From a chronological point of view the substitution for the mean calendaric system of one based on the true movements of the sun and moon, was anything but an improvement, as it destabilized the foundations of the time reckoning. Indeed, the system may have had the charm of adapting daily life as nearly as the astronomical knowledge permitted to the movement of the heavenly bodies, but on the o...

We developed an OpenMP compiler, called Omni. This paper describes a performance evaluation of the Omni OpenMP compiler. We take two commercial OpenMP C compilers, the KAI GuideC and the PGI C compiler, for comparison. Microbenchmarks and a program in Parkbench are used for the evaluation. The results using a SUN Enterprise 450 with four processors show the performance of Omni is comparable to ...

and their multifunctional applications Kai Li,*ac Yuanyuan Liu,a Yuanyuan Li,b Qi Feng,a Hongwei Hou*a and Ben Zhong Tang*c a College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Zhengzhou University, Henan 450001, P. R. China. b College of Chemistry, Chemical and Environmental Engineering, Henan University of Technology, Henan 450001, P. R. China. c Department of Chemistry and Hong Kong Branch of C...

The heavenly ascent motif is common in religious documents of late antiquity. A preoccupation with the similarities between these accounts leads some to overlook the equally important differences. Care should be taken, however, to distinguish between mystical esotericism and extraordinary religious encounter. Earlier Jewish traditions provide the proper context for understanding Paul's visions ...

Autonomous machines have fascinated people for millennia. The Ancient Greeks told of Talos, the Man of Bronze, whose supposedly mythical existence has been given unexpected credence by the recent discovery of the Antikythera Mechanism. Could the Greeks really have created a giant mechanical man to protect Europa in Crete against pirates and invaders? Long before that, the Ancient Egyptians crea...