Description.

Members of the family Pinaceae are trees (rarely shrubs) growing from tall, mostly evergreen (except the deciduous "Larix" and "Pseudolarix"), resinous, monoecious, with subopposite or whorled branches, and spirally arranged, linear (needle-like) leaves. The embryos of Pinaceae have three to 24 cotyledons.  The female cones are large and usually woody, long, with numerous spirally arranged scales, and two winged seeds on each scale. The male cones are small, long, and fall soon after pollination; pollen dispersal is by wind. Seed dispersal is mostly by wind, but some species have large seeds with reduced wings, and are dispersed by birds. Analysis of Pinaceae cones reveals how selective pressure has shaped the evolution of variable cone size and function throughout the family. Variation in cone size in the family has likely resulted from the variation of seed dispersal mechanisms available in their environments over time. All Pinaceae with seeds weighing less than 90 mg are seemingly adapted for wind dispersal. Pines having seeds larger than 100 mg are more likely to have benefited from adaptations that promote animal dispersal, particularly by birds. Pinaceae that persist in areas where tree squirrels are abundant do not seem to have evolved adaptations for bird dispersal.  Boreal conifers have many adaptions for winter. The narrow conical shape of northern conifers, and their downward-drooping limbs help them shed snow, and many of them seasonally alter their biochemistry to make them more resistant to freezing, called "hardening".

Classification.

Classification of the subfamilies and genera of Pinaceae has been subject to debate in the past. Pinaceae ecology, morphology, and history have all been used as the basis for methods of analyses of the family. An 1891 publication divided the family into two subfamilies, using the number and position of resin canals in the primary vascular region of the young taproot as the primary consideration. In a 1910 publication, the family was divided into two tribes based on the occurrence and type of long–short shoot dimorphism.  A more recent classification divided the subfamilies and genera based on the consideration of features of ovulate cone anatomy among extant and fossil members of the family. Below is an example of how the morphology has been used to classify Pinaceae. The 11 genera are grouped into four subfamilies, based on the microscopical anatomy and the morphology of the cones, pollen, wood, seeds, and leaves:  Some genera of interest include "Pinus", "Picea", "Abies", "Cedrus", "Larix", "Tsuga" and "Pseudotsuga."

Defense mechanisms.

External stresses on plants have the ability to change the structure and composition of forest ecosystems. Common external stress that "Pinaceae" experience are herbivore and pathogen attack which often leads to tree death. In order to combat these stresses, trees need to adapt or evolve defenses against these stresses. "Pinaceae" have evolved a myriad of mechanical and chemical defenses, or a combination of the two, in order to protect themselves against antagonists. "Pinaceae" have the ability to up-regulate a combination of constitutive mechanical and chemical strategies to further their defenses.  "Pinaceae" defenses are prevalent in the bark of the trees. This part of the tree contributes a complex defensive boundary against external antagonists. Constitutive and induced defenses are both found in the bark.

Constitutive defenses.

Constitutive defenses are typically the first line of defenses used against antagonists and can include sclerified cells, lignified periderm cells, and secondary compounds such as phenolics and resins. Constitutive defenses are always expressed and offer immediate protection from invaders but could also be defeated by antagonists that have evolved adaptations to these defense mechanisms. One of the common secondary compounds used by "Pinaceae" are phenolics or polyphenols. These secondary compounds are preserved in vacuoles of polyphenolic parenchyma cells (PP) in the secondary phloem.

Induced defenses.

Induced defense responses need to be activated by certain cues, such as herbivore damage or other biotic signals.  A common induced defense mechanism used by "Pinaceae" is resins. Resins are also one of the primary defenses used against attack. Resins are short term defenses that are composed of a complex combination of volatile mono- (C) and sesquiterpenes (C) and nonvolatile diterpene resin acids (C). They are produced and stored in specialized secretory areas known as resin ducts, resin blisters, or resin cavities. Resins have the ability to wash away, trap, fend off antagonists, and are also involved in wound sealing. They are an effective defense mechanism because they have toxic and inhibitory effects on invaders, such as insects or pathogens. Resins could have developed as an evolutionary defense against bark beetle attacks. One well researched resin present in "Pinaceae" is oleoresin. Oleoresin had been found to be a valuable part of the conifer defense mechanism against biotic attacks. They are found in secretory tissues in tree stems, roots, and leaves. Oleoresin is also needed in order to classify conifers.

Active research: methyl jasmonate (MJ).

The topic of defense mechanisms within family "Pinaceae" is a very active area of study with numerous studies being conducted. Many of these studies use methyl jasmonate (MJ) as an antagonist. Methyl jasmonate is known to be able to induce defense responses in the stems of multiple "Pinaceae" species. It has been found that MJ stimulated the activation of PP cells and formation of xylem traumatic resin ducts (TD). These are structures that are involved in the release of phenolics and resins, both forms of defense mechanism.

The Pinaceae, pine family, are trees or shrubs, including many of the well-known conifers of commercial importance such as cedars, firs, hemlocks, larches, pines and spruces. The family is included in the order Pinales, formerly known as Coniferales. Pinaceae are supported as monophyletic by their protein-type sieve cell plastids, pattern of proembryogeny, and lack of bioflavonoids. They are the largest extant conifer family in species diversity, with between 220 and 250 species (depending on taxonomic opinion) in 11 genera, and the second-largest (after Cupressaceae) in geographical range, found in most of the Northern Hemisphere, with the majority of the species in temperate climates, but ranging from subarctic to tropical. The family often forms the dominant component of boreal, coastal, and montane forests. One species, "Pinus merkusii", grows just south of the equator in Southeast Asia. Major centres of diversity are found in the mountains of southwest China, Mexico, central Japan, and California.


Life.

Early years (1833–1850).

Brahms's father, Johann Jakob Brahms (1806–72), was from the town of Heide in Holstein. The family name was also sometimes spelt 'Brahmst' or 'Brams', and derives from 'Bram', the German word for the shrub broom. Against the family's will, Johann Jakob pursued a career in music, arriving in Hamburg in 1826, where he found work as a jobbing musician and a string and wind player. In 1830, he married Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen (1789–1865), a seamstress 17 years older than he was. In the same year he was appointed as a horn player

Early career (1850–1862).

In 1850 Brahms met the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi and accompanied him in a number of recitals over the next few years. This was his introduction to "gypsy-style" music such as the "csardas", which was later to prove the foundation of his most lucrative and popular compositions, the two sets of "Hungarian Dances" (1869 and 1880). 1850 also marked Brahms's first contact (albeit a failed one) with Robert Schumann; during Schumann's visit to Hamburg that year, friends persuaded Brahms to send the former some of his compositions, but the package was returned unopened.  In 1853 Brahms went on a concert tour with Reményi. In late May the two visited the violinist and composer Joseph Joachim at Hanover. Brahms had earlier heard Joachim playing the solo part in Beethoven's violin concerto and been deeply impressed. Brahms played some of his own solo piano pieces for Joachim, who remembered fifty years later: "Never in the course of my artist's life have I been more completely overwhelmed". This was the beginning of a friendship which was lifelong, albeit temporarily derailed when Brahms took

Maturity (1862–1876).

Brahms had hoped to be given the conductorship of the Hamburg Philharmonic, but in 1862 this post was given to the baritone Julius Stockhausen. (Brahms continued to hope for the post; but when he was finally offered the directorship in 1893, he demurred as he had "got used to the idea of having to go along other paths".) In autumn 1862 Brahms made his first visit to Vienna, staying there over the winter. There he became an associate of two close members of Wagner's circle, his earlier friend Peter Cornelius and Karl Tausig, and of Joseph Hellmesberger Sr. and Julius Epstein, respectively the Director and head of violin studies, and the head of piano studies, at the Vienna Conservatoire.

