Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932--1986) was, arguably, the greatest filmmaker of his nation. While perhaps not the innovator that fellow Russian Sergei Eisenstein was, Tarkovsky nevertheless imbued each of his films with a poet...

Animals are multicellular, heterotrophic eukaryotes. Because animals are unable to make their own food, they must have some means of ingesting food. They do this by consuming plants, other animals, or decomposing organic matter, or by abso...

The aardwolf (Proteles cristatus) is a small insectivorous hyena-like mammal, native to Eastern and Southern Africa. The name means "earth wolf" in Afrikaans.[2] It is also called "maanhaar-jackal" and "protelid". Unlike other hyenas (subfa...

Some bold adventurers disdain The limits of their little reign, And unknown regions date descry. . . . and now expecting Each hour their great adventurer, from the search Of foreign words. He who has not an adventure has not horse or mule,...

Species of agave (Agave americana), of Mexico and the southwestern U.S. It takes many years (from five to 100) to mature, flowers only once, and then dies. It is widely cultivated for its large spiny leaves and enormous flower cluster, and...

Early U.S. constitution (1781–89) under the government by the Continental Congress, replaced in 1787 by the U.S. Constitution. It provided for a confederation of sovereign states and gave the Congress power to regulate foreign affair...

Whoever would undertake the formidable task of writing the intellectual history of the twentieth century would be well advised to include in it the works of Arthur Koestler and the controversies they helped to spawn. These controversies we...

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), whose pessimistic philosophy was widely known in the late 19th century in Europe and the United States, held that ultimate reality was nothing but senseless striving or will, having n...

Angola is located on the South Atlantic Coast of West Africa between Namibia and the Republic of the Congo. It also is bordered by the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia to the east. The country is divided into an arid coastal stri...

This article is part of the series: Politics and government ofAngola...

This article is about communications in Angola: if (window.showTocToggle) { var tocShowText = "show"; var tocHideText = "hide"; showTocToggle(); } Telephone Telephone service is limited mostly to government and business use. 96,300 main lin...

The Angolan Armed Forces (FAA) is headed by a Chief of Staff who reports to the Minister of Defense. There are three divisions, the Army, Navy (Marinha de Guerra, MdG), and Air and Air Defense Forces (FAPA). Total manpower is about 110,000....

Morale is faith in the man at the top....

Androids are mechanical, or otherwise artificial, creations in the shape of humans. They have long been a staple of science fiction. From the clockwork persons of myth to Isaac Asimov's humanoid robots, to Star Wars's C-3PO, ...

Parallel of latitude approximately 66°30′ north of the Equator that circumscribes the northern frigid zone. It marks the southern limit of the area within which, for one day or more each year, the sun does not set or rise. The le...

HARTLAND, E. SIDNEY (1848–1927), was an English folklorist and armchair anthropologist. Hartland is a good example of the polymaths produced by the Victorian era, contributing prolifically to a wide range of topics but practically f...

The Actinopterygii (the plural form of Actinopterygius) comprise the class of the ray-finned fishes. The ray-finned fishes are so called because they possess lepidotrichia or "fin rays", their fins being webs of skin supported by bony or ho...

country in southern Europe, located in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula on the Strait of Otranto, the southern entrance to the Adriatic Sea. The capital city is Tirana (Tiranë). Albanians refer to themselves as shqiptarë,...

A Markov chain is a process, invented by the Russian mathematician Andrei Markov (1856-1922), used for predicting future outcomes or "states" of a system based upon the current state of the system. More formally, a Markov chain is a probab...

country of eastern Transcaucasia. Occupying an area that fringes the southern flanks of the Caucasus Mountains, it is bounded on the north by Russia, on the east by the Caspian Sea, on the south by Iran, on the west by Armenia, and on the ...

(Japanese: “way of spiritual harmony”), self-defense system that resembles the fighting methods jujitsu and judo in its use of twisting and throwing techniques and in its aim of turning an attacker's strength and momentum again...

Agnostida (the agnostids) is an order of trilobite. These small trilobites first appeared toward the end of the Early Cambrian and thrived in the Middle Cambrian. They are present in the lower Cambrian fossil record along with trilobites fr...

In law, an abstract is a brief statement that contains the most important points of a long legal document or of several related legal papers....

A unit measure of electric current. It is often abbreviated to ‘amp’. One ampere is that which, if flowing in two parallel conductors, both of which are infinitely thin and long and 1 metre apart in a vacuum, will produce a for...

systematic procedure that produces—in a finite number of steps—the answer to a question or the solution of a problem. The name derives from the Latin translation, Algoritmi de numero Indorum, of the 9th-century Muslim mathemati...