Gemma

Gemma is a female name of Italian origin, meaning "precious stone." Its popularity peaked in the United Kingdom during the 1980s. It was the third most popular female name in 1984 in the UK.

Notable people with the name Gemma include:

Gemma (organization)

GEMMA is a magazine and a social group founded in 1976 whose mandate is to provide a "friendship and support group for disabled lesbians in England."

The organization was founded by members of lesbian organization Sappho and mixed organization Campaign for Homosexual Equality, including Elsa Beckett. Gemma's member newsletter was published in regular print, in braille as well as cassette format.

In her essay Unearthing Our Past: Engaging with Diversity at the Museum of London, Raminder Kaur describes a leaflet promoting the activities of Gemma, which is a part of the Museum of London collection, as "crucial to exploring the theme of multiple identities or difference within difference".

See also

References

Alpha Coronae Borealis

Alpha Coronae Borealis (α CrB, α Coronae Borealis, Alphecca) is a binary star in the constellation Corona Borealis. It is located about 75 light years from the Solar System.

Properties

The primary component is a white main sequence star that has a stellar classification of A0V and 2.6 times the mass of the Sun. Estimates of the star's radius range from 2.89 to 3.04 times the radius of the Sun. An excess of infrared radiation at 24 μm and 70 μm has been detected about the primary star by the IRAS. This suggests the presence of a large disc of dust and material around Alphecca, prompting speculation of a planetary or proto-planetary system similar to that currently assumed around Vega. The disk extends out to a radius of around 60 astronomical units (AU).

The secondary component is a yellow main sequence star with an estimated stellar class of G5, 0.92 times the Sun's mass and 0.90 times the Sun's radius. The X-ray luminosity of this star is 6 × 10²⁸erg s⁻¹, which is 30 times greater than the peak activity level of the Sun. This higher activity level is expected for a young star of this class. The corona has a temperature of about 5 MK, which is much hotter than the Sun's corona. The upper limit of 14 km/s for the equatorial rotation velocity is equivalent to a rotation period of 3 days. More likely, the rotation period is 7–9 days.

Trix

Trix may refer to:

Entertainment and the arts

TRIX (operating system)

TRIX is a network-oriented research operating system developed in the late 1970s at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) by Professor Steve Ward and his research group. It ran on the NuMachine and had remote procedure call functionality built into its kernel, but was otherwise a Version 7 Unix workalike.

Design and implementation

On startup, the NuMachine would load the same program on each CPU in the system, passing each instance of the program the numeric ID of the CPU it was running on. TRIX relied on this design to have the first CPU set up global data structures and then set a flag to signal when initialization completed. After that, each instance of the kernel was able to access global data. The system also supported data private to each CPU. Access to the filesystem was provided by a program in user space.

The kernel supported unnamed threads running in domains. A domain was the equivalent of a Unix process without a stack pointer (each thread in a domain had a stack pointer). A thread could change domains, and the system scheduler would migrate threads between CPUs in order to keep all processors busy. Threads had access to a single kind of mutual exclusion primitive, and one of seven priorities. The scheduler was designed to avoid priority inversion. User space programs could create threads through a spawn system call.

Trix (construction sets)

Trix model construction sets were originally produced in 1931 by a Nuremberg company, Andreas Förtner (Anfoe). The German patent for the basic Trix pieces had been granted the previous year, in 1930.

The origin of the name Trix is uncertain; it has been suggested (by Adrie Wind) that it could have referred to the triple-hole configuration of the basic pieces.

A friendship between Stephan Bing, owner of Anfoe, and the English toy manufacturer W J Bassett-Lowke led to the founding of the London company Trix Ltd in 1932. In the United Kingdom, Trix sets challenged the British-invented Meccano model construction sets.

(See Trix (company) for details of the model electric trains that the German company also began producing in 1935).

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