Half Life
Half-Life was inspired by FPS games Doom (1993) and Quake (1996),[9][page needed] Stephen King's 1980 novella The Mist, and a 1963 episode of The Outer Limits titled "The Borderland".[10] According to the designer Harry Teasley, Doom was a major influence, and the team wanted Half-Life to "scare you like Doom did". The project had the working title Quiver, after the Arrowhead military base from The Mist.[11] The name Half-Life was chosen because it was evocative of the theme, not clichéd, and had a corresponding visual symbol: the Greek letter λ (lower-case lambda), which represents the decay constant in the half-life equation.[9][page needed] According to designer Brett Johnson, the level design was inspired by environments in the manga series Akira.[12]
half life
The Half-Life software development kit served as the development base for many mods, including the Valve-developed Team Fortress Classic and Deathmatch Classic (a remake of Quake's multiplayer deathmatch mode in the GoldSrc engine).[21] Other mods such as Counter-Strike and Day of Defeat (DOD) began life as the work of independent developers who later received aid from Valve. Other multiplayer mods include Action Half-Life, Firearms, Science and Industry, The Specialists, Pirates, Vikings and Knights, Natural Selection and Sven Co-op.[citation needed]
Several reviewers cited the level of immersion and interactivity as revolutionary.[50] AllGame said, "It isn't everyday that you come across a game that totally revolutionizes an entire genre, but Half-Life has done just that."[50] Hot Games commented on the realism, and how the environment "all adds up to a totally immersive gaming experience that makes everything else look quite shoddy in comparison".[56] Gamers Depot found the game engaging, stating that they have "yet to play a more immersive game period".[57] The Electric Playground said that Half-Life was an "immersive and engaging entertainment experience", but noted that this only lasted for the first half of the game, explaining that the game "peaked too soon".[58]
Jeff Lundrigan reviewed the PlayStation 2 version of the game for Next Generation, rating it three stars out of five, and stated that "It may be getting old, but there's still a surprising amount of life in Half-Life".[55] the PlayStation 2 version of Half-Life was a nominee for The Electric Playground's 2001 Blister Awards for "Best Console Shooter Game", but lost to Halo: Combat Evolved for Xbox.[63]
After maintaining the 16th place for May in the US,[100] Half-Life exited PC Data's monthly top 20 in June.[101] Half-Life became the fifth-bestselling PC game of the first half of 1999 in the US.[102] Its domestic sales during 1999 reached 290,000 copies by the end of September.[103] During 1999, it was the fifth-best-selling PC game in the US, with sales of 445,123 copies. These sales brought in revenues of $16.6 million, the sixth-highest gross that year for a PC game in the US.[104] The following year, it was the 16th-bestselling PC game in the US, selling another 286,593 copies and earning $8.98 million.[105]
Half-life (symbol t) is the time required for a quantity (of substance) to reduce to half of its initial value. The term is commonly used in nuclear physics to describe how quickly unstable atoms undergo radioactive decay or how long stable atoms survive. The term is also used more generally to characterize any type of exponential (or, rarely, non-exponential) decay. For example, the medical sciences refer to the biological half-life of drugs and other chemicals in the human body. The converse of half-life (in exponential growth) is doubling time.
The original term, half-life period, dating to Ernest Rutherford's discovery of the principle in 1907, was shortened to half-life in the early 1950s.[1] Rutherford applied the principle of a radioactive element's half-life in studies of age determination of rocks by measuring the decay period of radium to lead-206.
Half-life is constant over the lifetime of an exponentially decaying quantity, and it is a characteristic unit for the exponential decay equation. The accompanying table shows the reduction of a quantity as a function of the number of half-lives elapsed.
A half-life often describes the decay of discrete entities, such as radioactive atoms. In that case, it does not work to use the definition that states "half-life is the time required for exactly half of the entities to decay". For example, if there is just one radioactive atom, and its half-life is one second, there will not be "half of an atom" left after one second.