Years of fame (1876–1890).

Brahms's first symphony, Op. 68, appeared in 1876, though it had been begun (and a version of the first movement had been announced by Brahms to Clara and to Albert Dietrich) in the early 1860s. During the decade it evolved very gradually; the finale may not have begun its conception until 1868. Brahms was cautious and typically self-deprecating about the symphony during its creation, writing to his friends that it was "long and difficult", "not exactly charming" and, significantly "long and in C Minor", which, as Richard Taruskin points out, made it clear "that Brahms was taking on the model of models [for a symphony]: Beethoven's Fifth."  In May 1876, Cambridge University offered to grant honorary degrees of Doctor of Music to both Brahms and Joachim, provided that they composed new pieces as "theses" and were present in Cambridge to receive

Last years (1890–1897).

Brahms had become acquainted with Johann Strauss II, who was eight years his senior, in the 1870s, but their close friendship belongs to the years 1889 and after. Brahms admired much of Strauss's music, and encouraged the composer to sign up with his publisher Simrock. In autographing a fan for Strauss's wife Adele, Brahms wrote the opening notes of "The Blue Danube" waltz, adding the words "unfortunately not by Johannes Brahms".  After the successful Vienna premiere of his Second String Quintet, op. 111, in 1890, the 57-year-old Brahms came to think that he might retire from composition, telling a friend that he "had achieved enough; here I had before me a carefree old age and could enjoy it in peace." He also began to find solace in escorting the mezzo-soprano Alice Barbi and may have proposed to her (she was only 28). His admiration for Richard Mühlfeld, clarinettist with the Meiningen orchestra, revived his interest in composing and led him to write

Music.

Style and influences.

Brahms maintained a classical sense of form and order in his works, in contrast to the opulence of the music of many of his contemporaries. Thus, many admirers (though not necessarily Brahms himself) saw him as the champion of traditional forms and "pure music", as opposed to the "New German" embrace of programme music.  Brahms venerated Beethoven; in the composer's home, a marble bust of Beethoven looked down on the spot where he composed, and some passages in his works are reminiscent of Beethoven's style. Brahms's First Symphony bears strongly the influence of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, as the two works are both in C minor and end in the struggle towards a C major triumph. The main theme of the finale of the First Symphony is also reminiscent of the main theme of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth, and when this resemblance was pointed out to Brahms he replied that

Works.

Brahms wrote a number of major works for orchestra, including two Serenades, four symphonies, two piano concertos (No. 1 in D minor; No. 2 in B-flat major), a Violin Concerto, a Double Concerto for violin and cello, and two companion orchestral overtures, the "Academic Festival Overture" and the "Tragic Overture".  His large choral work "A German Requiem" is not a setting of the liturgical "Missa pro defunctis" but a setting of texts which Brahms selected from the Luther Bible. The work was composed

Influence.

Brahms looked both backward and forward; his output was often bold in its exploration of harmony and rhythm. As a result, he was an influence on composers of both conservative and modernist tendencies. Within his lifetime, his idiom left an imprint on several composers within his personal circle, who strongly admired his music, such as Heinrich von Herzogenberg, Robert Fuchs, and Julius Röntgen, as well as on Gustav Jenner, who was his only formal composition pupil. Antonín Dvořák, who received substantial assistance from Brahms, deeply admired his music and was influenced by it in several works, such as the Symphony No. 7 in D minor and the F minor Piano Trio. Features of the "Brahms style" were absorbed in a more complex synthesis with other contemporary (chiefly Wagnerian) trends by Hans Rott, Wilhelm Berger, Max Reger and Franz Schmidt, whereas the British composers Hubert Parry and Edward Elgar and the Swede Wilhelm Stenhammar all testified to learning much from Brahms. As Elgar said, "I look at the Third Symphony of Brahms, and I feel like a pygmy."  Ferruccio Busoni's early music shows much Brahmsian influence, and Brahms took an

Beliefs.

Brahms was baptised into the Lutheran church as an infant, and was confirmed at aged fifteen (at St. Michael's Church, Hamburg), but has been described as an agnostic and a humanist. The devout Catholic Antonín Dvořák wrote in a letter: "Such a man, such a fine soul – and he believes in nothing! He believes in nothing!" When asked by conductor Karl Reinthaler

External links.

Sheet music  Photographs

Johannes Brahms (; 7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897) was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna. His reputation and status as a composer are such that he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.


Biography.

Early years.

Reuter was born in Apenrade (Aabenraa), Province of Schleswig-Holstein (now in Denmark). He spent his childhood days in Leer where a public square is named after him. Reuter attended the universities of Münster and Marburg where he completed his studies in 1912 and passed the examinations as a teacher. Moreover, he was member in a fraternity called "SBV Frankonia Marburg". The same year he became a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).  Reuter opposed Kaiser Wilhelm's regime at the start of the First World War. After being drafted, Reuter was wounded and captured by Russians during the Bolshevik Revolution. In captivity, Reuter joined the Bolsheviks and organized his fellow prisoners into a soviet. In 1917, Lenin sent him to Saratov in the to-be-established Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.

Weimar Republic.

Upon his return to Germany, Reuter joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and was named the First Secretary of its Berlin section. He embraced a position on the left wing of the party endorsing an open rebellion in March 1921 in central Germany and placed himself hereby in opposition to the leader of the party, Paul Levi. Although Reuter was seen as a favorite of Lenin, he was expelled from the party in 1922. He moved briefly to the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD), and then returned to the Social Democrats for good.  In 1926, Reuter entered services in the government of Berlin and was responsible for transportation. Accomplishments were the foundation of the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG), the introduction of a unified ticket for public transportation, and extensions of the Berlin subway system.  From 1931 until 1933, Reuter was the mayor of Magdeburg where he fought lack of housing and jobs due to the economic crisis. He also was elected as a member of the Reichstag. In 1933, with the Nazis now in power, he was forced to resign his positions and was brought to the concentration camp (KZ) Lichtenburg near Torgau. After his release, he went into exile in Turkey in 1935 where he stayed until the end to the Nazi era. In Ankara he lectured at the University, introduced urban planning as a university discipline, and served as consultant to the Government.

Post-war Berlin.

After the end of World War II, Reuter returned to Berlin, and was elected in 1946 to the Magistrate (governing body) where he oversaw initially the Transportation Department. In 1947 he was elected Lord Mayor ("Oberbürgermeister") of Berlin but in the deepening crisis of the Cold War, the Soviet government withheld their necessary consent.  Reuter is most notable for his stance during the Cold War in Berlin. During the Soviet-imposed Berlin Blockade (1948/49), the western part of city was sustained by the Berlin airlift that was established by the American Military Governor, Lucius D. Clay. In response to the threat, the citizens in the western sectors had to come together. Ernst Reuter became their spokesman and leader, a symbolic figure of the "Free" Berlin. Memorable is Reuter’s speech in front of the burned-out Reichstag building on 9 September 1948, facing a crowd of 300,000 where he appealed to the world not to abandon Berlin. In the election that was conducted in the western part of Berlin two months later, his popularity gave the SPD the highest win with 64.5% ever achieved by any party in a free election in Germany. As mayor he formed a grand coalition government with the next two largest parties to demonstrate West Berlin’s unity. Reuter's appeal to the West did not go unheard. The airlift saved the city from starvation, and Reuter became only the second German postwar politician (after Konrad Adenauer) to be placed on the cover of "Time" magazine. He was titled "Herr Berlin". When the new Berlin State Constitution became effective for West Berlin, Reuter was re-elected and on 18 January 1951, became what was now called the Governing Mayor (Regierender Bürgermeister) of West Berlin. He served in this function until his death.  Under his aegis, the Free University of Berlin was founded, as the University of Berlin was in the Soviet sector and under communist rule. In 1953 Reuter established the "Bürgermeister-Reuter-Stiftung" (Mayor Reuter Foundation) to assist refugees coming to West-Berlin.  A few weeks after the uprising of 17 June 1953 in East Berlin, Reuter died suddenly and unexpectedly from a heart attack in West Berlin at the age of 64. His funeral was attended by more than 1 million people. His grave is an Ehrengrab (honorary grave) on the Waldfriedhof Zehlendorf.

