Topo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A topo is a guide for a crag or climbing area. It gives details of the grade of each of the climb. It includes the length of the climbs and most importantly how to get to the area of the climbs, and where exactly each climb starts. It will usually specify where a climb is a sport climb or a trad (traditional) climb eg needing gear.
Topo is also a robot, designed in the 80's by Androbot Inc. Aimed at the consumer and educational market, it was programmable via Apple II. The programmable language allows the robot to perform a set of geometrical movements, moving precisely around the room and performing some minor task.
Topo is also Spanish for a mole, and in the '70's a subversive, community theater group in California named themselves 'Los Topos' referring to their undergroup activities. One member of this group even adopted Topo as his stage name. He later specialised in 'robotics' miming mechanical robots (which is an interesting link to the above entry), and formed his own fringe company 'Christians from Outer Space' perfoming satirical theatre.
Topo was also the name of the octopus which aided Aquaman in several of his 1950's adventures.
It is also the short form for topography.
There is a place in the Azores, see Topo (Azores).
Topo is also a technology patented by Invitrogen and used for cloning PCR products, which is based on the use of topoisomerase I from Vaccinia virus.
TOPO is also a short name used for the chemical trioctylphosphine oxide.
