Fetch (geography)

The fetch, also called the fetch length, is the length of water over which a given wind has blown. Fetch is used in geography and meteorology and its effects are usually associated with sea state and when it reaches shore it is the main factor that creates storm surge which leads to coastal erosion and flooding. It also plays a large part in longshore drift as well.

Fetch length, along with the wind speed (wind strength), determines the size (sea state) of waves produced. The wind direction is considered constant. The longer the fetch and the faster the wind speed, the more wind energy is imparted to the water surface and the larger the resulting sea state will be.

See also

Fetch

Fetch may refer to:

Fetch (game)

Fetch is a game usually played with a dog. An object, such as a stick or ball, is thrown a moderate distance away from the animal, and it is the animal's objective to grab and retrieve it. Many times, the owner of the animal will say "Fetch" to the animal before or after throwing the object. In rare instances, cats, especially younger cats, have been known to engage in fetch behavior.

Mathematics of Fetch

Arizona State psychology professor Michael McBeath has proposed a simple model to explain how dogs play Fetch. By mounting a camera on the head of a dog, he found that the dog changed its speed and direction in order to keep the frisbee's image in a constant position on its retina. This approach, called the Linear Optical Trajectory, makes the frisbee appear to move in a linear path at a constant speed. McBeath had previously noticed this interception strategy in professional baseball players pursuing fly balls.

Tim Pennings, a mathematics professor at Hope College, has found that dogs are somehow able to calculate the optimal path to a ball thrown in the water. While playing Fetch with his Welsh Corgi, he noticed that the dog ran along the beach for a certain distance before jumping into the water. Because the dog is faster on land, this technique minimizes the total retrieval time. He showed that the dog is able to calculate the optimal point to jump into the water with statistical significance, a problem Pennings must resort to calculus to solve.

Fetch (folklore)

A fetch is a supernatural double or an apparition of a living person in Irish folklore. It is largely akin to the doppelgänger, and sightings are regarded as omens, usually for impending death. The origin of the term is unclear.

Description

The fetch is described as an exact, spectral double of a living human, whose appearance is regarded as ominous. As such, it is similar to the Germanic doppelgänger, and to some conceptions of the British wraith.Francis Grose associated the term with Northern England in his 1787 Provincial Glossary, but otherwise it seems to have been in popular use only in Ireland. A sighting of a fetch is generally taken as a portent of its exemplar's looming death, though John and Michael Banim report that if the double appears in the morning rather than the evening, it is instead a sign of a long life in store.

The etymology is obscure. It may derive from the verb "fetch"; the compound "fetch-life", evidently referring to a psychopomp who "fetches" the souls of the dying, is attested in Richard Stanyhurst's 1583 translation of the Aeneid. Alternately, the word may derive from fæcce, found in two Old English glossaries. In both texts, fæcce is glossed for mære, a spirit associated with death and nightmares. The word may be Old English in origin, though it would have been atypical for the author to gloss one English word with another. He seems to have regarded it as a Latin word, though it is unattested in Latin. Instead, it may be Irish, which could be the origin of the Hiberno-English fetch.

Geography

Geography (from Greek γεωγραφία, geographia, lit. "earth description") is a field of science devoted to the study of the lands, the features, the inhabitants, and the phenomena of Earth. A literal translation would be "to describe or picture or write about the earth". The first person to use the word "geography" was Eratosthenes (276–194 BC). Four historical traditions in geographical research are spatial analysis of the natural and the human phenomena (geography as the study of distribution), area studies (places and regions), study of the human-land relationship, and research in the Earth sciences. Nonetheless, modern geography is an all-encompassing discipline that foremost seeks to understand the Earth and all of its human and natural complexities—not merely where objects are, but how they have changed and come to be. Geography has been called "the world discipline" and "the bridge between the human and the physical science". Geography is divided into two main branches: human geography and physical geography.

Word chain

Word chain, also known as Grab on Behind, Last and First, Alpha and Omega, and The Name Game. is a word game in which players come up with words that begin with the letter or letters that the previous word ended with. A category of words is usually chosen, there is a time limit such as five seconds, and words may not be repeated in the same game. An example chain for food would be: Soup - Peas - Sugar - Rice.

It is used as a tool for teaching English as a second language and as a car game.

The version of the game in which cities are used is called Geography.

Related games

A similar Japanese game is Shiritori, in which the word must begin with the last syllable, or kana, of the previous word. It includes a rule for loss: words ending with N may not be used since the kana is never used in the beginning of words. The game Antakshari (ant means end, akshar means letter), played in India, Pakistan and Nepal also involves chaining, but with verses of movie songs (usually Bollywood songs). In Russia a game similar to the Word chain is called Words (Russian: слова).

Geography (Ptolemy)

The Geography (Greek: Γεωγραφικὴ Ὑφήγησις, Geōgraphikḕ Hyphḗgēsis, lit. "Geographical Guidance"), also known by its Latin names as the Geographia and the Cosmographia, is a gazeteer, an atlas, and a treatise on cartography, compiling the geographical knowledge of the 2nd-century Roman Empire. Originally written by Ptolemy in Greek at Alexandria around AD 150, the work was a revision of a now-lost atlas by Marinus of Tyre using additional Roman and Persian gazetteers and new principles. Its translation into Arabic in the 9th century and Latin in 1406 was highly influential on the geographical knowledge and cartographic traditions of the medieval Caliphate and Renaissance Europe.

Manuscripts

Versions of Ptolemy's work in antiquity were probably proper atlases with attached maps, although some scholars aver that the references to maps in the text were later additions.

No Greek manuscript of the Geography survives from earlier than the 13th century. A letter written by the Byzantine monk Maximus Planudes records that he searched for one for Chora Monastery in the summer of 1295; one of the earliest surviving texts may have been one of those he then assembled. In Europe, maps were sometimes made redrawn using the coördinates provided by the text, as Planudes was forced to do. Later scribes and publishers could then copy these new maps, as Athanasius did for the emperor Andronicus II Palaeologus. The three earliest surviving texts with maps are those from Constantinople (Istanbul) based on Planudes's work.