Family.

Reuter was married in 1920, and he and his wife Lotte (Charlotte) had two children, Hella (1920–1983), and (Gerd Edzard) Harry (1921–1992) who became a British citizen and a professor of mathematics. Harry's son Timothy was a distinguished mediaeval historian. In 1927 Reuter divorced Charlotte and remarried. He and his second wife Hanna had one son, Edzard, who became the CEO of Daimler-Benz.  Other towns in Germany have streets or schools named after Ernst Reuter.

Honours.

The "Champion of Liberty" series issued by the United States Postal Service in 1959 honored Reuter with two stamps.

References.

This article is based on the in the German Wikipedia from 10 May 2006.

Ernst Rudolf Johannes Reuter (29 July 1889 – 29 September 1953) was the German mayor of West Berlin from 1948 to 1953, during the time of the Cold War.


Stages.

The Carnot cycle when acting as a heat engine consists of the following steps:  In this case,  or,  This is true as formula_3 and formula_4 are both lower and in fact are in the same ratio as formula_5.

The pressure–volume graph.

When the Carnot cycle is plotted on a pressure–volume diagram (), the isothermal stages follow the isotherm lines for the working fluid, the adiabatic stages move between isotherms, and the area bounded by the complete cycle path represents the total work that can be done during one cycle. From point 1 to 2 and point 3 to 4 the temperature is constant. Heat transfer from point 4 to 1 and point 2 to 3 are equal to zero.

Properties and significance.

The temperature–entropy diagram.

The behaviour of a Carnot engine or refrigerator is best understood by using a temperature–entropy diagram (T–S diagram), in which the thermodynamic state is specified by a point on a graph with entropy (S) as the horizontal axis and temperature (T) as the vertical axis (). For a simple closed system (control mass analysis), any point on the graph will represent a particular state of the system. A thermodynamic process will consist of a curve connecting an initial state (A) and a final state (B). The area under the curve will be:  which is the amount of thermal energy transferred in the process. If the process moves to greater entropy, the area under the curve will be the amount of heat absorbed by the system in that process. If the process moves towards lesser entropy, it will be the amount of heat removed. For any cyclic process, there will be an upper portion of the cycle and a lower portion. For a clockwise cycle, the area under the upper portion will be the thermal energy absorbed during the cycle, while the area under the lower portion will be the thermal energy removed during the cycle. The area inside the cycle will then be the difference between the two, but since the internal energy of the system must have returned to its initial value, this difference must be the amount of work done by the system over the cycle. Referring to, mathematically, for a reversible process we may write the amount of work done over a cyclic process as:  Since "dU" is an exact differential, its integral over any closed loop is zero and it follows that the area inside the loop on a T–S diagram is equal to the total work performed if the loop is traversed in a clockwise direction, and is equal to the total work done on the system as the loop is traversed in a counterclockwise direction.

The Carnot cycle.

Evaluation of the above integral is particularly simple for the Carnot cycle. The amount of energy transferred as work is  The total amount of thermal energy transferred from the hot reservoir to the system will be  and the total amount of thermal energy transferred from the system to the cold reservoir will be  The efficiency formula_9 is defined to be: where This definition of efficiency makes sense for a heat engine, since it is the fraction of the heat energy extracted from the hot reservoir and converted to mechanical work. A Rankine cycle is usually the practical approximation.

Reversed Carnot cycle.

The Carnot heat-engine cycle described is a totally reversible cycle. That is all the processes that compose it can be reversed, in which case it becomes the Carnot refrigeration cycle. This time, the cycle remains exactly the same except that the directions of any heat and work interactions are reversed. Heat is absorbed from the low-temperature reservoir, heat is rejected to a high-temperature reservoir, and a work input is required to accomplish all this. The P–V diagram of the reversed Carnot cycle is the same as for the Carnot cycle except that the directions of the processes are reversed.

Carnot's theorem.

It can be seen from the above diagram, that for any cycle operating between temperatures formula_13 and formula_12, none can exceed the efficiency of a Carnot cycle.  Carnot's theorem is a formal statement of this fact: "No engine operating between two heat reservoirs can be more efficient than a Carnot engine operating between those same reservoirs." Thus, Equation gives the maximum efficiency possible for any engine using the corresponding temperatures. A corollary to Carnot's theorem states that: "All reversible engines operating between the same heat reservoirs are equally efficient." Rearranging the right side of the equation gives what may be a more easily understood form of the equation, namely that the theoretical maximum efficiency of a heat engine equals the difference in temperature between the hot and cold reservoir divided by the absolute temperature of the hot reservoir. Looking at this formula an interesting fact becomes apparent: Lowering the temperature of the cold reservoir will have more effect on the ceiling efficiency of a heat engine than raising the temperature of the hot reservoir by the same amount. In the real world, this may be difficult to achieve since the cold reservoir is often an existing ambient temperature.  In other words, maximum efficiency is achieved if and only if no new entropy is created in the cycle, which would be the case if e.g. friction leads to dissipation of work into heat. In that case, the cycle is not reversible and the Clausius theorem becomes an inequality rather than an equality. Otherwise, since entropy is a state function, the required dumping of heat into the environment to dispose of excess entropy leads to a (minimal) reduction in efficiency. So Equation gives the efficiency of any reversible heat engine.  In mesoscopic heat engines, work per cycle of operation in general fluctuates due to thermal noise. If the cycle is performed quasi-statically, the fluctuations vanish even on the mesoscale. However, if the cycle is performed faster than the relaxation time of the working medium, the fluctuations of work are inevitable. Nevertheless, when work and heat fluctuations are counted, there is exact equality that relates the exponential average of work performed by any heat engine and the heat transfer from the hotter heat bath.

Efficiency of real heat engines.

Carnot realized that in reality it is not possible to build a thermodynamically reversible engine, so real heat engines are even less efficient than indicated by Equation 3. In addition, real engines that operate along this cycle are rare. Nevertheless, Equation 3 is extremely useful for determining the maximum efficiency that could ever be expected for a given set of thermal reservoirs.  Although Carnot's cycle is an idealisation, the expression of Carnot efficiency is still useful. Consider the average temperatures,  at which heat is input and output, respectively. Replace "T" and "T" in Equation () by 〈"T"〉 and 〈"T"〉 respectively.  For the Carnot cycle, or its equivalent, the average value 〈"T"〉 will equal the highest temperature available, namely "T", and 〈"T"〉 the lowest, namely "T". For other less efficient cycles, 〈"T"〉 will be lower than "T", and 〈"T"〉 will be higher than "T". This can help illustrate, for example, why a reheater or a regenerator can improve the thermal efficiency of steam power plants—and why the thermal efficiency of combined-cycle power plants (which incorporate gas turbines operating at even higher temperatures) exceeds that of conventional steam plants. The first prototype of the diesel engine was based on the Carnot cycle.

