Tic Tac

Tic Tac (officially styled as "tic tac") is a brand of small, hard mints, manufactured by the Italian confectioner Ferrero, and available in a variety of flavors in over 100 countries.

Tic Tacs were first produced in 1969. They are usually sold in small transparent plastic boxes with a flip-action living hinge lid. Originally, Tic Tacs were dyed specific colors for different flavors. In many countries, the transparent plastic boxes are colored but the actual Tic Tac pieces are white.

History

Tic-Tacs were first introduced by Ferrero in 1969, under the name "Refreshing Mints". In 1970, the name was changed to Tic-Tacs, after the distinctive sound of the mints clicking in their container. Besides the original "Orange" and Fresh mint flavor, several new varieties were added including: aniseed, cinnamon (or "Winter Warmer"), an orange and grape mix (in 1976), spearmint, peppermint, Powermint, sour apple, mandarin, tangarine, berry, fresh orange, strawberry, wintergreen, pink grapefruit, orange and lime together (in 1978), cherry, passion fruit (in 2007), pomegranate (in 2010), mango, and lime. The grape flavor was eliminated in 1976 because of health concerns about the red dye amaranth (FD&C Red #2), a suspected carcinogen. Orange Tic-Tacs were sold without the Grape.

Tacs

Tacs or TACS may refer to:

Total Access Communication System

Total Access Communication System (TACS) and ETACS are mostly-obsolete variants of Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) which was announced as the choice for the first two UK national cellular systems in Feb 1983, less than a year after the UK government announced the T&Cs for the two competing mobile phone networks in June 1982.

Vodafone (known then as Racal-Vodafone) opted for a £30 million turnkey contract from Ericsson (ERA) to design, build and set up its initial network of 100 base station sites.

Cellnet (then known Telecom Securicor Cellular Radio Ltd) used development labs in the facilities at General Electric (later made part of Motorola) based at Lynchburg, Virginia, USA. The reason Cellnet used the General Electric labs was because the AMPS system was already in development there, and the company had set up a production facility in readiness for AMPS production in 1985 which the Cellnet TACS was to share. In March 1984 development of prototypes began at General Electric. Production began in 1985 and General Electric produced 20,000 systems that year for Cellnet's distribution in the UK. Production of what was to become the Motorola model were then made at Stotfold, Bedfordshire, England. This production facility continued making TACS until the advent of GSM.

Tic

A tic is a sudden, repetitive, nonrhythmic motor movement or vocalization involving discrete muscle groups. Tics can be invisible to the observer, such as abdominal tensing or toe crunching. Common motor and phonic tics are, respectively, eye blinking and throat clearing.

Tics must be distinguished from movements of other movement disorders such as chorea, dystonia, myoclonus; movements exhibited in stereotypic movement disorder or some autistic people, and the compulsions of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and seizure activity.

Classification

Tics are classified as either motor or phonic, and simple or complex.

Motor or phonic

Motor tics are movement-based tics affecting discrete muscle groups.

Phonic tics are involuntary sounds produced by moving air through the nose, mouth, or throat. They may be alternately referred to as verbal tics or vocal tics, but most diagnosticians prefer the term phonic tics to reflect the notion that the vocal cords are not involved in all tics that produce sound.

Tongue-in-cheek

The tongue-in-cheek figure of speech is used to imply that a statement or other production is humorously or otherwise not seriously intended, and it should not be taken at face value. The facial expression typically indicates that one is joking or making a mental effort. In the past, it may also have indicated contempt, but that is no longer common.

By 1842, the phrase had acquired its contemporary meaning, indicating that a statement was not meant to be taken seriously. Early users of the phrase include Sir Walter Scott in his 1828 The Fair Maid of Perth.

History

Putting one's tongue into a cheek was formerly used to signify contempt. For example, in Tobias George Smollett's The Adventures of Roderick Random, which was published in 1748, the eponymous hero is taking a coach to Bath and apprehends a highwayman. This provokes an altercation with a less brave passenger:

A similar usage appears in 1828 in The Fair Maid of Perth by Sir Walter Scott, "The fellow who gave this all-hail thrust his tongue in his cheek to some scapegraces like himself."

Truncated cube

In geometry, the truncated cube, or truncated hexahedron, is an Archimedean solid. It has 14 regular faces (6 octagonal and 8 triangular), 36 edges, and 24 vertices.

If the truncated cube has unit edge length, its dual triakis octahedron has edges of lengths 2 and .

Area and volume

The area A and the volume V of a truncated cube of edge length a are:

Orthogonal projections

The truncated cube has five special orthogonal projections, centered, on a vertex, on two types of edges, and two types of faces: triangles, and octagons. The last two correspond to the B₂ and A₂Coxeter planes.

Spherical tiling

The truncated cube can also be represented as a spherical tiling, and projected onto the plane via a stereographic projection. This projection is conformal, preserving angles but not areas or lengths. Straight lines on the sphere are projected as circular arcs on the plane.

Cartesian coordinates

The following Cartesian coordinates define the vertices of a truncated hexahedron centered at the origin with edge length 2ξ: