An oil well is a drillhole boring in Earth that is designed to bring petroleum oil hydrocarbons to the surface. Usually some natural gas is released as associated petroleum gas along with the oil. A well that is designed to produce only gas may be termed a gas well. Wells are created by drilling down into an oil or gas reserve that is then mounted with an extraction device such as a pumpjack which allows extraction from the reserve. Creating the wells can be an expensive process, costing at least hundreds of thousands of dollars, and costing much more when in hard to reach areas, e.g., when creating offshore oil platforms. The process of modern drilling for wells first started in the 19th century, but was made more efficient with advances to oil drilling rigs during the 20th century.

Wells are frequently sold or exchanged between different oil and gas companies as an asset – in large part because during falls in price of oil and gas, a well may be unproductive, but if prices rise, even low production wells may be economically valuable. Moreover, new methods, such as hydraulic fracturing (a process of injecting gas or liquid to force more oil or natural gas production) have made some wells viable. However, peak oil and climate policy surrounding fossil fuels has made fewer of these wells and costly techniques viable.

However, the large number of neglected or poorly maintained wellheads is a large environmental issue: they may leak methane emissions or other toxic emissions into local air, water or soil systems. This pollution often becomes worse when wells are abandoned or orphaned – where wells no longer are economically viable, and no longer are maintained by a company. A 2020 estimate by Reuters suggested that there were at least 29 million abandoned wells internationally, creating a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.

History

The earliest known oil wells were drilled in China in 347 CE. These wells had depths of up to about  and were drilled using bits attached to bamboo poles. The oil was burned to evaporate brine and produce salt. By the 10th century, extensive bamboo pipelines connected oil wells with salt springs. The ancient records of China and Japan are said to contain many allusions to the use of natural gas for lighting and heating. Petroleum was known as burning water in Japan in the 7th century.

According to Kasem Ajram, petroleum was distilled by the Persian alchemist Muhammad ibn Zakarīya Rāzi (Rhazes) in the 9th century, producing chemicals such as kerosene in the alembic (al-ambiq), and which was mainly used for kerosene lamps. Arab and Persian chemists also distilled crude oil in order to produce flammable products for military purposes. Through Islamic Spain, distillation became available in Western Europe by the 12th century.

Some sources claim that from the 9th century, oil fields were exploited in the area around modern Baku, Azerbaijan, to produce naphtha for the petroleum industry. These places were described by Marco Polo in the 13th century, who described the output of those oil wells as hundreds of shiploads. When Marco Polo in 1264 visited Baku, on the shores of the Caspian Sea, he saw oil being collected from seeps. He wrote that "on the confines toward Geirgine there is a fountain from which oil springs in great abundance, in as much as a hundred shiploads might be taken from it at one time."

 In 1846, Baku (settlement Bibi-Heybat) the first ever well was drilled with percussion tools to a depth of  for oil exploration. In 1846–1848, the first modern oil wells were drilled on the Absheron Peninsula north-east of Baku, by Russian engineer Vasily Semyonov considering the ideas of Nikolay Voskoboynikov.

Ignacy Łukasiewicz, a Polish pharmacist and petroleum industry pioneer built one of the world's first modern oil wells in 1854 in Polish village Bóbrka, Krosno County who in 1856 built one of the world's first oil refineries.

In North America, the first commercial oil well entered operation in Oil Springs, Ontario in 1858, while the first offshore oil well was drilled in 1896 at the Summerland Oil Field on the California Coast.

The earliest oil wells in modern times were drilled percussively, by repeatedly raising and dropping a cable tool into the earth. In the 20th century, cable tools were largely replaced with rotary drilling, which could drill boreholes to much greater depths and in less time. The record-depth Kola Borehole used a mud motor while drilling to achieve a depth of over .

Until the 1970s, most oil wells were vertical, although lithological and mechanical imperfections cause most wells to deviate at least slightly from true vertical (see deviation survey). However, modern directional drilling technologies allow for strongly deviated wells which can, given sufficient depth and with the proper tools, actually become horizontal. This is of great value as the reservoir rocks which contain hydrocarbons are usually horizontal or nearly horizontal; a horizontal wellbore placed in a production zone has more surface area in the production zone than a vertical well, resulting in a higher production rate. The use of deviated and horizontal drilling has also made it possible to reach reservoirs several kilometers or miles away from the drilling location (extended reach drilling), allowing for the production of hydrocarbons located below locations that are either difficult to place a drilling rig on, environmentally sensitive, or populated.

Life of a well

Planning
Before a well is drilled, a geologic target is identified by a geologist or geophysicist to meet the objectives of the well.
 For a production well, the target is picked to optimize production from the well and manage reservoir drainage.
 For an exploration or appraisal well, the target is chosen to confirm the existence of a viable hydrocarbon reservoir or to learn its extent.
 For an injection well, the target is selected to locate the point of injection in a permeable zone, which may support disposing of water or gas and /or pushing hydrocarbons into nearby production wells.
The target (the end point of the well) will be matched with a surface location (the starting point of the well), and a trajectory between the two will be designed. There are many considerations to take into account when designing the trajectory such as the clearance to any nearby wells (anti-collision) or if this well will get in the way of future wells, trying to avoid faults if possible and certain formations may be easier/more difficult to drill at certain inclinations or azimuths.

When the well path is identified, a team of geoscientists and engineers will develop a set of presumed properties of the subsurface that will be drilled through to reach the target.  These properties include pore pressure, fracture gradient, wellbore stability, porosity, permeability, lithology, faults, and clay content. This set of assumptions is used by a well engineering team to perform the casing design and completion design for the well, and then detailed planning, where, for example, the drill bits are selected, a BHA is designed, the drilling fluid is selected, and step-by-step procedures are written to provide instruction for executing the well in a safe and cost-efficient manner.

With the interplay with many of the elements in a well design and making a change to one will have a knock on effect on many other things, often trajectories and designs go through several iterations before a plan is finalised.

Drilling

The well is created by drilling a hole 12 cm to 1 meter (5 in to 40 in) in diameter into the earth with a drilling rig that rotates a drill string with a bit attached. After the hole is drilled, sections of steel pipe (casing), slightly smaller in diameter than the borehole, are placed in the hole. Cement may be placed between the outside of the casing and the borehole known as the annulus. The casing provides structural integrity to the newly drilled wellbore, in addition to isolating potentially dangerous high pressure zones from each other and from the surface.

With these zones safely isolated and the formation protected by the casing, the well can be drilled deeper (into potentially more-unstable and violent formations) with a smaller bit, and also cased with a smaller size casing. Modern wells often have two to five sets of subsequently smaller hole sizes drilled inside one another, each cemented with casing.

To drill the well

 The drill bit, aided by the weight of the drill string above it, cuts into the rock. There are different types of drill bit; some cause the rock to disintegrate by compressive failure, while others shear slices off the rock as the bit turns.
 Drilling fluid, a.k.a. "mud", is pumped down the inside of the drill pipe and exits at the drill bit. The principal components of drilling fluid are usually water and clay, but it also typically contains a complex mixture of fluids, solids and chemicals that must be carefully tailored to provide the correct physical and chemical characteristics required to safely drill the well. Particular functions of the drilling mud include cooling the bit, lifting rock cuttings to the surface, preventing destabilisation of the rock in the wellbore walls and overcoming the pressure of fluids inside the rock so that these fluids do not enter the wellbore. Some oil wells are drilled with air or foam as the drilling fluid.

 The generated rock "cuttings" are swept up by the drilling fluid as it circulates back to surface outside the drill pipe. The fluid then goes through "shakers" which strain the cuttings from the good fluid which is returned to the pit. Watching for abnormalities in the returning cuttings and monitoring pit volume or rate of returning fluid are imperative to catch "kicks" early. A "kick" is when the formation pressure at the depth of the bit is more than the hydrostatic head of the mud above, which if not controlled temporarily by closing the blowout preventers and ultimately by increasing the density of the drilling fluid would allow formation fluids and mud to come up through the annulus uncontrollably.
 The pipe or drill string to which the bit is attached is gradually lengthened as the well gets deeper by screwing in additional 9 m (30 ft) sections or "joints" of pipe under the kelly or topdrive at the surface. This process is called making a connection. The process called "tripping" is when pulling the bit out of hole to replace the bit (tripping out), and running back in with a new bit (tripping in). Joints can be combined for more efficient tripping when pulling out of the hole by creating stands of multiple joints. A conventional triple, for example, would pull pipe out of the hole three joints at a time and stack them in the derrick. Many modern rigs, called "super singles", trip pipe one at a time, laying it out on racks as they go.

This process is all facilitated by a drilling rig which contains all necessary equipment to circulate the drilling fluid, hoist and turn the pipe, control downhole, remove cuttings from the drilling fluid, and generate on-site power for these operations.

Completion

After drilling and casing the well, it must be 'completed'. Completion is the process in which the well is enabled to produce oil or gas.

In a cased-hole completion, small holes called perforations are made in the portion of the casing which passed through the production zone, to provide a path for the oil to flow from the surrounding rock into the production tubing. In open hole completion, often 'sand screens' or a 'gravel pack' is installed in the last drilled, uncased reservoir section. These maintain structural integrity of the wellbore in the absence of casing, while still allowing flow from the reservoir into the wellbore. Screens also control the migration of formation sands into production tubulars and surface equipment, which can cause washouts and other problems, particularly from unconsolidated sand formations of offshore fields.

After a flow path is made, acids and fracturing fluids may be pumped into the well to fracture, clean, or otherwise prepare and stimulate the reservoir rock to optimally produce hydrocarbons into the wellbore. Finally, the area above the reservoir section of the well is packed off inside the casing, and connected to the surface via a smaller diameter pipe called tubing. This arrangement provides a redundant barrier to leaks of hydrocarbons as well as allowing damaged sections to be replaced. Also, the smaller cross-sectional area of the tubing produces reservoir fluids at an increased velocity in order to minimize liquid fallback that would create additional back pressure, and shields the casing from corrosive well fluids.

In many wells, the natural pressure of the subsurface reservoir is high enough for the oil or gas to flow to the surface. However, this is not always the case, especially in depleted fields where the pressures have been lowered by other producing wells, or in low permeability oil reservoirs. Installing a smaller diameter tubing may be enough to help the production, but artificial lift methods may also be needed. Common solutions include downhole pumps, gas lift, or surface pump jacks. Many new systems in the last ten years have been introduced for well completion. Multiple packer systems with frac ports or port collars in an all in one system have cut completion costs and improved production, especially in the case of horizontal wells. These new systems allow casings to run into the lateral zone with proper packer/frac port placement for optimal hydrocarbon recovery.

Production

The production stage is the most important stage of a well's life; when the oil and gas are produced. By this time, the oil rigs and workover rigs used to drill and complete the well have moved off the wellbore, and the top is usually outfitted with a collection of valves called a Christmas tree or production tree. These valves regulate pressures, control flows, and allow access to the wellbore in case further completion work is needed. From the outlet valve of the production tree, the flow can be connected to a distribution network of pipelines and tanks to supply the product to refineries, natural gas compressor stations, or oil export terminals.

As long as the pressure in the reservoir remains high enough, the production tree is all that is required to produce the well. If the pressure depletes and it is considered economically viable, an artificial lift method mentioned in the completions section can be employed.

Workovers are often necessary in older wells, which may need smaller diameter tubing, scale or paraffin removal, acid matrix jobs, or completing new zones of interest in a shallower reservoir. Such remedial work can be performed using workover rigs – also known as pulling units, completion rigs or "service rigs" – to pull and replace tubing, or by the use of well intervention techniques utilizing coiled tubing. Depending on the type of lift system and wellhead a rod rig or flushby can be used to change a pump without pulling the tubing.

Enhanced recovery methods such as water flooding, steam flooding, or CO2 flooding may be used to increase reservoir pressure and provide a "sweep" effect to push hydrocarbons out of the reservoir. Such methods require the use of injection wells (often chosen from old production wells in a carefully determined pattern), and are used when facing problems with reservoir pressure depletion, high oil viscosity, or can even be employed early in a field's life. In certain cases – depending on the reservoir's geomechanics – reservoir engineers may determine that ultimate recoverable oil may be increased by applying a waterflooding strategy early in the field's development rather than later. Such enhanced recovery techniques are often called "tertiary recovery".

Abandonment

Types of wells

By produced fluid
 Wells that produce oil
 Wells that produce oil and natural gas, or
 Wells that only produce natural gas.
Natural gas, in a raw form known as associated petroleum gas, is almost always a by-product of producing oil. The small, light gas carbon chains come out of solution as they undergo pressure reduction from the reservoir to the surface, similar to uncapping a bottle of soda where the carbon dioxide effervesces. If it escapes into the atmosphere intentionally it is known as vented gas, or if unintentionally as fugitive gas.

Unwanted natural gas can be a disposal problem at wells that are developed to produce oil. If there are no pipelines for natural gas near the wellhead it may be of no value to the oil well owner since it cannot reach the consumer markets.  Such unwanted gas may then be burned off at the well site in a practice known as production flaring, but due to the energy resource waste and environmental damage concerns this practice is becoming less common.

Often, unwanted (or 'stranded' gas without a market) gas is pumped back into the reservoir with an 'injection' well for storage or for re-pressurizing the producing formation. Another solution is to convert the natural gas to a liquid fuel. Gas to liquid (GTL) is a developing technology that converts stranded natural gas into synthetic gasoline, diesel or jet fuel through the Fischer–Tropsch process developed in World War II Germany. Like oil, such dense liquid fuels can be transported using conventional tankers or trucking to users. Proponents claim GTL fuels burn cleaner than comparable petroleum fuels. Most major international oil companies are in advanced development stages of GTL production, e.g. the  Pearl GTL plant in Qatar, scheduled to come online in 2011. In locations such as the United States with a high natural gas demand, pipelines are usually favored to take the gas from the well site to the end consumer.

By location
Wells can be located:
 On land, or
 Offshore
Offshore wells can further be subdivided into
 Wells with subsea wellheads, where the top of the well is sitting on the ocean floor under water, and often connected to a pipeline on the ocean floor.
 Wells with 'dry' wellheads, where the top of the well is above the water on a platform or jacket, which also often contains processing equipment for the produced fluid.

While the location of the well will be a large factor in the type of equipment used to drill it, there is actually little difference in the well itself. An offshore well targets a reservoir that happens to be underneath an ocean. Due to logistics, drilling an offshore well is far more costly than an onshore well. By far the most common type is the onshore well. These wells dot the Southern and Central Great Plains, Southwestern United States, and are the most common wells in the Middle East.

By purpose
Another way to classify oil wells is by their purpose in contributing to the development of a resource. They can be characterized as:
 wildcat wells are drilled where little or no known geological information is available. The site may have been selected because of wells drilled some distance from the proposed location but on a terrain that appeared similar to the proposed site. Individuals who drill wildcat wells are known as 'wildcatters'.
 exploration wells are drilled purely for exploratory (information gathering) purposes in a new area, the site selection is usually based on seismic data, satellite surveys etc. Details gathered in this well includes the presence of hydrocarbon in the drilled location, the amount of fluid present and the depth at which oil or/and gas occurs.
 appraisal wells are used to assess characteristics (such as flow rate, reserve quantity) of a proven hydrocarbon accumulation. The purpose of this well is to reduce uncertainty about the characteristics and properties of the hydrocarbon present in the field.
 production wells are drilled primarily for producing oil or gas, once the producing structure and characteristics are determined.
 development wells are wells drilled for the production of oil or gas already proven by appraisal drilling to be suitable for exploitation.
 abandoned wells are wells permanently plugged in the drilling phase for technical reasons.

At a producing well site, active wells may be further categorised as:
 oil producers producing predominantly liquid hydrocarbons, but most include some associated gas.
 gas producers producing almost entirely gaseous hydrocarbons, consisting mostly of natural gas.
 water injectors injecting water into the formation to maintain reservoir pressure, or simply to dispose of water produced with the hydrocarbons because even after treatment, it would be too oily and too saline to be considered clean for dumping overboard offshore, let alone into a fresh water resource in the case of onshore wells. Water injection into the producing zone frequently has an element of reservoir management; however, often produced water disposal is into shallower zones safely beneath any fresh water zones.
 aquifer producers intentionally producing water for re-injection to manage pressure. If possible this water will come from the reservoir itself. Using aquifer produced water rather than water from other sources is to preclude chemical incompatibility that might lead to reservoir-plugging precipitates.  These wells will generally be needed only if produced water from the oil or gas producers is insufficient for reservoir management purposes.
 gas injectors injecting gas into the reservoir often as a means of disposal or sequestering for later production, but also to maintain reservoir pressure.

Lahee classification
 New Field Wildcat (NFW) – far from other producing fields and on a structure that has not previously produced.
 New Pool Wildcat (NPW) – new pools on already producing structure.
 Deeper Pool Test (DPT) – on already producing structure and pool, but on a deeper pay zone.
 Shallower Pool Test (SPT) – on already producing structure and pool, but on a shallower pay zone.
 Outpost (OUT) – usually two or more locations from nearest productive area.
 Development Well (DEV) – can be on the extension of a pay zone, or between existing wells (Infill).

Cost
The cost of a well depends mainly on the daily rate of the drilling rig, the extra services required to drill the well, the duration of the well program (including downtime and weather time), and the remoteness of the location (logistic supply costs).

The daily rates of offshore drilling rigs vary by their capability, and the market availability. Rig rates reported by industry web service show that the deepwater water floating drilling rigs are over twice that of the shallow water fleet, and rates for jackup fleet can vary by factor of 3 depending upon capability.

With deepwater drilling rig rates in 2015 of around $520,000/day, and similar additional spread costs, a deep water well of duration of 100 days can cost around US$100 million.

With high performance jackup rig rates in 2015 of around $177,000, and similar service costs, a high pressure, high temperature well of duration 100 days can cost about US$30 million.

Onshore wells can be considerably cheaper, particularly if the field is at a shallow depth, where costs range from less than $4.9 million to $8.3 million, and the average completion costing $2.9 million to $5.6 million per well. Completion makes up a larger portion of onshore well costs than offshore wells, which have the added cost burden of an oil platform.

The total cost of an oil well mentioned does not include the costs associated with the risk of explosion and leakage of oil. Those costs include the cost of protecting against such disasters, the cost of the cleanup effort, and the hard-to-calculate cost of damage to the company's image.

See also
 Fracking (hydraulic fracturing)
 Hydro-slotted perforation
 Offshore drilling
 Oil spill
 Petroleum industry
 Thermomechanical cuttings cleaner

References

External links

 Halliburton Technical Papers
 Freemyer Industrial Pressure
 Schlumberger Oilfield Glossary
 The History of the Oil Industry
 "Black Gold" Popular Mechanics, January 1930 – photo article on oil drilling in the 1920s and 1930s
 "World's Deepest Well" Popular Science, August 1938, article on the late 1930s technology of drilling oil wells
 'Ancient Chinese Drilling' article from June 2004 CSEG Recorder
 Brief history of oil and gas production
 Mir-Babayev M.F. "Brief history of the first drilled oil well; and the people involved". Oil-Industry History (US), 2017, v. 18 #1, pp. 25–34

American inventions
Chinese inventions
Drilling technology
Polish inventions
Russian inventions

Oil well


Freedom of Speech is a painting of Norman Rockwell and is one of his series of four paintings called the Four Freedoms. Rockwell was inspired to make these paintings since he heard the Four Freedoms Speech of American President Franklin D. Roosevelt of January 6, 1941.

Background
This painting was made public in The Saturday Evening Post of February 20, 1943, along with an essay of Booth Tarkington. The other paintings of the Four Freedoms series are Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want and Freedom from Fear, and were shown in other editions of the paper.

In this painting he shows a local meeting where one person speaks out his own, opposite opinion, while the others present give him the freedom of speech as a matter of protocol. Rockwell undertook four efforts to end up with this painting. He took Vermont neighbors as models for his series.

Rockwell needed four attempts to end up with this version of the painting. In former versions he found that the attention was confused because he had used to many objects. Furthermore he did not like the place of the main person in the picture.

The paintings toured through the United States with the motto Buy War Bonds. All together 1.2 million Americans saw the paintings and 132 million dollar was collected to be used in World War II.

The painting can be found in the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

References
Parts of this article are derived from the article on English Wikipedia

1943 paintings
American paintings

Freedom of Speech (painting)


The Aberdeen Line was a shipping company founded in 1825 by George Thompson of Aberdeen to take sailing vessels to the St. Lawrence river, carrying some passengers and returning with cargoes of timber. The business flourished and grew to 12 sailing vessels by 1837, travelling to South America, the Pacific, West Indies and the Mediterranean. In 1842 the line included a regular schedule from London to Australia.

The Aberdeen Line's best known ship was the clipper Thermopylae, launched in 1868, and constructed with the 'Aberdeen Bow', designed for greater speed and seaworthiness. The clipper set new records for voyages to and from Australia and the Far East.
In 1872, her nearest rival, Cutty Sark, lost by seven days in a race from Shanghai to London. Thermopylae was acknowledged to be the fastest sailing ship afloat.

The arrival of the steamship signalled the end of the sailing era, but enabled the line to introduce a regular service between London and Australia in 1882 and by 1899 all the vessels were able to carry frozen produce.

Changing fortunes put the company under joint control of White Star Line and Shaw, Savill & Albion Line in 1905, while retaining a degree of autonomy. In 1928 the White Star Line took over the Government-owned Australian Commonwealth Line, but in 1931 White Star Line's holding company, the Kylsant shipping group, collapsed. A year later Shaw, Savill & Albion bought the Aberdeen Line and in 1933 the former Australian Commonwealth Line was incorporated and the Aberdeen & Commonwealth Line was founded. Furness Withy & Co took over Shaw Savill & Albion in 1936. By 1957 the last of the ships was scrapped and the company dissolved.

References

External links

 Aberdeen Line History and Ephemera

1825 establishments in Scotland
1957 disestablishments in Scotland
Companies based in Aberdeen
Shipping companies of Scotland
Transatlantic shipping companies
British companies established in 1825
Transport companies disestablished in 1957
Transport companies established in 1825

Aberdeen Line


Very Long Instruction Word or VLIW which refers to a CPU architecture designed to take advantage of instruction level parallelism (ILP) but at minimum level of hardware complexities. ( Alternatively, Variable Length Instruction Word or VLIW a refers to a CPU instruction (  instruction set ) designed to load ( or copy ) a literal value count of inline Machine code to the on-chip RAM for higher speed CPU decoding. )

A processor that executes every instruction one after the other (i.e. a non-pipelined scalar architecture) may use processor resources inefficiently, leading to poor performance.
The performance can be improved by using micro-architectural design techniques that use ILP including:
Instruction pipelining where the execution of multiple instructions can be partially overlapped; where each instructions is divided into series of sub-steps (termed: micro-operations).
Superscalar execution in which multiple execution units are used to execute multiple instructions in parallel.
Out-of-order execution where instructions execute in any order but without violating data dependencies.
Register renaming which is a technique used to avoid unnecessary serialization of program instructions caused by the reuse of registers by those instructions, in order to enable out-of-order execution.
Speculative execution which allow the execution of complete instructions or parts of instructions before being sure whether this execution is required.
Branch prediction which is used to avoid delays (termed: stalls) cause of control dependencies to be resolved. Branch prediction is used with speculative execution.

All above ILP techniques are implemented at a higher cost with increased hardware complexity. Before executing any operations in-parallel, the processor must verify that the instructions do not have interdependencies. There are many types of interdependencies, but a simple example would be a program in which the first instruction's result is used as an input for the second instruction. They clearly cannot execute at the same time, and the second instruction cannot be executed before the first. Modern out-of-order processors use major resources in order to take advantage of these techniques, since the scheduling of instructions must be determined dynamically as a program executes based on dependencies.

The VLIW approach, on the other hand, executes operation in parallel based on a fixed schedule determined when programs are compiled. Since determining the order of execution of operations (including which operations can execute simultaneously) is handled by the compiler, the processor does not need the complex hardware required by ILP techniques described above. As a result, VLIW CPUs offer significant computational power with less hardware complexity but with greater compiler design complexity.

The VLIW approach is a concept which is only useful as the code generated by a compiler makes it, but with a number of special-purpose instructions available to simplify certain complicated operations:
In superscalar designs, the number of execution units is invisible to the instruction set. Each instruction encodes only one operation. For most superscalar designs, the instruction width is 32 bits or less.
In contrast, one VLIW instruction encodes multiple operations; specifically, one instruction encodes at least one operation for each execution unit of the device. For example, if a VLIW device has five execution units, then a VLIW instruction for that device would have five operation fields, each field specifying what operation should be done on that corresponding execution unit. In order to find a space for these operation fields, VLIW instructions are usually at least 64-bits in width and on some architectures 128-bits or wider; this is how the name comes.

Related pages
 Complex instruction set computer (CISC)
 Reduced instruction set computer (RISC)
 Minimal instruction set computer (MISC)

Other websites
Paper That Introduced VLIWs
ISCA "Best Papers" Retrospective On Paper That Introduced VLIWs
VLIW and Embedded Processing
VLIW Example Code

Computer architecture

Very long instruction word


The 18th century BCE was the century which lasted from 1800 BCE to 1701 BCE.

Events

 1800 BCE: Iron Age in India
 1800 BCE: Beginning of the Nordic Bronze Age in the period system devised by Oscar Montelius.
 1800 BCE – 1300 BCE: Troy VI flourishes.
  c. 1800 BCE: Sedentary Mayan communities in Mesoamerica
  c. 1800 BCE: Hyksos start to settle in the Nile Delta. The capital was at Avaris.
 c. 1792 BCE – 1750 BCE: (middle chronology) – Hammurabi rules Babylonia and has to deal with Mari.
 c. 1792 BCE – 1750 BCE: (middle chronology) – Stela of Hammurabi, from Susa (modern Shush, Iran) is made. It is now in Musée du Louvre, Paris.
 1787 BCE – 1784 BCE: Amorite conquests of Uruk and Isin.
 1786 BCE: Egypt: Queen Sobekneferu dies. End of Twelfth Dynasty, start of Thirteenth Dynasty, start of Fourteenth Dynasty.
 1779 BCE: Zimrilim, the King of Mari, starts to rule.
 1770 BCE: Babylon, capital of Babylonia becomes the largest city of the world, taking the lead from Thebes, capital of Egypt.
 1766 BCE: Shang conquest of Xia Dynasty. China.
 1764 BCE – 1750 BCE: Wars of Hammurabi.
 1757 BCE: Mari sacked by Hammurabi. Zimrilim's palace is destroyed.
 1757 BCE: Zimrilim, the King of Mari, dies.
 1750 BCE: Hyksos occupation of Northern Egypt.
 1750 BCE: A large volcano eruption at Mount Veniaminof, Alaska.
 c. 1750 BCE: Nomadic shepherds, the Aryans, enter India from Central Asia and the Russian steppes.
 c. 1750 BCE: Vedic period starts in India.
 c. 1750 BCE: Investiture of Zimrilim (Zimiri-Lim, King of Mari, before the Goddess Ishtar), a wall painting on mud plaster from the Zimrilim palace at Mari (modern Tell Hariri, Iraq), Court 106, is made. It is now in Musée du Louvre, Paris.
 1749 BCE – 1712 BCE: Mesopotamian Rebellions.
 Early Unetice culture, beginning of the Bronze Age in Central Europe.
 Minoan civilization: phase II of the Middle period (MM II).
 c. 1700 BC: The last species of mammoth became extinct on Wrangel Island.
 c. 1700 BC: Indus Valley Civilization comes to an end but is continued by the Cemetery H culture
 c. 1700 BC: Minoan Old Palace period ends and Minoan Second Palace (Neopalatial) period starts in Crete.
 c. 1700 BC: Aegean metalworkers are producing decorative objects that may be better than Ancient Near East jewelers, whose techniques they seem to borrow.
 c. 1700 BC: Lila-Ir-Tash started to rule the Elamite Empire.
 c. 1700 BC: Bronze Age starts in China.
 c. 1700 BC: Shang Dynasty starts in China.
 1800 BCE – 1700 BCE: Decline of the Indus Valley Civilization

Significant persons
 Hammurabi (1792 BCE–1750 BCE), ruler of the Babylonian Empire
 Tang overthrew emperor Jie, last ruler of the Xia dynasty.

Deaths
1750 BCE—Hammurabi (middle chronology)

Inventions, discoveries, introductions
 c. 1700 BCE—date for the building of the Phaistos Disc. Its purpose and meaning, and even its original geographical place of manufacture is unknown. This makes it one of the most famous mysteries of archaeology.

References

18th century BC


Kenneth Goff (September 19, 1914 - April 11, 1972) was an anti-fluoride, Christian Identity, anti-Communist minister.  He was the 1944 national chairman of Gerald L. K. Smith's Christian Youth for America.

Biography

According to his biographical material, he was a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) from May 2, 1936, to October 9, 1939, when he testified before the Dies Committee.  He claimed that while in the CPUSA he infiltrated youth organizations and worked for Communist front organizations, maintaining links with Communist leaders both in the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., in order to lay the groundwork for Communist revolution in the United States.  He also claimed that his testimony before the Dies Committee led to the dismissal of 169 federal employees. He died at the age of 57 in Chicago in 1972 during a speaking tour.

Following his appearance before the Dies Committee, Goff made numerous speaking tours and was the author of 28 books, numerous tracts and several periodicals, including from 1962-1967 The Pilgrim Torch. In his 1954 book, Hitler and the Twentieth Century Hoax, which denied the Holocaust, Goff claimed that Hitler was a Communist agent, hinted he was Jewish, and also that Hitler was still alive and would reappear to advance Communism. He also claimed that both hippies and desegregation were part of a Communist plot.  He told the Dies Committee that the Communists were in favor of water fluoridation, because they intended to take over water treatment plants and threaten to poison the water supply with fluoride if Americans did not surrender.

Goff's main influence on Christian Identity came through his leadership of the Soldiers of the Cross Training Institute, located in Evergreen, Colorado, which trained Christian Identity ministers, including Dan Gayman of the Church of Israel and Thomas Robb, pastor of the Christian Revival Center and National Director of The Knights Party (KKK). The Institute  provided courses on Christianity, politics, survivalism and other subjects.

On The Joe Pyne Show Episode #12 1965, Joe Pyne asked Kenneth Goff if he were anti-Semitic. He dodged the question by saying Arabs are included in the term Semitic. Then, Joe Pyne said "Jesus was a Jew." Kenneth Goff said "Jesus could not be a Jew because Jesus was human and Jews aren't."

In his 1970 book, The Hoaxers: Plain Liars, Fancy Liars and Damned Liars, Morris Kominsky claimed that Goff was the author of Brain-Washing, a book that purported to be a condensation of a work by Lavrentiy Beria, the Soviet secret police chief.

Goff has also been attributed with creating the "strangled to death quote", which he falsely attributed to the CPUSA leader, Gus Hall.  The purported quote was:

I dream of the hour when the last congressman is strangled to death on the guts of the last preacher-and since the Christians seem to love to sing about the blood, why not give them a little of it? Slit the throats of their children [and] draw them over the mourners' bench and the pulpit and allow them to drown in their own blood, and then see whether they enjoy singing those hymns.

The quote is evocative of Denis Diderot, the eighteenth-century philosopher who allegedly wrote, "I should like to see ... the last king strangled with the guts of the last priest."  The evangelist Jerry Falwell used the false quote as late as 1980.

In 2011, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police released a 1960 letter from Goff to the anti-Communist writer Pat Walsh, which claimed that Canadian socialist leader Tommy Douglas had been active in Communist circles in the 1930s.  According to Goff, "Premier Douglas was a preacher in Chicago about the time I was a member of the Communist Party and he attended party rallies on the University campus presided over by Claude Lightfoot and Morris Childs".

Books
 Brainwashed Into Slavery, by Kenneth Goff, 63 pages
 They would destroy our way of life (1944) 48 pages
 Traitors in the Pulpit and Treason Toward God (1946) 61 pages
 Confessions of Stalin's Agent (1948) 78 pages text
 Red betrayal of youth (1948) 32 pages
 The Soviet Art Of Brainwashing - A Synthesis of the Russian Textbook on Psychopolitics (1950)
 Will Russia Invade America? (1951) 63 pages
 Communism in America (1952)
 The scarlet woman of Revelation (1952) 32 pages
 One World a Red World (1952) 64 pages
 The Long Arm of Stalin (1952) 63 pages
 Hitler and the Twentieth Century Hoax (1954) 72 pages. Goff suggests Hitler was a communist agent and may have survived the fall of Berlin.
 Strange Fire (The Church, Christianity & Communism in America) (1954) hardcover
 The flying saucers: From Russia, from another planet, from God (1955) 32 pages
 AMERICA: Zion of God (1955) 80 pages
 Reds Promote Racial War (1958) 76 pages
 Red Shadows (1959) 93 pages
 Still 'tis Our Ancient Foe (1962)
 Red tide (1962) 63 pages
 Crackpot or crack shot (1964) 10 pages
 Satanism - the father of Communism (1968) 72 pages
 Red atrocities against Christians (1968) 63 pages
 Reds launch war to destroy white race (1969)
 From Babylon to Baruch
 Pilgrim Torch (c.1946-1967)
 Christian Battle Cry (1966-1971)

See also
 Brain-Washing (book)
 Dr. Strangelove

References

External links

Kenneth Goff's FBI files, obtained under the FOIA and hosted at the Internet Archive:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4
Denver office part 1
Denver office part 1A
Denver office part 2
Denver office part 3
Denver office part 4
Denver office part 5

Christian Identity
1915 births
1972 deaths
Old Right (United States)
American conspiracy theorists
American Holocaust deniers
American anti-communists
Activists from Colorado

Kenneth Goff


Cue sports are games played with balls on a cloth-covered table that has rubber railings (called "cushions") around it to keep the balls on the table.  Two or more people use sticks (called cues) to make one ball (the cue ball) hit other balls. In the past, all cue sports were called billiards, but that term has various different meanings in different areas.

There are different kinds of cue sports, including:
Pool or pocket billiards, in which the goal is to use the cue ball to knock other balls into "pockets" (holes cut into the rubber cushions, so that the balls can drop down into nets or a collection tray).  There are many different pool games, such as "eight-ball", "nine-ball", "cutthroat" and "killer".  Pool is usually played with either nine or fifteen balls (besides the cue ball).
Carom billiards, usually played with three balls, uses a table without pockets.  The goal is to use the cue ball to hit one of the other two balls, then hit one or more of the cushions, and finally hit the second other ball.  There are several different kinds of carom games, too; they are different mostly because of how many cushions must be hit.
Snooker, which is similar to pool, is played on a large (6 foot wide by 12 foot long) table, with small balls and small pockets, making the game very challenging.  Snooker also uses more balls than pool.

Cue sports


Leoš Friedl (born January 1 1977 in Jindřichův Hradec) is a Czech professional tennis player best known for his doubles play with František Čermák. He is coached by Lubomir Gerla. In his career, he has won 15 top-level doubles titles and $1,027,625 in prize money. Having turned professional in 1997, Friedl won the 2001 Wimbledon mixed doubles title with Daniela Hantuchová, where they beat Mike Bryan and Liezel Huber, 4–6, 6–3, 6–2.

1977 births
Living people
Male tennis players
Czech tennis players

Leoš Friedl


The Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests is an ecoregion of the temperate broadleaf and mixed forests biome, as defined by the World Wildlife Fund. It consists of mesophytic plants west of the Appalachian Mountains in the Southeastern United States.

This ecoregion consists of the following EPA level III ecoregions:
 Southwestern Appalachians (ecoregion)
 Central Appalachians (ecoregion)
 Western Allegheny Plateau (ecoregion)

Setting
This ecoregion is located in the plains and hill country west of the Appalachians in northwest Alabama and east central Tennessee, eastern Kentucky, western North Carolina and Virginia, most of West Virginia, western Maryland, southeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania. This ecoregion also occurs in scattered disjuncts in the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas, Missouri, and extreme eastern Oklahoma. These forests are known for their rich diversity of plants and animals, which is due to several contributing factors, especially that the area was an unglaciated refugium for many species. It shares species with the high elevation Appalachian-Blue Ridge forests to the east, the hardwood forests to the west, and the mixed hardwood/conifer forests to the south.

Climate
The climate varies from humid continental in the north to humid subtropical in the south.

Flora
They are one of the most biologically diverse temperate forest regions on earth. It has an unusually diverse tree flora, with as many as 30 tree species at a single site including many relics of the ancient forest that once covered North America more widely. Along with the forest there is a rich undergrowth of ferns, fungi, herbaceous plants, shrubs and small trees as well as areas of glade, heath, shale, peat bog and cranberry bog.

Mesophytic forests
Mesophytic forests are found on deep and enriched soils in sheltered topography such as coves and low-elevation slopes. They are often found near small streams. The herb layer is very rich and, in undisturbed areas, the trees can grow very large.
Typical trees include sugar maple (Acer saccharum), beech (Fagus grandifolia), tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera), basswood (Tilia americana), northern red oak (Quercus rubra), cucumber tree (Magnolia acuminata), and black walnut (Juglans nigra). Other trees found here are eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), white ash (Fraxinus americana), sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua), and yellow buckeye (Aesculus flava).

Dry calcareous forests
The southern Ridge and Valley/Cumberland dry calcareous forests occur on dry to dry-mesic calcareous habitats on low escarpments of the Cumberland Plateau. They are often found on deep soils in a variety landscapes within their range. Trees are mainly oaks and hickories, with other species less abundant. Oaks include white oak (Quercus alba), northern red oak (Quercus rubra), post oak (Quercus stellata), chinkapin oak (Quercus muehlenbergii), and Shumard oak (Quercus shumardii). Hickories include shagbark hickory (Carya ovata). Other trees can be sugar maple (Acer saccharum), eastern red-cedar (Juniperus virginiana), or pines.

Appalachian cove forests
Appalachian cove forests are found in sheltered concave slopes with a moist environment. Characteristic tree include yellow buckeye (Aesculus flava), sugar maple (Acer saccharum), white ash (Fraxinus americana), basswood (Tilia americana), tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera), Carolina silverbell (Halesia tetraptera), eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis), beech (Fagus grandifolia), cucumber tree (Magnolia acuminata), and Fraser magnolia (Magnolia fraseri).

Dry-mesic oak forests
Dry-mesic oak forests cover large areas at lower and middle elevations on flat to gently rolling terrain. Mature stands have a variety of oak and hickory species adapted to dry-mesic conditions. Oaks include northern red oak (Quercus rubra), white oak (Quercus alba), black oak (Quercus velutina), and scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea); hickories include mockernut hickory (Carya tomentosa), shagbark hickory (Carya ovata), red hickory (Carya ovalis), and pignut hickory (Carya glabra). In addition, red maple (Acer rubrum), sweet birch (Betula lenta), and yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis) are common; sugar maple (Acer saccharum) is occasional. In areas that have been recently disturbed, white pine (Pinus strobus), Virginia pine (Pinus virginiana), or tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) can be abundant. Areas of impeded drainage sometimes harbor small wetlands, including non-forested seeps or forested wetlands with red maple (Acer rubrum), swamp white oak (Quercus bicolor), or black tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica).

Dry oak forests and woodlands
The Allegheny-Cumberland dry oak forest and woodland forest system is found on acidic soils on the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus, and ridges in the southern Ridge and Valley. The forests are typically dominated by white oak (Quercus alba), southern red oak (Quercus falcata), chestnut oak (Quercus prinus), scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea), with lesser amounts of red maple (Acer rubrum), pignut hickory (Carya glabra), and mockernut hickory (Carya tomentosa). A few shortleaf pines (Pinus echinata) or Virginia pines (Pinus virginiana) may occur, particularly adjacent to escarpments or following fire. Sprouts of chestnut (Castanea dentata) can often be found where it was formerly a common tree.

Low-elevation pine forests
Southern Appalachian low-elevation pine forests occur on a variety of topographic and landscape positions, including ridgetops, upper- and mid-slopes, and in lower elevations (generally below ) such as mountain valleys. These forests dominated by shortleaf pine (Pinus echinata) and Virginia pine (Pinus virginiana). Pitch pine (Pinus rigida) may sometimes be present. Hardwoods are sometimes abundant, especially dry-site oaks such as southern red oak (Quercus falcata), chestnut oak (Quercus prinus), and scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea), but also pignut hickory (Carya glabra), red maple (Acer rubrum), and others. The shrub layer may be well-developed, with hillside blueberry (Vaccinium pallidum), black huckleberry (Gaylussacia baccata), or other acid-tolerant species most characteristic. Herbs are usually sparse but may include narrowleaf silkgrass (Pityopsis graminifolia) and Goat-rue (Tephrosia virginiana).

Montane oak forests
Montane oak forests occur on exposed ridges and on south- to west-facing slopes at middle elevations. Soils are thin and nutrient-poor and trees are often stunted and wind-flagged. Northern red oak (Quercus rubra) and white oak (Quercus alba) are common, as are sprouts of American chestnut (Castanea dentata). Winterberry (Ilex montana), flame azalea (Rhododendron calendulaceum), catawba rhododendron (Rhododendron catawbiense), and great rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum) are common shrubs.

Hemlock-northern hardwood forests
Hemlock-northern hardwood forests are found at higher elevations. They include yellow birch (Betula alleghaniensis), mountain maple (Acer spicatum), sugar maple (Acer saccharum), beech (Fagus grandifolia), and eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis). Mountain laurel (Kalmia latifolia) and rhododendron (Rhododendron spp.) are found in the understory.

Spruce-fir forests
Spruce-fir forests occur at the highest elevations, above . Their environment is cool and wet, with frequent fog and precipitation. Red spruce (Picea rubens) and Fraser fir (Abies fraseri) dominate the forest canopy.

Bogs
Cranberry bogs harbor species typical of ecoregions found to the north. These species include cranberry and blueberry (Vaccinium spp.), bog rosemary (Andromeda glaucophylla), and buckbean (Menyanthes trifoliata). These bogs are relicts that have survived since the last glacial period.

Other habitats
More unique, restricted habitats within these forests include glades, heath barrens, shale barrens, and sphagnum bogs. These often support endemic plants and land snails.

Prehistoric period
During the Last Glacial Maximum about 18,000 years ago, the influence of Arctic air masses and boreal vegetation extended to about 33° N. latitude, the approximate latitude of Birmingham and Atlanta.  Forests of the glacial period were dominated by various spruces (Picea spp.) and jack pine; fir (Abies spp.) was abundant in some locations. With the exception of the absence of certain prairie elements, the understories of these forests were generally typical of modern spruce-fir forests within and near Canada.  Temperate deciduous forests dominated from about 33° to 30° N. latitude, including most of the glacial Gulf Coast from about 84° W. longitude.  Regional climate was similar to or slightly drier than modern conditions. Oak, hickory, chestnut, and southern pine species were abundant. Walnuts, beech, sweetgum, alder, birch, tulip poplar, elms, hornbeams (Carpinus spp.), basswoods, and others that are generally common in modern southern deciduous forests were also common then.  Grasses, sedges, and sunflowers were also common.

Fauna
The woodlands of the area are rich in wildlife. In particular they are important habitat for migrating birds including wood warblers, vireos, and thrushes. The rivers of the ecoregion have the highest species richness of any freshwater ecosystem. In particular, there are a large number of endemic fish and shellfish species.

Threats
This ecoregion is considered critically endangered with 95% of the habitat degraded or converted to commercial forest. Large areas have been destroyed and fragmented through surface mining, including mountaintop removal. Large areas have also been logged and then converted to plantations of fast-growing tree species, such as Loblolly Pine (Pinus taeda) which are then used to produce wood pulp, which is particularly a problem in the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee. Another threat to habitats come from growing numbers of deer. Major rivers in the ecoregion, such as the Tennessee River, have been dammed. This has resulted in the threatened or endangered status of many species of native fish, amphibians, and shellfish.

Natural areas

The remaining forest is mostly found in protected areas.
 Alabama
 Monte Sano State Park
 Oak Mountain State Park
 Talladega National Forest
 Cheaha Wilderness
 William B. Bankhead National Forest
 Sipsey Wilderness
 Georgia
 Cloudland Canyon State Park
 Kentucky
 Blanton Forest State Nature Preserve
 Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area
 Cumberland Gap National Historical Park
 Daniel Boone National Forest
 Beaver Creek Wilderness
 Kentenia State Forest
 Kentucky Ridge State Forest
 Robinson Forest
 Maryland
 Garrett State Forest
 Potomac State Forest
 Ohio
 Ales Run Wilderness Area
 Beaver Creek State Park
 Blue Rock State Forest
 Brush Creek State Forest
 Brush Creek Wilderness Area
 Burr Oak State Park
 Clear Creek Nature Preserve
 Crown City Wildlife Area
 Dean State Forets
 Egypt Valley Wilderness Area
 Fernwood State Forest
 Highlandtown Wilderness Area
 Hocking State Forest
 Mohican-Memorial State Forest
 Muskingum River State Park
 Perry State Forest
 Pike State Forest
 Salt Fork State Park
 Shade River State Forest
 Shawnee State Forest
 Strouds Run State Park
 Tar Hollow State Forest
 Tri-Valley Wilderness Area
 Wayne National Forest
 Wolf Creek Wilderness Area
 Woodybury State Wilderness Area
 Zaleski State Forest
 Pennsylvania
 Black Moshannon State Park
 Forbes State Forest
 Gallitzin State Forest
 Laurel Hill State Park
 Laurel Ridge State Park
 Moraine State Park
 Ohiopyle State Park
 Prince Gallitzin State Park
 Raccoon Creek State Park
 Roaring Run Natural Area
 Tennessee
 Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area
 Catoosa Wildlife Management Area
 Fall Creek Falls State Park
 Frozen Head State Park
 Prentice Cooper State Forest
 Scott State Forest
 South Cumberland Recreation Area
 South Cumberland State Park
 Virginia
 Parts of Jefferson National Forest
 Stone Mountain Wilderness
 West Virginia
 Babcock State Park
 Beech Fork State Park
 Blackwater Falls State Park
 Canaan Valley National Wildlife Refuge
 Canaan Valley Resort State Park
 Cedar Creek State Park
 Chief Logan State Park
 Coopers Rock State Forest
 Gauley River National Recreation Area
 Holly River State Park
 Kanawha State Forest
 Monongahela National Forest
 Cranberry Wilderness
 Dolly Sods Wilderness
 Otter Creek Wilderness
 Roaring Plains West Wilderness

See also
 Appalachian temperate rainforest
 Western Allegheny Plateau ecoregion: WWF sub−ecoregion on the western Allegheny Plateau.
 List of ecoregions in the United States (WWF)
 List of ecoregions in the United States (EPA)

References

Bibliography

 Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests images at bioimages.vanderbilt.edu

 Data source for map: Olson, D. M. and E. Dinerstein. The Global 200: Priority ecoregions for global conservation. (PDF file) Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 89: pgs. 125-126.

Appalachian forests
Temperate broadleaf and mixed forests in the United States
Ecoregions of the United States
Laurel Highlands
Ecology of the Appalachian Mountains

Plant communities of the Eastern United States
Plant communities of Alabama
Plant communities of Georgia (U.S. state)
Plant communities of Kentucky
Plant communities of Maryland
Plant communities of Ohio
Plant communities of Pennsylvania
Plant communities of Tennessee
Plant communities of Virginia
Plant communities of West Virginia
Appalachian Ohio
East Tennessee
Western Maryland

Appalachian mixed mesophytic forests


Vung Tau (Vietnamese: Vũng Tàu) is a city in Ba Ria-Vung Tau Province, Vietnam. This city has a population of 240,000 and an area of 154.0 km2. This is a petroleum and tourism centre of Vietnam.

History
Vung Tau is located about 120 km northeast of Ho Chi Minh City. Vung Tau town was founded by French colonists under the administration of Paul Doumer, then the Governor General of French Indochina. This city borders Vietnam Sea and has several beautiful beaches.

Cities in Vietnam

Vung Tau


British Rail Class D3/1 was a locomotive commissioned by British Rail in England. It was a diesel powered locomotive in the pre-TOPS period built by the North British Locomotive Company.  The NBL/MAN engines were built by the North British Locomotive Company in Scotland under licence from the German company MAN.

D003.01
NBL locomotives
B locomotives

British Rail Class D3/1


Giacomo Manzù, pseudonym of Giacomo Manzoni (22 December 1908 – 17 January 1991), was an Italian sculptor.

Biography

Manzù was born in Bergamo. His father was a shoemaker. Other than a few evening art classes, he was self-taught in sculpture, and later became a professor himself. He started working with wood during his military service in Veneto in 1928; later, after a short stay in Paris, he moved to Milan, where architect Giovanni Muzio commissioned him the decoration of the chapel of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (1931–1932). In 1933 he exhibited a series of busts at the Triennale di Milano,  which granted him national popularity. The following year he held a personal exhibition in Rome with the painter Aligi Sassu, with whom he shared a studio.

In 1939 Manzù started a series of bronze bas-reliefs about the death of Jesus Christ; the works, exhibited in Rome in 1942, were criticized by the Fascist government and the ecclesiastical authorities. In 1940 he obtained a teaching position in the Accademia di Brera in Milan, but later he moved to the Accademia Albertina in Turin. During World War II Manzù moved to Clusone, returning to teach at Brera after the end of the conflict. He held his teaching position until 1954 when he moved to Salzburg, where he lived until 1960. Here he met Inge Schabel, his future wife, who was the model of a large number of his portraits together with her sister Sonja. He was commissioned in 1957 to design the central doors for Salzburg Cathedral, completed in bronze in 1959. In 1964 he completed the "Death Gate" for the St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. In the same year, he moved to Ardea, near Rome, in a locality now rechristened Colle Manzù in his honour.

He created two sculptures in stiacciato relief at Rockefeller Center on the former Italian building in the 1960s, one titled "The Immigrant" and the other "A Fruitful Harvest".

In the late 1960s, Manzù started to work also as scenographer. In 1977 he completed a "Monument to the Partisan" in Bergamo. His last great work was the 6 m-tall sculpture facing the ONU seat in New York City, inaugurated in 1989.

He was the subject of a famous photographic portrait by Yousuf Karsh.

His works are displayed in prestigious museums and private collections. Although he was an atheist, he was a personal friend of Pope John XXIII and had important liturgical commissions for the Vatican. In the United States, architect Minoru Yamasaki commissioned him the Passo di Danza (dance step) sculpture at the One Woodward Avenue building in Detroit. He also carved the Nymph and Faun at Wayne State University's McGreagor Memorial Sculpture Garden.

Manzù died in Rome in 1991.

Awards
 Gold medal: Italian Order of Merit for Culture and Art (1981)
Lenin Peace Prize (1965)
 Knighthood: Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (1960)

References

Sources

External links

Masters of 20th Century Figure Sculpture
Door of Death in St Peter's
 Antonella Crippa, Giacomo Manzù, online catalogue Artgate by Fondazione Cariplo, 2010, CC BY-SA.

1908 births
1991 deaths
Artists from Bergamo
Italian atheists
Italian contemporary artists
Italian communists
Recipients of the Lenin Peace Prize
Academic staff of Brera Academy
Academic staff of Accademia Albertina
Recipients of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic
20th-century Italian sculptors
20th-century male artists
Italian male sculptors
Honorary Members of the Royal Academy
Recipients of the Italian Order of Merit for Culture and Art

Giacomo Manzù


A Fresnel lens is an optical lens, which was originally developed for Lighthouses. It is named after its inventor, French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel. The name is pronounced  /freɪˈnɛl/ (fray-NELL), the 's' is silent. Before Fresnel,  Buffon and Condorcet proposed a similar design, as a way to make large burning lenses.

The design allows the construction of lenses of large aperture and short focal length without the weight and volume of material that would be required in conventional lens design.  Compared to earlier lenses, the Fresnel lens is much thinner. More light can pass through. Lighthouses that use these kind of lenses can be seen from farther away.

Optics

Fresnel lens


Speak is whan spoken langage is uised for tae communicate. It's juist humans haes langage. Beasts disna hae speak, but some anes can communicate wi ither wi uisin soonds and gesturs.

Speak is made wi soonds dirlin the vocal faulds. Soonds throu the vyce box is shapit wi the jaw, tung, teeth, palate, lips, and nose.

Tae mak speak a bodie haes tae can:

 wale speak soonds
 pit thaim intil a sequence
 mak soond in the vyce box
 uise the lips, tung, teeth, nose and palate for tae shape the soonds

Things can gang wrang in onie pairt o this fower-stage process. A speak and langage therapist can help an wirk oot the bit o the sequence that's gaen agley and gie therapie.

Effective speak haes the follaein elements – fluency, flexibility, accuracy, and comprehensibilitie.

 Fluency is the abilitie tae communicate a message that wis the ane ettelt tae be communicatit, or affect the listener in the wey that the speaker's ettlin tae.

 Flexibility is whaur the message can be fittit tae the responses o the listener. It involves chuisin wirds and expressions that the listener(s) will unnerstaund an aa.

 Accuracy is the uiss o the richt grammar in spoken langage.

 Comprehensibility is the ability tae be understuid by ither fowk. The'r three pairts o soond that influences somebodie's comprehensibility:

 Pronunciation: sayin the soonds o wirds richt;
 Intonation: uisin the richt stress and rhythm while speakin; and
 Enunciation: speakin clear at the richt pace and loodness.

Soorces

Speak


The Act of Security 1704 (also referred to as the Act for the Security of the Kingdom) was a response by the Parliament of Scotland to the Parliament of England's Act of Settlement 1701. Queen Anne's last surviving child, William, Duke of Gloucester, had died in 1700, and both parliaments needed to find a Protestant successor.  The English Parliament had settled on Electress Sophia of Hanover, granddaughter of King James VI and I, without consulting the Scottish Parliament.

The response of the Scottish Parliament was to pass a bill in 1703 requiring that, on the death of Queen Anne without issue, the three Estates of the Parliament were to appoint a Protestant successor from the descendants of the Scottish kings, but not the English successor unless various economic, political and religious conditions were met.  The bill was refused royal assent by the Lord High Commissioner to the Parliament of Scotland.

The following year, 1704, the bill became an Act after the Scottish Parliament refused to raise taxes and sought to withdraw troops from the Duke of Marlborough's army in the War of the Spanish Succession unless royal assent was given.

The English Parliament retaliated with the Alien Act 1705, threatening to cut trade and free movement between the two countries, unless negotiations opened leading either to the repeal of the Act of Security, or (as in the event happened) to an Act of Union. The result was the Union of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707, approximately one hundred years after the Union of the Crowns.

The Parliament of Great Britain passed an Act (Repeal of Certain Scotch Acts 1707, 6 Ann. c. 32) explicitly repealing this Act together with the Act anent Peace and War.

References

See also

1704 in law
1704 in Scotland
Acts of the Parliament of Scotland
Religion in Scotland
Religion and politics
Constitutional laws of Scotland
Heads of state of Scotland
Succession to the British crown
England–Scotland relations
Scottish monarchy
Political history of Scotland
Economic history of Scotland
History of Christianity in Scotland
Taxation in Scotland

Act of Security 1704


th M25 mooturway ees the reeng rud of Lunnon. It wus menna bee purt of th Rengweys Proojuct thut wus nevur bult. The  Durtfurd Crussing purt is th A282. It is vury busy and folk in their curs often cusse truffic jums

M25
25
Streets in the Lunnon Burgh o Enfield
Roads in Berkshire
Transport in Buckinghamshire
Transport in the Lunnon Burgh o Enfield
Transport in Epping Forest
Roads in Essex
Roads in Hertfordshire
Roads in Kent
Roads in Surrey
Transport in Thurrock
Motorweys in Lunnon
Constituent roads o European route E30

M25 motorwey


Sirr Eluan Parker is a former American football running back for Texas A&M University who played professionally in the National Football League (NFL), the Canadian Football League (CFL), and the Arena Football League (AFL).

Youth and high school
Sirr Parker, who was raised in South Central Los Angeles and graduated with honors from Alain Leroy Locke High School, was abandoned by his father when he was three, his mother, who struggled with alcoholism and drug abuse, and raised by his grandparents, and later Parker and his infant brother Donyea stayed with his aunt and uncle. Parker became the Los Angeles Times player of the year, first-team all-state and a second-team All-American pick by USA Today by leading the Los Angeles area in rushing (4,000 yards) and scoring (50 touchdowns) as a senior at Locke High School while playing for a team that went 0–9 that season. He was also the homecoming king and an honor roll student with a 3.9 grade-point average.

College
Parker was a running back at Texas A&M, where he was known for his speed and playmaking ability. He ran a  4.24 40-yard dash which is still a school record, and held the school vertical leap record of 40.5 inches (later broken by Terrence Murphy).

Although injuries cut down on his playing time, he finished his college career by leading the Aggies to the 1998 Big 12 Conference championship his senior year. He helped A&M rally to defeat number 2-ranked Kansas State in the championship game, scoring a touchdown and a two-point conversion late in regulation to tie the score. He scored the winning touchdown on a 32-yard slant from Branndon Stewart on third-and-17 in the second overtime, sealing a 36–33 victory and earning the Aggies an invitation to the Sugar Bowl.
On the year, he rushed for 226 yards and a touchdown on 69 carries while catching eight passes for 106 yards and two touchdowns, and returning nine kicks for 200 yards. His best overall season was his junior year, when he rushed for 800 yards and a team-leading 10 touchdowns on 149 carries (for 5.4 yards per carry) on his way to becoming a Doak Walker Award nominee. He also caught 18 passes for 194 yards and returned five kickoffs, including a 78-yard touchdown return... As a sophomore, he led the Aggies in rushing with 704 yards and two touchdowns on 149 carries while taking the only kickoff he returned 100 yards for a touchdown. As a true freshman, he finished third on the team with 312 yards on 71 carries while catching four passes for 77 yards. Overall as an Aggie, Parker rushed for 2,042 yards and scored 20 touchdowns.

Professional career

NFL
Although Parker was not chosen in the 1999 NFL Draft, he was signed as an undrafted free agent by the San Diego Chargers. The Chargers released Parker in August 1999; he was then signed by the Carolina Panthers. However, he was unable to join the active roster because of a lingering hamstring injury that he sustained at Texas A&M. Parker was placed on the inactive list before being waived once again.

Prior to the 2000 season, Parker was picked up by the Cincinnati Bengals. Because of both his speed and the team's lack of depth in the secondary, the Bengals switched Parker to cornerback, a position he had not played since high school. He spent most of the season on the practice squad. Although he was activated for the last three games of the season (seeing playing time in the final two), he did not record any offensive or defensive statistics. Upon his arrival at Cincinnati's mini-camp in May, Parker was released from the team.

CFL
Parker was signed by the British Columbia Lions prior to the 2001 season, but was released before the start of the season. He signed as a free agent with the Calgary Stampeders the following year. In his first preseason game, he rushed for 66 yards on three carries, but did not make their opening roster, and was once again released.

AFL
Parker was signed as a free agent by the Dallas Desperados to play receiver and defensive back in December 2002. He was inactive for the first nine games of the season before being placed on injured reserve in April 2003. He was activated with one game remaining in the season, but did not play in the season finale or in the playoffs. In January 2004, the Austin Wranglers traded for Parker, but he did not see playing time for the team.

Semi-pro
Parker played the 2005 and 2006 seasons for the Inglewood Blackhawks, a professional developmental football (minor league) team in the La Belle Community Football League. In 2006 Parker was named League Offensive MVP and team MVP when he had 95 receptions and 16 receiving touchdowns, both league records. His 6,578 total yards gained that season is second all-time in minor league football history.

They Call Me Sirr
In 2001, Showtime released They Call Me Sirr, a TV movie about Parker's life starring Kente Scott as Sirr Parker and Michael Clarke Duncan as his high school coach.

References

External links
 A&M preview w/ 40 time
 Panthers article
 Semi-pro football records
 Inglewood highlight video
 CFL article

1977 births
Living people
Players of American football from Los Angeles
American football wide receivers
American football running backs
American football defensive backs
Texas AandM Aggies football players
Cincinnati Bengals players
Players of Canadian football from Los Angeles

Sirr Parker


A macromolecule is a molecule with a large number of atoms. The word is usually used only when describing polymers, molecules which are made up of smaller molecules called monomers. All organic monomers are based on carbon, usually with hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. There are inorganic macromolecules based on other monomers.

Examples
 Proteins, composed of amino acids.
 Nucleic acids.
 DNA, composed of nucleotides.
 RNA, similarly composed, differently structured
 Carbohydrates, composed of monosaccharide sugars.
 Lipids or fats  composed of fatty acids and triglycerides.
 Nylon, composed of polyamides.
 Polythiazyl, composed of polymeric sulphur nitride (SN)x.

Macromolecule


Titration is a type of quantitative chemical analysis. It is used to work out the unknown concentration of a known substance.

It makes the use of two main chemical apparatus namely, pipette and burette. External indicators like phenolphthalein or methyl orange and internal indicators like KMnO4 (potassium permanganate) are used to mark the end point of titration.

A known concentration and volume of a reagent, called the titrant or titrator, is added to a known volume of another reagent, the analyte or titrand. This is done slowly from a burette until the end point is reached. The volume added before the end point is reached is noted. Because one of the solutions, the titrant, has a known concentration, that of the other, the titrand, can be calculated.

Professionals now use a pH meter, which is potentiometer with an electrode whose potential depends on the amount of H+ ions in the solution. The pH of the solution is measured throughout the titration, more accurately than with an indicator. At the endpoint there is a sudden change in the measured pH.

Since volume measurements play a key role in titration, it is known as volumetric analysis as well as quantitative analysis.

References

Analytical chemistry

Titration


The Antarctic Circle is one of the five major circles of latitude that mark maps of the Earth.  It is the parallel of latitude at 66° 33′ 39″ south of the Equator, crossing mostly the Southern Ocean.

