A language designed originally by Ken Iverson at Harvard University in 1957-1960 as a notation for the concise expression of mathematical algorithms. It went unnamed (or just called Iverson's Language) and unimplemented for many years. Finally a subset, APL\360, was implemented in 1964.

(Adapted from "A Programming Language", Kenneth E. Iverson, Wiley, 1962.)

A major is, for most people, a simple chord to play. It is usually played using the 1st finger on the fourth string, the 2nd (middle) finger on the third string and the 4th (ring) finger on the second string.

A was the first chord I leaned to play, and I was disappointed with how hard I found it to finger properly. To fit three fingers in a row, they had to be at a wild angle:


================ 
|  |  |  |  |  | 
|  |  |  |  |  | 
|  |  |  |  |  | 
|--|--|--|--|--| 
|  |  1  |  |  | 
|  |  |  2  |  | 
|  |  |  |  3  | 
|--|--|--|--|--| 
My first finger was so far away from the 2nd fret that it never made a 'clean' sound no matter how hard I tried. Luckily, I tried other chords, and discovered that they were comparatively easy - so I didn't give up all hope, or the guitar.

The next day, I was at work complaining about my difficulty with A, and my boss suggested that I try an alternative fingering. It's difficult to explain without a guitar or a diagram in front of you, so...


================                         
|  |  |  |  |  |      
|  |  |  |  |  |      
|  |  |  |  |  |      
|--|--|--|--|--|      
|  |  |  |  |  |      
|  |  2  1  3  |      
|  |  |  |  |  |      
|--|--|--|--|--| 
The idea is to cross your middle finger over the top of your first finger. Although it sounds really difficult to do, your middle finger is, usually at least, longer than your first finger so it feels quite natural. With my comically large hands and fingers, I have found that it makes A much easier to play.


stewacide points out that three fingers are even harder to fit when making an A-major shaped barre chord further down the neck. His alternative is to play the chord with just one finger fretting the three strings at the second fret, while using that same finger to mute the high E (which is not needed of course, as there's already a low E in the chord).

In lowercase ("a"), the title of a book facilitated by Andy Warhol
published by Grove Press, 1968

Though billed on its title page as "a novel by Andy Warhol", a was originally conceived as a transcription of a 24-hour period captured on audio tape, during which Warhol (who appears intermittently as "Drella", his nickname that was a combination of "Dracula" and "Cinderella") would hang out with some of the motormouth amphetamine abusers who facinated him with their "creativity" (Lester Bangs once observed, regarding an interview he had conducted with Lou Reed, that speed-freaks have to lie all the time, otherwise they would run out of things to say). Warhol later admitted that his scheme for creating "a consecutive twenty-four-hour tape-recorded 'novel'" had a few flaws--Andy was incapable of staying awake that long himself, and several sessions were needed to fill the tapes. Also, when the taping was done, the cassettes were handed over for transcribing to whoever wandered into The Factory, Warhol's studio. After a year-and-a-half of amateur typing, the resulting text was a mess--full of mis-hearings, spelling mistakes, inconsistent formatting and confusing attributions--nevertheless, it was published without corrections. At 451 pages of fine print, a is as intimidating as any epic could be, but with far less charm than, say, Finnegans Wake.

A sample:
(silence) (dialtone) (silence) (voices in between static) (dialtone) (Drella's making phone calls) (Phone rings) At the tone the time will be 6:27 exactly. (Beep) At the tone the time will be 6:27 and ten seconds. (Beep.) At the tone (click) (buzz) (silence) (buzy signal) (click) (dialtone) (dialing) (phone rings) B--Is Ondine? Yeah. B--Oh, fifty minutes of tape. Are you on the phone? O--Yeah. Will you talk to me for fifty minutes? B--Oh, of course. Okay, I'll take the, right here. O--What?

Everything Guitar Project : The Everything Guide to Guitar Chords : A

This is a high and funky version, good for alternating with the E chord in my writeup. Strictly this is an inversion (or slash chord), A/C#.

-12- 
-10- 
--9- 
-11- 
--X- 
--X- 

Notes, from the bottom up, are C#, E, A, E. Best played with a bar across the top four strings at the 9th fret.

Series of Single Lens Reflex Canon cameras beginning with the AE-1 released in 1976 by Canon Inc. The 'A' portion of the name stood for "Automatic" which was a selling feature of this product line. The AE-1 was the first Canon SLR camera with "Automatic Exposure" setting. In the case of the AE-1, this was shutter priority. The A-1, released in 1978, allowed for aperture priority as well.