Instead, the half-life is defined in terms of probability: "Half-life is the time required for exactly half of the entities to decay on average". In other words, the probability of a radioactive atom decaying within its half-life is 50%.[2]
For example, the image on the right is a simulation of many identical atoms undergoing radioactive decay. Note that after one half-life there are not exactly one-half of the atoms remaining, only approximately, because of the random variation in the process. Nevertheless, when there are many identical atoms decaying (right boxes), the law of large numbers suggests that it is a very good approximation to say that half of the atoms remain after one half-life.
The term "half-life" is almost exclusively used for decay processes that are exponential (such as radioactive decay or the other examples above), or approximately exponential (such as biological half-life discussed below). In a decay process that is not even close to exponential, the half-life will change dramatically while the decay is happening. In this situation it is generally uncommon to talk about half-life in the first place, but sometimes people will describe the decay in terms of its "first half-life", "second half-life", etc., where the first half-life is defined as the time required for decay from the initial value to 50%, the second half-life is from 50% to 25%, and so on.[7]
A biological half-life or elimination half-life is the time it takes for a substance (drug, radioactive nuclide, or other) to lose one-half of its pharmacologic, physiologic, or radiological activity. In a medical context, the half-life may also describe the time that it takes for the concentration of a substance in blood plasma to reach one-half of its steady-state value (the "plasma half-life").
For example, the biological half-life of water in a human being is about 9 to 10 days,[9] though this can be altered by behavior and other conditions. The biological half-life of caesium in human beings is between one and four months.
The concept of a half-life has also been utilized for pesticides in plants,[10] and certain authors maintain that pesticide risk and impact assessment models rely on and are sensitive to information describing dissipation from plants.[11]
In epidemiology, the concept of half-life can refer to the length of time for the number of incident cases in a disease outbreak to drop by half, particularly if the dynamics of the outbreak can be modeled exponentially.[12][13]
Biological half-life (also known as elimination half-life, pharmacological half-life) is the time taken for concentration of a biological substance (such as a medication) to decrease from its maximum concentration (Cmax) to half of Cmax in the blood plasma,[1][2][3][4][5] and is denoted by the abbreviation t 1 2 \displaystyle t_\frac 12 . [2][4]
This is used to measure the removal of things such as metabolites, drugs, and signalling molecules from the body. Typically, the biological half-life refers to the body's natural detoxification (cleansing) through liver metabolism and through the excretion of the measured substance through the kidneys and intestines. This concept is used when the rate of removal is roughly exponential.[6][clarification needed]
In a medical context, half-life explicitly describes the time it takes for the blood plasma concentration of a substance to halve (plasma half-life) its steady-state when circulating in the full blood of an organism. This measurement is useful in medicine, pharmacology and pharmacokinetics because it helps determine how much of a drug needs to be taken and how frequently it needs to be taken if a certain average amount is needed constantly. By contrast, the stability of a substance in plasma is described as plasma stability. This is essential to ensure accurate analysis of drugs in plasma and for drug discovery.
The relationship between the biological and plasma half-lives of a substance can be complex depending on the substance in question, due to factors including accumulation in tissues, protein binding, active metabolites, and receptor interactions.[7]
The biological half-life of water in a human is about 7 to 14 days. It can be altered by behavior. Drinking large amounts of alcohol will reduce the biological half-life of water in the body.[8][9] This has been used to decontaminate humans who are internally contaminated with tritiated water. The basis of this decontamination method is to increase the rate at which the water in the body is replaced with new water.
The removal of ethanol (drinking alcohol) through oxidation by alcohol dehydrogenase in the liver from the human body is limited. Hence the removal of a large concentration of alcohol from blood may follow zero-order kinetics. Also the rate-limiting steps for one substance may be in common with other substances. For instance, the blood alcohol concentration can be used to modify the biochemistry of methanol and ethylene glycol. In this way the oxidation of methanol to the toxic formaldehyde and formic acid in the human body can be prevented by giving an appropriate amount of ethanol to a person who has ingested methanol. Note that methanol is very toxic and causes blindness and death. A person who has ingested ethylene glycol can be treated in the same way. Half life is also relative to the subjective metabolic rate of the individual in question. 041b061a72