The Carnot cycle is a theoretical ideal thermodynamic cycle proposed by French physicist Sadi Carnot in 1824 and expanded upon by others in the 1830s and 1840s. It provides an upper limit on the efficiency that any classical thermodynamic engine can achieve during the conversion of heat into work, or conversely, the efficiency of a refrigeration system in creating a temperature difference by the application of work to the system. It is not an actual thermodynamic cycle but is a theoretical construct.


History.

Decadent movement.

Decadence was the name given to a number of late nineteenth-century writers who valued artifice over the earlier Romantics' naïve view of nature. Some of them triumphantly adopted the name, referring to themselves as Decadents. For the most part, they were influenced by the tradition of the Gothic novel and by the poetry and fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, and were associated with Symbolism and/or Aestheticism.  This concept of decadence dates from the eighteenth century, especially from Montesquieu, and was taken up by critics as a term of abuse after Désiré Nisard used it against Victor Hugo and Romanticism in general. A later generation of Romantics, such as Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire took the word as a badge of pride, as a sign of their rejection of what they saw as banal "progress." In the 1880s, a group of French writers referred to themselves as Decadents. The classic novel from this group is Joris-Karl Huysmans' "Against Nature", often seen as the first great decadent work, though others attribute this honor to Baudelaire's works.  In Britain and Ireland the leading figure associated with the Decadent movement was Irish writer, Oscar Wilde. Other significant figures include Arthur Symons, Aubrey Beardsley and Ernest Dowson.  The Symbolist movement has frequently been confused with the Decadent movement. Several young writers were derisively referred to in the press as "decadent" in the mid-1880s. Jean Moréas' manifesto was largely a response to this polemic. A few of these writers embraced the term while most avoided it. Although the aesthetics of Symbolism and Decadence can be seen as overlapping in some areas, the two remain distinct.

1920s Berlin.

This ""fertile culture"" of Berlin extended onwards until Adolf Hitler rose to power in early 1933 and stamped out any and all resistance to the Nazi Party. Likewise, the Nazis decried Berlin as a haven of vice. A new culture developed in and around Berlin, including architecture and design (Bauhaus, 1919–33), a variety of literature (Döblin, "Berlin Alexanderplatz", 1929), film (Lang, "Metropolis", 1927, Dietrich, "Der blaue Engel", 1930), painting (Grosz), and music (Brecht and Weill, "The Threepenny Opera", 1928), criticism (Benjamin), philosophy/psychology (Jung), and fashion. This culture was often considered to be decadent, and socially, morally, destructive.  Film was making huge technical and artistic strides during this period of time in Berlin, and gave rise to the influential movement called German Expressionism. "Talkies", the Sound films, were also becoming more popular with the general public across Europe, and Berlin was producing very many of them.  Berlin in the 20s also proved to be a haven for English writers such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood, who wrote a series of 'Berlin novels', inspiring the play "I Am a Camera", which was later adapted into a musical, "Cabaret", and an Academy Award winning film of the same name. Spender's semi-autobiographical novel "The Temple" evokes the attitude and atmosphere of the place at the time.

Use in Marxism.

Leninism.

According to Vladimir Lenin, capitalism had reached its highest stage and could no longer provide for the general development of society. He expected reduced vigor in economic activity and a growth in unhealthy economic phenomena, reflecting capitalism's gradually decreasing capacity to provide for social needs and preparing the ground for socialist revolution in the West. Politically, World War I proved the decadent nature of the advanced capitalist countries to Lenin, that capitalism had reached the stage where it would destroy its own prior achievements more than it would advance.  One who directly opposed the idea of decadence as expressed by Lenin was José Ortega y Gasset in "The Revolt of the Masses" (1930). He argued that the "mass man" had the notion of material progress and scientific advance deeply inculcated to the extent that it was an expectation. He also argued that contemporary progress was opposite the true decadence of the Roman Empire.

Left communism.

Decadence is an important aspect of contemporary left communist theory. Similar to Lenin's use of it, left communists, coming from the Communist International themselves started in fact with a theory of decadence in the first place, yet the communist left sees the theory of decadence at the heart of Marx's method as well, expressed in famous works such as "The Communist Manifesto", "Grundrisse", "Das Kapital" but most significantly in "Preface to the Critique of Political Economy".  Contemporary left communist theory defends that Lenin was mistaken on his definition of imperialism (although how grave his mistake was and how much of his work on imperialism is valid varies from groups to groups) and Rosa Luxemburg to be basically correct on this question, thus accepting capitalism as a world epoch similarly to Lenin, but a world epoch from which no capitalist state can oppose or avoid being a part of. On the other hand, the theoretical framework of capitalism's decadence varies between different groups while left communist organizations like the International Communist Current hold a basically Luxemburgist analysis that makes an emphasis on the world market and its expansion, others hold views more in line with those of Vladimir Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin and most importantly Henryk Grossman and Paul Mattick with an emphasis on monopolies and the falling rate of profit.

The word decadence, which at first meant simply "decline" in an abstract sense, is now most often used to refer to a perceived decay in standards, morals, dignity, religious faith, honor, discipline, or skill at governing among the members of the elite of a very large social structure, such as an empire or nation state. By extension, it may refer to a decline in art, literature, science, technology, and work ethics, or (very loosely) to self-indulgent behavior.


Biography.

Anaxagoras is believed to have enjoyed some wealth and political influence in his native town of Clazomenae. However, he supposedly surrendered this out of a fear that they would hinder his search for knowledge. The Roman author Valerius Maximus preserves a different tradition: Anaxagoras, coming home from a long voyage, found his property in ruin, and said: "If this had not perished, I would have"—a sentence described by Valerius as being "possessed of sought-after wisdom!"  Anaxagoras was a Greek citizen of the Persian Empire and had served in the Persian army; he may have been a member of the Persian regiments that entered mainland Greece during the Greco-Persian Wars. Though this remains uncertain, "it would certainly explain why he came to Athens in the year of Salamis, 480/79 B.C." Anaxagoras is said to have remained in Athens for thirty years. Pericles learned to love and admire him, and the poet Euripides derived from him an enthusiasm for science and humanity.  Anaxagoras brought philosophy and the spirit of scientific inquiry from Ionia to Athens. His observations of the celestial bodies and the fall of meteorites led him to form new theories of the universal order, and to prediction of the impact of meteorites. Plutarch says "Anaxagoras is said to have predicted that if the heavenly bodies should be loosened by some slip or shake, one of them might be torn away, and might plunge and fall down to earth". According to Pliny he was credited with predicting the fall of the meteorite in 467. He attempted to give a scientific account of eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and the Sun, which he described as a mass of blazing metal, larger than the Peloponnese; his theories about eclipses, the Sun and Moon may well have been based on observations of the eclipse of 463 BCE, which was visible in Greece. He was the first to explain that the Moon shines due to reflected light from the Sun. He also said that the Moon had mountains and believed that it was inhabited. The heavenly bodies, he asserted, were masses of stone torn from the Earth and ignited by rapid rotation. He was the first to give a correct explanation of eclipses, and was both famous and notorious for his scientific theories, including the claims that the Sun is a mass of red-hot metal, that the Moon is earthy, and that the stars are fiery stones. He thought the Earth was flat and floated supported by'strong' air under it and disturbances in this air sometimes caused earthquakes. These speculations made him vulnerable in Athens to a charge of impiety. Diogenes Laërtius reports the story that he was prosecuted by Cleon for impiety, but Plutarch says that Pericles sent his former tutor, Anaxagoras, to Lampsacus for his own safety after the Athenians began to blame him for the Peloponnesian war.  The charges against Anaxagoras may have stemmed from his denial of the existence of a solar or lunar deity. According to Laërtius, Pericles spoke in defense of Anaxagoras at his trial,. Even so, Anaxagoras was forced to retire from Athens to Lampsacus in Troad (433). He died there in around the year 428. Citizens of Lampsacus erected an altar to Mind and Truth in his memory, and observed the anniversary of his death for many years. They placed over his grave the following inscription: Here Anaxagoras, who in his quest of truth scaled heaven itself, is laid to rest.  Anaxagoras wrote a book of philosophy, but only fragments of the first part of this have survived, through preservation in work of Simplicius of Cilicia in the 6th century AD.

