Content.

The Aarhus Convention is a multilateral environmental agreement through which the opportunities for citizens to access environmental information are increased and transparent and reliable regulation procedure is secured. It is a way of enhancing the environmental governance network, introducing a reactive and trustworthy relationship between civil society and governments and adding the novelty of a mechanism created to empower the value of public participation in the decision making process and guarantee access to justice: a "governance-by-disclosure" that leads a shift toward an environmentally responsible society. The Aarhus Convention was drafted by governments, with the highly required participation of NGOs, and is legally binding for all the States who ratified it becoming Parties. Among the latter is included the EC, who therefore has the task to ensure compliance not only within the member States but also for its institutions, all those bodies who carry out public administrative duties. Each Party has the commitment to promote the principles contained in the convention and to fill out a national report, always embracing a consultative and transparent process

General features.

The Aarhus Convention is a rights-based approach: the public, both in the present and in future generations, have the right to know and to live in a healthy environment.  A distinction is made between "the public", all the civil society's actors, and the "public concerned" precisely, those persons or organisations affected or interested in environmental decision-making (e.g. environmental NGOs). "Public authorities" are the addressees of the convention, namely, governments, international institutions, and privatized bodies that have public responsibilities or act under the control of public bodies. The private sector, for which information disclosure depends on voluntary, non- mandatory practices, and bodies acting in a judicial or legislative capacity, are excluded.  Other significant provisions are the "non-discrimination" principle (all the information has to be provided without taking account of the nationality or citizenship of the applicant), the international nature of the convention, and the importance attributed to the promotion of environmental education of the public.

Further reflections.

The Aarhus convention is a "proceduralisation of the environmental regulation", it focuses more on setting and listing procedures rather than establishing standards and specifying outcomes, permitting the parties involved to interpret and implement the convention on the systems and circumstances that characterize their nation. This model embodies a perfect example of a multi-level governance.  The risk could lay in a loss of time and resources that could be otherwise invested in defining the outcomes, notwithstanding the fact that it renders the convention vague, weak and open to multiple interpretations. Other critiques note the fact that private bodies are excluded from the mandatory procedures (Mason, 2010), and that, moreover, it can also be debated whether the NGOs involved are faithfully representing environmental interests, ordinary citizens often do not have the financial means to participate effectively and are therefore have no choice but to be represented by these larger organisations. The relative differences between the participants and social groups' resource inequalities also suggests the possibility for irregular and imbalanced environmental protection.

Compliance Committee.

The Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee was established to fulfill the requirement of Article 15 of the Convention on review of compliance to establish arrangements for reviewing compliance with the Convention.  The Convention has a unique Compliance Review Mechanism, which can be triggered in four ways: The Compliance mechanism is unique in international environmental law, as it allows members of the public to communicate concerns about a Party's compliance directly to a committee of international legal experts empowered to examine the merits of the case (the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee). Nonetheless, the Compliance Committee cannot issue binding decisions, but rather makes recommendations to the full Meeting of the Parties (MoP). However, in practise, as MoPs occur infrequently, Parties attempt to comply with the recommendations of the Compliance Committee. As of August 2009, 41 communication from the public – many originating with non-governmental organizations – and one submission from a Party had been lodged with the Convention's Compliance Committee.

Pollutant Release Protocol.

The Kiev Protocol on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers to the Aarhus Convention was adopted at an extraordinary meeting of the Parties on 21 May 2003, in Kiev, Ukraine. 36 States and the European Community signed the Protocol. As of May 2016, 34 states plus the European Union have ratified the Protocol.  The Kiev Protocol is the first legally binding international instrument on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers (PRTRs). PRTRs are inventories of pollution from industrial sites and other sources such as agriculture and transport. The objective of the Protocol is "to enhance public access to information through the establishment of coherent, nationwide pollutant release and transfer registers (PRTRs)." The Protocol places indirect obligations on private enterprises to report annually to their national governments on their releases and transfers of pollutants.  Parties to the Protocol need not be Parties to the Convention. The Protocol is in this sense a free-standing, international agreement. The Kiev Protocol on PRTRs will enter into force 90 days after the sixteenth State ratifies or accedes to the agreement.  An amendment to the Aarhus Convention on "Public Participation in Decisions on Deliberate Release into the Environment and Placing on the Market of Genetically Modified Organisms" was adopted at the Second Meeting of the Parties on 27 May 2005, in Almaty, Kazakhstan. As of August 2009, it had been ratified by 21 countries. The GMO amendment will enter into force 90 days after at least three-quarters of the Parties to the Aarhus Convention ratify it.  United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan (1997–2006) has said, "Although regional in scope, the significance of the Aarhus Convention is global. It is by far the most impressive elaboration of principle 10 of the Rio Declaration, which stresses the need for citizens' participation in environmental issues and for access to information on the environment held by public authorities. As such it is the most ambitious venture in the area of environmental democracy so far undertaken under the auspices of the United Nations."  The influence of the Aarhus Convention also extends beyond the environmental field. At the 2nd Internet Governance Forum, held on 12–15 May 2007, in Rio de Janeiro, the Convention was presented as a model of public participation and transparency in the operation of international forums.

The UNECE Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, usually known as the Aarhus Convention, was signed on 25 June 1998 in the Danish city of Aarhus. It entered into force on 30 October 2001. As of March 2014, it has 47 parties—46 states and the European Union. All of the ratifying states are in Europe and Central Asia. The EU has begun applying Aarhus-type principles in its legislation, notably the Water Framework Directive (Directive 2000/60/EC). Liechtenstein and Monaco have signed the convention but have not ratified it.


History.

The game of "Battleship" is thought to have its origins in the French game "L'Attaque" played during World War I, although parallels have also been drawn to E. I. Horsman's 1890 game "Basilinda", and the game is said to have been played by Russian officers before World War I. The first commercial version of the game was "Salvo", published in 1931 in the United States by the Starex company. Other versions of the game were printed in the 1930s and 1940s, including the Strathmore Company's "Combat: The Battleship Game", Milton Bradley's "Broadsides: A Game of Naval Strategy" and Maurice L. Freedman's "Warfare Naval Combat". Strategy Games Co. produced a version called "Wings" which pictured planes flying over the Los Angeles Coliseum. All of these early editions of the game consisted of pre-printed pads of paper.  In 1967 Milton Bradley introduced a version of the game that used plastic boards and pegs. Conceived by Ed Hutchins, play was on pegboards using miniature plastic ships. In 1977, Milton Bradley also released a computerized "Electronic Battleship", followed in 1989 by "Electronic Talking Battleship". In 2008, an updated version of "Battleship" was released, using hexagonal tiles. In the updated version, each player's board contains several islands on which "captured man" figurines can be placed. Ships may be placed only around the islands, and only in the player's half of the board. When the movie "Battleship" was released, the board game reverted to the original 1967 style. The 2008 updated version is still available as "Battleship Islands".  "Battleship" was one of the earliest games to be produced as a computer game, with a version being released for the Z80 Compucolor in 1979. Many computer editions of the game have been produced since. In "Clubhouse Games" for the Nintendo DS, "Battleship" is known as "Grid Attack". It is played on an 8×8 grid, and includes slight variations, such as 4-player gameplay, and various ship sizes and shapes. Versions of "Battleship" appear as applications on numerous social networking services.  "Battleship" was also part of "Hasbro Family Game Night" for the PlayStation 2 and Wii, as well as the Xbox 360 (Xbox Live Arcade). These alter the rules, including the size of the grid (8×12 in the NES version, 8×8 in the Game Boy version), size of ships (it is common to feature a submarine that takes up a single square) and special shot missiles for each ship. For example, in the NES version the cruiser has a five-shot missile which strikes five squares in an X pattern on the grid in one turn. Submarine-tracking sonar and aerial reconnaissance to spot ships are also features.  A minigame version of "Battleship" was used in the third season of The Hub's "Family Game Night", which uses a 5×5 grid and the first team to sink three ships wins the game.  In 2012, the military science fiction action movie "Battleship" was released, which was inspired by the board game. A version of "Battleship" based on the movie was released in which one side had alien ship playing pieces.

Description.

The game is played on four grids, two for each player. The grids are typically square – usually 10×10 – and the individual squares in the grid are identified by letter and number. On one grid the player arranges ships and records the shots by the opponent. On the other grid the player records their own shots.  Before play begins, each player secretly arranges their ships on their primary grid. Each ship occupies a number of consecutive squares on the grid, arranged either horizontally or vertically. The number of squares for each ship is determined by the type of the ship. The ships cannot overlap (i.e., only one ship can occupy any given square in the grid). The types and numbers of ships allowed are the same for each player. These may vary depending on the rules.  The 1990 Milton Bradley version of the rules specify the following ships:  In 2002, Hasbro renamed the Cruiser as "Destroyer", taking three squares, and substituted a new two-square ship called the "Patrol Boat".  After the ships have been positioned, the game proceeds in a series of rounds. In each round, each player takes a turn to announce a target square in the opponent's grid which is to be shot at. The opponent announces whether or not the square is occupied by a ship. If it is a "hit", the player who is hit marks this on their own or "ocean" grid (with a red peg in the pegboard version). The attacking player marks the hit or miss on their own "tracking" or "target" grid with a pencil marking in the paper version of the game, or the appropriate color peg in the pegboard version (red for "hit", white for "miss"), in order to build up a picture of the opponent's fleet.  When all of the squares of a ship have been hit, the ship's owner announces the sinking of the Carrier, Submarine, Cruiser/Destroyer/Patrol Boat, or the titular Battleship. If all of a player's ships have been sunk, the game is over and their opponent wins. If all ships of both players are sunk by the end of the round, the game is a draw.

Variations.

In the 1931 "Salvo" edition of the game, players target a specified number of squares at one time, and all of the squares are attacked simultaneously. A player may initially target five (one for each battleship) squares per turn, and the amount of shots decreases when one of the player's ships are lost. In other variants of this mechanic, the number of shots allowed to fire each turn may either be fixed at five for the whole game, be equal to the number of unsunk ships belonging to the player, or be equal to the size of the player's largest undamaged ship. The oppoment player may either call the result of each shot in turn, or simply announce the hits or misses. E.g: "two hits and three misses", leaving their opponent to work out the consequences of the salvo. In the modern Milton Bradley rules for "Battleship", "Salvo" is listed as a variation "for more experienced players", with the number of shots being equal to the number of ships that the firing player has remaining.  One variant of Battleship allows players to decline to announce that a ship has been sunk, requiring their opponent to take further shots in order to confirm that an area is clear. Another variant of the rule allows a player to move one of their ships to a new, uncalled location every fourth or fifth move.  Another variant allows multiple players and allow different shapes for the ships as long as each square of a ship touches at least one other square of that ship.

Battleship (also Battleships or Sea Battle) is a strategy type guessing game for two players. It is played on ruled grids (paper or board) on which each player's fleet of ships (including battleships) are marked. The locations of the fleets are concealed from the other player. Players alternate turns calling "shots" at the other player's ships, and the objective of the game is to destroy the opposing player's fleet.


History.

From the foundation of the Dutch national football championship in 1898 until 1954, the title was decided through play-offs by a handful of clubs who had previously won their regional league. The competition was purely an amateur one; the Royal Dutch Football Association (KNVB) rejected any form of payment and suspended players who were caught receiving salary or transfer fees. The call for professional football grew in the early fifties after many national team members left to play abroad in search for financial benefits. The KNVB would usually suspend these players, preventing them from appearing for the Dutch national team. After the North Sea flood of 1953, the Dutch players abroad (mainly playing in the French league) organised a charity match against the French national team in Paris. The match was boycotted by the KNVB, but after the assembled Dutch players defeated the French (2–1), the Dutch public witnessed the heights that could be achieved through professional football. To serve the growing interest, a dissident professional football association (the NBVB) and league were founded for the 1954–55 season. On 3 July 1954, the KNVB met with a group of concerned amateur club chairmen, who feared the best players would join the professional teams. The meeting, dubbed the "slaapkamerconferentie" ('bedroom conference'), led to the Association reluctantly accepting semi-professionalism.  Meanwhile, both the KNVB and the NBVB started their separate competition. The first professional football match was contested between Alkmaar and Venlo. The leagues went on for eleven rounds, before a merger was negotiated between the two federations in November. Both leagues were cancelled and a new, combined competition emerged immediately. De Graafschap, Amsterdam, Alkmaar and Fortuna '54 from the NBVB were accepted to the new league. Other clubs merged, which led to new names like Rapid J.C., Holland Sport and Roda Sport. The first (semi-)professional league was won by Willem II. For the 1956–57 season, the KNVB abandoned the regional league system. The Eredivisie was founded, in which the eighteen best clubs nationwide directly played for the league title without play-offs. The inaugural members of the Eredivisie in 1956 were Ajax, BVC, BVV, DOS, EVV, Elinkwijk, SC Enschede, Feijenoord, Fortuna '54, GVAV, MVV, NAC, NOAD, PSV, Rapid J.C., Sparta, VVV '03 and Willem II. Ajax was the first team to claim the title that season.

Current teams (2019–20).

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Attendance.

Since the beginning of the league, there have been three clubs with an attendance much higher than the others: Ajax, PSV and Feyenoord. Clubs like Heerenveen, FC Utrecht and FC Groningen also have fairly large fanbases. The regular season average league attendance was just over 7,000 in 1990, but this figure has risen sharply over the years thanks to the opening of new stadiums and the expansion of existing ones nationwide. Average attendance for the 2018-19 season was 18,010, with Ajax having the largest (52,987) and Excelsior having the smallest (4,223). Ajax's figures however differ from those provided by the Johan Cruyff Arena since the club counts all tickets sold instead of the number of people going through the turnstiles.

Eredivisie teams and major UEFA and FIFA competitions.

The following sixteen international tournaments were won by Eredivisie teams:  The UEFA Super Cup was founded by a Dutch reporter named Anton Witkamp and Ajax's 1973 win was the first time the tournament was contested officially.  The following 24 European finals took place at Dutch venues, or are scheduled to take place at them:

The Eredivisie (; ""Honour Division"" or ""Premier Division"") is the highest echelon of professional football in the Netherlands. The league was founded in 1956, two years after the start of professional football in the Netherlands. As of the 2019–20 season it is ranked the 9th best league in Europe by UEFA.


Early life.

Elcano was born in around 1476 to Domingo Sebastián Elcano and Catalina del Puerto. He had three brothers: Domingo Elcano, a Catholic priest, Martín Pérez Elcano, and Antón Martín Elcano.

Military life.

Elcano fought in the Italian Wars under the command of Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba in Italy, and in 1509 he joined the Spanish expedition organized by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros against Algiers.

Merchant shipping.

Elcano settled in Seville and became a merchant ship captain. After breaking Castilian laws by surrendering a ship to Genoan bankers in repayment of a debt, he sought a pardon from the emperor Charles V, by signing on as a subordinate officer for the Magellan expedition to the East Indies.

Voyage of circumnavigation.

Elcano served as a naval commander of the emperor Charles V, and took part in the expedition to the Philippines. In 1519, this 241-man expedition set sail with five ships, "Trinidad", "Concepción", "San Antonio", "Santiago", and "Victoria". Elcano participated in a fierce mutiny against Magellan before the convoy discovered the passage through South America, the Strait of Magellan. He was spared by Magellan and after five months of hard labour in chains was made captain of the galleon. "Santiago" was later destroyed in a storm. The fleet sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern coast of Brazil and into Puerto San Julián in Argentina. Several months later they discovered a passage now known as the Strait of Magellan located in the southern tip of South America and sailed through the strait. The crew of "San Antonio" mutinied and returned to Spain. On 28 November 1520, three ships set sail for the Pacific Ocean and about 19 men died before they reached Guam on 6 March 1521. Conflicts with the nearby island of Rota prevented Magellan and Elcano from resupplying their ships with food and water. They eventually gathered enough supplies and continued their journey to the Philippines and remained there for several weeks. Close relationships developed between the Spaniards and the islanders. They took part in converting the Cebuano tribes to Christianity and became involved in tribal warfare between rival Filipino groups in Mactan Island.  On 27 April 1521, Magellan was killed and the Spaniards defeated by natives in the Battle of Mactan in the Philippines. The surviving members of the expedition could not decide who should succeed Magellan. The men finally voted on a joint command with the leadership divided between Duarte Barbosa and João Serrão. Within four days these two were also dead. They were killed after being betrayed at a feast at the hands of Rajah Humabon. The mission was now teetering on disaster and João Lopes de Carvalho took command of the fleet and led it on a meandering journey through the Philippine archipelago.  During the six-month listless journey after Magellan died, and before reaching the Moluccas, Elcano's stature grew as the men became disillusioned with the weak leadership of Carvalho. The two ships, "Victoria" and "Trinidad" finally reached their destination, the Moluccas, on 6 November. They rested and re-supplied in this haven, and filled their holds with the precious cargo of cloves and nutmeg. On 18 December, the ships were ready to leave. "Trinidad" sprang a leak, and was unable to be repaired. Carvalho stayed with the ship along with 52 others hoping to return later.  "Victoria", commanded by Elcano along with 17 other European survivors of the 240 man expedition and 4 (survivors out of 13) Timorese Asians continued its westward voyage to Spain crossing the Indian and Atlantic Oceans. They eventually reached Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 6 September 1522.  Antonio Pigafetta, an Italian scholar, was a crew member of the Magellan and Elcano expedition. He wrote several documents about the events of the expedition. According to Pigafetta the voyage covered 14,460 leagues—about.

Honours.

Emperor Charles V granted Elcano an augmentation of his coat of arms featuring a world globe with the words "Primus circumdedisti me" (Latin: "You first encircled me") and an annual pension. His family were given rule over the Marquisate of Buglas in Negros Island, Philippines. In the modern era, the country with the most people surnamed "Elcano" is currently the Philippines.

Loaísa expedition.

In 1525, Elcano returned to sea, and became a member of the Loaísa expedition. He was appointed leader along with García Jofre de Loaísa as captains, who commanded seven ships and sent to claim the East Indies for King Charles I of Spain. Both Elcano and Loaísa and many other sailors died of malnutrition in the Pacific Ocean, but the survivors reached their destination and a few of them managed to return to Spain.

Family life.

Elcano never married but he had a son by María Hernández Dernialde named Domingo Elcano, whom he legitimized in his last will and testament. Elcano also fathered a daughter with a different woman named Maria de Vida Urreta.

Juan Sebastián Elcano (sometimes misspelled "del Cano"; c. 1476 – 4 August 1526) was a Spanish explorer of Basque origin who completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth. After Magellan's death in the Philippines, Elcano took command of the carrack "Victoria" from the Moluccas to Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain.


Education and employment.

Stoney was born at Oakley Park, near Birr, County Offaly, in the Irish Midlands, the son of George Stoney (1792–) and Anne Blood (1801–1883). The Stoney family is an old-established Anglo-Irish family. He attended Trinity College, Dublin, graduating with a B.A. degree in 1848. From 1848 to 1852 he worked as an astronomy assistant to William Parsons, 3rd Earl of Rosse at Birr Castle, County Offaly, where Parsons had built the world's largest telescope, the 72-inch Leviathan of Parsonstown. Simultaneously Stoney continued to study physics and mathematics and was awarded an M.A. by Trinity College Dublin in 1852.  From 1852 to 1857, Stoney was professor of physics at Queen's College Galway. From 1857 to 1882, he was employed as Secretary of the Queen's University of Ireland, an administrative job based in Dublin. In the early 1880s, he moved to the post of superintendent of Civil Service Examinations in Ireland, a post he held until his retirement in 1893. In that year, he took up residence in London, England. Stoney died in 1911 at his home in Notting Hill, London. During his decades of non-scientific employment responsibilities in Dublin, Stoney continued to do scientific research on his own. He also served for decades as honorary secretary and then vice-president of the Royal Dublin Society, a scientific society modelled after the Royal Society of London, and after his move to London Stoney served on the council of that society too. Additionally, he intermittently served on scientific review committees of the British Association for the Advancement of Science from the early 1860s on.

Scientific output.

Stoney published seventy-five scientific papers in a variety of journals, but chiefly in the journals of the Royal Dublin Society. He made significant contributions to cosmic physics and to the theory of gases. He estimated the number of molecules in a cubic millimetre of gas, at room temperature and pressure, from data obtained from the kinetic theory of gases. Stoney's most important scientific work was the conception and calculation of the magnitude of the "atom of electricity". In 1891, he proposed the term 'electron' to describe the fundamental unit of electrical charge, and his contributions to research in this area laid the foundations for the eventual discovery of the particle by J. J. Thomson in 1897.  His scientific work was carried out in his spare time.  Stoney was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in June 1861 on the basis of being "the author of papers on "The Propagation of Waves," – "On the Rings seen in Fibrous Specimens of Calc Spar," and Molecular Physics, published in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, et cetera, Distinguished for his acquaintance with the science of Astronomy & General Physics".

The Stoney scale.

Contemporary physics has settled on the Planck scale as the most suitable scale for a unified theory. The Planck scale was, however, anticipated by George Stoney. Like Planck after him, Stoney realised that large-scale effects such as gravity and small-scale effects such as electromagnetism naturally imply an intermediate scale where physical differences might be rationalised. This intermediate scale comprises units (Stoney scale units) of mass, length, time etc., yet mass is the cornerstone.  The Stoney mass "m" (expressed in contemporary terms):  where ε is the permittivity of free space, "e" is the elementary charge and "G" is the gravitational constant, and where α is the fine-structure constant and "m" is the Planck mass.  Like the Planck scale, the Stoney scale functions as a symmetrical link between microcosmic and macrocosmic processes in general and yet it appears uniquely oriented towards the unification of electromagnetism and gravity. Thus for example whereas the Planck length is the mean square root of the reduced Compton wavelength and half the gravitational radius of any mass, the Stoney length is the mean square root of the 'electromagnetic radius' (see Classical electron radius) and half the gravitational radius of any mass, "m":  where formula_4 is the reduced Planck's constant and "c" is the speed of light. These are only mathematical constructs since there must be some practical limit to how small a length can get. If the Stoney length is the minimum length then either a body's electromagnetic radius or its half gravitational radius is a physical impossibility, since one of these must be smaller than the Stoney length. If Planck length is the minimum then either a body's reduced Compton wavelength or its half gravitational radius is a physical impossibility since one of these must be smaller than the Planck length. Moreover, the Stoney length and Planck length cannot both be the minimum length.  According to contemporary convention, the Planck scale is the scale of vacuum energy, below which space and time do not retain any physical significance. This prescription mandates general neglect of the Stoney scale within the scientific community today. Previous to this mandate, Hermann Weyl made a notable attempt to construct a unified theory by associating a gravitational unit of charge with the Stoney length. Weyl's theory led to significant mathematical innovations but his theory is generally thought to lack physical significance.

Family.

Stoney married his cousin, Margaret Sophia Stoney, by whom he had had two sons and three daughters. For most of his decades in Dublin, Stoney resided in the Dundrum, Dublin neighbourhood. The street that he lived on was later renamed Stoney Road in his memory. After Stoney died in London, his cremated ashes were buried in St. Nahi's Church in Dundrum.  One of Stoney's sons, George Gerald Stoney FRS, was a scientist, his daughter Florence Stoney OBE was a radiologist while his daughter Edith is considered to be the first woman medical physicist. But a more scientifically notable relative was Stoney's nephew, the Dublin-based physicist George FitzGerald (1851–1901).  His brother Bindon Blood Stoney was Engineer of Dublin Port is renowned for building a number of the main Dublin bridges, and developing the Quayside, as well as other engineering projects.

Legacy.

Stoney received an honorary Doctorate of Science (D.Sc.) from the University of Dublin in June 1902.  Stoney and FitzGerald were in regular communication on scientific matters. In addition, on political matters, both Stoney and FitzGerald were active opponents of the Irish Home Rule Movement. In their political opinion, the spirit of Irish Home Rule and later Irish nationalism was contrary to the spirit of science. Stoney resigned from his job as Secretary of Queen's University of Ireland in 1882 in objection to a government decision to introduce "sectarianism" into the system; i.e., Stoney wanted to keep the system non-denominational, but the government acceded to Irish Catholic demands for Catholic institutions.  Craters on Mars and the Moon are named in his honour.

George Johnstone Stoney FRS (15 February 1826 – 5 July 1911) was an Irish physicist. He is most famous for introducing the term "electron" as the "fundamental unit quantity of electricity".


Biography.

The third of seven children, Van ’t Hoff was born in Rotterdam, Netherlands, 30 August 1852. His father was Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, Sr., a physician, and his mother was Alida Kolff van 't Hoff. From a young age, he was interested in science and nature, and frequently took part in botanical excursions. In his early school years, he showed a strong interest in poetry and philosophy. He considered Lord Byron to be his idol.  Against the wishes of his father, Van 't Hoff chose to study chemistry. First, he enrolled at Delft University of Technology in September 1869, and studied until 1871, when he passed his final exam on 8 July and obtained a degree of chemical technologist. He passed all his courses in two years, although the time assigned to study was three years. Then he enrolled at University of Leiden to study chemistry. He then studied in Bonn, Germany, with Friedrich Kekulé and in Paris with C. A. Wurtz. He received his doctorate under Eduard Mulder at the University of Utrecht in 1874.  In 1878, Van 't Hoff married Johanna Francina Mees. They had two daughters, Johanna Francina (1880–1964) and Aleida Jacoba (1882–1971), and two sons, Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff III (1883–1943) and Govert Jacob (1889–1918). Van 't Hoff died at the age of 58, on 1 March 1911, at Steglitz, near Berlin, of tuberculosis.

Career.

Van 't Hoff earned his earliest reputation in the field of organic chemistry. In 1874, he accounted for the phenomenon of optical activity by assuming that the chemical bonds between carbon atoms and their neighbors were directed towards the corners of a regular tetrahedron. This three-dimensional structure accounted for the isomers found in nature. He shares credit for this with the French chemist Joseph Le Bel, who independently came up with the same idea.  Three months before his doctoral degree was awarded, Van 't Hoff published this theory, which today is regarded as the foundation of stereochemistry, first in a Dutch pamphlet in the fall of 1874, and then in the following May in a small French book entitled "La chimie dans l'espace". A German translation appeared in 1877, at a time when the only job Van 't Hoff could find was at the Veterinary School in Utrecht. In these early years his theory was largely ignored by the scientific community, and was sharply criticized by one prominent chemist, Hermann Kolbe. Kolbe wrote: "A Dr. J. H. van ’t Hoff of the Veterinary School at Utrecht has no liking, apparently, for exact chemical investigation. He has considered it more convenient to mount Pegasus (apparently borrowed from the Veterinary School) and to proclaim in his "‘La chimie dans l’espace’" how, in his bold flight to the top of the chemical Parnassus, the atoms appeared to him to be arranged in cosmic space." However, by about 1880 support for Van 't Hoff's theory by such important chemists as Johannes Wislicenus and Viktor Meyer brought recognition.  In 1884, Van 't Hoff published his research on chemical kinetics, titled "Études de Dynamique chimique" (""Studies in Chemical Dynamics""), in which he described a new method for determining the order of a reaction using graphics and applied the laws of thermodynamics to chemical equilibria. He also introduced the modern concept of chemical affinity. In 1886, he showed a similarity between the behaviour of dilute solutions and gases. In 1887, he and German chemist Wilhelm Ostwald founded an influential scientific magazine named "Zeitschrift für physikalische Chemie" (""Journal of Physical Chemistry""). He worked on Svante Arrhenius's theory of the dissociation of electrolytes and in 1889 provided physical justification for the Arrhenius equation. In 1896, he became a professor at the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. His studies of the salt deposits at Stassfurt were an important contribution to Prussia's chemical industry.  Van 't Hoff became a lecturer in chemistry and physics at the Veterinary College in Utrecht. He then worked as a professor of chemistry, mineralogy, and geology at the University of Amsterdam for almost 18 years before eventually becoming the chairman of the chemistry department. In 1896, Van 't Hoff moved to Germany, where he finished his career at the University of Berlin in 1911. In 1901, he received the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with solutions. His work showed that very dilute solutions follow mathematical laws that closely resemble the laws describing the behavior of gases.

Honours and awards.

In 1885, Van 't Hoff was appointed as a Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Other distinctions include honorary doctorates from Harvard and Yale (1901), Victoria University, the University of Manchester (1903), and University of Heidelberg (1908). He was awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society in 1893 (along with Le Bel), and elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1897. He was awarded the Helmholtz Medal of the Prussian Academy of Sciences (1911), and appointed Knight of the French Legion of Honour (1894) and Senator in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (1911). Van 't Hoff became an Honorary Member of the British Chemical Society in London, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (1892), American Chemical Society (1898), the Académie des Sciences in Paris (1905), and the Netherlands Chemical Society (1908). Of his numerous distinctions, Van 't Hoff regarded winning the first Nobel Prize in Chemistry as the culmination of his career. The following are named after him:

Jacobus Henricus "Henry" van 't Hoff Jr. (; 30 August 1852 – 1 March 1911) was a Dutch physical chemist. A highly influential theoretical chemist of his time, Van 't Hoff was the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His pioneering work helped found the modern theory of chemical affinity, chemical equilibrium, chemical kinetics, and chemical thermodynamics. In his 1874 pamphlet Van 't Hoff formulated the theory of the tetrahedral carbon atom and laid the foundations of stereochemistry. In 1875, he predicted the correct structures of allenes and cumulenes as well as their axial chirality. He is also widely considered one of the founders of physical chemistry as the discipline is known today.


Description.

The fruit of "A. squamosa" (sugar-apple) has sweet whitish pulp, and is popular in tropical markets.

Distribution.

"Annona squamosa" is native to the tropical Americas and West Indies, but the exact origin is unknown. It is now the most widely cultivated of all the species of "Annona", being grown for its fruit throughout the tropics and warmer subtropics, such as Indonesia, Thailand, and Taiwan; it was introduced to southern Asia before 1590. It is naturalized as far north as southern Florida in the United States and as south as Bahia in Brazil, Bangladesh, and is an invasive species in some areas.

