Rapture (Blondie song)
"Rapture" is a song by the American pop rock band Blondie from their fifth studio album, Autoamerican (1980).
In January 1981, "Rapture" was released as the second and final single from the album. The song reached No. 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart, where it stayed for two weeks. It was the first No. 1 song in the U.S. to feature rap. The song peaked at No. 4 in Australia and No. 5 in the United Kingdom.
History
"Rapture" is a combination of disco, funk, and hip hop with the rap section forming an extended coda. The song title "Rapture" served to indicate this element. While it was not the first single featuring rapping to be commercially successful, it was the first to top the charts. Its lyrics were especially notable for namechecking hip-hop pioneers Fab Five Freddy and Grandmaster Flash.
Music video
The music video made its U.S. television debut on Solid Gold on January 31, 1981, and became the first rap video ever broadcast on MTV. Set in the East Village section of Manhattan, the "Man from Mars" or "voodoo god" (dancer William Barnes in the white suit and top hat) is the introductory and central figure. Barnes also choreographed the piece. The final shot is a one-take scene of Debbie Harry dancing along the street, passing by graffiti artists, Uncle Sam, a Native American and a goat. Fab Five Freddy and graffiti artists Lee Quinones and Jean-Michel Basquiat make cameo appearances. Basquiat was hired when Grandmaster Flash did not show for the filming. The UK 7" version of the song is used in the video.
Final Fantasy XIV
Final Fantasy XIV (ファイナルファンタジーXIV, Fainaru Fantajī Fōtīn), also known as Final Fantasy XIV Online, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game for Microsoft Windows personal computers, developed and published by Square Enix in 2010. It is the fourteenth entry in the main Final Fantasy series and the second MMORPG in the series after Final Fantasy XI. Set in the fantasy realm of Eorzea, players take control of a customized avatar as they explore the land and are caught up in both an invasion by the hostile Garlean Empire and the threat of the Primals, the deities of the land's Beastmen tribes. Eventually, they are embroiled in a plot by a Garlean Legatus to destroy the Primals by bringing one of the planet's moons down on Eorzea.
The game had been in development since 2005 under the codename "Rapture", and was announced in 2009 for Windows and PlayStation 3 video game consoles. It ran on Square Enix's Crystal Tools middleware engine, which was adjusted to suit the game's specifications. During development, the team carried over multiple aesthetic elements from XI while creating something that stood on its own. Due to several factors, the development was beset by problems that would later have drastic effects on the game. Attempts to bring the game to Xbox 360 consoles fell through due to disagreements with Microsoft about the use of Xbox Live.
Rapture (composition)
Rapture is an orchestral composition in one movement by the American composer Christopher Rouse. The work was commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and was completed January 9, 2000. It is dedicated to then Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra music director Mariss Jansons and premiered in May 2000.
Composition
Rapture is markedly more tonal than Rouse's earlier compositions. In the program notes to the score, Rouse commented, "With the exception of my Christmas work, Karolju, this is the most unabashedly tonal music I have composed. I wished to depict a progression to an ever more blinding ecstasy, but the entire work inhabits a world devoid of darkness -- hence the almost complete lack of sustained dissonance." The piece is also built around "gradually increasing tempi" gains speed over the course of its roughly 11 minutes.
Despite the religious title of the work, Rouse did not intend Rapture to be sacred music. He further commented, "...the piece is not connected to any specific religious source. Rather, I used the word 'rapture' to convey a sense of spiritual bliss, religious or otherwise."
List of Death Note episodes
Death Note is a 37-episode anime series based on the manga series of the same title written by Tsugumi Ohba and illustrated by Takeshi Obata. Death Note aired in Japan on the Nippon Television (NTV) network every Tuesday, from October 3, 2006, to June 26, 2007. The plot of the series primarily revolves around high school student Light Yagami, who decides to rid the world of evil with the help of a supernatural notebook titled Death Note. This book causes the death of anyone whose name is written in it and is passed on to Light by the God of Death (or Shinigami) Ryuk after he becomes bored within the Shinigami world.
A three-hour "Director's Cut" compilation TV special, titled "Death Note: Relight: Visions of a God", aired on NTV a few months after the anime concluded. Although advertised to be the "complete conclusion", the popularity of the series inspired the release of a second TV special, titled "Death Note: Relight 2: L's Successors" nearly a year later. These specials recap the first and second arcs of the anime respectively, with new scenes added to fill in any plot holes resulted from omitted footage.
Transfer (public transit)
A transfer allows the rider of a public transportation vehicle who pays for a single-trip fare to continue the trip on another bus or train. Depending on the network, there may or may not be an additional fee for the transfer. Historically, transfers may have been stamped or hole-punched with the time, date, and direction of travel to prevent their use for a return trip. More recently, magnetic or barcoded tickets may be recorded (as on international flights) or ticket barriers may only charge on entry and exit to a larger system (as on modern underground rail networks).
Some public transport companies may honor transfers purchased from another company with connecting service.
References
Transfer (computing)
In computer technology, transfers per second and its more common derivatives gigatransfers per second (abbreviated GT/s) and megatransfers per second (MT/s) are informal language that refer to the number of operations transferring data that occur in each second in some given data-transfer channel. It is also known as sample rate, i.e. the number of data samples captured per second, each sample normally occurring at the clock edge. The terms are neutral with respect to the method of physically accomplishing each such data-transfer operation; nevertheless, they are most commonly used in the context of transmission of digital data. 1 MT/s is 106 or one million transfers per second; similarly, 1 GT/s means 109, or equivalently in the US/short scale, one billion transfers per second.
These terms alone do not specify the bit rate at which binary data is being transferred, because they do not specify the number of bits transferred in each transfer operation (known as the channel width or word length). In order to calculate the data transmission rate, one must multiply the transfer rate by the information channel width. For example, a data bus eight-bytes wide (64 bits) by definition transfers eight bytes in each transfer operation; at a transfer rate of 1 GT/s, the data rate would be 8 × 109 B/s, i.e. 8 GB/s, or approximately 7.45 GiB/s. The bit rate for this example is 64 Gbit/s (8 × 8 × 109 bit/s).
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