Also the name of a 1980 Jethro Tull album. The style had changed from rennaisance to sci-fi, and there was a much more computerised sound to the music, accented by Moog synthesizers. Also, their bass player, John Glascock had died in 1979.


In 2003 a super deluxe special DVD/CD 2-pack reissue was heralded by Tull fans. This package contained the DVD of "Slipstream", a concert/"video" show containing both live performances of Tull songs, and music videos for a few songs.

Tracklisting: 1. Crossfire
2. Fylingdale Flyer
3. Working John, Working Joe
4. Black Sunday
5. Protect and Survive
6. Batteries not Included
7. Uniform
8. 4WD -- Low Ratio
9. The Pine Marten's Jig
10. And Further On

Furthermore, the original issue CD is out of print. It sounded like shit anyway.

Letter stiched to Hester Prynne's clothing in The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne, as punishment for having a child out of wedlock in a Puritan community. The 'A,' which stood for Adultery, was a beautiful scarlet color, and bordered in gold. As time passed, and Hester learned to live with the symbol, the 'A' came to stand for Able, being that she was a competent, hard-working member of society.

From The Demon's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce:

A.

The first letter in every properly constructed alphabet. It is the first natural utterance of the human vocal organs, and is variously sounded, according to the pleasure and convenience of the speaker. In logic, A asserts and B denies. Assertions being proverbially untrue, the presumption would be in favor of B’s innocence were it not that denials are notoriously false. In grammar, A is called the indefinite article, probably because, denoting a definite number, it is so obviously a numeral adjective.



NOTE: The Demon's Dictionary was published by Bierce in the December 11, 1875 edition of the San Francisco News Letter. The Demon’s Dictionary was later incorporated into The Devil’s Dictionary in 1967 by Ernest J. Hopkins, thus creating The Enlarged Devil’s Dictionary, which, naturally, remains copyrighted.

One of the most useful HTML tags, a allows you to create an anchor between or within one or more documents. An anchor is typically some text or an image that marks the boundaries of a hypertext link (a.k.a., hyperlink). Clicking the link will take you from one document/resource to another. While the concept is simple, this is the driving force of the World Wide Web.

See also: area, map, link, hard link, pipe link, soft link

Attributes

To be of any use, the anchor tag must define either the "href" or "name" HTML attributes -- however, there are no required attributes. If either of these values is not defined at design time, they are usually set through a client side or server side script at runtime. Below are all the valid attributes for the a tag based on the W3C HTML 4.01 specification:

Usage

There are several methods for using the a tag, but all of them involve the placement of opening and closing HTML tags around some text, an image, or some other object. Here are some examples:

Standard Text Link - the following will link the words "Blow your mind" to the everything2.com web site

<a href="http://www.everything2.com">Blow your mind</a>

Standard Text Link with Title - the following will link the words "Joe Blow" to the Bazooka gum web site

<a href="http://www.topps.com/Confectionery/Bazooka" title="Blow some bubbles">Joe Blow</a>

Inner-Document Anchor - the following will specify the words "Jump down to here" as the location to go to for an internal link

<a name="inner-document-anchor">Jump down to here</a>

Linking to an Inner-Document Anchor - the following would take you directly to the inner-document anchor specified above using the URL fragment (#)

<a href="#inner-document-anchor">Jump down there</a>

Standard Image Link - the following will create a link from an image instead of linking text (this example links the E2 Jukka logo to the E2 homepage)

<a href="http://www.everything2.com"><img src="http://images.everything2.com/img/e2_others_01.gif" alt="Everything2 logo"></a>

Email Address - the following will link the words "Email nate" and would typically cause your default email client to open and place nate's email address in the "To" field

<a href="mailto:nate@oostendorp.net">Email nate</a>

Everything2 Support?

Technically, E2 does not support the anchor tag. However, by using hard links and pipe links, you can get similar results. By using these unique features of Everything2, you will create links similar to the "Standard Text Link with Title" under the Usage section above. When creating a pipe link, the hyperlink text will show the words you are linking, and the title attribute will contain the title of the node you are actually linking to. Hard links display the same text as the link and the title. If you want to use real anchor tags, turn on and use your Notelet Nodelet.

Common Browser Implementations*

With the default settings, nearly all visual user agents (web browsers) display hyperlinks as underlined blue text. If it is an image anchor, it will usually display a blue border around the linked image. Obviously these settings can be overridden with additional HTML tags, cascading style sheets, and various scripting languages.