Climate and cultivation.

Like most species of "Annona", it requires a tropical or subtropical climate with summer temperatures from to, and mean winter temperatures above. It is sensitive to cold and frost, being defoliated below and killed by temperatures of a couple of degrees below freezing. It is only moderately drought-tolerant, requiring at least 700 mm of annual rainfall, and will not produce fruit well during droughts.  It will grow from sea level to and does well in hot dry climates, differing in its tolerance of lowland tropics from many of the other fruit bearers in the "Annona" family.  It is quite a prolific bearer, and it will produce fruit in as little as two to three years. A five-year-old tree can produce as many as 50 sugar apples. Poor fruit production has been reported in Florida because there are few natural pollinators (honeybees have a difficult time penetrating the tightly closed female flowers); however, hand pollination with a natural fiber brush is effective in increasing yield. Natural pollinators include beetles (coleoptera) of the families Nitidulidae, Staphylinidae, Chrysomelidae, Curculionidae and Scarabeidae.  In the Philippines, the fruit is commonly eaten by the Philippine fruit bat ("kabag" or "kabog"), which then spreads the seeds from island to island.  It is a host plant for larvae of the butterfly "Graphium agamemnon" (tailed jay).

Uses.

In traditional Indian, Thai, and American medicine, the leaves are used in a decoction to treat dysentery and urinary tract infection.<ref name=" doi10.1016/j.hermed.2016.10.003"></ref> In traditional Indian medicine, they are also crushed and applied to wounds. In Mexico, the leaves are rubbed on floors and put in hens' nests to repel lice.

Chemical constituents.

The diterpenoid alkaloid atisine is the most abundant alkaloid in the root. Other constituents of "Annona squamosa" include the alkaloids oxophoebine, reticuline, isocorydine, and methylcorydaldine, and the flavonoid quercetin-3-O-glucoside.  Bayer AG has patented the extraction process and molecular identity of the annonaceous acetogenin annonin, as well as its use as a biopesticide. Other acetogenins have been isolated from the seeds, bark, and leaves.

Annona squamosa is a small, well-branched tree or shrub from the family Annonaceae that bears edible fruits called sugar-apples or sweetsops. It tolerates a tropical lowland climate better than its relatives "Annona reticulata" and "Annona cherimola" (whose fruits often share the same name) helping make it the most widely cultivated of these species. "Annona squamosa" is a small, semi-(or late) deciduous, much branched shrub or small tree to tall similar to soursop ("Annona muricata").


Etymology and common names.

The genus name of "Arctostaphylos uva-ursi" comes from the Greek words "arctos" (meaning bear) and "staphyle" (meaning "bunch of grapes") in reference to the fruits which form grape-like clusters. In the wild, the fruits are commonly eaten by bears. The specific epithet, "uva-ursi", comes from the Latin words "uva" (meaning grape) and "ursus" (bear), reflected by the "bearberry" nickname.  The common name, "kinnikinnick", is an Algonquin word meaning "smoking mixture". Native Americans and early pioneers smoked the dried "uva-ursi" leaves and bark alone or mixed with other herbs, tobacco or dried dogwood bark in pipes. Numerous common names exist, depending on region, such as mealberry, sandberry, mountain-box, fox-plum, hog-crawberry, and barren myrtle.

Distribution.

The distribution of "Arctostaphylos uva-ursi" is circumpolar, and it is widespread in northern latitudes, but confined to high altitudes further south:

Description.

"Arctostaphylos uva-ursi" is a small procumbent woody groundcover shrub high. The leaves are evergreen, remaining green for 1–3 years before falling. The fruit is a red berry.  The leaves are shiny, small, and feel thick and stiff. They are alternately arranged on the stems. Undersides of leaves are lighter green than on the tops. New stems can be red if the plant is in full sun, but are green in shadier areas. Older stems are brown. In spring, they have white or pink flowers.  Wild stands of "Arctostaphylos uva-ursi" can be dense, with heights rarely taller than 6 inches. Erect branching twigs emerge from long flexible prostrate stems, which are produced by single roots. The trailing stems will layer, sending out small roots periodically. The finely textured velvety branches are initially white to pale green, becoming smooth and red-brown with maturity. The small solitary three-scaled buds are dark brown.  The simple leaves of this broadleaf evergreen are alternately arranged on branches. Each leaf is held by a twisted leaf stalk, vertically. The leathery dark green leaves are an inch long and have rounded tips tapering back to the base. In fall, the leaves begin changing from a dark green to a reddish-green to purple, becoming pale on the underside.  Terminal clusters of small urn-shaped flowers bloom from May to June. The flowers are white to pink, and bear round, fleshy or mealy, bright red to pink fruits called drupes. The smooth, glossy skinned fruits range from in diameter. The fruit persist on the plant into early winter. The fruits are bittersweet when raw, but sweeter when boiled and dried. Fruits are edible for humans, but are generally considered to be unpalatable. Each drupe contains 1 to 5 hard seeds, which need to be scarified and stratified prior to germination to reduce the seed coat and break embryo dormancy. There is an average of 40,900 cleaned seeds per pound. It is a fire-tolerant species and may be a seedbanking species.

Pathology.

"Arctostaphylos uva-ursi" is an alternate host for spruce broom rust.

Subspecies.

There are some 14 subspecies, including:  For a list of reported North American subspecies and varietals, see "USDA Plants Profile".

Uses.

Phytochemicals.

The plant contains diverse phytochemicals, including ursolic acid, tannic acid, gallic acid, some essential oils and resin, hydroquinones (mainly arbutin, up to 17%), tannins (up to 15%), phenolic glycosides and flavonoids. "Arctostaphylos uva-ursi" leaves contain arbutin, which metabolizes to form hydroquinone, a potential liver toxin.

Food.

Historically, bearberry fruits and leaves were used by the Blackfeet Nation as food. The fruits can be used to make jelly.

Dye.

Native Americans used the plant to make yellow dye.

Smoking.

Dried bearberry leaves are the main component in many traditional North American Native smoking mixes, known collectively as "kinnikinnick" (Algonquin for "smoking mixture") used especially among western First Nations, often including other herbs and sometimes tobacco.

Traditional medicine.

Teas and extracts of the leaves have been used in traditional medicine of First Nations people over centuries as urinary tract antiseptics, diuretics, and laxatives. In herbalism, leaf tea is used to treat urinary tract inflammation. Though thought to be an astringent or cure for sexually transmitted diseases, as of 2017, there was no high-quality evidence from clinical research that such treatments are effective or safe.

Precautions and adverse effects.

One review indicated that ingestion of large doses can cause allergic reactions, with nausea and seizures, as a potential emergency condition. Preliminary studies indicate that arbutin may be toxic when ingested in high doses. Uva ursi may cause adverse effects in people with liver or kidney disease, or pregnant and breastfeeding women.

Cultivation.

There are several cultivars that are propagated for use as ornamental plants. It is an attractive year-round evergreen groundcover for gardens, and is useful for controlling erosion on hillsides and slopes due to its deep roots. It is tolerant of sun and dry soils, and is thus common groundcover in urban areas, in naturalized areas, and in native plant or rock gardens.

Arctostaphylos uva-ursi is a plant species of the genus "Arctostaphylos" widely distributed across circumboreal regions of the subarctic Northern Hemisphere. Kinnikinnick (First Nations for "smoking mixture") is a common name in Canada and the United States. It is one of several related species referred to as bearberry.


Early life.

Szisz was born in the small town of Szeghalom in Békés county of the Hungarian part the former Austro-Hungarian Empire on September 20, 1873. He was trained to be a locksmith and a coppersmith but in his early twenties the growing proliferation of automobiles fascinated Szisz and he studied engineering along with car design. After time spent in several Austrian and German cities, in the spring of 1900 he ended up in Paris, France where he found work at the new Renault automobile company.

Grand Prix Career.

At Renault, Szisz's engineering talent made him an integral part of the testing department, and when the company became involved in racing in 1902 he was chosen as the riding mechanic for Louis Renault. Following the death of Marcel Renault in the 1903 Paris-Madrid race, Szisz took over as a driver. In 1905, he finished fifth in the Gordon Bennett Cup elimination race on the Circuit d'Auvergne at Clermont-Ferrand. In October of that same year, along with other French and Italian automobile manufacturers, Renault sent a team to the United States to compete in the Vanderbilt Cup on Long Island, New York. In a field that included Felice Nazzaro and Louis Chevrolet driving for Fiat, Szisz finished fifth behind the winner, fellow Frenchman Victor Hémery driving a Darracq. Szisz's primary duties as the head of testing at Renault limited the number of races he could compete in. However, in 1906 he achieved a permanent place in the annals of auto racing when he and his riding mechanic M. Marteau drove a Renault AK 90CV to victory in the first Grand Prix race in Le Mans. He averaged. His victory in the French Grand Prix and the commercial success of the race soon led to the establishing of other Grand Prix races throughout Europe. The following year, Italy's Felice Nazzaro, who had finished second behind Szisz, captured the second French Grand Prix. Szisz competed in the 1908 race but did not finish and suffered a similar fate following mechanical problems in Savannah, Georgia at an American Grand Prize race organized by the Automobile Club of America.  In early 1909, Szisz left Renault to open his own garage in Neuilly-sur-Seine. In July 1914, Fernand Charron lured him out of retirement to drive an Alda in the French Grand Prix at Lyon. In a race won by Christian Lautenschlager in a Mercedes, Szisz was honored with the number 1 for his car, but an injury forced him out just past half distance.

World War I.

European automobile racing ended in September with the onset of World War I and Szisz joined the French army, serving as head of the transport troops in Algeria until being hospitalized with typhoid fever.

Later life.

At war's end, he went to work for an aircraft company until his retirement to a cottage in the country at Auffargis not far from Paris, where he died in 1944.  Ferenc Szisz and his wife are buried in the churchyard cemetery in Auffargis. The Szisz Museum is part of the Renault Museum located near the Le Mans racetrack.

Ferenc Szisz (September 20, 1873 – February 21, 1944), was a Hungarian race car driver and the winner of the first Grand Prix motor racing event on a Renault Grand Prix 90CV on 26 June, 1906.


Design and use.

The most common cable tie consists of a flexible nylon tape with an integrated gear rack, and on one end a ratchet within a small open case. Once the pointed tip of the cable tie has been pulled through the case and past the ratchet, it is prevented from being pulled back; the resulting loop may only be pulled tighter. This allows several cables to be bound together into a cable bundle and/or to form a cable tree.  A cable tie tensioning device or tool may be used to apply a cable tie with a specific degree of tension. The tool may cut off the extra tail flush with the head in order to avoid a sharp edge which might otherwise cause injury.  In order to increase resistance to ultraviolet light in outdoor applications, nylon containing a minimum of 2% carbon black is used to protect the polymer chains and extend the cable tie's service life. Blue cable ties are supplied to the food industry and contain a metal additive so they can be detected by industrial metal detectors. Cable ties made of ETFE (Tefzel) are used in radiation-rich environments. Red cable ties made of ECTFE (Halar) are used for plenum cabling.  Stainless steel cable ties are also available for flameproof applications—coated stainless ties are available to prevent galvanic attack from dissimilar metals (e.g. zinc-coated cable tray).  PlastiCuffs are handcuffs based on the cable tie design and are used by law enforcement to restrain prisoners. Cable ties are also sometimes used to prevent hubcaps (also known as wheel trims) from falling off a moving vehicle, and some are sold specifically for this purpose.

History.

Cable ties were first invented by Thomas & Betts, an electrical company, in 1958 under the brand name Ty-Rap. Initially they were designed for airplane wire harnesses. The original design used a metal tooth, and these can still be obtained. Manufacturers later changed to the nylon/plastic design.  Over the years the design has been extended and developed into numerous spin-off products. One example was a self-locking loop developed as an alternative to purse-string suture in colon anastomosis.  Ty-Rap cable tie inventor, Maurus C. Logan, worked for Thomas & Betts and finished his career with the company as Vice President of Research and Development. During his tenure at Thomas & Betts, he contributed to the development and marketing of many successful Thomas & Betts products. Logan died on 12 November 2007, at the age of 86.  The idea of the cable tie came to Logan while touring a Boeing aircraft manufacturing facility in 1956. Aircraft wiring was a cumbersome and detailed undertaking, involving thousands of feet of wire organized on sheets of 50-foot-long plywood and held in place with knotted, waxcoated, braided nylon cord. Each knot had to be pulled tight by wrapping the cord around one's finger which sometimes cut the operator's fingers until they developed thick calluses or "hamburger hands." Logan was convinced there had to be an easier, more forgiving, way to accomplish this critical task.  For the next couple of years, Logan experimented with various tools and materials. On June 24, 1958, a patent for the Ty-Rap cable tie was submitted.

Surgery.

Self-locking loops are used for closure of the sternum after open chest surgery and at repair of rib fractures in foals.  Within research, there are self-locking loops, based on the construction of the traditional cable tie, designed for surgery. The device is intended for ligation purposes, by compressing tissue hemorrhage is prevented. The same material is used as in surgical suture (resorbable polymers), therefore the implant can be left in the body where after the material is resorbed by the tissue.  Traditional cable ties, due to their non-resorbable material, may not be left in the body permanently due to the risk of development of chronic granulomas. In urology, short term use of cable ties have been described at partial kidney resection.

Reuse.

Cable ties are generally single-use devices. Some models have a button to release the pawl and allow re-use.

Alternatives.

Other methods of bundling cable together securely and semi-permanently include cable lacing, strapping, binding knots such as the surgeon's knot or constrictor knot, Velcro brand hook-and-loop strips, conveyor belt hooks, twist ties, Rapstrap fasteners, or metal buckle.

A cable tie (also known as a hose tie, zip tie, or by the brand name Ty-Rap) is a type of fastener, for holding items together, primarily electrical cables or wires. Because of their low cost and ease of use, cable ties are ubiquitous, finding use in a wide range of other applications.


Career.

Pachman's first chess championship came in 1940, when he became champion of the nearby village of Cista (population 900). The first break in his chess career came in 1943, when he was invited to an international tournament in Prague. World Champion Alekhine dominated the event, with Keres taking second place. Pachman finished ninth in the nineteen-player tournament. Alekhine paid him a compliment in an article in the "Frankfurter Zeitung" and from the fifth round on, invited him every evening to analyze games and opening variations. "I don't have to tell you how a beginner from a village chess club felt at that time", Pachman wrote.  Pachman went on to become one of the world's leading players. He was awarded the International Master title in 1950 and the Grandmaster title in 1954. He won fifteen international tournaments, but considered sharing second place in Havana 1963, with Mikhail Tal and Efim Geller, behind Viktor Korchnoi, his best tournament result. Pachman won the Czechoslovak championship seven times between 1946 and 1966. He became the champion of West Germany in 1978. He played in six Interzonal tournaments between Saltsjöbaden 1948 and Manila 1976. He represented Czechoslovakia in eight consecutive Chess Olympiads from 1952 through 1966, usually playing. The most successful year of his career was 1959. After winning the Czechoslovakian championship he went on a South American tour, winning tournaments in Mar del Plata (tied with Miguel Najdorf); Santiago, Chile (tied with Borislav Ivkov); and Lima, Peru (again tied with Ivkov). On this tour he beat the 16-year-old Bobby Fischer twice. Pachman made an even lifetime score against Fischer, +2−2=4.

Politics.

Pachman was politically active throughout his life, first as a Communist and later as a staunch anti-Communist. In December 1968, he won a tournament in Athens. Upon his return to Prague, the authorities arrested, imprisoned, and tortured him for months. During this time he attempted suicide: On Christmas Eve 1969, doctors called his wife and told her that he probably would not survive the night. In 1972, Pachman was finally allowed to emigrate to West Germany. He soon became known as a strongly anti-Communist political activist, and his eloquence made him a regular guest on political talk shows.

Author.

Pachman was also a prolific author, publishing eighty books in five languages. In the 1950s, he became the world's leading opening expert with the publication of his four-volume opus, "Theory of Modern Chess". Pachman considered "Modern Chess Strategy", published in 1959, to be his best book. His book "Checkmate in Prague" recounts his treatment at the hands of the Communist authorities.

Luděk Pachman (German: Ludek Pachmann, May 11, 1924 in Bělá pod Bezdězem, today Czech Republic – March 6, 2003 in Passau, Germany) was a Czechoslovak-German chess grandmaster, chess writer, and political activist. In 1972, after being imprisoned and tortured almost to death by the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, he was allowed to emigrate to West Germany. He lived the remainder of his life there, and resumed his chess career with considerable success, including playing in the Interzonal in 1976 and winning the West German Championship in 1978.


Early life and education.

Arens was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, to a Jewish family. His father was an industrialist and his mother was a dentist. When he was a year old, his family moved to Riga, Latvia. where he attended elementary school. In 1939, Arens and his family immigrated to the United States, where his father had business interests. The family settled in New York City, where Arens attended George Washington High School.  As a youth, Arens was a leader in the Betar youth movement. During World War II, Arens served in the United States Army Corps of Engineers as a technical sergeant. Following the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, Arens immigrated to the new State of Israel and joined the Irgun, despite the opposition of his father. He was sent to North Africa (mostly Morocco and Algeria) and Europe to help local Jewish communities establish self-defense groups. In March 1949, he returned to Israel, and became a founding member of the Herut party, which had grown out of the Irgun. He worked as an engineer for an American company that designed water systems for Tel Aviv.  In 1951, he returned to the United States, and studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and aeronautical engineering at the California Institute of Technology where he was a student of Qian Xuesen, then worked for a time in the aircraft industry.

Academic and research career.

In 1957, Arens became professor of aeronautics at the Technion, serving in this position until 1962. After retiring from the government, he devoted himself to researching and commemorating the story of the Jewish Military Union (ŻZW), which fought alongside the better known Jewish Combat Organization (ŻOB) in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Arens is the author of a number of articles on the revolt as well as a book, "Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto", which has been published in Hebrew, Polish and English.  Arens was chairman of the International Board of Governors of Ariel University Center of Samaria. He was also a columnist for Haaretz newspaper.

Business career.

From 1962 until 1971, Arens served as Deputy Director General at Israel Aircraft Industries, where he oversaw major development projects, including the Kfir fighter jet project.

Political career.

After the Yom Kippur War, Arens entered politics and was elected to the Knesset as a member of Likud in the 1973 elections. After being re-elected in 1977, he became chairman of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. He voted against the Camp David Accords and the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty. In 1980, Prime Minister Menachem Begin offered Arens the post of Minister of Defense, but he turned it down due to his disagreement over the terms of the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty. Arens did not oppose peace with Egypt, but was opposed to certain aspects of the treaty, and thus did not want to have to oversee Israel's evacuation from the Sinai.  He was re-elected again in 1981, but resigned from the Knesset on 19 January 1982 when appointed ambassador to the United States. At this point, he brought his young protégé, Benjamin Netanyahu, then 32, to work for him in Washington. He returned to Israel in February 1983 after being appointed Minister of Defense, replacing Ariel Sharon, who had been forced out of office following the Kahan Commission's report on the Sabra and Shatila massacre. He was re-elected in 1984, but was only appointed Minister without Portfolio. After another re-election in 1988 he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs (with Netanyahu his deputy), and in 1990 returned to the Defense portfolio.  After Likud lost the 1992 elections, Arens retired from politics. He returned in 1999, however, to challenge Netanyahu for the Likud leadership. Although he won only 18% of the vote, Netanyahu appointed him Minister of Defense, replacing Yitzhak Mordechai, who had left Likud to establish the Centre Party. Although Arens returned to the Knesset after the 1999 elections, Likud lost the elections and he left the cabinet. He lost his seat for the final time in 2003.  Arens questioned the wisdom of Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Israeli procurement, given the neglected state of Israeli ground forces. In an article for Fathom Journal, Arens stated that he was a critic of unilateral withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza, accusing its proponents of suffering from "unilateral withdrawal syndrome".

Personal life.

While living in the United States, Arens married Muriel F. Eisenberg from New York City, and she moved to Israel with him. The couple had four children, two boys and two girls; Yigal, Aliza, Raanan, and Rut. Arens died on 7 January 2019 at the age of 93.

Awards and recognition.

In 1971, Arens won the Israel Defense Prize. In 2016, Nefesh B'Nefesh awarded him the Bonei Zion Prize.

Moshe Arens (27 December 1925 – 7 January 2019) was an Israeli aeronautical engineer, researcher, diplomat and Likud politician. A member of the Knesset between 1973 and 1992 and again from 1999 until 2003, he served as Minister of Defense three times and once as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Arens also served as the Israeli ambassador to the U.S. and was a professor at the Technion in Haifa.


Implementation.

In order to initiate a TCP connection, the client sends a TCP SYN packet to the server. In response, the server sends a TCP SYN+ACK packet back to the client. One of the values in this packet is a "sequence number", which is used by the TCP to reassemble the data stream. According to the TCP specification, that first sequence number sent by an endpoint can be any value as decided by that endpoint. SYN cookies are initial sequence numbers that are carefully constructed according to the following rules:  The initial TCP sequence number, i.e. the "SYN cookie", is computed as follows: "(Note: since m must be encoded using 3 bits, the server is restricted to sending up to 8 unique values for m when SYN cookies are in use.)"  When a client sends back a TCP ACK packet to the server in response to the server's SYN+ACK packet, the client must (according to the TCP spec) use "n+1" in the packet's "Acknowledgement number", where "n" is the initial sequence number sent by the server. The server then subtracts 1 from the acknowledgement number to reveal the SYN cookie sent to the client.  The server then performs the following operations. From this point forward, the connection proceeds as normal.

Drawbacks.

The use of SYN cookies does not break any protocol specifications, and therefore should be compatible with all TCP implementations. There are, however, two caveats that take effect when SYN cookies are in use. Firstly, the server is limited to only 8 unique MSS values, as that is all that can be encoded in 3 bits. Secondly, the server must reject all TCP options (such as large windows or timestamps), because the server discards the SYN queue entry where that information would otherwise be stored.. Finally, SYN cookies place increased load on server resources. Encrypting responses is computationally expensive. The SYN cookie does not reduce traffic, which makes it ineffective against SYN flooding attacks that target bandwidth as the attack vector.  While these restrictions necessarily lead to a sub-optimal experience, their effect is rarely noticed by clients because they are only applied when under attack. In such a situation, the loss of the TCP options in order to save the connection is usually considered to be a reasonable compromise.  A problem arises when the connection-finalizing ACK packet sent by the client is lost, and the application layer protocol requires the server to speak first (SMTP and SSH are two examples). In this case, the client assumes that the connection was established successfully and waits for the server to send its protocol banner, or resend the SYN+ACK packet; however, the server is not aware of the session and will not resend the SYN+ACK because it discarded the backlog queue entry that would enable it to do so. Eventually, the client will abort the connection due to an application layer timeout, but this may take a relatively long time.  In 2008, Version 2.6.26 of the Linux kernel added limited support of TCP options by encoding them into the timestamp.  TCP Cookie Transactions (TCPCT) standard was designed to overcome these shortcomings of SYN cookies and improve it on a couple of aspects. Unlike SYN cookies, TCPCT is a TCP extension and required support from both endpoints. It was moved to "Historic" status by RFC 7805 in 2016.

Security considerations.

Simple firewalls that are configured to allow all "outgoing" connections but to restrict which ports an "incoming" connection can reach (for example, allow incoming connections to a Web server on port 80 but restrict all other ports), work by blocking only incoming SYN requests to unwanted ports. If SYN cookies are in operation, care should be taken to ensure an attacker is not able to bypass such a firewall by forging ACKs instead, trying random sequence numbers until one is accepted. SYN cookies should be switched on and off on a "per-port" basis, so that SYN cookies being enabled on a public port does not cause them to be recognised on a non-public port. The original Linux kernel implementation misunderstood this part of Bernstein's description and used a single global variable to switch on SYN cookies for all ports; this was pointed out by a research student and subsequently fixed in.

History.

The technique was created by Daniel J. Bernstein and Eric Schenk in September 1996. The first implementation (for SunOS) was released by Jeff Weisberg a month later, and Eric Schenk released his Linux implementation in February 1997. FreeBSD implements syncookies since FreeBSD 4.5 (January 2002).

SYN cookie is a technique used to resist IP Spoofing attacks. The technique's primary inventor Daniel J. Bernstein defines SYN cookies as "particular choices of initial TCP sequence numbers by TCP servers." In particular, the use of SYN cookies allows a server to avoid dropping connections when the SYN queue fills up. Instead of storing additional connections, the SYN queue entry is encoded into the sequence number sent in the SYN+ACK response. If the server then receives a subsequent ACK response from the client with the incremented sequence number, the server is able to reconstruct the SYN queue entry using information encoded in the TCP sequence number and proceed as usual with the connection.


Career before and during World War II.

Paul Karl Schmidt became a member of the Nazi Party in 1931 and a member of the SS in 1938. He graduated from university in 1934, and became an assistant at the Institute of Psychology of the Universität Kiel in Germany. He held several positions in the Nazi Student Association.  In the SS, Schmidt was promoted to the rank of "Obersturmbannführer" in 1940. During the same year, he became the chief press spokesman for foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. In this position, he was responsible for the German Foreign Ministry's news and press division.  Schmidt chaired the daily press conferences of the ministry, and was thus one of the most important and influential propagandists for National Socialism during World War II. Recent studies confirm that his influence was at least on the same level as that of Otto Dietrich (Reichspressechef of Adolf Hitler) and of Hans Fritzsche (Pressechef of the Reichspropagandaministerium). Schmidt was also responsible for the German propaganda magazine "Signal", which was published in several languages to tell the German side of the story in neutral and occupied countries during the war.  Schmidt justified the Holocaust through his propaganda efforts. In May 1944, he gave advice on how to justify the deportation and murder of Hungarian Jews, to counter the potential accusation of mass murder: Schmidt was arrested on 6 May 1945 and interned for 30 months. It was left open for a long time whether he would appear as one of those indicted, or as a witness for the prosecution, during the war crimes trials. During the Ministries Trial, part of the Nuremberg Trials, he finally appeared as a witness for the prosecution, and portrayed himself as a fighter for democratic freedom of the press.

Post-war.

After World War II, Schmidt became a writer. Aided by the network of 'old comrades' working in the publishing industry, he was able to secure assignments. Starting in the 1950s, he wrote for the popular magazine "Kristall". He first used the pseudonym Paul Karell, and later Paul Carell.  He worked as a freelance author under various noms de plume for newspapers such as "Die Welt" and "Die Zeit" (as P. C. Holm, among others). He also wrote for the magazines "Norddeutsche Rundschau" and "Der Spiegel", and published some accounts of war stories for "Der Landser", a West German pulp magazine featuring stories predominantly set during World War II. He was seen as an influential adviser to the German Axel Springer AG, where he wrote speeches for Axel Springer.  From 1965 to 1971 the Office of the State Prosecutor of Verden in Germany investigated him for murder. But the investigation, which some claim should have clarified his role in the genocide of Hungarian Jews, ended without an indictment. Schmidt never had to face a trial for his activities during the war.  In 1992 Carell claimed that even after the Battle of Stalingrad there was a possibility for Germany to win the war. In his view, it was primarily the command of Adolf Hitler that led to the defeat. The leadership of the Wehrmacht and very competent commanders such as Erich von Manstein could have achieved victory if not for Hitler's interference. Carell also claimed that the invasion of the Soviet Union was a preemptive attack to forestall an invasion of Germany by the Red Army.

Writing career.

The success of his books "Hitler Moves East (Unternehmen Barbarossa)" and "Scorched Earth (Verbrannte Erde)" made Carell a leading post-war chronicler of the German side of World War II on the Eastern Front. His book "Die Gefangenen" (1980), dealing with German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union, was published by Ullstein-Verlag. These books generally had a positive media reception; "Die Welt" wrote, for example: "Helps to reduce the dislike between Germans and Russians (...) qualified as an historian." Or the "": "Someone for whom the seriousness of the source and the value of documentation are more important than going for cheap thrills – that is Paul Carell!" Carell also wrote about Rommel and about the Allied invasion of Normandy.  In his books, Carell portrays the Wehrmacht as heroes fighting for a lost cause. Carell presents the post-war revisionist messages first popularized by leading Wehrmacht ex-generals:  Critics point out that Carell's works emphasize the German army's professionalism, sacrifice and positive encounters with civilians, and his books also suggest that the Wehrmacht freed the Russians from their Communist tyrants and restored their religious community.  Critics also suggest that in Carell's works the army thus operated in a world distinct from the political sphere, and the culprits for any calamities that befell the Russian people rule this political sphere, namely the Nazi and the Communist parties. The thrust of this argument thus confirmed the high moral position of the German officer, perpetuating the myth of the "clean Wehrmacht". Carell's themes of anti-Communism also appealed to the U.S. public and garnered Carell repeat reprints.  Carell is the author of:

Paul Carell (born Paul Karl Schmidt; 2 November 1911, Kelbra – 20 June 1997) was a German propagandist who was the chief press spokesman for Joachim von Ribbentrop's Foreign Ministry during the Nazi era. In this capacity during World War II, he maintained close ties with the Wehrmacht, while he served in the "Allgemeine-SS" (General SS). One of his specialities was the "Jewish question". After the war, Carell became a successful author, although critics claim that his books romanticized and whitewashed the Wehrmacht.


Life.

