Åsen

Åsen is a village and former municipality in Nord-Trøndelag county, Norway. The former municipality constitutes the southern part of the present-day municipality of Levanger, bordering Stjørdal to the south.

The village of Åsen is located along the European route E6 highway and the Nordlandsbanen railway line with the Åsen Station. The village sits between the lakes Hammervatnet and Hoklingen. It is home to the Åsen Church. The 0.52-square-kilometre (130-acre) village has a population (2013) of 593. The population density is 1,140 inhabitants per square kilometre (3,000/sq mi).

History

The municipality of Aasen was established on 1 January 1838 (see formannskapsdistrikt). The spelling was later changed to Åsen. On 1 January 1962, Åsen was merged with Frol, Levanger, and Skogn to form a new, larger Levanger municipality. Prior to the merger, Åsen had a population of 1,939.

References

Thai units of measurement

Thailand adopted the metric system on 17 December 1923. However, old Thai units are still in common use, especially for measurements of land.

Before metrication, the traditional system of measurement used in Thailand employed anthropic units. Some of these units are still in use, albeit standardised to SI/metric measurements. When the Royal Thai Survey Department began cadastral survey in 1896, Director R. W. Giblin, F.R.G.S., noted, "It so happens that 40 metres or 4,000 centimetres are equal to one sen," so all cadastral plans are plotted, drawn, and printed to a scale of 1:4,000. The square wa, ngan and rai are still used in measurements of land area.

The baht is still used as a unit of measurement in gold trading. However, one baht of 96.5% gold bullion is defined as 15.16 grams rather than the generic standard of 15 grams. The baht has also become the name of the currency of Thailand, which was originally fixed to the corresponding mass of silver.

List of units

Professional go handicaps

Professional go handicaps were a system developed in Japan, in the Edo period, for handicapping professional players of the game of go against each other. With the abolition of the Oteai system, which from the 1920s had used some handicap games to determine the go ranking of professional players, this system has become obsolete. It is now completely superseded by the use of komidashi. Knowledge of it is required to understand the conditions of play in historical go matches, particularly the jubango that died out around 1960.

Pro levels

The professional go ranks have traditionally been divided into nine levels, with shodan or 1 dan being the initial grade for a student player certified as professional (kishi in Japanese). The ranks go up to 9 dan, the whole system being based on old customs from the Chinese Imperial court. (The imperial court had 1 pin as highest and 9 pin as lowest however) To this day there are nine professional dan levels in China and South Korean as well as in Japan; the same applies in Taiwan. The basic system described at go handicaps is insufficient to provide an accurate ranking, because professional levels are closer together. It is considered inconceivable that any pro should take a four-stone handicap from another.

Smile

A smile is a facial expression formed primarily by flexing the muscles at the sides of the mouth. Some smiles include a contraction of the muscles at the corner of the eyes, an action known as a "Duchenne smile". Smiles performed without the eye contraction can be perceived as "fake".

Among humans, smiling is an expression denoting pleasure, sociability, happiness, or amusement. It is distinct from a similar but usually involuntary expression of anxiety known as a grimace. Although cross-cultural studies have shown that smiling is a means of communication throughout the world, there are large differences between different cultures, with some using smiles to convey confusion or embarrassment.

Historical background

Primatologist Signe Preuschoft traces the smile back over 30 million years of evolution to a "fear grin" stemming from monkeys and apes who often used barely clenched teeth to portray to predators that they were harmless. The smile may have evolved differently among species and especially among humans. Apart from Biology as an academic discipline that interprets the smile, those who study kinesics and psychology such as Freitas-Magalhaes view the smile as an affect display that can communicate feelings such as love, happiness, pride, contempt, and embarrassment.

Smile! (novel)

Smile! is a children's book by Geraldine McCaughrean. In 2004 it won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize Bronze Award.

References

Smile (The Beach Boys album)

Smile (occasionally typeset as SMiLE) was a projected album by American rock band the Beach Boys intended to follow their 11th studio album Pet Sounds. After the group's songwriting leader Brian Wilson abandoned large portions of music recorded between 1966 and 1967, the band recorded and released the dramatically scaled-down Smiley Smile album in its place. Some of the original Smile tracks eventually found their way onto subsequent Beach Boys studio and compilation albums. As more fans learned of the project's origins, details of its recordings acquired considerable mystique, and it was later acknowledged as the most legendary unreleased album in the history of popular music.

Working with lyricist Van Dyke Parks, Smile was composed as a multi-thematic concept album, existing today in its unfinished and fragmented state as an unordered series of abstract musical vignettes. Its genesis came during the recording of Pet Sounds, when Wilson began recording a new single: "Good Vibrations". The track was created by an unprecedented recording technique: over 90 hours of tape was recorded, spliced, and reduced into a three-minute pop song. It quickly became the band's biggest international hit yet; Smile was to be produced in a similar fashion. Wilson touted the album "a teenage symphony to God," incorporating a diverse range of music styles including psychedelic, doo-wop, barbershop singing, ragtime, yodeling, early American folk, classical music, and avant-garde explorations into noise and musical acoustics. Its projected singles were "Heroes and Villains", a Western musical comedy, and "Vega-Tables", a satire of physical fitness.