title: Fine art

text: Music is performed with a vast range of instruments and vocal techniques ranging from singing to rapping; there are solely instrumental pieces, solely vocal pieces (such as songs without instrumental accompaniment) and pieces that combine singing and instruments.


title: Fine art

text: Dance is an art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic, and to music, used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting.


title: Fine art

text: Dance is also used to describe methods of nonverbal communication (see body language) between humans or animals (bee dance, patterns of behaviour such as a mating dance), motion in inanimate objects ("the leaves danced in the wind"), and certain musical genres. In sports, gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are dance disciplines while the "kata" of the martial arts are often compared to dances.


title: Fine art

text: Modern Western theatre is dominated by realism, including drama and comedy. Another popular Western form is musical theatre. Classical forms of theatre, including Greek and Roman drama, classic English drama (Shakespeare and Marlowe included), and French theater (Molière included), are still performed today. In addition, performances of classic Eastern forms such as Noh and Kabuki can be found in the West, although with less frequency.


title: Fine art

text: "Fine arts film" is a term that encompasses motion pictures and the field of film as a fine art form. A "fine arts movie theater" is a venue, usually a building, for viewing such movies. Films are produced by recording images from the world with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or special effects. Films are cultural artifacts created by specific cultures, which reflect those cultures, and, in turn, affect them. Film is considered to be an important art form, a source of popular entertainment and a powerful method for educating – or indoctrinating – citizens. The visual elements of cinema give motion pictures a universal power of communication. Some films have become popular worldwide attractions by using dubbing or subtitles that translate the dialogue.


title: Fine art

text: Cinematography is the discipline of making lighting and camera choices when recording photographic images for the cinema. It is closely related to the art of still photography, though many additional issues arise when both the camera and elements of the scene may be in motion.


title: Fine art

text: Independent filmmaking often takes place outside of Hollywood, or other major studio systems. An independent film (or "indie film)" is a film initially produced without financing or distribution from a major movie studio. Creative, business, and technological reasons have all contributed to the growth of the indie film scene in the late 20th and early 21st century.


title: Fine art

text: Poetry (the term derives from a variant of the Greek term ποίησις ("poiesis", "to make") is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as sound symbolism, phonaesthetics and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.


title: Fine art

text: In the United States an academic course of study in fine art may include the Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art, or a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and/or a Master of Fine Arts degree – traditionally the terminal degree in the field. Doctor of Fine Arts degrees —earned, as opposed to honorary degrees— have begun to emerge at some US academic institutions, however.


title: West Germanic languages

text: The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three branches of the Germanic family of languages (the others being the North Germanic and the extinct East Germanic languages). The West Germanic branch is classically subdivided into three branches: Ingvaeonic, which includes English and Frisian, Istvaeonic, which includes Dutch and its close relatives, and Irminonic, which includes German and its close relatives and variants.


title: West Germanic languages

text: English is by far the most-spoken West Germanic language, with more than 1 billion speakers worldwide. Within Europe, the three most prevalent West Germanic languages are English, German, and Dutch. Frisian, spoken by about 450,000 people, constitutes a fourth distinct variety of West Germanic. The language family also includes Afrikaans, Yiddish, Luxembourgish, and Scots, which are closely related to Dutch, German and English respectively. Additionally, several creoles, patois, and pidgins are based on Dutch, English, or German.


title: West Germanic languages

text: The Germanic languages are traditionally divided into three groups: West, East and North Germanic. In some cases, their exact relation was difficult to determine from the sparse evidence of runic inscriptions, so that some individual varieties have been difficult to classify. This is especially true for the unattested Jutish language; today, most scholars classify Jutish as a West Germanic variety with several features of North Germanic.


title: West Germanic languages

text: Until the late 20th century, some scholars claimed that all Germanic languages remained mutually intelligible throughout the Migration Period, others hold that speakers of West Germanic dialects like Old Frankish and speakers of Gothic were already unable to communicate fluently by around the 3rd century AD. As a result of the substantial progress in the study of Proto-West Germanic in the early 21st century, there is a growing consensus that East and West Germanic indeed have been mutually unintelligible at that time, whereas West and North Germanic remained partially intelligible.


title: West Germanic languages

text: Dialects with the features assigned to the western group formed from Proto-Germanic in the late Jastorf culture (ca. 1st century BC). The West Germanic group is characterized by a number of phonological, morphological and lexical innovations or archaisms not found in North and East Germanic. Examples of West Germanic phonological particularities are:


title: West Germanic languages

text: A relative chronology of about 20 sound changes from Proto-Northwest Germanic to Proto-West Germanic (some of them only regional) has been published by Don Ringe in 2014.


title: West Germanic languages

text: A phonological archaism of West Germanic is the preservation of "grammatischer Wechsel" in most verbs, particularly in Old High German. This implies the same for West Germanic, whereas in East and North Germanic many of these alternations (in Gothic almost all of them) had been levelled out analogically by the time of the earliest texts.


title: West Germanic languages

text: Furthermore, the West Germanic languages share many lexemes not existing in North Germanic and/or East Germanic – archaisms as well as common neologisms.


title: West Germanic languages

text: Up until the 1990s, some scholars doubted that there was once a Proto-West-Germanic proto-language which was ancestral only to later West Germanic languages. Today, there is a growing consensus on what Don Ringe stated in 2012, that "these [phonological and morphological] changes amount to a massive evidence for a valid West Germanic clade".


title: West Germanic languages

text: After East Germanic broke off (an event usually dated to the 2nd or 1st century BC), the remaining Germanic languages, the Northwest Germanic languages, divided into four main dialects: North Germanic, and the three groups conventionally called "West Germanic", namely


title: West Germanic languages

text: Although there is quite a bit of knowledge about North Sea Germanic or Anglo-Frisian (because of the characteristic features of its daughter languages, Anglo-Saxon/Old English and Old Frisian), linguists know almost nothing about "Weser-Rhine Germanic" and "Elbe Germanic". In fact, both terms were coined in the 1940s to refer to groups of archaeological findings, rather than linguistic features. Only later were the terms applied to hypothetical dialectal differences within both regions. Even today, the very small number of Migration Period runic inscriptions from the area, many of them illegible, unclear or consisting only of one word, often a name, is insufficient to identify linguistic features specific to the two supposed dialect groups.


title: West Germanic languages

text: Evidence that East Germanic split off before the split between North and West Germanic comes from a number of linguistic innovations common to North and West Germanic, including:


title: West Germanic languages

text: Under that view, the properties that the West Germanic languages have in common separate from the North Germanic languages are not necessarily inherited from a "Proto-West-Germanic" language but may have spread by language contact among the Germanic languages spoken in Central Europe, not reaching those spoken in Scandinavia or reaching them much later. Rhotacism, for example, was largely complete in West Germanic while North Germanic runic inscriptions still clearly distinguished the two phonemes. There is also evidence that the lowering of "ē" to "ā" occurred first in West Germanic and spread to North Germanic later since word-final "ē" was lowered before it was shortened in West Germanic, but in North Germanic the shortening occurred first, resulting in "e" that later merged with "i". However, there are also a number of common archaisms in West Germanic shared by neither Old Norse nor Gothic. Some authors who support the concept of a West Germanic proto-language claim that, not only shared innovations can require the existence of a linguistic clade, but also that there are archaisms that cannot be explained simply as retentions later lost in the North or East, because this assumption can produce contradictions with attested features of the other branches.


title: West Germanic languages

text: That North Germanic is... a unitary subgroup [of Proto-Germanic] is completely obvious, as all of its dialects shared a long series of innovations, some of them very striking. That the same is true of West Germanic has been denied, but I will argue in vol. ii that all the West Germanic languages share several highly unusual innovations that virtually force us to posit a West Germanic clade. On the other hand, the internal subgrouping of both North Germanic and West Germanic is very messy, and it seems clear that each of those subfamilies diversified into a network of dialects that remained in contact for a considerable period of time (in some cases right up to the present).


title: West Germanic languages

text: Several scholars have published reconstructions of Proto-West-Germanic morphological paradigms and many authors have reconstructed individual Proto-West-Germanic morphological forms or lexemes. The first comprehensive reconstruction of the Proto-West-Germanic language was published in 2013 by Wolfram Euler, followed in 2014 by the study of Don Ringe and Ann Taylor.


title: West Germanic languages

text: If indeed Proto-West-Germanic existed, it must have been between the 2nd and 7th centuries. Until the late 2nd century AD, the language of runic inscriptions found in Scandinavia and in Northern Germany were so similar that Proto-North-Germanic and the Western dialects in the south were still part of one language ("Proto-Northwest-Germanic"). After that, the split into West and North Germanic occurred. By the 4th and 5th centuries the great migration set in. By the end of the 6th century, the area in which West Germanic languages were spoken, at least by the upper classes, had tripled compared to the year 400. This caused an increasing disintegration of the West Germanic language and finally the formation of the daughter languages.


title: West Germanic languages

text: It has been argued that, judging by their nearly identical syntax, the West Germanic dialects were closely enough related to have been mutually intelligible up to the 7th century. Over the course of this period, the dialects diverged successively. The High German consonant shift that occurred mostly during the 7th century AD in what is now southern Germany, Austria, and Switzerland can be considered the end of the linguistic unity among the West Germanic dialects, although its effects on their own should not be overestimated. Bordering dialects very probably continued to be mutually intelligible even beyond the boundaries of the consonant shift.


title: West Germanic languages

text: During the Early Middle Ages, the West Germanic languages were separated by the insular development of Old and Middle English on one hand, and by the High German consonant shift on the continent on the other.


title: West Germanic languages

text: The High German consonant shift distinguished the High German languages from the other West Germanic languages. By early modern times, the span had extended into considerable differences, ranging from Highest Alemannic in the South (the Walliser dialect being the southernmost surviving German dialect) to Northern Low Saxon in the North. Although both extremes are considered German, they are not mutually intelligible. The southernmost varieties have completed the second sound shift, whereas the northern dialects remained unaffected by the consonant shift.


title: West Germanic languages

text: Of modern German varieties, Low German is the one that most resembles modern English. The district of Angeln (or Anglia), from which the name "English" derives, is in the extreme northern part of Germany between the Danish border and the Baltic coast. The area of the Saxons (parts of today's Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony) lay south of Anglia. The Angles and Saxons, two Germanic tribes, in combination with a number of other peoples from northern Germany and the Jutland Peninsula, particularly the Jutes, settled in Britain following the end of Roman rule in the island. Once in Britain, these Germanic peoples eventually developed a shared cultural and linguistic identity as Anglo-Saxons; the extent of the linguistic influence of the native Romano-British population on the incomers is debatable.


title: West Germanic languages

text: Note that divisions between subfamilies of continental Germanic languages are rarely precisely defined; most form dialect continua, with adjacent dialects being mutually intelligible and more separated ones not.


title: West Germanic languages

text: The following table shows a list of various linguistic features and their extent among the West Germanic languages, organized roughly from northwest to southeast. Some may only appear in the older languages but are no longer apparent in the modern languages.


title: West Germanic languages

text: The original vowel system of West Germanic was similar to that of Proto-Germanic; note however the lowering of the long front vowels.


title: West Germanic languages

text: The consonant system was also essentially the same as that of Proto-Germanic. Note, however, the particular changes described above, as well as West Germanic gemination.


title: West Germanic languages

text: The following table compares a number of Frisian, English, Scotch, Yola, Dutch, Limburgish, German and Afrikaans words with common West Germanic (or older) origin. The grammatical gender of each term is noted as masculine ("m."), feminine ("f."), or neuter ("n.") where relevant.


title: West Germanic languages

text: Note that some of the shown similarities of Frisian and English vis-à-vis Dutch and German are secondary and not due to a closer relationship between them. For example, the plural of the word for "sheep" was originally unchanged in all four languages and still is in some Dutch dialects and a great deal of German dialects. Many other similarities, however, are indeed old inheritances.


title: Opinion polling on Scottish independence

text: This page lists public opinion polls that have been conducted in relation to the issue of Scottish independence since September 2014.


text: This page only shows polling since the Independence Referendum of 18th September 2014, where Scotland voted No to Independence by some 55% to 45% details and pre referendum polling can be found here


text: Only polling companies that are members of the British Polling Council and therefore fully disclose their findings and methodology, are shown in this section.


text: The main table, containing the large majority of polls, includes primarily those which ask the same question as the 2014 referendum "Should Scotland be an Independent Country?".


text: Any variations that might have an impact on the poll result such as if 16 to 17 year old voters are excluded, or size of poll sample are recorded in the notes field. Polling, even using the same question, can show systematic differences between different polling organisations and sponsors.


text: There are several tables reflecting the different ways questions around Independence can be asked, they may produce different results.


text: Generally, from early 2015 until late 2017 the trend showed a slow but steady increase in support for ‘No’ with several peaks and troughs, during 2017 polling indicated that ‘No’ had a larger winning margin than it had achieved in 2014.


text: From late 2017 until late 2020 there was a steady rise in support for 'Yes' which gave us a period between late 2019 and April 2021 where ‘Yes’ had a sustained lead. Since when ‘No’ had re-established its lead to about 4%. In late 2022 there were several polls that showed Yes establishing a lead.


text: There have been many issues that appear to have impacted on polling returns, these include the EU Referendum, Brexit, Covid Pandemic, the Vaccine rollout and Supreme Court decision.


text: The following tables give the results of opinion polls conducted since the 2014 referendum, with most recent polls first in the tables.


text: There are several tables reflecting the different ways the question can be asked, producing different results. The main table, containing the large majority of polls, includes primarily those which ask the same question as the 2014 referendum "Should Scotland be an Independent Country?". The use of a slightly different question is noted in the table. The second table lists polls which use the question "Should Scotland remain in the United Kingdom or leave the United Kingdom?". Subsequent tables deal with multi-option polling.


text: Most of the polls sample 16-17 year-olds, who were entitled to vote in the 2014 referendum. Some do not, again as noted.


text: Polling, even using the same question, can show systematic differences between different polling organisations and sponsors.


text: Instead of using the question posed in the 2014 referendum ("Should Scotland be an independent country?"), some polls have adopted the remain / leave formulation that was used in the 2016 Brexit referendum. In the context of Scottish independence, this means that the question would be asked in the fashion of "Should Scotland remain in the United Kingdom or leave the United Kingdom?". The use of this format has been criticised by Scottish nationalists; SNP depute leader Keith Brown said in September 2019 that it was "a deliberate bid to confuse independence with Brexit".


text: Prior to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014, some three option opinion polls were conducted, giving respondents the option of full independence, some (undefined) form of increased devolution and the status quo. One poll of this type has been conducted since the EU membership referendum.


text: On 23 November 2022, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to unilaterally hold an independence referendum without the consent of the Westminster Parliament. Following that judgment, the SNP reiterated its intention to campaign in the next UK general election as a "de facto" independence referendum.


text: Since devolution, the annual Scottish Social Attitudes Survey has contained a question on independence.


text: A report released in 2017, entitled "From Indyref1 to Indyref2? The State of Nationalism in Scotland", detailed the previous responses from this survey by grouping options one and two as "independence", options three and four as "devolution" and option five as "No Parliament".


text: Separate from the question of how Scots might vote in a hypothetical second referendum is the question of whether there should be a second referendum. Once again the responses vary with exactly how the question is asked. The first table below lists answers to the question "Do you support or oppose a second referendum on Scottish independence?". The second table lists polls asking "Do you think another Scottish independence referendum should be held in the next 12 months, in the next 2–5 years or there should not be another referendum in the next few years?".


text: The "British Social Attitudes Survey" has asked voters in England how Scotland should be governed, since the 1997 British Election Study. It has always found a plurality in favour of devolution, with majorities in favour between 1997 and 2003 and again between 2017 and 2021. Since 2011, when the Scottish National Party won a majority in the Scottish Parliament, there has always been one in five people in England in favour of Scottish independence.


title: The Thick of It

text: The Thick of It is a British comedy television series that satirises the inner workings of British government. Written and directed by Armando Iannucci, it was first broadcast for two short series on BBC Four in 2005, initially with a small cast focusing on a government minister, his advisers and their party's spin-doctor. The cast was significantly expanded for two hour-long specials to coincide with Christmas and Gordon Brown's appointment as prime minister in 2007, which saw new characters forming the opposition party added to the cast. These characters continued when the show switched channels to BBC Two for its third series in 2009. A fourth series about a coalition government was broadcast in 2012, with the last episode transmitted on 27 October 2012.


title: The Thick of It

text: The series has been described as the 21st century's answer to "Yes Minister." It highlights the struggles and conflicts between politicians, party spin doctors, advisers, civil servants and the media. In similar fashion to "Yes Minister", the political parties involved are never mentioned by name, and in series 1 and 2 most policies discussed are fairly generic and non-ideological. Iannucci describes it as ""Yes Minister" meets "Larry Sanders"". Journalist and former civil servant Martin Sixsmith was an adviser to the writing team, adding to the realism of some scenes. The series became well known for its profanity and for featuring storylines which have mirrored, or in some cases predicted, real-life policies, events or scandals.


title: The Thick of It

text: A feature film spin-off, "In the Loop", was released in the UK on 17 April 2009. A pilot for a U.S. remake of the show was not successful, but Iannucci was subsequently invited to create "Veep" for HBO, a programme with a very similar tone and political issues, with the involvement of some "The Thick of It" writers and production members.


title: The Thick of It

text: Armando Iannucci originally conceived of a modern political satire after "arguing the case" for "Yes Minister" in a 2004 Best British Sitcom poll for BBC Two. His idea was commissioned by Roly Keating, the controller of BBC Four, who granted Iannucci limited budget, telling him to "turn that into what you can." Iannucci created the first series of three episodes, which aired in May–June 2005, and a second series, also of three episodes, which followed in October.


title: The Thick of It

text: The series was written by a team of writers led by Armando Iannucci, who also directed the series, with Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Roger Drew, Sean Gray, Ian Martin, Will Smith and Tony Roche. Some of the dialogue was improvised rather than scripted (with the cast credited as providing "additional material"), and included some very strong language. Peter Capaldi said "Fundamentally 80% of the final cut is the script that we started with. The improvisation just makes it feel more real and not written." Prior to rehearsals, the scripts were sent to a "swearing consultant" in Lancaster called Ian Martin, who added some of the more colourful language. The programme's producer was Adam Tandy, who had produced all of Iannucci's television projects since 2000. The programme was shot with hand-held cameras to give it a sense of vérité or fly-on-the-wall documentary. The documentary style was furthered by the absence of any incidental music or laughter track.


title: The Thick of It

text: The action centres on the fictional Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship ("DoSAC" – previously the Department of Social Affairs, or "DoSA", prior to the reshuffle of episode five), which supposedly came out of the prime minister's passing enthusiasm for "joined-up government". Thus it acts as a "super department" overseeing many others, with some similarities to the Cabinet Office. This concept enables different political themes to be dealt with in the programme, similar to the Department of Administrative Affairs in "Yes Minister".


title: The Thick of It

text: Hugh Abbot, played by Chris Langham, is a blundering minister heading the department, who is continually trying to do his job under the watchful eye of Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi), Number 10's highly aggressive and domineering "enforcer". The programme also features James Smith as senior special adviser Glenn Cullen, Chris Addison as junior policy adviser Ollie Reeder, and Joanna Scanlan as civil service press secretary Terri Coverley.


title: The Thick of It

text: The beginning of the third series saw Hugh Abbot replaced as head of DoSAC by Nicola Murray (Rebecca Front), who arrives without her own staff, so Ollie and Glenn find themselves keeping their jobs.


title: The Thick of It

text: From series 4, after a general election which results in a coalition government, Peter Mannion MP (Roger Allam) is the new Secretary of State for DoSAC, supported by his team of special advisers, commanded by Number 10's director of communications Stewart Pearson (Vincent Franklin) and thwarted by his new coalition partner, DoSAC's junior minister Fergus Williams MP (Geoffrey Streatfeild). Nicola Murray MP is now leader of the opposition, and opposition spin doctor Malcolm Tucker is desperate for a return to power.


