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Qfwfq
Qfwfq is the narrator of many stories appearing in several works by Italian author Italo Calvino. Description Qfwfq is as old as the universe and has taken various forms, of which Qfwfq retains its memory in later incarnations. For example, in the short story "Blood, Sea" (found in the collection ''t zero'') this character is a man riding in a car with three other people, but this man also remembers when he lived in the form of an amoeba of sorts inhabiting a primeval ocean. He also describes Zylphia, one of the other car passengers, as having been there, raising the question of whether Qfwfq is able to take multiple discrete physical forms at once. Qfwfq also describes having a family, who seem also to transcend time in a similar manner (for example, they had an uncle who was a fish while the rest of the family has evolved into amphibians). He also has a competitive relationship with a similar entity named Kgwgk, which results in the invention of art. In some stories he mentions o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cosmicomics
''Cosmicomics'' ( it, Le cosmicomiche) is a collection of twelve short stories by Italo Calvino first published in Italian in 1965 and in English in 1968. The stories were originally published between 1964 and 1965 in the Italian periodicals ''Il Caffè'' and ''Il Giorno''. Each story takes a scientific "fact" (though sometimes a falsehood by today's understanding), and builds an imaginative story around it. An always-extant being called Qfwfq narrates all of the stories save two. Every story is a memory of an event in the history of the universe. Qfwfq also narrates some stories in Calvino's '' t zero''. All of the stories in ''Cosmicomics'', together with those from ''t zero'' and other sources, are now available in a single volume collection, ''The Complete Cosmicomics'' (Penguin UK, 2009). The first U.S. edition, translated by William Weaver, won the National Book Award in the Translation category. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino (, also , ;. RAI (circa 1970), retrieved 25 October 2012. 15 October 1923 – 19 September 1985) was an Italian writer and journalist. His best known works include the ''Our Ancestors'' trilogy (1952–1959), the '' Cosmicomics'' collection of short stories (1965), and the novels ''Invisible Cities'' (1972) and ''If on a winter's night a traveler'' (1979). Admired in Britain, Australia and the United States, he was the most translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death. Italo Calvino is buried in the garden cemetery of Castiglione della Pescaia, in Tuscany. Biography Parents Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, a suburb of Havana, Cuba, in 1923. His father, Mario, was a tropical agronomist and botanist who also taught agriculture and floriculture. Born 47 years earlier in Sanremo, Italy, Mario Calvino had emigrated to Mexico in 1909 where he took up an important position with the Ministry of Agriculture. In an autobiographical ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
T Zero
T, or t, is the twentieth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''tee'' (pronounced ), plural ''tees''. It is derived from the Semitic Taw 𐤕 of the Phoenician and Paleo-Hebrew script (Aramaic and Hebrew Taw ת/𐡕/, Syriac Taw ܬ, and Arabic ت Tāʼ) via the Greek letter τ (tau). In English, it is most commonly used to represent the voiceless alveolar plosive, a sound it also denotes in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It is the most commonly used consonant and the second most commonly used letter in English-language texts. History '' Taw'' was the last letter of the Western Semitic and Hebrew alphabets. The sound value of Semitic ''Taw'', Greek alphabet Tαυ (''Tau''), Old Italic and Latin T has remained fairly constant, representing in each of these; and it has also kept its original basic shape in most of these alphabets. Use in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The New York Review Of Books
''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of important books is an indispensable literary activity. ''Esquire'' called it "the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English language." In 1970, writer Tom Wolfe described it as "the chief theoretical organ of Radical Chic". The ''Review'' publishes long-form reviews and essays, often by well-known writers, original poetry, and has letters and personals advertising sections that had attracted critical comment. In 1979 the magazine founded the ''London Review of Books'', which soon became independent. In 1990 it founded an Italian edition, ''la Rivista dei Libri'', published until 2010. The ''Review'' has a book publishing division, established in 1999, called New York Review Books, which publishes reprints of classics, as well as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Numbers In The Dark And Other Stories
A number is a mathematical object used to count, measure, and label. The original examples are the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and so forth. Numbers can be represented in language with number words. More universally, individual numbers can be represented by symbols, called ''numerals''; for example, "5" is a numeral that represents the number five. As only a relatively small number of symbols can be memorized, basic numerals are commonly organized in a numeral system, which is an organized way to represent any number. The most common numeral system is the Hindu–Arabic numeral system, which allows for the representation of any number using a combination of ten fundamental numeric symbols, called digits. In addition to their use in counting and measuring, numerals are often used for labels (as with telephone numbers), for ordering (as with serial numbers), and for codes (as with ISBNs). In common usage, a ''numeral'' is not clearly distinguished from the ''number'' that it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palindrome
