Poinsettias are flowers native to southern Mexico, Central America, and Africa. They are named after Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first United States ambassador to Mexico, who introduced the plant in the U.S. in 1825. In the U.S., poinsettias can be found in the wild in Hawaii and Puerto Rico.
Alternative names for the poinsettia are Euphorbia pulcherrima, Mexican flame leaf, Christmas star, Winter rose, Noche Buena and Pascua.
天使瑋倫在舉國不捨下還是離去了。這個消息，震撼了我一整夜。
哈...一疊十萬的錢就這樣握在我手上...，不過卻不是屬於我的。
知 悉 "Involvement" 就是 "Interest" 的同義字，距今也大約一個月了。也會帶著這樣眼鏡去觀察周遭的人，究竟將他們大多世間投注於何事。有些熱情，是工作瑣事羈絆不了的。像是華得魯大大就是一 個這樣的人，在老大的婚宴上殺底片比拼酒開心，搶畫面比搶菜迅速。必要的時候，以前當兵老本的匍匐前進還要派上用場。
嗯，誰說撿垃圾不會撿到寶藏，老大就撿到了未來一輩子的寶貝。甜蜜的才子佳人，難怪去年我們從綠島回來剛到機場，老大瞬間就被嫂子給擄走了...。嗯。夫妻是一輩子的事情，衷心獻上祝福。
電玩，從紅白機，GameBoy，PS，一路走到了現在的 Wii。
偶 然和譚公到太原路上的五金行去尋找他的 Flexible 材料。竟發現這裡盡是寶藏，一個創作者靈感來源的天堂。曾幾何時，這裡的材料造就了多少作品。眼尖的我發現，這裡根本是分類系統的大宗，到處都是各種型態 的分類模式，散佈在有限的櫃架。圖為一家賣鋼板的店，這個角度望去，有很驚人的透視感，一種太空漫遊的金屬味道。有機會可以再來這裡尋寶。
1 : occurring every day*2 : belonging to each day : everyday 3 : commonplace, ordinary
Example sentence:
As an employee, Fiona is gifted at solving the difficult problems that arise from time to time, but she is often careless about the quotidian responsibilities of her job.
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In Shakespeare's play As You Like It, the character Rosalind observes that Orlando, who has been running about in the woods carving her name on trees and hanging love poems on branches, "seems to have the quotidian of love upon him." Shakespeare's use doesn't make it clear that "quotidian" derives from a Latin word that means "every day." But as odd as it may seem, Shakespeare's use of "quotidian" is just a short semantic step away from the "daily" adjective sense. Some fevers occur intermittently — sometimes daily. The phrase "quotidian fever" and the noun "quotidian" have long been used for such recurring maladies. Poor Orlando is simply afflicted with such a "fever" of love.
The Glasgow Coma Scale is a neurological scale which seems to give a reliable, objective way of recording the conscious state of a person, for initial as well as continuing assessment. A patient is assessed against the criteria of the scale, and the resulting points give the Glasgow Coma Score (or GCS). It has value in predicting ultimate outcome. Initially used to assess level of consciousness after head trauma, the scale is actually applied to different situations. The scale was published in 1974 by Graham Teasdale and Bryan J. Jennett, professors of neurosurgery at the University of Glasgow. The pair went on to author the textbook Management of Head Injuries (FA Davis 1981, ISBN 0-8036-5019-1), a celebrated work in the field.
GCS is used as part of several ICU scoring systems, including APACHE II, SAPS II and SOFA, as a contribution for the status of the central nervous system. A similar scale, the Rancho Los Amigos Scale is used to assess the recovery of head injury patients.
"'Autumn Moon, the High Sierra from Glacier Point,' taken by Ansel Adams in Yosemite National Park, is a thrilling view of the American West, featuring a waxing Moon rising over dark, ice-tinged peaks.
To say that something is "ineffable" means that it cannot or should not, for overwhelming reasons, be expressed in spoken words. It is generally used to describe a feeling, concept or aspect of existence that is too great to be adequately described in words, or that inherently (due to its nature) cannot be conveyed in dualistic symbolic human language, but can only be known internally by individuals. In Zen it is often said that (by analogy) the finger can point to the moon but is not the moon; likewise words and actions can point towards what is ineffable but cannot make another know it.
In phylogenetics, derived members of a group diverged after another member (or subgroup of members) had already diverged. The earlier members are termed basal. Neither word means anything on its own, and each can only be interpreted in the context of other members of the group. For example:
For the sake of precision, biologists often prefer "derived" over "advanced," a term which may inaccurately imply superiority. Although a derived member of a group may have higher fitness in a given environment, this is not always the case. It is quite common for both basal and derived members of a group to exist simultaneously and be well-suited for different ecological niches, or the same niche in different locations.