title: The Thick of It

text: In the first batch of three episodes, Hugh Abbot is installed as a new minister following the forced resignation of his predecessor Cliff Lawton. These episodes follow his attempts to make his mark on the department by introducing new policies while toeing the party line enforced by Malcolm Tucker. Due to a series of complications and mistakes, this leads to the minister coming close to resignation on a number of occasions.


title: The Thick of It

text: The second batch of episodes takes place before a cabinet reshuffle, and follows Hugh's attempts to keep his job. Ollie Reeder is seconded to number 10 "to phone his girlfriend" Emma Messinger, a member of the shadow defence policy team, where he is under the close eye of enforcer Jamie. Meanwhile, Terri Coverley is on compassionate leave following the death of her father, leaving her role to Robyn Murdoch, a senior press officer. The department also has to contend with the interference of the prime minister's "blue skies" adviser Julius Nicholson. The minister and the department survive the reshuffle, with the department being rebranded as the "Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship" and moved to a new building. However, the mistakes and compromises continue.


title: The Thick of It

text: In the two specials, following the Christmas break, Hugh Abbot is in Australia and the department has to "babysit" junior minister for immigration Ben Swain, who is described as a "Nutter" (a term used for supporters of prime-minister-in-waiting Tom Davis). The first special ("Rise of the Nutters") revolves around a computer problem at Immigration, which is exacerbated by the junior minister appearing in a disastrous "Newsnight" interview. The opposition policy adviser, Emma Messinger, capitalises on the error by stealing an idea from her boyfriend, Ollie Reeder, to send the shadow minister Peter Mannion on a fact-finding mission at an immigration centre. Meanwhile, Tucker is concerned about his position in the government after speculating that the prime minister's handover to Tom Davis is expected in less than six months. Tucker conspires with Ollie to leak the prime minister's "legacy programme" (the PM's plan to move the handling of immigration policy to a non-political executive board) in the hope of stalling his departure, inadvertently leading the PM to resign early. The next episode ("Spinners and Losers") follows a single night of "spin", as advisers, junior politicians and enforcers all try to better their position during the transition, but only Malcolm gets anywhere.


title: The Thick of It

text: In series 3, Hugh Abbot is replaced as minister by Nicola Murray, played by Rebecca Front. She is an unexpected, last-minute choice for the position, and given her inexperience and lack of staff, she is forced to retain Ollie and Glenn as her advisers. The series continues to focus on the general running, or mis-running, of DoSAC, with Murray's attempts to formulate her "Fourth Sector Pathfinder Initiative" being a running thread throughout the series. With the cloud of the forthcoming general election and tension at 10 Downing Street looming, the series also broadens its scope to include episodes set at the annual party conference and BBC Radio 5 Live. We also see more of Murray's opposite number, Peter Mannion, and other members of the opposition first seen in the 2007 specials. The gradual breakdown of Malcolm Tucker and appearance of new threats to his control, in particular Steve Fleming (David Haig), are also major plotlines. The series ends with Fleming forcing Malcolm's resignation, only to be ousted himself a matter of days later. Having regained dominance, Malcolm decides to call an election immediately to seize the initiative from his enemies in the opposition and his own party.


title: The Thick of It

text: In series 4, the government and opposition have switched places following a hung election and there is therefore a coalition government with a smaller third party. Peter Mannion has been made the Secretary of State for Social Affairs and Citizenship but has to contend with Fergus Williams, his junior partner in the coalition. Meanwhile, following Tom Davis's defeat and resignation, Nicola Murray had been elected by her party, apparently on a technicality, over Dan Miller, her opponent, as leader of the opposition, although she resigns at the end of episode four and is replaced by her deputy, Miller. A running thread throughout the series is an ongoing "Leveson-style public inquiry" which takes place in episode six. While the first four episodes each focuses solely on one side (episodes one and three focusing on the coalition, and episode two and four focusing on the opposition), each episode thereafter cuts between the parties. The final three episodes of series four show all parties trying to cover their tracks regarding a public health care bill which has led to the public eviction and consequent suicide of Douglas Tickel, a nurse with a history of mental illness. All three main parties have some level of responsibility and have participated in the illegal leaking of documents, in particular Tickel's medical records, which is the reason for the Goolding Inquiry being launched.


title: The Thick of It

text: Most episodes focus on the department's incumbent minister and a core cast of advisers and civil servants, under the watchful eye of Number 10's enforcer, Malcolm Tucker. Over its run, the series has developed a large cast of additional characters, who form the government, opposition, as well as members of the media.


title: The Thick of It

text: The first run of three episodes screened on BBC Four from 19 May 2005. A further three episodes were transmitted 20 October – 3 November 2005. The six episodes were repeated on BBC Two in early 2006, and later on BBC America together as a single series. The subsequent DVD release of all six episodes describes the episodes as "The Complete First Series".


title: The Thick of It

text: An hour-long Christmas special, "The Rise of the Nutters", aired in January 2007 with a further ten episodes planned for later on in the year. Chris Langham did not reprise his role as Hugh Abbot, due to arrest and later conviction on charges of possession of child pornography, ruling him out of any further roles. To fill this void, Iannucci introduced new characters into the series forming the opposition.


title: The Thick of It

text: Another one-off hour-long episode "Spinners and Losers" aired on 3 July 2007. It was followed by a 15-minute extra episode through BBC Red Button, following the same story from the opposition's point of view.


title: The Thick of It

text: For series 3, transmission switched to BBC Two, with subsequent repeats on BBC Four. The series ran for eight episodes from 24 October 2009 to 12 December 2009. As a Red Button extra, each episode had an accompanying 10-minute documentary titled "Out of The Thick of It" broadcast immediately afterwards and on the BBC Comedy website, which featured cut scenes, specially written scenes and, later, discussion of the programme by the series' writers, makers and with figures involved in British politics.


title: The Thick of It

text: Internationally, series 1 and 2 aired back-to-back in Australia on ABC1 each Friday at 9:40 pm from 21 November 2008 and has since been repeated on ABC2 and UKTV. Later, the two-hour-long specials along with series 3 premiered consecutively on the lower-rated ABC2 channel from 7 July 2011 each Thursday at 10:15 pm and again repeated, this time on ABC1 and UKTV.


title: The Thick of It

text: A fourth series was commissioned in March 2010. Work began on the scripts in March 2011, filming began in March 2012 and airing started on BBC Two on 8 September 2012. The fourth series is co-produced by Hulu. Iannucci stated that the coalition government, in particular the role of the Liberal Democrats, would remain the target of the next series. In an interview with "The Guardian", he stated his idea was for Peter Mannion to have become a minister "but there will be someone from the other party in the coalition in his office, so a lot of the comedy will come from that tension between duplicated ministers." Press for the fourth series partially focused on the applicability of the show to real life, with Will Smith commenting that the use of the word "omnishambles", coined in the third series, becoming a political meme in the months before transmission being a "baffling" example of life imitating art.


title: The Thick of It

text: "The Thick of It" received critical acclaim during its original run. On Metacritic, the first series of the show holds a score of 90 out of 100 based on 4 reviews, indicating "[u]niversal acclaim". "Entertainment Weekly" gave the season a grade of A−, with reviewer Alynda Wheat calling the "sly Britcom [...] a C-SPAN spin-off of [...] "The Office"." Margy Rochlin in "The New York Times" described it as "urgently authentic. Visually, the series has a news-as-it-is-happening feel, where actors are often only half in the frame or partly obscured while reciting a line of dialogue. The cameras will skitter restlessly from character to character, sometimes bouncing so crazily that the result looks like a foot chase from "Cops."" The DVD of the first two series received a perfect score from the U.K.'s "Empire" magazine, with critic William Thomas calling it "the finest shot of pitch-black comic vitriol to be aimed at Whitehall in many a moon." A DVD of the post-series 2 specials also received a perfect score from Gary Andrews of "Den of Geek", who wrote: "What makes "The Thick Of It" so watchable is the feeling that what you’re watching could well have happened at one point or another behind the scenes at Westminister. Even the minor characters are perfectly drawn and everybody gets at least one good line, with classic quotes popping up in virtually every line of dialogue. "Yes Minister" may have set the bar for political sitcoms but "The Thick Of It" adds gratuitous swearing and a group of utterly unlikeable yet immensely watchable characters."


title: The Thick of It

text: The third series of the show has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 83% based on 6 reviews, with an average score of 10/10. The day its first episode aired, Caitlin Moran wrote an article for "The Times" calling "The Thick of It" the "best show ever made" and a show that "has changed the way we see politics." Verne Gay of "Newsday" gave the series a highest possible grade of A+, calling it "[o]ne of the flat-out funniest half-hours of television in the English-speaking world." His review, published in 2012, posited that Ianucci's semi-spin-off of the show -- the U.S.-based "Veep" -- was a "pallid knockoff" compared to "The Thick of It" because of Capaldi's role as Malcolm Tucker in the latter, "a human blowtorch who doesn't merely dress down subordinates but rips their clothes off to pour sulfuric acid -- figuratively speaking, though barely -- on their still-smoldering skin." "The A.V. Club"'s David Sims' retrospective assessment of the series was also mostly positive, though he opined that Malcolm's "thrilling" "fall from grace" towards the end was a bit rushed. In his review of the first episode, Michael Deacon of "The Daily Telegraph" felt that Tucker's character was "overdone", but admitted that this criticism was "silly" and "tantamount to saying the show's too funny." A negative review came from "The Guardian", whose Michael White felt that the show "lacked heart, lacked sympathy, lacked good guys, let alone honest ambitions. In that sense it's the exact opposite of another highly professional show about politics, "The West Wing". [...] But I can't stand "The West Wing" either: too sentimental, just as "The Thick of It" is much too cynical. I can see that it's funny, but I rarely laugh."


