Initial

In a written or published work, an initial or dropcap is a letter at the beginning of a word, a chapter, or a paragraph that is larger than the rest of the text. The word is derived from the Latin initialis, which means standing at the beginning. An initial often is several lines in height and in older books or manuscripts, sometimes ornately decorated.

In illuminated manuscripts, initials with images inside them, such as those illustrated here, are known as historiated initials. They were an invention of the Insular art of the British Isles in the eighth century. Initials containing, typically, plant-form spirals with small figures of animals or humans that do not represent a specific person or scene are known as "inhabited" initials. Certain important initials, such as the B of Beatus vir... at the opening of Psalm 1 at the start of a vulgate Latin psalter, could occupy a whole page of a manuscript.

These specific initials, in an illuminated manuscript, also were called Initiums.

Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants).

Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic meter and its stress patterns.

Syllabic writing began several hundred years before the first letters. The earliest recorded syllables are on tablets written around 2800 BC in the Sumerian city of Ur. This shift from pictograms to syllables has been called "the most important advance in the history of writing".

A word that consists of a single syllable (like English dog) is called a monosyllable (and is said to be monosyllabic). Similar terms include disyllable (and disyllabic) for a word of two syllables; trisyllable (and trisyllabic) for a word of three syllables; and polysyllable (and polysyllabic), which may refer either to a word of more than three syllables or to any word of more than one syllable.

Initial (album)

Initial is the debut album from the band Person L, released on August 5, 2008. Kenny Vasoli self-recorded the album in his home studio in late 2007–2008 and released it through his record label, Human Interest. Several of the songs originate from demos he worked on while on tour with The Starting Line.

Track listing

Trivia

2. "Holy Hell" is inspired by the band Drive Like Jehu, according to frontman Kenny Vasoli.

Axis (novel)

Axis is a science fiction novel by author Robert Charles Wilson, published in 2007. It is a direct sequel to Wilson's Hugo Award-winning Spin, published two years earlier. The novel was a finalist for the 2008 John W. Campbell Award.

Plot

Axis takes place on the new planet introduced at the end of Spin, a world the Hypotheticals engineered to support human life and connected to Earth by way of the Arch that towers hundreds of miles over the Indian Ocean. Humans are colonizing this new world — and, predictably, fiercely exploiting its resources, chiefly large deposits of oil in the western deserts of the continent of Equatoria.

Lise Adams is a young woman attempting to uncover the mystery of her father's disappearance ten years earlier. Turk Findley is an ex-sailor and sometimes-drifter. They come together when showers of cometary dust seed the planet with tiny remnant Hypothetical machines. Soon, this seemingly hospitable world becomes very alien, as the nature of time is once again twisted by entities unknown.

Cartesian coordinate system

A Cartesian coordinate system is a coordinate system that specifies each point uniquely in a plane by a pair of numerical coordinates, which are the signed distances to the point from two fixed perpendicular directed lines, measured in the same unit of length. Each reference line is called a coordinate axis or just axis of the system, and the point where they meet is its origin, usually at ordered pair (0, 0). The coordinates can also be defined as the positions of the perpendicular projections of the point onto the two axes, expressed as signed distances from the origin.

One can use the same principle to specify the position of any point in three-dimensional space by three Cartesian coordinates, its signed distances to three mutually perpendicular planes (or, equivalently, by its perpendicular projection onto three mutually perpendicular lines). In general, n Cartesian coordinates (an element of real n-space) specify the point in an n-dimensional Euclidean space for any dimension n. These coordinates are equal, up to sign, to distances from the point to n mutually perpendicular hyperplanes.

Axis (technical festival)

AXIS is the annual technical festival of the Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology, Nagpur. Traditionally held in the month of September or early October, AXIS has grown to become one of the largest technical festivals in India and the largest in Central India. AXIS organises over 40 events, exhibitions and workshops, encompassing multiple engineering disciplines, with an aim to provide a national platform to attract and nurture talent in the fields of science and technology. AXIS also undertakes various social initiatives which strive to bring about a change in the lives of those less fortunate than themselves. Started in 2004 after merging two traditionally held festivals - the IEEE Expressions and Odyssey, AXIS has come a long way from its modest beginnings and annually attracts over 25,000 school and college students from different parts of the country.

Structure and Organisation

AXIS is an entirely student organised event. At its helm are the 12 core committee members, who overlook all the aspects of the techfest and manage the finances, publicity and logistics, among others. Each event has its own (third year) event managers and (second year) organisers, who interact directly with the core team. AXIS also has the assistance of professors-in-charge, who are the professors in VNIT. The strong and well-established VNIT Alumni also assist the coordinators in varied aspects of different events.