Pincer levers.
A pincer is a device with a pair of levers that act to concentrate force on a point.
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Mechanical
Pincers are hand tools used in many situations where a mechanical advantage is required to pinch, cut or pull an object. Pincers are first-class levers, but differ from pliers in that the concentration of force is either to a point, or to an edge perpendicular to the length of the tool. This allows pincers to be brought close to a surface, as is often required when working with nails. Carpenter’s pincers are particularly suited to this task.
Biological
Many insects possess pincers to assist carrying loads, for defense from other creatures, or to attack prey. The pincers are usually part of the creature’s mandible, and often venom or acid can be injected during a pincer strike.
Military usage
A Pincer movement describes an attack where the enemy is approached from the two flanks and from the front. Examples include the Battle of El Mazuco (1937) and the Battle of Sitka (1803).
See also
- Krukenberg procedure
- Claw (disambiguation)
Combustion chamber internal combustion engine
A combustion chamber is the part of an engine in which fuel is burned.
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Internal Combustion Engine
The leftover hot gases produced by this combustion tend to occupy a far greater volume than the original fuel, thus creating an increase in pressure within the limited volume of the chamber. This pressure can be used to do work, for example, to move a piston on a crankshaft. The energy can be converted to various types of motion or to produce thrust when directed out of a nozzle as in a rocket or jet engine.
Petrol or Gasoline engine
A reciprocating engine is often designed so that the moving pistons are flush with the top of the cylinder block at top dead centre. The combustion chamber is recessed in the cylinder head and commonly contains a single intake valve and a single exhaust valve. Some engines use a dished piston and in this case the combustion chamber can be considered as partly within the cylinder. Various shapes of combustion chamber have been used, such as L-head (or flathead) for side-valve engines, “bathtub”,”hemispherical” and “wedge” for overhead valve engines and “pent-roof” for engines having 3, 4 or 5 valves per cylinder. The shape of the chamber has a marked effect on power output, efficiency and harmful emissions; the designer’s objectives are to burn all of the mixture as completely as possible while avoiding excessive temperatures (which create NOx). This is best achieved with a compact rather than elongated chamber. The intake valve/port is usually placed to give the mixture a pronounced “swirl” (the term is preferred to “turbulence” which implies uncontrolled movement) above the rising piston, improving mixing and combustion. The shape of the piston top also effects the amount of “swirl.” Finally, the spark plug must be situated in a position from which the flame front can reach all parts of the chamber at the desired point, usually around 15 degrees after top dead centre. It is strongly desirable to avoid narrow crevices where stagnant “end gas” can become trapped, as this tends to detonate violently after the main charge, adding little useful work and potentially damaging the engine. Also, the residual gasses displace room for fresh air/fuel mixture and will thus reduce the power potential of each firing stroke.
Diesel engine
Diesel engines fall into two broad classes:
- Direct injection, where the combustion chamber consists of a dished piston
- Indirect injection, where the combustion chamber is in the cylinder head
Direct injection engines usually give better fuel economy but indirect injection engines can use a lower grade of fuel.
Harry Ricardo was prominent in developing combustion chambers for diesel engines.
Steam Engine
The term combustion chamber is also used to refer to an additional space between the firebox and boiler in a steam locomotive. This space is used to allow further combustion of the fuel, providing greater heat to the boiler.
Large steam locomotives usually have a combustion chamber in the boiler to allow the use of shorter firetubes. This is because:
- Long firetubes have a theoretical advantage in providing a large heating surface but, beyond a certain length, this is subject to diminishing returns
- Very long firetubes are prone to “sagging” in the middle
See also
- cylinder head
- engine displacement
Cycling club two-wheelers in developing countries
A cycling club is a club or society formed by and for cyclists, and is usually focused in a particular geographic location, perhaps a region, town or city suburb, as well as national cycling clubs, such as the United Kingdom’s Cyclists’ Touring Club, CTC) and also internet based clubs such as i-Team & Team Internet.
There are also specialist cycling associations drawing together enthusiasts in particular niche disciplines (eg: the Tricycle Association, the Tandem Club) or age groups (eg: the Veterans Time Trial Association, for those aged over 40). Members of these groups will tend also to be members of conventional cycling clubs.
There are also groups which specialise in supporting the needs of leisure cyclists and/or campaign for improved facilities for recreational and commuting cyclists (eg: the London Cycling Campaign, Friends of the Earth, Greenwich Cyclists).
