Archy

Archy is a software system whose user interface poses a radically different approach for interacting with computers with respect to traditional graphical user interfaces. Designed by human-computer interface expert Jef Raskin, it embodies his ideas and established results about human-centered design described in his book The Humane Interface. These ideas include content persistence, modelessness, a nucleus with commands instead of applications, navigation using incremental text search, and a zooming user interface (ZUI). The system was being implemented at the Raskin Center for Humane Interfaces under Raskin's leadership. Since his death in February 2005 the project was continued by his team, which later shifted focus to the Ubiquity extension for the Firefox browser.

Archy in large part builds on Raskin's earlier work with the Apple Macintosh, Canon Cat, SwyftWare, and Ken Perlin's Pad ZUI system. It can be described as a combination of Canon Cat's text processing functions with a modern ZUI. Archy is more radically different from established systems than are Sun Microsystems' Project Looking Glass and Microsoft Research's "Task Gallery" prototype. While these systems build upon the WIMP desktop paradigm, Archy has been compared as similar to the Emacs text editor, although its design begins from a clean slate.

Government

A government is the system by which a state or community is controlled. In the Commonwealth of Nations, the word government is also used more narrowly to refer to the collective group of people that exercises executive authority in a state. This usage is analogous to what is called an "administration" in American English. Furthermore, especially in American English, the concepts of the state and the government may be used synonymously to refer to the person or group of people exercising authority over a politically organized territory. Finally, government is also sometimes used in English as a synonym for governance.

In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislators, administrators, and arbitrators. Government is the means by which state policy is enforced, as well as the mechanism for determining the policy of the state. A form of government, or form of state governance, refers to the set of political systems and institutions that make up the organisation of a specific government.

Archy and Mehitabel

Archy and Mehitabel (styled as archy and mehitabel) are the names of two fictional characters created in 1916, by Don Marquis, a columnist for The Evening Sun newspaper in New York City. Archy, a cockroach, and Mehitabel, an alley cat, appeared in hundreds of humorous verses and short stories in Marquis’ daily column, The Sun Dial. Their exploits were first collected in the 1927 book “archy and mehitabel,” which remains in print today, and in two later volumes, “archys life of mehitabel” (1933) and “archy does his part” (1935). Many editions are recognized by their iconic illustrations by George Herriman, the creator of Krazy Kat.

History

Marquis introduced Archy into his daily newspaper column at The New York Evening Sun. Archy (whose name was always written in lower case in the book titles, but was upper case when Marquis would write about him in narrative form) was a cockroach who had been a free verse poet in a previous life, and took to writing stories and poems on an old typewriter at the newspaper office when everyone in the building had left. Archy would climb up onto the typewriter and hurl himself at the keys, laboriously typing out stories of the daily challenges and travails of a cockroach. Archy's best friend was Mehitabel, an alley cat. The two of them shared a series of day-to-day adventures that made satiric commentary on daily life in the city during the 1910s and 1920s.