Sphere (band)
Sphere is the name of the following musical groups:
Sphere (American band)
Sphere were an American jazz ensemble which began as a tribute to pianist/composer Thelonious Monk, whose middle name was "Sphere".
The band initially consisting of Monk's longtime tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Buster Williams, and Monk's former drummer Ben Riley. Saxophonist Gary Bartz assumed Rouse's place after his death in 1988.
Discography
References
Sphere (1998 film)
Sphere is a 1998 science fiction psychological thriller film directed and produced by Barry Levinson. It stars Dustin Hoffman, Sharon Stone, and Samuel L. Jackson. Sphere was based on the 1987 novel of the same name by Michael Crichton. The film was released in the United States on February 13, 1998.
Plot
An alien spacecraft is discovered on the floor of the Pacific Ocean, estimated to have been there for 300 years. A team of experts, including marine biologist Dr. Beth Halperin, mathematician Dr. Harry Adams, astrophysicist Dr. Ted Fielding, psychologist Dr. Norman Goodman, and U.S. Navy Capt. Harold Barnes, are assembled and taken to the Habitat, a state-of-the-art living environment located near the spacecraft.
On examination of the spacecraft, they determine that it is actually an American spacecraft from the future, apparently having fallen back through time after entering a black hole, an "unknown event" in the ship's computer logs. The logs do not give any indication of how far in the future it came, but that its mission was to collect objects from across the galaxy. This includes a large perfect fluid sphere that hovers a few feet above the floor in the ship's cargo bay. They cannot find any way to probe the inside of the sphere, and the surface is impenetrable; the crew find it odd that the surface of the sphere reflects its surroundings except for humans.
Card game
A card game is any game using playing cards as the primary device with which the game is played, be they traditional or game-specific. Countless card games exist, including families of related games (such as poker). A small number of card games played with traditional decks have formally standardized rules, but most are folk games whose rules vary by region, culture, and person.
Many games that are not generally placed in the family of card games do in fact use cards for some aspect of their gameplay. Similarly, some games that are placed in the card game genre involve a board. The distinction is that the gameplay of a card game primarily depends on the use of the cards by players (the board is simply a guide for scorekeeping or for card placement), while board games (the principal non-card game genre to use cards) generally focus on the players' positions on the board, and use the cards for some secondary purpose.
Playing cards
A card game is played with a deck or pack of playing cards which are identical in size and shape. Each card has two sides, the face and the back. Normally the backs of the cards are indistinguishable. The faces of the cards may all be unique, or there can be duplicates. The composition of a deck is known to each player. In some cases several decks are shuffled together to form a single pack or shoe.
Albion (Blake)
In the complex mythology of William Blake, Albion is the primeval man whose fall and division results in the Four Zoas: Urizen, Tharmas, Luvah/Orc and Urthona/Los. The name derives from the ancient and mythological name of Britain, Albion.
Sources
In the mythical story of the founding of Britain, Albion was a Giant son of Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea. He was a contemporary of Heracles, who killed him. Albion founded a country on the island and ruled there. Britain, then called Albion after its founder, was inhabited by his Giant descendants until about 1100 years before Julius Cæsar's invasion of Britain, when Brutus of Troy came and defeated the small number of Giants that remained (as a group of the Giants had killed all the others).
According to another myth, Noah's son Japhet had a son named Histion, who had four sons. Their names were Francus, Romanus, Brittos and Alemannus, and the French, Roman, British and German people are descended from them. Brittos divided Britain into three kingdoms and gave each to one of his sons. They were Loegria (a Latinization of the Welsh Lloegr, "England"), Scotland and Cambria.
List of poker hands
In poker, players construct hands of playing cards according to predetermined rules, which vary according to which variant of poker is being played. These hands are compared using a hand ranking system that is standard across all variants of poker. The player with the highest-ranking hand wins that particular deal in most poker games. In some variants, the lowest-ranking hand can win or tie.
These hand rankings are also used in some other card games and in poker dice. The ranking of a particular hand is increased by including multiple cards of the same card rank, by all five cards being from the same suit, or by the five cards forming a consecutive series. The relative ranking of the various hand categories is based on the probability of being randomly dealt such a hand from a well-shuffled deck.
General rules
The following rules apply to the ranking of all poker hands unless specifically changed by game variant rules or house rules.
Podcasts:
