Cable (British band)

Cable were a British indie rock band originally from Derby, UK who released 3 albums in the late '90s: Down-Lift the Up-Trodden ('96), When Animals Attack ('97), and Sub-Lingual ('99), on Infectious Records. The band split up in 1999.

Formed in 1992 by Matt Bagguley and Darius Hinks, Cable were initially inspired by the art-rock leanings of indie-labels such as Touch and Go, Dischord, Blast First, Southern Records and Shimmy Disc, and also UK artists such as Spacemen 3 & My Bloody Valentine. The first settled line-up was Matt Bagguley (vocals/guitar), Darius Hinks (guitar), Pete Darrington (bass), Neil Cooper (drums) and throughout 1993 the band played regularly with underground acts from the U.S (such as Medicine, Polvo, Truman's Water, Rocket From The Crypt..) In early '94 their debut single "Sale of the Century" was released on 7", by Derby-based indie-label Krunch! Records. Radio 1 DJ John Peel played it immediately on his show saying it was the best thing he'd heard that week and phoned the band during the show to invite them to record a session. John Peel remained a loyal fan from that moment on, and altogether the band recorded 4 Peel Sessions.

Cable (American band)

Cable is an American band formed in 1994 in Rockville, Connecticut. They combine a hardcore punk and emo aesthetic with a rhythmically complex, often discordant metal-influenced musical approach. Lineup changes and delays between recordings may have hindered their notoriety over the years.

History

The quartet formed in 1994, at which time it consisted of Randy Larsen (guitar/vocals), Vic Szalaj (drums), Matt Becker (guitar), and Jeff Caxide (bass) and were players in Connecticut's "noise-core" scene. This line-up recorded a demo and appeared on a split 7" with Malcolm's Lost. Vocalist Aaron Lazauski joined the band briefly and appeared on the "Part Three"/"Feed Me Glass" 7" in 1995. Soon, both Lazauski and Larsen left the band and Bernie Romanowski joined the group as vocalist/guitarist. In the documentary Last Call, Jeff Caxide stated that he was unhappy with Larsen's departure and soon, he parted ways with Cable, only to, ironically, be replaced by a returning Randy Larsen, who picked up the bass upon re-entry into the band. In 1997, their debut, Variable Speed Drive was released by Doghouse Records.

Cable (foreign exchange)

Cable (or the cable) is a foreign exchange term used for the GBP/USD currency pair rate (British pound vs the US dollar).

The term cable is a slang term used by forex traders to refer to the exchange rate between the pound and dollar and is also used to simply refer to the British pound itself. The term originated in the mid-19th century, when the exchange rate between the U.S. dollar and British pound began to be transmitted across the Atlantic by a submarine communications cable. Since that time the exchange rate has been referred to as the cable.

The first Transatlantic Cable was laid under the Atlantic Ocean in 1858, but it failed after only about a month of fitful service. The first really successful cable across the Atlantic was completed in July 1866, reliably transmitting currency prices between the London and New York Exchanges. The first such exchange rate to be published in The Times appeared in their issue of 10 August 1866.

Transatlantic communications are now mainly carried by optical fibre cables, supplemented to a small degree by satellites, but forex traders' nickname for the pound-dollar pair still hearkens back to the old days of copper telegraph cables.

Block (periodic table)

A block of the periodic table of elements is a set of adjacent groups. The term appears to have been first used by Charles Janet. The respective highest-energy electrons in each element in a block belong to the same atomic orbital type. Each block is named after its characteristic orbital; thus, the blocks are:

The block names (s, p, d, f and g) are derived from the spectroscopic notation for the associated atomic orbitals: sharp, principal, diffuse and fundamental, and then g which follows f in the alphabet.

The following is the order for filling the "subshell" orbitals, according to the Aufbau principle, which also gives the linear order of the "blocks" (as atomic number increases) in the periodic table:

For discussion of the nature of why the energies of the blocks naturally appear in this order in complex atoms, see atomic orbital and electron configuration.

The "periodic" nature of the filling of orbitals, as well as emergence of the s, p, d and f "blocks" is more obvious, if this order of filling is given in matrix form, with increasing principal quantum numbers starting the new rows ("periods") in the matrix. Then, each subshell (composed of the first two quantum numbers) is repeated as many times as required for each pair of electrons it may contain. The result is a compressed periodic table, with each entry representing two successive elements:

Block (rural Australia)

Block is an Australian term for a small agricultural landholding. Block settlement has been used by Governments to encourage decentralization and during financial depressions to give families of unemployed workers an opportunity (frequently illusory) to become primary producers. It may also refer to a lifestyle choice or "hobby farm" for those with an independent source of income.

In parts of Australia, parcels of land of around 6 to 20 acres (2 to 8 ha) were allocated by Government to working-class men at nominal rent during the depression of the 1890s with the object of giving them work and, potentially, a source of income. Some eventually prospered, but those on marginal land were doomed to failure. Proponents of the "block system" included George Witherage Cotton. Holders of such allotments were referred to as "blockers" or "blockies".

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References

Block (data storage)

In computing (specifically data transmission and data storage), a block, sometimes called a physical record, is a sequence of bytes or bits, usually containing some whole number of records, having a maximum length, a block size. Data thus structured are said to be blocked. The process of putting data into blocks is called blocking, while deblocking is the process of extracting data from blocks. Blocked data is normally stored in a data buffer and read or written a whole block at a time. Blocking reduces the overhead and speeds up the handling of the data-stream. For some devices such as magnetic tape and CKD disk devices blocking reduces the amount of external storage required for the data. Blocking is almost universally employed when storing data to 9-track magnetic tape, to NAND flash memory, and to rotating media such as floppy disks, hard disks, and optical discs.

Most file systems are based on a block device, which is a level of abstraction for the hardware responsible for storing and retrieving specified blocks of data, though the block size in file systems may be a multiple of the physical block size. This leads to space inefficiency due to internal fragmentation, since file lengths are often not integer multiples of block size, and thus the last block of a file may remain partially empty. This will create slack space, which averages half a block per file. Some newer file systems attempt to solve this through techniques called block suballocation and tail merging.