Surat Shabd Simran is a type of spiritual meditation in the Sant Mat tradition.

Etymology
Surat is "attention" or "face", that is, an outward expression of the soul; Shabd or Shabda has multiple meanings including 'sacred song', 'word', 'voice', 'hymn', 'verse', or 'sound current, 'audible life stream', and the 'essence of the Absolute Supreme Being'. The Absolute Supreme Being is a dynamic force of creative energy sent out into the abyss of space at the dawn of the universe's manifestation, as sound vibrations. These vibrations continue and are sent forth through the ages, framing all things that constitute and inhabit the universe. Yoga is literally 'union', or 'to yoke'. Etymologically, Surat Shabd Yoga means the 'Union of the Soul with the Essence of the Absolute Supreme Being'.

Surat Shabda Yoga is also known as Sehaj Yoga – the path leading to Sehaj or equipoise, The Path of Light and Sound, The Path of the Sants or 'Saints', The Journey of Soul, and The Yoga of the Sound Current.

Basic principles
Surat Shabda Yoga is for the discovery of True Self (Self-Realization), True Essence (Spirit-Realization), and True Divinity (God-Realization) while living in the human physical body. This involves reuniting in stages with what is called the "Essence of the Absolute Supreme Being", also known as the "Shabd or Word". Attaining this extent of self-realization is believed to result in jivan moksha/mukti, which is liberation/release from samsara and positivity in the cycle of karma and reincarnation. Initiation by a contemporary living Satguru (Sat - true, Guru - teacher) is considered a prerequisite for successful sadhana (spiritual exercises). The sadhanas include simran (repetition, particularly silent repetition of a mantra given at initiation), dhyan (concentration, viewing, or contemplation, particularly on the Inner Master), and bhajan (listening to the inner sounds of the Shabd). The mantra is Guru Manter. These are some verbal words that one gets from living masters and chants in mind, not with the mouth. As the language varies from culture to culture, Guru Manter or Mantra may also vary from culture to culture in spirituality. On the other hand, Naam or Word of God or Kalma is unspeakable, alive and no one can write it on paper. In the new testament "Hebrews 4:12" states, "For the Word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it pierces even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. It judges the thoughts and intentions of the heart." Words which we write on paper are not alive and active. According to Scripture, the Word of God has existed since the beginning of the world, prior to any man-made language.

Surat Shabd Yoga arose in India in the last several hundred years, specifically in the Sikh tradition (Nanakpanthi) founded by Guru Nanak. The practice of meditation (Shabad), which is the central core practice of Surat Shabd Yoga, is derived from the ancient Hindu practice of nāda yoga. Nada yoga is expounded in various Hindu scriptures such as the Nadabindu Upanishad, an ancient text affiliated with the several thousands-year-old Rig Veda. The practice of nāda yoga within Hinduism has been widely affiliated within many yoga traditions including bhakti or devotional yoga, kundalini and tantric yogas, laya yoga, and raja yoga. Modern Hindu teachers still emphasizing nada yoga include Swami Sivananda, Swami Rama, Rammurti Mishra (Shri Brahmananda Sarasvati), Paramahansa Yogananda (Kriya Yoga Lineage), and many others. The practice of nāda yoga is an integral part of various other traditions as well, such as being a form of the advanced thogal practice in the Tibetan Dzogchen lineage, and is mentioned by H. P. Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society in her book "The Voice of the Silence". The form of Surat Shabd Yoga, practiced by followers of Sant Mat and the Sikh tradition (nanakpanthi), is most commonly related to nāda yoga. Furthermore, nāda yoga resembles and combines elements from the Hindu practices of raja yoga, laya yoga, and bhakti yoga.

Movements and masters

Adherents believe Surat Shabda Yoga has been expressed through the movements of many different masters. However, a basic principle of Surat Shabd Yoga's tradition is the requirement for an outer Living Master to initiate followers onto the Path. The movements whose historical Satgurus have died and their successors do not purport themselves to be Surat Shabd Yoga Satgurus, usually are not considered currently to be Surat Shabd Yoga movements, either by their own leaders or by movements with current Living Masters.

Satguru Maharshi Mehi Paramahansa Ji Maharaj is considered the movement leader in the 20th century. He came to an isolated cave of Kuppaghat, Bhagalpur (Bihar, India) and practiced Surat-Shabda Yoga from March 1933 - November 1934. He achieved self-realization and attained ultimate salvation during his practice. He wrote books "Moksha-Darshan (Philosophy of Salvation), "Satsang-Yoga", "Shri Gita-Yoga Prakash", "Raamcharit Maanas Saar-Satik", "Maharshi-Mehi-Padaawali" and "Maharshi-Mehi-Padawaali".

The Radha Soami movement of Surat Shabda Yoga was established by Shiv Dayal Singh (1818–1878) in 1861 and named "Radhasoami Satsang" circa 1866. Soamiji Maharaj, as he was known, presided over the satsang meetings for seventeen years at Panni Gali and Soami Bagh in Agra, India, until he died on June 15, 1878.  Accounts of his guru and successors vary, although he gave verbal instructions on his last day as to how his followers should be cared for. According to Radha Soami Satsang Beas, his guru was Tulsi Sahib of Hathras. According to the successors Soami Bagh and Dayal Bagh, Tulsi Sahib  was a contemporary guru of the same teachings; but being a natural born Satguru, Seth Shiv Dayal Singh Ji himself had no guru.

After his death, six immediate successors carried on Shiv Dayal Singh's teachings, including Huzur Maharaj Rai Salig Ram of Peepal Mandi, Agra, and Babaji Maharaj Baba Jaimal Singh of Radha Soami Satsang Beas (RSSB). More information on living masters related to Seth Shiv Dayal Singh Ji's lineage can be found in the Contemporary Sant Mat movements article.

Sant Kirpal Singh, a contemporary Sant Mat guru, stated that "Naam" ("Word") has been described in many traditions through the use of several different terms. In his teachings, the following expressions are interpreted as being identical to "Naam":
"Naad", "Akash Bani", and "Sruti" in the Vedas
"Nada" and "Udgit" in the Upanishads
"Logos" and "Word" in the New Testament
"Tao" by Lao Zi
"Music of the Spheres" by Pythagoras
"Sraosha" by Zoraster
"Kalma" and "Kalam-i-Qadim" in the Qur'an
"Naam", "Akhand Kirtan", and "Sacha ('True') Shabd" by Guru Granth Sahib

The more recently promulgated Quan Yin Method of meditation espoused via the spiritual teachings of Supreme Master Ching Hai has notable similarities to Surat Shabd Yoga.

Eckankar, an American movement, has many links to Surat Shabd Yoga including terminology, although its American founder Paul Twitchell disassociated himself from his former teacher Kirpal Singh.

The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness, also founded in America in 1971 by John-Roger and now with students in thirty-two countries, also teaches a similar form of active meditation called spiritual exercises. This movement uses the Sound Current and ancient Sanskrit tones in order to traverse and return to the higher realms of Spirit and into God.

The MasterPath is another contemporary American movement of Surat Shabda Yoga. Gary Olsen, the current Living Master of this branch, contends that several historical figures are Sat Gurus of Surat Shabda Yoga as representatives for the eternal Inner Shabda Master. A few of these Living Masters of their times include Lao Tsu, Jesus, Pythagoras, Socrates, Kabir, the Sufi Masters, and mystic poets, Hafez and Rumi, the Ten Sikh Gurus beginning with Guru Nanak, Tulsi Sahib, and the Radhasoami/Radha Soami and offshoot Masters, including Seth Shiv Dayal Singh Ji, Baba Sawan Singh, Baba Faqir Chand, and Sant Kirpal Singh.

The ten Sikh Satgurus (Nanak Panthis) discuss the inner sound and inner light a lot in their scriptures. The first Sikh Satguru was Guru Nanak, but his master (guru) was Waheguru. These masters teach these two techniques. There is a master, Satpal Maharaj, that teaches four techniques that include these two of inner light and inner music. Altogether He teaches inner light (sight), inner music (hearing), primordial vibration (sense of touch), and nectar (taste and smell).

These correspond to the five senses, and this is how a student turns them inward to experience what is inside of himself. See Vishnu with his four arms and they correspond to these. One hand is holding a circle (chakra) of light, one holding a  conch shell for the inner sound (hold it to the ear and a sound is heard), one holding a lotus flower to refer to nectar, and finally the fourth hand is holding a metal club (mace) for the inner vibration (if you hit something with it, it vibrates like a tuning fork). Some people refer to this inner energy as the soul.

The Line of Succession of sikhs
THE LINE OF SUCCESSION FROM KABIR TO PRESENT
From Kabir to present, the Masters of the Divine Science of Light and Sound appear and manifest themselves as an uninterrupted line, through which they transmitted to each successor the one knowledge and the one Power. Subsequently, we can trace an
exact "family tree" from Kabir Sahib (1398-1518) to Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji (1469-1539) and further as shown below:

ਹੁਕਮੁ ਪਛਾਨੈ ਸੁ ਏਕੋ ਜਾਨੈ ਬੰਦਾ ਕਹੀਐ ਸੋਈ॥੩॥ (GGSG-Page No.1350-3)...Saint Kabir
Translation: One who will recognize the Command (Hukam), will know One Lord, we call him the real man.

ਸਚਾ ਸਉਦਾ ਹਰਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਹੈ ਸਚਾ ਵਾਪਾਰਾ ਰਾਮ॥ (GGSG-Page No.570)
Translation: The True merchandise(ਸਚਾ ਸਉਦਾ) is the Lord`s Naam. Trader Raam is the truth.

Above line in the book "Guru Granth Sahib Ji" verifies that during the true merchandise (ਸਚਾ ਸਉਦਾ) when Guru Nanak Dev Ji fed the hungry saints and he got the Naam from them. Whereas in books when we read the history of Guru Nanak Dev Ji, we find no information regarding true merchandise of Word or Naam of God. This line also verifies that Guru Nanak Dev Ji also interacted with living SattGuru where from he got the Naam.

ਏਕੋ ਨਾਮੁ ਹੁਕਮੁ ਹੈ ਨਾਨਕ ਸਿਤਗੁਿਰ ਦੀਆ ਬੁਝਾਇ ਜੀਉ॥੫॥ (GGSG-Page No.72) ..Guru Nanak
Translation: The One "Naam" is the Lord's Command, O Nanak, the "True Guru(teacher)" helped me to guess the lamp (light).
(Here One Naam means One Word, and Hukam also addresses the Naam of God)

ਦੇਹੀ ਅੰਦਰਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਨਿਵਾਸੀ॥ (GGSG-Page No.1026)
Translation: The Naam or Word or Kalma, abides deep within the body.