In the Antarctic Circle, all places have twenty-four hours of daylight on the Summer Solstice in December.  In June on the Winter Solstice all places have twenty-four hours of night.  There is a minimum of one whole day that the sun does not set and one whole day that the sun does not rise.

The area south of this circle is named the Antarctic, and the zone to the north is the Southern Temperate Zone.

The continent of Antarctica is a land mass that is most of the area within the Antarctic Circle.  The South Pole is in the center of the Antarctic Circle.

There is no permanent population of persons south of the Antarctic Circle. There are research centers from some nations on Antarctica.  Teams of scientists live in the research centers for part of the year. In past centuries some whaling stations were set up on Antarctica and some of the whalers would live there for a year or more. At least three children have been born in Antarctica. It is one of the coldest places on earth.The lowest temperature ever recorded on earth was recorded in Antarctica (-129.3)

Related pages
Southern Hemisphere
Northern Hemisphere
Eastern Hemisphere
Western Hemisphere
Seasons
Solstice and equinox
Equator
Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Capricorn
Arctic Circle

Other websites
Antarctic Circle org
Map

Lines of latitude
Geography of Antarctica
Antarctic region

Antarctic Circle


Lenny Bruce (October 13, 1925 – August 3, 1966), was an American comedian. His real name was Leonard Alfred Schneider. He is considered an innovator of modern stand-up comedy and changed the way many people see comedians. His jokes and routines were very improper and off limits for the time and he got in a lot of trouble for them. He is considered a hero for the defense of the First Amendment rights in the United States, especially for free speech.

In the 1960s he was the last person arrested for impersonating and swearing, overwatched by martial law and police and banned from many cities and comedy clubs.

He appeared on the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.

He died in 1966 of an accidental morphine overdose whist on trial.

In 1970 the New York's highest court of appeals decided that he is "not guilty for using bad words".

1925 births
1966 deaths
American Jews
American stand-up comedians
Comedians from New York (state)
Drug-related accidental deaths in the United States

Lenny Bruce


Traction motor refers to a type of electric motor. A traction motor is used to make rotation torque on a machine. It is usually changed into a straight line motion.

Traction motors are used in electrically powered rail vehicles such as electric multiple units and electric locomotives. They are also used in electric vehicles, such as electric milk floats, elevators, and conveyors. Vehicles with electrical transmission systems such as Diesel-electric locomotives, electric hybrid vehicles and battery powered electric vehicles.

Transportation applications

Railroad
Railroads first used DC motors. These motors usually ran on about 600 volts. High-powered semiconductors were developed to control the switching of AC motors. They have made AC induction motors a better choice. An induction motor does not require contacts inside the motor. These AC motors are simpler, and more reliable than the old DC motors. AC induction motors known as asynchronous traction motors.

Before the mid-20th century, a single large motor was often used to drive multiple wheels through connecting rods. This was the same way that steam locomotives would turn their drive wheels. Now, the normal practice is to use one traction motor to drive each axle through a gear drive.

Usually, the traction motor is mounted between the wheel frame and the driven axle. This is called a "nose-suspended traction motor". The problem with this mounting is that some of the motor's weight is on the axle. This causes the track and frame to wear out faster. The "Bi-Polar" electric locomotives built by General Electric for the Milwaukee Road had direct drive motors. The rotating shaft of the motor was also the axle for the wheels.

The DC motor is made in two parts; the rotating armature and the fixed field windings. The field windings, also called the stator, surrounds the armature. The field windings are made of tightly wound coils of wire inside the motor case. The armature, also called the rotor, is another set of coils of wire wound round the central shaft. The armature is connected to the field windings through brushes. The brushes are spring loaded contacts pressing against the commutator. The commutator sends the electricity in a circular pattern to armature windings. A series-wound motor has the armature and the field windings connected in series. A series-wound DC motor has a low electrical resistance. When voltage is applied to the motor, it makes a strong magnetic field inside the motor. This produces a high amount of torque, so it is good for starting a train. If more current than needed is sent to the motor, there would be too much torque and the wheels would spin. If too much current is sent to the motor, it could damage the motor. Resistors are used to limit the current when the motor starts.

As the DC motor starts to turn, the magnetic fields inside start to join together. They create an internal voltage. This electromagnetic force (EMF) works against the voltage sent to the motor. The EMF controls the current flow in the motor. As the motor speeds up, the EMF falls. Less current flows into the motor, and it makes less torque. The motor will stop increasing its speed when the torque matches (is the same as) the drag on the train. To accelerate the train, more voltage must be sent to the motor. One or more resistors are removed to increase the voltage. This will increase the current. The torque will increase, and so will the speed of the train. When no resistors are left in the circuit, full line voltage is applied directly to the motor.

On an electric train, the train driver originally had to control the speed by changing the resistance manually. By 1914, automatic acceleration was being used. This was achieved by an accelerating relay in the motor circuit. This was often called a notching relay. The relay would watch the fall of current and control the resistance. All the driver had to do was select low, medium or full speed. These speeds are called shunt, series and parallel from the way the motors were wired.

Road vehicles

Traditionally road vehicles (cars, buses and trucks) have used diesel or gasoline engines with a transmission. In the latter part of the 20th century, vehicles with electrical transmission systems began to be developed. These vehicles have a source of electricity from batteries or fuel cells. They may also be powered by an internal combustion engines.

A benefit from using electric motors is that some types can generate energy. They act as a dynamo during braking. This helps improve the efficiency of the vehicle.

Cooling
Because of the high power levels used by traction motors, they create a lot of heat. They usually require cooling, often with forced air.

References

Other websites
 "Deconstructing a traction motor - Associated Rewinds (Ireland) Limited"
 Image of a nose mounted traction motor on an R46 New York City Subway car. The motor can be clearly seen behind the axle with the gear box with the writing on it in the center.
 Another nose mounted traction motor on a wrecked R38 Subway car.
 Coney Island Truck Repair shop; many pictures regarding traction motors
 Detached truck with Traction Motors.
 Information About Electric Vehicles

Motors
Locomotives
Vehicles
Electricity

Traction motor


The coat o airms o Romanie wis adoptit in the Romanie Pairlament on 10 September 1992 as a representative coat o airms for Romanie. It is based on the Lesser Coat o Airms o the Kinrick o Romanie (uised atween 1922 an 1947), redesigned bi Victor Dima. As a central element it shows a gowden aquila hauldin a cross in its beak an a mace an a swuird in its claws. It an aa consists o the three colors: red, yellae, an blue, which represent the colors o the naitional banner.

Romanie
Naitional seembols o Romanie

Coat o airms o Romanie


A disk buffer is a small amount of memory on a hard drive. Sometimes it is also called cache buffer, or disk cache, but these words should not be used, a disk buffer is not  a cache. In early 2015, hard disks usually have between 16 and 128 megabytes of such memory.

Uses

Reading or writing data
When writing data to the disk, the data needs to be written to a certain position on the disk. This is done by a component called disk read/write head.  This head needs to be moved to (or near) the correct track. After some settling time the read head begins to pick up bits. Usually, the first sectors to be read are not the ones that have been requested by the operating system. The disk's embedded computer typically saves these unrequested sectors in the disk buffer, in case the operating system requests them later.

Speed
The disk is attached to the computer by what is called an I/O interface. This interface almost always works at a different speed than that of the hard disk platter. In such a case, the disk buffer is used to store the data that comes from the disk, before it sent to the computer, or to store the data that comes from the computer before it can be written to the disk.

Command queuing
Modern disks often have a feature called command queuing (This is called TCQ in SCSI disks, and NCQ in SATA disks). This means that many commands can be sent at the same time, and the hard disk will put them into the best order. To store the commands and re-order them, the hard disk needs the disk buffer

Hard drives

Disk buffer


The Trinity Cross (abbreviated T.C. or TC) was the highest of the National Awards of Trinidad and Tobago, between the years 1969 and 2008.  It was awarded for: "distinguished and outstanding service to Trinidad and Tobago. It was awarded for gallantry in the face of the enemy, or for gallant conduct."  Either nationals or non-nationals were  awarded the honour, but no more than five may have been awarded in any year.  The President was awarded the Trinity Cross in an ex officio capacity.  The award was first presented in 1969, last conferred in 2005, and was subsequently replaced by The Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago (abbreviated O.R.T.T.) in the year 2008.

Controversy

The name of the award has been criticised as being discriminatory against non-Christians (since it used the Christian symbol of the cross).

Prime Minister Dr. Eric Williams in 1972 prevailed upon a reluctant Dr. Wahid Ali, then President of the Senate of Trinidad and Tobago, and a Muslim, to wear the Trinity Cross; he agreed to accept it only after the Prime Minister promised to change the name of the award in the future. In 1973, then Roman Catholic Archbishop Anthony Pantin declined to go on record in favour of renaming the award, but allowed that he lacked "any strong feelings one way or the other."

In 1995 the Dharmacharya (spiritual head of the Hindu organization, Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha) Pandit Krishna Maharaj, refused to accept the Trinity Cross from Prime Minister Patrick Manning, for his social work on the grounds that it did not represent a true national award involving all religious denominations of  Trinidad and Tobago.

In 1997, a cabinet appointed committee was appointed to look at the issue of the Trinity Cross. The committee was chaired by the then Chief Justice, Mr. Justice Michael de la Bastide; recommendations included encouragement of public consultation on the matter, and the suggestion that "The Order of Trinidad & Tobago" should be considered as "the Trinity Cross...was perceived as a Christian symbol" in this multi-religious society.

In June 2005, High Court Action 2065 of 2004 was heard before Mr. Justice Jamadar in the San Fernando High Court. This was a constitutional motion filed by Satnarayan Maharaj (aka Sat Maharaj), secretary general of the Sanatan Dharma Maha Sabha, and Inshan Ishmael, president of the Islamic Relief Centre of Trinidad and Tobago. The applicants in the case had challenged the constitutionality of the Trinity Cross on the grounds that its continued existence and award were in breach of the applicants' fundamental rights as guaranteed by certain Sections of the Constitution. UK based John Horan, Anand Ramlogan and Sir Fenton Ramsahoye, attorneys for the applicants, argued that the State kept the Trinity Cross, knowing that "non-Christians are unable and unwilling to accept (it) because it is perceived to be and/or in fact is a Christian symbol." The result is an experience of disparate treatment, or unfair discrimination, for "many deserving non-Christian citizens who...will never be rewarded by the State and country."

