Most members of the family are ambush predators: they stay motionless in a camouflaged position, and then strike suddenly at passing prey. They wrap their body round the prey and squeeze. To kill its prey, the python squeezes it to death, then swallows it whole. Larger pythons can prey on animals as large as a full-grown deer. In Africa, there are pythons that eat gazelles. Most of their prey is much smaller than that. Pythons may take several days or even weeks to fully digest prey.
Despite their size, pythons are rarely dangerous to humans.
"Python" can be up to 900 cm long and weigh up to 90 kg, but males are much smaller and lighter than females. The python can live up to 30 years. The breeding time is between 60 or 70 days.
Research indicates that all snakes, including pythonids, are descended from a venomous ancestor.
Burmese pythons have become an invasive species in south Florida. The problem is most serious in the Everglades National Park.
In 2013 a pet python killed two children in New Brunswick, Canada.
Consultation (Bahá'í practice)
Consultation is a special way of discussing problems and making decisions used by Bahá'ís.
The word consult generally means to talk about something, consider all the facts, and make a decision. To Bahá'ís, consultation also means:
Consultation is used by Bahá'í elected leaders when they gather in councils to make sure no one person gets to decide everything. Married people consult with their husband or wife to solve difficulties in the marriage. Parents and children may consult, teachers and students may consult, and Bahá'ís all consult as a community when they get together every nineteen days.
List of riots
This is a list of important riots that happened:
Serbian language
Serbian is South Slavic language spoken by Serbs, primarily in Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and some parts of neighboring countries. It is also spoken by many Serbs in diaspora, mainly in Central European countries, North America and Australia. The language is European and south Slavic. This language got a complete makeover in the mid-1800s by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić; when it was modernized from the times of Middle Ages, when "Old Serbian" was still spoken. Total number of speakers worldwide today is estimated to be more than 12 million.
Namaste
Namaste or Namaskar is a neutral greeting used a lot in many East Asian countries. It is used when Hello and Hi are used in English, though it has a very different meaning.
Namaste is kind of like a praise to the person receiving the namaste.
The word's meaning is “I bow to the divine in you.” Namaste is a traditional Indian greeting of respect and thank you, with spiritual and symbolic meaning.
Vessel element
A vessel element (trachea) is one of the cell types found in xylem, the water conducting tissue of plants.
Vessel elements are found in flowering plants (angiosperms) but not in most gymnosperms such as conifers. Vessel elements are the main feature distinguishing the "hardwood" of angiosperms from the "softwood" of conifers.
Xylem vessels are a long straight chain made of tough long dead cells known as vessel elements. The vessel have no cytoplasm. They are not living, but are made by living cells. The cells are arranged end to end and the cell walls have disappeared. This makes a tube.
Vessels are made of a substance called lignin. They have a lignified cell wall and a central cavity. Vessel members are interconnected through perforations in their common walls. Lignin is a hard organic polymer. It makes the cell walls rigid and is very long-lasting. It is the lignin in xylem vessels which holds trees up.
Water flows up the xylem vessels. The evaporation of water from the stomata cells in the leaves pulls up the water in a transpiration stream. This is called capillary action, because it depends on the way water molecules stick to the walls of the xylem (adhesion).
There is also some root pressure, because water enters the roots by osmosis. This is important so water gets upwards during the night when transpiration is low.
As the water goes up, it carries some minerals with it, so actually the xylem brings some basic nutrients to the plant. The phloem mostly distributes the more complex organic molecules.
Confluence
Confluence means the meeting of two or more waterways.
It usually means the point where a smaller river joins a more major river.
The German city name Koblenz indicates that the city lies at the point at the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle.
Artificial neural network
A neural network (also called an ANN or an artificial neural network) is a sort of computer software, inspired by biological neurons. Biological brains are capable of solving difficult problems, but each neuron is only responsible for solving a very small part of the problem. Similarly, a neural network is made up of cells that work together to produce a desired result, although each individual cell is only responsible for solving a small part of the problem. This is one method for creating artificially intelligent programs.
Neural networks are an example of machine learning, where a program can change as it learns to solve a problem. A neural network can be trained and improved with each example, but the larger the neural network, the more examples it needs to perform well—often needing millions or billions of examples in the case of deep learning.
There are two ways to think of a neural network. First is like a human brain. Second is like a mathematical equation.
A network starts with an input, somewhat like a sensory organ. Information then flows through layers of neurons, where each neuron is connected to many other neurons. If a particular neuron receives enough stimuli, then it sends a message to any other neuron is it connected to through its axon. Similarly, an artificial neural network has an input layer of data, one or more hidden layers of classifiers, and an output layer. Each node in each hidden layer is connected to a node in the next layer. When a node receives information, it sends along some amount of it to the nodes it is connected to. The amount is determined by a mathematical function called an activation function, such as sigmoid or tanh.
Thinking of a neural network like a mathematical equation, a neural network is simply a list of mathematical operations to be applied to an input. The input and output of each operation is a tensor (or more specifically a vector or matrix). Each pair of layers is connected by a list of weights. Each layer has several tensors stored in it. An individual tensor in a layer is called a node. Each node is connected to some or all of the nodes in the next layer by a weight. Each node also has a list of values called biases. The value of each layer is then the out of the activation function of the values of the current layer (called X) multiplied by the weights.
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A cost function is defined for the network. The loss function tries to estimate how well the neural network is doing at its assigned task. Finally, an optimization technique is applied to minimize the output of the cost function by changing the weights and biases of the network. This process is called training. Training is done one small step at a time. After thousands of steps, the network is typically able to do its assigned task pretty well.
Consider a program that checks whether a person is alive. It checks two things - the pulse, and breath.If a person has either a pulse or is breathing, the program will output 'alive', otherwise, it will output 'dead'. In a program that does not learn over time, this would be written as:
function isAlive(pulse, breathing) {
A very simple neural network, made of just one neuron that solves the same problem will look like this: