Mill Reef

Mill Reef (1968–1986) was a Champion Thoroughbred racehorse and sire. He was bred in the United States but was trained in the United Kingdom throughout his racing career which lasted from 1970 to 1972. Mill Reef won twelve of his fourteen races and finished second in the other two. He was an outstanding two-year-old in 1970, and proved even better at three, winning the Epsom Derby, the Eclipse Stakes, the King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes and the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe. He won both his starts as a four-year-old before his career was ended by injury.

He was an exact contemporary of another British-trained champion, the English-bred Brigadier Gerard who defeated him in their only racecourse meeting in the 2000 Guineas. As the race was over Brigadier Gerard's optimum distance of one mile, the relative merits of the two colts continued to be the subject of debate.

Background

Mill Reef was bred in the United States of America at the Rokeby Stables in Virginia of his owner and breeder the philanthropist Paul Mellon. He was a son of Never Bend out of the mare Milan Mill by Princequillo. As a yearling it was thought that his action better suited him to a career on the turf courses in Europe rather than the dirt tracks in America and so he was sent to England in December 1969 to be trained by Paul Mellon's young English trainer Ian Balding at Kingsclere. He was ridden by Geoff Lewis in all his fourteen races. Mellon named the horse after the Mill Reef Club, which is situated on the island of Antigua in the West Indies. The Mellon family has maintained a home at Mill Reef since its founding in 1947.

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.

Mill (currency)

The mill or mille (₥) (sometimes mil in the UK, when discussing property taxes in the United States, or previously in Cyprus and Malta) is a now-abstract unit of currency used sometimes in accounting. In the United States, it is a notional unit equivalent to ¹⁄₁₀₀₀ of a United States dollar (a tenth of a cent). In the United Kingdom it was proposed during the decades of discussion on the decimalization of the pound as a ¹⁄₁₀₀₀ division of the pound sterling. Several other currencies used the mill, such as the Maltese lira.

The term comes from the Latin "millesimum", meaning "thousandth part".

Usage

United States

In the United States, the term was first used by the Continental Congress in 1786, being described as the "lowest money of account, of which 1000 shall be equal to the federal dollar."

The Coinage Act (1792) describes milles and other subdivisions of the dollar:

The mint of Philadelphia made half cents worth 5 mills each from 1793 to 1857.

Tokens in this denomination were issued by some states and local governments (and by some private interests) for such uses as payment of sales tax. These were of inexpensive material such as tin, aluminium, plastic or paper. Rising inflation depreciated the value of these tokens in relation to the value of their constituent materials; this depreciation led to their eventual abandonment. Virtually none were made after the 1960s.

Reef

A reef is a bar of rock, sand, coral or similar material, lying beneath the surface of water. Reefs may be up to 261 feet (80 m) below the surface.

Many reefs result from abiotic processes—deposition of sand, wave erosion planing down rock outcrops, and other natural processes—but the best-known reefs are the coral reefs of tropical waters developed through biotic processes dominated by corals and calcareous algae. Artificial reefs such as shipwrecks are sometimes created to enhance physical complexity on generally featureless sand bottoms in order to attract a diverse assemblage of organisms, especially fish.

Biotic reef

There is a variety of biotic reef types, including oyster reefs, but the most massive and widely distributed are tropical coral reefs. Although corals are major contributors to the framework and bulk material comprising a coral reef, the organisms most responsible for reef growth against the constant assault from ocean waves are calcareous algae, especially, although not entirely, species of coralline algae.

Vein (geology)

In geology, a vein is a distinct sheetlike body of crystallized minerals within a rock. Veins form when mineral constituents carried by an aqueous solution within the rock mass are deposited through precipitation. The hydraulic flow involved is usually due to hydrothermal circulation.

Veins are classically thought of as being the result of growth of crystals on the walls of planar fractures in rocks, with the crystal growth occurring normal to the walls of the cavity, and the crystal protruding into open space. This certainly is the method for the formation of some veins. However, it is rare in geology for significant open space to remain open in large volumes of rock, especially several kilometers below the surface. Thus, there are two main mechanisms considered likely for the formation of veins: open-space filling and crack-seal growth.

Open space filling

Open space filling is the hallmark of epithermal vein systems, such as a stockwork, in greisens or in certain skarn environments. For open space filling to take effect, the confining pressure is generally considered to be below 0.5 GPa, or less than 3-5 kilometers. Veins formed in this way may exhibit a colloform, agate-like habit, of sequential selvages of minerals which radiate out from nucleation points on the vein walls and appear to fill up the available open space. Often evidence of fluid boiling is present. Vugs, cavities and geodes are all examples of open-space filling phenomena in hydrothermal systems.

Reef knot

The reef knot, or square knot, is an ancient and simple binding knot used to secure a rope or line around an object. It is sometimes also referred to as a Hercules knot. The knot is formed by tying a left-handed overhand knot and then a right-handed overhand knot, or vice versa. A common mnemonic for this procedure is "right over left; left over right", which is often appended with the rhyming suffix "... makes a knot both tidy and tight". Two consecutive overhands of the same handedness will make a granny knot. The working ends of the reef knot must emerge both at the top or both at the bottom, otherwise a thief knot results.

Although the reef knot is often seen used for tying two ropes together, it is not recommended for this purpose because of the potential instability of the knot, and over-use has resulted in many deaths (see #Misuse as a bend).

Naming

The reef knot is at least between 4,000 and 9,000 years old. The name "reef knot" dates from at least 1794 and originates from its common use to reef sails, that is to tie part of the sail down to decrease its effective surface area in strong winds. To release the knot a sailor could collapse it with a pull of one hand; the sail's weight would make the collapsed knot come apart. It is specifically this behavior which makes the knot unsafe for connecting two ropes together.