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Activities
A cycling club’s range of activities can vary from being solely focussed on one aspect of cycle sport, as in the case of racing teams, through to offering members a broad base of cycling related and social activities.
Traditionally, cycle racing clubs organise events for their members and local sporting community, including track cycling, cyclo-cross, road bicycle racing and time trials). Also included will be organised training for such race events.
Cycling clubs may also offer suitable events for the recreational and lesuire cyclist ranging from touring, to weekly club-runs (traditionally held on Sunday mornings). Most clubs will usually also hold regular meetings and social events, and may have BC or ABCC qualified coaches, or simply offer the benefits of accumulated experience.
For most competitive cyclists, membership of a cycling club affiliated to a recognised national association (eg: British Cycling and Cycling Time Trials in the UK) will be required before he or she can race. While training or competing, cyclists can be associated with their clubs by wearing jerseys in distinctive club colours.
Sponsorship
Some cycling clubs are sponsored by commercial organisations. Club members’ racing jerseys and other clothing may, therefore, carry the logo of the club’s sponsor (thereby advertising them, their products or services), while some members may also get other benefits such as equipment discounts, free equipment, and/or financial support for race attendance.
Names
UK cycling club names vary enormously. Many simply reflect their home town or district (for example, Tom Simpson started his cycling career with Nottinghamshire’s Harworth and District Cycling Club, while contemporary Brian Robinson started with Huddersfield Road Club). On the other hand, some club names will give little or no guide to their geographic origin (eg: Acme Wheelers are based in south Wales, Zenith CC in Leicester, Gemini BC in north-west Kent) or may be known by a website name such as i-Team.cc & TrackCycling.co.uk
As well as calling themselves ‘cycling clubs’, clubs may also style themselves as a ‘road club’ (eg: Beacon Roads Cycling Club, Warrington RC and Archer RC), a ‘velo club’ (velo being French for cycle; eg: Clayton Velo, Yorkshire Velo, Thames Velo, VC Elan, VC Londres or Velo Sport Jersey) or a bicycle club (eg: Tooting BC);
some call themselves ‘wheelers’ (eg: Nelson Wheelers, Macclesfield Wheelers, Manchester Wheelers’ Club, etc.) or even ‘coureurs’ (eg: Cleveland Coureurs). Some club names have their roots in political or social movements (eg: the one-time socialist Clarion clubs, such as Fenland Clarion, Nottingham Clarion, Crewe Clarion, etc), religious circles (eg: Manchester St Christopher’s Catholic Cycling Club) or occupational groups (RAF CC, Northumbria Police CC, GB Fire Service Road Team, Army Cycling Union). There are also club names that evoke the wandering nature of cycling (eg: 34th Nomads, Altrincham Ravens, Lewes Wanderers, Colchester Rovers, etc) or some other aspiration (eg: Norwood Paragon, Sheffield Phoenix, Dulwich paragon).
External links
- Beacon Roads Cycling Club
- Chaos Cycling Club
- Nelson Wheelers Cycling Club
- Manchester District of Cycling Time Trials
- Garstng Cycling Club
- Acme Wheelers
- British Cycling Federation
- Cascade Bicycle Club
- Charlotteville Cycling Club
- i-Team Cyclist’s Club
- League of American Bicyclists
- Lakeland Cycle Club
- Sheffield phoenix cycling club
- Skyline Velo
- Tandem Club of the United Kingdom
- Tricycle Association
- Veterans Time Trial Association
- TrackCycling.co.uk
- Cycling Clubs in the USA
- Macclesfield Wheelers’ Club
- Manchester Wheelers’ Club
- Westerley Cycling Club
- Union College Cycling
- Velo Sport Jersey
- Yorkshire Velo
- Glasgow Nightingale Cycling Club
Devil in the Details use kick
Devil In The Details is a Saigon Kick album. It is the first Saigon Kick album to feature guitarist Pete Dembrowski.
Track listing
- Intro
- Russian Girl
- Killing Ground
- Eden
- Going On
- Everybody
- Spanish Rain
- Flesh And Bone
- Sunshine
- Victoria
- Afraid
- So Painfully
- Edgar
- All Around
Line up
- Jason Bieler: Lead Vocals and Guitar
- Pete Dembrowski: Guitar
- Chris McLernon: Bass
- Phil Varone: Drums
Gas torus produced that
A gas torus is a toroidal cloud of gas or plasma that encircles a planet. In our solar system, gas tori tend to be produced by the interaction of a satellite’s atmosphere with the magnetic field of a planet. The most famous example of this is the Io plasma torus, which is produced by the ionization of roughly 1 ton per second of oxygen and sulfur from the tenuous atmosphere of Jupiter’s volcanic moon, Io. Other examples include the largely neutral torus of oxygen and hydrogen produced by Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, and the proposed (though not observationally supported) torus of nitrogen produced by Saturn’s moon, Titan.
