I remember my mother taking my older sister and I to a park by the ocean.

We would jump from the car and run over the dunes and down to the scrag of a beach looking for razor clams and conch pouches.

We would find moon-jellies and toss them back and forth, feeling their sandyspaceslime seep into our fingers.

After a while our mother would call us for lunch and we would rinse our hands in the salty water and run over to the shade where she sat with our sandwiches and Capri-Sun juice boxes.

We would sit, my mother with her back to the trunk of the large tree, and eat, my sister and I telling Mom all about the things we had found and she would listen and be even more excited about our discoveries than we were.

When I had finished my sandwich and wiped the peanut butter from my lips with my arm, I would scramble up the tree behind my mother.

She and my sister would talk of other things, but I was a few feet above them, high off the ground I thought, working my way out the long deep-grooved bark.

I would continue to climb higher until I found a spot where I could see some light through the curling umbrella of gray-green leaves.

Some window through the canopy.

Oaks are hardwood trees in the faminy Fagaceae, the Beech family. Oaks are angiosperms, meaning they have flowers. (although they are small and green) Some oaks are evergreen... for instance california live oaks.. there are also oaks in rain forests and various other areas.. almost all are in the northern hemisphere. Oaks are important parts of many plant communities, and often assist in the survival of other native plants. In some areas, factors such as grazing and fire suppression are repressing oak germination, and research is currently being done to address this problem

The Oak is also a 16-bit DSP i.e. a microprocessor designed for Digital Signal Processing. It was designed by Israeli hardware company DSP Group, and is generally sold as a soft core (a design for an integrated circuit) rather than as a physical chip.

The main features of the Oak DSP are as follows:

  1. 16-bit data and address busses able to access 64 kwords of memory.
  2. 16 x 16 bit multiplier with 32 bit output, able to be shifted one or two bits.
  3. 36-bit accumulators for addition and logic operations.
  4. Efficient multiply-accumulate architecture capable of single-cycle "multiply and accumulate last result" instructions.
  5. Able to access program memory and 2 blocks of data memory (known as x and y) simultaneously on one clock cycle.
  6. Fast register-switching instructions.
  7. Low power consumption.
  8. C compiler based on GCC, with several extensions to use features of the DSP architecture.

DSP Group has produced a number of more powerful chips, such as the Teak and Teak Lite since the Oak, but it is still used by a few companies as a small, low power DSP for mobile applications.

Oak (?), n. [OE. oke, ok, ak, AS. ac; akin to D. eik, G. eiche, OHG. eih, Icel. eik, Sw. ek, Dan. eeg.]

1. Bot.

Any tree or shrub of the genus Quercus. The oaks have alternate leaves, often variously lobed, and staminate flowers in catkins. The fruit is a smooth nut, called an acorn, which is more or less inclosed in a scaly involucre called the cup or cupule. There are now recognized about three hundred species, of which nearly fifty occur in the United States, the rest in Europe, Asia, and the other parts of North America, a very few barely reaching the northern parts of South America and Africa. Many of the oaks form forest trees of grand proportions and live many centuries. The wood is usually hard and tough, and provided with conspicuous medullary rays, forming the silver grain.

2.

The strong wood or timber of the oak.

Among the true oaks in America are: Barren oak, or Black-jack, Q. nigra. -- Basket oak, Q. Michauxii. -- Black oak, Q. tinctoria: -- called also yellow or quercitron oak. -- Bur oak (see under Bur.), Q. macrocarpa; -- called also over-cup or mossy-cup oak. -- Chestnut oak, Q. Prinus and Q. densiflora. -- Chinquapin oak (see under Chinquapin), Q. prinoides. -- Coast live oak, Q. agrifolia, of California; -- also called enceno. -- Live oak (see under Live), Q. virens, the best of all for shipbuilding; also, Q. Chrysolepis, of California. -- Pin oak. Same as Swamp oak. -- Post oak, Q. obtusifolia. -- Red oak, Q. rubra. -- Scarlet oak, Q. coccinea. -- Scrub oak, Q. ilicifolia, Q. undulata, etc. -- Shingle oak, Q. imbricaria. -- Spanish oak, Q. falcata. -- Swamp Spanish oak, or Pin oak, Q. palustris. -- Swamp white oak, Q. bicolor. -- Water oak, Q. aguatica. -- Water white oak, Q. lyrata. -- Willow oak, Q. Phellos.

Among the true oaks in Europe are: Bitter oak, or Turkey oak, Q. Cerris (see Cerris). -- Cork oak, Q. Suber. -- English white oak, Q. Robur. -- Evergreen oak, Holly oak, or Holm oak, Q. Ilex. -- Kermes oak, Q. coccifera. -- Nutgall oak, Q. infectoria.

& Among plants called oak, but not of the genus Quercus, are: African oak, a valuable timber tree (Oldfieldia Africana). -- Australian, or She, oak, any tree of the genus Casuarina (see Casuarina). -- Indian oak, the teak tree (see Teak). -- Jerusalem oak. See under Jerusalem. -- New Zealand oak, a sapindaceous tree (Alectryon excelsum). -- Poison oak, the poison ivy. See under Poison. -- Silky, or Silk-bark, oak, an Australian tree (Grevillea robusta).

Green oak, oak wood colored green by the growth of the mycelium of certain fungi. -- Oak apple, a large, smooth, round gall produced on the leaves of the American red oak by a gallfly (Cynips confluens). It is green and pulpy when young. -- Oak beauty Zool., a British geometrid moth (Biston prodromaria) whose larva feeds on the oak. -- Oak gall, a gall found on the oak. See 2d Gall. -- Oak leather Bot., the mycelium of a fungus which forms leatherlike patches in the fissures of oak wood. -- Oak pruner. Zool. See Pruner, the insect. -- Oak spangle, a kind of gall produced on the oak by the insect Diplolepis lenticularis. -- Oak wart, a wartlike gall on the twigs of an oak. -- The Oaks, one of the three great annual English horse races (the Derby and St. Leger being the others). It was instituted in 1779 by the Earl of Derby, and so called from his estate. -- To sport one's oak, to be "not at home to visitors," signified by closing the outer (oaken) door of one's rooms. [Cant, Eng. Univ.]

 

© Webster 1913.

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