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Ray spoke about Time Cube at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in January 2002. At MIT, a professor tried to cancel the lecture before it took place. Ray believed this is proof of a conspiracy to keep information about Time Cube hidden. Ray also spoke about Time Cube at the Georgia Institute of Technology in April 2005. |
Otis Eugene Ray died on March 18, 2015. He was 87 years old. The website went down on August 2015. It was last archived by the Wayback Machine on January 12, 2016. A theory of everything (TOE or ToE), final theory, ultimate theory, or master theory is a hypothetical single, all-encompassing, coherent theoretical framework of physics that fully explains and links together all physical aspects of the universe. |
Census of Marine Life |
The Census of Marine Life was a ten-year survey of life in the oceans, starting in 2000. Its head was Ron O'Dor of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. It used data from researchers all over the world. More than 70 nations were involved and over a billion US dollars were spent on it. |
It was a major work of marine ecology. It was founded by J. Frederick Grassle. |
The purpose of the Census of Marine Life was to say what is alive in our seas and oceans. |
Maize |
Maize or Indian corn (called corn in some countries) is "Zea mays", a member of the grass family "Poaceae". It is a cereal grain which was first grown by people in ancient Central America. Approximately 1 billion tonnes are harvested every year. However, little of this maize is eaten directly by humans. Most is used to make corn ethanol, animal feed and other maize products, such as corn starch and corn syrup. |
Maize is a leafy stalk whose kernels have seeds inside. It is an angiosperm, which means that its seeds are enclosed inside a fruit or shell. It is has long been a staple food by many people in Mexico, Central and South America and parts of Africa. In Europe and the rest of North America, maize is grown mostly for use as animal feed. In Canada and the United States, maize is commonly referred to as "corn". |
Centuries of cross breeding have produced larger plants, and specialized varieties. Corn has become an important ingredient in American foods through the use of corn starch. People have long eaten sweet corn and popcorn with little processing, and other kinds after processing into flour for making cornbread, tortillas, and other artificial foods. |
Maize has been a fruitful model organism for research in genetics for many years: see Barbara McClintock. Research has shown that artificial selection developed maize from a Mexican plant called Teosinte. |
There are five species and many subspecies in the genus. They are all plants similar to the cultivated maize, with less developed cobs. The wild ones are sometimes called teosintes, and they are all native to Mesoamerica. |
Civics |
Civics is the study of government. It most often refers to studying government in high school to prepare to be a good citizen. In college, civics is usually called political science. Since a city has the most unsimple government problems, the word for this study is like that for city. |
Theories of civics can be grouped as: |
Calculus |
Calculus is a branch of mathematics that helps us understand changes between values that are related by a function. For example, given a formula indicating how much money one gets every day, calculus would help one understand related formulas, such as how much money one has in total, and whether one is getting more or less money than before. Many of these formulas are functions of time, and one way to think of calculus is to see it as a study of functions of time. |
There are two different types of calculus. Differential calculus divides things into small ("different") pieces, and tells us how they change from one moment to the next, while integral calculus joins ("integrates") the small pieces together, and tells us how much of something is made, overall, by a series of changes. Calculus is used in many different areas such as physics, astronomy, biology, engineering, economics, medicine and sociology. |
In the 1670s and 1680s, Sir Isaac Newton in England and Gottfried Leibniz in Germany figured out calculus at the same time, working separately from each other. Newton wanted to have a new way to predict where to see planets in the sky, because astronomy had always been a popular and useful form of science, and knowing more about the motions of the objects in the night sky was important for navigation of ships. Leibniz wanted to measure the space (area) under a curve (a line that is not straight). Many years later, the two men argued over who discovered it first. Scientists from England supported Newton, but scientists from the rest of Europe supported Leibniz. Most mathematicians today agree that both men share the credit equally. Some parts of modern calculus come from Newton, such as its uses in physics. Other parts come from Leibniz, such as the symbols used to write it. |
They were not the first people to use mathematics to describe the physical world — Aristotle and Pythagoras came earlier, and so did Galileo Galilei, who said that mathematics was the language of science. But both Newton and Leibniz were the first to design a system that describes how things change over time, and can predict how they will change in the future. |
The name "calculus" was the Latin word for a small stone the ancient Romans used in counting and gambling. The English word "calculate" comes from the same Latin word. |
Differential calculus is used to find the rate of change of a variable—compared to another variable. |
In the real world, it can be used to find the speed of a moving object, or to understand how electricity and magnetism work. It is very important for understanding physics—and many other areas of science. |
Differential calculus is also useful for graphing. It can be used to find the slope of a curve, and the highest and lowest points of a curve (these are called the maximum and minimum, respectively). |