This line demonstrates that the Naam of God is something present in the body. One will get it within his own home i.e body where the spirit lives. Body is the current home of the spirit. After Guru Nanak Dev Ji below are the nine SattGurus (i.e Teachers of truth) of the Sikhs who got the success in the history and lead the community of Sikhs:
Sri Guru Angad Dev Ji (1504-1552),
Sr Guru Amar Das Ji (1479-1574),
Sri Guru Ram Das Ji (1534-1581),
Sri Guru Arjan Dev Ji (1563-1606),
Sri Guru Har Gobind Sahib Ji (1595-1644),
Sri Guru Har Rai Sahib Ji (1630-1661),
Sri Guru Har Krishan Ji (1656-1664),
Sri Guru Teg Bahadur Ji (1621-1675)
and Sri Guru Gobind Singh Ji (1667-1708).

Variations in movements
Among the exponents of Surat Shabd Yoga and the commonly shared elements related to the basic principles, notable variations also exist. For example, the followers of the orthodox Sikh faith no longer lay emphasis on a contemporary living guru. Different Surat Shabd Yoga paths will vary in the names used to describe the Absolute Supreme Being (God), including Anami Purush (nameless power) and Radha Soami (lord of the soul); the presiding deities and divisions of the macrocosm; the number of outer initiations; the words given as mantras; and the initiation vows or the prerequisites that must be agreed to before being accepted as an initiate.

Notes and references

External links

 Website of Ruhani Satsang USA
 Website of Sant Kirpal Singh Unity of Man
 Website of School of Spirituality

Creation myths
Meditation
Sant Mat

Surat Shabd Yoga


The Special Operations Executive (SOE) was a British World War II organisation. It was officially formed on 22 July 1940 under Minister of Economic Warfare Hugh Dalton. It was formed by combining three existing secret organisations. Its purpose was to conduct espionage, sabotage and reconnaissance in occupied Europe  against the Axis powers, and to aid local resistance movements. Later there were also reconnaissance missions in  occupied Southeast Asia.

One of the organisations from which SOE was created was also involved in the formation of the Auxiliary Units, a top secret "stay-behind" resistance organisation which would have been activated in the event of a German invasion of Britain.

Few people were aware of SOE's existence. Those who were part of it or liaised with it sometimes referred to as the "Baker Street Irregulars", after the location of its London headquarters. It was also known as "Churchill's Secret Army" or the "Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare". Its various branches, and sometimes the organisation as a whole, were concealed for security purposes behind names such as the "Joint Technical Board" or the "Inter-Service Research Bureau", or fictitious branches of the Air Ministry, Admiralty or War Office.

SOE operated in all countries or former countries occupied by or attacked by the Axis forces, except where demarcation lines were agreed with Britain's principal Allies (the Soviet Union and the United States). It also made use of neutral territory on occasion, or made plans and preparations in case neutral countries were attacked by the Axis. The organisation directly employed or controlled just over 13,000 people, about 3,200 of whom were women.

After the war, the organisation was officially dissolved on 15 January 1946. A memorial to SOE's agents was unveiled on the Albert Embankment by Lambeth Palace in London in October 2009.

References

Organisations based in the United Kingdom
World War II

Special Operations Executive


John Stig Claesson (June 2, 1928 – January 4, 2008) was a Swedish writer and illustrator. He also was known by his signature Slas.

Biography
Claesson was born on June 2, 1928 in Huddinge, south of Stockholm. He went to the Royal Swedish Academy of Arts between 1947 and 1952, when he began to illustrate Swedish classical books such as those written by Per Anders Fogelström.

Claesson was the father of actor Leif Claesson. Stig died on January 4, 2008 in Stockholm.

Other websites
 Obituary in the Dagens Nyheter (Swedish)

1928 births
2008 deaths
Swedish writers
Swedish illustrators

Stig Claesson


In broadcasting, a transposer or translator is a device in or beyond the service area of a radio or television station transmitter that rebroadcasts signals to receivers which can't properly receive the signals of the transmitter because of a physical obstruction (like a hill). A translator receives the signals of the transmitter and rebroadcasts the signals to the area of poor reception. Sometimes  the translator is also called a relay transmitter, rebroadcast transmitter or transposer. Since translators are used to cover a small shadowed area, their output powers are usually lower than that of the radio or television station transmitters feeding them.

Physical obstruction

Reception of RF signals is sensitive to the size of obstruction in the path between the transmitter and the receiver. Generally speaking, if the size exceeds the wavelength the reception is interrupted. Since the wavelength is inversely proportional to frequency, it follows than that the higher frequency broadcast is more sensitive to objects between the transmitter and receiver. If the transmitter and the receiver were at the opposite sides of a hill, MW radio signals may  be received,  but UHF TV signals won't be received at all.  That's why translators are mostly employed for VHF and UHF broadcasting (television and FM radio).

Translator circuitry

Broadcast station transmitters have the following stages:

Audio (AF) or video (VF) frequency buffer stages
Modulator
IF stages
Mixer (IF → RF)
RF output stages (RF amplifiers and filters)

FM and TV translator stations have the following stages.

RF input stages (RF amplifiers with AGC and band-pass filter)
Input mixer (RF → IF)
IF stages
Output mixer (IF → RF)
RF output stages (RF amplifiers and filters).

The output stages of both devices are similar, but the input stages are quite different. There is no baseband audio or video input to the translator.  The translator receives an over-the air RF input signal by means of an antenna, just like a home receiver. Since received signal is already modulated there is no need for a modulator. Instead an input mixer or down-converter shifts the radio-frequency (RF) signal down to an intermediate-frequency (IF) signal.  A second mixer (known as output mixer or up-converter) shifts the IF signal back up to the FM or TV band output signal frequency.

Relationship between input and output RF signals.

In order to stabilize the output power, the amplification of the input RF signal is automatically controlled by PIN diodes  If the frequency of the output signal were to be set equal to the frequency of the input RF signal, the output RF would feed back from the output antenna to the input antenna and the input stage would overload, completely blocking out the translator. Because of this, the translator output frequency must be different from the input signal frequency. Input and output band-pass filters further isolate the two signals.

Future of the translator
In North America FM and TV translators were common before satellite broadcasting. With the introduction of satellite broadcasting (TVRO and RRO), some TV translator operators abandoned their stations or switched over to low power TV station (LPTV) licenses because of the higher broadcast quality provided by non-over-the-air input program streams.

With the operation of an FM or TV translator being less expensive than the same power full-service station they remained an attractive signal delivery alternative.

The transition from the analog NTSC television broadcasting standard to the digital ATSC standard resulted in a resurgence in popularity of TV translator systems in the United States.

The introduction of In-band on-channel (IBOC) hybrid analog digital FM (HDFM) technologies provided further opportunities for translator system operators.

See also

Broadcast relay station
TV transmitters
Transmitters
Output power of an analog TV transmitter
Radial (radio)
Earth bulge

References and notes

Broadcast engineering
Television technology

fi:Toisiotutka#Toisiotutkavastain

Transposer


Pierre François Marie Louis Boulle (20 February 1912 – 30 January 1994) was a French author. He is best known for two works, The Bridge over the River Kwai (1952) and Planet of the Apes (1963), that were both made into award-winning films.

Boulle was an engineer serving as a secret agent with the Free French in Singapore, when he was captured and subjected to two years' forced labour. He used these experiences in The Bridge over the River Kwai, about the notorious Death Railway, which became an international bestseller. The film, named The Bridge on the River Kwai, by David Lean won seven Oscars, and Boulle was credited with writing the screenplay, because its two actual screenwriters had been blacklisted.

His science-fiction novel Planet of the Apes, in which intelligent apes gain mastery over humans, was adapted into a series of nine award-winning films that spawned magazine and TV versions and popular themed toys.

Life and career
Born in Avignon, France, Pierre Boulle was baptised and raised as a Catholic, although later in life he became an agnostic. He studied at the prestigious École supérieure d'électricité (Supélec) where he received an engineer's degree in 1933. From 1936 to 1939, he worked as a technician on British rubber plantations in Malaya.  While there he met a Frenchwoman who was separated from her husband. She was to become the love of his life, to whom he would write tender love letters. She later chose to return to her husband, an official in French Indochina. During World War II she and her husband escaped into Malaya, but one of her children died in the process. Boulle would later meet her after the war, and they enjoyed a platonic friendship.

At the outbreak of World War II, Boulle enlisted with the French army in Indochina.  After German troops occupied France, he joined the Free French Mission in Singapore. During the war he was a supporter of Charles de Gaulle.

Boulle served as a secret agent under the name Peter John Rule and helped the resistance movement in China, Burma, and French Indochina. In 1943, he was captured by Vichy France loyalists on the Mekong River and was subjected to severe hardship and forced labour.  He was later made a chevalier of the Légion d'Honneur and decorated with the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille de la Résistance.  He described his war experiences in the non-fiction My Own River Kwai. After the war he would keep in touch with his war comrades for the rest of his life.

After the war, Boulle returned to work for a while in the rubber industry, but in 1949 he moved back to Paris and began to write. While in Paris, too poor to afford his own flat, he lived in a hotel until his recently widowed sister, Madeleine Perrusset, allowed him to move into her large apartment. She had a daughter, Françoise, whom Pierre helped raise, but plans for him to officially adopt the girl never materialized.

The Bridge over the River Kwai

While in Paris, Boulle used his war experiences in writing Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï (1952; The Bridge over the River Kwai), which became a multi-million-copy worldwide bestseller, winning the French "Prix Sainte-Beuve".  The book was a semi-fictional story based on the real plight of Allied POWs forced to build a  railway that passed over the bridge, and which became known as the "Death Railway". 16,000 prisoners and 100,000 Asian conscripts died during construction of the line.  His character of Lt-Col. Nicholson was not based on the real Allied senior officer at the Kwai bridges, Philip Toosey, but was reportedly an amalgam of his memories of collaborating French officers. Both the book and film outraged former prisoners because Toosey did not collaborate with the enemy, unlike the fictional Colonel Nicholson. Boulle outlined the reasoning which led him to conceive the character of Nicholson in an interview which forms part of the 1969 BBC2 documentary Return to the River Kwai made by former POW John Coast. A transcript of the interview and the documentary as a whole can be found in the new edition of John Coast's book Railroad of Death.

David Lean made the book into a motion picture that won seven 1957 Oscars, including the Best Picture, and Best Actor for Alec Guinness. Boulle himself won the award for Best Adapted Screenplay despite not having written the screenplay and, by his own admission, not even speaking English.  Boulle had been credited with the screenplay because the film's actual screenwriters, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, had been blacklisted as communist sympathizers. Boulle was neither a socialist nor a communist. The Motion Picture Academy added Foreman's and Wilson's names to the award in 1984.

Kim Novak accepted the Oscar on behalf of Pierre Boulle.

Planet of the Apes

In 1963, following several other reasonably successful novels, Boulle published his other famous novel, La planète des singes, translated in 1964 as Monkey Planet by Xan Fielding, and later re-issued as Planet of the Apes. The book was highly praised and given such reviews as this example from England's Guardian newspaper: "Classic science fiction ... full of suspense and satirical intelligence." In the year 2500, a group of astronauts, including journalist Ulysse Mérou, voyage to a planet in the star system of Betelgeuse. They land to discover a bizarre world where intelligent apes are the Master Race and humans are reduced to savages: caged in zoos, used in laboratory experiments and hunted for sport. The story focuses on Ulysse's capture, his struggle to survive, and the shattering climax as he returns to Earth and a horrific final discovery. The novel is also a wry parable on science, evolution, and the relationship between man and animal.

In 1968, the book was made into an Oscar-winning film, directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and starring Charlton Heston. The screenplay, originally written by Rod Serling, focused more on action and deviated in many ways from the novel, including the addition of its own classic twist ending that was different from the novel's. It inspired four sequels, a television series, an animated series, a 2001 remake of the original title by Tim Burton, and a 2011 reboot, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, directed by Rupert Wyatt.

The five films of the original series (1968–1973) have become cult classics.  Boulle, who had thought his novel to be unfilmable, was taken by surprise at the worldwide success and impact of the film. He wrote a script for a sequel titled Planet of the Men, but the producers of the original film turned it down. The second film, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, which came out in 1970, was also very successful. It was followed by Escape from the Planet of the Apes in 1971, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes in 1972, and Battle for the Planet of the Apes in 1973.

In September 1973, the original film was first aired on network television. The marketing of toys and other products relating to the film series skyrocketed at this time, creating an 'Apemania' craze. In June 1974, Marvel Comics also released a magazine based on the novel and film called Planet of the Apes. By September 1974, Planet of the Apes had become a television series.  In 1975, an animated Return to the Planet of the Apes series was shown on television.

Other adaptations
The French film Le Point de mire, based on Boulle's novel Le Photographe, was released in 1977. There have also been TV films based on Boulle's novels William Conrad in 1958 (US) and 1973 (France), La Face in 1959 (US) and 1966 (West Germany), and Un Métier de Seigneur in 1986 (France), as well as the short story "Le Miracle" (from E=mc2) in 1985 (US).

Another film adaptation is in production for Boulle's A Noble Profession (Un Métier de Seigneur), a spy thriller partly based on Boulle's real-life experience working as a secret agent during the Second World War.  The movie is being produced by Tessa Bell and Andrea Chung.

Death
Pierre Boulle died in Paris, France, on 30 January 1994, at age 81, three weeks before his 82nd birthday.

Works

Novels
William Conrad (1950; tr. in 1955 as Not the Glory by Xan Fielding; also issued as Spy Converted)
Le Sacrilège malais (1951; tr. in 1959 as Sacrilege in Malaya by Xan Fielding; also issued as S.O.P.H.I.A.)
Le Pont de la rivière Kwaï (1952; tr. in 1954 as The Bridge over the River Kwai by Xan Fielding)
Le Bourreau (1954; tr. in 1961 by Xan Fielding, US title: The Executioner, UK title: The Chinese Executioner)
L'Épreuve des hommes blancs (1955; tr. in 1957 as The Test by Xan Fielding; also issued as White Man's Test)
La Face (1956; tr. in 1956 as Saving Face by Xan Fielding; also issued as Face of a Hero)
Les Voies du salut (1958; tr. in 1958 as The Other Side of the Coin by Richard Howard)
Un métier de seigneur (1960; tr. in 1960 as A Noble Profession by Xan Fielding; also issued as For a Noble Cause)
La Planète des singes (1963; tr. in 1964 as Monkey Planet by Xan Fielding; later issued as Planet of the Apes)
Le Jardin de Kanashima (1964; tr. in 1965 as Garden on the Moon by Xan Fielding)
Le Photographe (1967; tr. in 1967 by Xan Fielding, US title: The Photographer, UK title: An Impartial Eye)
Les Jeux de l'esprit (1971; tr. in 1973 as Desperate Games by Patricia Wolf)
Les Oreilles de jungle (1972; tr. in 1972 as Ears of the Jungle by Michael Dobry and Lynda Cole) - story of the Vietnam war told from the perspective of a North Vietnamese commander
Les Vertus de l'enfer (1974; tr. in 1974 as The Virtues of Hell by Patricia Wolf)
Le Bon Léviathan (1978; tr. in 1978 as The Good Leviathan by Margaret Giovanelli)
Les Coulisses du Ciel (1979; tr. in 1985 as Trouble in Paradise by Patricia Wolf)
L'Énergie du désespoir (1981)
Miroitements (1982; tr. in 1986 as Mirrors of the Sun by Patricia Wolf)
La Baleine des Malouines (1983; tr. in 1984 by Patricia Wolf, US title: The Whale of the Victoria Cross, UK title: The Falklands Whale)
Pour l'amour de l'art (1985)
Le Professeur Mortimer (1988)
Le Malheur des uns... (1990)
À nous deux, Satan ! (1992)
L'Archéologue et le Mystère de Néfertiti (2005; posthumous)

Short story collections
Contes de l'absurde (1953)
E=mc2 (1957)
Histoires charitables (1965)
Time Out of Mind: And Other Stories (1966; twelve stories from Boulle's first three collections tr. by Xan Fielding and Elisabeth Abbott)
Quia absurdum: sur la Terre comme au Ciel (1966; tr. in 1970 as Because It Is Absurd: On Earth as It Is in Heaven by Elisabeth Abbott)
Histoires perfides (1976; tr. in 1977 as The Marvelous Palace And Other Stories by Margaret Giovanelli)
L'Enlèvement de l'obélisque (2007; posthumous)

Non-fiction
 Le Siam (Walt Disney) (1955; tr. in 1958 as Walt Disney's Siam by Herbert Knapp)—in Walt Disney's "Le Monde et ses habitants"/"The World and its Inhabitants" series
 L'étrange croisade de l'empereur Frédéric II (1963)
 Aux sources de la rivière Kwaï (1966; tr. in 1967 by Xan Fielding, US title: My Own River Kwai, UK title: The Source of the River Kwai)—memoir
 L'univers ondoyant (1987)
 L'îlon (1990)—memoir

References

External links

1912 births
1994 deaths
Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery
Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award winners
Best British Screenplay BAFTA Award winners
Knights of the Legion of Honour
French agnostics
French military personnel of World War II
French science fiction writers
Writers from Avignon
Recipients of the Croix de Guerre 1939–1945 (France)
Recipients of the Resistance Medal
20th-century French novelists
20th-century French male writers
French male screenwriters
French male novelists
Free French military personnel of World War II
20th-century French screenwriters
Planet of the Apes

Pierre Boulle


In medicine the term comorbidity is used to describe diseases and conditions that often occur together with another disease or condition. The first disease or disorder is called primary. In many cases, the primary condition or disease does not cause the comorbid disorders. However, they may both be caused or partly caused by the same thing, for example a genetic mutation or a traumatic experience.

As an example, a patient may have antisocial personality disorder and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. The two conditions are comorbid. Another patient might suffer from borderline personality disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder and bipolar disorder. The three conditions are comorbid.

Diseases

Comorbidity


A beam is a structural  element that carries structural load.

Beams generally carry vertical forces, but can also be used to carry horizontal loads (Those loads can result from wind or an earthquake).  The loads that a beam carries are led to columns or walls, which lead the force to the next element.

Beams are characterized by their profile (their shape), their length, and their material.  In constructions of today beams are mostly made of steel, reinforced concrete, or wood.

Architectural elements

Beam (structure)


Sir William Morice (6 November 1602 – 12 December 1676) of Werrington in Devon, was an English statesman and theologian. He served as Secretary of State for the Northern Department and a Lord of the Treasury from June 1660 to September 1668.

Life
Morice was educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He was elected Member of Parliament for Devon to fill a vacancy in 1648, but was excluded in Pride's Purge in December of that year, probably before he had taken his seat. Nevertheless, he was appointed High Sheriff of Devon in 1651, and returned to Parliament as MP for Devon in the First Protectorate Parliament elected in 1654. He subsequently represented Devon again in the Second Protectorate Parliament, Newport (Cornwall) in the Third Protectorate Parliament.

A relation of General Monck, Morice assisted in the Restoration and was knighted in 1660. He was also made a Privy Counsellor and appointed Secretary of State for the Northern Department, an office he held until he resigned in 1668; he was apparently an undistinguished minister, but justified his tenure of office by his usefulness in the House of Commons. In the Convention Parliament of 1660 he was re-elected for Newport but was also elected for Plymouth, which he chose to represent, and was that city's MP until his death 16 years later.

In 1657, during the Commonwealth, he published a treatise on the administration of the sacrament to all church members.

Marriage and children
Morice married Elizabeth Prideaux, a daughter of Humphrey Prideaux (abt 1573–1617) of Soldon, and Honor Fortescue, by whom he had children including
Sir William Morice, 1st Baronet (c.1628–1690), eldest son and heir, MP, created a baronet in 1661.
John Morice (c. 1630–1705), MP.
Nicholas Morice (c.1640–1712), MP.
Anne (b. c.1653), who married Sir John Pole, 3rd Baronet
Thomasine, who married Sir Walter Moyle

Notes

References

 Sir George Clark, The Later Stuarts 1660-1714 (2nd edition - Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955)

|-

1602 births
1676 deaths
Secretaries of State for the Northern Department
High Sheriffs of Devon
Alumni of Exeter College, Oxford
English MPs 1640–1648
English MPs 1654–1655
English MPs 1656–1658
English MPs 1659
English MPs 1660
English MPs 1661–1679
Members of the Parliament of England (pre-1707) for Devon
Members of the Parliament of England for Plymouth

William Morice (Secretary of State)


A farm is a piece of land used to grow crops  and/or raise animals.

People who grow these plants or raise these animals are called farmers. This work is called farming.

Land that is used to grow plants is called farmland.  Land that is used to feed animals with its grass is called pasture.  Land that can be used to grow plants for food is called arable land.

Many farms are very large and can cause damage.  In some places farms are many and small, and can also cause damage.  Farms provides most of the food for people.  Some people farm to eat the food they produce (subsistence agriculture). Other farms, including large ones, sell their products to markets far away in urban areas (commercial or industrial farming). Most subsistence farms are in poorer countries, while industrial farms are in richer countries.

Kinds of farms

 A farm that produces fruits or nuts is called an orchard.
 A farm that produces grapes is called a vineyard.
 A farm that raises and trains horses is called a stable.
 A farm that produces milk and dairy products is called a dairy farm.
 If the animals are raised for meat it is a ranch.
 A large farm that produces non-essential crops like tobacco, coffee, cotton or sugarcane is called a plantation.

Related pages
 Farming
 Ranch

Basic English 850 words

Farm


A Gentile is a person who is not Jewish. It is polite to use this word when needed to describe a person who is not Jewish, as in "my friend Robert is a Gentile." Up until about a hundred years ago, it was very hard (and unlikely) for Jews and Gentiles to be close friends. This is because they would be expected to ask each other over for dinner, but Jews follow strict laws about what they can and cannot eat. They can only eat what is kosher.

Related pages
Goy
Israelite

Judaism

Gentile


Apulia First of All (La Puglia Prima di Tutto, PPT) is a regionalist-centrist political party in Italy active in Apulia, as local branch of Forza Italia.

The party was launched in 2005 as a civic list in support of Raffaele Fitto, the outgoing President of the Region of Forza Italia. In the 2005 regional election PPT gained 9.2% of the vote and 5 seats in the Regional Council, while Fitto was defeated by Nichi Vendola.

The party has since organized on a stable basis and gained some autonomy from Fitto, although it can be considered a sort of sister-party of The People of Freedom, the party in which Fitto and Forza Italia merged in 2009. Since then PPT is led by Salvatore Greco, a former deputy of the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats.  In the 2010 regional election the party obtained 7.1% and 4 regional councillors, including Greco.

2005 establishments in Italy
Political parties established in 2005
Political parties in Apulia

Apulia First of All


A gramophone record (or just record) is a type of analog storage medium. It stores recorded music (or other sounds). It was popular during most of the 20th century. Gramophone records are played on a phonograph ("record player").

A gramophone record is a flat disk that is usually made of plastic. The sound is recorded on a very fine line or groove which goes around and around in a spiral from the outside edge of the disk to the center. The phonograph plays the sound with a needle that touches the groove. A record usually has different music on each side. When made of vinyl they were also known as vinyl records. Most music made in the 20th century used this format.

Thomas Edison made early phonographs in the 1870s. He originally used tin foil to record the sound.  Soon wax cylinders were used in place of the tin foil. The cylinders could be taken off the machine and put back on without destroying the recording. Although discs were made as early as 1888, it was not until 1902 that discs became more popular than cylinder records. Discs were first made of a shellac mixture, and later of polyvinyl chloride, often abbreviated as "vinyl". Singles usually carried only one or two songs or recordings. EPs (extended play records) carried from three to five songs. Albums carried many more recordings; a dozen was normal, or from 30 to 45 minutes of playing time. These formats are still used today, with digital recordings, and playing time for singles and albums has grown considerably.

Vinyl records lost popularity but never went out of production. Now, in recent years vinyl is gaining popularity, while CD record shops have gone out of business, more and more vinyl only record shops are opening. CD and other digital formats have a much higher objective sound quality (closeness to the original) than vinyl, being identical to the original within the limits of human hearing, but many argue the higher subjective (heard by the ear) sound quality of vinyl compared to newer formats. This higher subjective quality comes from changes to the sound caused by the record cutting and pressing process. This sound is very subjective, and not everyone prefers the sound of vinyl over CD.

References

Audio disc
Storage devices

Gramophone record


The Nature Company was a Berkeley, California-based chain of retail stores that sold scientific toys, telescopes, artwork, fossils, minerals and gems, books, clothing, and music CDs.

The Nature Company was founded in 1972 by Priscilla and Tom Wrubel. Starting from its flagship store on El Dorado Avenue Berkeley, it expanded throughout the United States, and had stores in Canada and the United Kingdom. In 1996, it was purchased by Discovery Channel, at a price of $40 million (~$ in ).  At the time, it had 114 stores in malls, airports, and on shopping streets. Prior to the sale it was owned by CML Group, the holding company for NordicTrack (fitness equipment), Boston Whaler and Smith & Hawken (gardening equipment).

From 1996 to 2000, approximately 75% of The Nature Co. stores were converted into Discovery Channel stores. By the end of 2001, all of the Nature Co. stores were closed or converted.

Nature Company Stores were recognizable by their stone entranceway arch and water feature, customized to each location. All stores had extravagantly built custom cabinetry to showcase the maps, fossils, minerals and gems that were sold. The original store concept was designed by the San Francisco office of the award-winning retail architect Richard Altuna. Later stores in the chain were designed and rolled out by the San Francisco office of the firm NBBJ.

References

Companies based in Berkeley, California
Defunct retail companies of the United States
Defunct companies based in the San Francisco Bay Area
Retail companies established in 1972
Retail companies disestablished in 1996
1972 establishments in California
1996 disestablishments in California
Retail companies based in California

The Nature Company


A mechanism is a mechanical device for doing something. It includes the idea of tools and machines, but is used for a wider range of objects, processes and ideas.

Palaeolithic hand axes were one of the first tools used. Simple modern mechanisms would be rope pulleys or levers. The internal combustion engine is a mechanism for turning oil into motion. A complicated example would be computers and the web.

The word "mechanism" is also used as a metaphor. The celestial mechanics  of Kepler and Newton is a way of predicting and explaining planetary motions in the Solar System. Darwin's natural selection is his proposed mechanism as to how evolution took place.

In that way, a mechanism in science or technology is an explanation of how something works or might work.

Philosophy of science
Engineering

Mechanism


Guido Herman Fridolin Verbeck (born Verbeek) (23 January 1830 – 10 March 1898) was a Dutch political advisor, educator, and missionary active in Bakumatsu and Meiji period Japan. He was one of the most important foreign advisors serving the Meiji government and contributed to many major government decisions during the early years of the reign of Emperor Meiji.

Early years
Verbeck was born in Zeist, Netherlands as the sixth of eight children in a Moravian family. As a young man, he studied at the Polytechnic Institute of Utrecht in hopes of becoming an engineer. At Zeist he grew up speaking Dutch, German, French and English.

Life in the United States
At the age of twenty-two, on the invitation of his brother-in-law, Verbeck traveled to the United States to work at a foundry located outside of Green Bay, Wisconsin, which had been developed by Moravian missionaries to build machinery for steamboats. Verbeck stayed in Wisconsin for almost a year, during which time he changed the spelling of his name from "Verbeek" to "Verbeck" in the hope that Americans could better pronounce it. However he wanted to see more of America and moved to Brooklyn, New York where his sister had previously lived. He then decided to work as a civil engineer in Arkansas, and designed bridges, structures and machines. However, in Arkansas he was deeply moved by the lives of slaves in the southern plantations, and the teachings of Henry Ward Beecher, the famed preacher whose sister was Harriet Beecher Stowe, writer of Uncle Tom's Cabin. After almost dying from cholera, he swore that he would become a missionary if he recovered. In 1855 he entered a seminary in Auburn, New York, where many Dutch had immigrated.

Life in Japan
Verbeck graduated in 1859, and moved to Nagasaki as a missionary for the Dutch Reformed Church. Since housing in the foreign settlement had not yet been constructed, his first dwelling was at the Sōfuku-Temple (Sōfukuji), where Ranald MacDonald had previously stayed.

In 1862 Wakasa Murata, retainer of Nabeshima Naomasa, the 10th and final daimyō of Saga Domain in Hizen Province, sent three young men to study English with Verbeck, beginning a deep relation between Verbeck and the Saga domain.

Verbeck also taught foreign languages, politics, and science at the Yōgakusho (School for Western Studies) in Nagasaki, from August 1864.  Initially he taught two hours a day, five days a week. Soon there were more than one hundred students at the school. Verbeck's pupils included Ōkuma Shigenobu, Itō Hirobumi, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Sagara Tomoyasu (Chian), and Soejima Taneomi. In 1865, French and Russian were added to the curriculum, and the school was renamed Gogakusho (Language School). In September of that same year the school was moved again and given the name Seibikan. Here, Verbeck taught both German and English classes. The texts that he preferably used were the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Verbeck cooperated with Takahashi Shinkichi to publish the Satsuma Dictionary. The first edition was printed by the American Presbyterian Mission Press in Shanghai. In 1873, a revised edition was printed in Tokyo.

In 1869, recommended by Ōkubo, Verbeck received an appointment as teacher at the Kaisei School (later Tokyo Imperial University). At one point, future Prime Minister Takahashi Korekiyo was a boarder at Verbeck's house.

Verbeck also served as a counselor of the Meiji government under Sanjō Sanetomi. In close cooperation with Sagara Tomoyasu (Chian), one of his former pupils, Verbeck recommended German medicine as a model for modern medical education and practice in Japan. He was also often consulted about the establishment of the prefectural system of local administration and influential in encouraging the dispatch of the Iwakura mission, the first Japanese diplomatic mission to the United States and Europe

In 1871 Verbeck assisted in bringing William Elliot Griffis of Rutgers University to Japan to teach at the Fukui Domain academy Meishinkan per the invitation of daimyo Matsudaira Norinaga.

In September 1871 the Ministry of Education was established and Verbeck became an advisor, providing inspiration for the Education Order of 1872 and the Conscription Ordinance of 1873.

As the ban of Christianity in Japan was lifted in February 1873, Verbeck was permitted to resume his missionary efforts.

Verbeck made a trip to Europe on 6 months' leave given by the Japanese government and traveled to meet up with the Iwakura Mission. On his return to Japan, he resigned from the university, and spent the next few years as a translator of English legal documents into Japanese.

In 1877, he taught at the Gakushuin, and was appointed the first trustee of Meiji Gakuin University in 1886.

In 1887, Verbeck translated the Old Testament Psalms and Book of Isaiah into Japanese.

Verbeck attempted to return to the United States in 1890 with his daughter, but was refused by the American government, as he could not prove his Dutch nationality and his application for American nationality based on his previous stay in the United States was denied. The Japanese government responded by granting Verbeck permanent residency and issuing him a passport.

Verbeck died in Tokyo of a heart attack in 1898 and was buried in the foreign section of the Aoyama Cemetery in central Tokyo.

Descendants
Guido and Maria had six sons and three daughters. His son Gustave emigrated to the United States and gained some fame as a newspaper cartoonist. Another son, William, was Adjutant General of the State of New York, and head of the Manlius School, near Syracuse, New York. His grandson, Guido Verbeck III served in the army. His great grandson, Guido Verbeck IV, is, as of 2012, a professor of chemistry at the University of North Texas.

Honors
 Order of the Rising Sun.

Further reading

References

External links

 Nikon Instruments Inc. Congratulates Dr. Guido Verbeck (the great grandson of the person of this article, Guido Verbeck IV)
 Guido F. Verbeck, IV (the great grandson of the person of this article) /  University of North Texas

1830 births
1898 deaths
Foreign advisors to the government in Meiji-period Japan
Protestant missionaries in Japan
Dutch expatriates in Japan
Foreign educators in Japan
Foundrymen
People from Zeist
Recipients of the Order of the Rising Sun
Dutch Protestant missionaries
Dutch Reformed Church missionaries
Burials in Japan
Translators of the Bible into Japanese

Guido Verbeck


A hobby is a leisure activity that people do for fun or recreation. People do it because they like it.

Arts and crafts
Some people do arts and crafts. They make clothing or decorations with their hands. Some popular arts and crafts that involve textiles or fabrics include crocheting, sewing (making clothing), embroidery, knitting, and quilting.

Some people like to do hobbies that involve making images on paper, such as scrapbooking, painting, and drawing. Some people like to make three-dimensional decorations using clay or wood, in the hobbies of pottery, sculpture, wood carving, and woodworking.

Some other arts include movie-making, photography, and musical hobbies such as singing, playing musical instruments, and writing songs.

Games and puzzles
Some people enjoy hobbies such as playing games or solving puzzles. Games include board games such as chess, card games, and newer games such as wargaming and role-playing games. Popular puzzles include jigsaw puzzles and crossword puzzles.

Reading and learning
Some people enjoy spending their time reading books, magazines, and newspapers, or writing stories or in a diary. Other people enjoy learning foreign languages by taking classes, or doing research, such as genealogy.

In the 2000s, many people have Internet-based hobbies, such as editing Wikipedia, writing their own blogs, or having online discussions in Newsgroups or online forums.
Some people enjoy computer activities, such as computer programming, learning about open source software, or playing computer games. Some people enjoy learning about electronics such as doing amateur radio broadcasts or building robots.

Hobbies in the home
Some people enjoy working on their home and learning how to repair their home by themselves, without hiring repair people or plumbers. Some people enjoy learning how to repair motor vehicles, such as antique cars. Some people even build and repair sailboats in their backyard.

Many people have hobbies that they do in the kitchen, such as cooking for their guests and family, and making their own beer. Many people also have hobbies in their home that involve animals, such as keeping a pet animal, such as a dog, a cat, or tropical fish.  Some people even learn about dog breeding.

Collecting

Collecting is a popular hobby in North America and in Europe. People enjoy finding interesting examples of different items and learning about them. Some of the well-known types of collecting include stamp collecting, coin collecting, video game collecting, trading cards such as baseball cards, and Pokémon cards. People also collect toys, books, comic books, and old records. Some people collect antiques and artwork, but these hobbies are more rare, because antiques and artwork are usually expensive.

A type of hobby that is related to collecting is model building. People who do model-building as a hobby collect small models which they build, paint, and then display. Some common types of model-building hobbies include model airplanes, model rockets, model ships, model cars, and model railways.

Outdoor activities and sports
Outdoor hobbies include bird feeding, birdwatching, canoeing, gardening, hiking, walking, and sports such as baseball, bowling, cycling, fishing, hunting, and sailing.

Other hobbies
Many people spend a lot of time in leisure activities that are not necessarily called hobbies. Some people disapprove of spending time on these activities. These activities include watching too much television, drinking alcohol, and taking illegal drugs.

Related pages
List of hobbies

Other websites
 Hobby -Citizendium

Hobby


Divorce is a process where a marriage is ended in the eyes of the law; after a couple divorces, they are no longer married. When a divorce happens, the couple must do many things, like decide who gets to care for the child or who owns certain things.

There are many reasons why a couple may divorce one another. One of the married people may have had sex with someone who wasn't their partner, or the two married people didn't like each other.

Divorce is different from annulment. In annulment, the couple is said to not have been married in the eyes of the law. In divorce, the couple was married, but isn't anymore.

Methods of divorce
The laws are different in every country, but usually there are two ways reasons for a divorce in law: because of a bad act by one person and divorce with no bad act. In some countries it is important who did the bad act. This may have an effect on decisions about the money and property of the two people. Normally a divorce comes in force some time after the decision of approval.

Divorce with no bad doing
Under this system, divorce is possible with no argument about a bad act by one of the married people. In some countries it is enough to make a statement that the relation is broken and it is not possible for it to be fixed. This is true in the United States for example. It is not necessary to say that one of the married people was responsible. The system lets two married people make a request together or only one.

Divorce with facts in support of a bad deed by one person
In most systems of law it is necessary to give facts about a bad act by one married person to get a divorce. The person may give arguments against the decision. Examples of this sort of reason for a divorce are:
 One person did violent or unsafe acts against the other person or their sons or daughters
 addiction (where the person is dependent on a substance)
 crimes or support for crimes by other people
 the other person was untrue
 the other person got married a second time
 the other person went far from the family with no reason

Different ways of getting a divorce

Quick divorce
In some systems it is possible to get a quick divorce with simple rules. The important questions then are:
 Were they married for a short time? (normally less than 5 years)
 Do they have sons or daughters? If yes, is there an agreement about who is responsible for them?
 Do the people have a house or land?
 Does their common property have a low value in money?
 Does the separate property of the two persons have a low value?

Divorce with no argument
About 95% of divorces in the United States are without argument because the two people are able to come to an agreement about the property, their sons and daughters, and other questions. The agreement may be made with the help of lawyers (experts on laws).

In some countries, there are special systems which give help to people. For example, they are able to go a hearing with a judge but no lawyers. Lawyers may have discussions with the people to make an agreement. In some systems, an expert with experience of divorces makes decisions in place of a judge.
In Russia two people are able to get a divorce in the office where the government keeps records of births marriages and deaths. One person or the two married persons make the request and it will be given if:
 they are in agreement about the divorce; and
 they do not have sons or daughters less than 18 years old.
Then, the office will give knowledge of the request to the other person. After this time, the other person has one month to make an argument in writing against the request. Then the office will put a stop to the request.

Impacts
A divorce can be very stressful; some people become depressed or sad after a divorce. If there are children, the children may also feel sad when the parents are divorced. However, there are many resources that can help people who are divorcing, such as therapists, counselors, books, and DVDs.

The biggest impact is always felt the children who are often force to grow up with only one parent. This reaches its climax when the one parent taking care of the child is forced to work all day and doesn't have time for the child. Children who have broken homes are twice as likely to drop out of high school dropout
If the parents remarry, the children of their new husband or wife are their stepchildren. "Step-" can be put before any relation to show it is from another marriage. If there are children in the new marriage, children from a former marriage are called half-brothers or half-sisters, since they are "half" related.

People who are trapped in abusive relationships might divorce as a way of help.

Divorce in different cultures
The law of divorce is different in every country. Only two countries do not allow divorce, the Philippines and the Vatican. In the Philippines, only Muslims,  are allowed to divorce, and the Vatican is the only country with no law of divorce. In the Philippines and the Vatican, married people are not able to end their relation, but it is possible for them to say they were never married for example, because of an error. Most religions do not agree with the couples divorcing. Divorce in Australia follows the no-fault principle, which was established by the Family Law Act 1975. This means that the court does not need to know the reason for the divorce, just that the marriage has broken down irretrievably.

Related pages
 Child custody
 Disengagement

References

Other websites

 Armchair Advice - Divorce Information  UK specific information & advice on divorce.
Family law
Marriage

Divorce


Nitrogen dating is a form of relative dating which relies on the reliable breakdown and release of   amino acids from bone samples to estimate the age of the object. For human bones, the assumption of about 5% nitrogen in the bone, mostly in the form of   collagen, allows fairly consistent dating techniques.

Compared to other dating techniques, Nitrogen dating can be unreliable because  leaching from bone is dependent on temperature, soil pH, ground water, and the presence of microorganism that digest nitrogen rich elements, like collagen. Some studies compare nitrogen dating results with dating results from methods like fluorine absorption dating to create more accurate estimates. Though some situations, like thin porous bones might more rapidly change the dating created by multiple methods.

References
Lyndsie Krogh Sr. at Stanford University

Dating methodologies in archaeology
Nitrogen cycle
Nitrogen

Nitrogen dating


For the electric plug-in hybrid concept car, see Chevrolet Volt.
For the record label, see Volt Records
The volt (symbol: V) is the SI derived unit of electric potential difference or electromotive force (also known as voltage). It is named in honor of the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta (1745–1827), who invented the voltaic pile, the first chemical battery.

Definition
The volt is defined as the potential difference across a conductor when a current of one ampere dissipates one watt of power. Hence, it is the base SI representation m2 · kg · s−3 · A−1, which can be equally represented as one joule of energy per coulomb of charge, J/C.

Hydraulic analogy
In the hydraulic analogy sometimes used to explain electric circuits by comparing them to water-filled pipes, voltage is like water pressure - it determines how fast the electrons will travel through the circuit. Current (in amperes), in the same analogy, is a measure of the volume of water that flows past a given point, the rate of which is determined by the voltage, and the total output measured in watts. The equation that brings all three components together is: volts × amperes = watts

Common voltages

Nominal voltages of familiar sources:
 Nerve cell action potential: around 30 mV
 Single-cell, rechargeable NiMH or NiCd battery: 1.2 V
 Mercury battery 1.355 V
 Single-cell, non-rechargeable alkaline battery (e.g. AAA, AA, C and D cells): 1.5 V
 Lithium polymer rechargeable battery: 3.75 V
 Transistor-transistor logic (TTL) power supply: 5 V
 PP3 battery: 9 V
 Automobile electrical system: 12 V (nominal)
 Household mains electricity: 230 V RMS in Europe, Australia, Asia and Africa, 120 V RMS in North America, 100 V RMS in Japan (see List of countries with mains power plugs, voltages and frequencies)
 Rapid transit third rail: 600 to 700 V (see List of current systems for electric rail traction)
 High speed train overhead power lines: 25 kV RMS at 50 Hz, but see List of current systems for electric rail traction for exceptions.
 High voltage electric power transmission lines: 110 kV RMS and up (1150 kV RMS is the record as of 2005)
 Lightning: Varies greatly, often around 100 MV.

