Touch
Touching is having or getting a zero distance; in geometry it refers especially to a tangent line or curve. See also collision.
Touch may simply be considered one of five human senses. However, when a person touches something or somebody this gives rise to various feelings: the perception of pressure (hence shape, softness, texture, vibration, etc.), heat, cold and sometimes pain. Thus the term "touch" is actually the combined term for several senses, see sense. Holding or moving something is usually done by touching (exceptions are e.g. blowing or using a magnet or engine), but this is sometimes done indirectly, e.g. with pliers.
Touching another person is a form of physical intimacy and plays an important role in human sexual behavior, but also in physical abuse, such as striking, pushing, pulling, pinching, kicking, etc.
Touching is a form of nonverbal communication [1].
Human babies have been observed to have enormous difficulty surviving if they do not possess a sense of touch, even if they retain sight and hearing. Babies who can feel the sense of touch, even without sight and hearing, fare much better. The implications are intriguing from an AI perspective. Touch can be considered a basic sense in that nearly all life forms have a response to being touched, while only a subset have sight and hearing.
See also frotteurism, grappling, massage, tickling.
Quote (Leonard Cohen): I needed so much/ To have nothing to touch/ I've always been greedy that way.. -from The Night Comes On (1984)
One can also be emotionally touched. In this sense it refers to some action or object that has evoked a sad or joyful emotion.
For example to say "I was touched by your letter" would not imply you were angered by it, but that you felt joy or sadness when reading it.
"Touch" is one of the most traditional Manga in Japan. It is about brothers who play baseball, trying to play at the Koushien. The youger brother is called the Katsuya, and the older brother is called Tastuya, and they were twins. In fact, Tastuya had never played baseball until he entered the high school. Comparing to this, Kastuya was a very fomous baseball player since he was in middle school, but he died when he was in the first grade in high school by a car accident. Kastuya's death made Tastuya play baseball to accomplish Kastuya's dream. When Kastuya was alive, these two boys fell in love with a same girl, called Minami, who was a childhood friend with Tastuya and Kastuya. After Kastuya's death, Tastuya and Minami supported eachother to accomplish eachother's goal. Tastuya's goal was to play baseball at the KOUSIENN, and Minami's goal was to do a good performance at the All Japan Gymnastic Tournament. They fell in love gradually but Tastuya can't show his emotions that he loves Minami because of his dead brother. He knew that Kastuya loved Minami too, so he feels a sense of guilt to Kastuya. This Manga creates a story of their difficult love and their enshusiasm towards their sports.
A 102-episode anime TV series, three movies, and one TV special were also produced.
Touch is also a record label concentrating on experimental electronic music - see Touch (record label).
Touch is a novel by Elmore Leonard, later made into a film directed by Paul Schrader and starring LL Cool J, Christopher Walken, and Skeet Ulrich.
touch is a program on Unix and Unix-like systems used for changing the date and timestamp on a file, but is also often used for creating an empty file. The command-syntax is:
touch [options]If that file exists, its current details are updated as if a user edited the file and saved it again, but if the file does not exist, a file with the name specified in the current directory will be created with a timestamp corresponding to the present time of the system clock. touch can also be invoked with a plethora of options to change the files timestamp to something other than the current date and time. The version of touch bundled in coreutils that is distributed by the FSF and found on most GNU/Linux systems was written by Paul Rubin, Arnold Robbins, Jim Kingdon, David MacKenzie and Randy Smith.
