National (ナショナル, Nashonaru) is a defunct brand used by Panasonic Corporation (formerly Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd.) to sell home appliances, personal appliances, and industrial appliances. Neither National Semiconductor nor National Car Rental are related to Panasonic or the "National" brand.

History

Before present-day Panasonic produced appliances under the name, the National brand was first used by Konosuke Matsushita's electric firm to sell his battery-powered bicycle lamps, hoping that they would be a product used by all of Japan, hence the name "National". It was arguably the first well-known brand of Japanese electronics.

National was formerly the premier brand on most Matsushita products, including audio and video and was often combined as National Panasonic after the worldwide success of the Panasonic name.

After 1980 in Europe, and 1988 in Australia and New Zealand, Matsushita ceased the usage of "National", and sold audiovisual products exclusively under the Panasonic and Technics nameplates. Perhaps due to trademark issues, Matsushita never officially used the National name in the United States, except for early imported products, but rice cookers bearing the National name, imported from Japan, could be found at many ethnic Asian markets.

A Cymanfa Ganu (Welsh pronunciation: [kəˈmanva ˈɡanɨ], Singing Festival), is a Welsh festival of sacred hymns, sung with four part harmony by a congregation, usually under the direction of a choral director.

In Wales, more than a thousand Cymanfa Ganu are held each year. These take place in virtually every village and town in Wales, except for parts of Monmouthshire and south east Wales. Many villages and towns have more than one Cymanfa Ganu a year, as often many separate chapels in towns and villages hold their own. Some large annual ones occur event in some chapels and take place at festivals such as the National Eisteddfod of Wales and the Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod. Some are occasionally held in theatres and concert halls. Cymanfa Ganus are held across the world - wherever people of Welsh heritage live, significantly in Patagonia ( Argentina) e.g. Trelew, Gaiman, where there were significant Welsh settlements from the 19th Century. In some of these areas Welsh is still spoken as a main language in daily use, usually together with Spanish. Outside Wales, in the UK there are Cymanfa Ganu in London, parts of the West Midlands and other areas where there are still chapels using the medium of Welsh .

In the United Kingdom, National Government is an abstract concept referring to a coalition of some or all major political parties. In a historical sense it usually refers primarily to the governments of Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain which held office from 1931 until 1940.

The all-party coalitions of Herbert Henry Asquith and David Lloyd George in the First World War and of Winston Churchill in the Second World War were sometimes referred to as National Governments at the time, but are now more commonly called Coalition Governments. The term "National Government" was chosen to dissociate itself from negative connotations of the earlier Coalitions. Churchill's brief 1945 "Caretaker Government" also called itself a National Government and in terms of party composition was very similar to the 1931–1940 entity.

The crisis of 1931

The Wall Street Crash heralded the global Great Depression and Britain was hit, although not as badly as most countries. The government was trying to achieve several different, contradictory objectives: trying to maintain Britain's economic position by maintaining the pound on the gold standard, balancing the budget, and providing assistance and relief to tackle unemployment. The gold standard meant that British prices were higher than its competitors, so the all-important export industries did poorly.

In geometry, an envelope of a family of curves in the plane is a curve that is tangent to each member of the family at some point. Classically, a point on the envelope can be thought of as the intersection of two "adjacent" curves, meaning the limit of intersections of nearby curves. This idea can be generalized to an envelope of surfaces in space, and so on to higher dimensions.

Envelope of a family of curves

Let each curve C_t in the family be given as the solution of an equation f_t(x, y)=0 (see implicit curve), where t is a parameter. Write F(t, x, y)=f_t(x, y) and assume F is differentiable.

The envelope of the family C_t is then defined as the set of points for which

for some value of t, where is the partial derivative of F with respect to t.

Note that if t and u, t≠u are two values of the parameter then the intersection of the curves C_t and C_u is given by

or equivalently

Letting u→t gives the definition above.

An important special case is when F(t, x, y) is a polynomial in t. This includes, by clearing denominators, the case where F(t, x, y) is a rational function in t. In this case, the definition amounts to t being a double root of F(t, x, y), so the equation of the envelope can be found by setting the discriminant of F to 0.

An aerostat (From Greek ἀήρ aer (air) + στατός statos (standing) through French) is a lighter than air craft (the average density of the craft is lower than the density of atmospheric air) that gains its lift through the use of a buoyant gas. Aerostats include unpowered balloons and powered airships. A balloon may be free-flying or tethered. An aerostat's main component is one or more gasbags, a lightweight skin containing a lifting gas to provide buoyancy, to which other components such as a gondola containing equipment or people are attached. Especially with airships, the gasbags are often protected by an outer envelope. One of the most recent deployments of an aerostat was seen at the opening ceremony of the nineteenth 2010 Commonwealth Games, held in Delhi, India. The aerostat used in the ceremony was the largest in the world.

Aerostats are so named because they use aerostatic lift which is a buoyant force that does not require movement through the surrounding air mass. This contrasts with the heavy aerodynes that primarily use aerodynamic lift which requires the movement of a wing surface through the surrounding air mass. The term has also been used in a narrower sense, to refer to the statically tethered balloon in contrast to the free-flying airship. This article uses the term in its broader sense.

In mechanical engineering, an envelope is a solid representing all positions which may be occupied by an object during its normal range of motion.

Another (jargon) word for this is a "flop".

Wheel envelope

In automobile design, a wheel envelope may be used to model all positions a wheel and tire combo may be expected to occupy during driving. This will take into account the maximum jounce and rebound allowed by the suspension system and the maximum turn and tilt allowed by the steering mechanism. Minimum and maximum tire inflation pressures and wear conditions may also be considered when generating the envelope.

This envelope is then compared with the wheel housing and other components in the area to perform an interference/collision analysis. The results of this analysis tell the engineers whether that wheel/tire combo will strike the housing and components under normal driving conditions. If so, either a redesign is in order, or that wheel/tire combo will not be recommended.