Note: Where 'RMS' (root mean square) is stated above, the peak voltage is  times greater than the RMS voltage for a sinusoidal signal.

History of the volt
In 1800, as the result of a professional disagreement over the galvanic response advocated by Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta developed the so-called Voltaic pile, a forerunner of the battery, which produced a steady electric current. Volta had determined that the most effective pair of dissimilar metals to produce electricity was zinc and silver. In the 1880s, the International Electrical Congress, now the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), approved the volt for electromotive force. The volt was defined as the potential difference across a conductor when a current of one ampere dissipates one watt of power.

Related pages
 SI for unit prefixes
 SI electromagnetism units
 Voltmeter
 Watt
 Ampere

References

Other websites
 Volt -Citizendium

Electricity
SI derived units

Volt


Frankfurt is the name of two cities in Germany:
 Frankfurt am Main in Hesse
 Frankfurt (Oder) in Brandenburg

Historical territories and entities, centered in Frankfurt am Main:
 Grand Duchy of Frankfurt, which existed from 1810 to 1813; its center was Aschaffenburg
 the Free City of Frankfurt, which was one of four city states in the German Confederation. It existed from 1816 to 1866.

Historical territories and entititie, centered in Frankfurt (Oder):
Regierungsbezirk Frankfurt (1815-1945)
Frankfurt (Bezirk), was one of forteen Administrative divisions of East Germany. It existed from 1952 to 1989.

There is a city with a similar spelling:
 Frankfort, Kentucky, the capital of Kentucky, USA

Franfurt is the family name of:
Harry Frankfurt, born 1929, US philiosopher
Suzie Frankfurt,1931-2005, US designer and artist

Frankfurt (disambiguation)


Sir Malcolm Arnold (born Northampton, 21 October 1921; died 23 September 2006) was an English composer.  He is famous for writing symphonies, concertos and movie music.  People disagree about whether he is one of the really great composers, or just a very skilled musician.  His music is often very tuneful, sometimes it is sentimental.  He could write music very quickly.  His famous music for the movie The Bridge on the River Kwai was composed in ten days.

Life
In 1938 Malcolm Arnold went to the Royal College of Music to study composition with Gordon Jacob.  He started his career as a trumpeter with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, later becoming principal trumpet.  By the late 1940s he was concentrating on his composing career.

Arnold was composing at a time when many composers were writing music which was quite atonal which made it hard to understand, but Arnold's music is tonal and there are many tunes which are easy to remember.  He wrote nine symphonies and several concertos for different instruments, even unusual instruments like the harmonica.  Some of his best orchestral works are the set of dances: English Dances , Scottish Dances  and  Cornish Dances .  He also wrote 2 operas, 7 ballets and 2 string quartets. His overture Tam O'Shanter is very exciting.  It tells in music the story in the poem by Robert Burns.

Arnold wrote music for 132 films.  The most famous is The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) for which he won an Oscar.  He was the first British composer ever to have won this award. This movie includes the famous Colonel Bogey March.  This march had been written many years earlier by Kenneth J. Alford, but Arnold composed a countermelody to it.  His original music for the movie includes the famous River Kwai March (this is not the same as the Colonel Bogey March).   Other movies for which he wrote music include The Belles of St Trinian's (1954), The Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958) and Whistle Down the Wind (1961).

He was made a CBE in 1970 and was knighted in 1993.

Youth orchestras and amateur orchestras enjoy playing his works because they are an exciting mixture of classical, jazz, popular and folk music, and are not too difficult to play.

Arnold's health was often very poor. At times he fought with alcoholism and depression, and in his later years with dementia.  He had moved to Dublin in 1972, but moved back to England in 1984 and settled in Attleborough, Norfolk.  His full-time carer Anthony Day helped him a lot during his final years.

Arnold died from a chest infection in September 2006.

References

1921 births
2006 deaths
20th-century English composers
People from Northampton
British trumpeters

Malcolm Arnold


Butte Valley National Grassland is a  United States National Grassland located in northern California. Administered by the United States Forest Service, Klamath National Forest, it is located in northern Siskiyou County, near the Oregon border, between the communities of Dorris and Macdoel along U.S. Highway 97. It was dedicated in July 1991 as the nation's 20th National Grassland.  It is administered as part of the Klamath National Forest, and is the sole National Grassland in California and in Region 5 (Pacific Southwest) of the Forest Service. Administrative offices are located in Macdoel, California.

Geography
The area is located in the Klamath River basin at an elevation of approximately . The annual precipitation is approximately . It consists primarily of flat, sandy soils and a dry lake bed. The area includes sweeping views of the Cascade Range and Mount Shasta.

History
The area attracted homesteaders in the late 19th century who ditched, drained, plowed, and grazed the land. Overuse caused a decline in productivity that was exacerbated by the drought of the 1930s. The U.S. government purchased submarginal lands in 1937. The lands were then administered by the Soil Conservation Service (now the Natural Resources Conservation Service) which began stabilizing the land by planting of over  of crested wheatgrass. In the 1940s a portion of the area was used as bombing range. Grazing of the land continued until its designation as a National Grassland in 1991.

Flora and fauna
The current habitat of the grassland consists of open sagebrush, rabbit brush, juniper and native bunch grasses.

Bird watching is a popular recreational activity. Birds found in the grassland include sage thrasher and Brewer's sparrow in the spring, summer and fall. Resident bird species include the horned lark and lark sparrow. Nesting raptors include golden eagle, prairie falcon, red-tailed hawk and Swainson's hawk, drawn by resident rodents in the fields. Ferruginous hawk have successfully nested in recent years.

See also

Native grasses of California
Grasslands of California

References

External links
 Butte Valley National Grassland - Klamath National Forest

Grasslands of California
National Grasslands of the United States
Protected areas of Siskiyou County, California
Cascade Range
Klamath National Forest

Butte Valley National Grassland


A radio telescope is a type of antenna used for radio astronomy.  The majority look like a huge satellite television dish.  Stars shine, and the light can be seen with an ordinary telescope, but they also give off radio waves.  Scientists with radio telescopes receive these radio waves and use computers to learn about the stars.  Other things like black holes also give off radio waves, and radio telescopes are useful for learning about them too.

The dish is sometimes constructed of a conductive wire mesh whose openings are smaller than a wavelength. The information received by several radio telescopes in different places can be combined. This gives similar results to having a single dish as big as the distance between the telescopes. It can receive very faint signals, and see more details. The biggest telescope is a virtual radio telescope almost as big as the Earth, called the Event Horizon Telescope.

The radio telescope at the Parkes Observatory, Parkes, New South Wales was used by NASA to receive messages from the Apollo 11 moon landings.

Related pages
 Atacama Large Millimeter Array

Telescopes

Radio telescope


Women in Switzerland gained the right to vote in federal elections after a referendum in February 1971. The first federal vote in which women were able to participate was the 31 October 1971 election of the Federal Assembly. However it was not until a 1990 decision by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland that women gained full voting rights in the final Swiss canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden.

An earlier referendum on women's suffrage was held on 1 February 1959 and was rejected by the majority (67%) of Switzerland's men. Despite this, in some French-speaking cantons women obtained the right to vote in cantonal referendums. The first Swiss woman to hold political office, Trudy Späth-Schweizer, was elected to the municipal government of Riehen in 1958.

Swiss political system and universal suffrage
The principal reason for the delay of the Swiss relative to the other European countries was the importance of direct democracy in the political system. The introduction of federal and cantonal universal suffrage necessitated the vote of the majority of the electors, men in this case, for a referendum. Moreover, a new federal constitutional reform likewise had to be approved by the majority of the cantons. Another reason was the tight connection, since the constitution of 1848, between the right to vote and military service in the Swiss Army, which was compulsory for men.

Direct democracy also allowed the introduction of woman suffrage via the initiative. Many cantons had initiatives for the right to vote prior to 1971. For example, the canton of Basel-Stadt had referendums on women's suffrage in 1920, 1927, and 1946.

Representation of women in political institutions

Federal Assembly
The number of women in the Swiss National Council, the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Switzerland, went from 10 in 1971 to 50 in 2003, and from 1 to 11 in the 46-member Swiss Council of States, the upper house, in the same period.  there were 64 women out of 200 members (32%) in the National Council and 7 out of 46 (15.2%) in the Council of States.

Lise Girardin (member of FDP.The Liberals) served as the first female Councillor of States from 1971 to 1975, and was also the first mayor of a Swiss city, namely Geneva in 1968.

The first women elected in 1971 in the Swiss parliament

Federal Council
The first female member of the seven-member Swiss Federal Council, Elisabeth Kopp, served from 1984 to 1989.

Ruth Dreifuss, the second female member, served from 1993 to 1999, and was the first female President of the Swiss Confederation for the year 1999.

Two women, Micheline Calmy-Rey and Ruth Metzler-Arnold, served on the Swiss Federal Council from 1999 to 2003; when Ruth Metzler-Arnold failed to be re-elected in 2003, the number fell back to one. With the election of Doris Leuthard in 2006, there were again two, and, after January 2008, three with the arrival of Eveline Widmer Schlumpf. Micheline Calmy-Rey was elected President of the Swiss Confederation for 2007 and 2011.

On 22 September 2010, the Federal Council changed to a female majority for two years with the addition of Simonetta Sommaruga. Doris Leuthard was elected President for the years 2010 and 2017, and Eveline Widmer Schlumpf for the year 2012, Simonetta Sommaruga for the year 2015. The female representation dropped back to three in 2012, and further down to two women in 2016.

Since 2019 there are three female members of the Federal Council: Simonetta Sommaruga (elected in 2010), Viola Amherd (since 2019) and Karin Keller-Sutter (since 2019).

Cantonal level
, 37 women serve on cantonal executives (24% of a total of 154); 722 serve as representatives in cantonal parliaments (27.7% of 2609).

Municipal level
, 277 women serve in town executives (26% of 789); 1,598 serve as representatives in town parliaments (31.3% of 3,508).

