Minima!

Minima! is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Machiko Sakurai. It was cancelled in February 2008.

Manga

The manga was licensed for an English-language release in North America by Del Rey Manga. As of February 2009, Del Rey Manga had released 4 bound volumes of the manga.

Volume list

Reception

Mania.com's Nadia Oxford and About.com's Deb Aoki comments on the manga's realistic portrayal of a high school girl who is a victim of bullying. Pop Culture Shock's Katherine Dacey criticises the manga artist's artwork saying that Sakurai "has a limited repertoire of character designs, and a tendency to draw vaguely alien faces with bulging eyes and foreheads." Casey Brienza at Anime News Network commends the manga's ability to seamlessly "shift from human-sized perspectives to toy-sized ones and back again".

References

External links

Maxima and minima

In mathematical analysis, the maxima and minima (the plural of maximum and minimum) of a function, known collectively as extrema (the plural of extremum), are the largest and smallest value of the function, either within a given range (the local or relative extrema) or on the entire domain of a function (the global or absolute extrema).Pierre de Fermat was one of the first mathematicians to propose a general technique, adequality, for finding the maxima and minima of functions.

As defined in set theory, the maximum and minimum of a set are the greatest and least elements in the set, respectively. Unbounded infinite sets, such as the set of real numbers, have no minimum or maximum.

Definition

A real-valued function f defined on a domain X has a global (or absolute) maximum point at x^∗ if f(x^∗) ≥ f(x) for all x in X. Similarly, the function has a global (or absolute) minimum point at x^∗ if f(x^∗) ≤ f(x) for all x in X. The value of the function at a maximum point is called the maximum value of the function and the value of the function at a minimum point is called the minimum value of the function.

VEB Typoart

VEB Typoart was the only type foundry of East Germany. It was a state-owned enterprise ("Volkseigener Betrieb") located in Dresden. The foundry's most influential art directors were Herbert Thannhäuser and Albert Kapr.

History

VEB Typoart was created by the government of the German Democratic Republic in 1948 through a merger of several nationalised type foundries, including Schelter & Giesecke (1945) and Ludwig Wagner AG (1960). It was subordinated to Zentrag, a state enterprise coordinating all GDR printing activity. Typoart's principal mission was to create typefaces for Eastern Germany and other Eastern Bloc countries. It was frequently ordered to plagiarise Western typefaces that Zentrag could not afford to license.

In the course of German reunification, Typoart was privatised as Typoart GmbH in 1989 and went bankrupt in 1995. The copyright status of its typefaces remained uncertain, and some of them have been reissued in digital form by other type foundries.

Typefaces

Typoart's typefaces included:

Moiré pattern

In mathematics, physics, and art, a moiré pattern (/mwɑːrˈeɪ/; French: [mwaˈʁe]) is a secondary and visually evident superimposed pattern created, for example, when two identical (usually transparent) patterns on a flat or curved surface (such as closely spaced straight lines drawn radiating from a point or taking the form of a grid) are overlaid while displaced or rotated a small amount from one another.

In physics, its manifestation is the beat phenomenon, that occurs in many wave interference conditions.

Etymology

The term originates from moire (moiré in its French adjectival form), a type of textile, traditionally of silk but now also of cotton or synthetic fiber, with a rippled or "watered" appearance.

The history of the word moiré is complicated. The earliest agreed origin is the Arabic mukhayyar (مُخَيَّر in Arabic, which means chosen), a cloth made from the wool of the Angora goat, from khayyara (خيّر in Arabic), "he chose" (hence "a choice, or excellent, cloth"). It has also been suggested that the Arabic word was formed from the Latin marmoreus, meaning "like marble". By 1570 the word had found its way into English as mohair. This was then adopted into French as mouaire, and by 1660 (in the writings of Samuel Pepys) it had been adopted back into English as moire or moyre. Meanwhile, the French mouaire had mutated into a verb, moirer, meaning "to produce a watered textile by weaving or pressing", which by 1823 had spawned the adjective moiré. Moire (pronounced "mwar") and moiré (pronounced "mwar-ay") are now used somewhat interchangeably in English, though moire is more often used for the cloth and moiré for the pattern.

Moire (disambiguation)

Moire or Moiré may refer to:

See also

Moire (fabric)

In textiles, a moire (/ˈmwɑːr/ or /ˈmɔːr/), less often moiré, is a fabric with a wavy (watered) appearance produced mainly from silk, but also wool, cotton and rayon. The watered appearance is usually created by the finishing technique called calendering. Moire effects are also achieved by certain weaves, such as varying the tension in the warp and weft of the weave, or by running the fabric through engraved copper rollers. Silk treated in this way is sometimes called watered silk.

Method of production

Moire is produced from two distinctly different methods of finishing. Calendering produces the true moire, known as "moire antique" and "moire Anglaise," which is a purely physical phenomenon. In calendering, the fabric is folded lengthwise in half with the face side inward, and with the two selvedges running together side by side. To produce moire, ribbed rollers are used, and the ribs produce the watermark effect. The rollers polish the surface and make the fabric smoother and more lustrous. High temperatures and pressure are used as well, and the fabric is often damped before being run through the rollers. The end result is a peculiar luster resulting from the divergent reflection of the light rays on the material, a divergence brought about by compressing and flattening the warp and filling threads in places, thereby forming a surface which reflects light differently. The weft threads also are moved slightly.

European Space Agency

The European Space Agency (ESA) is an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to the exploration of space, with 22 member states. Established in 1975 and headquartered in Paris, France, ESA has a staff of more than 2,000 with an annual budget of about €4.28 billion / US$5.51 billion (2013).

ESA's space flight programme includes human spaceflight, mainly through the participation in the International Space Station programme, the launch and operations of unmanned exploration missions to other planets and the Moon, Earth observation, science, telecommunication as well as maintaining a major spaceport, the Guiana Space Centre at Kourou, French Guiana, and designing launch vehicles. The main European launch vehicle Ariane 5 is operated through Arianespace with ESA sharing in the costs of launching and further developing this launch vehicle.

Its facilities are distributed among the following 5 research centres: