Aborym

Aborym are an Italian industrial black metal band from Taranto, Apulia, formed in 1993. The band have described their music as "alien-black-hard/industrial", whilst Allmusic described them as playing "a truly original brand of futuristic black metal [with] jagged samples, electronic drums, and industrial overtones, mak[ing] Aborym's peculiar sound very hard to pin down or define". The name of the band derives from Haborym Sadek Aym, overseer of the twenty-six legions of Hell in a seventeenth-century grimoire.

History

Early years and Kali Yuga Bizarre (1993-1999)

Aborym were originally formed in 1991 or 1992 by bass player and vocalist Malfeitor Fabban, who also played bass for Funeral Oration and keyboards for M.E.M.O.R.Y. Lab. At the beginning the three piece line-up performed covers of bands like Sodom,Celtic Frost,Mayhem,Sepultura,Sarcófago,Morbid,Rotting Christ and Darkthrone. Along with Alex Noia (guitars) and Mental Siege (drums), Fabban recorded the first Aborym demo, the five-track Worshipping Damned Souls, in 1993. The band split up shortly afterwards and were reformed by Fabban in Rome in 1997. With the new members Yorga SM and Sethlans, the second demo (Antichristian Nuclear Sabbath) was recorded that same year. The band struck a deal with the Italian Scarlet Records for two albums.

Dirty (Sonic Youth album)

Dirty is the seventh studio album by American alternative rock band Sonic Youth. It was released on July 21, 1992 by record label DGC. The band recorded and produced the album with Butch Vig in early 1992 at The Magic Shop studios. The sound on Dirty was inspired by the grunge scene of the time, and was described as avant-rock. Some songs on the album mark the first appearance of three guitars in Sonic Youth songs. The album was remastered and released on quadruple vinyl and double CD in 2003.

The album spawned four singles. The first single was "100%", but it was not the crossover hit the label anticipated. Geffen Record executive Mark Kates admitted the single "was not a great radio song", however, the single did chart well. The next was "Youth Against Fascism", which did not chart well. The last two were "Sugar Kane" and "Drunken Butterfly", released in 1993. "Sugar Kane" did better commercially than "Youth Against Fascism". The album sold exceptionally well, reaching No. 6 in the UK Albums Chart (their highest charting album in the UK) and No. 83 in the US.

Helix

A helix (pl: helixes or helices) is a type of smooth space curve, i.e. a curve in three-dimensional space. It has the property that the tangent line at any point makes a constant angle with a fixed line called the axis. Examples of helices are coil springs and the handrails of spiral staircases. A "filled-in" helix – for example, a spiral ramp – is called a helicoid. Helices are important in biology, as the DNA molecule is formed as two intertwined helices, and many proteins have helical substructures, known as alpha helices. The word helix comes from the Greek word ἕλιξ, "twisted, curved".

Types

Helices can be either right-handed or left-handed. With the line of sight along the helix's axis, if a clockwise screwing motion moves the helix away from the observer, then it is called a right-handed helix; if towards the observer, then it is a left-handed helix. Handedness (or chirality) is a property of the helix, not of the perspective: a right-handed helix cannot be turned to look like a left-handed one unless it is viewed in a mirror, and vice versa.

Phelix

Phelix is a high-speed stream cipher with a built-in single-pass message authentication code (MAC) functionality, submitted in 2004 to the eSTREAM contest by Doug Whiting, Bruce Schneier, Stefan Lucks, and Frédéric Muller. The cipher uses only the operations of addition modulo 2³², exclusive or, and rotation by a fixed number of bits. Phelix uses a 256-bit key and a 128-bit nonce, claiming a design strength of 128 bits. Concerns have been raised over the ability to recover the secret key if the cipher is used incorrectly.

Performance

Phelix is optimised for 32-bit platforms. The authors state that it can achieve up to eight cycles per byte on modern x86-based processors.

FPGA Hardware performance figures published in the paper "Review of stream cipher candidates from a low resource hardware perspective" are as follows:

Helix

Phelix is a slightly modified form of an earlier cipher, Helix, published in 2003 by Niels Ferguson, Doug Whiting, Bruce Schneier, John Kelsey, Stefan Lucks, and Tadayoshi Kohno; Phelix adds 128 bits to the internal state.

Helix (newspaper)

After a series of organizational meetings held at the Free University of Seattle involving a large and eclectic group including Paul Dorpat, Tom Robbins, Lorenzo Milam and others from KRAB-FM, John Ullman of the Seattle Folklore Society, Unitarian minister Paul Sawyer, and many others, the Helix first appeared on March 23, 1967. A member of both the Underground Press Syndicate and the Liberation News Service, it published a total of 125 issues (sometimes as a weekly, sometimes as a biweekly) before folding on June 11, 1970. The first issue was produced by Paul Dorpat with $200 in borrowed capital, out of a rented storefront on Roosevelt Way NE. After being turned down by the first printers they approached, they found a printer in Ken Monson, communications director of the International Association of Machinists local, who had recently acquired a printing press. 1500 copies were printed of the first issue. By the fourth biweekly issue sales had reached 11,000 copies. After the first two issues a "split-font" rainbow effect was sometimes used to print psychedelically colorful front covers; issues averaged 24 pages, with illustrations and graphics clipped from old magazines and having little to do with the adjoining copy crammed into the interior pages.

Dogū

Dogū (土偶)(meaning "clay figures") are small humanoid and animal figurines made during the late Jōmon period (14,000–400 BC) of prehistoric Japan. Dogū come exclusively from the Jōmon period. By the Yayoi period, which followed the Jōmon period, Dogū were no longer made. There are various styles of Dogū, depending on exhumation area and time period. According to the National Museum of Japanese History, the total number found throughout Japan is approximately 15,000. Dogū were made across all of Japan, except Okinawa. Most of the Dogū have been found in eastern Japan and it is rare to find one in western Japan. The purpose of the Dogū remains unknown and should not be confused with the clay haniwa funerary objects of the Kofun period (250 – 538).

Origins

Some scholars theorize the Dogū acted as effigies of people, that manifested some kind of sympathetic magic. For example, it may have been believed that illnesses could be transferred into the Dogū, then destroyed, clearing the illness, or any other misfortune.

Dog in Chinese mythology

Dogs are an important motif in Chinese mythology. These motifs include a particular dog which accompanies a hero, the dog as one of the twelve totem creatures for which years are named, a dog giving first provision of grain which allowed current agriculture, and claims of having a magical dog as an original ancestor in the case of certain ethnic groups.

Myth versus history

Chinese mythology is those myths found in the geographic area called China, which of course has evolved and changed throughout its history. These include myths in Chinese and other languages, as transmitted by Han Chinese as well as other ethnic groups (of which fifty-six are officially recognized by the current administration of China). (Yang 2005:4)

In the study of historical Chinese culture, many of the stories that have been told regarding characters and events which have been written or told of the distant past have a double tradition: one which tradition which presents a more historicized and one which presents a more mythological version.(Yang 2005: 12-13) This is also true of some accounts related to mythological dogs in China.