Lise Girardin was in 1968 the first female mayor of a Swiss city, Geneva, and also served as the first female Councillor of States (1971–1975).

Corine Mauch (member of the Social Democratic Party) presides the largest Swiss city Zürich as its mayor since 2009.  she has been re-elected in first round as Stadtpräsidentin for another 4 years. She is openly gay and lives in a relationship.

Chronology

Constitution of 1848
The constitution of 1848, the origin of modern Switzerland, proclaims the equality in the eyes of the law of all human beings (in German, Menschen) but does not explicitly include women in that equality. However, the laws that followed that constitution rigidly placed women in a situation of legal inferiority.

Debate over women's rights: 1860–1887
From 1860 to 1874, the first feminist movements were organized and, contemporaneously, the first constitutional revision of 1874; the political rights of women became the object of numerous discussions. In 1886, a first petition from a group of eminent women led by Marie Goegg-Pouchoulin was presented to the Federal Assembly. The attention attracted by this initiative opened the way for the first article about the claims of women in a large daily, Ketzerische Neujahrsgedanken einer Frau (Heretical New Years' Thoughts of a Woman), by Meta von Salis published in 1887 by the Zürcher Post. In the same year, Emilie Kempin-Spyri demanded before the federal court the right to become a lawyer. Her request was refused.

Women's rights organizations: 1893–1898
In 1893, Frauenkomitee Bern was founded in Bern, and women in Zurich founded the Union fuer Frauenbestrebungen (Union for Women's Endeavors), which focused on women's rights.  In 1894, von Salis organized meetings in the principal cities of Switzerland on the theme of the right to vote for women. Her conferences had little success and she often had to confront numerous demonstrations of hostility. Two years later, in 1896, the first congress of Swiss women was held in Geneva. Numerous male speakers called for an alliance between men and women, and, at the same time, for moderation in the demands. The importance that these demands acquired in the public debate led to the creation of the first parliamentary commission for the "woman question."

Advances and resistance: 1900–1959
Around the turn of the 20th century, women organized in the entire country, and formed various women's organizations, for, as well as against, women's suffrage. The two most important were the Confederation of Swiss Women's Associations (Bund Schweizerischer Frauenvereine (BSF), since 1899 known as alliance F), under the leadership of Helene von Mülinen, and the Swiss Alliance for Women's Suffrage (Schweizerischer Verband für Frauenstimmrecht (SVF)), which was founded in 1909.

During the First World War, the movement came to a halt, as more critical problems came to the forefront. Among others, the women's alliances carried out the collective welfare work during the war, since Switzerland at this time still had no social insurance.

In the 1918 Swiss general strike, women's suffrage was the second of nine demands. In December, the first two advances for women's suffrage at the federal level were made by the National Councillors Herman Greulich (SP) and Emil Göttisheim (FDP). In two motions, the Federal Council was called upon to "introduce a report and motion regarding the constitutional granting of the same voting rights and eligibility for election to female Swiss citizens as to male Swiss citizens".

Half a year later, in June 1919, 158 women's associations prepared a petition to grant more importance to the two motions. As a result, the motions of Greulich and Göttisheim were accepted by the National Council and taken over by the Federal Council for completion. However, the responsible Federal Councillor, Heinrich Häberlin (FDP), postponed the action, due to "urgent problems." Fifteen years later, in 1934, Häberlin handed over the unfinished business to his successor with the instruction, "The material for women's suffrage lies in the middle drawer to the right of your desk."

In 1923, a group of women from Bern prepared a constitutional complaint. They wanted to exercise their voting rights in community, cantonal, and federal matters; however, they were rejected by the federal court by reference to customary law (Gewohnheitsrecht).

Five years later, Leonard Jenni applied to the Federal Council with a petition demonstrating that the concept of "Stimmbürger" (elector) in the German language included both sexes. The petition was rejected on the following grounds:

"When one now asserts that the concept is also supposed to include Swiss women, then one oversteps the boundaries of the allowable interpretation and thereby commits an act that contradicts the sense of the constitution..."

In the summer of the same year, the Swiss Exhibition for Women's Work (Schweizerische Ausstellung für Frauenarbeit (SAFFA)) took place. A memorable vehicle accompanied the procession; a snail named "women's suffrage." The organizers were strongly criticized for the snail and some critics saw this entirely as a sign of the political immaturity of the women.

In 1929, the SVF launched a new petition for women's suffrage and this time achieved a record number of signatures that even exceeded the required number of signatures for a popular initiative: 170,397 signatures of women and 78,840 signatures of men. The Catholic Women's League (Katholische Frauenbund) distanced itself explicitly from the demands of the other women's associations. Other oppositional organizations reacted as well and, in 1931, the Swiss League Against Political Women's Suffrage (Schweizer Liga gegen das politische Frauenstimmrecht) brought a petition to the Federal Council titled "Position Against the Politicization of Swiss Women." On many occasions, the women and men of the League, among them Emma Rufer, wrote to the Federal Council and the parliament and implored them to abandon the project.

During the 1930s and early 1940s, the effort for women's suffrage was once again overshadowed by international events such as the economic crisis and the Second World War. Women were called upon many times during these years to "protect democracy", to which the women's alliances advocating voting rights responded that in order to do that they needed to have democratic rights at their disposal.

Near the end of the Second World War, the question arose again; in particular, middle-class women, in a counter-move to their entry in the military Women's Support Service (Frauenhilfsdienst), demanded that they be granted their democratic rights. In 1944, National Councillor Emil Oprecht requested in a postulate the introduction of women's suffrage, because important women's political issues were close to the political agenda of the day: old age and survivors' insurance, motherhood insurance, and family protection. The postulate was supported by the BSF with a petition of 6 February 1945 in the name of 38 women's alliances. The Swiss Women's Association for the Public Good (Schweizerische Gemeinnützige Frauenverein) did not express an opinion on the question; however, the Catholic Women's League (Katholische Frauenbund) departed from the conservative line of the Catholic church and gave its members a free voice. In 1945, the Swiss Action Committee for Women's Suffrage (Schweizerische Aktionskomitee für Frauenstimmrecht) was established as an opinion-forming instrument.

In 1948, celebrations of the one hundred-year existence of the federal constitution were carried out, and "Switzerland, a people of brothers", celebrated. The women's associations rephrased the motto as "a people of brothers without sisters", and symbolically presented the Federal Council a map of Europe with a black blot in the middle. At this time, all European countries, with the exception of Switzerland, Portugal and Liechtenstein, had established women's suffrage. Like the SAFFA snail previously, this symbolic map was interpreted by critics as a sign of the political immaturity of the women.

In 1950, the Federal Council put a report before the Federal Assembly about the procedure for coming to an agreement for the establishment of women's voting rights. In 1951, the Swiss Women's Circle Against Women's Voting Rights (Schweizerische Frauenkreis gegen das Frauenstimmrecht), under the leadership of Dora Wipf, wrote a letter to the Federal Council that said: "[...]We do not believe that our country requires politicized women[...]"

A year later, in 1952, Antoinette Quinche, president of the Swiss Women's Circle for Women's Voting Rights, and 1414 other disputants from her community, demanded to be entered into the voters' register. With the argument that the cantonal constitution at that time did not explicitly exclude women's voting rights, they went with their demand before the Federal Court. Again as in 1923, they were rejected by reference to customary law.

In 1957 a plebiscite was held, by which the civil defense service (Zivilschutzdienst) became mandatory for all Swiss women. During the plebiscite, a scandal took place. Encouraged by the community council, the women of the Unterbäch community of the canton Valais (Wallis) voted. The community council explained that according to the terms of the constitution, the community is legally authorized to set up the voting register.

Community president and chief councillor Paul Zenhäusern and the Valais (Wallis) National Councillor Peter von Roten were the initiators of the women's vote. 33 of the 84 potentially eligible Unterbäch women took part; Katharina Zenhäusern, wife of the community president of Unterbäch, was the first Swiss woman who placed a ballot in a Swiss ballot box. The women's votes, that were collected in a separate ballot box (the men's votes thus remained valid) had to be annulled, because the women's participation at that time still had no legal basis. Nevertheless, these first national women's votes wrote Swiss history, because they gave an important push for the later official establishment of women's suffrage. Thus Unterbäch was the first community in Switzerland to establish the communal voting and election rights for women – in spite of the ban by the Valais (Wallis) executive council.

After the canton of Basel-City empowered the three city communities to establish women's suffrage in 1957, the community of Riehen was the first in Switzerland to introduce women's suffrage on 26 June 1958. In the same year, Gertrud Späth-Schweizer was in the city council and therefore became the first Swiss woman elected to a governing body.

In 1958, the Federal parliament voted for the first time for a referendum on the establishment of women's suffrage for national issues; the proposal was accepted in the National Council with 96 to 43 votes, and in the Council of States with 25 to 12 votes.

On 1 February 1959, the first people's vote on national women's suffrage decisively failed with a voter participation of 67 percent in the people's vote (33% to 66%) and cantonal vote (3 to 16 plus 6 half cantons). Protest actions and women's strikes followed in all of Switzerland. Only in the cantons of Vaud, Neuchâtel, and canton of Geneva did a majority speak for women's suffrage.

The proponents, however, were able to record their first success at the cantonal level. On 1 February 1959, the canton of Vaud accepted women's suffrage. The cantons of Neuchâtel (27 September 1959) and Geneva (6 March 1960) followed, as well as the German-speaking cantons of Basel-City (26 June 1966), and canton of Basel-Country (23 June 1968). Likewise, before the establishment of a national women's suffrage, the cantons of Ticino (19 October 1969), Valais (Wallis) (12 April 1970), and Zürich (15 November 1970) gave voting and election rights to women at the cantonal level.

Extension to the cantonal level: 1960–1990
In the end of 1970, 9 out of 25 cantons had introduced women's suffrage at the cantonal level. From 1970 to 1990, this right was extended to other cantons. In a judgment of 27 November 1990 in the case of Theresa Rohner et consorts contre Appenzell Rhodes-Intérieures (ATF 116 Ia 359), the Swiss federal court declared unconstitutional the exclusive male suffrage as had been practiced in the half canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden. The principle of equality between men and women as was guaranteed by the federal constitution ordered, in effect, an interpretation of the Appenzell constitution such that women's suffrage should be equally possible. The voters of the canton had stood against women's suffrage in 1959 by 2,050 votes to 105.

