Magnolia

Magnolia is a large genus of about 210flowering plant species in the subfamily Magnolioideae of the family Magnoliaceae. It is named after French botanist Pierre Magnol.

Magnolia is an ancient genus. Appearing before bees did, the flowers are theorized to have evolved to encourage pollination by beetles. To avoid damage from pollinating beetles, the carpels of Magnolia flowers are extremely tough.Fossilised specimens of M. acuminata have been found dating to 20 million years ago, and of plants identifiably belonging to the Magnoliaceae date to 95 million years ago. Another aspect of Magnolia considered to represent an ancestral state is that the flower bud is enclosed in a bract rather than in sepals; the perianth parts are undifferentiated and called tepals rather than distinct sepals and petals. Magnolia shares the tepal characteristic with several other flowering plants near the base of the flowering plant lineage such as Amborella and Nymphaea (as well as with many more recently derived plants such as Lilium).

Magnolia (Turnover album)

Magnolia is the debut studio album by American pop punk band Turnover. The album was released on April 16, 2013 via Run For Cover Records.

Track listing

References

Magnolia (soundtrack)

Magnolia: Music from the Motion Picture is the soundtrack album to the Paul Thomas Anderson motion picture of the same name. Largely composed of works by Aimee Mann, enough such that she receives a title billing on the album, the album also features tracks by Gabrielle, Supertramp, and Jon Brion.

Description

Anderson has stated that Magnolia was inspired by Mann's music.

Many of the songs feature prominently within the film, with "Wise Up" even being sung by the cast at one point, but only two of the songs were written expressly for the film, those being "You Do" and "Save Me". "Save Me" would garner Mann an Academy Award nomination for Best Song, losing to Phil Collins's song "You'll Be in My Heart" from Tarzan.

The tracks "Deathly", "Driving Sideways", and "You Do" show up on Aimee Mann's following album, Bachelor No. 2, though the track "Save Me" replaces "Driving Sideways" on EU editions. "Nothing Is Good Enough", here an instrumental, appears in lyrical form on that album. (Bachelor also includes "Red Vines", a song Mann wrote about director Anderson.)

Balance (game design)

In game design, balance is the concept and the practice of tuning a game's rules, usually with the goal of preventing any of its component systems from being ineffective or otherwise undesirable when compared to their peers. An unbalanced system represents wasted development resources at the very least, and at worst can undermine the game's entire ruleset by making important roles or tasks impossible to perform.

Balancing and fairness

Balancing does not necessarily mean making a game fair. This is particularly true of action games: Jaime Griesemer, design lead at Bungie, said in a lecture to other designers that "every fight in Halo is unfair". This potential for unfairness creates uncertainty, leading to the tension and excitement that action games seek to deliver. In these cases balancing is instead the management of unfair scenarios, with the ultimate goal of ensuring that all of the strategies which the game intends to support are viable. The extent to which those strategies are equal to one another defines the character of the game in question.

Gimp (thread)

Gimp is a narrow ornamental trim used in sewing or embroidery. It is made of silk, wool, or cotton and is often stiffened with metallic wire or coarse cord running through it. Gimp is used as trimming for dresses, curtains, furniture, etc. Originally the term referred to a thread with a cord or wire in the center, but now is mainly used for a trimming braided or twisted from this thread. Sometimes gimp is covered in beads or spangles.

The term "gimp" for a braided trim has been around since the 15th and 16th centuries, when gimp threads were braided into flat braids up to a quarter of an inch (7 mm) wide. The braids were sometimes made either with bobbins or needle and thread, which gave greater control over the threads. Gimp trim was then sewn down to form designs.

The name "gimp" has also been applied to the plastic thread used in the knotting and plaiting craft scoubidou.

In lace

The term gimp with reference to lace refers to the thread that is used to outline the pattern. This thread is normally thicker than that used to make the lace. It gives definition and slightly raises the edge of the design. A gimp thread is used widely in many laces, with notable exceptions being Binche lace and Valenciennes lace.

GIMP

GIMP (/ɡɪmp/; an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a free and open-source raster graphics editor used for image retouching and editing, free-form drawing, resizing, cropping, photo-montages, converting between different image formats, and more specialized tasks.

GIMP began in 1995 as the school project of two university students; now GIMP is a full-fledged application, available on all distributions of Linux, OS X and Microsoft Windows. It is released under GPLv3+ licenses and is freely distributed to (and by) anybody, who can look at its contents and its source code and can add features or fix problems.

GIMP is expandable and extensible; it is designed to be augmented with plug-ins and extensions in order to improve its functionality. This is implemented through the use of a scripting interface.

History

GIMP was originally released as the General Image Manipulation Program, by creators Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis. Development of GIMP began in 1995 as a semester-long project at the University of California, Berkeley; the first public release of GIMP (0.54) was made in January 1996. When Richard Stallman visited UC Berkeley the following year, Kimball and Mattis asked him if they could change General to GNU (the name given to the operating system created by Stallman). With Stallman's approval, the definition of the acronym GIMP was changed to mean the GNU Image Manipulation Program, which also reflects its existence under the GNU Project. GIMP is developed by a self-organized group of volunteers under the banner of the GNU Project.