Relic

In religion, a relic usually consists of the physical remains of a saint or the personal effects of the saint or venerated person preserved for purposes of veneration as a tangible memorial. Relics are an important aspect of some forms of Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Shamanism, and many other religions. Relic derives from the Latin reliquiae, meaning "remains," and a form of the Latin verb relinquere, to "leave behind, or abandon." A reliquary is a shrine that houses one or more religious relics.

Relics in classical antiquity

In ancient Greece, a city or sanctuary might claim to possess, without necessarily displaying, the remains of a venerated hero as a part of a hero cult. Other venerable objects associated with the hero were more likely to be on display in sanctuaries, such as spears, shields, or other weaponry; chariots, ships or figureheads; furniture such as chairs or tripods; and clothing. The sanctuary of the Leucippides at Sparta claimed to display the egg of Leda.

The bones were not regarded as holding a particular power derived from the hero, with some exceptions, such as the divine shoulder of Pelops held at Olympia. Miracles and healing were not regularly attributed to them; rather, their presence was meant to serve a tutelary function, as the tomb of Oedipus was said to protect Athens.

Halo 2

Halo 2 is a 2004 first-person shooter video game developed by Bungie Studios. Released for the Xbox video game console on November 9, 2004, the game is the second installment in the Halo franchise and the sequel to 2001's critically acclaimed Halo: Combat Evolved. A Microsoft Windows version of the game was released on May 31, 2007, developed by an internal team at Microsoft Game Studios known as Hired Gun. The game features a new game engine, as well as using the Havok physics engine; added weapons and vehicles, and new multiplayer maps. The player alternately assumes the roles of the human Master Chief and the alien Arbiter in a 26th-century conflict between the human United Nations Space Command and genocidal Covenant.

After the success of Combat Evolved, a sequel was expected and highly anticipated. Bungie found inspiration in plot points and gameplay elements that had been left out of their first game, including multiplayer over the Internet through Xbox Live. Time constraints forced a series of cutbacks in the size and scope of the game, including a cliffhanger ending to the game's campaign mode that left many in the studio dissatisfied. Among Halo 2's marketing efforts was an alternate reality game called "I Love Bees" that involved players solving real-world puzzles.

Relic (novel)

Relic is a 1995 novel by American authors Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child and is the first in the Special Agent Pendergast series. As a techno-thriller, it commented on the possibilities inherent in genetic manipulation, while also being critical of museums and their role both in society and in the scientific community. It is the basis of the 1997 film The Relic.

Plot

In September of 1987, Dr. Julian Whittlesey is leading an expedition through the Amazon Basin in the Brazilian rainforest, in search of the lost Kothoga tribe. He hopes to prove that they still do exist, and in the process learn more about their culture, including their lizard god Mbwun ("He Who Walks On All Fours"), supposedly the son of Satan. However, Whittlesey disappears after he finds the mutilated body of his partner Crocker, and realizes that a creature in the brush is stalking him. A year later, in Belem, a dock worker named Ven is suddenly and brutally killed when a freighter arrives with a shipment of crates from Whittlesey's expedition.

Minuit

Minuit is French for midnight. It may also refer to:

Minuit (band)

Minuit (pronounced min-wee, French for midnight) are an electronic band from New Zealand, formed in Nelson.

The members of Minuit include lead singer, Ruth Carr, with Paul Dodge (also known as Gimme a C!) and Ryan Beehre (also known as Funk'n'SloCuts) playing machines.

Early work

Minuit began as a guitar band with lead vocalist, Ruth Carr, on drums. Ryan Beehre bought a sampler and turned the band electronic, replacing the need for a drummer and putting Ruth out front as vocalist. The band released four self-released EPs, Sonic Experience (1998), Silver (1999), Luck (2000) and Except You (2002).

The 88

In 2003 Minuit signed to Tardus music and released their debut album, The 88. Some of the songs had already been released on their earlier EPs. The 88 achieved gold certification in New Zealand.

Minuit first came to prominence in 2002 when their first single "Species II" was used in the intro to the New Zealand TV show Queer Nation.

A video of the single "Except You" was made by their flatmate Alyx Duncan who thought it would be fun. The result was an award-winning eerie carnival-themed music video.

MINUIT

MINUIT, now MINUIT2, is a numerical minimization computer program originally written in the FORTRAN programming language by CERN staff physicist Fred James in the 1970s. The program searches for minima in a user-defined function with respect to one or more parameters using several different methods as specified by the user. The original FORTRAN code was later ported to C++ by the ROOT project; both the FORTRAN and C++ versions are in use today. The program is very widely used in particle physics, and hundreds of published papers cite use of MINUIT. In the early 2000s Fred James started a project to implement MINUIT in C++ using object-oriented programming. The new MINUIT is an optional package (minuit2) in the ROOT release. As of October 2014 the latest version is 5.34.14, released on 24 January 2014. There is also a Java port as well as several Python ports.

MINUIT is not a program that can be distributed as an executable binary to be run by a relatively unskilled user: the user must write and compile a subroutine defining the function to be optimized, and oversee the optimization process.