Introduction of women's suffrage at the cantonal level

See also
 Women in Switzerland
 Women's suffrage
 List of suffragists and suffragettes
 List of women's rights activists
 Timeline of women's suffrage
 Alliance F
 The Divine Order

References

Further reading
 Banaszak, Lee Ann. Why Movements Succeed or Fail: Opportunity, Culture & the Struggle for Woman Suffrage (1996), 291pp, compares the success of pro-women's suffrage campaigners in 48 American states and 25 Swiss cantons.

External links

 Vidéos: le 7 février 1971, les femmes accèdent au droit de vote en Suisse, un dossier des archives de la Télévision Suisse Romande

Women's rights in Switzerland
Electoral reform in Switzerland

Women's suffrage in Switzerland


Pietro Metastasio (3 January 1698 – 12 April 1782) was a poet from Italy. His real name was Pietro Antonio Domenico Bonaventura Trapassi. He was born in Rome and died in Vienna. For many years he was the poet laureate for the Holy Roman Emperor in Vienna. He is most famous for his librettos (the story and words) for operas. Many composers used them for their operas. More than 800 operas have a libretto by Metastasio.

Life

Metastasio was born in Rome in 1698. His real name was Pietro Antonio Domenico Bonaventura Trapassi. His father came from Assisi, a city in the Umbria region of Italy. His mother came from Bologna. Metastasio's father, Felice Trapasso, was a soldier in the Pope's army. Later he had a small shop in Rome. When he was a small boy, Metastasio liked to make up poems and say them in the streets near his house. His parents were poor and could not send him to school. When he was 10 years old, they sent him to work for a goldsmith (a person who makes things out of gold). One day a rich lawyer named Giovanni Vincenzo Gravina heard Metastasio saying his poems. He adopted Metastasio and paid for him to go to school. He also changed the boy's name to Pietro Metastasio. Gravina died when Metastasio was 20 years old and left all his money to him. Metastasio wrote a long poem in memory of his adopted father. It was called  (The Road of Glory).

When he was a young man, Metatstasio worked as lawyer in Naples. In those days, Naples was famous for its music and its beautiful opera houses. In Naples, Metastasio took music lessons from the Italian composer, Nicola Porpora. He liked to sing and to play the harpsichord. He sometimes composed his own music too. He also made money by writing poems for famous people's weddings and birthdays. He wrote his first opera libretto in 1724. It was called . It told the story of Queen Dido and her love for Aeneas, a Trojan prince. It was a great success. He stopped working as a lawyer and made all his money by writing librettos and poems. Soon, he was famous all over Italy for his librettos. Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor asked Metastasio to come to Vienna to work as his poet laureate. In March 1730 Metastasio went to Vienna. He lived there for the rest of his life. He wrote many more opera librettos for the emperor's theatre. After the emperor died, Metastasio worked for the emperor's daughter Maria Theresa of Austria.

Metastasio died in 1782 at the house of his good friends, the Martinez family. He was 84 years old. Metastasio was buried in St. Michael's Church in Vienna. He left all of his money to the Martinez children. There are monuments to Metastasio in Rome and in Vienna. There are also theatres named after him in the Italian cities of Prato and Assisi. During his long life Metastasio wrote many letters to his friends. The English musician and writer, Charles Burney, translated Metastasio's letters into English. In 1796, Burney used them to write a book about the life of Metastasio. The book was called Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio.

Metastasio's librettos

Metastasio wrote 26 librettos for a style of opera called . Many composers used them. More than 800 operas have a libretto by Metastasio. Some of his opera seria librettos are:
 (1724). Its title means Dido Abandoned. It tells the story of Dido, the first queen of Carthage, and her unhappy love for Aeneas. This was Metastasio's first libretto. The first opera to use this libretto was composed by Domenico Sarro. In the next 100 years more than 40 operas by other composers used this libretto.
  (1728). It tells the story of Flavius Aetius, a Roman general in the 5th century. Ezio is the Italian name for Aetius. Some of the many composers who used this libretto for their operas are George Frideric Handel, Christoph Willibald Gluck, and Nicola Porpora. Porpora was the first composer to use this libretto.
 (1733). It tells the story of Siroes, a king of Persia in the 7th century. George Frideric Handel, Antonio Vivaldi, and many other composers used this libretto
 (1734). The title means The Mercy of Titus. It tells the story of Titus a Roman emperor in the 1st century.  This libretto was used many times. The most famous opera using it is La Clemenza di Tito composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
 (1736). Its title means Achilles in Skyros. It tells the story of the Ancient Greek hero, Achilles. When Achilles was a young man, he lived on the Greek island of Skyros. Antonio Caldara was the first composer to use this libretto. His opera was performed in Vienna on 13 February 1736 to celebrate the wedding of Maria Theresa of Austria to Francis, Duke of Lorraine. The next year, Domenico Sarro composed an opera using this libretto. Sarro's opera was performed to celebrate the opening of the new Teatro di San Carlo in Naples. Another composer who used this libretto was Giovanni Paisiello.

Metastasio also wrote librettos for other types of stories set to music. They were used for cantatas, oratorios, ballets and a special type of short opera called an . An azione mostly tells a happy or funny story.  They were  performed at royal courts to celebrate weddings, birthdays and special anniversaries. One azione by Metastasio was called . The title means Cupid Wins. It was performed at the Schönbrunn Palace in 1765 to celebrate the wedding of Maria Theresa of Austria's son, Joseph II. Maria Theresa's younger children all sang and danced in .

Notes

Sources
Encyclopedia Britannica. "Pietro Metastasio"
Enciclopedia Italiana. "Metastasio, Pietro". Treccani
Grove, George (1900). A Dictionary of Music and Musicians (A.D. 1450-1889), Volume 2, pp. 315–316. MacMillan & Co., Ltd
Randel, Don (1996). "Metastasio, Pietro", The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music, pp. 583–584. Harvard University Press

Other websites

Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio by Charles Burney: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3
Metastasio's opera librettos on the website of the Metastasio Project at the University of Padua
Handbook for Metastasio Research at the University of Western Ontario

Italian poets
Librettists
Writers from Rome
1698 births
1782 deaths

Pietro Metastasio


The early modern period is a term used by historians for the period in Western Europe and its first colonies which spans the three centuries between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution.

The early modern period is characterized by the rise to importance of science and technological progress, civic politics and the nation state.  Capitalism began its rise, beginning in northern Italian republics such as Genoa. The early modern period also saw the rise and dominance of the economic theory of mercantilism. As such, the early modern period represents the decline and eventual disappearance, in much of the European sphere, of feudalism, serfdom and the power of the Catholic Church.

The period includes the Protestant Reformation, the Thirty Years' War, the European colonization of the Americas and the peak of the European hunt of witches.

The beginning of the early modern period is not clear-cut, but is generally accepted to be in the late 15th century or early 16th century. Significant dates in this phase from medieval to early modern Europe are:

 1447
 The invention of the first European movable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg, a device that fundamentally changed the circulation of information. Movable type, which allowed individual characters to be arranged to form words and which is an invention separate from the printing press, had also been invented in, but not known outside of, China.
 1453
 The conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans signalled the end of the Byzantine Empire; the Battle of Castillon meant the end of Hundred Years' War.
 1485
 England
 The last Plantagenet king, Richard III, was killed at Bosworth and the medieval civil wars of aristocratic factions gave way to early modern Tudor monarchy, in the person of Henry VII.
 1492
 Spain
 The first documented European voyage to the Americas by the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus; the end of the Reconquista, with the final expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula; the Spanish government expels the Jews.
 1494
 France
 Italy
 French king Charles VIII invaded Italy, so he started a series of wars which are typical for the Italian Renaissance.
 1513
 First formulation of modern politics with the publication of Machiavelli's The Prince.
 1517
 The Reformation begins with Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany.
 1545
 The Council of Trent marks the end of the medieval Roman Catholic Church.

The end date of the early modern period is associated with the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in about 1750, or the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789, which drastically transformed the state of European politics.

Among the most important political changes of this time are the abolition of serfdom and the change of kingdoms into nation-states. Then the Reformation, that meant that Christendom was no unified entity any more. Many kings and rulers used this radical shift in the understanding of the world to further consolidate their sovereignty over their territories. For instance, many of the Germanic states (as well as English Reformation) converted to Protestantism in an attempt to slip out of the power of the Pope.

The intellectual developments of the period included the creation of the economic theory of mercantilism and the publication of works of political and social philosophy, such as Machiavelli's The Prince (1513) and Thomas More's Utopia (1515).

Difference between 'early modern' and the Renaissance

The expression "early modern" is sometimes, and incorrectly, used as a substitute for the term Renaissance. However, "Renaissance" is properly used in relation to a diverse series of cultural developments; which occurred over several hundred years in many different parts of Europe—especially central and northern Italy—and span the transition from late Medieval civilization and the opening of the early modern period.

The term early modern is most often applied to Europe, and its overseas empire.  However, in Japan, the Edo period from 1590 to 1868 is also sometimes referred to as the early modern period.

Political powers
 Ottoman Empire
 Habsburg
 Portugal
 Great Britain
 France
 Early Modern Italy
 Romania
 Poland
 Hungary

Related pages
 Renaissance

Other websites
 Discussion of the medieval/modern transition from the introduction to the pioneering Cambridge Modern History (1903)
 Society for Renaissance Studies

History of Europe

Early modern Europe


3D (or 3-D) means three-dimensional, or having three dimensions. For example, a box is three-dimensional; it is solid, and not thin like a piece of paper. It has volume, a top and bottom, left and right (sides), as well as a front and back. You can turn the box around to view it from another side (called a face, surface or simply side).

A dimension can be measured in inches, microns, miles, kilometers, or any other unit of length.

The three dimensions are often called length (or depth), width (or breadth), and height. Some purposes use other words.

3D graphics are used to make video games or animated movies.  Many calculations are needed to make pictures seem three-dimensional on a screen. Modern computers usually have a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to handle these calculations.

Binocular vision helps people to see the third dimension easily.

In mathematics

In the Cartesian coordinate system, length, width, and height are given in letters (variables) to make them easier to write, or if a value is not known. Often X is width, Y is height, and Z is length. Other 3D coordinate systems such as spherical coordinates use both linear and angular measurements.

The mathematical study of 3D shapes and dimensions is called solid geometry.

Space-time theory

Some people think of time as if it were a fourth dimension. This is called space-time theory. In this idea, there are three dimensions of space, along with the dimension of time.

Related pages
 3D printing
 Holography
 Perspective (graphical)

Computing
Animation
Geometry

3D