simply deciding what color to output at each pixel based on a stored picture; or in a more complex case, at each pixel, one can compute if a certain light is being seen or not resulting in very good shadows (using a technique called shadow mapping).
Thus, real-time graphics is oriented toward providing as much performance as possible for the lowest quality possible for a given class of hardware. Most video-games and simulators fall in this category of real-time graphics. As mentioned above, real-time graphics is currently possible due to the significant recent advancements in these special hardware components called graphics processing units (GPUs). These GPUs are capable of handling millions of triangles per frame and within each such triangle capable of handling millions or even billions of pixels (i.e. generating these pixel colors). Current DirectX 10 class hardware are the top-line GPUs capable of generating complex effects on the fly (i.e. in real-time) such as shadow volumes, motion blurring, real-time triangle generation among many others. Although the gap in quality between real-time graphics and traditional off-line graphics is narrowing, the accuracy is still a far-cry to be justified in the near-future.
Another interesting difference between real-time and non-real-time graphics is the interactivity desired in real-time graphics. Feedback is typically the main motivation for pushing real-time graphics to its furore. In cases like films, the director has the complete control and determinism of what has to be drawn on each frame, typically involving weeks or even years of decision-making involving a number of people.
In the case of real-time interactive computer graphics, usually a user is in control of what is about to be drawn on the display screen; the user typically uses an input device to provide feedback to the system - for example, wanting to move a character on the screen - and the system decides the next frame based on this particular instance of action. Usually the display is far slower (in terms of the number of frames per second) in responsiveness than the input device (in terms of the input device’s response time measured in ms). In a way this is justified due to the immense difference between the infinitesimal response time generated by a human-being’s motion and the very slow perspective speed of the human-visual system; this results in significant advancements in computer graphics, whereas the advancements in input devices typically take a much longer time to achieve the same state of fundamental advancement (e.g., the current Wii controller), as these input devices have to be extremely fast in order to be usable.
Another important factor controlling real-time computer graphics is the combination of physics and animation. These techniques largely dictate what is to be drawn on the screen - or more precisely, where to draw certain objects (deciding their position) on the screen. These techniques imitate the behavior (the temporal dimension, not the spatial dimensions) seen in real-world to a degree that is far more realistic than and compensating computer-graphics’ degree of realism.
Claude Ledoux is a Belgian composer, born in 1960.
Claude Ledoux, photograph by Nao Momitani
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After obtaining a science diploma, Ledoux turned to music and studied at the Conservatoire de Liège where he met Jean-Louis Robert, Philippe Boesmans, Frederic Rzewski and Henri Pousseur. He also carried out research into electronic music in the CRFMW studio with Patrick Lenfant.
Afterwards, Ledoux pursued his education abroad, notably in Hungary (a Béla Bartók seminar), in Italy (in Bolzano and Venice) where he participated in a seminar by Gyorgy Ligeti and finally in Paris where he lived for two years on the occasion of IRCAM courses. At the same time, he studied composition with Iannis Xenakis at the University of Paris I.
As a composer he won several competitions (including Lille, Paris and Lausanne). In 2003 he received the Musical Prize from the Civitella Ranieri Foudation of New York for his recent works. His music has been performed in many towns in Europe (Brussels , Paris , Strasbourg , Berlin ) and in Ukraine and Russia. He has performed in North America (with the Colorado Orchestra and the Symphonic Orchestra of Montreal) and Asia (Vietnam, Japan). Latterly, Claude Ledoux has been the composer in residence at the Ensemble Musiques Nouvelles (Belgium :1998-2000), subsequently at the Castello of Umbria (Italy : 2003). Nowadays, he is composer in residence at the Brussel’s Bozar (2008-2009).
Due to his passion for Asian sounds, he travelled in several eastern countries in order to undertake research and to learn the traditional art of music. In 1992, he first went through India where he learned ethnic music from the Himalayan slopes to the Rajasthan desert. In 1996, he received a grant from the SPES Foundation to pursue his studies about oriental music in Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia. Recently he travelled in Japan (2004) with his wife Nao Momitani, where he went deeper into his knowledge of Nô, Bunraku and Kyôgen.
Claude Ledoux earned a Master in Communication from the University of Liège. Nowadays, he works as a musical journalist as well as a Musical Analysis professor at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris (France) and Composition professor at the Ecole Supérieure des Arts, Conservatoire de Mons (Belgium).
He is also member of the The Royal Academies for Science and the Arts of Belgium since 2006.
With the composers Michel Fourgon and Denis Bosse, he has founded in 1998 the Atelier Musicien, a place of creations, experiment and reflexions between composers and performers.
