A lady slipper orchid has a deep pocket that is actually a bee trap. When a bee crawls down into the flower to get the nectar, the pocket on the flower closes shut. Because of this, the bee is stuck for a while, wiggling and squirming, getting pollen all over itself.
The bee finally finds a small opening near the top of the orchid, and it gets out so that it can get trapped inside another lady slipper, where it will give that pollen to the other lady slipper's stigma.
The lady's slipper is also known in the United States of America as the "moccasin flower", because it looks like a shoe or moccasin.
Pandita Ramabai
Pandita Ramabai (23 April 1858, Karnataka- 5 April 1922) was an Indian Christian who tried to change many things in India. A poet and scholar, she tried hard to improve (make better) the lives of women in India. She wrote many books, such as her popular "The high
-Caste Indian Woman", which showed the troubles of child wives and women in India.
She was born in Gangamoola, in the Mala village, in Karkala Taluk, in the Karnataka State of India. Her father's name was Ananta Shastri. She lost her parents (Laxmi Bai) early. She travelled to Kolkata with her brother. There, she received (got) a Pandita and a Sarasvathi Award for her expertise in Sanskrit Poetry. Born in the home of an important scholar named Brahmin, Pandita Ramabai had more freedom than many Indian women. Her father taught her and her mother to read Sanskrit writing. She then began to study Christianity in India, and later in England. She decided that it was the best religion; that she should be a Christian. However, she had not yet received Jesus into her "heart". Ramabai later said,
Shortly after her "true conversion", Pandita Ramabai began a faith mission for the girls and widows of India. Pandita and her helpers began a school and prayed for what they needed every day. When a great famine came to India, Pandita went to and saved widows and girls from death or abuse.
Soon she had over a thousand women and girls at the mission. Helping this many people during a time of great famine was very hard, but Pandita wrote in her autobiography,
Every day, Pandita Ramabai and her helpers taught the women to read and write, showed them cleanliness, and helped them prepare for a job. She also taught them about Jesus. She opened Ashrams at Pune, Mumbai. She established a Christian High school at Gulbarga, (now at Karnataka) and her daughter Manorama was the principal. Manorama studied in the United States and traveled to Australia.
Synthesis
Synthesis means to bring ideas together, or to make something out of parts which were independent. It is the opposite of analysis.
Ruy Lopez
The Ruy Lopez, also called the "Spanish Opening", is an ancient chess opening. It is named after the Spanish clerk Ruy Lopez who invented the method. These are the opening moves:
The Ruy Lopez is one of the most common and well liked openings, with many ways to play it. It has always been popular in master chess. Something to know about it is that it does not threaten the black e5 pawn:
For this reason White usually plays a longer-term strategy, starting
Triathlon
A triathlon is a sport that consists of three different events one after another without resting in between. Usually, they are swimming, cycling, and running. Triathlon has been in the Olympic Games since 2000. One of the hardest and most famous triathlons is the Ironman Triathlon, which involves swimming two miles, biking a hundred miles, and then running a marathon.
Continuous function
A mathematical function is called continuous if, roughly said, a "small change" in the input only causes a "small change" in the output. If this is not the case, the function is discontinuous. Functions defined on the real numbers, with one input and one output variable, will show as an "uninterrupted line (or curve)". They can be drawn "without lifting the pen off of the page". The definition given above was made by Augustin-Louis Cauchy.
Karl Weierstraß gave another definition of continuity: Imagine a function "f", defined on the real numbers. At the point formula_1 the function will have the value formula_2. If the function is continuous at formula_1, then for every value of formula_4 no matter how small it is, there is a value of formula_5, so that formula_6, means that formula_7. We can put this another way, given a point close to formula_1 (called x), the "absolute value" of the difference between the two values of the function can be made increasingly small, if the point x is "close enough" to formula_1.
There are also special forms of continuous, such as "Lipschitz-continuous". A function is Lipschitz-continuous if there is a formula_10 with formula_11 for all x,y ∈ (a,b).
A basic way to know if a function is continuous is to use a pencil or your finger. Then, start at the left of the function. Then, move your finger along the path of the function. If you ever need to lift your finger or pencil to keep following the function, then you know it is not continuous. This is because, by lifting your finger, you have "jumped" from one section of the function to another. That means you made a very small movement but the function changed very much. This is what the first sentence of this article is talking about.
Peter Falk
Peter Michael Falk (September 16, 1927 - June 23, 2011) was an American actor. His best known role was Columbo in the TV series of the same name.
Falk was born in Manhattan on September 16, 1927. He was Jewish. He grew up in Ossining, New York. He earned a degree in political science from the New School for Social Research. He then earned his Master's degree in public administration at Syracuse University.
He appeared in a number of Broadway plays including: "The Prisoner of Second Avenue", "The Passion of Josef D", "Diary of a Scoundrel", and "Saint Joan". Falk won four Emmy Awards playing the police detective Columbo, and one for "The Dick Powell Theatre". He was nominated for seven other Emmy awards. Falk also received two Academy Award nominations for the films "Murder Inc." and "Pocketful of Miracles".
Falk was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. He died in his Beverly Hills, California home on the morning of June 23, 2011.
Claude Choules
Claude Choules (3 March 1901 – 5 May 2011) was a British-Australian World War I veteran who served in the Royal Navy.
Born in Wyre Piddle, son of Harry & Madeline (née Winn), near Pershore, Worcestershire, Choules joined the Royal Navy as a young man in 1916, and served aboard the Naval Training Ship HMS Circe at Plymouth. In 1917, he joined the battleship HMS "Revenge", which was the flagship of the First Battle Squadron. While serving aboard her, Choules witnessed the surrender of the German Imperial Navy at the Firth of Forth in 1918, ten days after the Armistice, and was also to witness the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow.
During World War II, Choules was the Acting Torpedo Officer of Fremantle and also the Chief Demolition Officer on the western side of the Australian continent. He was tasked with sabotaging Fremantle harbors and related oil storage tanks in the event of a Japanese invasion.
He died on 5 May 2011 in Perth, Western Australia at 110 years old.
Florence Green
Florence Green (19 February 1901 – 4 February 2012) was a British supercentenarian. She was the last surviving veteran of World War I. Green was born in London and moved to King's Lynn in 1920 after her marriage to Walter, a railway worker who died in 1970.
She joined up in September 1918, two months before the end of the war. She served as a waitress in the officers' mess at RAF Marham and also at Narborough airfield. She was the last living British veteran following the death of Claude Choules.
She was West Norfolk's oldest resident, the second oldest person in Norfolk and one of the 30 oldest people in Britain.
She had a son and two daughters, as well as four grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.