Excalibur

Excalibur or Caliburn is the legendary sword of King Arthur, sometimes attributed with magical powers or associated with the rightful sovereignty of Great Britain. Sometimes Excalibur and the Sword in the Stone (the proof of Arthur's lineage) are said to be the same weapon, but in most versions they are considered separate. The sword was associated with the Arthurian legend very early. In Welsh, the sword is called Caledfwlch; in Cornish, the sword is called Calesvol; in Breton, the sword is called Kaledvoulc'h; in Latin, the sword is called Caliburnus.

Forms and etymologies

The name Excalibur ultimately comes from the ancestor of Welsh Caledfwlch (and Breton Kaledvoulc'h, Middle Cornish Calesvol) which is a compound of caled "hard" and bwlch "breach, cleft". Caledfwlch appears in several early Welsh works, including the poem Preiddeu Annwfn (though it is not directly named - but only alluded to - here) and the prose tale Culhwch and Olwen, a work associated with the Mabinogion and written perhaps around 1100. The name was later used in Welsh adaptations of foreign material such as the Bruts (chronicles), which were based on Geoffrey of Monmouth. It is often considered to be related to the phonetically similar Caladbolg, a sword borne by several figures from Irish mythology, although a borrowing of Caledfwlch from Irish Caladbolg has been considered unlikely by Rachel Bromwich and D. Simon Evans. They suggest instead that both names "may have similarly arisen at a very early date as generic names for a sword"; this sword then became exclusively the property of Arthur in the British tradition.

Excalibur (yacht)

Excalibur was a 15.2-metre (50 ft) racing yacht based in Melbourne, Victoria, at the Royal Melbourne Yacht Squadron and owned by Alan Saunders.

Capsize

Excalibur capsized 40 nautical miles off Port Stephens after losing her keel.Excalibur was returning to Melbourne from Coff's Harbour after competing in the 2002 Hamilton Island Race Week. The skipper was Brian McDermott and the crew consisted of Christopher Heyes, Tracey Luke, Peter McLeod, Ann-Maree Pope and John Rogers. All but McDermott and Rogers died, with the body of Christopher Heyes being found on board the upturned hull and the bodies of Tracey Luke, Peter McLeod, Ann-Maree Pope lost at sea.

Brian McDermott and John Rogers survived after spending seven hours drifting in the sea before being found and rescued by the MV Curia, a 50,000 tonne bulk carrier.

Recovery

Excalibur was recovered by the Devine Marine Group to Sydney Harbour after being found 300 nautical miles (560 km) east of Jervis Bay.

Controversy

Forensic examination of the keel after recovery of Excalibur found that the keel had been cut and re-welded. The welding was defective and eventually failed causing the keel to detach from the boat, which resulted in the boat capsizing within 30 seconds. Manslaughter charges were brought against Adrian Presland and Alex Cittadini who both worked for Applied Alloy Yachts, who built Excalibur. Adrian Presland, the welder in charge of the keel of Excalibur, was acquitted. Alex Cittadini, a director of Applied Alloy Yachts, was convicted on four counts of manslaughter in April 2009. On 10 July 2009 he was sentenced to 3 years jail with a non parole period of 18 months. The convictions were overturned by the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal on 18 December 2009. The court found that the jury's verdict was unreasonable, and an acquittal was directed.

Excalibur (disambiguation)

Excalibur is the mythical sword of King Arthur.

Excalibur may also refer to:

Literature and entertainment

Anime and manga

Film and television

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Nil

Nil is a word commonly used to mean not in list or zero; it is one of several names for the number 0.

Nil may also refer to:

Given names

Surname

Places

NIL (programming language)

NIL was a 32-bit implementation of Lisp developed at MIT and intended to be the successor to Maclisp. NIL stood for "New Implementation of LISP", and was in part a response to DECs VAX computer. The project was headed by Jon L White, with a stated goal of maintaining compatibility with MacLisp whilst fixing many of the problems with the language.

History

The Lisp language was invented in 1958 by John McCarthy while he was at MIT. From its inception, Lisp was closely connected with the artificial intelligence research community, especially on PDP-10 systems. Lisp was used as the implementation of the programming language Micro Planner that was the foundation for the famous AI system SHRDLU. Lisp, in particular Maclisp (so called because it originated at MIT's project MAC) was also used to implement the Macsyma computer algebra system. In the 1970s, as AI research spawned commercial offshoots, the performance of existing Lisp systems became a growing issue.

Partly because of garbage collection (Lisp would use stop-and-copy garbage collection of its single heap for memory allocation) and partly because of its representation of internal structures, Lisp became difficult to run on the memory-limited stock hardware of the day. This led to the creation of LISP machines: dedicated hardware for running Lisp environments and programs. An alternative was to use the more powerful commodity hardware which was becoming available, in particular the DEC VAX.

Nil (album)

Nil (Nameless Liberty Underground) (commonly known simply as Nil) is the second studio album released by Japanese rock band The Gazette. It was released on February 8, 2006 by PS Company in Japan. It was also the first album by The Gazette to be released in Europe on May 30, 2006 by CLJ Records.

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References