Philosophy.

According to Anaxagoras all things have existed in some way from the beginning, but originally they existed in infinitesimally small fragments of themselves, endless in number and inextricably combined throughout the universe. All things existed in this mass, but in a confused and indistinguishable form. There was an infinite number of homogeneous parts () as well as heterogeneous ones.  The work of arrangement, the segregation of like from unlike and the summation of the whole into totals of the same name, was the work of Mind or Reason (). Mind is no less unlimited than the chaotic mass, but it stood pure and independent, a thing of finer texture, alike in all its manifestations and everywhere the same. This subtle agent, possessed of all knowledge and power, is especially seen ruling in all the forms of life. Its first appearance, and the only manifestation of it which Anaxagoras describes, is Motion. It gave distinctness and reality to the aggregates of like parts.  Decrease and growth represent a new aggregation () and disruption (). However, the original intermixture of things is never wholly overcome. Each thing contains in itself parts of other things or heterogeneous elements, and is what it is, only on account of the preponderance of certain homogeneous parts which constitute its character. Out of this process arise the things we see in this world.

Literary references.

Anaxagoras is mentioned by Socrates during his trial in Plato's "Apology". In the Phaedo, Plato portrays Socrates saying of Anaxagoras that as a young man: 'I eagerly acquired his books and read them as quickly as I could'.  In a quote which begins Nathanael West's first book "The Dream Life of Balso Snell" (1931), Marcel Proust's character Bergotte says, "After all, my dear fellow, life, Anaxagoras has said, is a journey."  Anaxagoras appears as a character in "Faust, Part II" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.  Anaxagoras appears as a character in "The Ionia Sanction", by Gary Corby.  Anaxagoras is referred to and admired by Cyrus Spitama, the hero and narrator of "Creation", by Gore Vidal. The book contains this passage, explaining how Anaxagoras became influential:  William H. Gass begins his novel, "The Tunnel" (1995), with a quote from Anaxagoras: "The descent to hell is the same from every place."  He is also mentioned in Seneca's Natural Questions (Book 4B, originally Book 3: On Clouds, Hail, Snow) It reads: "Why should I too allow myself the same liberty as Anaxagoras allowed himself?"  Dante Alighieri places Anaxagoras in the First Circle of Hell (Limbo) in his "Divine Comedy" ("Inferno", Canto IV, line 118).  Chapter 5 in Book II of De Docta Ignorantia (1440) by Nicholas of Cusa is dedicated to the truth of the sentence "Each thing is in each thing" which he attributes to Anaxagoras.

References.

Footnotes Citations

Anaxagoras (;, "Anaxagoras", "lord of the assembly"; BC) was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Born in Clazomenae at a time when Asia Minor was under the control of the Persian Empire, Anaxagoras came to Athens. According to Diogenes Laërtius and Plutarch, in later life he was charged with impiety and went into exile in Lampsacus; the charges may have been political, owing to his association with Pericles, if they were not fabricated by later ancient biographers.


History.

Middle Ages.

The castle of Brandenburg, which had been a fortress of the Slavic tribe Stodoranie, was conquered in 929 by King Henry the Fowler. It was first mentioned as "Brendanburg" in 948. That the name of the city in the local Slavic language was "Brennabor", a combination of two words "brenna" - defense and "bor" - fort, is an invention of the 17th century. The town remained German only until 983, when a Slavic rebellion was successful. During the next 170 years the area was ruled by Slavic princes of the Hevelli tribe. The last of them, Pribislav, died in 1150. From 1153/1154 to 1157 "Brendanburg" was part of the Slavonic Duchy of Kopanica, a fief of Poland. Afterwards Albert I settled here and became the first margrave of Brandenburg. The town was restricted to the western bank of the Havel until 1196, when it was extended to the eastern side. The parts on either side of the river were regarded as three towns (Old Town, New Town and Brandenburg cathedral district) for centuries.  In 1314–1315 the Old and New Towns joined the Hanseatic League. In the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) the towns suffered plundering and destruction which led to a loss of power; Potsdam became the new capital, and the court left the town of Brandenburg. In 1715 Old Town and New Town were merged to form a single town. In 1928 the Brandenburg cathedral district was added.

Modern history.

In the late 19th century Brandenburg an der Havel became a very important industrial center in the German Empire. Steel industries settled there, and several world-famous bicycle brands such as "Brennabor", "Corona" and "Excelsior" were manufactured in the city. A world-famous toy industry was also established. With a giant industrial complex, the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German Imperial Railways) was located in Brandenburg-Kirchmöser during the time between the two world wars and the time of the former GDR. The city's excellent transport infrastructure was a big advantage.  In 1933/34, a concentration camp, one of the first in Nazi Germany, was located on "Neuendorfer Straße" in Brandenburg Old Town. After closing this inner city concentration camp, the Nazis used the Brandenburg-Görden Prison, located in the suburb of Görden. Later the old gaol became the Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre where the Nazis killed people with mental diseases, including children. They called this operation "Action T4" because of the Berlin address, Tiergartenstraße 4, the headquarters of this planned and well-organized forced euthanasia organisation. Brandenburg an der Havel was one of the very first locations in the Third Reich where the Nazis experimented with killing their victims by gas. Here, they prepared the mass killings in Auschwitz and other extermination camps. After complaints by local inhabitants about the smoke, the mobile furnaces used to burn the corpses ceased operation. Shortly after this, the Nazis closed the old prison.  In 1934, the Arado Aircraft Company (Arado Flugzeugwerke), which originated in Warnemünde, built a satellite factory in Brandenburg that began producing planes in 1935. The factory was expanded over the next five years, and produced trainers and other aircraft for the Luftwaffe during World War II. The existence of this factory was one of the reasons Brandenburg was heavily bombed in later stages of the war; by 1945, 70% of the city was destroyed.  Friedrich Fromm, a German officer involved in the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler, was executed here in March 1945 for his part in the plot, even though Fromm betrayed those conspirators he knew and ordered their execution.  After German reunification the city's population declined from around 100,000 in 1989 to roughly 75,000 in 2005 through emigration. The migration was mainly by young people.

Transport.

The city is located on the navigable River Havel, a European Waterway, and vessels travelling through the city have a choice of two routes. The original route used the Brandenburg City Canal, a route through the city centre that descends through the "Stadtschleuse Brandenburg", but this route is constrained in size and now limited to leisure craft. Commercial traffic instead uses the Silo Canal that passes through the eastern and northern fringes of the city.  The city is located at the junction of Federal Highways 1 and 102 and the A2 autobahn is nearby. The Berlin and Magdeburg railway also runs through Brandenburg an der Havel.  The centrepiece of the city's urban public transport system is the Brandenburg an der Havel tramway network.

Sights.

