This is the first in a series of very important answers to very important questions as posed by Google’s query suggestion tool.
what is a...?
What is a database?
A database is a computer program that stores information in a series of tables. Databases are used everywhere, not just by government so that they can lose your personal information. This website uses databases to store information about the posts I have written as well as the comments people make. Search engines use tables to store information about the pages they have indexed, and about the queries people type.
Modern databases are known as relational databases; this is because you can create relationships between tables which make it easier to store lots of information in a compact way.
Tables are made up of a number of fields which can be numbers, strings and dates (among others). It’s usual to have one field that is used to uniquely identify a record (a row in the table) and this is known as the unique key. When tables are related, it is this unqiue key that relates them together.
There are lots of database programs that have been created over the years, but the most commonly used ones are Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and Oracle.
What’s the difference between an Excel Spreadsheet and a database? They certainly look similar: tables with rows (records) and columns (fields), but really that’s where the similarity ends. Proper database programs are far more useful when you have lots of data that needs to be retrieved by another computer program. Spreadsheets are limited also in the amount of information they can store. Proper databases are only limited by disc space.
What is autism?
Perhaps the most famous portrail of a autism was in the film “Rainman” with Dustin Hoffman playing the role of Raymond. In that film, Raymond was an autistic savant, which is basically someone with autism but also with highly unusal aptitude or knowledge for numbers, music, art, design and so on.
Anyway, this doesn’t really answer the question: Wordnet defines autism as “an abnormal absorption with the self; marked by communication disorders and short attention span and inability to treat others as people” As you can imagine, the degree to which someone is absorbed with oneself or has communication issues can vary from person to person.
It’s also possible to have these kinds of symptoms without actually having autism. For example, a child’s language development is not beholden to textbooks, so if a child develops later than expected this doesn’t mean they’ve got autism, there could be all sorts of reasons, including other developmental issues.
How can you detect if someone is autistic or not? Except in extreme cases you’re unlikely to spot it 100%, it’s revealed through symptoms over time. Always seek professional help if you’re concerned.
What is a verb?
I was brought up in a time when the government was experimenting and completely stuffing up any hope for children to get a proper appreciation for language – this was when grammar went out of fashion and replaced with gawd-knows what. In those awful times a verb was explained to me as a “doing word”. Well, thank you very much that helps! So “I eat” hmm, yep that’s a doing word. What about “I am“? Am I actually doing anything? Does that mean that the verb “to be” isn’t really a verb? What about “the destruction of the city”? Isn’t destruction a kind of doing word? Does that make it a verb?
Ok, so what is a verb really? A verb is something that holds a sentence together. It relates things together and tells you how and when they relate. For example: “an apple” and “John” is meaningless. It tells you nothing about the relationship, if any, between the objects. But, as soon as you put a verb in: “John ate an apple.” You now know that in the past John did the act of eating upon the apple, and you also know that the apple didn’t do the action on John. You know this because the verb “to eat” isn’t reciprocal. In the sentence “John chatted to Sam” you can also equally say that “Sam chatted to John.”
There are different sorts of verbs too! The verbs “to eat” and “to chat” are known as lexical verbs. There are two other major classes of verbs: auxiliary and modal verbs. The verbs “be”, “have” and “do” are auxiliary verbs because they “help” other verbs, they are mostly used to express grammatical meaning. Just to confuse matters these verbs can also be lexical verbs 
And then the modal verbs are verbs like “would”, “will”, “should”, “can”, “must” These express the way how factual something is, or has the sense of obligation or permission. They’re a bit of a hangover for English’s germanic roots.
What is a blog?
This is a blog! Essentially, a website that organises its content chronologically like a log. It is also something that tends to be informal. It’s said that it comes from the term: weblog and apparently some chap called “Jorn Barger” came up with the term on his site: www.robotwisdom.com – a site on which he is still blogging away. Quite when weblog became blog I haven’t quite pinned down yet.
What is a prime number?
A number that is divisible by itself and 1. So that is 1,3,5,7,11,13,17 etc According to Wikipedia, the largest prime number to date is: 243,112,609 – 1 (whatever that means )
In the Jodie Foster film “Contact” the aliens sent a message to earth that was encoded in a stream of prime numbers “to get our attention” because maths “is the only universal language”. And I always thought it was English.
