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🔗 Epiousios

🔗 Greece 🔗 Christianity 🔗 Christianity/Eastern Orthodoxy

Epiousios (ἐπιούσιος) is a Greek adjective used in the Lord's Prayer verse "Τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον" 'Give us today our epiousion bread'. Because the word is used nowhere else, its meaning is unclear. It is traditionally translated as "daily", but most modern scholars reject that interpretation.

Since it is a Koine Greek dis legomenon found only in the New Testament passages Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3, its interpretation relies upon morphological analysis and context. The traditional and most common English translation is daily, although most scholars today reject this in part because all other New Testament passages with the translation "daily" include the word hemera (ἡμέρᾱ, 'day').

The difficulty in understanding epiousios goes at least as far back as AD 382. At that time, St. Jerome was commissioned by Pope Damasus I to renew and consolidate the various collections of biblical texts in the Vetus Latina ("Old Latin") then in use by the Church. Jerome accomplished this by going back to the original Greek of the New Testament and translating it into Latin; his translation came to be known as the Vulgate. In the identical contexts of Matthew and Luke—that is, reporting the Lord's Prayer—Jerome translated epiousios in two different ways: by morphological analysis as 'supersubstantial' (supersubstantialem) in Matthew 6:11, but retaining 'daily' (quotidianum) in Luke 11:3.

The modern Catholic Catechism holds that there are several ways of understanding epiousios, including the traditional 'daily', but most literally as 'supersubstantial' or 'superessential', based on its morphological components. Alternative theories are that—aside from the etymology of ousia, meaning 'substance'—it may be derived from either of the verbs einai (εἶναι), meaning "to be", or ienai (ἰέναι), meaning both "to come" and "to go".:172

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🔗 Basil Zaharoff

🔗 Biography 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military biography 🔗 Military history/World War II

Sir Basil Zaharoff, GCB, GBE, born Vasileios Zacharias (Greek: Βασίλειος Zαχαρίας Ζαχάρωφ; October 6, 1849 – November 27, 1936), was a Greek arms dealer and industrialist. One of the richest men in the world during his lifetime, Zaharoff was described as a "merchant of death" and "mystery man of Europe". His success was forged through his cunning, often aggressive and sharp, business tactics. These included the sale of arms to opposing sides in conflicts, sometimes delivering fake or faulty machinery and skilfully using the press to attack business rivals.

Zaharoff maintained close contacts with many powerful political leaders, including British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos and Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II; he served as a primary inspiration for Ian Fleming's fictional James Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld.

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🔗 Ant On A Rubber Rope

🔗 Mathematics

The ant on a rubber rope is a mathematical puzzle with a solution that appears counterintuitive or paradoxical. It is sometimes given as a worm, or inchworm, on a rubber or elastic band, but the principles of the puzzle remain the same.

The details of the puzzle can vary, but a typical form is as follows:

An ant starts to crawl along a taut rubber rope 1 km long at a speed of 1 cm per second (relative to the rubber it is crawling on). At the same time, the rope starts to stretch uniformly at a constant rate of 1 km per second, so that after 1 second it is 2 km long, after 2 seconds it is 3 km long, etc. Will the ant ever reach the end of the rope?

At first consideration it seems that the ant will never reach the end of the rope, but in fact it does. (In the form stated above, it would take 8.9×1043421 years.) Whatever the length of the rope and the relative speeds of the ant and the stretching, provided that the ant's speed and the stretching remain steady, the ant will always be able to reach the end given sufficient time. Once the ant has begun moving, the rubber rope is stretching both in front of and behind the ant, conserving the proportion of the rope already walked by the ant and enabling the ant to make continual progress.

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🔗 Go! -- the non-Google programming language by Keith Clark and Francis McCabe.

🔗 Computer science

Go! is an agent-based programming language in the tradition of logic-based programming languages like Prolog. It was introduced in a 2003 paper by Francis McCabe and Keith Clark.

🔗 Dyson sphere

🔗 Spaceflight 🔗 Astronomy 🔗 Engineering 🔗 Astronomy/Astronomical objects

A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to explain how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the home planet's resources alone. Only a tiny fraction of a star's energy emissions reach the surface of any orbiting planet. Building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy.

The first contemporary description of the structure was by Olaf Stapledon in his science fiction novel Star Maker (1937), in which he described "every solar system... surrounded by a gauze of light traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use." The concept was later popularized by Freeman Dyson in his 1960 paper "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation." Dyson speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the escalating energy needs of a technological civilization and would be a necessity for its long-term survival. He proposed that searching for such structures could lead to the detection of advanced, intelligent extraterrestrial life. Different types of Dyson spheres and their energy-harvesting ability would correspond to levels of technological advancement on the Kardashev scale.

Since then, other variant designs involving building an artificial structure or series of structures to encompass a star have been proposed in exploratory engineering or described in science fiction under the name "Dyson sphere". These later proposals have not been limited to solar-power stations, with many involving habitation or industrial elements. Most fictional depictions describe a solid shell of matter enclosing a star, which was considered by Dyson himself the least plausible variant of the idea. In May 2013, at the Starship Century Symposium in San Diego, Dyson repeated his comments that he wished the concept had not been named after him.

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🔗 Greco-Buddhist Art

🔗 Religion 🔗 Visual arts 🔗 Buddhism 🔗 Asia

The Greco-Buddhist art or Gandhara art is the artistic manifestation of Greco-Buddhism, a cultural syncretism between Ancient Greek art and Buddhism. It had mainly evolved in the ancient region of Gandhara, located in the northwestern fringe of the Indian subcontinent.

The series of interactions leading to Gandhara art occurred over time, beginning with Alexander the Great's brief incursion into the area, followed by the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka converting the region to Buddhism. Buddhism became the prominent religion in the Indo-Greek Kingdoms. However, Greco-Buddhist art truly flowered and spread under the Kushan Empire, when the first surviving devotional images of the Buddha were created during the 1st-3rd centuries CE. Gandhara art reached its zenith from the 3rd-5th century CE, when most surviving motifs and artworks were produced.

Gandhara art is characterized by Buddhist subject matter, sometimes adapting Greco-Roman elements, rendered in a style and forms that are heavily influenced by Greco-Roman art. It has the strong idealistic realism and sensuous description of Hellenistic art, and it is believed to have produced the first representations of Gautama Buddha in human form, ending the early period of aniconism in Buddhism.

The representation of the human form in large sculpture had a considerable influence, both to the south in the rest of India, and to the east, where the spread of Buddhism carried its influence as far as Japan.

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🔗 Auto-Antonym

An auto-antonym or autantonym, also called a contronym, contranym or Janus word, is a word with multiple meanings (senses) of which one is the reverse of another. For example, the word cleave can mean "to cut apart" or "to bind together". This phenomenon is called enantiosemy, enantionymy (enantio- means "opposite"), antilogy or autantonymy. An enantiosemic term is necessarily polysemic.

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🔗 Occam programming language

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Computing/Computer science

occam is a programming language which is concurrent and builds on the communicating sequential processes (CSP) process algebra, and shares many of its features. It is named after philosopher William of Ockham after whom Occam's razor is named.

occam is an imperative procedural language (such as Pascal). It was developed by David May and others at Inmos (trademark INMOS), advised by Tony Hoare, as the native programming language for their transputer microprocessors, but implementations for other platforms are available. The most widely known version is occam 2; its programming manual was written by Steven Ericsson-Zenith and others at Inmos.

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🔗 List of countries by home ownership rate

🔗 Lists

This is a list of countries and territories by home ownership rate, which is the ratio of owner-occupied units to total residential units in a specified area.