1.
Mermaid
–
A mermaid is a legendary aquatic creature with the head and upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish. Mermaids appear in the folklore of cultures worldwide, including the Near East, Europe, Africa. The first stories appeared in ancient Assyria, in which the goddess Atargatis transformed herself into an out of shame for accidentally killing her human lover. Mermaids are sometimes associated with events such as floods, storms, shipwrecks. In other folk traditions, they can be benevolent or beneficent, the male equivalent of the mermaid is the merman, also a familiar figure in folklore and heraldry. Although traditions about and sightings of mermen are less common than those of mermaids, some of the attributes of mermaids may have been influenced by the Sirens of Greek mythology. Historical accounts of mermaids, such as reported by Christopher Columbus during his exploration of the Caribbean, may have been inspired by manatees. While there is no evidence that mermaids exist outside of folklore, reports of mermaid sightings continue to the present day, including 21st century examples from Israel and Zimbabwe. Mermaids have been a subject of art and literature in recent centuries. They have subsequently been depicted in operas, paintings, books, films, the word mermaid is a compound of the Old English mere, and maid. The equivalent term in Old English was merewif and they are conventionally depicted as beautiful with long flowing hair. Sirenia is an order of aquatic, herbivorous mammals that inhabit rivers, estuaries, coastal marine waters, swamps. They look ponderous and clumsy but are actually fusiform, hydrodynamic and highly muscular, sirenomelia, also called mermaid syndrome, is a rare congenital disorder in which a child is born with his or her legs fused together and small genitalia. This condition is about as rare as conjoined twins, affecting one out of every 100,000 live births and is fatal within a day or two of birth because of kidney and bladder complications. Four survivors were known as of July 2003, many folklorists and mythographers deem that the origin of the mythic mermaid is the dugong, posing a theory that mythicised tales have been constructed around early sightings of dugongs by sailors. The first known mermaid stories appeared in Assyria c.1000 BC, the goddess Atargatis, mother of Assyrian queen Semiramis, loved a mortal and unintentionally killed him. Ashamed, she jumped into a lake and took the form of a fish, the Greeks recognized Atargatis under the name Derketo. Sometime before 546 BC, Milesian philosopher Anaximander postulated that mankind had sprung from an animal species
2.
Spider-Man
–
Spider-Man is a fictional superhero appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. The character was created by writer-editor Stan Lee and writer-artist Steve Ditko, when Spider-Man first appeared in the early 1960s, teenagers in superhero comic books were usually relegated to the role of sidekick to the protagonist. Marvel has featured Spider-Man in several book series, the first. In the 2010s, he joins the Avengers, Marvels flagship superhero team, Spider-Mans nemesis Doctor Octopus also took on the identity for a story arc spanning 2012–2014, following a body swap plot in which Peter appears to die. Spider-Man is one of the most popular and commercially successful superheroes, the character was first portrayed in live action by Nicholas Hammond in the 1977 television movie Spider-Man. Reeve Carney starred as Spider-Man in the 2010 Broadway musical Spider-Man, in 1962, with the success of the Fantastic Four, Marvel Comics editor and head writer Stan Lee was casting about for a new superhero idea. He said the idea for Spider-Man arose from a surge in demand for comic books. At that time Lee had to get only the consent of Marvel publisher Martin Goodman for the characters approval, in a 1986 interview, Lee described in detail his arguments to overcome Goodmans objections. In particular, Lee stated that the fact that it had already decided that Amazing Fantasy would be cancelled after issue #15 was the only reason Goodman allowed him to use Spider-Man. While this was indeed the issue, its editorial page anticipated the comic continuing. Will appear every month in Amazing, regardless, Lee received Goodmans approval for the name Spider-Man and the ordinary teen concept, and approached artist Jack Kirby. Lee and Kirby immediately sat down for a conference, Theakston writes. Steve Ditko would be the inker, when Kirby showed Lee the first six pages, Lee recalled, I hated the way he was doing it. Not that he did it badly—it just wasnt the character I wanted, Lee turned to Ditko, who developed a visual style Lee found satisfactory. Ditko recalled, One of the first things I did was to work up a costume, a vital, visual part of the character. I had to know how he looked, for example, A clinging power so he wouldnt have hard shoes or boots, a hidden wrist-shooter versus a web gun and holster, etc. I wasnt sure Stan would like the idea of covering the characters face and it would also add mystery to the character. Although the interior artwork was by Ditko alone, Lee rejected Ditkos cover art, as Lee explained in 2010, I think I had Jack sketch out a cover for it because I always had a lot of confidence in Jacks covers
3.
Kristen Stewart
–
Kristen Jaymes Stewart is an American actress and model. Born in Los Angeles to parents working in business, Stewart began her acting career in 1997 with uncredited roles. She gained notice in 2002 for playing Jodie Fosters daughter in the thriller Panic Room and she went on to star in Speak, Catch That Kid, Zathura, and Into The Wild, for which she was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award. She received widespread recognition in 2008 for playing Bella Swan in The Twilight Saga film series, Stewart has appeared in a wide variety of films, including Adventureland, The Runaways, Snow White and the Huntsman, On the Road, Camp X-Ray, Still Alice and Equals. She won the BAFTA Rising Star Award in 2010 and was awarded the Milan International Film Festival Award for Best Actress in 2011 for Welcome to the Rileys. She starred in Personal Shopper, written for her by director Olivier Assayras, Stewart was listed as the highest-earning female actress in the Vanity Fair Hollywood Top Earners List of 2010, with an estimated earning of $28.5 million. In 2011, she was named number one on Forbes list of Hollywoods Best Actors for the Buck, Forbes also named her as the highest paid actress in 2012, with total earnings of $34.5 million. She is the face of Chanel and Balenciaga fashion brands, Stewart was born and raised in Los Angeles. Both of her parents work in the entertainment industry and her father, John Stewart, is a stage manager and television producer who has worked for Fox and currently works on Comedy Central show @midnight. Her mother, Jules Mann-Stewart, is originally from Maroochydore, Queensland and she is a script supervisor and has also directed a film, the 2012 prison drama K-11. She has a brother, Cameron B. Stewart, and two adopted brothers, Dana and Taylor, Stewart attended local schools until the seventh grade. As she became involved in acting, she continued her education by correspondence until completing high school. As she grew up with a family who worked behind the camera, Stewart thought she would become a screenwriter/director and she recalled, I never wanted to be the center of attention — I wasnt that I want to be famous, I want to be an actor kid. I never sought out acting, but I always practiced my autograph because I love pens, Id write my name on everything. She began acting at 8, after an agent saw her perform in her elementary schools Christmas play, after auditioning for a year, Stewart gained her first role with a small, nonspeaking part in the Disney Channel TV-movie The Thirteenth Year. Her next film was The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas, where she played the ring toss girl and she also appeared in the independent film The Safety of Objects, as the tomboy daughter of a troubled single mother. Stewart also played a tomboy, diabetic daughter of a mother in the film Panic Room
4.
