Last

A last is a mechanical form that has a shape similar to that of a human foot. It is used by shoemakers and cordwainers in the manufacture and repair of shoes. Lasts typically come in pairs and have been made from various materials, including hardwoods, cast iron, and high-density plastics.

Production

Lasts come in many styles and sizes, depending on the exact job they are designed for. Common variations include simple one-size lasts used for repairing soles and heels, durable lasts used in modern mass production, and custom-made lasts used in the making of bespoke footwear. Though a last is made approximately in the shape of a human foot, the precise shape is tailored to the kind of footwear being made. For example, a boot last would be designed to hug the instep for a close fit. Modern last shapes are typically designed using dedicated computer-aided design software.

Historically, lasts were typically made from hardwoods and cast iron because these materials retain their shape, even when in contact with wet materials (like leather) and subjected to the mechanical stresses of stretching and shaping shoes on them. Today, wooden lasts are generally used only for bespoke shoemaking, particularly in Europe and North America.

Last (Unthanks album)

Last, the fourth album by English folk group The Unthanks, was released on 14 March 2011. It reached number 40 in the UK Albums Chart and was well received by the critics, receiving a five-starred review in the Sunday Express and four-starred reviews in The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph.

Songs

As well as traditional material, the album included a song written by band member Adrian McNally ("Last"), and versions of songs by Jon Redfern ("Give Away Your Heart"), Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan ("No One Knows I'm Gone"), King Crimson ("Starless") and Alex Glasgow ("Close the Coalhouse Door"). "Last" was also issued as a single, edited for radio play; this was released on 13 June 2011.

Production and release

The album was produced by Adrian McNally; he and Thom Lewis were the sound engineers. The album was mastered by Denis Blackham and was released in the UK by Rabble Rouser Music on 14 March 2011. It was released in Europe by Rough Trade Records and in Australia on the Fuse Music Group label.

Last (TV series)

Last (Hangul: 라스트; RR: Laseuteu) is a 2015 South Korean television series based on the webtoon of the same name by Kang Hyung-kyu. Starring Yoon Kye-sang and Lee Beom-soo, it aired on jTBC on Fridays and Saturdays at 20:40 from July 24 to September 12, 2015 for 16 episodes.

Plot

Jang Tae-ho is a successful fund manager whose seemingly fool-proof financial deal goes horribly awry, leading to a loss of ₩350 million and his business partner's death. In desperate straits, Tae-ho goes on the run from loan shark gangsters and descends into the underbelly of Seoul. He discovers a secret society of homeless people living inside Seoul Station, one that has its own strict hierarchy and rules. Tae-ho vows to find out what went wrong with his deal, claw himself up from rock bottom, and get his life back.

Cast

Slug

Slug, or land slug, is a common name for any apparently shell-less terrestrial gastropod mollusc. The word slug is also often used as part of the common name of any gastropod mollusc that has no shell, a very reduced shell, or only a small internal shell, particularly sea slugs and semislugs (this is in contrast to the common name snail, which applies to gastropods that have a coiled shell large enough that the animal can fully retract its soft parts into the shell).

Various taxonomic families of land slugs form part of several quite different evolutionary lineages, which also include snails. Thus, the various families of slugs are not closely related, despite a superficial similarity in the overall body form. The shell-less condition has arisen many times independently during the evolutionary past, and thus the category "slug" is emphatically a polyphyletic one.

Taxonomy

Of the six orders of Pulmonata, two – the Onchidiacea and Soleolifera – solely comprise slugs. A third family, the Sigmurethra, contains various clades of snails, semi-slugs (i.e. snails whose shells are too small for them to retract fully into) and slugs. The taxonomy of this group is in the process of being revised in light of DNA sequencing. It appears that pulmonates are paraphyletic and basal to the opisthobranchs, which are a terminal branch of the tree. The family Ellobiidae are also polyphyletic.

Semantic URL

Semantic URLs, also sometimes referred to as clean URLs, RESTful URLs, user-friendly URLs, or search engine-friendly URLs, are Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) intended to improve the usability and accessibility of a website or web service by being immediately and intuitively meaningful to non-expert users. Such URL schemes tend to reflect the conceptual structure of a collection of information and decouple the user interface from a server's internal representation of information. Other reasons for using clean URLs include search engine optimization (SEO), conforming to the representational state transfer (REST) style of software architecture, and ensuring that individual web resources remain consistently at the same URL. This makes the World Wide Web a more stable and useful system, and allows more durable and reliable bookmarking of web resources.

Semantic URLs also do not contain implementation details of the underlying web application. This carries the benefit of reducing the difficulty of changing the implementation of the resource at a later date. For example, many non-semantic URLs include the filename of a server-side script, such as example.php, example.asp or cgi-bin. If the underlying implementation of a resource is changed, such URLs would need to change along with it. Likewise, when URLs are non-semantic, if the site database is moved or restructured it has the potential to cause broken links, both internally and from external sites, the latter of which can lead to removal from search engine listings. The use of semantic URLs presents a consistent location for resources to user-agents regardless of internal structure. A further potential benefit to the use of semantic URLs is that the concealment of internal server or application information can improve the security of a system.

Slug (projectile)

A slug is a term used for a solid ballistic projectile. It is "solid" in the sense of being composed of one piece; the shape can vary widely, including partially hollowed shapes. The term is occasionally applied to bullets (just the projectile, never the cartridge as a whole), but is most commonly applied to shotgun projectiles, to differentiate them from shotshells containing shot. Slugs are commonly fired from smoothbored barrels that are unable to impart the gyroscopic spin required for in-flight stability.

A water-slug refers to operating a submarine's torpedo tube that has been filled with water rather than a torpedo, thus shooting a "slug of water.".

See also