title: The Thick of It

text: The fourth and final series of the show has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 88% based on 16 review, with an average score of 7.30/10. It is also the only series to have a critical consensus on the site, which reads: "Armando Ianucci's gloriously profane satire concludes at the peak of its dyspeptic hilarity, combining its withering eye for political machinations and its Shakespearean flow of curse words to deliver a harrowingly funny sendoff." James Poniewozik, writing for "TIME", found that "the political specificity" of the show's situations "give it bite. And the way it draws its various characters gives it a kind of poignance for all its hard-hearted cynicism. Political satires like to depict pols as self-interested, cold professionals who have traded in their ideals, and that’s plenty true here. But Mannion and the various staffers are also simply imperfect people, fallen short of their ambitions and stuck in what are–for all the perks and access to power–often lousy, exhausting, crappy jobs, which grind them down and smother their personal lives." Anthony Paletta of "New York" magazine also wrote positively of the show's characterizations, noting their "genuine consciences" at various points. He also praised the show for its "startlingly versatile obscenity." A few critics, however, expressed reservations regarding the final series. Graeme Thornson of "The Arts Desk", for example, felt that "[t]ime [had] rounded off some of the sharp edges" of the show, "but it still delivers a highly generous helping of belly laughs per minute." Sam Wollaston of "The Guardian" was more critical, writing: "There is an unsubtlety, a too-obviousness, about it that makes me wonder whether Armando Iannucci, what with all his other projects like [sic] taking over America and the world, had let his eye off this one."


title: The Thick of It

text: The series has been the recipient of a number of awards, particularly from the BAFTA. Series 1 won both "Best Situation Comedy" and Chris Langham won "Best Comedy Performance" at the 2006 BAFTA Television Awards, with Peter Capaldi being nominated for the same award in 2006 and 2008. Capaldi won the BAFTA for "Best Male Comedy Performance" at the 2010 awards, with Rebecca Front winning "Best Female Comedy Performance". The series was also declared the "Best Situation Comedy". Additionally, the series won "Best Situation Comedy" from the Royal Television Society in 2006 and 2010, and won Broadcasting Press Guild Awards in 2006 and 2010 for "Best Sitcom" and "Best Writing Team".


title: The Thick of It

text: "The Thick of It" has often been ranked as one of the greatest TV shows of all time. In 2019, "The Guardian" ranked it the 4th greatest show of the 21st century, with Phil Harrison writing that the "craven, idiotic likes of Peter Mannion and Nicola Murray would be paragons of probity and wisdom in today’s parliamentary landscape. But at the time, Armando Iannucci’s scabrous comedy felt like an indictment of everything wrong with the spin and cynicism of British politics." "Empire" included it at #81 on their list of "The 100 Best TV Shows Of All Time", calling it "one of the sharpest, fastest-witted comedies ever, skewering Britain's political class via a tornado of creative cursing." "Digital Spy" readers voted it the 66th greatest show of the 21st century. The following year, BBC Culture polled 206 "critics, journalists, academics and industry figures" from around the world to compile the 100 greatest television series of the 21st century; "The Thick of It" came in at #20. The website also selected it as one of 25 shows that defined the century, with Turkish film critic Ali Arikan writing:The early part of the new century was marked by a heinous trend of "new optimism" in US comedy, where spiritual redemption was available to even the least deserving. On the opposite end of the spectrum was The Thick of It, Armando Iannucci's caustic UK satire, the central premise of which was that everyone involved in government were contemptible halfwits interested purely in self-preservation. Showcasing ever more inventive ways in which powerless politicians and useless civil servants can create monumental crises out of molehills, the show made a star of Peter Capaldi (years after he had won an Oscar for a short film he directed), whose scathing spin doctor Malcolm Tucker frantically rampaged through Westminster like a foul-mouthed Godzilla. Any faith in politics was confidently and certainly rebuked.Many commentators have written about the show's continued relevance in the years following its final season. In 2016, "NME" publsihed an article titled "Eight Times Brexit Made British Politics Look Like The Thick Of It". The following year, Ianucci revived Malcolm Tucker for a 4-page Brexit debate against Alan Partridge (another character he'd co-created) for "The Big Issue". Gavin Haynes wrote in Vice in 2019:Time and again, "The Thick of It" led and reality fell in behind. Eighteen months after “"Do you know what it’s like to clean up your own mother’s piss?"” we had The Gillian Duffy Incident. Nick Clegg used to bang on about "alarm clock Britain". Season two's Nicola Murray had her own target market: "the quiet bat-people". Murray's came first. The term "omnishambles", coined on the show in 2009, leapt from the screen into politics after George Osborne's flaky 2012 budget. By the following year, Malcolm Tucker's phrase had entered the OED.Adam Miller, writing for "Herald Scotland", wrote that it has become a "cliche" to compare modern political developments to the show, noting: "rarely has a Tory story in the last few years not led to ‘The Thick of It’ trending on Twitter." Collider's Joe Hoeffner wrote in 2022: "Just as any vaguely dystopian technological development is compared to an episode of "Black Mirror", people can’t help but wonder what Malcolm Tucker would have to say whenever someone in Whitehall makes a fool of themselves, which, in recent years, is more or less on a daily basis."


title: The Thick of It

text: In May 2008, the BBC issued a press release stating that filming had commenced on a feature-length adaptation named "In the Loop" starring Tom Hollander, James Gandolfini, Chris Addison, Peter Capaldi, Gina McKee and Steve Coogan. The film followed the plight of the International Development minister as an inadvertent comment in an interview leads to him being used as a puppet by the president of the United States and the prime minister who are looking to launch a war in the Middle East. The film follows the officials and advisers in their behind-the-scenes efforts either to promote the war or prevent it.


title: The Thick of It

text: Although many of the TV series cast returned, the only actual returning characters are Malcolm Tucker, Jamie McDonald and Sam Cassidy, with series regulars Chris Addison, James Smith, Joanna Scanlan, Alex MacQueen, Olivia Poulet, Eve Matheson and Will Smith playing new characters altogether. The film premiered in the US at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and in the UK at the 2009 Glasgow Film Festival. It was released on 17 April 2009 in the United Kingdom. "In The Loop" was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 2010. Several cast members later played similar roles in "Veep".


title: The Thick of It

text: On 27 October 2006, it was announced that "The Thick of It" would be adapted for American television, focusing on the daily lives of a low-level member of the United States Congress and his staff. "Arrested Development" creator Mitch Hurwitz would be the executive producer, along with Iannucci and Richard Day. The pilot was directed by Christopher Guest, and produced by Sony Pictures and BBC Worldwide. The cast included John Michael Higgins, Oliver Platt, Michael McKean, Alex Borstein, and Wayne Wilderson.


title: The Thick of It

text: ABC did not pick up the show for its 2007 Autumn schedule. Iannucci distanced himself from the pilot, saying: "It was terrible ... they took the idea and chucked out all the style. It was all conventionally shot and there was no improvisation or swearing. It didn't get picked up, thank God." Other networks including HBO, Showtime, and NBC expressed interest in the show, and in April 2009, Iannucci re-entered talks with HBO over the possibility of an American adaptation.


title: The Thick of It

text: In November 2010 it was announced that HBO had ordered a pilot for a new series called "Veep", to be written, directed and produced by Iannucci. It stars Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the leading role as vice president of the U.S. and also includes several of the American cast members who played similar characters in "In the Loop", most notably series co-star Anna Chlumsky. The series began airing in April 2012. Although it is not a direct spin-off, "Veep" shares a similar tone and style with "The Thick of It". "Veep" began showing in the UK on Sky Atlantic beginning in June 2012.


title: The Thick of It

text: Justin Edwards and Rebecca Gethings appear in the "Veep" episode "Special Relationship" as different characters.


title: The Thick of It

text: On 2 April 2007, a UK DVD of the first six episodes was released as "The Complete First Series". It also included audio commentary, deleted scenes, and photo galleries. The two specials were released on a second UK DVD in April 2009. The third series was released on UK DVD in April 2010, followed by a "complete series" to date box set. Although the third series was filmed and broadcast on the BBC in high definition video there has been no release to date on Blu-ray. A North American "Series One to Three" DVD box set was briefly scheduled for release in late 2012, but the release was delayed until 6 Aug. 2013, in order to allow all four seasons (plus specials) to be included in what was now a "Complete Series" release. The release date was announced by BBC Worldwide early in 2013, but coincidentally ended up occurring only two days after Peter Capaldi was announced as the new star of "Doctor Who". (Even more coincidental, a cast commentary included as part of a photo gallery featurette for the episode "Rise of the Nutters" included in the DVD set, recorded several years earlier, has several cast members jokingly deciding to start a rumour that Capaldi is to be the next Doctor.)


title: The Thick of It

text: "The Thick of It: The Scripts", a book containing the scripts from the first two series and the 2007 specials, was published on 1 September 2007.


title: The Thick of It

text: An iPhone app – based on the "DoSAC Files" book and named 'Malcolm Tucker: The Missing Phone' – was released in 2010, and was nominated for a New Media award at the 2011 Television BAFTAs.


title: The Thick of It

text: In the run-up to the 2010 general election, the column 'Malcolm Tucker's election briefing' appeared weekly in "The Guardian", written by Jesse Armstrong.


title: The Thick of It

text: A one-off column written by Ian Martin in the character of Stewart Pearson – 'Stewart Pearson's Media Notebook' – appeared in "The Guardian" in November 2010.


title: Dominic Sherwood

text: Dominic Anthony Sherwood (born 6 February 1990) is an English actor and model, best known for his roles as Christian Ozera in the teen vampire film "Vampire Academy" (2014), Jace Wayland on the Freeform fantasy series "Shadowhunters" (2016-2019), Kurt in the series "" (2020) and Jeff Murphy in the Netflix legal drama "Partner Track" (2022).


title: Dominic Sherwood

text: Sherwood was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. He attended Oakwood Park Grammar School in Maidstone for his secondary school education. After studying drama and theatre in Maidstone and Sevenoaks, he left to work abroad, starting in Kenya and working for six months before moving to London.