A bottleneck is literally the neck of a glass or pottery bottle. An hourglass has a bottleneck at its mid-point whose diameter governs the time that granular contents of a given mass will take to pass through. Metaphorically a bottleneck is a section of a route with a carrying capacity substantially below that characterising other sections of the same route. This is often a narrow part of a road, perhaps also with a smaller number of lanes, or a reduction of the number of tracks of a railway line. It may be due to a narrow bridge or tunnel, a deep cutting or narrow embankment, or work in progress on part of the road or railway.
Sleight of hand, also known as prestidigitation ("quick fingers") or legerdemain (from the French for "lightness of hand"), is the set of techniques used by a magician (or card sharp) to manipulate objects such as cards and coins secretly. Sleight of hand is not a branch of magic, but rather the means used by a magician to achieve magical effects. The techniques involved are sometimes difficult and may need months or years of practice before they can be performed proficiently. Sleight of hand is mostly employed in close-up magic, but it can also be used in stage magic.
Eigenfaces are a set of eigenvectors used in the computer vision problem of human face recognition. These eigenvectors are derived from the covariance matrix of the probability distribution of the high-dimensional vector space of possible faces of human beings. Many authors prefer the term eigenimage rather than eigenface, as the technique has been used for handwriting, lip reading, voice recognition, and medical imaging.
In layman's terms, eigenfaces are a set of "standardized face ingredients", derived from statistical analysis of many pictures of faces. Any human face can be considered to be a combination of these standard faces. One person's face might be made up of 10% from face 1, 24% from face 2 and so on. This means that if you want to record someone's face for use by face recognition software you can use far less space than would be taken up by a digitised photograph.
In computer graphics, the gamut, or color gamut (pronounced /ˈgæmət/), is a certain complete subset of colors. The most common usage refers to the subset of colors which can be accurately represented in a given circumstance, such as within a given color space or by a certain output device. Another sense, less frequently used but not less correct, refers to the complete set of colors found within an image at a given time. In this context, digitizing a photograph, converting a digitized image to a different color space, or outputting it to a given medium using a certain output device generally alters its gamut, in the sense that some of the colors in the original are lost in the process.
According to Roman mythology, when the peasant Gordius became king of Gordium in Phrygia, he dedicated his wagon to Jupiter and fastened its yoke to a beam with a very complex knot. Centuries later, when Alexander the Great arrived on the scene, he was told that he couldn't conquer and rule Asia unless he proved himself worthy by untying the knot. Alexander quickly solved his problem — and gained a new kingdom — by slicing the knot in half with his sword. Since then, "Gordian knot" has become a term for a difficult problem, and the phrase "cut the Gordian knot" has become a popular way to describe a neat solution for an apparently insurmountable difficulty.
The variable p refers to the spatial dimension of the brane. That is, a 0-brane is a zero-dimensional particle, a 1-brane is a string, a 2-brane is a "membrane", etc. Every p-brane sweeps out a (p+1)-dimensional world volume as it propagates through spacetime. Originally string theory was a theory of 1-branes called strings. By the mid-1990s it became apparent that the theory could be extended to also include higher dimensional objects. Typically these objects are non-perturbative features of the theory (meaning they do not appear in perturbation theory) which is partially why early string theorists were unaware of them.
"Happy Birthday to You" is a song which is sung to celebrate the anniversary of a person's birth. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, "Happy Birthday to You" is the most popular song in the English language, followed by "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" and "Auld Lang Syne". The song has been translated into many languages, though it is often sung with the English lyrics even in countries where English is not a primary language. The melody of "Happy Birthday to You" was written by American sisters Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill in 1893 when they were school teachers in Louisville, Kentucky. The verse was originally intended as a classroom greeting entitled "Good Morning to All". The version as we know it was copyrighted in 1935 by the Summy Company as an arrangement by Preston Ware Orem, and is scheduled to expire in 2030. This was the first known written version to include the lyrics. The company holding the copyright was purchased by Warner Chappell in 1990 for $15 million dollars, with the value of "Happy Birthday" estimated at $5 million.
"Telecommute" derives from the prefix "tele-," a descendant of the Greek "tele," meaning "far off," and the verb "commute," which arose from the Latin "commutare," meaning "to change" or "to exchange." The practice of working at home and interfacing with the office via modem, telephone, or another telecommunications device has only recently become commonplace, but the word "telecommute" has been around since the mid-1970s. Its earliest documented use can be found in a January 1974 article in The Economist that predicted, "As there is no logical reason why the cost of telecommunication should vary with distance, quite a lot of people by the late 1980s will telecommute daily to their London offices while living on a Pacific island if they want to."
