Hydra

Hydra may refer to:

Astronomy

Brands and company names

People

Places

Popular culture

Comics and animation

Hydra (film)

Hydra (also known as Hydra: The Lost Island) is a 2009 low-budget monster movie by Andrew Prendergast and Peter Sullivan, which blends elements of horror, thriller and classical mythology. It was made for cable TV and subsequently internationally distributed on DVD.

Plot

Young archaeologist Dr. Valerie Cammon (Polly Shannon) and her colleague Dr. Kim (Philip Moon) go by ship to a volcanic island in the Mediterranean sea. While she seeks relics in a cave, a seaquake sinks their ship without survivors. At about the same time all archaeologists except for Dr. Cammon get eaten by the re-awakened ancient Lernaean Hydra.

During the tempest, a whole island disappears. Two months later, Vincent (Alex McArthur) and Dixie Camden (Jana Williams) intended to organize a man-hunt for cranky millionaires. Their Captain (Michael Shamus Wiles), unaware of the Hydra, suggests the nearby, aforementioned island as a substitute.

Four ex-convicts, Tim Nolan George Stults), Gwen Russell (Dawn Olivieri), Bob Crick (James Wlcek) and Ronnie Kaplan (Texas Battle), are marooned at the shore and given 24 hours' headstart.

Hydra (chess)

Hydra was a chess machine, designed by a team with Dr. Christian "Chrilly" Donninger, Dr. Ulf Lorenz, GM Christopher Lutz and Muhammad Nasir Ali. Since 2006 the development team consisted only of Donninger and Lutz. Hydra was under the patronage of the PAL Group and Sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi. The goal of the Hydra Project was to dominate the computer chess world, and finally have an accepted victory over humans.

Hydra represented a potentially significant leap in the strength of computer chess. Design team member Lorenz estimates its FIDE equivalent playing strength to be over Elo 3000, and this is in line with its results against Michael Adams and Shredder 8, the former micro-computer chess champion.

Hydra began competing in 2002 and played its last game in June 2006. In June 2009, Christopher Lutz stated that "unfortunately the Hydra project is discontinued." The sponsors decided to end the project.

Architecture

The Hydra team originally planned to have Hydra appear in four versions: Orthus, Chimera, Scylla and then the final Hydra version – the strongest of them all. The original version of Hydra evolved from an earlier design called Brutus and works in a similar fashion to Deep Blue, utilising large numbers of purpose-designed chips (in this case implemented as a field-programmable gate array or FPGA). In Hydra, there are multiple computers, each with its own FPGA acting as a chess coprocessor. These co-processors enabled Hydra to search enormous numbers of positions per second, making each processor more than ten times faster than an unaided computer.

Vine (demon)

In demonology, Vine (also known as vain) is an Earl and also a King of Hell, commanded by Satan. He is known to be the trickiest, deadliest demon. He has the power to take one's soul without permission. He can tell present, past and future, discover witches and hidden things, create storms and make the water rough by means of these storms, bring down walls and build towers.

This demon is portrayed as a lion holding a snake in his hand and riding a black horse.

The etymology of his name seems to be stemming from the Latin word 'vinea', vine, which is also the name given to an ancient war machine made of wood and covered with leather and branches, used to overthrow walls.

Other spellings: Viné, Vinea.

See also

Sources

VINE Transit

VINE Transit (an acronym for Valley Intercity Neighborhood Express.) is a public transportation service in Napa County, California, USA; it is managed under the Napa County Transportation and Planning Agency and operated by Transdev. The system offers extensive service throughout the County along with providing connections to other public transportation systems in adjacent counties.

Service coverage

The Napa VINE provides services to the following cities, towns, and communities:

Napa County:

Solano County:

Sonoma County:

Contra Costa County

Schedules

All Napa VINE services do not operate on the following holidays:

However, these services operate on Saturday schedules on other holidays, including:

Vine (service)

Vine is a short-form video sharing service where users can share six-second-long looping video clips. The service was founded in June 2012, and American microblogging website Twitter acquired it in October 2012, just before its official launch. Users' videos are published through Vine's social network and can be shared on other services such as Facebook and Twitter. Vine's app can also be used to browse through videos posted by other users, along with groups of videos by theme, and trending, or popular, videos. While Vine enjoys the support of Twitter, it competes with others such as Viddy, Cineverse and Mobli. As of December 2015 Vine has 200 million active users.

History

Vine was founded by Dom Hofmann, Rus Yusupov, and Colin Kroll in June 2012. The company was acquired by Twitter in October 2012 for a reported $30 million.

Vine officially launched on January 24, 2013 as a free app for iOS devices. On June 2, 2013, an Android version was released. On November 12, 2013 the application was released for Windows Phone.

Crying

Crying is the shedding of tears in response to an emotional state. The act of crying has been defined as "a complex secretomotor phenomenon characterized by the shedding of tears from the lacrimal apparatus, without any irritation of the ocular structures". A related medical term is lacrimation, which also refers to non-emotional shedding of tears. Crying is also known as weeping, wailing, whimpering, and bawling.

For crying to be described as sobbing, it usually has to be accompanied by a set of other symptoms, such as slow but erratic inhalation, occasional instances of breath holding and muscular tremor.

A neuronal connection between the lacrimal gland (tear duct) and the areas of the human brain involved with emotion has been established. There is debate among scientists over whether or not humans are the only animals that produce tears in response to emotional states.Charles Darwin wrote in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals that the keepers of Indian elephants in the London Zoo told him that their charges shed tears in sorrow.