Noon

Noon (also midday or noon time) is usually defined as 12 o'clock in the daytime. The term midday is also used colloquially to refer to an arbitrary period of time in the middle of the day. Solar noon is when the sun crosses the meridian and is at its highest elevation in the sky, at 12 o'clock apparent solar time. The local or clock time of solar noon depends on the longitude and date. The opposite of noon is midnight.

In many cultures in the Northern Hemisphere, noon had ancient geographic associations with the direction "south" (as did midnight with "north" in some cultures). Remnants of the noon = south association are preserved in the words for noon in French (Midi) and Italian (Mezzogiorno), both of which also refer to the southern parts of the respective countries. Modern Polish, Ukrainian, and Serbian go a step farther, with the words for noon (południe, південь, пoднe – literally "half-day") also meaning "south" and the words for "midnight" (północ, північ, пoнoħ – literally "half-night", as with English mid(dle) meaning "half") also meaning "north".

List of The Keys to the Kingdom characters

The Keys to the Kingdom is a fantasy-adventure book series, written by Garth Nix, started in 2003 with Mister Monday and ended with "Lord Sunday". The series follows the story of Arthur Penhaligon and his charge as the Rightful Heir of the Architect to claim the Seven Keys to the Kingdom and the seven demesnes of the House.

Heroes

Arthur Penhaligon

Arthur, a 12-year-old boy, has recently moved to a town and wants to fit into it. After suffering an asthma attack, he is saved by a mysterious metal object, called a Key, given by an even stranger character, Mister Monday, whose servants bring an incurable plague to Arthur's town. Arthur hurries to the House, a mysterious structure that only he can see. Shortly after arriving in the House, Arthur discovers the structure of the house is a complete universe and is informed of his duty to unseat the seven Trustees who run the House, claim their Keys, and rule all of Creation. Arthur cannot live an ordinary life unless he overthrows all of the Trustees, who are also known as the Morrow Days. To do this, however, he must use the Keys, which infect him with sorcery and make him a Denizen of the House; and whenever Denizens appear in the Secondary Realms (everything in Creation that is not in the House, including Earth), they are "inimical to mortal life", i.e. incredibly harmful to reality. This dilemma is a constant theme in the books: as Arthur does not wish to turn into a Denizen; he often resists using the Keys, and only does when it is absolutely necessary.

Nun (letter)

Nun is the fourteenth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Nūn , Hebrew Nun נ, Aramaic Nun , Syriac Nūn ܢܢ, and Arabic Nūn ن (in abjadi order). It is the third letter in Thaana (ނ), pronounced as "noonu".
Its sound value is [n].

The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek nu (Ν), Etruscan , Latin N, and Cyrillic Н.

Origins

Nun is believed to be derived from an Egyptian hieroglyph of a snake (the Hebrew word for snake, nachash begins with a Nun and snake in Aramaic is nun) or eel. Some have hypothesized a hieroglyph of fish in water as its origin (in Arabic, nūn means large fish or whale). The Phoenician letter was named nūn "fish", but the glyph has been suggested to descend from a hypothetical Proto-Canaanite naḥš "snake", based on the name in Ethiopic, ultimately from a hieroglyph representing a snake,

(see Middle Bronze Age alphabets). Naḥš in modern Arabic literally means "bad luck". The cognate letter in Ge'ez and descended Semitic languages of Ethiopia is nehas, which also means "brass".

Pluto

Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond Neptune. It was the first Kuiper belt object to be discovered. It is the largest and second-most-massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System and the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object directly orbiting the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume but is less massive than Eris, a dwarf planet in the scattered disc. Like other Kuiper belt objects, Pluto is primarily made of ice and rock and is relatively small—about one-sixth the mass of Earth's Moon and one-third its volume. It has a moderately eccentric and inclined orbit during which it ranges from 30 to 49 astronomical units or AU (4.4–7.4 billion km) from the Sun. This means that Pluto periodically comes closer to the Sun than Neptune, but a stable orbital resonance with Neptune prevents them from colliding. Light from the Sun takes about 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its average distance (39.5 AU).

Pluto (manga)

Pluto (プルートウ, Purūtō) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Naoki Urasawa. It was serialized in Shogakukan's Big Comic Original magazine from 2003 to 2009, with the chapters collected into eight tankōbon volumes. The series is based on Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, specifically "The Greatest Robot on Earth" (地上最大のロボット, Chijō saidai no robotto) story arc, and named after the arc's chief villain. Urasawa reinterprets the story as a suspenseful murder mystery starring Gesicht, a Europol robot detective trying to solve the case of a string of robot and human deaths. Takashi Nagasaki is credited as the series' co-author. Macoto Tezuka, Osamu Tezuka's son, supervised the series, and Tezuka Productions is listed as having given cooperation.

Pluto was awarded the ninth Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize, an Excellence Prize at the seventh Japan Media Arts Festival and the 2010 Seiun Award for Best Comic. In France, it won the Intergenerational Award at the Angoulême International Comics Festival and the Prix Asie-ACBD award at Japan Expo in 2011. The series was licensed and released in English in North America by Viz Media, under the name Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka. By 2010, over 8.5 million volumes of the manga had been sold.

University of Central Lancashire

The University of Central Lancashire (abbreviated UCLan) is a public university based in Preston, Lancashire, England. It has its roots in The Institution For The Diffusion Of Useful Knowledge founded in 1828. Subsequently known as Harris Art College, then Preston Polytechnic, then Lancashire Polytechnic, in 1992 it was granted university status by the Privy Council. The university is the 19th largest in the UK in terms of student numbers.

History

The Institution for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was founded in 1828 by Joseph Livesey's Temperance Society. The society was born from a pledge made by seven Preston working men (whose names can be seen on a plaque in the university's library) to never again consume alcohol.

The institute was housed in a classical-revivalist building on Cannon Street, before eventually expanding under the endowment of a local lawyer, Edmund Robert Harris, who died in 1877. The expansion brought with it several new buildings and houses in the nearby Regent Street were purchased and demolished as a consequence. The institute became a regional centre of excellence for the arts and sciences.