The term "histrionic" developed from "histrio," Latin for "actor." Something that is "histrionic" tends to remind one of the high drama of stage and screen and is often stagy and over-the-top. It especially calls to mind the theatrical form known as the "melodrama," where plot and physical action, not characterization, are emphasized. But something that is "histrionic" isn't always overdone; the word might simply refer to an actor or something related to the theater. In that sense, it becomes a synonym of "thespian."
A palette is:
Carrier Air Wing (U.S. Navy in Japan) is an arcade game that was released in 1990 by Capcom. It uses the CPS-1 arcade system and is a spiritual sequel to 1989's side-scrolling shoot-em-up, U.N. Squadron. As with the original, players chose any one of three different jet fighters and battle their way through ten enemy-packed stages. Another idea carried over from U.N. Squadron is the end-of-level shop, which allows players to buy weapon and shield upgrades for their jet fighter.
"Miscible" isn't simply a lesser-known synonym of "mixable" — it's also a cousin. It comes to us from the Medieval Latin adjective "miscibilis," which has the same meaning as "miscible" and which derives in turn from Latin "miscēre," meaning "to mix." "Miscēre" is also the ultimate source of our "mix"; its past participle "mixtus" (meaning "mixed") spawned "mixte" in Anglo-French and Middle English, and "mix" came about as a back-formation of "mixte." The suffix "-able" gives us "mixable," thereby completing its link to "miscible." "Miscible" turns up most frequently in scientific discussions where it is used especially to describe fluids that don't separate when they are combined.
The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic clockface maintained since 1947 by the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago. It uses the analogy of the human race being at a time that is "minutes to midnight" where midnight represents destruction by nuclear war. The clock has appeared on the cover of each issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since its introduction.
The number of minutes before midnight, a measure of the degree of nuclear threat, is updated periodically. The clock is currently set to five minutes to midnight, having been advanced by two minutes on January 17, 2007.
The term postulate, or axiom, indicates a statement or assumption that is agreed by everyone to be so obvious or self-evident that no proof is necessary, and which can be used to prove other statements or theorems. Neither axioms nor postulates can be proven (within a system) using more basic statements. However, in many elementary textbooks, where the student does not have the training to understand a more rigorous approach, many otherwise-provable statements are accepted as postulates to allow further development of the subject.
Psychometrics is the field of study concerned with the theory and technique of educational and psychological measurement, which includes the measurement of knowledge (achievement), abilities, attitudes, and personality traits. The field is primarily concerned with the study of differences between individuals. It involves two major research tasks, namely: (i) the construction of instruments and procedures for measurement; and (ii) the development and refinement of theoretical approaches to measurement.
Debris (French, pronounced (IPA) di'bri) is a word used to describe the remains of something that has been otherwise destroyed. Depending on context, debris can refer to a number of different things.
Scree or detritic cone is a term given to broken rock that appears at the bottom of crags, mountain cliffs or valley shoulders. The maximum inclination of such deposits corresponds to the angle of repose of the mean debris size. The term scree comes from the Old Norse term for landslide: skriða[1].
The term scree is generally used interchangeably with talus, though scree often refers to rocks that are small (e.g., smaller than a human head), while talus can refer to rocks larger than scree.[2]
Length is the long dimension of any object. The length of a thing is the distance between its ends, its linear extent as measured from end to end. This may be distinguished from height, which is vertical extent, and width or breadth, which are the distance from side to side, measuring across the object at right angles to the length. In the physical sciences and engineering, the word "length" is typically used synonymously with "distance", with symbol l or L. Length is a measure of one dimension, whereas area is a measure of two dimensions (length squared) and volume is a measure of three dimensions (length cubed). In most systems of measurement, length is a fundamental unit, from which other units are derived.
adj. 
In the spherical plane, all geodesics are great circles. Great circles divide the sphere in two equal hemispheres and all great circles intersect each other. By the above definitions, there are no parallel geodesics to a given geodesic, all geodesics intersect. Equidistant lines on the sphere are called parallels of latitude in analog to latitude lines on a globe. These lines are not geodesics. An object traveling along such a line has to accelerate away from the geodesic it is equidistant to avoid intersecting with it. When embedded in Euclidean space a dimension higher, parallels of latitude can be generated by the intersection of the sphere with a plane parallel to a plane through the center.
E-mail spam is a subset of spam that involves sending nearly identical messages to numerous recipients by e-mail. Most definitions of spam are based on the e-mail being Unsolicited Bulk E-mail (UBE). That is, spam is e-mail that is both unsolicited by the recipients and there are many substantively similar e-mails being sent. Spam is usually also unwanted, commercial and sent by automated means and some definitions include those aspects.
