For a 2-dim array, axis 0 is the y-axis and 1 is the x-axis

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>>> b = numpy.random.random(9)
>>> b.resize(3,3)
>>> b
array([[ 0.87004074,  0.96632953,  0.23284793],
       [ 0.51685093,  0.28653961,  0.10544557],
       [ 0.06448447,  0.62316361,  0.93653307]])
>>> numpy.sum(b, axis=0)
array([ 1.45137614,  1.87603274,  1.27482656])
>>> numpy.sum(b, axis=1)
array([ 2.06921819,  0.90883611,  1.62418114])

From ‘The Grand Chessboard’ (1997) by Zbigniew Brzezinski,

The overseas British Empuire was initially acquired through a combination of exploration, trade, and conquest. But much like its Roman and Chinese predecessors or its French and Spanish rivals, it also derived a great deal of its staying power from the perception of British cultural superiority.

‘Cultural superiority’ as the key to the staying power of an empire is the main theme in the book so far

From ‘The Grand Chessboard’ (1997) by Zbigniew Brzezinski

Even so, the Roman Empire was not unique. The Roman and the Chinese empires emerged almost contemporaneously, though neither was aware of the other.

It is not entirely true. There are mentioning of a big empire in the far west named ‘Great Qin’ (大秦) in ancient official documentation e.g. the Book of Late Han. But the majority of populace probably did not know it.

Reading ‘The Grand Chessboard’ (1997) by Zbigniew Brzezinski and come across this passage on p. 9:

The Chinese, for whom the word “Russia” means “the hungry land,” were even more openly contemptuous.

I am really surprised to see this because the name of Russia is just translated phonetically into Chinese. Each syllable is mapped into a Chinese character which carries a similar sound. There is no special meaning in the final compound words.

But the history of this ‘translation by phonetic’ business does reflect an interesting evolution of the Chinese’s view of the outside world.

Basically, as is the case in most other languages, you can segregate chinese characters into three categories in term of connotations: positive, neutral and derogative.

Up to the end of Qing dynasty, since Han people consider their culture as the most advanced in the entire universe, any race or country outside of the sino-culture sphere is seen as barbaric. The Chinese translators will usually use the set of derogative character to son the phonetic translation of these alien names. The resultant combination usually do not make any sense but you can infer, by the choice of individual characters, it is a name of a barbarian.

More classy combination of characters are usually reserved for names of religious figures of significance.

This practice basically ceased when China became a republic in 1911, I suppose. Nowadays usually only characters of positive or neutral nature will be used in phonetic translation. In rare case literal translation is used. A good recent example is Montenegro. It is literally translated as ‘Black Mountain Republic’ in Chinese.

Quoted from Expert Python Programming by Tarek Ziadé

The Singleton pattern makes sure that a given class has always only one living instance in the application. This can be used, for example, when you want to restrict a resource access to one and only one memory context in the process. For instance, a database connector class can be a Singleton that deals with synchronization and manages its data in memory. It makes the assumption that no other instance is interacting with the database in the meantime. This pattern can simplify a lot the way concurrency is handled in an application. utilities that provide application-wide functions are often declared as Singletons. For instance, in web applications, a class that is in charge of reserving a unique document ID would benefit from the Singleton pattern. There should be one and only one utility doing this job.

Implementing the Singleton pattern is straightforward with the new method: