Icarus

In Greek mythology, Icarus (the Latin spelling, conventionally adopted in English; Ancient Greek: Ἴκαρος, Íkaros, Etruscan: Vikare) is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth. Often depicted in art, Icarus and his father attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. Icarus's father warns him first of complacency and then of hubris, asking that he fly neither too low nor too high, so the sea's dampness would not clog his wings or the sun's heat melt them. Icarus ignored his father's instructions not to fly too close to the sun, whereupon the wax in his wings melted and he fell into the sea. This tragic theme of failure at the hands of hubris contains similarities to that of Phaëthon.

The Legend

Icarus' father Daedalus, a very talented and remarkable Athenian craftsman, built the Labyrinth for King Minos of Crete near his palace at Knossos to imprison the Minotaur, a half-man, half-bull monster born of his wife and the Cretan bull. Minos imprisoned Daedalus himself in the labyrinth because he gave Minos's daughter, Ariadne, a clew (or ball of string) in order to help Theseus, the enemy of Minos, to survive the Labyrinth and defeat the Minotaur.

Icarus (band)

Icarus are a band from London, England, who specialise in a kind of electronic drum and bass with elements of experimental jazz and rich instrumentation. Formed in 1993 by Ollie Bown and Sam Britton, the band's music has been described by Kieran Hebden as "really beautiful and also quite kind of evil". Hebden included an Icarus track, "Benevolent Incubator", on his Late Night Tales compilation, and Icarus also provided a remix of the Four Tet track "My Angel Rocks Back and Forth".

Icarus founded the independent label Not Applicable in 2002.

Discography

Albums

Roger Squires

Roger Squires, born 22 February 1932, in Tettenhall, Wolverhampton, England, is a British crossword compiler, living in Ironbridge, Shropshire, who is best known for being the world's most prolific compiler. He compiles under the pseudonym Rufus in The Guardian, Dante in The Financial Times and is the Monday setter for the Daily Telegraph.

Early days, education, the military, and introduction to crosswords

In the Second World War, as a deck leader in the Sea Scouts, he acted as a messenger, helping to transfer the D-Day wounded and was a member of a Gang Show entertaining war workers in factories, as if they were not suffering enough. Squires was educated at Wolverhampton Grammar School where he gained his School Certificate before joining the Royal Navy at age 15 as a Boy Seaman. He trained at the notorious HMS Ganges, where the lash was still in use, winning the award for the best all-round boy of the year, coming first in the Seamanship, Gunnery and School examinations and representing the ship at football and cricket. At 20, as the youngest ever Seaman Petty Officer, he became a Lieutenant in the Fleet Air Arm and flew for 10 years from various carriers, visiting over 50 countries. He flew in several Squadrons, 703X test flying the new Gannet anti-submarine aircraft, various Flights of 849 AEW Squadron in Skyraiders and Gannets, and in 831 Radio Warfare Squadron as Senior Observer. His first published puzzle appeared in 1963, the year that he left the Navy, in the Wolverhampton Express & Star. The first national was the Radio Times, and in the same year he became a regular compiler with the Birmingham Post. He then started compiling for syndicates that supplied puzzles for newspapers in the UK and abroad, including Central Press Features, The Press Association, The Syndicate, First Features, Morley Adams, and Gemini Crosswords.

Hydra

Hydra may refer to:

Astronomy

Brands and company names

People

Places

Popular culture

Comics and animation

Hydra (film)

Hydra (also known as Hydra: The Lost Island) is a 2009 low-budget monster movie by Andrew Prendergast and Peter Sullivan, which blends elements of horror, thriller and classical mythology. It was made for cable TV and subsequently internationally distributed on DVD.

Plot

Young archaeologist Dr. Valerie Cammon (Polly Shannon) and her colleague Dr. Kim (Philip Moon) go by ship to a volcanic island in the Mediterranean sea. While she seeks relics in a cave, a seaquake sinks their ship without survivors. At about the same time all archaeologists except for Dr. Cammon get eaten by the re-awakened ancient Lernaean Hydra.

During the tempest, a whole island disappears. Two months later, Vincent (Alex McArthur) and Dixie Camden (Jana Williams) intended to organize a man-hunt for cranky millionaires. Their Captain (Michael Shamus Wiles), unaware of the Hydra, suggests the nearby, aforementioned island as a substitute.

Four ex-convicts, Tim Nolan George Stults), Gwen Russell (Dawn Olivieri), Bob Crick (James Wlcek) and Ronnie Kaplan (Texas Battle), are marooned at the shore and given 24 hours' headstart.

Hydra (chess)

Hydra was a chess machine, designed by a team with Dr. Christian "Chrilly" Donninger, Dr. Ulf Lorenz, GM Christopher Lutz and Muhammad Nasir Ali. Since 2006 the development team consisted only of Donninger and Lutz. Hydra was under the patronage of the PAL Group and Sheikh Tahnoon Bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi. The goal of the Hydra Project was to dominate the computer chess world, and finally have an accepted victory over humans.

Hydra represented a potentially significant leap in the strength of computer chess. Design team member Lorenz estimates its FIDE equivalent playing strength to be over Elo 3000, and this is in line with its results against Michael Adams and Shredder 8, the former micro-computer chess champion.

Hydra began competing in 2002 and played its last game in June 2006. In June 2009, Christopher Lutz stated that "unfortunately the Hydra project is discontinued." The sponsors decided to end the project.

Architecture

The Hydra team originally planned to have Hydra appear in four versions: Orthus, Chimera, Scylla and then the final Hydra version – the strongest of them all. The original version of Hydra evolved from an earlier design called Brutus and works in a similar fashion to Deep Blue, utilising large numbers of purpose-designed chips (in this case implemented as a field-programmable gate array or FPGA). In Hydra, there are multiple computers, each with its own FPGA acting as a chess coprocessor. These co-processors enabled Hydra to search enormous numbers of positions per second, making each processor more than ten times faster than an unaided computer.