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".

Oxynoemacheilus galilaeus

Oxynoemacheilus galilaeus is a species of stone loach in the Nemacheilidae family native to Israel and Syria. Its natural habitats are swamps and freshwater lakes. It is threatened by habitat loss.

References

Nune Yesayan

Nune Yesayan (Armenian: Նունե Եսայան) (born August 5, 1969 in Yerevan, Armenia), commonly known as Nune or Nouné, is a popular Armenian pop singer who began singing with an Armenian jazz band in the early 1990s before becoming a lounge singer at resorts in the Middle East. While performing in Damascus, she observed that young Syrian-Armenians knew the words to old folk songs performed by contemporary singers, which was not true of young Armenians from the Republic of Armenia.

Biography

Education

Even before studying music in college, Yesayan made a name for herself at her high school for being a gifted vocalist and talented performer. She graduated from high school in 1986 and was accepted to the Polytechnic University of Yerevan to study engineering.

During her first year in college, Nune excelled in her engineering studies and received high marks in both mathematics and physics. She spent her time away from school performing Armenian folk music with an amateur band. The group, which included long-time friend and collaborator Arthur Hagopian, appeared at small venues and a few concerts.

Entropy (arrow of time)

Entropy is the only quantity in the physical sciences (apart from certain rare interactions in particle physics; see below) that requires a particular direction for time, sometimes called an arrow of time. As one goes "forward" in time, the second law of thermodynamics says, the entropy of an isolated system can increase, but not decrease. Hence, from one perspective, entropy measurement is a way of distinguishing the past from the future. However in thermodynamic systems that are not closed, entropy can decrease with time: many systems, including living systems, reduce local entropy at the expense of an environmental increase, resulting in a net increase in entropy. Examples of such systems and phenomena include the formation of typical crystals, the workings of a refrigerator and living organisms.

Entropy, like temperature, is an abstract concept, yet, like temperature, everyone has an intuitive sense of the effects of entropy. Watching a movie, it is usually easy to determine whether it is being run forward or in reverse. When run in reverse, broken glasses spontaneously reassemble, smoke goes down a chimney, wood "unburns", cooling the environment and ice "unmelts" warming the environment. No physical laws are broken in the reverse movie except the second law of thermodynamics, which reflects the time-asymmetry of entropy. An intuitive understanding of the irreversibility of certain physical phenomena (and subsequent creation of entropy) allows one to make this determination.

Diversity index

A diversity index is a quantitative measure that reflects how many different types (such as species) there are in a dataset, and simultaneously takes into account how evenly the basic entities (such as individuals) are distributed among those types. The value of a diversity index increases both when the number of types increases and when evenness increases. For a given number of types, the value of a diversity index is maximized when all types are equally abundant.

When diversity indices are used in ecology, the types of interest are usually species, but they can also be other categories, such as genera, families, functional types or haplotypes. The entities of interest are usually individual plants or animals, and the measure of abundance can be, for example, number of individuals, biomass or coverage. In demography, the entities of interest can be people, and the types of interest various demographic groups. In information science, the entities can be characters and the types the different letters of the alphabet. The most commonly used diversity indices are simple transformations of the effective number of types (also known as 'true diversity'), but each diversity index can also be interpreted in its own right as a measure corresponding to some real phenomenon (but a different one for each diversity index).

Entropy (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

"Entropy" is the 18th episode of season 6 of the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Plot synopsis

The Trio, riding ATVs, pursue two vampires through a cemetery; one of them throws a tree branch at Andrew, causing him to fall off and the others to crash. The vampires encounter Buffy and they fight. One vampire drops the mysterious disk that the Trio were after; Warren snatches it and the Trio escapes, unseen by the Slayer. As Buffy fights, Spike seizes one of the vampires and offers to stake him, provided that Buffy agrees to tell the Scooby Gang about their sex life. Buffy rejects the deal and stakes both vampires without Spike's help. She dares Spike to spill the beans; since her friends have forgiven her attempt to kill them a little dalliance is unlikely to make them hate her.

Xander mopes alone at his apartment but eventually can't stand it anymore and leaves. As he walks away, Anya watches him from behind some bushes.

The next day, Willow waits for Tara outside of her classroom and the two talk and plan a coffee date. Buffy and Dawn stroll downtown, but there are very few stores where Dawn can show her face: she has confessed to shoplifting at most of them. They chat about all of the things Dawn stole and how they're working to remedy the whole problem.