In May 2006, Mr. Justice Jamadar, an ordained Presbyterian minister, ruled that "the Trinity Cross – the nation's highest award – is strictly a Christian symbol, and as a result, it discriminates in a multi-religious society.... In my opinion, leaving aside the savings clause argument for the moment, the respondent has shown no accommodation whatsoever to ameliorate the indirect adverse discriminating effects of the award of the Trinity Cross on the applicants as Hindus and Muslims and as corporate citizens representing Hindus and Muslims in T&T." Although he found it to be discriminatory, he said that it does not mean that the court can strike it down. As it was protected by the 1976 Constitution, it was a matter for the Parliament to change.

Prime Minister Patrick Manning said in Parliament on 2 June 2006, that the Trinity Cross "will pass into history and this year's National Awards will be conducted on the basis of new and more acceptable arrangements." Manning added that his Cabinet has established a committee, led by UWI history professor Bridget Brereton, to review all aspects of the nation's highest award and also to examine "such other national symbols and observances which may be considered discriminatory." This led to the creation of a new replacement highest award the Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, which was first presented in 2008.

Recipients

References

External links
Image of the Trinity Cross
List of persons conferred with the Trinity Cross
Sat Maharaj, "An award for all" (Editorial), The Trinidad Guardian, 7 May 2003.

Statement by Roman Catholic Archbishop Edward Gilbert on the Trinity Cross issue
"THE TRINITY CROSS". National Awards, NALIS.

Orders, decorations, and medals of Trinidad and Tobago
Awards established in 1969
Awards disestablished in 2006
1969 establishments in Trinidad and Tobago
2006 disestablishments in Trinidad and Tobago

Trinity Cross


A guitar solo is a portion of a musical performance when a guitar is used without other instruments.

In addition to their roles of rhythmic and harmonic accompaniment, guitars are well-suited to performing solo lines. This can take the form of a prominent section where the guitar is heard over other instruments, or unaccompanied, the guitarist providing all the necessary melody and harmony themselves. Many times, a guitar solo is a virtuosic performance in the rock music idiom with a heavily-overdriven electric guitar. However, solo instrumentation for the guitar can be found in a wide variety of musical styles and eras.

Many famous guitarists are known for their solo work. Approaches to solo creation vary from the jagged/atonal approach of Andy Gill from Gang of Four and Andy Partridge from XTC, the studio-produced soundscapes of Jimi Hendrix or Bill Nelson, or the composed approach of Frank Zappa.

The use of the guitar solo in popular music was especially notable during the 1980s, where a flashy and attention-grabbing instrumental was virtually obligatory for a guitar-based band. In later years, guitar solos became viewed as something of an "80s cliché", and their usage declined. Guitar solos in pop music have subsequently become much rarer, and more subdued and understated when used.

Notable rock-guitar soloists
 Eric Clapton
 Jimi Hendrix
 Eddie Van Halen
 Frank Zappa
 Steve Vai
 Joe Satriani
 Yngwie Malmsteen
 Jimmy Page
 Kerry King
 Dimebag Darrell
 Kirk Hammett
 Randy Rhoads
 Zakk Wylde
 John Petrucci
 The Edge (David Howell Evans)
 Carlos Santana

Related pages
 Riff

Guitars

Guitar solo


An asteroid is a minor planet that orbits within the inner solar system. It is a small object in the Solar System that travels around the Sun. It is like a planet but smaller. They range from very small (smaller than a car) to 600 miles (1000 km) across. A few asteroids have asteroid moon.

The name "asteroid" means "like a star" in the ancient Greek language. Asteroids may look like small stars in the sky, but they really do move around the Sun. Like planets, asteroids do not make their own light. Because of this, some people think "asteroids" is not a good name, and think that the name "planetoid" ("like a planet") would be a better name.

Giuseppe Piazzi found the first asteroid, in 1801. He called it Ceres, and it is the biggest object in the asteroid belt. Others, like Juno, Pallas, and Vesta were found later. In the 1850s, so many had been found that they were numbered by a Minor planet designation starting with 1 Ceres. Today, astronomers using computerized telescopes find thousands of asteroids every month. Asteroid impact prediction is one of their purposes.

Asteroids are the leftover rock and other material from the formation of the Solar System. These rocks were too small to come together to make a planet. Some are made of carbon or metal. Depending on what's on the surface, they are classified into various asteroid spectral types including Type M (metal), Type S (stone), and Type C (carbon).

Most asteroids in our Solar System are in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Many are not in the main asteroid belt. The ones that come close to Earth are called Near-Earth asteroids. Some scientists think asteroids striking the Earth killed off all the dinosaurs and caused some of the other extinction events.

References

Asteroid


In music, heterophony is a type of texture characterized by the simultaneous variation of a single melodic line. Such a texture can be regarded as a kind of complex monophony in which there is only one basic melody, but realized at the same time in multiple voices, each of which plays the melody differently, either in a different rhythm or tempo, or with various embellishments and elaborations. The term was initially introduced into systematic musicology to denote a subcategory of polyphonic music, though is now regarded as a textural category in its own right.

Characteristics
Heterophony is often a characteristic feature of non-Western traditional musics—for example Ottoman classical music, Arabic classical music, Japanese Gagaku, the gamelan music of Indonesia, kulintang ensembles of the Philippines, and the traditional music of Thailand. In European traditions, there are also some examples of heterophony. One such example is dissonant heterophony of Dinaric Ganga or "Ojkavica" traditions from southern Bosnia, Croatia and Montenegro that is attributed to ancient Illyrian tradition.
Another remarkably vigorous European tradition of heterophonic music exists, in the form of Outer Hebridean Gaelic psalmody.

David Morton describes the texture in Thai music:

Thai music is nonharmonic, melodic, or linear, and as is the case with all musics of this genre, its fundamental organization is horizontal...

Thai music in its horizontal complex is made up of a main melody played simultaneously with variants of it which progress in relatively slower and faster rhythmic units... Individual lines of melody and variants sound in unison or octaves only at specific structural points, and the simultaneity of different pitches does not follow the Western system of organized chord progressions. Between the structural points where the pitches coincide (unison or octaves) each individual line follows the style idiomatic for the instrument playing it. The vertical complex at any given intermediary point follows no set progression; the linear adherence to style regulates. Thus several pitches that often create a highly complex simultaneous structure may occur at any point between the structural pitches. The music "breathes" by contracting to one pitch, then expanding to a wide variety of pitches, then contracting again to another structural pitch, and so on throughout. Though these complexes of pitches between structural points may strike the Western listener as arbitrary and inconsequential, the individual lines are highly consequential and logical linearly. The pattern of pitches occurring at these structural points is the basis of the modal aspect of Thai music.

He goes on to suggest the term polyphonic stratification, rather than heterophony:

The technique of combining simultaneously one main melody and its variants is often incorrectly described as heterophony: polyphonic stratification seems a more precise description, since each of the 'layers' is not just a close approximation of the main melody, but also has distinct characteristics and a style of its own

Examples

Heterophony is somewhat rare in Western Classical music prior to the twentieth century.  There are examples to be found in some works of J.S. Bach:

as well as Mozart: and Mahler:

In the 20th century, Benjamin Britten used heterophony to great effect in many pieces, including parts of the War Requiem and especially in the instrumental interludes of his three church parables: Curlew River, The Burning Fiery Furnace and The Prodigal Son. Peter Evans explains it as follows: "So unexpectedly stark were the sounds Britten drew from this group, and in particular so little dependent of his familiar harmonic propulsion, that listeners were ready to trace direct exotic influences in many features of the score." Other examples include Pierre Boulez's Rituel, Répons, and …explosante-fixe….

Heterophony is a key element in the music of Canadian composer Jose Evangelista.

References

External links

Musical texture

Heterophony


King Fergus I (said to have flourished c. 330 B.C.), is generally identified as the son of Ferchard, Prince of Scots in Ireland and is the first of the line of Legendary kings of Scotland.

The "first king of Scotland", according to the fictitious chronologies of Boece and Buchanan, is said to have come to Scotland from Ireland about 330 B.C. to assist the Scots already settled in Scotland against the joint attack of the Picts and Britons. After succeeding in this he is further said to have gone back to Ireland to quell disturbances which had arisen in his absence, and to have been drowned in the passage off the port which got the name of Carrickfergus from him. According to Fordoun, Wyntoun, and most of the earlier genealogical lists of Scottish kings, the same account is given of the settlement of the Scots from Ireland by a King Fergus, son of Ferchard. According to others of the lists, Ferchard or Feardach, the father of Fergus, was the first and Fergus the second king. There follows a series of thirty-nine or forty-five kings between Fergus I and Fergus II, son of Earc. The critical insight of Father Innes demolished these fabulous lists of kings, and put the chronology of Scottish history on a sound foundation, by his proof that Fergus II, son of Earc, who came to Scotland about the end of the fifth century A.D., was in reality the first Dál Riata king in Scotland. Innes's results have been adopted by subsequent historians.

The invention and persistent acceptance during so many centuries, from the twelfth to the eighteenth, of a fabulous series of kings is, though not unparalleled, a singular specimen of the genealogical myth which flatters the vanity of nations as of families. It is supposed to have been due to the desire to establish a higher antiquity for the Scottish peoplehood, royal line, and church, than could be claimed for the Irish or English. It is of course not inconsistent with the rectified chronology of Innes that even prior to 503 A.D. there may have been Celts of the Scottic culture settled in Scotland. Scots had aided the Picts in opposing the Romans in the fourth century, and Bede evidently inclines to an earlier date for the Scottish settlement. All that can be safely said is that there is no proof of any Dál Riata kingdom till the commencement of the sixth century, and that the account given by Boece and Buchanan of Fergus, the son of Ferchard, and his successors, is as devoid of historical foundation as the statement that "his coming into Albion was at the time when Alexander the Great took Babylon, about 330 years before the birth of Christ".

Buchanan, from whom this sentence is quoted, attempts to save his own credit by prefixing the words "historians say that", but by adopting it he became himself one of these historians, and gave the fabulous narrative a prolonged existence. Father Innes presses somewhat hardly on Boece, for the origin of this narrative dates back at least as early as the twelfth century, but the special blame undoubtedly attaches to Boece and still more to Buchanan that they clothed the dry list of names with characters, and invented events or incidents which gave the narrative more of the semblance of history.

A portrait of Fergus I by Dutch painter Jacob de Wet II, who painted many mythical Scottish kings, hangs in the Great Gallery of Holyrood Palace. An engraving of Fergus and his genealogy is housed in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

See also
 Goídel Glas

References

Mythological kings
Scottish mythology

Fergus I (mythological king)