He was born at Brüx, a small Protestant community in Bohemia, to a Saxon father and a Bohemian mother. In 1626 the family had to flee Bohemia, during the Thirty Years' War, after it had become Catholic; they settled in Freiberg, Saxony, where Andreas must have received his musical education. He probably did not study with composer Christoph Demantius, who was "Kantor" at Freiberg and the most significant musician in the city while Hammerschmidt was there; however he may have known him. Many famous musicians of the early Baroque spent time in Freiberg but it is uncertain which of them taught Hammerschmidt; at any rate he received a superb musical training while there.  Hammerschmidt left Freiberg in 1633, through his mentor Stephan Otto, taking a post as organist for Count Rudolf von Bünau in Weesenstein, but returned to Freiberg the next year as an organist. He was married shortly after his return there, and of his six children three died in infancy. In 1639 he left Freiberg again, moving to Zittau, where he succeeded Christoph Schreiber as organist; he remained in Zittau at this post for the rest of his life. While musical life in Zittau was severely damaged by the Thirty Years' War, including the decimation of the choirs and general reduction in musical standards, Hammerschmidt survived; after the end of the war in 1648 musical life slowly regained its former high standard. Exact records of his activities in Zittau are spotty, for the documents were burned in 1757 when the city was destroyed by the Austrians in the Seven Years' War; however Hammerschmidt during this portion of his career became one of the best-known composers in Germany, and the most famous representative of the concertato style of the generation after Heinrich Schütz. While well-respected and called on as an expert in many matters, he seems to have been prone to outbursts of rage, some of which involved him in brawls. He also seems to have profited well from his activities as a musician and civic leader, and evidently lived in some luxury, having a house in town as well as a country estate.

Music and influence.

Hammerschmidt wrote motets, concertos and arias, and almost all of his output is sacred vocal music in the concertato style. According to Manfred Bukofzer (1947), he "watered down the achievements of Schütz for the multitude." Many of his compositions are in the form of the chorale monody, an adaptation of the early Baroque Italian form to a sacred, and specifically Protestant, purpose. Indeed, Hammerschmidt represents the second generation of composers who distilled a native German Baroque tradition out of forms and styles imported from Italy.  Over 400 works by Hammerschmidt survive, in a total of 14 separate collections. The motets represent a more conservative style, as noted by Hammerschmidt himself, and the concertos—concertato pieces with opposing groups of voices and instruments—are in a current idiom.  Some of his concertos are written for large ensembles, with diverse combinations of instruments and voices (for example, the sets from "Gespräche über die Evangelia" of 1655–1656; this was long enough after the war that large ensembles were available again). He wrote these pieces for Sundays and church feast days; their structure and intent foreshadowed the later German church cantata, as exemplified most famously by Johann Sebastian Bach. Even Hammerschmidt's masses conform to the concertato style, and are best seen as concertos.  While Hammerschmidt was an organist all of his life, no organ music of his has survived; indeed there is no evidence he published any. Some instrumental music of his has survived in three publications; most of these are suites of dances influenced by the English style which was prevalent in the northern part of Germany at that time.

Andreas Hammerschmidt (1611 or 1612 – 29 October 1675), the "Orpheus of Zittau," was a German Bohemian composer and organist of the early to middle Baroque era. He was one of the most significant and popular composers of sacred music in Germany in the middle 17th century.


History.

Construction began on the initiative of President Josip Broz Tito, who called the project the "Road of brotherhood and unity" ("Autoput bratstva i jedinstva") after the motto of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia. The first section between Zagreb and Belgrade was built with the effort of the Yugoslav People's Army and volunteer Youth Work Actions and was opened in 1950. The section between Ljubljana and Zagreb was built by 54,000 volunteers in less than eight months in 1958. The southern section from Belgrade was not completed until the mid-1960s.  Its importance caused it to be colloquially named "autoput" or "autocesta" (generic Serbo-Croatian expressions for "highway", "motorway"). This use has since largely faded out, after the successor states built further motorways.  In the 1960s and 1970s the "autoput" became a much frequented holiday route for Turkish immigrants in West Germany and Austria (then called "Gastarbeiter") visiting their original homeland during the summer vacation time, and for tourists to southeastern Europe. Entering communist but non-aligned Yugoslavia was far easier, for people from NATO countries such as West Germany and Turkey, than entering any of the Warsaw Pact communist countries of the Balkan region that might have provided alternative routes.  Originally an ordinary road, the carriageway used to be congested with cars and trucks, especially in summertime, when overtired long-distance drivers caused numerous accidents. Wrecked cars usually remained in place for long periods of time, providing a grim reminder of the dangers of the highway. The situation slightly improved after some parts were brought up to modern motorway standards (two lanes for each direction plus an emergency lane) on the following sections built between 1977 and 1991:  In 1991, several sections were affected by the Yugoslav wars, bringing severe damage, and causing the traffic to be almost completely discontinued in places.

International categorization.

Since 1975, the road was concurrent with the following routes of the International E-road network:

Legacy.

Since 1994 the route is also part of the Pan-European corridor X that extends from Salzburg to Thessaloniki.  The road has been continuously upgraded. As of 2019, it is a modern motorway in its entire length through:  The most difficult section to engineer and build was the Grdelica Gorge section which was completed in May 2019. The classification as the M-1 Highway continued in Serbia up to 2013, when the road was reorganized as the A1 and A3.

The Brotherhood and Unity Highway (; ; or, ), officially classed as the M-1 Highway, was a highway that stretched over across Yugoslavia, from the Austrian border at Rateče near Kranjska Gora in the northwest via Ljubljana, Zagreb, Belgrade and Skopje to Gevgelija on the Greek border in the southeast. It was the main modern highway in the country, connecting four constituent republics.


Description.

The Pyrenean desman is long with a rounded scale-covered tail of, and weighs. Pyrenean desmans have a long, sensitive nasal trompe provided with hypertrophic vibrissae and chemo-/mechanosensitive Eimer’s organs helping prey detection, and large webbed feet with fringed hairs to increase the swimming surface, and can close off their nostrils and ears to stop water penetration.  The desman's body is covered in dark, brownish fur, with the exception of its tail and nose. The nose is black and is covered in vibrissae (facial hairs), which it uses to feel the movement of prey as it sticks its nose into mud or crevices while searching for food. The Pyrenean desman can live at least 3.5 years. The animals are mostly nocturnal, and eat small invertebrates, mostly aquatic macroinvertebrates. They breed up to three times a year, with the period of gestation lasting around thirty days.  Three to four young are born in each litter. The males have a slightly larger territory than the female. Both males and females scent mark. They are thought to be aggressive towards other adult members of the species.

Habitat.

Pyrenean desmans are proficient swimmers, suited to their aquatic habitat, although their claws also allow them to be good at climbing. They mostly occur in fast-flowing, mountaineous rivers with shallow waters and good riparian galleries. The habitat of the Pyrenean desman is under threat, and recent studies have shown dramatic declines in species occurrence in several parts of its range in the last few decades

Conservation.

Threats include habitat fragmentation and alteration, invasive species (e.g. the American mink), and climate change.

"The Photo Ark".

On May 4, 2018, "National Geographic" reported that the Pyrenean desman was the 8,000th animal photographed for "The Photo Ark" by Joel Sartore.

The Pyrenean desman ("Galemys pyrenaicus") is a small semiaquatic, globally threatened mammal related to moles and shrews, and, along with the Russian desman ("Desmana moschata"), is one of the two extant members of the tribe Desmanini. The species occurs in north and central parts of Spain and Portugal, French Pyrenees, and Andorra, but severe range contractions have been documented across its geographic distribution.


Description.

"Bartsia alpina" is a hemiparasitic perennial plant with a woody rhizome, growing to a height of between. The stem is erect and sometimes branched, hairy and purple in colour. The leaves are in opposite pairs, with oval leaf blades up to long and toothed margins. At the base of the plant, the leaves are green, but higher up they are tinged with purple. The corolla is dark purple and is about long. It is narrow at the base and has two lips, an obtuse upper lip and a smaller lower one, with three blunt, equal-sized lobes. It has four stamens fused to the corolla and two ovaries fused to the style. The fruit is an oval brown capsule.

Distribution and habitat.

"Bartsia alpina" has a European Arctic-montane distribution, and is also known from North America. It occurs in the mountainous regions of northern Russia, Finland, Norway and Sweden, and in the Alps and other mountains in Central Europe, as far south as the Pyrenees and south‐west Bulgaria; it also occurs in Iceland, Greenland and north‐eastern Canada.  It has a very restricted distribution in the British Isles, occurring only in a few locations in upland areas in northern England, and in the central Scottish Highlands. It used to occur in damp pasture, in basic flushes and runnels and wet, steep, species-rich banks, but it has largely been eliminated from these habitats by over-grazing and trampling by livestock. It has persisted better away from grazing animals in ledge communities on mica-schist crags.

Bartsia alpina is a species of perennial flowering plant, known by the common name alpine bartsia or velvetbells. It is found in the mountainous regions of Europe and also occurs in Iceland, Greenland and north‐eastern Canada.


Life.

Maximilian Joseph was born at Bamberg, the only son of Duke Pius August in Bavaria (1786–1837) and his wife, Princess Amélie Louise of Arenberg. On 9 September 1828, at Tegernsee, Maximilian Joseph married Princess Ludovika of Bavaria, the sixth daughter of King Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria, his father's cousin. They had ten children.  In 1834 he purchased Possenhofen Castle on Lake Starnberg; this was his major residence for the rest of his life. In 1838 he acquired Unterwittelsbach Castle (today housing a "Sisi" museum) near the site of Burg Wittelsbach, the ancestral seat of the House of Wittelsbach. Maximilian Joseph died in Munich. He and his wife are buried in the family crypt in Tegernsee Abbey, a former monastery which Ludovika's father, King Maximilian I Joseph, had acquired in 1817. At the same time of the secularisation, Duke Maximilian Joseph's grandfather Duke Wilhelm in Bavaria had also purchased a former monastery, Banz Abbey. Both properties, Tegernsee and Banz, are still today owned by Prince Max, Duke in Bavaria.

Middle East trip.

In 1838 Maximilian Joseph travelled to Egypt and Palestine. He published an account of this trip: "Wanderung nach dem Orient im Jahre 1838" (München: Georg Franz, 1839; reprinted Pfaffenhofen: Ludwig, 1978). While climbing the Great Pyramid he arranged for his servants to yodel as if he were climbing in the Alps. He collected a number of antiquities which he brought back to Bavaria and displayed in his father's home, Banz Abbey; they can still be seen there today. Among the items are the mummy of a young woman, three mummies' heads, several animal mummies, shawabtis, and several stones from tombs or temples including one from the Temple of Dendur. He also bought some children in the Cairo slave market and later freed them. When Maximilian Joseph was in Jerusalem, he paid for the restoration of the Church of the Flagellation on the Via Dolorosa.

