Mikhail Iosifovich Veller is a Russian writer of Ukrainian Jewish extraction. He holds a dual citizenship of Estonia. Veller was born in Kamianets-Podilskyi, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union in 1948. In 1972 he graduated with a degree in linguistics from Leningrad University, he worked as a children's summer camp counselor, a hunter in Taimyr, a shepherd in the Altai mountains, a logger, a journalist, a teacher, more - around 30 professions in all. Veller's first book, a collection of short stories titled I Want To Be A Yard-Sweeper, was published in Estonia in 1983, followed by Heart Breaker, Technology of a Short Story, Rendezvous with a Celebrity. A Novel of Upbringing and Adventures of Major Zvyagin became bestsellers, along with "The Legends of Nevsky Prospect", his book Everything about Life is a book about how the world works, why a no one has what they need, why happiness is not achievable but should be sought. His mini-novel The Knife of Seryozha Dovlatov created a literary scandal. Hist latest bestseller, Courier from Pisa, has had 11 editions.

In Everything about Life Veller repeated Ernest Hemingway's words: "There are people who want to know everything and those who are sick of what they know. The latter say nothing to prevent things from turning for the worse, while the former interfere in all, hoping to make things better". Veller proclaims himself to be with the former kind. Veller nurtures his world-view to the point that he publishes volumes with philosophical inclination, he invented energoevolutionism. According to this theory the primordial energy released in the Big Bang is attached to material structures of increasing complexity, which in their turn decompose and release energy; these cycles continue at increasing speed. The human existence is entangled in this process and increases the speed of revolution. Humankind thus is at the cutting edge of the evolution of the universe; the end of history is to arrive when post-humanity will assist the release of all energy in the matter, thereby causing a new cycle by the next BIg Bang event.

Within the concept of energoevolution Veller addresses aesthetics and psychology. Veller's philosophical essays achieved some attention in Russia and abroad, but met with severe criticism from professional philosophers. Veller has lectured on modern Russian prose in the universities of Milan and Copenhagen. In his free time, Veller continues to work in Tallinn, his hobbies include target shooting. The Guru Veller's biography Александр Тарасов. Похабный анекдот. Скепсис. Archived from the original on 2012-05-18. Михаил Бойко. Большой Хлопок. Марат Салихов, к. т. Н.. Михаил Веллер и нигилизм

A smokebox is one of the major basic parts of a steam locomotive exhaust system. Smoke and hot gases pass from the firebox through tubes where they pass heat to the surrounding water in the boiler; the smoke enters the smokebox, is exhausted to the atmosphere through the chimney. Early locomotives had no smokebox and relied on a long chimney to provide natural draught for the fire but smokeboxes were soon included in the design for two main reasons. Firstly and most the blast of exhaust steam from the cylinders, when directed upwards through an airtight smokebox with an appropriate design of exhaust nozzle draws hot gases through the boiler tubes and flues and fresh combustion air into the firebox. Secondly, the smokebox provides a convenient collection point for ash and cinders drawn through the boiler tubes, which can be cleaned out at the end of a working day. Without a smokebox, all char must pass up the chimney or will collect in the tubes and flues themselves blocking them; the smokebox appears to be a forward extension of the boiler although it contains no water and is a separate component.

Smokeboxes are made from riveted or welded steel plate and the floor is lined with concrete to protect the steel from hot char and acid or rainwater attack. To assist the passage of the smoke and hot gases, a blower is used; this is a pipe ending in a ring containing pin-sized holes. The steam draws further gases through the tubes; this in turn causes air to be drawn through the firehole, making the fire burn hotter. When the locomotive is in motion, exhaust steam passes through the blastpipe, located within the smokebox; the steam is ejected through the chimney. The blastpipe is; the dimensions of the blastpipe and chimney are critical to the steam generating capacity of the locomotive and its fuel economy, since there is a natural trade-off between a high-velocity steam jet giving a strong draw on the fire, back-pressure on the exhaust. Small changes to this "front end" design can have a dramatic impact. More complex exhaust designs such as Kylchap and Giesl, can achieve better results than the simple blastpipe and chimney arrangement.