The "Dominsel" (Cathedral Island) is the historic heart of the town. Here stands its oldest edifice: the "Dom St. Peter und Paul" (Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul). Although construction began in the Romanesque style in 1165, it was completed as a Gothic cathedral during the 14th century. While the exterior is rather austere, the cathedral surprises the visitor with its sumptuous interior, especially the painted vault of the "Bunte Kapelle" (Coloured Chapel) and the Wagner organ (1725), one of the most famous Baroque organs in Germany.  The "Katharinenkirche" (St. Catherine's Church) built in 1401 in the Neustadt is an impressive example of northern German brick Gothic architecture. The "Gotthardtkirche" (St. Gotthardt's Church) was built of the same material just a few years later.  Another interesting building is the "Altstädtisches Rathaus" (Old Town Hall), a late Gothic brick building with stepped gables and an ornate portal. In front of it stands a 5.35m high statue of the knight Roland. Made of sandstone, the statue was erected in 1474 as a symbol of the town's independence.  There is also a part of Brandenburg's medieval city wall, with four preserved watchtowers: "Steintorturm" and "Mühlentorturm" (in the New Town), and "Rathenower Torturm" and "Plauer Torturm" (in the Old Town).  The "Brandenburg Industrial Museum" is an Anchor Point of ERIH, The European Route of Industrial Heritage. Brandenburg has its own theatre (Brandenburger Theater), a professional symphony orchestra (Brandenburger Symphoniker) and a wide range of local history and archaeology museums.

Brandenburg an der Havel is a town in Brandenburg, Germany, which served as the capital of the Margraviate of Brandenburg until replaced by Berlin in 1417.


Etymology.

The genus name "Humulus" is a Medieval name that was at some point Latinized after being borrowed from a Germanic source exhibiting the h•m•l consonant cluster, as in Middle Low German "homele". According to Soviet Iranist V. Abaev this could be a word of Sarmatian origin which is presented in modern Ossetian language () and derives from proto-Iranian "hauma-arayka", an "Aryan haoma". From Sarmatian dialects this word spread across Eurasia, thus creating a group of related words in Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Slavic and Germanic languages (see, Chuvash "хăмла", Finnish "humala", Hungarian "komló", Mordovian "комла", Avar "хомеллег").  The specific epithet, "lupulus," is Latin for small wolf. The name refers to the plant's tendency to strangle other plants, mainly osiers or basket willows ("Salix viminalis"), like a wolf does a sheep. Hops could be seen growing over these willows so often that it was named the willow-wolf.  The English word "hop" is derived from the Middle Dutch word, also meaning "Humulus lupulus".

Description.

"H. lupulus" can grow to be 10 meters tall and because it is a perennial herbaceous plant it goes through several growing seasons sometimes living up to 20 years. "H. lupulus" has simple leaves that can be opposite or alternate with 3-5 lobes. The staminate flowers do not have petals, while the pistillate flowers’ petals completely cover the fruit. The cones found on female plants are called strobili. The fruit of "H. lupulus" is an achene, meaning that the fruit is dry but does not split open at maturity. The achene is surrounded by tepals and lupulin secreting glands are concentrated on the fruit.  "H. lupulus" grows best in the latitude range of 38°-51° in full sun with moderate amounts of rainfall. It uses the longer summer days as a cue for when to flower, which is usually around July/ August.  "H. lupulus" can cause dermatitis to some who handle them. It is thought that about 1 in 30 people are affected by this.

Varieties.

The five varieties of this species ("Humulus lupulus") are:  Many cultivated varieties are found in the list of hop varieties. A yellow-leafed ornamental cultivar, "Humulus lupulus" 'Aureus', is cultivated for garden use. It is also known as golden hop, and holds the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit (AGM).

Domestication.

"H. lupulus" is first mentioned in 768 CE when King Pepin donated hops to a monastery in Paris. Cultivation was first recorded in 859 CE, in documents from a monastery in Freising, Germany.

Use in brewing.

The chemical compounds found in "H. lupulus" are main components in flavoring and bittering beer. Some other compounds help with creating foam in beer. Chemicals such as linalool and aldehydes contribute to the flavor of beer. The main components of bitterness in beer are iso-alpha acids, with many other compounds contributing to the overall bitterness of beer. Until the Middle Ages, "Myrica gale" was the most common plant used for brewing beer. "H. lupulus" took off as a flavoring agent for beer because it contains preserving agents, making the beer viable for longer.

Popularity.

"H. lupulus" was voted the county flower of Kent in 2002 following a poll by the wild flora conservation charity Plantlife.

Humulus lupulus (common hop or hops) is a species of flowering plant in the hemp family (Cannabaceae), native to Europe, western Asia and North America. It is a dioecious, perennial, herbaceous climbing plant which sends up new shoots in early spring and dies back to a cold-hardy rhizome in autumn.


Early life.

Franz Marc was born in 1880 in Munich, the then capital of the Kingdom of Bavaria. His father, Wilhelm Marc, was a professional landscape painter; his mother, Sophie, was a homemaker and a devout, socially liberal Calvinist.  At the age of 17 Marc wanted to study theology. Two years later, however, he enrolled in the arts program of Munich University. He was first required to serve in the military for a year, after which, in 1900, he began studies instead at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, where his teachers included Gabriel von Hackl and Wilhelm von Diez. In 1903 and 1907, he spent time in France, particularly in Paris, visiting the museums in the city and copying many paintings, a traditional way for artists to study and develop technique. In Paris, Marc frequented artistic circles, meeting numerous artists and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. He discovered a strong affinity for the work of painter Vincent van Gogh. After the 1903 trip, he ceased attending the Academy of Fine Arts.  During his 20s, Marc was involved in a number of stormy relationships, including an affair lasting for many years with Annette Von Eckardt, a married antique dealer nine years his senior. He married twice, first to Marie Schnür, then to Maria Franck; both were artists.

Career.

In 1906, Marc traveled with his elder brother Paul, a Byzantine expert, to Thessaloniki, Mount Athos, and various other Greek locations. A few years later, in 1910, Marc developed an important friendship with the artist August Macke. In 1910 Marc painted "Nude with Cat" and "Grazing Horses", and showed works in the second exhibition of the "Neue Künstlervereinigung" (New Artists' Association) at the Thannhauser Galleries in Munich.  In 1911, Marc founded the "Der Blaue Reiter" journal, which became the center of an artist circle, along with Macke, Wassily Kandinsky, and others who had decided to split off from the "Neue Künstlervereinigung" movement.  Marc showed several of his works in the first "Der Blaue Reiter" exhibition at the Thannhauser Galleries in Munich between December 1911 and January 1912. As it was the apex of the German expressionist movement, the exhibit also showed in Berlin, Cologne, Hagen, and Frankfurt. In 1912, Marc met Robert Delaunay, whose use of color and the futurist method was a major influence on Marc's work; fascinated by futurism and cubism, Marc created art that increasingly was stark and abstract in nature. He painted "The Tiger" and "Red Deer" in 1912 and "The Tower of Blue Horses", "Foxes", and "Fate of the Animals" in 1913.

Wartime.

With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Marc was drafted into the Imperial German Army as a cavalryman. By February 1916, as shown in a letter to his wife, he had gravitated to military camouflage. His technique for hiding artillery from aerial observation was to paint canvas covers in broadly pointillist style. He took pleasure in creating a series of nine such tarpaulin covers in styles varying "from Manet to Kandinsky", suspecting that the latter could be the most effective against aircraft flying at 2000 meters or higher.  After mobilization of the German Army, the government identified notable artists to be withdrawn from combat for their own safety. Marc was on the list but was struck in the head and killed instantly by a shell splinter during the Battle of Verdun in 1916 before orders for reassignment could reach him.

Style.

