The Void (film)

The Void is a 2001 American direct-to-DVD science-fiction thriller film which follows a scientist who has discovered that a man who's been attempting to solve an energy crisis has inadvertently created a black hole which, unless stopped, will swallow the world.

The film features Amanda Tapping as Prof. Eva Soderstrom, Adrian Paul as Prof. Steven Price, and Malcolm McDowell as Dr. Thomas Abernathy. Principal photography was completed in British Columbia, Canada.

Synopsis

Professor Eva Soderstrom (Tapping) discovers that Dr. Thomas Abernathy (McDowell), the man responsible for starting a scientific experiment which claimed the life of her father some years before, has plans to restart the experiment on a bigger scale. With only 24 hours, Eva must stop the experiment or the Earth will be destroyed.

Cast

The Void (philosophy)

The Void is the philosophical concept of nothingness manifested. The notion of The Void is closely affiliated, though not exclusive, to several realms of metaphysics, including agnosticism, existentialism, monism, and nihilism. The Void is also prevalent in numerous facets of psychology, notably logotherapy.

The manifestation of nothingness is closely associated with the contemplation of emptiness, and with human attempts to identify and personify it. As such, the concept of The Void, and ideas similar to it, have a significant and historically evolving presence in artistic and creative expression, as well as in academic, scientific and philosophical debate surrounding the nature of the human condition.

Perhaps one of the central paradoxes of all concepts of the Void is that it is not possible to speak about emptiness using language. This is akin to Laozi's idea in the Tao Te Ching that the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao, or Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" in the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus. Perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of the human condition is, however, our perennial desire to discuss something (or rather, lack of something) that remains ultimately elusive and impossible to entirely encapsulate through the compartmentalising process implicit in words. Eckhart Tolle has alluded to this problem of language by suggesting that he uses words as signposts to point towards the 'something' (or 'nothing') that cannot be described by those words themselves.

List of Doctor Who planets

This is a list of planets, fictional or otherwise, that are mentioned in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who and its spinoff literature, audio plays, television series and comics.

A

A&W (Canada)

A&W Food Services of Canada, Inc. is a Canadian fast food restaurant chain.

A&W Canada was part of the U.S.-based A&W Restaurants chain, but was sold to Unilever in 1972, and then bought by its management in 1995. It no longer has any corporate connection to A&W operations outside of Canada.

The Canadian operation is owned and operated by the privately held A&W Food Services of Canada Inc., based in North Vancouver, British Columbia. In December 2013, A&W was Canada's second-largest Quick Service Restaurant burger chain with 800 outlets after McDonald's 1,400 outlets.

History

The first Canadian A&W restaurant opened in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1956. The Canadian restaurants were part of the American chain until 1972 when they were sold to Unilever.

In 1975, facing competition from the growing Canadian operations of McDonald's, the company launched what was to have been a temporary advertising campaign starring an orange-clad mascot, The Great Root Bear. The bear and the tuba jingle that accompanied him became a long-running campaign (the tune, entitled "Ba-Dum, Ba-Dum", was released as a single by Attic Records, credited to "Major Ursus", a play on Ursa Major or "great bear"). The mascot was so successful that he was eventually adopted as the mascot by the American A&W chain as well. The famous tuba jingle was played by famed Vancouver jazz, classical and session trombonist Sharman King. King also did the ads for the "Book Warehouse" chain of discount book stores, which he owned.

A. W.

The anonymous poet A.W. is responsible for the long poem, "Complaint" printed in A Poetical Rapsody issued by two brothers, Francis and Walter Davison, in 1602. In the Rapsody the poem is ascribed to Francis Davison, but in Davison’s own manuscript, to “A. W.”. Not only the eight rhyme-endings, but the actual words that compose them, are the same in each of eight stanzas, a virtuoso display.

The mysterious "A.W." has never been identified but the songs of "A.W." found places in many anthologies and song-books of the early seventeenth century.

References

A3W reactor

The A3W reactor is a naval reactor used by the United States Navy to provide electricity generation and propulsion on warships. Like all operational U.S. naval reactors it was a pressurized water reactor (PWR) design. The A3W designation stands for:

The reactor was intended for use aboard USS John F. Kennedy. This four-reactor design was intended to reduce the cost involved in the construction and operation, as compared with the Enterprise and its eight nuclear reactors.

Early in the construction, the United States Secretary of the Navy had the plans changed to save money, and fossil fuel boilers were installed on the Kennedy. Because the plans for the ship did not include a funnel, the funnel on the Kennedy protrudes out from the ship at an angle.

The return to nuclear power for carriers came with the Nimitz class's A4W reactor's two reactor per ship design. While the two reactor configuration, with each core providing a much greater thermal output, is relatively less expensive than earlier designs, the power plant still represents about half the total cost of the ship.