Alphabet

An alphabet is a standard set of letters (basic written symbols or graphemes) which is used to write one or more languages based on the general principle that the letters represent phonemes (basic significant sounds) of the spoken language. This is in contrast to other types of writing systems, such as syllabaries (in which each character represents a syllable) and logographies (in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic unit).

The Proto-Canaanite script, later known as the Phoenician alphabet, is the first fully phonemic script. Thus the Phoenician alphabet is considered to be the first alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is the ancestor of most modern alphabets, including Arabic, Greek, Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and possibly Brahmic. According to terminology introduced by Peter T. Daniels, an "alphabet" is a script that represents both vowels and consonants as letters equally. In this narrow sense of the word the first "true" alphabet was the Greek alphabet, which was developed on the basis of the earlier Phoenician alphabet. In other alphabetic scripts such as the original Phoenician, Hebrew or Arabic, letters predominantly or exclusively represent consonants; such a script is also called an abjad. A third type, called abugida or alphasyllabary, is one where vowels are shown by diacritics or modifications of consonantal base letters, as in Devanagari and other South Asian scripts.

Alphabet pasta

Alphabet pasta, also referred to as Alfabeto, is pasta that has been mechanically cut or pressed into the letters of an alphabet. It is often served in an alphabet soup, sold in a can of condensed broth. Another variation, Alphaghetti, consists of letter-shaped pasta in a marinara or spaghetti sauce.

It is not clear who invented the alphabet soup but Knorr sold it in Europe already in the 1910s. One common American brand of condensed-style alphabet soup is Campbell's. This soup, like its competitors', is marketed towards parents for its educational value.

A similar product, Alphabetti Spaghetti, was sold by the H. J. Heinz Company for 60 years before being discontinued in 1990. Like Campbell's alphabet soup, it contains alphabet pasta canned in tomato sauce, but no cheese. It was later reintroduced by Heinz in 2005.

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Visual system

The visual system is the part of the central nervous system which gives organisms the ability to process visual detail, as well as enabling the formation of several non-image photo response functions. It detects and interprets information from visible light to build a representation of the surrounding environment. The visual system carries out a number of complex tasks, including the reception of light and the formation of monocular representations; the buildup of a nuclear binocular perception from a pair of two dimensional projections; the identification and categorization of visual objects; assessing distances to and between objects; and guiding body movements in relation to the objects seen. The psychological process of visual information is known as visual perception, a lack of which is called blindness. Non-image forming visual functions, independent of visual perception, include the pupillary light reflex (PLR) and circadian photoentrainment.

Structure

This article mostly describes the visual system of mammals, humans in particular, although other "higher" animals have similar visual systems (see bird vision, vision in fish, mollusc eye, reptile vision). In the case of mammals (including humans), the visual system consists of:

Visual (album)

Visual is the third studio album produced by the Dominican based electronic rock band Tabu Tek. This second production was released on the year 2003 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The fourth song of the album, Compadre Pedro Juan, is a rock tribute to Luis Alberti, father of merengue music. The song was previously set to be released in the merengue tribute Rockero Hasta La Tambora made by Dominican rock bands. The album is distinguished by the more rock based sound with less of the electronica aspect found in their previous production Girar. Nevertheless, it was well received and played in rock stations around the country.

Track listing

Visual 1050

The Visual 1050 was an 8-bit desktop computer sold by Visual Technology in the early 1980s. The computer ran under the CP/M operating system and used 2 400KB, 5¼, SSDD, 96tpi floppy disk drives (TEAC FD-55E) for mass storage with an optional 10Mb external Winchester hard disk drive. In addition to the Zilog Z80 processor clocked at 4 MHz, the Visual 1050 also included a MOS Technology 6502 used as a graphics coprocessor.

Overview

The Visual 1050 featured a dual-processor architecture; Z80A processor as the main CPU and a 6502 to drive the display.

Memory: 160K of RAM was included with the system. 128K of this was programmable and 32K reserved for use by the display processor.

Screen: The display unit was 640×300 pixel, 80×25 character (8×12 dot matrix) green monochrome CRT bit-mapped display. The display offered programmable features which could be invoked from the main processing unit via a character-stream interface built in between the Z80 CPU and 6502 co-processor.

Communication ports An RS-232C serial port and Centronics parallel port.