San Pedro, Los Angeles
–
San Pedro is a community within the city of Los Angeles, California. Formerly a separate city, it consolidated with Los Angeles in 1909, the Port of Los Angeles, a major international seaport, is partially located within San Pedro. The district has grown from being dominated by the industry to become primarily a working class community within the city of Los Angeles. The site, at the end of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. The peninsula, including all of San Pedro, was the homeland of the Tongva-Gabrieleño Native American people for thousands of years, in other areas of the Los Angeles Basin archeological sites date back 8, 000–15,000 years. The Tongva believe they have been here since the beginning of time, once called the lords of the ocean, due to their mastery of oceangoing canoes, many Tongva villages covered the coastline. Their first contact with Europeans in 1542 with João Cabrilho, the Portuguese explorer who also was the first to write of them, chowigna and Suangna were two Tongva settlements of many in the peninsula area, which was also a departure point for their rancherias on the Channel Islands. Legend has it that the Native Americans blessed the land of Palos Verdes, the Tongva called the San Pedro area Chaaw. San Pedro was named for St. Peter of Alexandria, a bishop in Alexandria. His feast day is November 24 on the ecclesiastical calendar of Spain. Santa Catalina Island, named after Catherine of Alexandria, was claimed for the Spanish Empire the next day, on her feast day, in 1602–1603, Sebastián Vizcaíno officially surveyed and mapped the California coastline, including San Pedro Bay, for New Spain. The anglicized pronunciation, popularized by the English-speaking people of Midwestern America, is san-PEE-dro, european settlement began in 1769 as part of an effort to populate California, although trade restrictions encouraged more smuggling than regular business. Rancho San Pedro is the site of the first Spanish land grant in Alta California, the land was granted in 1784 by King Carlos III to Juan Jose Dominguez, a retired Spanish soldier who came to California with the Gaspar de Portolà expedition. When New Spain won its independence from the Spanish Empire and Alta California became part of Mexico, the restrictions were lifted. In 1888, the War Department took control of a tract of land next to the bay and this became Fort MacArthur in 1914 and was a coastal defense site for many years. Woodrow Wilson transferred 200 United States Navy ships from the Atlantic to the Pacific in 1919 when tension arose between the United States and Japan over the fate of China. San Diego Bay was considered too shallow for the largest ships, local availability of fuel oil minimized transportation costs, and consistently good weather allowed frequent gunnery exercises off the nearby Channel Islands of California. The heavy cruisers of the Scouting Force were transferred from the Atlantic to San Pedro in response to the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria, by 1934,14 battleships, two aircraft carriers,14 cruisers, and 16 support ships were based at San Pedro
5.
VHS
–
The Video Home System is a standard for consumer-level analog video recording on tape cassettes. Developed by Victor Company of Japan in the early 1970s, it was released in Japan in late 1976, from the 1950s, magnetic tape video recording became a major contributor to the television industry, via the first commercialized video tape recorders. At that time, the devices were used only in professional environments such as television studios. In the 1970s, videotape entered home use, creating the video industry and changing the economics of the television. The television industry viewed videocassette recorders as having the power to disrupt their business, in the 1980s and 1990s, at the peak of VHSs popularity, there were videotape format wars in the home video industry. Two of the formats, VHS and Betamax, received the most media exposure, VHS eventually won the war, dominating 60 percent of the North American market by 1980 and emerging as the dominant home video format throughout the tape media period. Optical disc formats later began to better quality than analog consumer video tape such as standard. The earliest of these formats, LaserDisc, was not widely adopted, however, after the introduction of the DVD format in 1997, VHSs market share began to decline. By 2008, DVD had replaced VHS as the preferred method of distribution. After several attempts by other companies, the first commercially successful VTR, at a price of US$50,000 in 1956, and US$300 for a 90-minute reel of tape, it was intended only for the professional market. Kenjiro Takayanagi, a broadcasting pioneer then working for JVC as its vice president, saw the need for his company to produce VTRs for the Japan market. In 1959, JVC developed a video tape recorder. In 1964, JVC released the DV220, which would be the companys standard VTR until the mid-1970s, in 1969 JVC collaborated with Sony Corporation and Matsushita Electric in building a video recording standard for the Japanese consumer. The effort produced the U-matic format in 1971, which was the first format to become a unified standard, U-matic was successful in business and some broadcast applications, but due to cost and limited recording time very few of the machines were sold for home use. Soon after, Sony and Matsushita broke away from the collaboration effort, Sony started working on Betamax, while Matsushita started working on VX. JVC released the CR-6060 in 1975, based on the U-matic format, Sony and Matsushita also produced U-matic systems of their own. In 1971, JVC engineers Yuma Shiraishi and Shizuo Takano put together a team to develop a consumer-based VTR, by the end of 1971 they created an internal diagram titled VHS Development Matrix, which established twelve objectives for JVCs new VTR. These included, The system must be compatible with any television set
6.