A freelancer or freelance worker is a person who pursues a profession without a long-term commitment to any one employer. The term was first coined by Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) in his well-known historical romance Ivanhoe to describe a "medieval mercenary warrior." The phrase later transitioned to a figurative noun around the 1860s and was then officially recognized as a verb in 1903 by various authorities in etymology such as the Oxford English Dictionary. Only in modern times has the term morphed from a noun (a freelance or a freelancer) into various verb forms (a journalist who freelances), and an adverb (she worked freelance).
In anthropology, diffusion theories explain why cultures imitate the ideas or practices of other cultures. Some theories hold that all cultures imitate ideas from one or a few original cultures, the Adam of the Bible, or several cultural circles that overlap. Evolutionary diffusion theory holds that cultures are influenced by one another, but that similar ideas can be developed in isolation. In music, it refers to the repetition of a phrase played on one instrument by another instrument.
Coincident is a geometric term that pertains to the relationship between two vectors. Vectors consist of a "magnitude" and a "direction". Vectors can be said to be coincident when their direction is the same though the magnitude may be different. That is to say they lie one on top of the other. If two coincident vectors where to be normalized, the resulting vectors would be identical. The dot product of two coincident vectors is the product of their magnitudes. The cross product of two coincident vectors is a vector of all zeros.
One of the most familiar ice cream desserts in the United States, the sundae typically consists of a scoop of ice cream topped with sauce or syrup (often chocolate, caramel, butterscotch, or strawberry), and in some cases other items such as chopped peanuts, whipped cream, or maraschino cherries. Although earliest documentation points to Ithaca, New York, as the birthplace of the treat, a number of cities lay claim to its paternity.
In voting systems, Arrow’s impossibility theorem, or Arrow’s paradox, demonstrates that no voting system based on ranked preferences can possibly meet a certain set of reasonable criteria when there are three or more options to choose from. These criteria are called unrestricted domain, non-imposition, non-dictatorship, monotonicity, and independence of irrelevant alternatives, and are defined below. The theorem is named after economist Kenneth Arrow, who demonstrated the theorem in his Ph.D. thesis and popularized it in his 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values. The original paper was entitled "A Difficulty in the Concept of Social Welfare" and can be found in The Journal of Political Economy, Volume 58, Issue 4 (August, 1950), pp. 328–346. Arrow was a co-recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Economics.
The voting paradox (also known as Condorcet's paradox or the paradox of voting) is a situation noted by the Marquis de Condorcet in the late 18th century, in which collective preferences can be cyclic (i.e. not transitive), even if the preferences of individual voters are not. This is paradoxical, because it means that majority wishes can be in conflict with each other. When this occurs, it is because the conflicting majorities are each made up of different groups of individuals. For example, suppose we have three candidates, A, B and C, and that there are three voters with preferences as follows (candidates being listed in decreasing order of preference): If C is chosen as the winner, it can be argued that B should win instead, since two voters (1 and 2) prefer B to C and only one voter (3) prefers C to B. However, by the same argument A is preferred to B, and C is preferred to A, by a margin of two to one on each occasion. The requirement of majority rule then provides no clear winner.
If something is "perceptible," you can "capture" it with your senses. "Perceptible" traces back to the Latin word "capere," which means "to take," combined with the prefix "per-," which means "thoroughly." It shares the "capere" part of its ancestry with a number of other English words related to seizing or being seized, including "capture," "captor," "captivate," and even "catch."
Tapestry is a form of textile art. It is woven by hand on a weaving-loom. It is weft-faced weaving, which means that all the warp threads are hidden in the completed work, unlike cloth weaving where both the warp and the weft threads are visible. In this way, a colourful pattern or image is created. Most weavers use a naturally based warp thread such as linen or cotton. The weft threads are usually wool or cotton, but may include silk, gold, silver, or other alternatives.
"Consanguineous" is part of a family of "blood" relatives that all descend from the Latin noun "sanguis," meaning "blood." Some of these relatives are found on the literal branch of the family tree, as "exsanguination," a term for the draining or removal of blood. Others are on the figurative side of the family, such as "sanguine," a word that can mean "bloodred" or "ruddy" but that is more often used with the meaning "cheerful" or "optimistic." There is also "sangfroid," a French word (literally meaning "cold blood") that was borrowed into English to refer to self-control under stress. "Consanguineous" relies on the "kinship" sense of "blood," bringing together "sanguis" with the Latin prefix "con-," meaning "with," to form a word used to describe two or more organisms that descend from the same ancestor.
