Ampersand

The ampersand is the logogram "&", representing the conjunction word "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters et, Latin for "and".

Etymology

The word ampersand is a corruption of the phrase "and per se & (and)", meaning "and intrinsically the word and (represented by the symbol &)".

Traditionally, when reciting the alphabet in English-speaking schools, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A", "I", and, at one point, "O") was repeated with the Latin expression per se ("by itself"). This habit was useful in spelling where a word or syllable was repeated after spelling; e.g. "d, o, g—dog" would be clear but simply saying "a—a" would be confusing without the clarifying "per se" added. It was also common practice to add the "&" sign at the end of the alphabet as if it were the 27th letter, pronounced as the Latin et or later in English as and. As a result, the recitation of the alphabet would end in "X, Y, Z, and per se and". This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term had entered common English usage by 1837. However, in contrast to the 26 letters, the ampersand does not represent a speech sound—although other characters that were dropped from the English alphabet did, such as the Old English thorn, wynn, and eth.

Sign (album)

Sign is the seventh album by Clock DVA, released on August 3, 1993 through Contempo Records.

Track listing

All songs written and composed by Robert Baker and Adi Newton. 

Personnel

References

External links

Medical sign

A medical sign is an objective indication of some medical fact or characteristic that may be detected and still or video photographed or audio-recorded by a patient or anyone, especially a physician, before or during a physical examination of a patient. For example, whereas a tingling paresthesia is a symptom (only the person experiencing it can directly observe their own tingling feeling), erythema is a sign (anyone can confirm that the skin is redder than usual). Symptoms and signs are often nonspecific, but often combinations of them are at least suggestive of certain diagnoses, helping to narrow down what may be wrong. In other cases they are specific even to the point of being pathognomonic.

Some signs may have no meaning to the patient, and may even go unnoticed, but may be meaningful and significant to the healthcare provider in assisting diagnosis.

Examples of signs include elevated blood pressure, a clubbing of the ends of fingers (which may be a sign of lung disease, or many other things), a staggering gait (human) and arcus senilis of the eyes.

Ray (surname)

Ray is a common surname in eastern India, and in many English-speaking countries.

In India, it is an anglicized version of Rai Chowdhary or Roy Chowdhary, also written as Roy. The name comes from the same root as Raj, which is also the root of the Latin rex (king), English reign and royal, etc.

The English surname may come from the same root, probably via French roi; it can also come from a Middle English term meaning a female roe deer, or from the place-names Rye and Wray, among other possible roots.

Fictional characters

People

See also

Fish fin

Fins are usually the most distinctive features of a fish, composed of bony spines or rays protruding from the body with skin covering them and joining them together, either in a webbed fashion, as seen in most bony fish, or similar to a flipper, as seen in sharks. Apart from the tail or caudal fin, fish fins have no direct connection with the spine and are supported by muscles only. Their principal function is to help the fish swim. Fins located in different places on the fish serve different purposes, such as moving forward, turning, keeping an upright position or stopping. Most fish use fins when swimming, flying fish use pectoral fins for gliding, and frogfish use them for crawling. Fins can also be used for other purposes; male sharks and mosquitofish use a modified fin to deliver sperm, thresher sharks use their caudal fin to stun prey, reef stonefish have spines in their dorsal fins that inject venom, anglerfish use the first spine of their dorsal fin like a fishing rod to lure prey, and triggerfish avoid predators by squeezing into coral crevices and using spines in their fins to lock themselves in place.

End (graph theory)

In the mathematics of infinite graphs, an end of a graph represents, intuitively, a direction in which the graph extends to infinity. Ends may be formalized mathematically as equivalence classes of infinite paths, as havens describing strategies for pursuit-evasion games on the graph, or (in the case of locally finite graphs) as topological ends of topological spaces associated with the graph.

Ends of graphs may be used (via Cayley graphs) to define ends of finitely generated groups. Finitely generated infinite groups have one, two, or infinitely many ends, and the Stallings theorem about ends of groups provides a decomposition for groups with more than one end.

Definition and characterization

Ends of graphs were defined by Rudolf Halin (1964) in terms of equivalence classes of infinite paths. A ray in an infinite graph is a semi-infinite simple path; that is, it is an infinite sequence of vertices v₀, v₁, v₂, ... in which each vertex appears at most once in the sequence and each two consecutive vertices in the sequence are the two endpoints of an edge in the graph. According to Halin's definition, two rays r₀ and r₁ are equivalent if there is another ray r₂ (not necessarily different from either of the first two rays) that contains infinitely many of the vertices in each of r₀ and r₁. This is an equivalence relation: each ray is equivalent to itself, the definition is symmetric with regard to the ordering of the two rays, and it can be shown to be transitive. Therefore, it partitions the set of all rays into equivalence classes, and Halin defined an end as one of these equivalence classes.