title: Dominic Sherwood

text: Sherwood's first acting role came in 2010, with his appearance as Jack Simmons in the third season of "The Cut". The following year, he guest starred as a waiter named Tom in the "Sadie J" episode "Cherylistic". In 2012, he had a small role in the drama film "Not Fade Away" as a young Mick Jagger. He landed his first notable role in 2014, as Christian Ozera in the satirical horror film "Vampire Academy", based on the novel by Richelle Mead.


title: Dominic Sherwood

text: In February 2015, he became known for his appearance in Taylor Swift's music video for her single "Style", which was directed by Kyle Newman. On 20 April 2015, it was announced he was chosen to play Jace Herondale in the Freeform fantasy drama series "Shadowhunters", an adaptation of Cassandra Clare's "The Mortal Instruments" book series. He also co-starred alongside Ed Westwick and Jeremy Sumpter in the thriller film "Billionaire Ransom", and will appear in the horror-thriller film "Don’t Sleep" with Drea de Matteo and Cary Elwes.


title: Dominic Sherwood

text: On 13 September 2021 it was reported that Sherwood will be starring in a reboot of Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1996 film "Eraser" titled "" which is currently in post-production and is scheduled to be released in 2022. It was reported on 15 March 2022 that the movie will be released on Digital, Blu-ray & DVD on 7 June 2022, and will also be available for streaming on HBO Max in autumn 2022.


title: Dominic Sherwood

text: Sherwood will also be starring in the upcoming Netflix series "Partner Track" based on Helen Wan's novel of the same name. Principle production for the series began in September 2021 and ended in late February 2022 in New York. On 30 July Netflix released the official trailer for "Partner Track" confirming that the series will be released on 26 August 2022.


title: Dominic Sherwood

text: On 11 April 2022 he is set to begin hosting a "Shadowhunters" rewatch podcast with co-star Katherine McNamara called "Return to the Shadows".


title: Dominic Sherwood

text: Sherwood has sectoral heterochromia; one of his eyes is blue while the other is half blue-half brown.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: Naegleria fowleri, colloquially known as a "brain-eating amoeba", is a species of the genus "Naegleria", belonging to the phylum Percolozoa, which is technically not classified as true amoeba, but a shapeshifting amoeboflagellate excavate. It is a free-living, bacteria-eating microorganism that can be pathogenic, causing an extremely rare, sudden, severe and usually fatal brain infection called naegleriasis or primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAM). This microorganism is typically found in bodies of warm freshwater, such as ponds, lakes, rivers, hot springs, warm water discharge from industrial or power plants, geothermal well water, poorly maintained or minimally chlorinated (under 0.5 mg/m residual) swimming pools, water heaters, soil, and pipes connected to tap water. It can be seen in either an amoeboid or temporary flagellate stage.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: The organism was named after Malcolm Fowler, an Australian pathologist at Adelaide Children's Hospital, who was the first author of the original series of case reports of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: "Naegleria fowleri" is a thermophilic, free-living amoeba. It is found in warm and hot freshwater ponds, lakes and rivers, and in the very warm water of hot springs. As the water temperature rises, its numbers increase. The amoeba was identified in the 1960s in Australia but appears to have evolved in the United States. "N. fowleri" occurs in three forms – as a cyst, a trophozoite (ameboid), and a biflagellate. It does not form a cyst in solid human tissue, where only the amoeboid trophozoite stage exists, however the flagellate form has been found in cerebrospinal fluid.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: Trophozoites change to cyst form to survive times when the environment is temporarily harsh. The cyst is a spherical, single-layered, smooth wall about 7–15 µm in diameter, that encloses a single nucleus.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: The cyst is a resilient, life-preserving capsule for the amoeba, that resists adverse conditions. Factors that induce cyst formation include a lack of food, overcrowding, desiccation, accumulation of waste products, and cold temperatures. When conditions improve, the amoeba can escape through the pore, or ostiole, seen in the middle of the cyst. "N. fowleri" has been found to encyst at temperatures below .


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: The trophozoite is the infective stage for humans, when the organism can actively feed and divide. The trophozoite attaches to the olfactory epithelium, where it follows the olfactory cell axon through the cribriform plate (in the nasal cavity) to the brain. This reproductive stage of the protozoan organism, which transforms near 25 °C (77 °F) and grows best around 42 °C (106.7 °F), proliferates by binary fission.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: The trophozoites are characterized by a nucleus and a surrounding flexible membrane. They travel by pseudopodia, which means that they extend parts of their body's cell membrane (the pseudopods) and then fill them with protoplasm to force locomotion. The pseudopods form at different points along the cell, thus allowing the trophozoite to change directions. In their free-living state, trophozoites feed on bacteria. In tissues, it appears they phagocytize (consume by enclosing and then digesting prey) red blood cells and destroy tissue either by releasing cytolytic substances or by cell-to-cell contact using cytolytic membrane proteins.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: The flagellate is pear-shaped and biflagellate: this means that it has two flagella. This stage can be inhaled into the nasal cavity during swimming or diving. This biflagellate form occurs when trophozoites are exposed to a change in ionic concentration, such as placement in distilled water. The flagellate form does not exist in human tissue, but can exist in the cerebrospinal fluid. Once inside the nasal cavity, the flagellated form transforms into a trophozoite. The transformation of flagellate to trophozoite occurs within a few hours.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: "Naegleria fowleri" are excavates that inhabit soil and water. "N. fowleri" is sensitive to drying and acid. It cannot survive in sea water. This amoeba is able to grow best at moderately elevated temperatures making summer month infections more likely. "N. fowleri" is a facultative thermophile and is able to grow at temperatures up to . Warm, fresh water with a sufficient supply of bacterial food provides a habitat for amoebae. Man-made bodies of water, disturbed natural habitats, or areas with soil and unchlorinated / unfiltered water are locations where many amoebic infections have occurred.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: "N. fowleri" seems to thrive during periods of disturbance; the flagellate-empty hypothesis explains that Naegleria's success may be due to decreased competition from a depleted population of the normal, thermosensitive protozoal fauna. In other words, "N. fowleri" thrives in the absence of other predators consuming its food supply. This hypothesis suggests that human disturbances such as thermal pollution increase "N. fowleri" abundance by removing their resource competitors. Ameoboflagellates have a motile flagellate stage that is evolved for dispersal, which is advantageous when an environment has been cleared of competing organisms.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: "N. fowleri" can cause an often fatal infection of the brain called naegleriasis (also known as primary amoebic meningoencephalitis, amoebic encephalitis/meningitis, or simply "Naegleria" infection). Infections most often occur when water containing "N. fowleri" is inhaled through the nose, where it then enters the nasal and olfactory nerve tissue, travelling to the brain through the cribriform plate. "N. fowleri" cannot cause infection by swallowing contaminated water. Infections typically occur after swimming in warm-climate freshwater, although there have been cases in cooler climates such as Minnesota, US. In rare cases, infection has been caused by nasal or sinus rinsing with contaminated water in a nasal rinsing device such as a neti pot.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: "N. fowleri" normally eat bacteria, but during human infections, the trophozoites consume astrocytes and neurons. The reason why "N. fowleri" prefers to pass across the cribriform plate has remained unknown, but the neurotransmitter acetylcholine has been suggested to act as a stimulus, as a structural homolog of animal CHRM1 has been shown to be present in "Naegleria" and "Acanthamoeba".


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: It takes one to nine days (average five) for symptoms to appear after nasal exposure to "N. fowleri" flagellates. Symptoms may include headache, fever, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, altered mental state, coma, drooping eyelid, blurred vision, and loss of the sense of taste. Later symptoms can include stiff neck, confusion, lack of attention, loss of balance, seizures, and hallucinations. Once symptoms begin to appear, death will usually occur within two weeks. A person infected with "N. fowleri" cannot spread the infection to another person. From 2009 to 2017, 34 infections were reported in the United States.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: Though rarely observed, infection by "Naegleria fowleri" can occur in animals. Experimentally, mice, guinea pigs, and sheep have been infected, and there have been reports of South American tapirs and cattle contracting PAM. Animal infection is likely quite overlooked.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: The core antimicrobial treatment consists of the antifungal drug amphotericin B, which inhibits the pathogen by binding to its cell membrane sterols, thus leading to cell membrane disruption and pathogen death; however, even with this treatment, the fatality rate is greater than 95%. New treatments are being sought. Miltefosine, an antiparasitic drug that inhibits the pathogen via disrupting its cell survival signal pathway PI3K/Akt/mTOR, has been used in a few cases with mixed results.


title: Naegleria fowleri

text: A key factor to effective treatment is the speed of diagnosis. PAM is a rare occurrence and is not often considered as a likely diagnosis; therefore, the clinical laboratory’s identification of the microorganism may be the first time an amoebic etiology is considered. The rapid identification can help to avoid delays in diagnosis and therapy. Amoeba cultures and real-time PCR studies for "N. fowleri" are diagnostic of PAM, however, they are not readily available at most institutions and would require being performed at a reference laboratory. The time of presentation of the patient can also affect the identification of the microorganism as PAM has a variable incubation time, ranging from 1 to 7 days. The clinical signs of PAM are similar to bacterial and viral meningitis, including fever, neck stiffness, and severe headaches. Symptoms can progress to prolonged nausea, vomiting, and even seizures. The disease can progress to acute hemorrhagic necrotizing meningoencephalitis, which can lead to death in as soon as 7–10 days. A variable delay in treatment can be secondary to time intervals in multiple stages of care, including exposure to exhibition of symptoms; arrival for treatment at a health care facility; workup of the diagnosis (initial diagnosis of likely bacterial meningitis); and finally, from diagnosis to initiation of recommended therapy. Successful treatment of PAM is a rare occurrence and can only be attempted after correct diagnosis, which relies on rapid recognition of the microorganism by medical technologists and pathologists. It is critical that medical technologists consistently provide timely CSF evaluation, explore the diagnosis of PAM, and look for amoebae in the setting of meningitis, especially in the summertime.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium (from Greek ) is a chemical element with the symbol Os and atomic number 76. It is a hard, brittle, bluish-white transition metal in the platinum group that is found as a trace element in alloys, mostly in platinum ores. Osmium is the densest naturally occurring element. When experimentally measured using X-ray crystallography, it has a density of . Manufacturers use its alloys with platinum, iridium, and other platinum-group metals to make fountain pen nib tipping, electrical contacts, and in other applications that require extreme durability and hardness.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium is among the rarest elements in the Earth's crust, making up only 50 parts per trillion (ppt). It is estimated to be about 0.6 parts per billion in the universe and is therefore the rarest precious metal.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium has a blue-gray tint and is the densest stable element; it is approximately twice as dense as lead and narrowly denser than iridium. Calculations of density from the X-ray diffraction data may produce the most reliable data for these elements, giving a value of for osmium, slightly denser than the of iridium; both metals are nearly 23 times as dense as water, and times as dense as gold.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium is a hard but brittle metal that remains lustrous even at high temperatures. It has a very low compressibility. Correspondingly, its bulk modulus is extremely high, reported between and , which rivals that of diamond (). The hardness of osmium is moderately high at . Because of its hardness, brittleness, low vapor pressure (the lowest of the platinum-group metals), and very high melting point (the fourth highest of all elements, after carbon, tungsten, and rhenium), solid osmium is difficult to machine, form, or work.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium forms compounds with oxidation states ranging from −2 to +8. The most common oxidation states are +2, +3, +4, and +8. The +8 oxidation state is notable for being the highest attained by any chemical element aside from iridium's +9 and is encountered only in xenon, ruthenium, hassium, iridium, and plutonium. The oxidation states −1 and −2 represented by the two reactive compounds and are used in the synthesis of osmium cluster compounds.


