Schweizer SGU 1-6

The Schweizer SGU 1-6 was a United States Open Class, single-seat, high-wing, pod-and-boom glider built by Schweizer Metal Aircraft Company of Elmira, New York.

The sole SGU 1-6 built was completed in 1937 as an experimental aircraft and registered N17897. The design was never certified.

Design and development

Schweizer Aircraft started construction of the 1-6 prototype in 1937. The aircraft was built to compete in the Eaton Design Contest held in conjunction with the 8th US National Gliding Championships. This competition was open to any new American glider design that had not been flown at a previous National Championship. The rules required drawings and stress analysis data to be presented with the completed aircraft. The intention was that the winning design would be made available as drawings and kits for amateur construction and that Bureau of Air Commerce design approval would be eventually obtained as well.

The winners of the contest and the cash prizes won were:

Rudolph Fentz

Rudolph Fentz (also spelled as Rudolf Fenz) is the focal character of "I'm Scared", a 1951 science fiction short story by Jack Finney, which was later reported as an urban legend as if the events had truly happened. The story tells of a man wearing 19th century clothes being hit by a car and killed in New York City in 1950. A subsequent investigation reveals that the man had disappeared without trace in 1876, and the items in his possession appear to reveal that the man had travelled through time from 1876 to 1950 directly.

The story of Rudolph Fentz became one of the more significant urban legends of the 1970s and has been repeated occasionally since; with the spread of the Internet in the 1990s, it has been reported more often as a reproduction of facts and presented as evidence for the existence of (involuntary) time travel.

Urban legend

The Fentz legend describes how one evening in mid-June 1950, at about 11:15 p.m., passersby at New York City's Times Square noticed a man of about 30 years of age, dressed in the fashion of the late 19th century. No one observed how he had arrived there, and he was disoriented and confused standing in the middle of an intersection. He was hit by a taxi and fatally injured, before people were able to intervene.

Hatsune Miku

Hatsune Miku (Japanese: 初音ミク), sometimes referred to as Miku Hatsune, is a humanoid persona voiced by a singing synthesizer application developed by Crypton Future Media. Hatsune Miku is portrayed as a 16-year-old girl with long turquoise twintails. She uses Yamaha Corporation's Vocaloid 2 and Vocaloid 3 singing synthesizing technologies. She also uses Crypton Future Media's Piapro Studio, a singing synthesizer VSTi Plugin. She was the second Vocaloid sold using the Vocaloid 2 engine, and the first Japanese Vocaloid to use the Japanese version of the Vocaloid 2 engine. Her voice is sampled from Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita. Hatsune Miku has performed at her concerts onstage as an animated projection.

The name of the character comes from merging the Japanese words for first (初, hatsu), sound (音, ne) and future (ミク, miku), thus meaning "the first sound from the future," referring to her position as the first of Crypton's "Character Vocal Series."

Development

Hatsune Miku was the first Vocaloid developed by Crypton Future Media after they handled the release of the Yamaha vocal Meiko and Kaito. She was built using Yamaha's Vocaloid 2 technology, and later updated over time to newer engine versions. She was created by taking vocal samples from voice actress Saki Fujita at a controlled pitch and tone and those different samples all contain a single Japanese or English phonic which, when strung together, create full lyrics and phrases. The pitch of the samples was to be altered by the synthesizer engine itself, and was constructed into a keyboard style instrument within the Vocaloid software.

Cut the Rope

Cut the Rope is a series of physics-based puzzle video games developed by the Russian entertainment company ZeptoLab for several platforms and devices. It consists of the original Cut the Rope (2010) published by Chillingo, Cut the Rope: Holiday Gift (2010), Cut the Rope: Experiments (2011), Cut the Rope: Time Travel (2013), Cut the Rope 2 (2013 iOS; 2014 Android), My Om Nom (2014 iOS; 2015 Android), and Cut the Rope: Magic (2015).

The objective of the Cut the Rope games is to feed candy to a little green creature named Om Nom while collecting stars. As of May 2015, Cut the Rope games have been downloaded more than 600 million times.

Gameplay

In each level, the candy hangs by one or several of the titular ropes which the player must cut with a swipe of their finger using the device's touchscreen. Using various objects such as floating bubbles and bellows, the candy must also be manipulated around obstacles to get to Om Nom's mouth. Each level takes place in a box, and there are different boxes (such as the cardboard box, the fabric box, and the foil box). More boxes will be added soon.