Blue

Blue is the colour between violet and green on the optical spectrum of visible light. Human eyes perceive blue when observing light with a wavelength between 450 and 495 nanometres. Blues with a higher frequency and thus a shorter wavelength gradually look more violet, while those with a lower frequency and a longer wavelength gradually appear more green. Pure blue, in the middle, has a wavelength of 470 nanometres. In painting and traditional colour theory, blue is one of the three primary colours of pigments, along with red and yellow, which can be mixed to form a wide gamut of colours. Red and blue mixed together form violet, blue and yellow together form green. Blue is also a primary colour in the RGB colour model, used to create all the colours on the screen of a television or computer monitor.

The modern English word blue comes from Middle English bleu or blewe, from the Old French bleu, a word of Germanic origin, related to the Old High German word blao. The clear sky and the deep sea appear blue because of an optical effect known as Rayleigh scattering. When sunlight passes through the atmosphere, the blue wavelengths are scattered more widely by the oxygen and nitrogen molecules, and more blue comes to our eyes. Rayleigh scattering also explains blue eyes; there is no blue pigment in blue eyes. Distant objects appear more blue because of another optical effect called atmospheric perspective.

Blue (tourism magazine)

Blue was an adventure travel magazine, founded in 1997 by Amy Schrier, with David Carson as the original design consultant. Its focus was on global adventure travel. It was published in New York and is now out of print; its last issue was February–March 2000.

The cover of its first issue was included in a list of the Top 40 magazine covers of the last 40 years by the American Society of Magazine Editors. In 1999 Life magazine listed it in the Best Magazine Photos of the Year. The New York Times characterized it as "not your father's National Geographic."

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Blue Gender

Blue Gender (Japanese: ブルージェンダー, Hepburn: Burū Jendā) is a 26-episode anime created, co-directed and co-written by Ryōsuke Takahashi (of Armored Trooper Votoms and Gasaraki fame) broadcast in Japan from 1999-2000. Blue Gender was created by the Japanese animation studio, AIC and is distributed in the United States by Funimation Entertainment. In 2003, Blue Gender was released on American television as part of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, though it had originally been planned for Toonami, and was thus edited to remove its graphic violence, nudity, and sex scenes (however, its airing on Colours TV and Funimation Channel in the United States). There is also a compilation movie (Blue Gender: The Warrior) available on DVD with an alternative ending. The series was also shown on the Sci Fi Channel in the UK in 2002-2003. The Blue Gender series is set in the 2030s, in which Earth has been overrun by the Blue, which are mutated insect-like creatures containing a newly evolved B-cell that recently appeared in several humans, including the main protagonist, Yuji Kaido, that kill and harvest humans for food. Most of the surviving human race has moved to Second Earth, a huge space station that orbits the planet. The series mostly focuses on Yuji and Marlene's relationship as they work together to reach Second Earth and their participation in military combat operations against the Blue.

Metal (API)

Metal is a low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated graphics and compute application programming interface (API) that debuted in iOS 8. It combines functionality similar to OpenGL and OpenCL under one API. It is intended to bring to iOS some of the performance benefits of similar APIs on other platforms, such as Khronos Group's cross-platform Vulkan and Microsoft's Direct3D 12 for Windows. Since June 8, 2015, Metal is available for iOS devices using the Apple A7 or later, as well as Macs (2012 models or later) running OS X El Capitan. Metal also further improves the capabilities of GPGPU programming by introducing compute shaders.

Metal uses a new shading language based on C++11; this is implemented using Clang and LLVM.

Support for Metal on OS X was announced at WWDC 2015.

Performance

Metal should have better performance than OpenGL, for several reasons:

Metal (Wu Xing)

Metal (Chinese: 金; pinyin: jīn), the fourth phase of the Chinese philosophy of Wu Xing, is the decline of the matter, or the matter's decline stage. Metal is yin in character, its motion is inwards and its energy is contracting. It is associated with the autumn, the west, old age, the planet Venus, the color white, dry weather, and the White Tiger (Bai Hu) in Four Symbols. The archetypal metals are silver and gold.

Attributes

In Chinese Taoist thought, Metal attributes are considered to be firmness, rigidity, persistence, strength, and determination. The metal person is controlling, ambitious, forceful, and set in their ways as metal is very strong. They are self-reliant and prefer to handle their problems alone. The metal person is also wise, business-oriented, and good at organization and stability. However, the metal person can also appreciate luxury and enjoy the good things in life. Just as metal can conduct electricity, the metal person has strong impulses and generative powers and can bring about changes and transformations for those who come into contact with them. The metal person is patient, as well as a good person with a strong will.

Gravel road

A gravel road is a type of unpaved road surfaced with gravel that has been brought to the site from a quarry or stream bed. They are common in less-developed nations, and also in the rural areas of developed nations such as Canada and the United States. In New Zealand, and other Commonwealth countries, they may be known as 'metal roads'. They may be referred to as 'dirt roads' in common speech, but that term is used more for unimproved roads with no surface material added. If well constructed and maintained, a gravel road is an all-weather road.

Characteristics

Construction

Compared to sealed roads, which require large machinery to work and pour concrete or to lay and smooth a bitumen-based surface, gravel roads are easy and cheap to build. However, compared to dirt roads, all-weather gravel highways are quite expensive to build, as they require front loaders, dump trucks, graders and roadrollers to provide a base course of compacted earth or other material, sometimes macadamised, covered with one or more different layers of gravel. Graders are also used to produce a more extreme camber compared to a paved road to aid drainage, as well as construct drainage ditches and embankments in low-lying areas. Cellular confinement systems can be used to prevent the washboarding effect.