title: Osmium

text: The most common compound exhibiting the +8 oxidation state is osmium tetroxide. This toxic compound is formed when powdered osmium is exposed to air. It is a very volatile, water-soluble, pale yellow, crystalline solid with a strong smell. Osmium powder has the characteristic smell of osmium tetroxide. Osmium tetroxide forms red osmates upon reaction with a base. With ammonia, it forms the nitrido-osmates . Osmium tetroxide boils at 130 °C and is a powerful oxidizing agent. By contrast, osmium dioxide () is black, non-volatile, and much less reactive and toxic.


title: Osmium

text: Only two osmium compounds have major applications: osmium tetroxide for staining tissue in electron microscopy and for the oxidation of alkenes in organic synthesis, and the non-volatile osmates for organic oxidation reactions.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium pentafluoride () is known, but osmium trifluoride () has not yet been synthesized. The lower oxidation states are stabilized by the larger halogens, so that the trichloride, tribromide, triiodide, and even diiodide are known. The oxidation state +1 is known only for osmium monoiodide (OsI), whereas several carbonyl complexes of osmium, such as triosmium dodecacarbonyl (), represent oxidation state 0.


title: Osmium

text: In general, the lower oxidation states of osmium are stabilized by ligands that are good σ-donors (such as amines) and π-acceptors (heterocycles containing nitrogen). The higher oxidation states are stabilized by strong σ- and π-donors, such as and .


title: Osmium

text: Despite its broad range of compounds in numerous oxidation states, osmium in bulk form at ordinary temperatures and pressures resists attack by all acids, including aqua regia, but is attacked by fused alkalis, hot nitric acid, and hot aqua regia.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium has seven naturally occurring isotopes, five of which are stable: , , , , and (most abundant) . undergoes alpha decay with such a long half-life years, approximately times the age of the universe, that for practical purposes it can be considered stable. is also known to undergo alpha decay with a half-life of years. Alpha decay is predicted for all the other naturally occurring isotopes, but this has never been observed, presumably due to very long half-lives. It is predicted that and can undergo double beta decay, but this radioactivity has not been observed yet.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium was discovered in 1803 by Smithson Tennant and William Hyde Wollaston in London, England. The discovery of osmium is intertwined with that of platinum and the other metals of the platinum group. Platinum reached Europe as "platina" ("small silver"), first encountered in the late 17th century in silver mines around the Chocó Department, in Colombia. The discovery that this metal was not an alloy, but a distinct new element, was published in 1748.


title: Osmium

text: Chemists who studied platinum dissolved it in aqua regia (a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acids) to create soluble salts. They always observed a small amount of a dark, insoluble residue. Joseph Louis Proust thought that the residue was graphite. Victor Collet-Descotils, Antoine François, comte de Fourcroy, and Louis Nicolas Vauquelin also observed iridium in the black platinum residue in 1803, but did not obtain enough material for further experiments. Later the two French chemists Fourcroy and Vauquelin identified a metal in a platinum residue they called ‘"ptène"’.


title: Osmium

text: In 1803, Smithson Tennant analyzed the insoluble residue and concluded that it must contain a new metal. Vauquelin treated the powder alternately with alkali and acids and obtained a volatile new oxide, which he believed was of this new metal—which he named "ptene", from the Greek word (ptènos) for winged. However, Tennant, who had the advantage of a much larger amount of residue, continued his research and identified two previously undiscovered elements in the black residue, iridium and osmium. He obtained a yellow solution (probably of "cis"–<nowiki>[</nowiki>Os(OH)O<nowiki>]</nowiki>) by reactions with sodium hydroxide at red heat. After acidification he was able to distill the formed OsO. He named it osmium after Greek "osme" meaning "a smell", because of the ashy and smoky smell of the volatile osmium tetroxide. Discovery of the new elements was documented in a letter to the Royal Society on June 21, 1804.


title: Osmium

text: Uranium and osmium were early successful catalysts in the Haber process, the nitrogen fixation reaction of nitrogen and hydrogen to produce ammonia, giving enough yield to make the process economically successful. At the time, a group at BASF led by Carl Bosch bought most of the world's supply of osmium to use as a catalyst. Shortly thereafter, in 1908, cheaper catalysts based on iron and iron oxides were introduced by the same group for the first pilot plants, removing the need for the expensive and rare osmium.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium is the least abundant stable element in Earth's crust, with an average mass fraction of 50 parts per trillion in the continental crust.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium is found in nature as an uncombined element or in natural alloys; especially the iridium–osmium alloys, osmiridium (iridium rich), and iridosmium (osmium rich). In nickel and copper deposits, the platinum-group metals occur as sulfides (i.e., ), tellurides (e.g., ), antimonides (e.g., ), and arsenides (e.g., ); in all these compounds platinum is exchanged by a small amount of iridium and osmium. As with all of the platinum-group metals, osmium can be found naturally in alloys with nickel or copper.


title: Osmium

text: Within Earth's crust, osmium, like iridium, is found at highest concentrations in three types of geologic structure: igneous deposits (crustal intrusions from below), impact craters, and deposits reworked from one of the former structures. The largest known primary reserves are in the Bushveld Igneous Complex in South Africa, though the large copper–nickel deposits near Norilsk in Russia, and the Sudbury Basin in Canada are also significant sources of osmium. Smaller reserves can be found in the United States. The alluvial deposits used by pre-Columbian people in the Chocó Department, Colombia are still a source for platinum-group metals. The second large alluvial deposit was found in the Ural Mountains, Russia, which is still mined.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium is obtained commercially as a by-product from nickel and copper mining and processing. During electrorefining of copper and nickel, noble metals such as silver, gold and the platinum-group metals, together with non-metallic elements such as selenium and tellurium, settle to the bottom of the cell as "anode mud", which forms the starting material for their extraction. Separating the metals requires that they first be brought into solution. Several methods can achieve this, depending on the separation process and the composition of the mixture. Two representative methods are fusion with sodium peroxide followed by dissolution in aqua regia, and dissolution in a mixture of chlorine with hydrochloric acid. Osmium, ruthenium, rhodium, and iridium can be separated from platinum, gold, and base metals by their insolubility in aqua regia, leaving a solid residue. Rhodium can be separated from the residue by treatment with molten sodium bisulfate. The insoluble residue, containing ruthenium, osmium, and iridium, is treated with sodium oxide, in which Ir is insoluble, producing water-soluble ruthenium and osmium salts. After oxidation to the volatile oxides, is separated from by precipitation of (NH)RuCl with ammonium chloride.


title: Osmium

text: After it is dissolved, osmium is separated from the other platinum-group metals by distillation or extraction with organic solvents of the volatile osmium tetroxide. The first method is similar to the procedure used by Tennant and Wollaston. Both methods are suitable for industrial-scale production. In either case, the product is reduced using hydrogen, yielding the metal as a powder or sponge that can be treated using powder metallurgy techniques.


title: Osmium

text: Neither the producers nor the United States Geological Survey published any production amounts for osmium. In 1971, estimations of the United States production of osmium as a byproduct of copper refining was 2000 troy ounces (62 kg). Between 2010 and 2019, annual US imports of osmium ranged from less than 0.5 kg to 856 kg, averaging 157 kg/year.


title: Osmium

text: One another method for producing osmium is from rhenium. , which occurs 62.6% in nature, could absorb a neutron to become . This has a short half-life of approximately 17 hours; the nucleus converts to , which occurs 13.24% in nature.


title: Osmium

text: Because of the volatility and extreme toxicity of its oxide, osmium is rarely used in its pure state, but is instead often alloyed with other metals for high-wear applications. Osmium alloys such as osmiridium are very hard and, along with other platinum-group metals, are used in the tips of fountain pens, instrument pivots, and electrical contacts, as they can resist wear from frequent operation. They were also used for the tips of phonograph styli during the late 78 rpm and early "LP" and "45" record era, circa 1945 to 1955. Osmium-alloy tips were significantly more durable than steel and chromium needle points, but wore out far more rapidly than competing, and costlier, sapphire and diamond tips, so they were discontinued.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium tetroxide has been used in fingerprint detection and in staining fatty tissue for optical and electron microscopy. As a strong oxidant, it cross-links lipids mainly by reacting with unsaturated carbon–carbon bonds and thereby both fixes biological membranes in place in tissue samples and simultaneously stains them. Because osmium atoms are extremely electron-dense, osmium staining greatly enhances image contrast in transmission electron microscopy (TEM) studies of biological materials. Those carbon materials otherwise have very weak TEM contrast. Another osmium compound, osmium ferricyanide (OsFeCN), exhibits similar fixing and staining action.


