Windmill

A windmill is a mill that converts the energy of wind into rotational energy by means of vanes called sails or blades. Centuries ago, windmills usually were used to mill grain, pump water, or both. Thus they often were gristmills, windpumps, or both. The majority of modern windmills take the form of wind turbines used to generate electricity, or windpumps used to pump water, either for land drainage or to extract groundwater.

Windmills in antiquity

The windwheel of the Greek engineer Heron of Alexandria in the first century is the earliest known instance of using a wind-driven wheel to power a machine. Another early example of a wind-driven wheel was the prayer wheel, which has been used in Tibet and China since the fourth century. It has been claimed that the Babylonian emperor Hammurabi planned to use wind power for his ambitious irrigation project in the seventeenth century BCE.

Horizontal windmills

The first practical windmills had sails that rotated in a horizontal plane, around a vertical axis. According to Ahmad Y. al-Hassan, these panemone windmills were invented in eastern Persia as recorded by the Persian geographer Estakhri in the ninth century. The authenticity of an earlier anecdote of a windmill involving the second caliph Umar (AD 634–644) is questioned on the grounds that it appears in a tenth-century document. Made of six to 12 sails covered in reed matting or cloth material, these windmills were used to grind grain or draw up water, and were quite different from the later European vertical windmills. Windmills were in widespread use across the Middle East and Central Asia, and later spread to China and India from there.

Windmill (song)

"Windmill" is a song and a single made by the German power metal band Helloween taken from the album Chameleon. It was released in some countries as Windmill. In Japan, it was released as Step Out of Hell.

Single track listing

Japanese Version

Personnel

References

List of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero characters (S–Z)

This is an alphabetical List of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero characters whose code names start with the letters S-Z.

Salvo

Salvo is the G.I. Joe Team's Anti-Armor Trooper. His real name is David K. Hasle, and he was born in Arlington, Virginia. Salvo was first released as an action figure in 1990, and again in 2005. Both versions have the T-shirt slogan 'The Right of Might'.

Salvo's primary military specialty is anti-armor trooper. He also specializes in repairing "TOW/Dragon" missiles. Salvo expresses a deep distrust of advanced electronic weaponry. He prefers to use mass quantities of conventional explosives to overwhelm enemy forces.

In the Marvel Comics G.I. Joe series, he first appeared in issue #114. There, he fights as part of a large scale operation against Cobra forces in the fictional country of Benzheen. Steeler, Dusty, Salvo, Rock'N'Roll and Hot Seat get into vehicular based combat against the missile expert Metal-Head He is later part of the Joe team on-site who defends G.I. Joe headquarters in Utah against a Cobra assault.

Era (river)

The Era is a river in Tuscany in Italy. It rises near Volterra and flows into the Arno river at Pontedera.

The Era is 54 km long, and its main tributaries are: (to the left) Cascina river, Ragone torrent, Sterza torrent, and (to the right) Capriggine torrent and Roglio torrent.

In 1966 the river flooded the town of Pontedera.

Coordinates: 43°40′N 10°38′E / 43.667°N 10.633°E / 43.667; 10.633

Era (geology)

A geologic era is a subdivision of geologic time that divides an eon into smaller units of time. The Phanerozoic Eon is divided into three such time frames: the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic represent the major stages in the macroscopic fossil record. These eras are separated by catastrophic extinction boundaries, the P-T boundary between the Paleozoic and the Mesozoic and the K-T boundary between the Mesozoic and the Cenozoic. There is evidence that catastrophic meteorite impacts played a role in demarcating the differences between the eras.

The Hadean, Archean and Proterozoic eons were as a whole formerly called the Precambrian. This covered the four billion years of Earth history prior to the appearance of hard-shelled animals. More recently, however, those eons have been subdivided into eras of their own.

See also

Adjusted ERA+

Adjusted ERA+, often simply abbreviated to ERA+ or ERA plus, is a pitching statistic in baseball. It adjusts a pitcher's earned run average (ERA) according to the pitcher's ballpark (in case the ballpark favors batters or pitchers) and the ERA of the pitcher's league. Average ERA+ is set to be 100; a score above 100 indicates that the pitcher performed better than average, below 100 indicates worse than average.

For instance, if the average ERA in the league is 4.00, and the pitcher is pitching in a ballpark that favors hitters, and his ERA is 4.00, then his ERA+ will be over 100. Likewise, if the pitcher is pitching in a ballpark favoring pitchers, then the pitcher's ERA+ will be below 100.

As a result, ERA+ can be used to compare pitchers across different run environments. In the above example, the first pitcher may have performed better than the second pitcher, even though his ERA is higher. ERA+ can be used to account for this misleading impression.

Pedro Martínez holds the modern record for highest ERA+ in a single season; he posted a 1.74 ERA in the 2000 American League, which had an average ERA of 4.92, which gave Martínez an ERA+ of 291. While Bob Gibson has the lowest ERA in modern times (1.12 in the National League in 1968), the average ERA was 2.99 that year (the so-called Year of the Pitcher) and so Gibson's ERA+ is 258, sixth highest since 1900. 1968 was the last year that Major League Baseball employed the use of a pitcher's mound greater than 10 inches.