Cotton gin

A cotton gin is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, allowing for much greater productivity than manual cotton separation. The fibers are processed into clothing or other cotton goods, and any undamaged cotton was used for clothes. Seeds may be used to grow more cotton or to produce cottonseed oil and meal.

Although simple handheld roller gins have been used in India and other countries since at least 500 AD, the first modern mechanical cotton gin was created by American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793 and patented in 1794. It used a combination of a wire screen and small wire hooks to pull the cotton through, while brushes continuously removed the loose cotton lint to prevent jams. Whitney's gin revolutionized the cotton industry in the United States, but also led to the growth of slavery in the American South as the demand for cotton workers rapidly increased. The invention has thus been identified as an inadvertent contributing factor to the outbreak of the American Civil War. Modern automated cotton gins use multiple powered cleaning cylinders and saws, and offer far higher productivity than their hand-powered forebears.

Gin (disambiguation)

Gin is an alcoholic beverage flavoured with juniper berries.

Gin or Gins may also refer to:

People

Places

Science

Art, entertainment, and media

Other uses

See also

Kate and Gin

Kate and Gin are a musical canine freestyle act consisting of Kate Nicholas, from Norbury, Cheshire and her dancing Border Collie, Gin. The two achieved fame following their 2008 appearances on the second series of ITV talent show Britain's Got Talent. Since the show, the duo have appeared publicly and in pantomimes, as well as publishing a book, Kate and Gin, about dog training. In 2011, Nicholas joined the Royal Army Veterinary Corps, training dogs for the British military.

Britain's Got Talent

Kate and Gin first appeared on the second series of Britain's Got Talent on 12 April 2008 where they performed to Moby's remake of the James Bond theme tune, received "three yeses" by the judges (Simon Cowell, Amanda Holden and Piers Morgan) and were sent through to the semi-finals. Before the live shows, Cowell described the duo as the favourite to win. In the live semi-final, broadcast on 26 May 2008, Kate and Gin were again successful, performing a different routine to The Scissor Sisters' "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'" and finishing second behind dance group Signature. Before the final Kate and Gin were one of the five favourites to win Britain's Got Talent. They again performed a routine to Moby's "James Bond Theme" in the show's final on 31 May 2008, but failed to make the final three. The competition was eventually won by George Sampson. After the final, the duo performed with others from the show in the Britain's Got Talent Live Tour, again performing a routine to the Scissor Sisters' "I Don't Feel Like Dancin'".

Gin rummy

Gin rummy, or simply gin, is a two-player card game created in 1909 by Elwood T. Baker and his son C. Graham Baker. According to John Scarne, Gin evolved from 19th-century Whiskey Poker and was created with the intention of being faster than standard rummy but less spontaneous than knock rummy. John Scarne's theory deriving Rummy from Poker through the medium of Whiskey Poker has not gained general acceptance.

Deck

Gin is played with a standard 52-deck pack of cards. The ranking from high to low is King, Queen, Jack, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, Ace (kings over aces).

Objective

The objective in gin rummy is to score points and reach an agreed number of points or more, usually 100, before the opponent does.

The basic game strategy is to improve one's hand by forming melds and eliminating deadwood. Gin has two types of meld: Sets of 3 or 4 cards sharing the same rank, e.g. 8♥ 8♦ 8♠; and runs of 3 or more cards in sequence, of the same suit. e.g. 3♥ 4♥ 5♥ or more. Deadwood cards are those not in any meld. Aces are considered low—they can form a set with other aces but only the low end of runs (A♠ 2♠ 3♠ is a legal run but Q♠ K♠ A♠ is not). A player can form any combination of melds within their hand, whether it contains all sets, all runs, or both. A hand can contain three or fewer melds to knock or form legal gin.

Numeral prefix

Numeral or number prefixes are prefixes derived from numerals or occasionally other numbers. In English and other European languages, they are used to coin numerous series of words, such as unicycle – bicycle – tricycle, dyad – triad – decade, biped – quadruped, September – October – November – December, decimal – hexadecimal, sexagenarian – octogenarian, centipede – millipede, etc. There are two principal systems, taken from Latin and Greek, each with several subsystems; in addition, Sanskrit occupies a marginal position. There is also an international set of metric prefixes, which are used in the metric system, and which for the most part are either distorted from the forms below or not based on actual number words.

Table of number prefixes in English

In the following prefixes, a final vowel is normally dropped before a root that begins with a vowel, with the exceptions of bi-, which is bis- before a vowel, and of the other monosyllables, du-, di-, dvi-, tri-, which are invariable.

Philip Miller

Philip Miller FRS (1691 – 18 December 1771) was an English botanist of Scottish descent.

Born in Deptford or Greenwich Miller was chief gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden from 1722 until he was pressured to retire shortly before his death. According to the botanist Peter Collinson, who visited the physic garden in July 1764 and recorded his observation in his commonplace books, Miller "has raised the reputation of the Chelsea Garden so much that it excels all the gardens of Europe for its amazing variety of plants of all orders and classes and from all climates..." He wrote The Gardener's and Florists Dictionary or a Complete System of Horticulture (1724) and The Gardener's Dictionary containing the Methods of Cultivating and Improving the Kitchen Fruit and Flower Garden, which first appeared in 1731 in an impressive folio and passed through eight expanding editions in his lifetime and was translated into Dutch by Job Baster.

Miller corresponded with other botanists, and obtained plants from all over the world, many of which he cultivated for the first time in England and is credited as their introducer. His knowledge of living plants, for which he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, was unsurpassed in breadth in his lifetime. He trained William Aiton, who later became head gardener at Kew, and William Forsyth, after whom Forsythia was named. The Duke of Bedford contracted him to supervise the pruning of fruit trees at Woburn Abbey and the care of his prized collection of American trees, especially evergreens, which were grown from seeds that, on Miller's suggestion, had been sent in barrels from Pennsylvania, where they had been collected by John Bartram. Through a consortium of sixty subscribers, 1733–66, the contents of Bartram's boxes introduced such American trees as Abies balsamea and Pinus rigida into English gardens.

Shire (Middle-earth)

The Shire is a region of J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth, described in The Lord of the Rings and other works. The Shire refers to an area settled exclusively by Hobbits and largely removed from the goings-on in the rest of Middle-earth. It is located in the northwest of the continent, in the large region of Eriador and the Kingdom of Arnor. Its name in Westron was Sûza "Shire" or Sûzat "The Shire". Its name in Sindarin was i Drann.

Geography

According to Tolkien, the Shire measured 40 leagues (193 km, 120 miles) from the Far Downs in the west to the Brandywine Bridge in the east, and 50 leagues (241 km, 150 miles) from the northern moors to the marshes in the south. This is confirmed in an essay by Tolkien on translating The Lord of the Rings, where he describes the Shire as having an area of 18,000 square miles (47,000 km²).

The original territory of the Shire was bounded on the east by the Baranduin River, on the north by uplands rising to the old centre of Arnor, on the west by the White Downs, and on the south by marshland south of the River Shirebourn. After the original settlement, hobbits also expanded to the east into Buckland between the Baranduin and the Old Forest, and (much later) to the west into the Westmarch between the White Downs and the Tower Hills.