Darwin
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Darwin,
city (2016 pop. 78,804), capital of the Northern Territory, N Australia, on Port Darwin, an inlet of the Timor Sea. Remotely situated on the sparsely settled north coast, Darwin had no rail connection with any of the major Australian cities until 2003, when the line to Adelaide was completed. Australian military personnel and their dependents make up a large part of the population. Darwin is multicultural, with large Chinese and aboriginal populations. In World War II the city was heavily bombed by the Japanese; later a military airdrome, fuel-oil installations, and a wharf were built, and Darwin became a key Allied base. Originally called Palmerston, the town was renamed (1911) for Charles DarwinDarwin, Charles Robert,1809–82, English naturalist, b. Shrewsbury; grandson of Erasmus Darwin and of Josiah Wedgwood. He firmly established the theory of organic evolution known as Darwinism.
..... Click the link for more information. because its site had been a stop (1839) during a voyage of Darwin's ship, the Beagle. The city was almost completely destroyed by a cyclone in Dec., 1974. It was rebuilt and now attracts large numbers of tourists who visit nearby Kakadu National Park.
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Darwin
A ‘cornerstone’ mission of ESA's Horizon 2000 program that aims to contribute to humanity's search for Earthlike planets around nearby stars on which life as we understand it may have evolved or could be supported. It takes the form of a space-based infrared interferometer that will be used to seek out such extrasolar planets and then discover by spectral analysis whether the planets have atmospheres containing carbon dioxide, ozone (showing evidence of photosynthesis), and water. Darwin will consist of seven spacecraft, six of them carrying a 1-meter-class telescope functioning in the near infrared (6–17 μm) and linked in to a nulling interferometer in the centrally placed seventh craft. All the telescopes will be focused on each selected nearby star in turn. If a planet is revolving about the star, any light it reflects will be swamped by light from the star. The separate images the telescopes pick up will be fed to the seventh craft where they will be combined to cancel out the star's light, leaving only that of the planet, if there is one. This ambitious project is planned for launch in or after 2015.Collins Dictionary of Astronomy © Market House Books Ltd, 2006
The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.
Darwin
(Port Darwin), a city in Australia and administrative capital of the Northern Territory. Population, 43,000 (1973, including suburbs). A port on the Timor Sea, Darwin is the terminus of a highway from Adelaide. It is linked by a narrow-gauge railroad with Larrimah and has an international airport. Darwin is the commercial and distribution center of northern Australia. It has a meat-canning plant and sawmills. The city was badly damaged by the cyclone “Tracy” in December 1974.
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
darwin
[′där·wən] (evolution)
A unit of evolutionary rate of change; if some dimension of a part of an animal or plant, or of the whole animal or plant, changes from lo to lt over a time of t years according to the formula lt = lo exp (Et /106), its evolutionary rate of change is equal to E darwins.
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Darwin
11. Charles (Robert). 1809--82, English naturalist who formulated the theory of evolution by natural selection, expounded in On the Origin of Species (1859) and applied to man in The Descent of Man (1871)
2. his grandfather, Erasmus. 1731--1802, English physician and poet; author of Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life (1794--96), anticipating Lamarck's views on evolution
3. Sir George Howard, son of Charles Darwin. 1845--1912, English astronomer and mathematician noted for his work on tidal friction
Darwin
2 a port in N Australia, capital of the Northern Territory: destroyed by a cyclone in 1974 but rebuilt on the same site. Pop.: 71 347 (2001)
Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005
Darwin
(operating system)An operating system based on the
FreeBSD version of Unix, running on top of a microkernel
(Mach 3.0 with darwin 1.02) that offers advanced networking,
services such as the Apache web server, and support for
both Macintosh and Unix file systems. Darwin was
originally released in March 1999. It currently runs on
PowerPC based Macintosh computers, and, in October 2000, was
being ported to Intel processor-based computers and
compatible systems by the Darwin community.
Darwin
(programming, tool)A general purpose structuring tool of
use in building complex distributed systems from diverse
components and diverse component interaction mechanisms.
Darwin is being developed by the Distributed Software
Engineering Section of the Department of Computing at
Imperial College. It is in essence a declarative binding
language which can be used to define hierarchic compositions
of interconnected components. Distribution is dealt with
orthogonally to system structuring. The language allows the
specification of both static structures and dynamic structures
which evolve during execution. The central abstractions
managed by Darwin are components and services. Bindings are
formed by manipulating references to services.
The operational semantics of Darwin is described in terms of the Pi-calculus, Milner's calculus of mobile processes. The correspondence between the treatment of names in the Pi-calculus and the management of service references in Darwin leads to an elegant and concise Pi-calculus model of Darwin's operational semantics. The model has proved useful in arguing the correctness of Darwin implementations and in designing extensions to Darwin and reasoning about their behaviour.
Distributed Software Engineering Section. Darwin publications.
E-mail: Jeff Magee <jnm@doc.ic.ac.uk>, Naranker Dulay <nd@doc.ic.ac.uk>.
The operational semantics of Darwin is described in terms of the Pi-calculus, Milner's calculus of mobile processes. The correspondence between the treatment of names in the Pi-calculus and the management of service references in Darwin leads to an elegant and concise Pi-calculus model of Darwin's operational semantics. The model has proved useful in arguing the correctness of Darwin implementations and in designing extensions to Darwin and reasoning about their behaviour.
Distributed Software Engineering Section. Darwin publications.
E-mail: Jeff Magee <jnm@doc.ic.ac.uk>, Naranker Dulay <nd@doc.ic.ac.uk>.
Darwin
(3)This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)
Darwin
The open source version of the Mac operating system from Apple, which allows developers to make their own improvements. Darwin is based on the Mach microkernel and various Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) versions of Unix. Although Darwin has been available as source code since 2000, the programming interface (API) source code is not, however, open and free to use. From 2002 to 2006, a community-based OpenDarwin project existed, which was followed by PureDarwin in 2007. See macOS.Copyright © 1981-2019 by The Computer Language Company Inc. All Rights reserved. THIS DEFINITION IS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. All other reproduction is strictly prohibited without permission from the publisher.