Previous HTML Tag: !doctype
Next HTML Tag: abbr
See Also: HTML tags and HTML attributes


* If you know of any browsers that implement a link differently by default, please contact me so that I can add this information.

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See also: @, ª, À, à, Á, á, Â, â, Ã, ã, Ä, ä, Å, å, Α, α, , Æ, æ, &, , Ā, ā, Ă, ă, Ą, ą, Ǎ, ǎ, Ǻ, ǻ, Ǽ, ǽ, Ά, ά, А, Д, а, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

'A' or 'a' is:

Values and Representations of "A" and "a"

On March 20, 1995, amidst the morning rush hour of the busiest underground commuter system in the world, ten men carrying small bags and umbrellas boarded trains across Tokyo. Suddenly, they dropped the bags, stabbed them multiple times with their umbrellas, and jumped off the trains in flight. Within minutes, passengers began to suffer nose bleeds, vomiting, nausea, convulsions, and shortness of breath. As trains continued to stop at each station, victims staggered out gasping for air, crumpling at the foot of stairwells before they could even escape the underground. Witnesses reported a scene reminiscent of a battlefield, with the injured collapsing atop one another as they succumbed to the lethal effects of sarin gas. As the most deadly terrorist incident of post-war Japan came to a close, more than six thousand injured individuals swelled Tokyo hospitals. Twelve lay dead.

A, Tatsuya Mori's documentary of the religious group Aum Shinrikyo, whose top figures were behind the Tokyo sarin gas attack in 1995, relegates this incident to the background in favor of examining the daily lives of members who were left behind to continue their devotions. His frank and honest camerawork chronicles both Aum's internal dynamics in the wake of the terrorist attack and their outward responses to belligerent media figures and hostile neighbors. In the process, his film raises questions about the state of the modern Japanese society from which Aum arose and which endeavors to suppress it. Rife with contradictions, the behavior of the cult members and of those they encounter reveals a tendency among all parties to avoid responsibility for their actions, exerting pressure or shirking blame from beneath a fragile facade of consensus. As the documentary closes, it becomes apparent that the Japanese, whether within or without Aum Shinrikyo, find it profoundly difficult to openly discuss or debate the implications of the sarin gas terrorist attack.

Tracking the experiences of Aum's soft-spoken and seemingly overwhelmed public representative Hiroshi Araki, Mori uncovers numerous examples of Aum members' inability to accept the responsibility of their group for the suffering of sarin attack victims. A key point of contention throughout the film emerges in Aum's refusal to apologize for the attack, an act of submission with great significance in Japanese society. Yet rather than making any direct refusal, Aum members tip-toe around the subject with incredible timidity, even fleeing press conferences to escape the pressure of apology.

When figures on the street challenge Araki, the individual in the organization who should perhaps be most prepared to answer such questions, he cannot provide an explanation for the lack of apology. Instead, under the barrage of accusations he seems to visibly wilt. Pointedly asked by Mori from multiple different angles about the attack and what it implies about his esteem for Aum's leading figures, Araki repeatedly falls silent, trailing off with a “Well...” or “That is...” and letting his eyes drift away from the camera. The lack of apology paired with subtle evidence of members' distress with their leaders' actions suggests that they are unable to undergo the self-examination that would either open them to making an apology, or give them the determination to actively refuse doing so.

Not only Aum members, however, find it difficult to reflect critically about their behavior in the wake of the attack. Outside figures interacting with Aum, frequently belligerent, exhibit likewise a disturbing tendency to avoid taking responsibility for their hostility. The neighborhood figures demanding an apology from Aum exert all manner of pressure against Araki, urging him to leave the cult, get a job, get a wife, and become a normal 'upstanding member of society' indistinguishable from those around him. Their criticisms frequently turn personal and sometimes particularly vicious, especially when they speak about Aum through media interviews or across posterboards without having to directly face cult members, but they deliver the hostile words with stubbornly fixed smiles and language affirming shared consensus, as though discussing a matter of no personal relevance to either party.

An especially vivid example of this behavior emerges during a confrontation with a plain-clothes policeman just outside one of Aum's communal homes, as the man stands with his arms crossed and his body blocking a member's path while other officers encircle the two to prevent the other members from coming to aid. He will not physically restrain the cult member, nor will he issue a warrant or give a reason for questioning, but instead he repeatedly demands the man's name, chanting like a schoolchild over the man's protests hanashitekudasai hanashitekudasai hanashitekudasai, “tell me please tell me please tell me please.” The Japanese surrounding Aum clearly fear and hate the cult's presence, but they show a stunning lack of ability to recognize and acknowledge their own hostility. Instead, they express it through vicious, almost violent passive-aggressive behavior.

