Track (rail transport)

The track on a railway or railroad, also known as the permanent way, is the structure consisting of the rails, fasteners, railroad ties (sleepers, British English) and ballast (or slab track), plus the underlying subgrade. It enables trains to move by providing a dependable surface for their wheels to roll. For clarity it is often referred to as railway track (British English and UIC terminology) or railroad track (predominantly in the United States). Tracks where electric trains or electric trams run are equipped with an electrification system such as an overhead electrical power line or an additional electrified rail.

The term permanent way also refers to the track in addition to lineside structures such as fences etc.

Structure

Traditional track structure

Notwithstanding modern technical developments, the overwhelmingly dominant track form worldwide consists of flat-bottom steel rails supported on timber or pre-stressed concrete sleepers, which are themselves laid on crushed stone ballast.

Fidelipac

The Fidelipac, commonly known as a "NAB cartridge" or simply "cart", is a magnetic tape sound recording format, used for radio broadcasting for playback of material over the air such as radio commercials, jingles, station identifications, and music. Fidelipac is the official name of this industry standard audio tape cartridge. It was developed in 1954 by inventor George Eash (although the invention of the Fidelipac cartridge has also been credited to Vern Nolte of the Automatic Tape Company), and commercially introduced in 1959 by Collins Radio at the 1959 NAB Convention. The cartridge was widely used at radio stations until the late 1990s, when such formats as MiniDisc and computerized broadcast automation made the Fidelipac cartridge obsolete.

History

The Fidelipac cartridge was the first audio tape cartridge available commercially, based on the endless-loop tape cartridge design developed by Bernard Cousino in 1952, while Eash shared space in Cousino's electronics shop in the early 1950s. Instead of manufacturing the Fidelipac format himself after developing it, Eash decided to license it for manufacture to Telepro Industries, in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Telepro then manufactured and marketed the format under the Fidelipac brand name.

4-track

4-track or 4-track tape may refer to:

Unknown

Unknown or The Unknown may refer to:

Mathematics

Film

Music

Other uses

Placeholder name

Placeholder names are words that can refer to objects or people whose names are temporarily forgotten, irrelevant, or unknown in the context in which they are being discussed.

Linguistic role

These placeholders typically function grammatically as nouns and can be used for people (e.g. John Doe, Jane Doe), objects (e.g. widget) or places (e.g. Anytown, USA). They share a property with pronouns, because their referents must be supplied by context; but, unlike a pronoun, they may be used with no referent—the important part of the communication is not the thing nominally referred to by the placeholder, but the context in which the placeholder occurs.

Stuart Berg Flexner and Harold Wentworth's Dictionary of American Slang (1960) use the term kadigan for placeholder words. They define "kadigan" as a synonym for thingamajig. The term may have originated with Willard R. Espy, though others, such as David Annis, also used it (or cadigans) in their writing. Its etymology is obscure—Flexner and Wentworth related it to the generic word gin for engine (as in the cotton gin). It may also relate to the Irish surname Cadigan. Hypernyms (words for generic categories; e.g. "flower" for tulips and roses) may also be used in this function of a placeholder, but they are not considered to be kadigans.

Unknown (1988 anthology)

Unknown is an anthology of fantasy fiction short stories edited by Stanley Schmidt, the fifth of a number of anthologies drawing their contents from the classic magazine Unknown of the 1930s-40s. It was first published in paperback by Baen Books in October 1988.

The book collects nine tales by various authors, together with an introduction by the editor.

Contents

Bit (money)

The word bit is a colloquial expression referring to specific coins in various coinages throughout the world.

United States

In the United States, the bit is equal to one eighth of a dollar or 12 ¹⁄₂ cents. In the U.S., the "bit" as a designation for money dates from the colonial period, when the most common unit of currency used was the Spanish dollar, also known as "piece of eight", which was worth 8 Spanish silver reales. One eighth of a dollar or one silver real was one "bit".

With the adoption of the decimal U.S. currency in 1794, there was no longer a U.S. coin worth ¹⁄₈ of a dollar but "two bits" remained in the language with the meaning of one quarter dollar, "four bits" half dollar, etc. Because there was no one-bit coin, a dime (10¢) was sometimes called a short bit and 15¢ a long bit. (The picayune, which was originally ¹⁄₂ real or ¹⁄₂ bit (6 ¹⁄₄¢), was similarly transferred to the US 5¢-piece.)

In addition, Spanish coinage, like other foreign coins, continued to be widely used and allowed as legal tender by Chapter XXII of the Act of April 10, 1806 until the Coinage Act of 1857 discontinued the practice.