Marc made some sixty prints in woodcut and lithography. Most of his mature work portrays animals, usually in natural settings. His work is characterized by bright primary color, an almost cubist portrayal of animals, stark simplicity and a profound sense of emotion. Even in his own time, his work attracted notice in influential circles. Marc gave an emotional meaning or purpose to the colors he used in his work: blue was used to portray masculinity and spirituality, yellow represented feminine joy, and red encased the sound of violence. After the National Socialists took power, they suppressed modern art; in 1936 and 1937, the Nazis condemned the late Marc as an "entarteter Künstler" (degenerate artist) and ordered approximately 130 of his works removed from exhibition in German museums. His painting "Landscape With Horses" was discovered in 2012 along with more than a thousand other paintings, in the Munich apartment of Cornelius Gurlitt whose dealer father, Hildebrand Gurlitt, was a collector of Modernist art the Nazis called "degenerate".  One of Marc's best-known paintings is "Tierschicksale" ("Animal Destinies" or "Fate of the Animals"), which hangs in the Kunstmuseum Basel. Marc had completed the work in 1913, when "the tension of impending cataclysm had pervaded society", as one art historian noted. On the rear of the canvas, Marc wrote, "Und Alles Sein ist flammend Leid" ("And all being is flaming agony"). Serving in World War I, Marc wrote to his wife about the painting, "[it] is like a premonition of this war - horrible and shattering. I can hardly conceive that I painted it."

Legacy and honors.

Marc's family house in Munich is marked with a historical plaque. The Franz Marc Museum opened in 1986, and his dedicated to the artist life and work. It houses many of his paintings, and also works by other contemporary artists.  In October 1998, several of Marc's paintings garnered record prices at Christie's art auction house in London, including "Rote Rehe I" ("Red Deer I"), which sold for $3.3 million. In October 1999, his "Der Wasserfall" ("The Waterfall") was sold by Sotheby's in London for $5.06 million. This price set a record for Franz Marc's work and for twentieth-century German painting.

Public collections.

Among the public collections holding works by Franz Marc are:

Franz Moritz Wilhelm Marc (February 8, 1880 – March 4, 1916) was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of German Expressionism. He was a founding member of "Der Blaue Reiter" (The Blue Rider), a journal whose name later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it.


Types.

A balance sheet summarizes an organization or individual's assets, equity and liabilities at a specific point in time. Two forms of balance sheet exist. They are the report form and account form. Individuals and small businesses tend to have simple balance sheets. Larger businesses tend to have more complex balance sheets, and these are presented in the organization's annual report. Large businesses also may prepare balance sheets for segments of their businesses. A balance sheet is often presented alongside one for a different point in time (typically the previous year) for comparison.

Personal.

A personal balance sheet lists current assets such as cash in checking accounts and savings accounts, long-term assets such as common stock and real estate, current liabilities such as loan debt and mortgage debt due, or overdue, long-term liabilities such as mortgage and other loan debt. Securities and real estate values are listed at market value rather than at historical cost or cost basis. Personal net worth is the difference between an individual's total assets and total liabilities.

US small business.

A small business balance sheet lists current assets such as cash, accounts receivable, and inventory, fixed assets such as land, buildings, and equipment, intangible assets such as patents, and liabilities such as accounts payable, accrued expenses, and long-term debt. Contingent liabilities such as warranties are noted in the footnotes to the balance sheet. The small business's equity is the difference between total assets and total liabilities.

Public business entities structure.

Guidelines for balance sheets of public business entities are given by the International Accounting Standards Board and numerous country-specific organizations/companies. The standard used by companies in the USA adhere to U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). The Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board (FASAB) is a United States federal advisory committee whose mission is to develop generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) for federal financial reporting entities.  Balance sheet account names and usage depend on the organization's country and the type of organization. Government organizations do not generally follow standards established for individuals or businesses.  If applicable to the business, summary values for the following items should be included in the balance sheet: Assets are all the things the business owns. This will include property, tools, vehicles, furniture, machinery, and so on.

Assets.

Current assets  Non-current assets (Fixed assets)  Creditors equity

Equity / capital.

The net assets shown by the balance sheet equals the third part of the balance sheet, which is known as the shareholders' equity. It comprises:  Formally, shareholders' equity is part of the company's liabilities: they are funds "owing" to shareholders (after payment of all other liabilities); usually, however, "liabilities" is used in the more restrictive sense of liabilities excluding shareholders' equity. The balance of assets and liabilities (including shareholders' equity) is not a coincidence. Records of the values of each account in the balance sheet are maintained using a system of accounting known as double-entry bookkeeping. In this sense, shareholders' equity by construction must equal assets minus liabilities, and thus the shareholders' equity is considered to be a residual. Regarding the items in equity section, the following disclosures are required:

Substantiation.

Balance sheet substantiation is the accounting process conducted by businesses on a regular basis to confirm that the balances held in the primary accounting system of record (e.g. SAP, Oracle, other ERP system's General Ledger) are reconciled (in balance with) with the balance and transaction records held in the same or supporting sub-systems.  Balance sheet substantiation includes multiple processes including reconciliation (at a transactional or at a balance level) of the account, a process of review of the reconciliation and any pertinent supporting documentation and a formal certification (sign-off) of the account in a predetermined form driven by corporate policy.  Balance sheet substantiation is an important process that is typically carried out on a monthly, quarterly and year-end basis. The results help to drive the regulatory balance sheet reporting obligations of the organization.  Historically, balance sheet substantiation has been a wholly manual process, driven by spreadsheets, email and manual monitoring and reporting. In recent years software solutions have been developed to bring a level of process automation, standardization and enhanced control to the balance sheet substantiation or account certification process. These solutions are suitable for organizations with a high volume of accounts and/or personnel involved in the Balance Sheet Substantiation process and can be used to drive efficiencies, improve transparency and help to reduce risk.  Balance sheet substantiation is a key control process in the SOX 404 top-down risk assessment.

Sample.

The following balance sheet is a very brief example prepared in accordance with IFRS. It does not show all possible kinds of assets, liabilities and equity, but it shows the most usual ones. Because it shows goodwill, it could be a consolidated balance sheet. Monetary values are not shown, summary (subtotal) rows are missing as well.  Under IFRS items are always shown based on liquidity from the least liquid assets at the top, usually land and buildings to the most liquid, i.e. cash. Then liabilities and equity continue from the most immediate liability to be paid (usual account payable) to the least i.e. long term debt such a mortgages and owner's equity at the very bottom.

In financial accounting, a balance sheet or statement of financial position or statement of financial condition is a summary of the financial balances of an individual or organization, whether it be a sole proprietorship, a business partnership, a corporation, private limited company or other organization such as Government or not-for-profit entity. Assets, liabilities and ownership equity are listed as of a specific date, such as the end of its financial year. A balance sheet is often described as a "snapshot of a company's financial condition". Of the four basic financial statements, the balance sheet is the only statement which applies to a single point in time of a business' calendar year.


Etymology.

The name "horsetail", often used for the entire group, arose because the branched species somewhat resemble a horse's tail. Similarly, the scientific name "Equisetum" is derived from the Latin ("horse") + ("bristle").  Other names include candock for branching species, and snake grass or scouring-rush for unbranched or sparsely branched species. The latter name refers to the rush-like appearance of the plants and to the fact that the stems are coated with abrasive silicates, making them useful for scouring (cleaning) metal items such as cooking pots or drinking mugs, particularly those made of tin. ("'E. hyemale", rough horsetail, is still boiled and then dried in Japan to be used for the final polishing process on woodcraft to produce a smoother finish than any sandpaper.) In German, the corresponding name is ("tin-herb"). In Spanish-speaking countries, these plants are known as, meaning "horsetail".