title: Osmium

text: The tetroxide and its derivative potassium osmate are important oxidants in organic synthesis. For the Sharpless asymmetric dihydroxylation, which uses osmate for the conversion of a double bond into a vicinal diol, Karl Barry Sharpless was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2001. OsO is very expensive for this use, so KMnO is often used instead, even though the yields are less for this cheaper chemical reagent.


title: Osmium

text: In 1898, the Austrian chemist Auer von Welsbach developed the Oslamp with a filament made of osmium, which he introduced commercially in 1902. After only a few years, osmium was replaced by tungsten, which is more abundant (and thus cheaper) and more stable. Tungsten has the highest melting point among all metals, and its use in light bulbs increases the luminous efficacy and life of incandescent lamps.


title: Osmium

text: The light bulb manufacturer Osram (founded in 1906, when three German companies, Auer-Gesellschaft, AEG and Siemens & Halske, combined their lamp production facilities) derived its name from the elements of osmium and Wolfram (the latter is German for tungsten).


title: Osmium

text: Like palladium, powdered osmium effectively absorbs hydrogen atoms. This could make osmium a potential candidate for a metal-hydride battery electrode. However, osmium is expensive and would react with potassium hydroxide, the most common battery electrolyte.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium has high reflectivity in the ultraviolet range of the electromagnetic spectrum; for example, at 600 Å osmium has a reflectivity twice that of gold. This high reflectivity is desirable in space-based UV spectrometers, which have reduced mirror sizes due to space limitations. Osmium-coated mirrors were flown in several space missions aboard the Space Shuttle, but it soon became clear that the oxygen radicals in low Earth orbit are abundant enough to significantly deteriorate the osmium layer.


title: Osmium

text: The only known clinical use of osmium is synovectomy in arthritic patients in Scandinavia. It involves the local administration of osmium tetroxide (OsO), which is a highly toxic compound. The lack of reports of long-term side effects suggest that osmium itself can be biocompatible, though this depends on the osmium compound administered. In 2011, osmium(VI) and osmium(II) compounds were reported to show anticancer activity "in vivo"; this indicated a promising future for using osmium compounds as anticancer drugs.


title: Osmium

text: Metallic osmium is harmless in its metallic state, but finely divided metallic osmium is pyrophoric and reacts with oxygen at room temperature, forming volatile osmium tetroxide. Because all osmium metal slowly oxidizes in air, with the exception of crystallized osmium and various alloys, the degree of hazard comes from its surface area. Some osmium compounds are also converted to the tetroxide if oxygen is present. This makes osmium tetroxide the main source of contact with the environment.


title: Osmium

text: Osmium tetroxide is highly volatile and penetrates skin readily, and is very toxic by inhalation, ingestion, and skin contact. Airborne low concentrations of osmium tetroxide vapor can cause lung congestion and skin or eye damage, and should therefore be used in a fume hood. Osmium tetroxide is rapidly reduced to relatively inert compounds by e.g. ascorbic acid or polyunsaturated vegetable oils (such as corn oil).


title: Osmium

text: Osmium, like other precious metals, is measured by troy weight and grams. The market price of osmium has not changed in decades, primarily because little change has occurred in supply and demand. In addition to being scarce, osmium is difficult to work with, has few uses, and is a challenge to store safely because of the metal's toxic gas made when oxygenated.


title: Osmium

text: While the price of $400 per troy ounce has remained steady since the 1990s, inflation since that time has led to the metal losing about one-third of its value in the two decades prior to 2018.


title: Amrapali Gan

text: Amrapali Gan is an Indian-American businesswoman. In December 2021, she was appointed as CEO of OnlyFans, which she joined in September 2020 as chief marketing and communications officer. She succeeded founding CEO Tim Stokely.


title: Amrapali Gan

text: Gan was born in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India in 1984 or 1985. She is a graduate of California State University, Los Angeles.


title: Astrological symbols

text: Historically, astrological and astronomical symbols overlapped. Frequently used symbols include signs of the zodiac and classical planets. These originate from medieval Byzantine codices. Their current form is a product of the European Renaissance. Other symbols for astrological aspects are used in various astrological traditions.


title: Astrological symbols

text: Symbols for the classical planets, zodiac signs, aspects, lots, and the lunar nodes appear in the medieval Byzantine codices in which many ancient horoscopes were preserved. In the original papyri of these Greek horoscopes, there was a circle with the glyph representing shine () for the Sun; and a crescent for the Moon.


title: Astrological symbols

text: The written symbols for Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn have been traced to forms found in late Classical Greek papyri. The symbols for Jupiter and Saturn are monograms of the initial letters of the corresponding Greek names, and the symbol for Mercury is a stylized caduceus. A.S.D. Maunder finds antecedents of the planetary symbols in earlier sources, used to represent the gods associated with the classical planets. "Bianchini's planisphere", produced in the 2nd century, shows Greek personifications of planetary gods charged with early versions of the planetary symbols: Mercury has a caduceus; Venus has, attached to her necklace, a cord connected to another necklace; Mars, a spear; Jupiter, a staff; Saturn, a scythe; the Sun, a circlet with rays radiating from it; and the Moon, a headdress with a crescent attached. A diagram in Johannes Kamateros' 12th century "Compendium of Astrology" shows the Sun represented by the circle with a ray, Jupiter by the letter "zeta" (the initial of Zeus, Jupiter's counterpart in Greek mythology), Mars by a shield crossed by a spear, and the remaining classical planets by symbols resembling the modern ones, without the cross-mark seen in modern versions of the symbols.


title: Astrological symbols

text: The modern sun symbol, pictured as a circle with a dot (), first appeared in the Renaissance. (The conventional symbols for the signs of the zodiac also develop in the Renaissance period as simplifications of the classical pictorial representations of the signs.)


title: Astrological symbols

text: The modern sun symbol resembles the Egyptian hieroglyph for "sun" – a circle that sometimes had a dot in the center, ().


title: Astrological symbols

text: Similar in appearance were several variants of the ancestral form of the modern Chinese logograph for "sun", which in the oracle bone script and bronze script were .


title: Astrological symbols

text: It is not know if the Egyptian and Chinese logographs have any connection to the European astrological symbol.


title: Astrological symbols

text: Symbols for Uranus and Neptune were created shortly after their discovery. For Uranus, two variant symbols are seen. One symbol, , invented by J. G. Köhler and refined by Bode, was intended to represent the newly discovered metal platinum; since platinum, sometimes described as white gold was found by chemists mixed with iron, the symbol for platinum combines the alchemical symbols for iron, ♂, and gold, ☉. An inverted version of that same symbol, was in use in the early 20th century. Another symbol, , was suggested by Lalande in 1784. In a letter to Herschel, Lalande described it as "un globe surmonté par la première lettre de votre nom" ("a globe surmounted by the first letter of your name"). After Neptune was discovered, the Bureau des Longitudes proposed the name Neptune and the familiar trident for the planet's symbol, though at bottom may be either a cross or an orb .


title: Astrological symbols

text: The astrological symbols for the first four objects discovered at the beginning of the 19th century — Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta — were created shortly after their discoveries. They were initially listed as planets, and half a century later came to be called asteroids, though such "minor planets" continued to be considered planets for perhaps another century. Shortly after Giuseppe Piazzi's discovery of Ceres, a group of astronomers ratified the name, proposed by the discoverer, and chose the sickle as a symbol of the planet. The symbol for Pallas, the spear of Pallas Athena, was invented by Baron Franz Xaver von Zach, and introduced in his "Monatliche Correspondenz zur Beförderung der Erd- und Himmels-Kunde". Karl Ludwig Harding, who discovered and named Juno, assigned to it the symbol of a scepter topped with a star.


title: Astrological symbols

text: The modern astrological form of the symbol for Vesta, ⚶, was created by Eleanor Bach, who is credited with pioneering the use of the big four asteroids with the publication of her "Ephemerides of the Asteroids" in the early 1970s. The original form of the symbol for Vesta, , was created by German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. Olbers, having previously discovered and named one new planet (as the asteroids were then classified), gave Gauss the honor of naming his newest discovery. Gauss decided to name the planet for the goddess Vesta, and also specified that the symbol should be the altar of the goddess with the sacred fire burning on it.


title: Astrological symbols

text: The symbol for the centaur Chiron, ⚷, is both a key and a monogram of the letters O and K (for 'Object Kowal', a provisional name of the object, for discoverer Charles T. Kowal) was proposed by astrologer Al Morrison, who presented the symbol as "an inspiration shared amongst Al H. Morrison, Joelle K.D. Mahoney, and Marlene Bassoff."


title: Astrological symbols

text: A widely used convention for other centaurs, proposed by Robert von Heeren in the 1990s, is to replace the K of the Chiron key glyph with the initial letter of the object: e.g. P for Pholus and N for Nessus, or dedicated Unicode characters like and .


title: Astrological symbols

text: Pluto, like Uranus, has multiple symbols in use. One symbol, ♇, is a monogram of the letters PL (which can be interpreted to stand for Pluto or for astronomer Percival Lowell), was announced with the name of the new planet by the discoverers on May 1, 1930. Another symbol, which was popularized in Paul Clancy's astrological publications, is based on Pluto's bident: . This symbol is described by Dane Rudhyar as "suggest[ing] the planetary character of the Pluto mind by the circle, floating above the open cup." Although, this meaning is readily debatable due to Blavatskian origins, rather than a properly traditional understanding, such as may be found in Hermeticism.


title: Astrological symbols

text: Symbols for other large trans-Neptunian objects have mostly been proposed on the Internet;<ref name="/www.suberic.net/~dmm/astro/tno.html"></ref> some created by Denis Moskowitz have been used by NASA


title: Astrological symbols

text: and are used by the popular open-source astrological software Astrolog, as well as being used less consistently by commercial programs.


title: Astrological symbols

text: The symbol for retrograde motion is , a capital 'R' with a tail stroke. An 'R' with a tail stroke was used to abbreviate many words beginning with the letter 'R'; in medical prescriptions, it abbreviated the word "recipe" (from the Latin imperative of "recipere" "to take"), and in missals, an R with a tail stroke marked the responses.