Variables can change their value. This is different from numbers because numbers are always the same. For example, the number 1 is always equal to 1, and the number 200 is always equal to 200. One often write variables as letters such as the letter x: "x" can be equal to 1 at one point and 200 at another. |
Some examples of variables are distance and time, because they can change. The speed of an object is how far it travels in a particular time. So if a town is 80 kilometres (50 miles) away and a person in a car gets there in one hour, they have traveled at an average speed of 80 kilometres (50 miles) per hour. But this is only an average: maybe they travelled faster at some times (say on a highway), and slower at other times (say at a traffic light or on a small street where people live). Certainly it is more difficult for a driver to figure out a car's speed using only its odometer (distance meter) and clock—without a speedometer. |
Until calculus was invented, the only way to work this out was to cut the time into smaller and smaller pieces, so the average speed over the smaller time would get closer and closer to the actual speed at a point in time. This was a very long and hard process, and had to be done each time people wanted to work something out. |
A very similar problem is to find the slope (how steep it is) at any point on a curve. The slope of a "straight" line is easy to work out — it is simply how much it goes up or down ("y" or vertical) divided by how much it goes across ("x" or horizontal). On a "curve", however, the slope is a variable (has different values at different points) because the line bends. But if the curve was to be cut into very, very small pieces, the curve at the point would look almost like a very short straight line. So to work out its slope, a straight line can be drawn through the point with the same slope as the curve at that point. If this is done exactly right, the straight line will have the same slope as the curve, and is called a tangent. But there is no way to know (without complex mathematics) whether the tangent is exactly right, and our eyes are not accurate enough to be certain whether it is exact or simply very close. |
What Newton and Leibniz found was a way to work out the slope (or the speed in the distance example) exactly, using simple and logical rules. They divided the curve into an infinite number of very small pieces. They then chose points on either side of the range they were interested in and worked out tangents at each. As the points moved closer together towards the point they were interested in, the slope "approached" a particular value as the tangents approached the real slope of the curve. The particular value it approached was the actual slope. |
Given a function formula_1. "f" is short for function, so this equation means "y is a function of x". This tells us that how high y is on the vertical axis depends on what x (the horizontal axis) is at that time. For example, with the equation formula_2, we know that if formula_3 is 1, then formula_4 will be 1; if formula_3 is 3, then formula_4 will be 9; if "formula_3" is 20, then "formula_4" will be 400. The slope of the tangent line produced using this method here is formula_9, or 2 multiplied by "formula_3". So we know without having to draw any tangent line at any point on the curve formula_11 that the derivative, often written as formula_12 (marked with the prime symbol), will be formula_9 at any point. This process of working out a slope using limits is called differentiation, or finding the derivative. |
The way to write the derivative in mathematics is |
formula_14 |
Leibniz came to the same result, but called h "formula_15", which means "with respect to x". He called the resulting change in formula_16 "formula_17", which means "a tiny amount of y". Leibniz's notation is used by more books, because it is easy to understand when the equations become more complicated. In Leibniz notation: |
formula_18. |
Mathematicians have grown this basic theory to make simple algebra rules—which can be used to find the derivative of almost any function. |
Integral calculus is the process of calculating the area underneath a graph of a function. An example is calculating the distance a car travels: if one knows the speed of the car at different points in time and draw a graph of this speed, then the distance the car travels will be the area under the graph. |
The way to do this is to divide the graph into many very small pieces, and then draw very thin rectangles under each piece. As the rectangles become thinner and thinner, the rectangles cover the area underneath the graph better and better. The area of a rectangle is easy to calculate, so we can calculate the total area of all the rectangles. For thinner rectangles, this total area value "approaches" the area underneath the graph. The final value of the area is called the "integral" of the function. |
In mathematics, the integral of the function "f(x)" from "a" to "b", is written as |
formula_19. |
The main idea in calculus is called the fundamental theorem of calculus. This main idea says that the two calculus processes, differentiation and integration, are inverses of each other. That is, a person can use differentiation to undo an integration process. Also, a person can use integration to undo a differentiation. This is just like using division to "undo" multiplication, or addition to "undo" subtraction. |
In a single sentence, the fundamental theorem runs something like this: "The derivative of the integral of a function "f" is the function itself". |
Calculus is used to describe things that change, like things in nature. It can be used for showing and learning all of these: |
Coin |
A coin is normally a round piece of metal that is used as currency, or money. Coins have been made for about 2600 years; the first place to make coins was Lydia (modern Turkey).[citation needed] These coins were made of Precious metals and allowed people to trade with a standard amount of metal. |
Most people use coins as currency. They usually have lower value than banknotes. Most are made in government mints. |
Many coins have unique or complicated decorations; one side often has the picture of a famous or important person's head on it. |
