Palm wine

Palm wine is an alcoholic beverage created from the sap of various species of palm tree such as the palmyra, date palms, and coconut palms. It is known by various names in different regions and is common in various parts of Asia, Africa the Caribbean and South America.

Palm wine production by small holders and individual farmers may promote conservation as palm trees become a source of regular household income that may economically be worth more than the value of timber sold.

Palm wine is known as emu, nkwu, oguro in Nigeria; nsamba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; nsafufuo in Ghana;kallu in South India; Htan Yay (ထန်းရည်) in Myanmar; matango in Cameroon; tuak in North Sumatra, Indonesia; mnazi in the Mijikenda language of Kenya; goribon (Rungus) in Sabah, Borneo; and tubâ in the Philippines, Borneo and Mexico. In the Philippines, tubâ refers both to the freshly harvested, sweetish cloudy-white sap and the one with the red lauan-tree tan bark colorant. In Leyte, the red tubâ is aged with the tan bark for up to six months to two years, until it gets dark red and tapping its glass container gives a sound that does not suddenly stop. This type of tubâ is called bahal (for tubâ aged this way for up to six months) and bahalina (for tubâ aged thus for up to a year or more). Toddy is also consumed in Sri Lanka and Myanmar.

Arecaceae

The Arecaceae are a botanical family of perennial lianas, shrubs, and trees commonly known as palm trees. (Owing to historical usage, the family is alternatively called Palmae.) They are flowering plants, the only family in the monocot order Arecales. Roughly 200 genera with around 2600 species are currently known, most of them restricted to tropical, subtropical, and warm temperate climates. Most palms are distinguished by their large, compound, evergreen leaves arranged at the top of an unbranched stem. However, palms exhibit an enormous diversity in physical characteristics and inhabit nearly every type of habitat within their range, from rainforests to deserts.

Palms are among the best known and most extensively cultivated plant families. They have been important to humans throughout much of history. Many common products and foods are derived from palms, and palms are also widely used in landscaping, making them one of the most economically important plants. In many historical cultures, palms were symbols for such ideas as victory, peace, and fertility. For inhabitants of cooler climates today, palms symbolize the tropics and vacations.

Palm (unit)

The palm may be either one of two obsolete non-SI units of measurement of length.

In English usage the palm, or small palm, also called handbreadth or handsbreadth, was originally based on the breadth of a human hand without the thumb, and has origins in ancient Egypt. It is distinct from the hand, the breadth of the hand with the thumb, and from the fist, the height of a clenched fist. It is usually taken to be equal to four digits or fingers, or to three inches, which, following the adoption of the international inch in 1959, equals exactly 7.62 centimetres. It is today used only in the field of biblical exegesis, where opinions may vary as to its precise historic length.

In other areas, such as parts of continental Europe, the palm (French: palme, Italian: palmo) related to the length of the hand, and derived from the Roman great palm, the Latin: palmus major.

History

Ancient Egypt

On surviving Ancient Egyptian cubit-rods, the royal cubit is divided into seven palms of four digits each. Five digits are equal to a hand, with thumb; and six to a closed fist. The royal cubit measured approximately 525 mm, so the length of the ancient Egyptian palm was about 75 mm.

Hand

A hand (Latin manus) is a prehensile, multi-fingered organ located at the end of the forearm or forelimb of primates such as humans, chimpanzees, monkeys, and lemurs. A few other vertebrates such as the koala (which has two opposable thumbs on each "hand" and fingerprints remarkably similar to human fingerprints) are often described as having "hands" instead of paws on their front limbs. The raccoon is usually described as having "hands" though opposable thumbs are lacking.

Fingers contain some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body, are the richest source of tactile feedback, and have the greatest positioning capability of the body; thus the sense of touch is intimately associated with hands. Like other paired organs (eyes, feet, legs) each hand is dominantly controlled by the opposing brain hemisphere, so that handedness—the preferred hand choice for single-handed activities such as writing with a pencil, reflects individual brain functioning.

Some evolutionary anatomists use the term hand to refer to the appendage of digits on the forelimb more generally — for example, in the context of whether the three digits of the bird hand involved the same homologous loss of two digits as in the dinosaur hand.

Wine (software)

Wine (recursive acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator) is a free and open source compatibility layer software application that aims to allow applications designed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. Wine also provides a software library, known as Winelib, against which developers can compile Windows applications to help port them to Unix-like systems.

It duplicates functions of Windows by providing alternative implementations of the DLLs that Windows programs call, and a process to substitute for the Windows NT kernel. This method of duplication differs from other methods that might also be considered emulation, where Windows programs run in a virtual machine. Wine is predominantly written using black-box testing reverse-engineering, to avoid copyright issues.

The name Wine initially was an abbreviation for Windows emulator. Its meaning later shifted to the recursive acronym, Wine is not an emulator in order to differentiate the software from CPU emulators. While the name sometimes appears in the forms WINE and wine, the project developers have agreed to standardize on the form Wine.

Health effects of wine

The health effects of wine are mainly determined by its active ingredient alcohol. Drinking small quantities of alcohol (up to one drink per day for women and one to two drinks per day for men) is associated with a decreased risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes mellitus, metabolic syndrome and early death. Drinking more than this amount, however, increases the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, atrial fibrillation, and stroke. Risk is greater in younger people due to binge drinking which may result in violence or accidents. About 3.3 million deaths (5.9% of all deaths) are believed to be due to alcohol each year.Alcoholism reduces a person's life expectancy by around ten years and excessive alcohol use is the third leading cause of early death in the United States. No professional medical association recommends that people who are nondrinkers should start drinking wine.

Wine has a long history of use as an early form of medication, being recommended variously as a safe alternative to drinking water, an antiseptic for treating wounds, a digestive aid, and as a cure for a wide range of ailments including lethargy, diarrhea and pain from child birth.Ancient Egyptian Papyri and Sumerian tablets dating back to 2200 BC detail the medicinal role of wine, making it the world's oldest documented human-made medicine. Wine continued to play a major role in medicine until the late 19th and early 20th century, when changing opinions and medical research on alcohol and alcoholism cast doubt on its role as part of a healthy lifestyle.

Wine (1913 film)

Wine is a 1913 short comedy film featuring Fatty Arbuckle.

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