Folk-music.

Maximilian Joseph was one of the most prominent promoters of Bavarian folk-music in the 19th century. Under his influence the zither started to be used in court circles and eventually became identified as the national musical instrument of Bavaria. Because of his interest he received the nickname "Zither-Maxl". He himself played the zither and also composed music for it.  During a visit by his cousin Ludwig II of Bavaria, Ludwig saw some sheet music on Maximilian Joseph's piano by the composer Richard Wagner, which led on to Ludwig's financial support for Wagner from 1863.  Maximilian Joseph's musical compositions have been collected in the work: "Die im Druck erschienenen Kompositionen von Herzog Maximilian in Bayern: Ländler, Walzer, Polka, Schottisch, Mazurka, Quadrillen und Märsche für Pianoforte, Zither, Gitarre oder Streichinstrumente" (München: Musikverlag Emil Katzbichler, 1992).

Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria (4 December 1808 – 15 November 1888), known informally as Max in Bayern, was a member of a junior branch of the House of Wittelsbach and a promoter of Bavarian folk-music. He is most famous today as the father of Empress Elisabeth of Austria ("Sisi") and great-grandfather of King Leopold III of Belgium.


Early life.

Backus was born in Philadelphia and grew up in nearby Wilmington, Delaware. He studied at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and was apparently not a diligent student. After entering the University of Virginia to study chemistry, he quit and was conscripted into the U.S. Army. He began medical training at Haverford College and, during an internship at a hospital, he was diagnosed with a cranial bone tumor, which was successfully removed; a plate was installed in his head, and he ended medical training after nine months and a subsequent operation to replace the plate with one of his own design.

Fortran.

After moving to New York City he trained initially as a radio technician and became interested in mathematics. He graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor's degree in 1949 and a master's degree in 1950, both in mathematics, and joined IBM in 1950. During his first three years, he worked on the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator (SSEC); his first major project was to write a program to calculate positions of the Moon. In 1953 Backus developed the language Speedcoding, the first high-level language created for an IBM computer, to aid in software development for the IBM 701 computer.  Programming was very difficult at this time, and in 1954 Backus assembled a team to define and develop Fortran for the IBM 704 computer. Fortran was the first high-level programming language to be put to broad use.

Backus–Naur form.

Backus served on the international committees that developed ALGOL 58 and the very influential ALGOL 60, which quickly became the "de facto" worldwide standard for publishing algorithms. Backus developed the Backus–Naur form (BNF), in the UNESCO report on ALGOL 58. It was a formal notation able to describe any context-free programming language, and was important in the development of compilers. A few deviations from this approach were tried—notably in Lisp and APL—but by the 1970s, following the development of automated compiler generators such as yacc, Backus–Naur context-free specifications for computer languages had become quite standard. This contribution helped Backus win the Turing Award in 1977.

Function-level programming.

Backus later worked on a function-level programming language known as FP, which was described in his Turing Award lecture "Can Programming be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?". Sometimes viewed as Backus's apology for creating Fortran, this paper did less to garner interest in the FP language than to spark research into functional programming in general. When Backus publicized the function-level style of programming, his message was mostly misunderstood as being the same as traditional functional programming style languages.  FP was strongly inspired by Kenneth E. Iverson's APL, even using a non-standard character set. An FP interpreter was distributed with the 4.2BSD Unix operating system, but there were relatively few implementations of the language, most of which were used for educational purposes.  Backus spent the latter part of his career developing FL (from "Function Level"), a successor to FP. FL was an internal IBM research project, and development of the language stopped when the project was finished. Only a few papers documenting it remain, and the source code of the compiler described in them was not made public. FL was at odds with functional programming languages being developed in the 1980s, most of which were based on the lambda calculus and static typing systems instead of, as in APL, the concatenation of primitive operations. Many of the language's ideas have now been implemented in versions of the J programming language, Iverson's successor to APL.

John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He directed the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define formal language syntax. He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?"


Marriage to Ingund.

Hermenegild was the eldest son of the Liuvigild and his first wife, Princess Theodosia (a Chalcedonian Christian.) He was brother to Reccared I and brought up an Arian. Liuvigild made his sons co-regents.  In 579 he married Ingund, daughter of the Frankish King Sigebert I of Austrasia who was a Chalcedonian Christian. Her mother was the Visigoth princess Brunhilda of Austrasia. The twelve-year-old Ingund was pressured by Hermenegild's stepmother Goiswintha to abjure her beliefs, but she stayed firm in her faith.  Liuvigild sent Hermenegild to the south to govern on his behalf. There he came under the influence of Leander of Seville, older brother of Isidore of Seville. Hermenegild was converted to Chalcedonian Christianity. His family demanded that he return to Arianism, but he refused.  Around this time, he led a revolt against Liuvigild. Contemporary accounts attribute this to politics rather than primarily to religious differences. He asked for the aid of the Byzantine Empire but they were occupied with defending against territorial incursions by the Sasanian Empire For a time Hermenegild had the support of the Suebi, who had been defeated by Liuvigild in 579. However, Liuvigild forced them to capitulate once again in 583.  Hermenegild fled to Seville and when that fell to a siege in 584 went to Córdoba. After Liuvigild paid 30,000 pieces of gold, the Byzantines withdrew, taking Ingund and her son with them. Hermenegild sought sanctuary in a church. Liuvigild would not violate the sanctuary. He sent Reccared inside to speak with Hermenegild and to offer peace. This was accepted and peace was made for some time.

Imprisonment and death.

Goiswintha, however, brought about another alienation within the family. Hermenegild was imprisoned in Tarragona or Toledo. During his captivity in the tower of Seville, an Arian bishop was sent to Hermenegild for Easter but he would not accept the Eucharist from him. King Liuvigild ordered him beheaded; he was executed on 13 April 585.

Saint Hermenegild or Ermengild (died 13 April 585) (, from Gothic "*Airmana-gild", "immense tribute"), was the son of king Liuvigild of the Visigothic Kingdom in the Iberian Peninsula and southern France. He fell out with his father in 579, then revolted the following year. During his rebellion, he converted from Arianism to Chalcedonian Christianity. Hermenegild was defeated in 584 and exiled. His death was later celebrated as a martyrdom due to the influence of Pope Gregory I's "Dialogues", in which he portrayed Hermenegild as a "Catholic martyr rebelling against the tyranny of an Arian father."


Abduction claims.

According to Walton, on November 5, 1975 he was working with a timber stand improvement crew in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest near Snowflake, Arizona. While riding in a truck with six of his coworkers, they encountered a saucer-shaped object hovering over the ground approximately 110 feet away, making a high-pitched buzz. Walton claims that after he left the truck and approached the object, a beam of light suddenly appeared from the craft and knocked him unconscious. The other six men were frightened and supposedly drove away. Walton claimed that he awoke in a hospital-like room, being observed by three short, bald creatures. He claimed that he fought with them until a human wearing a helmet led Walton to another room, where he blacked out as three other humans put a clear plastic mask over his face. Walton has claimed he remembers nothing else until he found himself walking along a highway, with the flying saucer departing above him.

Ufologists.

In the days following Walton's UFO claim, "The National Enquirer" awarded Walton and his co-workers a $5,000 prize for "best UFO case of the year" after they allegedly passed polygraph tests administered by the "Enquirer" and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO). Walton, his older brother, and his mother were described by the Navajo County, Arizona sheriff as "longtime students of UFOs". Some UFOlogists believe Walton was abducted by aliens. UFOlogist Jim Ledwith said, “For five days, the authorities thought he’d been murdered by his co-workers, and then he was returned. All of the co-workers who were there, who saw the spacecraft, they all took polygraph tests, and they all passed, except for one, and that one was inconclusive.”

Skeptical reception.

Skeptics consider the case to be a hoax, describing it as "sensationalizing on the part of the media" and "a put-up job to make money". UFO researcher Philip J. Klass considered Walton's story to be a hoax perpetrated for financial gain and discovered many "discrepancies" in the accounts of Walton and his co-workers. After investigating the case, Klass reported that the polygraph tests were "poorly administered", that Walton used "polygraph countermeasures," such as holding his breath, and that Klass uncovered an earlier failed test administered by an examiner who concluded the case involved "gross deception".  Science and skepticism writer Michael Shermer criticized Walton's claims, saying, "I think the polygraph is not a reliable determiner of truth. I think Travis Walton was not abducted by aliens. In both cases, the power of deception and self-deception is all we need to understand what really happened in 1975 and after." Cognitive psychologist Susan Clancy argues that alien abduction reports began only after stories of extraterrestrials appeared in films and on TV, and that Walton was likely influenced by the NBC television movie "The UFO Incident," which aired two weeks before his own claimed abduction and dramatized the alien abduction claims of Barney and Betty Hill. Clancy noted the rise in alien abduction claims following the movie and cites Klass's conclusions that "after viewing this movie, any person with a little imagination could now become an instant celebrity", concluding that "one of those instant celebrities was Travis Walton."

Media and publicity.

In 1978, Walton wrote the book "The Walton Experience" detailing his claims, which became the basis for the 1993 film "Fire in the Sky". Paramount Pictures decided Walton’s account was "too fuzzy and too similar to other televised close encounters", so they ordered screenwriter Tracy Tormé to write a "flashier, more provocative" abduction story. Walton has occasionally appeared at UFO conventions or on television. He sponsors his own UFO conference in Arizona called the "Skyfire Summit".  Thirty years after the book's release, Walton appeared on the Fox game show "The Moment of Truth" and was asked if he in fact was abducted by a UFO on November 5, 1975, to which he replied, "Yes". The polygraph test determined he was lying.

The Travis Walton UFO incident was an alleged alien abduction of an American forestry worker, Travis Walton, by a UFO on November 5, 1975, while he was working in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests near Snowflake, Arizona. Walton reappeared after a five-day search. The Walton case received mainstream publicity and remains one of the best-known alien abduction stories. Skeptics consider it a hoax. Walton wrote a book about his purported abduction in 1978 called "The Walton Experience", which was adapted into the 1993 film "Fire in the Sky".