Coryate's countrymen, however, thought his zeal for eating with a fork was at best a foreign affectation and at worst an affront to God: he was mocked on the stage for his effete reluctance to touch his food with his hands, and he was castigated in churches for putting a devilish fork between himself and the food that his Lord so graciously gave him.
Perhaps, however, much of this uproar was merely sour grapes, since it was evident that Coryate, unlike everyone else in England, was now able to eat a meal without smearing it all over his hands, clothes, and table cloth. In time, therefore, reason prevailed and the dinner fork did catch on in England. In origin, the word fork derives from the Latin furca, meaning a two-pronged fork; the diminutive of furca - furcula, meaning little fork - was adopted by ornithologists as being the anotomical name for what everyone else calls a wishbone.
Source: Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities.
1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Bc5 4. Ng5 d6? 5. Nxf7
This is a knight fork. The knight simultaneously attacks both the queen and the rook. When black moves one, white can still capture the other. However, this does not mean more powerful threats cannot be made. Let's see what happens if white gets greedy.
5. .. Qf6 6. Nxh8 Qxf7#
Their motto being SHOW ME THE BITS!.
Also, fork is a posix function call that creates a child process that differs from the parent process only in its PID and PPID, and in the fact that resource utilizations are set to 0. File locks and pending signals are not inherited.
When I was taking Operating Systems at Boston College, we were told we were not allowed to run our homeworks involving fork on the main server--we had to run them on the local workstations (people had an uncanny ability to stick their fork in an infinite loop). We furthered this restriction by telling people there was an Adult corner of the computer lab--and only there were you able to fork without regard for other people.
To use a nondestructive form of uploading to create an infomorph version of youself while still keeping the old biological version.
-Back to the Transhumanist Terminology metanode
(f g h) v is identical to (f v) g (h v)
For example:
The concept of a fork also generalizes to dyadic verbs in a train:
x (f g h) v is identical to (x f v) g (x h v)
Again, an example:
The most important thing to note about the concept of a fork is that it allows extended chaining of verbs in a meaningful way, because a fork can also be a component of a fork (or a hook, which, as noted above, is just a special case of a fork).
For example, to find the distance of each element from the mean (an important step in finding the variance and standard deviation) we just do it:
(- +/ % #) v is (] - (+/ % #)) v is (] - (+/ % #)) v is v - ((+/ % #) v) is v - ((+/v) % (#v)) is the pairwise subtraction of elements in v with their mean.
More information on extended chaining of J verbs can be found at train.
fork
In the open-source community, a fork is what occurs when two (or more) versions of a software package's source code are being developed in parallel which once shared a common code base, and these multiple versions of the source code have irreconcilable differences between them. This should not be confused with a development branch, which may later be folded back into the original source code base. Nor should it be confused with what happens when a new distribution of Linux or some other distribution is created, because that largely assembles pieces than can and will be used in other distributions without conflict.
Forking is uncommon; in fact, it is so uncommon that individual instances loom large in hacker folklore. Notable in this class were the http://www.xemacs.org/About/XEmacsVsGNUemacs.html, the GCC/EGCS fork (later healed by a merger) and the forks among the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD operating systems.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.
With regard to bicycles, the fork is the device which connects the handlebars to the front wheel. For such a simple device, forks come in many, many different forms and are integral to the handling and overall 'feel' of the bike.
Touring bikes and consumer gear will often have a bent fork, sloping away from the rider. This has the effect of dampening road vibration by allowing a fair amount of flex up and down that is not directly transferred to the rider's hands.
Racing bikes, especially those designed for sprinting, will often have straighter or straight forks, this allows the most direct transfer of power and the best handling, although the rider will feel each and every bump in the road below him.
The material of the fork is also important, with steel and carbon fibre both being popular for their 'comfort' as well as good power transfer. Steel is less popular as it is much heavier and isn't as stiff as the alternatives. Aluminium is popular where performance is more important then comfort, as it is fairly stiff, and where carbon fibre may be too expensive.
Fork (?), n. [AS. forc, fr. L. furca. Cf. Fourch, Furcate.]
1.
An instrument consisting consisting of a handle with a shank terminating in two or more prongs or tines, which are usually of metal, parallel and slightly curved; -- used from piercing, holding, taking up, or pitching anything.
2.
Anything furcate or like of a fork in shape, or furcate at the extremity; as, a tuning fork.
3.
One of the parts into which anything is furcated or divided; a prong; a branch of a stream, a road, etc.; a barbed point, as of an arrow.
Let it fall . . . though the fork invade The region of my heart. Shak.
A thunderbolt with three forks. Addison.
4.
The place where a division or a union occurs; the angle or opening between two branches or limbs; as, the fork of a river, a tree, or a road.
5.
The gibbet.
Bp. Butler.
Fork beam Shipbuilding, a half beam to support a deck, where hatchways occur. -- Fork chuck Wood Turning, a lathe center having two prongs for driving the work. -- Fork head. (a) The barbed head of an arrow. (b) The forked end of a rod which forms part of a knuckle joint. -- In fork. Mining A mine is said to be in fork, or an engine to "have the water in fork," when all the water is drawn out of the mine. Ure. -- The forks of a river ∨ a road, the branches into which it divides, or which come together to form it; the place where separation or union takes place.
© Webster 1913.
Fork, v. i. [imp. & p. p. Forked (?); p. pr. & vb. n. Forking.]
To shoot into blades, as corn.
The corn beginneth to fork. Mortimer. 1 2. To divide into two or more branches; as, a road, a tree, or a stream forks. © Webster 1913. Fork, v. t. To raise, or pitch with a fork, as hay; to dig or turn over with a fork, as the soil. Forking the sheaves on the high-laden cart. Prof. Wilson. To fork over ∨ out, to hand or pay over, as money. [Slang] G. Eliot.
To divide into two or more branches; as, a road, a tree, or a stream forks.
Fork, v. t.
To raise, or pitch with a fork, as hay; to dig or turn over with a fork, as the soil.
Forking the sheaves on the high-laden cart. Prof. Wilson.
To fork over ∨ out, to hand or pay over, as money. [Slang]
G. Eliot.
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