With both sides clearly and deeply affected by the vicious attack of that morning on March 20, 1995, it is distressing that neither can enter into a process of understanding or reconciliation with their own responses to the incident, much less recognize the responses of the opposite party. Mori's documentary depicts a social mechanism for maintaining consensus gone into overdrive, ruthlessly oppressing emotional or critical reactions to a clearly devastating event. The Japanese society of A, in its desperate attempts to maintain an image of placidity, seems destined to only further stir the rapids coursing just beneath the surface tension.

A (named a in the English, and most commonly Á in other languages).

The first letter of the English and of many other alphabets. The capital A of the alphabets of Middle and Western Europe, as also the small letter (a), besides the forms in Italic, black letter, etc., are all descended from the old Latin A, which was borrowed from the Greek Alpha, of the same form; and this was made from the first letter (Aleph, and itself from the Egyptian origin. The Aleph was a consonant letter, with a guttural breath sound that was not an element of Greek articulation; and the Greeks took it to represent their vowel Alpha with the Á sound, the Phenician alphabet having no vowel symbols.

This letter, in English, is used for several different vowel sounds. See Guide to pronunciation, §§ 43-74. The regular long a, as in fate, etc., is a comparatively modern sound, and has taken the place of what, till about the early part of the 17th century, was a sound of the quality of Á (as in far).

2. Mus.

The name of the sixth tone in the model major scale (that in C), or the first tone of the minor scale, which is named after it the scale in A minor. The second string of the violin is tuned to the A in the treble staff. -- A sharp (A#) is the name of a musical tone intermediate between A and B. -- A flat (Ab) is the name of a tone intermediate between A and G.

A per se (L. per se by itself), one preeminent; a nonesuch. [Obs.]

O fair Creseide, the flower and A per se

Of Troy and Greece. Chaucer.

 

© Webster 1913.


A (# emph. #).

1. [Shortened form of an. AS. an one. See One.]

An adjective, commonly called the indefinite article, and signifying one or any, but less emphatically.

"At a birth"; "In a word"; "At a blow". Shak. It is placed before nouns of the singular number denoting an individual object, or a quality individualized, before collective nouns, and also before plural nouns when the adjective few or the phrase great many or good many is interposed; as, a dog, a house, a man; a color; a sweetness; a hundred, a fleet, a regiment; a few persons, a great many days. It is used for an, for the sake of euphony, before words beginning with a consonant sound [for exception of certain words beginning with h, see An]; as, a table, a woman, a year, a unit, a eulogy, a ewe, a oneness, such a one, etc. Formally an was used both before vowels and consonants.

2. [Originally the preposition a (an, on).]

In each; to or for each; as, "twenty leagues a day", "a hundred pounds a year", "a dollar a yard", etc.

 

© Webster 1913.


A (#), prep. [Abbreviated form of an (AS. on). See On.]

1.

In; on; at; by.

[Obs.] "A God's name." "Torn a pieces." "Stand a tiptoe." "A Sundays" Shak. "Wit that men have now a days." Chaucer. "Set them a work." Robynson (More's Utopia)

2.

In process of; in the act of; into; to; -- used with verbal substantives in -ing which begin with a consonant. This is a shortened form of the preposition an (which was used before the vowel sound); as in a hunting, a building, a begging. "Jacob, when he was a dying" Heb. xi. 21. "We'll a birding together." " It was a doing." Shak. "He burst out a laughing." Macaulay. The hyphen may be used to connect a with the verbal substantive (as, a-hunting, a-building) or the words may be written separately. This form of expression is now for the most part obsolete, the a being omitted and the verbal substantive treated as a participle.

 

© Webster 1913.


A. [From AS. of off, from. See Of.]

Of.

[Obs.] "The name of John a Gaunt." "What time a day is it ?" Shak. "It's six a clock." B. Jonson.

 

© Webster 1913.


A.

A barbarous corruption of have, of he, and sometimes of it and of they.

"So would I a done" "A brushes his hat."

Shak.

 

© Webster 1913.


A.

An expletive, void of sense, to fill up the meter

A merry heart goes all the day, Your sad tires in a mile-a. Shak.

 

© Webster 1913.

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