DVD
–
DVD is a digital optical disc storage format invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. The medium can store any kind of data and is widely used for software. DVDs offer higher capacity than compact discs while having the same dimensions. Pre-recorded DVDs are mass-produced using molding machines that physically stamp data onto the DVD, such discs are a form of DVD-ROM because data can only be read and not written or erased. Blank recordable DVD discs can be recorded using a DVD recorder. Rewritable DVDs can be recorded and erased many times, DVDs containing other types of information may be referred to as DVD data discs. The OED also states that in 1995, The companies said the name of the format will simply be DVD. Toshiba had been using the name ‘digital video disk’, but that was switched to ‘digital versatile disk’ after computer companies complained that it left out their applications, Digital versatile disc is the explanation provided in a DVD Forum Primer from 2000 and in the DVD Forums mission statement. There were several formats developed for recording video on optical discs before the DVD, Optical recording technology was invented by David Paul Gregg and James Russell in 1958 and first patented in 1961. A consumer optical disc data format known as LaserDisc was developed in the United States and it used much larger discs than the later formats. CD Video used analog video encoding on optical discs matching the established standard 120 mm size of audio CDs, Video CD became one of the first formats for distributing digitally encoded films in this format, in 1993. In the same year, two new optical disc formats were being developed. By the time of the launches for both formats in January 1995, the MMCD nomenclature had been dropped, and Philips and Sony were referring to their format as Digital Video Disc. Representatives from the SD camp asked IBM for advice on the system to use for their disc. Alan E. Bell, a researcher from IBMs Almaden Research Center, got that request and this group was referred to as the Technical Working Group, or TWG. On August 14,1995, an ad hoc group formed from five computer companies issued a release stating that they would only accept a single format. The TWG voted to both formats unless the two camps agreed on a single, converged standard. They recruited Lou Gerstner, president of IBM, to pressure the executives of the warring factions, as a result, the DVD specification provided a storage capacity of 4.7 GB for a single-layered, single-sided disc and 8.5 GB for a dual-layered, single-sided disc
7.
Blu-ray
–
Blu-ray or Blu-ray Disc is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was designed to supersede the DVD format, in that it is capable of storing high-definition, the plastic disc is 120 mm in diameter and 1.2 mm thick, the same size as DVDs and CDs. Conventional Blu-ray Disc discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual layer discs being the standard for feature-length video discs. Triple-layer discs and quadruple layers are available for BD-XL re-writer drives, the name Blu-ray refers to the blue laser used to read the disc, which allows information to be stored at a greater density than is possible with the longer-wavelength red laser used for DVDs. The main application of Blu-ray is as a medium for video material such as films and physical distribution of video games for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4. Besides the hardware specifications, Blu-ray is associated with a set of multimedia formats, high-definition video may be stored on Blu-ray discs with up to 2160p resolution, at up to 60 frames per second. DVD discs had been limited to a resolution of 480p or 576p. The BD format was developed by the Blu-ray Disc Association, a group representing makers of consumer electronics, computer hardware, Sony unveiled the first Blu-ray disc prototypes in October 2000, and the first prototype player was released in April 2003 in Japan. Afterwards, it continued to be developed until its release in June 2006. During the high definition disc format war, Blu-ray Disc competed with the HD DVD format. Toshiba, the company that supported HD DVD, conceded in February 2008. According to Media Research, high-definition software sales in the US were slower in the first two years than DVD software sales, Blu-ray faces competition from video on demand and the continued sale of DVDs. As of January 2016, 44% of U. S. broadband households had a Blu-ray player, the information density of the DVD format was limited by the wavelength of the laser diodes used. Following protracted development, blue laser diodes operating at 405 nanometers became available on a production basis, Sony started two projects in collaboration with Philips applying the new diodes, UDO, and DVR Blue, a format of rewritable discs that would eventually become Blu-ray Disc. The core technologies of the formats are similar, the first DVR Blue prototypes were unveiled at the CEATEC exhibition in October 2000 by Sony. A trademark for the Blue Disc logo was filed February 9,2001, on February 19,2002, the project was officially announced as Blu-ray Disc, and Blu-ray Disc Founders was founded by the nine initial members. The first consumer device arrived in stores on April 10,2003, the Sony BDZ-S77, but there was no standard for prerecorded video, and no movies were released for this player. On October 4,2004, the name Blu-ray Disc Founders was officially changed to the Blu-ray Disc Association, the Blu-ray Disc physical specifications were completed in 2004
8.