The different decorations on each side of a coin might be used to decide things randomly. This is called "tossing a coin". A person can throw the coin into the air and catch it. You then look at which side is facing up. If the head is facing up it is called "heads", if the other side is facing up it is called "tails". Before tossing the coin someone has to decide what each side means. Tossing a coin can be a type of gambling, which is illegal (against the law) in some countries. |
Some people see coins as a sign of greed, such as some Communists and Puritans, who sometimes condemn over-hoarding of coins, and ascetics, who often keep little in the ways of money (coins), leading a "poor"-lifestyle. |
Because coins have been made for a very long time, some people collect old coins. They can be much cheaper than other old things, especially if they are made of cheap metals like copper. Older coins normally cost more than newer ones, but rarity matters more-some coins from the 1920s cost vast sums, while some Roman coins cost very little. |
Conceptual metaphor |
A conceptual metaphor or cognitive metaphor is a metaphor which refers to one domain (group of ideas) in terms of another. For example, treating quantity in terms of direction: |
The idea of a conceptual metaphor came from a book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in 1980: "Metaphors we live by". |
A convention is to write conceptual metaphors in small capital letters, e.g. , with the target domain (idea being referred to) first, here "money," and the source domain (terms used to refer to it) second. |
There are many more, enough to prove the importance of the metaphor in our lives. |
Crust |
Crust is a piece of bread where the edge where it is harder and darker. |
Crust can also mean: |
Comedy |
Comedy (from ), in modern times, is entertainment with generally funny content. It is able to make people laugh. This definition was used for theatre plays, and was first used in Ancient Greece. Aristotle defined this as “Comedy is, as an imitation of characters of a lower type- not, however, in the full sense of the word bad, the ludicrous being merely a subdivision of the ugly. It consists in some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive. To take an obvious example, the comic mask is ugly and distorted, but does not imply pain.” To him, the lampooners became writers of Comedy and the truly artistic ones became writers of Tragedy. |
Comedy is also a media genre that is for television shows or movies that are either funny or silly. People who are known for acting in comedies are termed as comedians or comedic actors. |
The ancient Greeks had comedies, which were presented in competitions at the festival of Dionysia. |
One of the best-known comedy authors of the time was Aristophanes (about 446386 BC). One of his works, "The Clouds" was performed 425 BC. The work did not survive completely, but a later version did survive. It is a satire against Socrates, and pictures the great philosopher as a swaggering con artist. Some of the accusations were re-used at Socrates' trial, twenty years later. |
Typical for satire are that the author criticizes society, and living people. |
Another type of Ancient Greek theatre was the satyr play. This was mock drunkenness, brazen sexuality (including phallic props), pranks, sight gags, and general merriment. The modern equivalent would be knock-about comedy. |
Humour, or 'New Comedy' is not about criticizing people or ideas, but rather about showing characters in funny situations. The most important Greek playwright of this type was probably Menander. The best known Roman comedy writer was Plautus. He often used Greek comedies for his plays. |
Many comedy plays were written in the 1500s by the British writer William Shakespeare. |
Shakespeare's comedy plays include:" All’s Well That Ends Well, The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Nights Dream", and "Twelfth Night". In Shakespeare's day a comedy did not mean a play that would make people laugh or that had a lot of jokes. Instead it was a play in which all the problems work out all right in the end. This was unlike a tragedy, where the problems do not work out, usually resulting in someone's death. |
The two masks, one was smiling, the other crying, often associated with theatre represent comedy and tragedy. |
There are different types of comedy. One type of comedy is called "slap stick comedy." In "slap stick comedy," people do silly things such as tripping, falling over or embarrassing themselves just to make people laugh. Slap stick comedy can be used in comedy movies or comedy television shows. |
Slap stick comedy was used a lot in silent (no sound) movies from the 1920s. A comedian who acted in the silent movies who used a lot of slapstick comedy was Charlie Chaplin. In the 1950s and 1960s, comedian Jerry Lewis also used silly slap stick comedy in his comedy movies. |
A comedy is a very popular type of movie. Some comedy movies have "slapstick comedy," in which people just do silly things such as tripping, falling over or embarrassing themselves just to make people laugh. Other comedy movies show funny stories or situations in which people are behaving in a silly manner. Some comedies make the audience laugh by showing strange or unusual images or situations that do not make sense. |
A parody or spoof movie imitates or exaggerates another person or movie to make them seem silly, dumb, or just plain out of it. |
Some types of comedy movies mix comedy with other types of movies. |
Comedy shows are very popular on television. Comedy shows on television are often called "sitcoms." The word "sitcom" is a shortened way of saying "situational comedy." Television situational comedies usually show characters who do silly or funny things which make the audience laugh. |
Comet |
A comet is a ball of mostly ice that moves around in outer space. Comets are often described as "dirty snowballs". They are very different from asteroids. The orbital inclinations of comets are usually high and not near the ecliptic where most solar system objects are found. Most of them are long-period comets and come from the Kuiper belt. That is very far away from the Sun, but some of them also come near enough to Earth for us to see at night. |