Ashes and soot which may be present in the smoke are deposited in the smokebox. The front of the smokebox has a door, opened to remove these deposits at the end of each locomotive's working day; the handle must be tightened to prevent air leaks, which would reduce the draw on the fire and can allow any unburnt char at the bottom of the smokebox to catch fire there. Some smokebox doors have a single handle in the form of a wheel. On many steamrollers an extension to the body of the smokebox houses the bearing which supports the front roller. Due to limitations of space, these rollers have a drop-down flap instead of a circular smokebox door; the smokebox incorporates the main steam pipes from the regulator, one leading to each valve chest, a part of the cylinder casting. These may pass through the smokebox wall to join with the cylinder or may stay within the profile of the smokebox. Inside steam pipes do not require lagging as the smokebox keeps them warm, but outside steam pipes are more common for locomotives with cylinders outside the frames.

Some locomotive classes used both types depending on the date. Because heat losses from the smokebox are of little consequence, it is not lagged. In most cases it appears to be the same diameter as the boiler in the finished locomotive but this only because of the boiler cladding. Tank engines had their water tanks stop short of the unlagged smokebox as it could raise the temperature of the water sufficiently to cause problems with the injectors. British Railways standard classes use this design, where a robust mesh grille is incorporated into the smokebox, forming a filter between the front tubeplate and the exhaust. Any large pieces of char passing through the boiler tubes tend to be broken up on impact with the mesh, creating finer particles which are swept up the chimney instead of accumulating in the bottom of the smokebox; this does not negate the need to clean out the smokebox but reduces the amount of work that has to be done. In the best case, smokebox cleaning could be avoided between boiler washouts at intervals of two weeks.

The classic layout of a steam locomotive has the smokebox and chimney at the front of the locomotive, referred to as travelling "smokebox-first". Some designs reversed the layout to avoid problems caused by having the exhaust blowing back onto the crew. A spark arrester is installed within the smokebox; this may take the form of a cylindrical mesh running from the top of the blast pipe to the bottom of the chimney. The purpose of a spark arrester is to prevent excessively large fragments of hot ash from being exhausted into the environment where they may pose a fire risk. For this reason, spark arresters are installed on locomotives running through dry environments, they should not be confused with the external spark arrestors fitted to some locomotives. The presence of a spark arrester may have a thermodynamic effect, distorting the draw of air over the fire and thereby reducing total power output, thus their use can be contentious. Locomotives fitted with a superheater will ha

A psychic detective is a person who investigates crimes by using purported paranormal psychic abilities. Examples have included postcognition, telepathy, dowsing and remote viewing. In murder cases, psychic detectives may purport to be in communication with the spirits of the murder victims. Although there are documented cases where individuals claiming psychic abilities have assisted police in solving crimes, there is considerable skepticism in regard to the general use of psychics under these circumstances. Many police departments around the world have released official statements saying that they do not regard psychics as credible or useful on cases. Many prominent police cases involving missing persons, have received the attention of alleged psychics. In November 2004, purported psychic Sylvia Browne told the mother of kidnapping victim Amanda Berry, who had disappeared 19 months earlier: "She's not alive, honey." Browne claimed to have had a vision of Berry's jacket in the garbage with "DNA on it".

Berry's mother died two years believing that her daughter had been killed. After Berry was found alive, Browne received criticism for the false declaration that Berry was dead. Browne became involved in the case of Shawn Hornbeck, which received the attention of psychics after the eleven-year-old went missing on 6 October 2002. Browne appeared on The Montel Williams Show and provided the parents of Shawn Hornbeck a detailed description of the abductor and where Hornbeck could be found. Browne responded "No"; when Hornbeck was found alive more than four years few of the details given by Browne were correct. Shawn Hornbeck's father, Craig Akers, has stated that Browne's declaration was "one of the hardest things that we've had to hear", that her misinformation diverted investigators wasting precious police time; when Washington, D. C. intern Chandra Levy went missing on 1 May 2001, psychics from around the world provided tips suggesting that her body would be found in places such as the basement of a Smithsonian storage building, in the Potomac River, buried in the Nevada desert among many other possible locations.

Each tip led nowhere. A little more than a year after her disappearance, Levy's body was accidentally discovered by a man walking his dog in a remote section of Rock Creek Park. Following the disappearance of Elizabeth Smart on 5 June 2002, the police received as many as 9,000 tips from psychics. Responding to these tips took "many police hours", according to Salt Lake City Police Chief Lieutenant Chris Burbank. Yet, Elizabeth Smart's father, Ed Smart, concluded that: "the family didn't get any valuable information from psychics." Smart was located by observant witnesses. No psychic was credited with finding Elizabeth Smart. In the case of the Long Island serial killer, the psychic said the body would be found in a shallow grave, near water and a sign with a G in it would be nearby. Despite the vagueness of this claim the New York Post stated that the "Psychic Nailed it!". Describing the case and author Benjamin Radford wrote: "more surprising than the psychic's failure is the fact that this information was described as an amazing success on over 70,000 websites without anyone realizing that she was wrong."A body was located in the US by Psychic Annette Martin.