Point Fermin Light
–
Point Fermin is a lighthouse on Point Fermin in San Pedro, California. The lighthouse was built in 1874 and designed by Paul J, the original fourth order Fresnel lens was removed in 1942 and a wood replica lantern was installed in 1974. The lighthouse was saved from demolition in 1972 and refurbished in 1974, in 1972, the light was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Historical Information from Coast Guard web site, Point Fermin Light was built in 1874 with lumber from California redwoods, in 1941 the light was extinguished due to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. There was fear that the light would serve as a beacon for enemy planes, later, the lantern room and gallery were removed. They were replaced by a lookout shack that remained for the next 30 years, in 1972 the light was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The light fell into disuse and disrepair, a new lantern room and gallery were built in 1974. The building has now restored to its original state and is open to the public as the Point Fermin Lighthouse Historic Site. The original Fresnel lens from the lighthouse, removed in the 1940s, had been missing for decades, the lighthouse is open daily except Monday and holidays. In 1986, the lighthouse appeared in a episode of Amazing Stories. In June 2011, the General Services Administration made the Point Fermin Light available at no cost to public organizations willing to preserve them, united States Coast Guard Historians Office
9.
Google Play
–
Google Play is a digital distribution service, including a digital media store, the Google Play Store, operated and developed by Google. Google Play also serves as a digital media store, offering music, magazines, books, movies and it previously offered Google hardware devices for purchase until the introduction of a separate online hardware retailer, Google Store, on March 11,2015. Applications are available through Google Play either free of charge or at a cost and they can be downloaded directly to an Android device through the Play Store mobile app, or by deploying the application to a device from the Google Play website. Applications exploiting hardware capabilities of a device can be targeted to users of devices with specific hardware components, the Google Play store had over 50 billion app downloads in 2013 and has reached over 2.7 million apps published in 2017. Google Play was launched on March 6,2012, bringing together the Android Market, Google Music, and the Google eBookstore under one brand, marking a shift in Googles digital distribution strategy. The services operating under the Google Play banner are, Google Play Books, Google Play Games, Google Play Movies & TV, Google Play Music, as of February 2017, Google Play features over 2.7 million Android applications. Developers in over 150 locations can distribute apps on Google Play, to distribute apps, developers have to pay a one-time $25 registration fee for a Google Play Developer Console account. App developers can control which countries an app is distributed to, Developers receive 70% of the application price, while the remaining 30% goes to the distribution partner and operating fees. Developers can set up sales, with the original price striked out, Google Play allows developers to release early versions of apps to a select group of users, as alpha or beta tests. Developers can also release apps through staged rollouts, in which your update reaches only a percentage of your users, users can pre-order select apps to have the items delivered as soon as they are available. Some network carriers offer billing for Google Play purchases, allowing users to opt for charges in the phone bill rather than on credit cards. Users can request refunds within 48 hours if something you bought isnt working, isnt what you expected, was bought by accident, Apps meeting specific usability requirements can qualify as an Android Wear app. Google Play Games is a gaming service for Android that features real-time multiplayer gaming capabilities, cloud saves, social and public leaderboards. The service was introduced at the Google I/O2013 Developer Conference, Google Play Music is a music and podcast streaming service and online music locker. It features over 40 million songs, and gives users free cloud storage of up to 50,000 songs, as of January 2017, Google Play Music is available in 62 countries. Google Play Books is a digital distribution service. Google Play offers over five million ebooks available for purchase, as of January 2017, Google Play Books is available in 75 countries. Google Play Movies & TV is a video on demand service offering movies and television shows available for purchase or rental, Google Play Newsstand is a news aggregator and digital newsstand service offering subscriptions to digital magazines and topical news feeds