They have long "tails", because the Sun melts the ice. A comet's tail does not trail behind it, but points directly away from the Sun, because it is blown by the solar wind. |
The hard centre of the comet is the "nucleus". It is one of the blackest things (lowest albedo) in the solar system. When light shone on the nucleus of Halley's Comet, the comet reflected only 4% of the light back to us. |
"Periodic" comets visit again and again. "Non-periodic" or "single-apparition" comets visit only once. |
Comets sometimes break up, as Comet Biela did in the 19th century. Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke up, and the pieces hit Jupiter in 1994. Some comets orbit (go around) together in groups. Astronomers think these comets are broken pieces that used to be one object. |
For thousands of years, people feared comets. They did not know what they were, or where they came from. Some thought that they were fireballs sent from demons or gods to destroy the earth. They said that each time a comet appeared, it would bring bad luck with it. Whenever a comet appeared, a king would die. For example, the Bayeux Tapestry shows the return of Halley's Comet and the death of a king. Comets were also known to end wars and thought to bring famine. During the Renaissance, astronomers started to look at comets with less superstition and to base their science on observations. Tycho Brahe reasoned that comets did not come from the earth, and his measurements and calculations showed that comets must be six times farther than the earth is from the moon. |
Edmond Halley reasoned that some comets are periodic, that is, they appear again after a certain number of years, and again and again. This led to the first prediction of a comet's return, Halley's Comet, named after him. |
Isaac Newton also studied comets. He realised that comets make U-turns around the sun. He asked his friend Edmond Halley to publish this in his book "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica". Before Newton said this, people believed that comets go in to the sun, then another comes out from behind the sun. |
In later years some astronomers thought comets were spit out by planets, especially Jupiter. |
All this new information and research gave people confidence, but some still thought that comets were messengers from the gods. One 18th century vision said that comets were the places that hell was, where souls would ride, being burned up by the heat of the sun and frozen by the cold of space. |
In modern times space probes have visited comets to learn more about them. |
Cytology |
Cytology is the study of the cells, especially their appearance and structure. Cells are the small parts that make up all living things, and their effects on each other and their environment. |
There are two types of cells. Prokaryotic cells do not have a clear and easy-to-see nucleus, and do not have a membrane, or wall, around them. Eukaryotic cells have an easy-to-see nucleus where all of the cell's functions take place, and a membrane around them. The main organelles of a cell and their uses are: |
Christian |
A Christian () is a person who believes in Christianity, a monotheistic religion. Christianity is mostly about the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, in the New Testament and interpreted of prophesied in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Christianity is the world's largest religion, with 2.1 billion followers around the world. |
Christians consider the Holy Bible to be a sacred book, inspired by God. The Holy Bible is a combination of the Hebrew Bible, or Torah, and a collection of writings called the New Testament. Views on the importance of these writings vary. Some Christian groups prefer to favor the New Testament, while others believe the entire Bible is equally important. Also, while many Christians prefer to consider the Bible as fully true, not all Christian groups believe that it is completely accurate. |
The question of "Who is a Christian?" can be very difficult. Christians often disagree over this due to their differences in opinion on spiritual matters. In countries where most persons were baptized in the state church or the majority Christian church, the term "Christian" is a default label for citizenship or for "people like us". |
In this context, religious or ethnic minorities can use "Christians" or "you Christians" as a term for majority members of society who do not belong to their group - even in a very secular (though formerly Christian) society. |
Persons who are more devoted the their Christian faith prefer not to use the word so broadly, but only use it to refer to those who are active in their Christian religion and really believe the teachings of Jesus and their church. In some Christian movements (especially Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism), to be a born-again Christian is to undergo a "spiritual rebirth" by believing in the Bible's teachings about Jesus and choosing to follow him. |
Many Christians choose to go to church. Most Christians believe this to be a sign of their religious devotion to God and an act of worship. However, some Christian groups think that one can be a Christian without ever going to a church. Though there are many different viewpoints on the issue, most Protestants believe all Christians are part of the spiritual church of Christ, whether or not those Christians go to an actual church each week. On the other hand, Catholics in the past have believed that the Holy Catholic Church is the only true church. |
Cheese |
Cheese is a dairy product that is made from milk. There are many types of cheese, such as cheddar, Swiss, and provolone. |
Many things affect the form, texture, colour and flavour of a cheese. These include the milk (cow or goat), if the milk has been pasteurized, the amount of butterfat, bacteria and mold in the cheese, how the cheese is made, how much fat is in the cheese, and how old the cheese is. Example for cheese used in a sentence: Todd the dog likes cheese. |
People have been making cheese since before history was written down. It is not known when cheese was first made. It is known that cheese was eaten by the Sumerians in about 4000 BC. |
Subsets and Splits