Balance (Kim-Lian album)

Balance is the debut album of the Dutch singer Kim-Lian. It was released on 25 May 2004 in the Netherlands. Kim-Lian said the album to be "a fun pop/rock album". The album spawned four top 20 singles, being "Teenage Superstar", "Hey Boy", "Garden of Love" and Kim Wilde cover "Kids in America".

Track listing

Singles

Chart performance

Balance (puzzle)

A balance puzzle is a mathematical puzzle which challenges the solver to distribute a subset of numbers so that the several sides of a stylized diagram representing a balance scale are equal. The balance puzzle is a classical number puzzle in the World Puzzle Championship. It consists in a mobile or tree structure, with designated positions where the player must hang specified weights, so that everything balances. See examples below.

There are usually 8 to 12 consecutive numbers (weights) to place, which makes it much smaller than, for example, sudoku.

As in many mathematical puzzles, the solution is unique. Expert puzzlers often prefer puzzles where the rules explicitly states that there is only one solution. This property allows for some reasoning strategies. It also makes generating puzzles a bit more difficult.

Examples

Variants

Balance (accounting)

In banking and accountancy, the outstanding balance is the amount of money owed, (or due), that remains in a deposit account.

Diablo II

Diablo II is an action role-playing hack and slash video game developed by Blizzard North and published by Blizzard Entertainment in 2000 for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. The game, with its dark fantasy and horror themes, was conceptualized and designed by David Brevik and Erich Schaefer, who with Max Schaefer acted as project leads on the game. The producers were Matthew Householder and Bill Roper.

Building on the success of its predecessor Diablo (1996), Diablo II was one of the most popular games of 2000. Major factors that contributed to Diablo II's success include its continuation of popular fantasy themes from the previous game and its access to Blizzard's free online play service Battle.net. An expansion to Diablo II, Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, was released in 2001. A sequel, Diablo III, was announced in 2008, and was released on May 15, 2012.

Gameplay

Diablo II's storyline progresses through four chapters or "Acts". Each act follows a more or less predetermined path, although there is some random-level generation in wilderness areas and dungeons between key cities. The player progresses through the story by completing a series of quests within each act, with optional quests providing additional rewards. In contrast to the first Diablo, whose levels consisted of descending deeper and deeper into a Gothic-themed dungeon and Hell, Diablo II's environments are much more varied. Act I, Rogue Encampment, is a simple palisade fort placed between plains and forests and is similar to the original Diablo. Act II, Lut Gholein, mimics Egypt desert while Act III, Kurast, is supposedly based on the Maya civilization jungles. Act IV takes place in Hell and is the shortest, with just three quests compared to the other Acts that have six.

Marius de Romanus

Marius de Romanus is a fictional character in The Vampire Chronicles novels written by Anne Rice. He is the primary character in the novel Blood and Gold.

Fictional biography

Marius de Romanus was born in 30 BC in Rome. He was an illegitimate child of a Roman patrician and a Celtic slave from the land of Gaul. In his mortal years, he travelled the Empire and much of the known world compiling a travelogue/history of the world. Contrary to his appearance in the movie Queen of the Damned (in which he was portrayed by Vincent Perez), he has white-blonde hair curled at the shoulders and cobalt blue eyes. Due to his age, his skin is often described as being as pale and hard as white marble; to seem "normal" to mortals, he often applies salves and oils to his skin as stated in Blood and Gold.

When he was approximately 40 years old, he was abducted by druids who followed the religion of the Gods of the Groves. Marius was taken to the Grove where he was made into a vampire by the God of the Grove just before the yearly Feast of Samhain. He was instructed by the god to go and try, by any means possible, to find out why vampires all over the world (and the god himself) had been burned or destroyed, even though they had not been exposed to fire or the sun. Marius traveled to Egypt and became the caretaker of the original two vampires, Akasha and Enkil, Those Who Must Be Kept.

Marius (crater)

Marius is a lunar crater located on the Oceanus Procellarum. The surface to the west and north of this crater contains a large number of lunar domes spread across an area over a hundred kilometers in diameter that may be of volcanic origin dubbed the Marius Hills. These domes, if volcanic, may have been formed by magma that is fairly more viscous than the volcanic material that formed the basaltic lunar maria. The nearest named crater feature is Reiner to the southwest. Kepler is located to the east-southeast, and rays from that formation reach the rim of Marius.

The floor of Marius has been flooded by basaltic lava, and the surface is relatively smooth and flat. There is no central rise, but a small craterlet Marius G lies in the northeast part of the floor. The crater rim is low and generally circular in form.

The area of this crater was one of the locations proposed for an Apollo mission, but the expedition was subsequently cancelled. About 50 kilometres to the southeast was the landing site of the Luna 7 probe.