A notable use of a gas torus in fiction is as the setting for Larry Niven’s novels The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring, in which a gas giant in orbit around a neutron star generates a gas torus of sufficient density to allow life (including humans) to survive in it. This arrangement is not particularly plausible in the real world, however.
Electric Fence and an electric start
- For the physical barrier, see electric fence.
Electric Fence (or eFence) is a memory debugger written by Bruce Perens. It consists of a library which a programmer can link into his or her code to override the C standard library memory management functions. eFence triggers a program crash when the memory error occurs, so a debugger can be used to inspect the code that caused the error.
Electric Fence is intended to find two common types of programming bugs:
- Overrunning the end (or beginning) of a dynamically allocated buffer
- Using a dynamically allocated buffer after returning it to the heap
In both cases, Electric Fence causes the errant program to abort immediately via a segmentation fault. Normally, these two errors would cause heap corruption, which would manifest itself only much later, usually in unrelated ways. Thus, Electric Fence helps programmers find the precise location of memory programming errors.
Electric Fence allocates at least two pages (often 8KB) for every allocated buffer. In some modes of operation, it does not deallocate freed buffers. Thus, Electric Fence vastly increases the memory requirements of programs being debugged. This leads to the recommendation that programmers should apply Electric Fence to smaller programs when possible, and should never leave Electric Fence linked against production code.
Electric Fence is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License.
See also
- Dmalloc
External
links
- eFence – source code
- DUMA – a fork of Electric Fence
Joey McNicol being useful in case
Joey McNicol is an activist against E-mail spam. He became notable after a high profile court case in which he was the defendant. The case alleged that he had caused IP addresses of companies controlled by Wayne Mansfield to be blacklisted. The case against him was dismissed in October 2002.
See Also
- Spam Act 2003
- Wayne Mansfield
External links
- Joe Fights Spam
- Details of the case against McNicol
The President’s Challenge starters
The President’s Challenge is an American program introduced by the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports that aims to encourage all Americans to “make being active part of their everyday lives” and to be physically fit. It offers the Active Lifestyle program for starters and Presidential Champions for more active people.
There are 5 events, in which students must meet standards to qualify for The Presidential Physical Fitness Award, ‘The National Physical Fitness Award, and The Participant Physical Fitness Award. These 5 events are: Curl-ups/Sit-ups, Pull-ups/Arm Hang, One Mile Walk/Run, Shuttle Run, and Sit & Reach/V-Sit.
External links
- The President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports Official Website
- The President’s Challenge Official Website
Quick kick foot. Kick
- Quick Kick is also a character in the G.I. Joe universe. See List of G.I. Joe ARAH characters.
In American football and Canadian football, a quick kick is any punt made under conditions such that the opposing team should not expect a punt. Typically this has been a kick from scrimmage from a formation that is, or resembles, one usually used other than for punting, or at least not resembling the one usually used for punting. Typically it will also be on a down before last down (3rd in Canadian, and 4th in American football), unless done from a formation usually used for place kicking.
The purpose of a quick kick is the same as a punt, but with additional hope of:
- preventing a runback (return) of the ball by the opponents,
- additional distance by the ball’s bouncing or rolling instead of being fielded by an opponent, and
- (where legal) recovery and retained possession of the ball by the kicking team.
The disadvantages:
- earlier sacrifice of ball possession, or of a field goal;
- greater exposure to the kick being blocked by an opponent (although that may be mitigated by being unexpected), or inadvertently by a teammate;
- sacrificing distance or accuracy by need of being done quickly; and/or
- being done by someone other than the team’s best punter.
Factors that make a quick kick more likely:
- long distance to go for a new first down
- the other team’s not showing anticipation of a quick kick, as by dropping a Safety far back
- being close to one’s own goal line
- being close enough to the other team’s goal line that a field goal attempt is credible, but far enough that its success is not likely
- conditions that make long drives (moving the ball in possession) unlikely
- a strong wind blowing either with or against the team; a headwind would encourage a low kick which, if expected, would get quickly to the other team for a runback; a tailwind could allow an unfielded kick much extra distance
- hard playing surface, allowing extra distance via bounce
A quick kick is often executed by a technique called a “pooch punt”, which is a more controlled kick.