May 3, 2012
A 64k intro is a demo (a non-interactive multimedia presentation) where the size of the executable file is limited to 65,536 bytes. At demo parties there is a category for this kind of demo. 64k intros generally apply many techniques to be able to fit in the given size, usually including procedural generation, sound synthesis, and executable compression.
The size of 64 kilobytes is a traditional limit which was inherited from the maximum size of a COM file. An intro originally referred to an endless demo where all the action happened on a single graphical screen, often to promote a BBS or a game crack. Nowadays it can refer to any demo written within a strict size limit, such as 4 kB or 64 kB.
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May 3, 2012
Interlingua [in-ter-ling-gwuh] is a planned language using words that are found in most West-European languages. It was made by IALA – a group of people (the most known was Alexander Gode) that worked on it for more than 20 years, and they finished and published the first dictionary in 1951. Interlingua was created on the base of languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.
‘Inter’ means ‘between’ or ‘to each other’; ‘lingua’ means ‘language.’ The goal of the language was to enable people of different countries to talk to each other easily. Because Interlingua was made by people to be easy, it is easier than natural languages to learn. Many thousands of people know Interlingua, and Interlingua speakers say that millions can understand it (read texts in it and listen to someone talk in it) without having to learn it first.
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May 3, 2012
Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution (1969) is a book by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, who’s work proposed that the kinds of basic color terms a culture has, such as black, brown or red, are predictable by the number of color terms the culture has.
Berlin and Kay posit seven levels in which cultures fall, with Stage I languages having only the colors black (dark–cool) and white (light–warm). Languages in Stage VII have eight or more basic color terms. This includes English, which has eleven basic color terms.
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May 3, 2012
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view. Popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined as having two versions: Strong (language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories) and Weak (linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behavior).
The term ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ is a misnomer as the men never co-authored anything and never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis. The notion of ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ versions of Whorf’s principal of linguistic relativity is a misunderstanding of Whorf promulgated by Stuart Chase, whom Whorf considered ‘utterly incompetent by training and background to handle such a subject.’
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May 3, 2012
The Culture is a fictional interstellar anarchist, socialist, and utopian society created by the Scottish writer Iain M. Banks which features in a number of science fiction novels and works of short fiction by him, collectively called the Culture series.
The Culture is characterized by being a post-scarcity society (meaning that its advanced technologies provide practically limitless material wealth and comforts for everyone for free, having all but abolished the concept of possessions), by having overcome almost all physical constraints on life (including disease and death) and by being an almost totally egalitarian, stable society without the use of any form of force or compulsion, except where necessary to protect others.
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May 3, 2012
Excession, first published in 1996, is Scottish writer Iain M. Banks’s fourth science fiction novel to feature the Culture (a fictional interstellar anarchist, socialist, and utopian society). It concerns the response of the Culture and other interstellar societies to an unprecedented alien artifact, the Excession of the title.
The book is largely about the response of the Culture’s Minds (AIs with enormous intellectual and physical capabilities and distinctive personalities) to the Excession itself and the way in which another society, whose systematic brutality horrifies the Culture, tries to use the Excession to increase its power.
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May 3, 2012
Slavoj Žižek [slah-voy zhee-zhek] (b. 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic working. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory and theoretical psychoanalysis. Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana.
Žižek uses examples from popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy, and Marxist economic criticism to interpret and speak extensively on immediately current social phenomena, including the current ongoing global financial crisis.
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