Marble (toy)

A marble is a small spherical toy usually made from glass, clay, steel, plastic or agate. These balls vary in size. Most commonly, they are about 1/2 inch to 1 inch (1.3 to 2.54 cm) in diameter, but they may range from less than 1/30 inch (0.111 cm) to over 3 inches (7.75 cm), while some art glass marbles for display purposes are over 12 inches (30 cm) wide. Marbles can be used for a variety of games called marbles. They are often collected, both for nostalgia and for their aesthetic colors. In the North of England the objects and the game are called "taws", with larger taws being called bottle washers after the use of a marble in Codd-neck bottles.

History

Various balls of stone were found on excavation near Mohenjo-daro. Marbles are also often mentioned in Roman literature, like Ovid's poem Nux about nuts playing and there are many examples of marbles from Chaldeans of Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. They were commonly made of clay, stone or glass.

Marbles were first manufactured in Germany in the 1800s. The game has become popular throughout the US and other countries.

Toy

A toy is an item that can be used for play. Toys are generally played with by children and pets. Playing with toys is an enjoyable means of training young children for life in society. Different materials are used to make toys enjoyable to all ages. Many items are designed to serve as toys, but goods produced for other purposes can also be used. For instance, a small child may pick up a household item and "fly" it through the air as to pretend that it is an airplane. Another consideration is interactive digital entertainment. Some toys are produced primarily as collector's items and are intended for display only.

The origin of toys is prehistoric; dolls representing infants, animals, and soldiers, as well as representations of tools used by adults are readily found at archaeological sites. The origin of the word "toy" is unknown, but it is believed that it was first used in the 14th century. Toys are mainly made for children.

Playing with toys is important when it comes to growing up and learning about the world around us. Younger children use toys to discover their identity, help their bodies grow strong, learn cause and effect, explore relationships, and practice skills they will need as adults. Adults use toys to form and strengthen social bonds, teach, remember and reinforce lessons from their youth, discover their identity, exercise their minds and bodies, explore relationships, practice skills, and decorate their living spaces.

Toy dog

Toy dog traditionally refers to a very small dog or a grouping of small and very small breeds of dog. A toy dog may be of any of various dog types. Types of dogs referred to as toy dogs may include Spaniels, Pinschers and Terriers that have been bred down in size. Not all toy dogs are lapdogs, although that is an important and ancient type of toy dog. The very smallest toy dogs are sometimes called teacup size, although no major dog registry recognizes that term.

Small dogs

Dogs referred to as toy or teacup dogs, are dogs found in the Toy Group of breed registries, may be of the very ancient lapdog type, or they may be small versions of hunting dogs or working dogs, bred down in size for a particular kind of work or to create a pet of convenient size. In the past, very small dogs not used for hunting were kept as symbols of affluence, as watchdogs, and for the health function of attracting fleas away from their owners.

Breeds

Most major dog clubs in the English-speaking world have a toy group, under one exact name or another, in which they place breeds of dog that the kennel club categorises as toy, based on size and tradition. The Kennel Club (UK), the Canadian Kennel Club, the American Kennel Club, the Australian National Kennel Council, and the New Zealand Kennel Club all have a group named "Toy", all though they may not all categorise the same breeds in this category. The United States has a second major kennel club, the United Kennel Club (UKC, originally formed for hunting and working breeds, though general today), and it does not recognize such a group; instead, small dogs are placed with larger dogs of their type, or into a UKC's "Companion Dog" group.As of September 2008, the American Kennel Club began debating whether or not to change the name of their "Toy" group to "Companion", in order to emphasise that dogs are not playthings, but the name change was resisted by traditionalists.

Toy (Toy album)

TOY is the 2012 eponymous debut album by London-based band TOY.

The album was recorded in early 2012, by music producer Dan Carey at his South London studio. Their album artwork is by artist Leif Podhajsky

Tracklisting

References

Marble, Minnesota

Marble is a city in Itasca County, Minnesota, United States. It is part of the chain of small mining towns known as the Iron Range. The population was 701 at the 2010 census.

U.S. Highway 169 serves as a main route in the community.

Geography

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 4.45 square miles (11.53 km²), of which 4.35 square miles (11.27 km²) is land and 0.10 square miles (0.26 km²) is water.

Demographics

2010 census

As of the census of 2010, there were 701 people, 281 households, and 174 families residing in the city. The population density was 161.1 inhabitants per square mile (62.2/km²). There were 315 housing units at an average density of 72.4 per square mile (28.0/km²). The racial makeup of the city was 93.4% White, 0.6% African American, 3.1% Native American, 0.4% Asian, and 2.4% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 0.3% of the population.

There were 281 households of which 32.7% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 41.6% were married couples living together, 13.9% had a female householder with no husband present, 6.4% had a male householder with no wife present, and 38.1% were non-families. 31.0% of all households were made up of individuals and 9.6% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.47 and the average family size was 3.04.

Marble (software)

Marble is a virtual globe application which allows the user to choose among the Earth, the Moon, Venus, Mars and other planets to display as a 3-D model. It is free software under the terms of the GNU LGPL, developed by KDE for use on personal computers and smart phones. It is written in C++ and uses Qt 4 or 5.

Marble is intended to be very flexible; beyond its cross-platform design, the core components can easily be integrated into other programs. It is designed to run without the need for hardware acceleration, but it can be extended to use OpenGL. An important user-experience objective being that the application start fairly quickly, it ships with a minimal but useful off-line dataset (5–10MB).

Contributors have added support for on-line mapping sources such as OpenStreetMap and the ability to interpret KML files. Marble also provides route planning capabilities. A navigation mode called MarbleToGo was developed as part of Google Summer of Code 2010. It was later partially rewritten and renamed to Marble Touch.

Marble (disambiguation)

Marble is a type of rock resulting from the metamorphism of limestone.

Marble or Marbles may also refer to:

People

Places

In the United States

Music

Other