Purple Naked Ladies

Purple Naked Ladies is the debut studio album by hip hop soul band The Internet, a duo consisting of Syd tha Kyd and Matt Martians of Odd Future. The digital version of the album was released on December 20, 2011, with a physical copy, with bonus tracks released on January 31, 2012. The album is the first physically released album on Odd Future's own record label Odd Future Records.

Personnel

The Internet is formed of Odd Future members Syd the Kyd, the group's sound engineer, audio mixer, and live DJ, and Matt Martians, one half of The Jet Age of Tomorrow. The album features collaborations with fellow Odd Future members Left Brain, Mike G, and Pyramid Vritra as well as other guest artists Tay Walker, Kilo Kish, and Coco O.

Singles

The album's first single, "Love Song -1" was released on September 14, 2011. The second single, "They Say", which features Tay Walker, was released on October 4, 2011, though before its single release, it was included on the Odd Future compilation album 12 Odd Future Songs. The third single, "Cocaine", which features Left Brain, had its music video premiere on Odd Future's YouTube page on October 31, 2011. It was released as a single to the iTunes Store on November 8, 2011, as a 3 track EP including "Love Song -1" and "They Say" as tracks 2 and 3 respectively. The fourth single, "Fastlane", was released on January 19, 2012.

Cocaine (PaaS)

Cocaine (Configurable Omnipotent Custom Applications Integrated Network Engine) is an open source PaaS system for creating custom cloud hosting apps that are similar to Google App Engine or Heroku.

Any library or service can be implemented as a service in Cocaine using a special API. Several indispensable services have already been implemented this way, including a service for detecting a user's region or language, a service for accessing MongoDB storage, and a URL fetcher.

History

In times when cloud technologies were not yet popular, Andrey Sibiryov, the project founder, discovered Heroku. At that time Heroku was an app engine supporting only Ruby but the idea was somewhat revolutionary. It was possible to create a Ruby app, push it to the cloud and do not pay attention to any infrastructure problems. Load balance problems were covered as well.

The idea was great but it was hard to find any description how it worked, which became a reason to start yet another open source cloud app engine project. The same logic was followed by many developers, which lead to many cloud project start up.

Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography

Cocaine: An Unauthorized Biography (ISBN 0312286244) is a 2002 non-fiction book about the history of cocaine, written by Dominic Streatfeild and published by Diane Publishing Company. The 2003 paperback edition (ISBN 0-312-42226-1) was published by Picador. The book investigates cocaine from the chewing of the coca leaf to the large scale trafficking of cocaine into the United States.

Streatfeild goes into lucid detail about the history that the coca leaf had with the Native Americans and their Spanish overlords. He also investigates the life and impact of the world's most famous cocaine addict, Sigmund Freud. Written with sobering statistics and personal humor, Streatfeild travels to a number of locations, including to New York, indigenous areas of South America, and ultimately to Colombia to meet with the Ochoa family. Prior to his trip to Colombia, is unable to obtain life-insurance, and proceeds without it.

Within the book, the author interviews some of the most notorious figures directly involved in the distribution of Cocaine including George Jung, whose life story was depicted in the 2001 film Blow and "Freeway" Ricky Ross, the man attributed with the explosion of Cocaine use in California in the 1980s.

Grapplers (comics)

The Grapplers are a fictional organization appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. It was a loosely organized band of female wrestlers, most of whom gained superhuman strength after their first published appearances, through the group known as Power Broker, Inc.

Publication history

The Grapplers first appeared in Marvel Two-in-One #54-56 (August–October 1979), and were created by Mark Gruenwald, Ralph Macchio, and John Byrne.

The team subsequently appears in Dazzler #13 (March 1982), Marvel Two-in-One #96 (February 1983), Thing #33 (March 1986), #35-36 (May–June 1986), Captain America #389-391 (August–September 1991), and Thunderbolts #21 (December 1998).

The Grapplers received an entry in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe Deluxe Edition #5.

History

The original four Grapplers were drafted by the Roxxon Oil Company to invade Project: Pegasus, along with Thundra. They were given specially designed costumes to heighten their formidable prowess at physical combat. However, Quasar and Giant-Man defeated the quartet and gave them over to authorities.

Annual growth cycle of grapevines

The annual growth cycle of grapevines is the process that takes place in the vineyard each year, beginning with bud break in the spring and culminating in leaf fall in autumn followed by winter dormancy. From a winemaking perspective, each step in the process plays a vital role in the development of grapes with ideal characteristics for making wine. Viticulturalists and vineyard managers monitor the effect of climate, vine disease and pests in facilitating or impeding the vines progression from bud break, flowering, fruit set, veraison, harvesting, leaf fall and dormancy-reacting if need be with the use of viticultural practices like canopy management, irrigation, vine training and the use of agrochemicals. The stages of the annual growth cycle usually become observable within the first year of a vine's life. The amount of time spent at each stage of the growth cycle depends on a number of factors-most notably the type of climate (warm or cool) and the characteristics of the grape variety.

Bloom (Jeff Coffin album)

Bloom was the fourth album released by Jeff Coffin, released in 2005. This album was the second album recorded and released with the Mu'tet, a constantly changing group of guest musicians that play with Coffin.

Track listing

All tracks by Jeff Coffin except were noted

Personnel

Bloom (shader effect)

Bloom (sometimes referred to as light bloom or glow) is a computer graphics effect used in video games, demos and high dynamic range rendering (HDR) to reproduce an imaging artifact of real-world cameras. The effect produces fringes (or feathers) of light extending from the borders of bright areas in an image, contributing to the illusion of an extremely bright light overwhelming the camera or eye capturing the scene.

Theory

The physical basis of bloom is that, in the real world, lenses can never focus perfectly. Even a perfect lens will convolve the incoming image with an Airy disk (the diffraction pattern produced by passing a point light source through a circular aperture). Under normal circumstances, these imperfections are not noticeable, but an intensely bright light source will cause the imperfections to become visible. As a result, the image of the bright light appears to bleed beyond its natural borders.

The Airy disc function falls off very quickly but has very wide tails (actually, infinitely wide tails). As long as the brightness of adjacent parts of the image are roughly in the same range, the effect of the blurring caused by the Airy disc is not particularly noticeable; but in parts of the image where very bright parts are adjacent to relatively darker parts, the tails of the Airy disc become visible, and can extend far beyond the extent of the bright part of the image.