title: Astrological symbols

text: The symbols of the planets are usually (but not always) broken down into four common elements by astrologers: A circle denoting spirit, a crescent denoting the mind, a cross denoting practical/physical matter and an arrow denoting action or direction. This is not the historical origin of the symbols. (The cross, for example, was an attempt to Christianize pagan symbols.)


title: Astrological symbols

text: Since the 1970s, some astrologers have used asteroids and other celestial bodies in their horoscopes. The symbol for the first-recognised centaur, 2060 Chiron, was devised by Al H. Morrison soon after it had been discovered by Charles Kowal, and has become standard amongst astrologers. In the late 1990s, German astrologer Robert von Heeren created symbols for other centaurs based on the Chiron model, though only those for 5145 Pholus and 7066 Nessus are included in Unicode, and only that for Pholus in Astrolog. The following list by no means exhaustive and confines itself to bodies that are in Unicode or are mentioned by Unicode proposals.


title: Astrological symbols

text: The Hamburg School of Astrology, also called Uranian Astrology, is a sub-variety of western astrology. It adds eight fictitious trans-Neptunian planets to the normal ones used by western astrologers:


title: Astrological symbols

text: In astrology, an aspect is an angle the planets make to each other in the horoscope, also to the ascendant, midheaven, descendant, lower midheaven, and other points of astrological interest. The following symbols are used to note aspect:


title: Astrological symbols

text: In addition to the aspect symbols above, some Russian astrologers use additional or unique aspect symbols:


title: Power of two

text: A power of two is a number of the form where is an integer, that is, the result of exponentiation with number two as the base and integer  as the exponent.


title: Power of two

text: In a context where only integers are considered, is restricted to non-negative values, so there are 1, 2, and 2 multiplied by itself a certain number of times.


title: Power of two

text: Because two is the base of the binary numeral system, powers of two are common in computer science. Written in binary, a power of two always has the form 100...000 or 0.00...001, just like a power of 10 in the decimal system.


title: Power of two

text: Two to the exponent of , written as , is the number of ways the bits in a binary word of length can be arranged. A word, interpreted as an unsigned integer, can represent values from 0 () to  () inclusively. Corresponding signed integer values can be positive, negative and zero; see signed number representations. Either way, one less than a power of two is often the upper bound of an integer in binary computers. As a consequence, numbers of this form show up frequently in computer software. As an example, a video game running on an 8-bit system might limit the score or the number of items the player can hold to 255—the result of using a byte, which is 8 bits long, to store the number, giving a maximum value of . For example, in the original "Legend of Zelda" the main character was limited to carrying 255 rupees (the currency of the game) at any given time, and the video game Pac-Man famously has a kill screen at level 256.


title: Power of two

text: Powers of two are often used to measure computer memory. A byte is now considered eight bits (an octet), resulting in the possibility of 256 values (2). (The term "byte" once meant (and in some cases, still means) a collection of bits, typically of 5 to 32 bits, rather than only an 8-bit unit.) The prefix "kilo", in conjunction with "byte", may be, and has traditionally been, used, to mean 1,024 (2). However, in general, the term "kilo" has been used in the International System of Units to mean 1,000 (10). Binary prefixes have been standardized, such as "kibi" (Ki) meaning 1,024. Nearly all processor registers have sizes that are powers of two, 32 or 64 being very common.


title: Power of two

text: Powers of two occur in a range of other places as well. For many disk drives, at least one of the sector size, number of sectors per track, and number of tracks per surface is a power of two. The logical block size is almost always a power of two.


title: Power of two

text: Numbers that are not powers of two occur in a number of situations, such as video resolutions, but they are often the sum or product of only two or three powers of two, or powers of two minus one. For example, , and . Put another way, they have fairly regular bit patterns.


title: Power of two

text: A prime number that is one less than a power of two is called a Mersenne prime. For example, the prime number 31 is a Mersenne prime because it is 1 less than 32 (2). Similarly, a prime number (like 257) that is one more than a positive power of two is called a Fermat prime—the exponent itself is a power of two. A fraction that has a power of two as its denominator is called a dyadic rational. The numbers that can be represented as sums of consecutive positive integers are called polite numbers; they are exactly the numbers that are not powers of two.


title: Power of two

text: The geometric progression 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, ... (or, in the binary numeral system, 1, 10, 100, 1000, 10000, 100000, ... ) is important in number theory. Book IX, Proposition 36 of "Elements" proves that if the sum of the first terms of this progression is a prime number (and thus is a Mersenne prime as mentioned above), then this sum times the th term is a perfect number. For example, the sum of the first 5 terms of the series 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 = 31, which is a prime number. The sum 31 multiplied by 16 (the 5th term in the series) equals 496, which is a perfect number.


title: Power of two

text: Book IX, Proposition 35, proves that in a geometric series if the first term is subtracted from the second and last term in the sequence, then as the excess of the second is to the first—so is the excess of the last to all those before it. (This is a restatement of our formula for geometric series from above.) Applying this to the geometric progression 31, 62, 124, 248, 496 (which results from 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 by multiplying all terms by 31), we see that 62 minus 31 is to 31 as 496 minus 31 is to the sum of 31, 62, 124, 248. Therefore, the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 31, 62, 124 and 248 add up to 496 and further these are all the numbers that divide 496. For suppose that divides 496 and it is not amongst these numbers. Assume is equal to , or 31 is to as is to 16. Now cannot divide 16 or it would be amongst the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16.


title: Power of two

text: Therefore, 31 cannot divide . And since 31 does not divide and measures 496, the fundamental theorem of arithmetic implies that must divide 16 and be amongst the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8 or 16. Let be 4, then must be 124, which is impossible since by hypothesis is not amongst the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 31, 62, 124 or 248.


title: Power of two

text: Starting with 2 the last digit is periodic with period 4, with the cycle 2–4–8–6–, and starting with 4 the last two digits are periodic with period 20. These patterns are generally true of any power, with respect to any base. The pattern continues where each pattern has starting point , and the period is the multiplicative order of 2 modulo , which is (see Multiplicative group of integers modulo n).


title: Power of two

text: Because data (specifically integers) and the addresses of data are stored using the same hardware, and the data is stored in one or more octets (), double exponentials of two are common. For example,


title: Power of two

text: Several of these numbers represent the number of values representable using common computer data types. For example, a 32-bit word consisting of 4 bytes can represent distinct values, which can either be regarded as mere bit-patterns, or are more commonly interpreted as the unsigned numbers from 0 to , or as the range of signed numbers between and . Also see tetration and lower hyperoperations. For more about representing signed numbers see two's complement.


title: Power of two

text: The numbers formula_1 form an irrationality sequence: for every sequence formula_2 of positive integers, the series


title: Power of two

text: converges to an irrational number. Despite the rapid growth of this sequence, it is the slowest-growing irrationality sequence known.


title: Power of two

text: The sum of all -choose binomial coefficients is equal to . Consider the set of all -digit binary integers. Its cardinality is . It is also the sums of the cardinalities of certain subsets: the subset of integers with no 1s (consisting of a single number, written as 0s), the subset with a single 1, the subset with two 1s, and so on up to the subset with 1s (consisting of the number written as 1s). Each of these is in turn equal to the binomial coefficient indexed by and the number of 1s being considered (for example, there are 10-choose-3 binary numbers with ten digits that include exactly three 1s).


title: Power of two

text: The number of vertices of an -dimensional hypercube is . Similarly, the number of -faces of an -dimensional cross-polytope is also and the formula for the number of -faces an -dimensional cross-polytope has is formula_4


title: Power of two

text: The sum of the reciprocals of the powers of two is 1. The sum of the reciprocals of the squared powers of two (powers of four) is 1/3.


title: Power of two

text: Every power of 2 (excluding 1) can be written as the sum of four square numbers in 24 ways. The powers of 2 are the natural numbers greater than 1 that can be written as the sum of four square numbers in the fewest ways.


title: Power of two

text: As a real polynomial, "a" + "b" is irreducible, if and only if "n" is a power of two. (If "n" is odd, then "a" + "b" is divisible by "a"+"n", and if "n" is even but not a power of 2, then "n" can be written as "n"="mp", where "m" is odd, and thus formula_6, which is divisible by "a" + "b".)


title: Power of two

text: But in the domain of complex numbers, the polynomial formula_7 (where "n">=1) can always be factorized as


title: Power of two

text: In musical notation, all unmodified note values have a duration equal to a whole note divided by a power of two; for example a half note (1/2), a quarter note (1/4), an eighth note (1/8) and a sixteenth note (1/16). Dotted or otherwise modified notes have other durations. In time signatures the lower numeral, the "beat unit", which can be seen as the denominator of a fraction, is almost always a power of two.


title: Power of two

text: If the ratio of frequencies of two pitches is a power of two, then the interval between those pitches is full octaves. In this case, the corresponding notes have the same name.


title: Queen of the Damned

text: Queen of the Damned is a 2002 vampire film directed by Michael Rymer, loosely based on the third novel of Anne Rice's "The Vampire Chronicles" series, "The Queen of the Damned" (1988), although the film contains many plot elements from the novel's predecessor "The Vampire Lestat". A stand-alone sequel to "Interview with the Vampire" (1994), the film stars Stuart Townsend, Aaliyah in her final film role, Marguerite Moreau, Vincent Pérez and Lena Olin. Townsend and Matthew Newton replaced Tom Cruise and Antonio Banderas in the roles Lestat and Armand respectively.


title: Queen of the Damned

text: The film is dedicated to Aaliyah, who died in a plane crash on August 25, 2001, after she had shot all her scenes. Released on February 22, 2002, in North America and on April 4, 2002, in Australia, it received generally negative reviews from critics and did not perform well at the box office.


title: Queen of the Damned

text: The vampire Lestat is awakened from decades of slumber by the sound of a hard rock band, and proceeds to take over as their lead singer. Achieving international success, Lestat, having revealed the existence of vampires, taunts the others of his kind during an interview for promoting his first and only live concert.