Curse

A curse (also called a jinx, hex or execration) is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to some other entity—one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, "curse" may refer to a wish that harm or hurt will be inflicted by any supernatural powers, such as a spell, a prayer, an imprecation, an execration, magic, witchcraft, God, a natural force, or a spirit. In many belief systems, the curse itself (or accompanying ritual) is considered to have some causative force in the result. To reverse or eliminate a curse is called removal or breaking, and is often believed to require equally elaborate rituals or prayers.

The study of the forms of curses comprise a significant proportion of the study of both folk religion and folklore. The deliberate attempt to levy curses is often part of the practice of magic. In Hindu culture the Sage or Rishi is believed to have the power to bless and curse. Examples include the curse placed by Rishi Bhrigu on king Nahusha and the one placed by Rishi Devala. Special names for specific types of curses can be found in various cultures:

Curse, Inc.

Curse, Inc. is an online game portal and network of gaming websites founded by Hubert Thieblot in 2006. The company is headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, and has offices in San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, Brighton, UK, and Berlin, Germany. Claiming to be the "number one resource for core online gamers,"Quantcast estimated monthly unique traffic in 2013 in excess of 30 million visitors. Curse has several primary functions, the most notable of which include an add-on and modification service called Curse Client for such games as World of Warcraft, Rift, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Terraria, Kerbal Space Program, and Minecraft, a collection of over 1000 gaming wikis (many of which are official) known as Gamepedia, and a Voice Over IP (VOIP) service called Curse Voice.

Curse has sponsored professional teams that compete in League of Legends and Call of Duty, which in addition to various high-profile wins have garnered sponsorship from companies such as Nissan,Alienware, and Cooler Master. In January 2015 Team Curse merged with Team Liquid under the name of the latter organization.

Curse (comics)

The Curse is a fictional villain in the comic book, Spawn. The Curse in the book is a billionaire and a religious zealot who seeks a place in Heaven and knows far more about the war between Heaven and Hell than most on Earth.

Fictional character biography

The Curse, born Phillip Krahn, seeks a chance to lead Heaven's armies against the armies of Hell. When he was a boy he removed his own left eye and scarred his face with a large, deep scratch from a rusty metal fence running horizontally over his right eye. When he was older, he removed his right arm to show his dedication to God. He grew to become wealthy and studied the occult. He used technology to rebuild his arm, far stronger and better than it was before.

He sought to gain Spawn's powers, believing him at first to be a soldier of Heaven, but Spawn destroyed his bionic arm and beat him severely, leaving the Curse crucified on a wall in Rat City to teach him and others that the alleys belong to Spawn. He was found and tortured by the demon-hunter, Sankser.

Tierra

Astronomy

Computing and games

Film

Music

See also

Tierra (computer simulation)

Tierra is a computer simulation developed by ecologist Thomas S. Ray in the early 1990s in which computer programs compete for time (central processing unit (CPU) time) and space (access to main memory). In this context, the computer programs in Tierra are considered to be evolvable and can mutate, self-replicate and recombine. Tierra's virtual machine is written in C. It operates on a custom instruction set designed to facilitate code changes and reordering, including features such as jump to template (as opposed to the relative or absolute jumps common to most instruction sets).

Simulations

The basic Tierra model has been used to experimentally explore in silico the basic processes of evolutionary and ecological dynamics. Processes such as the dynamics of punctuated equilibrium, host-parasite co-evolution and density-dependent natural selection are amenable to investigation within the Tierra framework. A notable difference between Tierra and more conventional models of evolutionary computation, such as genetic algorithms, is that there is no explicit, or exogenous fitness function built into the model. Often in such models there is the notion of a function being "optimized"; in the case of Tierra, the fitness function is endogenous: there is simply survival and death.

Tierra (band)

Tierra is a Latin R&B band, originally from Los Angeles, California, that was first established in the 1970s by former El Chicano members Steve Salas (vocals) and his brother Rudy Salas (guitar). The other original members were Bobby Navarrete (reeds), Joey Guerra (keyboards), Steve Falomir (bass guitar), and Philip Madayag (drums) and Andre Baeza (percussion). Their biggest hit was the 1980 remake of The Intruders' 1967 hit "Together", written by Gamble & Huff, which reached #18 on the Billboard Hot 100, and #9 on the US Billboard R&B chart.

Background

Tierra has the distinction of being the first Latino band to have four songs on the national chart with two of them in the Top 100 at the same time.

Around 1973, Rudy and Steve Salas formed Tierra and their self-titled debut album was recorded. By the mid-1970s the band consisted of the Salas brothers, Rudy Villa on reeds, Kenny Romain on drums and latin-percussion, Conrad Lazano on bass, Aaron Ballesteros on drums and vocals, Alfred Rubaclava on bass and Leon Bisquera on keyboards. Around that time they recorded the album Stranded for the Salsoul records label.

Ghetto

A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, especially because of social, legal, or economic pressure. The term was originally used in Venice to describe the part of the city to which Jews were restricted and segregated.

Etymology

The English word ghetto comes from the Jewish area of Venice, the Venetian Ghetto in Cannaregio. However, there is no agreement among etymologists about the origins of the Venetian language term. The Oxford University Press etymologist Anatoly Liberman considers that all the proposed etymologies for the Venetian name are wrong, and suggests a possible connection with German Gasse, Swedish Gata, Gothic Gatwo, meaning street. Among the theories that Liberman rejects are the following: getto (foundry), as ge- and ghe- have very different pronunciations in Italy, and the area would logically have been called "getti", foundries, in the plural; borghetto, diminutive of borgo, meaning little town, a nonspecific term; and the Hebrew word get, a divorce document, with no connection to "a place of forced separation".