Dennis Prado, a retired US paratrooper, had gone missing from his apartment and police had been unable to locate his whereabouts. With no further leads, the chief investigating officer, Fernando Realyvasquez, a sergeant with the Pacifica Police, contacted psychic detective Annette Martin. Prado had lived near some 2000 square miles. Martin was given a map, she circled a small spot about the size of two city blocks, she said that Prado had struggled for breath, had died, his body would be there within the indicated area. She described the path he took, where the body would be found. Although the area had been searched before and Prado had not been found, a search and rescue officer initiated a new search with the help of a search dog, as Martin suggested "A search dog is going to find him." They found. While the body had deteriorated, there was no evidence that he had been attacked and it is thought that he had died of natural causes, as she indicated. However, when Joe Nickell, a columnist for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, was shown tapes of Martin at work, he stated he was “underwhelmed”.

Regarding the Prado case, he noted that "What she did was shrewdly ask all kinds of questions of that police officer, who helped her further and told her all kinds of things. It's perfectly sincere, not an act, but it's just the facility of a imaginative and emotional person and doesn't mean anything scientifically. "In August 2010, Aboriginal elder Cheryl Carroll-Lagerwey claimed to have seen the location of a missing child, Kiesha Abrahams, in her dream. The missing child's disappearance was being investigated by police, she took them to a location where a dead body was found, however it was of an adult woman and not the body of the child. In Sydney, Australia, in 1996, a Belgian-born Sydney psychic, Phillipe Durant was approached by the fiancé of missing Paula Brown to help locate her. Durante told police the location of the body of Brow

In four spacetime dimensions, N=8 Supergravity is the most symmetric quantum field theory which involves gravity and a finite number of fields. It can be found from a dimensional reduction of 11D supergravity by making the size of seven of the dimensions go to zero, it has eight supersymmetries, the most any gravitational theory can have, since there are eight half-steps between spin 2 and spin -2. More supersymmetries would mean the particles would have superpartners with spins higher than 2; the only theories with spins higher than 2 which are consistent involve an infinite number of particles. Stephen Hawking in his Brief History of Time speculated that this theory could be the Theory of Everything. However, in years this was abandoned in favour of String Theory. There has been renewed interest in the 21st century, with the possibility that this theory may be finite, it has been found that the expansion of N=8 Supergravity in terms of Feynman diagrams has shown that N=8 Supergravity is in some ways a product of two N = 4 super Yang–Mills theories.

This is written schematically as: N = 8 Supergravity = × This is not surprising, as N=8 supergravity contains six independent representations of N=4 Super Yang–Mills. The theory contains 1 graviton, 8 gravitinos, 28 vector bosons, 56 fermions, 70 scalar fields where we don't distinguish particles with negative spin; these numbers are simple combinatorial numbers that come from Pascal's Triangle and the number of ways of writing n as a sum of 8 nonnegative cubes A173681. One reason why the theory was abandoned was that the 28 vector bosons which form an O gauge group is too small to contain the standard model UxSUxSU gauge group, which can only fit within the orthogonal group O. For model building, it has been assumed that all the supersymmetries would be broken in nature, leaving just one supersymmetry, although nowadays because of the lack of evidence for N=1 supersymmetry higher supersymmetries are now being considered such as N=2. N=8 Supergravity can be viewed as the low energy approximation of the type IIA or type IIB superstring with 6 of its dimensions compactified on a 6-torus.

Equivalently, it may be viewed as 11D M-Theory with seven of its dimensions compactified on a 7-torus. Some surprising global symmetries have been found in this theory. For example, it has been shown that there is an E₇ global symmetry but in order for the theory to be finite it is thought that there may be other symmetries not yet found

Azeem Ghumman is a Pakistani cricketer. He is a right-handed batsman, who played as a Pakistan Under-19s, he has plenty of experience for a first-class cricketer, having played 19 games before the Under-19 World Cup in New Zealand. The highlight of his career before the tournament had been a sparkling 199 for Hyderabad. Most he has played in the 2005/06 Pentangular Cup tournament for the National Bank of Pakistan. In September 2019, he was named in Balochistan's squad for the 2019–20 Quaid-e-Azam Trophy tournament, his father, Shahnawaz Ghumman, was a film star, who acted in more than 200 movies and was killed on 25 June 1991 for political reasons. Azeem Ghumman at CricInfo