A palindrome is a word, number, phrase, or other sequence of symbols that reads the same backwards as forwards, such as the words ''madam'' or ''racecar'', the date and time ''11/11/11 11:11,'' and the sentence: "A man, a plan, a canal – Panama". The 19-letter Finnish word ''saippuakivikauppias'' (a soapstone vendor), is the longest single-word palindrome in everyday use, while the 12-letter term ''tattarrattat'' (from James Joyce in ''Ulysses'') is the longest in English. The word ''palindrome'' was introduced by English poet and writer Henry Peacham in 1638.Henry Peacham, ''The Truth of our Times Revealed out of One Mans Experience'', 1638p. 123/ref> The concept of a palindrome can be dated to the 3rd-century BCE, although no examples survive; the first physical examples can be dated to the 1st-century CE with the Latin acrostic word square, the Sator Square (contains both word and sentence palindromes), and the 4th-century Greek Byzantine sentence palindrome ''nipson ano ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
First Law Of Thermodynamics
The first law of thermodynamics is a formulation of the law of conservation of energy, adapted for thermodynamic processes. It distinguishes in principle two forms of energy transfer, heat and thermodynamic work for a system of a constant amount of matter. The law also defines the internal energy of a system, an extensive property for taking account of the balance of energies in the system. The law of conservation of energy states that the total energy of any isolated system, which cannot exchange energy or matter, is constant. Energy can be transformed from one form to another, but can be neither created nor destroyed. The first law for a thermodynamic process is often formulated asThe sign convention (Q is heat supplied ''to'' the system but W is work done ''by'' the system) is that of Rudolf Clausius (Equation IIa on page 384 of Clausius, R. (1850)), and it is followed below. :\Delta U = Q - W, where \Delta U denotes the change in the internal energy of a closed system (f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Heat Engine
In thermodynamics and engineering, a heat engine is a system that converts heat to mechanical energy, which can then be used to do mechanical work. It does this by bringing a working substance from a higher state temperature to a lower state temperature. A heat source generates thermal energy that brings the working substance to the higher temperature state. The working substance generates work in the working body of the engine while transferring heat to the colder sink until it reaches a lower temperature state. During this process some of the thermal energy is converted into work by exploiting the properties of the working substance. The working substance can be any system with a non-zero heat capacity, but it usually is a gas or liquid. During this process, some heat is normally lost to the surroundings and is not converted to work. Also, some energy is unusable because of friction and drag. In general, an engine is any machine that converts energy to mechanical work. Heat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rowman & Littlefield
Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group is an independent publishing house founded in 1949. Under several imprints, the company offers scholarly books for the academic market, as well as trade books. The company also owns the book distributing company National Book Network based in Lanham, Maryland. History The current company took shape when University Press of America acquired Rowman & Littlefield in 1988 and took the Rowman & Littlefield name for the parent company. Since 2013, there has also been an affiliated company based in London called Rowman & Littlefield International. It is editorially independent and publishes only academic books in Philosophy, Politics & International Relations and Cultural Studies. The company sponsors the Rowman & Littlefield Award in Innovative Teaching, the only national teaching award in political science given in the United States. It is awarded annually by the American Political Science Association for people whose innovations have advanced ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Google Books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical character recognition (OCR), and stored in its digital database.The basic Google book link is found at: https://books.google.com/ . The "advanced" interface allowing more specific searches is found at: https://books.google.com/advanced_book_search Books are provided either by publishers and authors through the Google Books Partner Program, or by Google's library partners through the Library Project. Additionally, Google has partnered with a number of magazine publishers to digitize their archives. The Publisher Program was first known as Google Print when it was introduced at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2004. The Google Books Library Project, which scans works in the collections of library partners and adds them to the digital invent ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
