Fire and Water (Lexx)

In the sci-fi television series Lexx, the fictional planet "Fire" is the afterlife for all evil souls, and the location for much of Season 3. It shares a tight mutual orbit and an atmosphere with the Planet "Water", which is the afterlife for all good souls in the Lexx universe. Both worlds are locked in a perpetual war.

The souls on Water and Fire have no memory of how they arrived there; they simply "woke up" there one day. They are incapable of sexual reproduction and there are no children on either planet. When anyone dies on Planet Fire or Planet Water, they go to a spiritual holding cell in which time stands still, giving the illusion that no time has passed nomatter how long they have been there. When space opens up they "wake up" again whole and healthy on their respective home planet.

Fire is destroyed by the Lexx under the command of Xev at the end of Season 3. With Fire gone, Prince can not reincarnate so he instead chooses to possess the Lexx and destroy Water. When Water and Fire are both destroyed, it is revealed that both planets were actually on the other side of the Sun in our solar system and that all the souls contained on both worlds will be reincarnated on Earth.

Fire (Ohio Players song)

"Fire" is a hit song by R&B/funk band Ohio Players. The song was the opening track from the album of the same name and hit #1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 (where it was succeeded by Linda Ronstadt's "You're No Good") and the Hot Soul Singles chart in early 1975. It spent five weeks atop the soul chart. "Fire" was the Ohio Players' only entry on the new disco/dance chart, where it peaked at #10. The tune is considered to be the band's signature song along with "Love Rollercoaster."

The song was recorded at Mercury Records' Chicago-based studio. While performing it in California, the band let Stevie Wonder hear the basic track for the song and he predicted that it would become a big hit. The song is noted for its sound of a siren recorded from a fire truck, heard at the beginning, as well as in the instrumental break in the middle. The edit version avoided much of the repetition of the music.

A cover of the song was released by Canadian New Wave band Platinum Blonde on their third album Contact in 1987. Another cover, also from 1987, is featured on the album Rhythm Killers by Sly and Robbie, produced by Bill Laswell. For their 2014 album For the Love of Money, industrial hip hop outfit Tackhead covered the song.

Alpha (finance)

Alpha is a measure of the so-called active return on an investment, the performance of that investment compared to a suitable market index. An alpha of 1 means the investment's return on investment over a selected period of time was 1% better than the market during that same period, an alpha of -1 means the investment underperformed the market. Alpha is one of the five key measures in modern portfolio theory: alpha, beta, standard deviation, R-squared and the Sharpe ratio.

In modern financial markets, where index funds are widely available for purchase, alpha is commonly used to judge the performance of mutual funds and similar investments. As these funds include various fees normally expressed in percent terms, the fund has to maintain an alpha greater than its fees in order to provide positive gains compared to an index fund. Historically, the vast majority of traditional funds have had negative alphas, which has led to a flight of capital to index funds and non-traditional hedge funds.

DEC Alpha

Alpha, originally known as Alpha AXP, is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computing (RISC) instruction set developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), designed to replace their 32-bit VAX complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set. Alpha was implemented in microprocessors originally developed and fabricated by DEC. These microprocessors were most prominently used in a variety of DEC workstations and servers, which eventually formed the basis for almost all of their mid-to-upper-scale lineup. Several third-party vendors also produced Alpha systems, including PC form factor motherboards.

Operating systems that supported Alpha included OpenVMS (previously known as OpenVMS AXP), Tru64 UNIX (previously known as DEC OSF/1 AXP and Digital UNIX), Windows NT (using a 32-bit emulation layer and discontinued after 4.0 SP6 and Windows 2000 RC1),Linux (Debian GNU/Linux, SUSE Linux,Gentoo Linux and Red Hat Linux), BSD UNIX (NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD up to 6.x), Plan 9 from Bell Labs, as well as the L4Ka::Pistachio kernel.

Alpha (ethology)

In studies of social animals, the highest ranking individual is sometimes designated as the alpha. Males, females, or both, can be alphas, depending on the species. Where one male and one female fulfill this role together, they are sometimes referred to as the alpha pair. Other animals in the same social group may exhibit deference or other species-specific subordinate behaviours towards the alpha or alphas.

Alpha animals usually gain preferential access to food and other desirable items or activities, though the extent of this varies widely between species. Male or female alphas may gain preferential access to sex or mates; in some species, only alphas or an alpha pair reproduce.

Alphas may achieve their status by superior physical strength and aggression, or through social efforts and building alliances within the group.

The individual with alpha status sometimes changes, often through a fight between the dominant and a subordinate animal. Such fights may or may not be to the death.