Description.

"Equisetum" leaves are greatly reduced and usually non-photosynthetic. They contain a single, non-branching vascular trace, which is the defining feature of microphylls. However, it has recently been recognised that horsetail microphylls are probably not ancestral as in lycophytes (clubmosses and relatives), but rather derived adaptations, evolved by reduction of megaphylls.  The leaves of horsetails are arranged in whorls fused into nodal sheaths. The stems are usually green and photosynthetic, and are distinctive in being hollow, jointed and ridged (with sometimes 3 but usually 6–40 ridges). There may or may not be whorls of branches at the nodes.

Spores.

The spores are borne under sporangiophores in strobili, cone-like structures at the tips of some of the stems. In many species the cone-bearing shoots are unbranched, and in some (e.g. "E. arvense", field horsetail) they are non-photosynthetic, produced early in spring. In some other species (e.g. "E. palustre, marsh horsetail) they are very similar to sterile shoots, photosynthetic and with whorls of branches.  Horsetails are mostly homosporous, though in the field horsetail, smaller spores give rise to male prothalli. The spores have four elaters that act as moisture-sensitive springs, assisting spore dispersal through crawling and hopping motions after the sporangia have split open longitudinally.

"Equisetum" cell walls.

The crude cell extracts of all "Equisetum" species tested contain (MXE) activity. This is a novel enzyme and is not known to occur in any other plants. In addition, the cell walls of all "Equisetum" species tested contain mixed-linkage glucan (MLG), a polysaccharide which, until recently, was thought to be confined to the Poales. The evolutionary distance between "Equisetum" and the Poales suggests that each evolved MLG independently. The presence of MXE activity in "Equisetum" suggests that they have evolved MLG along with some mechanism of cell wall modification. Non-"Equisetum" land plants tested lack detectable MXE activity. An observed negative correlation between XET activity and cell age led to the suggestion that XET may be catalysing endotransglycosylation in controlled wall-loosening during cell expansion. The lack of MXE in the Poales suggests that there it must play some other, currently unknown, role. Due to the correlation between MXE activity and cell age, MXE has been proposed to promote the cessation of cell expansion.

Taxonomy.

Species.

The living members of the genus "Equisetum" are divided into three distinct lineages, which are usually treated as subgenera. The name of the type subgenus, "Equisetum", means "horse hair" in Latin, while the name of the other large subgenus, "Hippochaete", means "horse hair" in Greek. Hybrids are common, but hybridization has only been recorded between members of the same subgenus. While plants of subgenus "Equisetum" are usually referred to as horsetails, those of subgenus "Hippochaete" are often called scouring rushes, especially when unbranched.  Two "Equisetum" plants are sold commercially under the names "Equisetum japonicum" (barred horsetail) and "Equisetum camtschatcense" (Kamchatka horsetail). These are both types of "E. hyemale" var. "hyemale", although they may also be listed as separate varieties of "E. hyemale".

Phylogeny.

The phylogeny of extant species (excluding hybrids), according to Christenhusz "et al." (2019), is shown in the following cladogram.

Distribution and ecology.

The genus "Equisetum" as a whole, while concentrated in the non-tropical northern hemisphere, is near-cosmopolitan, being absent only from Antarctica, though they are not known to be native to Australia, New Zealand nor the islands of the Pacific. They are most common in northern North America (Canada and the northernmost United States), where the genus is represented by nine species ("E. arvense", "E. fluviatile", "E. hyemale", "E. laevigatum", "E. palustre", "E. pratense", "E. scirpoides", "E. sylvaticum"', and "E. variegatum"). Only four ("E. bogotense", "E. giganteum", "E. myriochaetum", and "E. ramosissimum") of the fifteen species are known to be native south of the Equator. They are perennial plants, herbaceous and dying back in winter as most temperate species, or evergreen as most tropical species and the temperate species "E. hyemale" (rough horsetail), "E. ramosissimum" (branched horsetail), "E. scirpoides" (dwarf horsetail) and "E. variegatum" (variegated horsetail). They typically grow 20 cm–1.5 m (8 in–5 ft) tall, though the "giant horsetails" are recorded to grow as high as ("E. telmateia", northern giant horsetail), ("E. giganteum", southern giant horsetail) or ("E. myriochaetum", Mexican giant horsetail), and allegedly even more.  One species, "Equisetum fluviatile", is an emergent aquatic, rooted in water with shoots growing into the air. The stalks arise from rhizomes that are deep underground and difficult to dig out. Field horsetail ("E. arvense") can be a nuisance weed, readily regrowing from the rhizome after being pulled out. It is unaffected by many herbicides designed to kill seed plants. Since the leaves have a waxy coat, the plant is resistant to contact weedkillers like glyphosate. However, as "E. arvense" prefers an acid soil, lime may be used to assist in eradication efforts to bring the soil pH to 7 or 8. Members of the genus have been declared noxious weeds in Australia and in the US state of Oregon.  All the "Equisetum" are classed as "unwanted organisms" in New Zealand and are listed on the National Pest Plant Accord.

Consumption.

People have regularly consumed horsetails. For example, the fertile stems bearing strobili of some species are cooked and eaten like asparagus (a dish called "tsukushi") in Japan. Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest eat the young shoots of this plant raw. The young plants are eaten cooked or raw, but considerable care must be taken.  If eaten over a long enough period of time, some species of horsetail can be poisonous to grazing animals, including horses. The toxicity appears to be due to thiaminase, which can cause thiamin (vitamin B1) deficiency.  "Equisetum" species may have been a common food for herbivorous dinosaurs. With studies showing silicate within hadrosaur teeth and that horsetails are nutritionally of high quality, it is assumed that horsetails were an important component of herbivorous dinosaur diets.

Folk medicine and safety concerns.

Extracts and other preparations of "E. arvense" have served as herbal remedies, with records dating over centuries. In 2009, the European Food Safety Authority concluded there was no evidence for the supposed health effects of "E. arvense", such as for invigoration, weight control, skincare, hair health or bone health., there is insufficient scientific evidence for its effectiveness as a medicine to treat any human condition.  "E. arvense" contains thiaminase, which metabolizes the B vitamin, thiamine, potentially causing thiamine deficiency and associated liver damage, if taken chronically. Horsetail might produce a diuretic effect. Further, its safety for oral consumption has not been sufficiently evaluated and it may be toxic, especially to children and pregnant women.

Equisetum (; horsetail, snake grass, puzzlegrass) is the only living genus in Equisetaceae, a family of vascular plants that reproduce by spores rather than seeds.


Definitions/meanings.

Summary.

There have been many proposed criteria for identifying words. However, no definition has been found to apply to all languages. Dictionaries categorize a language's lexicon (i.e., its vocabulary) into lemmas. These can be taken as an indication of what constitutes a "word" in the opinion of the writers of that language. The most appropriate means of measuring the length of a word is by counting its syllables or morphemes. When a word has multiple definitions or multiple senses, it may result in confusion in a debate or discussion.

Semantic definition.

Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of "Minimal Free Forms" in 1928. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves. This correlates phonemes (units of sound) to lexemes (units of meaning). However, some written words are not minimal free forms as they make no sense by themselves (for example, "the" and "of").  Some semanticists have put forward a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes, indefinable words representing fundamental concepts that are intuitively meaningful. According to this theory, semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning, without circularity, of other words and their associated conceptual denotations.

Features.

In the Minimalist school of theoretical syntax, words (also called "lexical items" in the literature) are construed as "bundles" of linguistic features that are united into a structure with form and meaning. For example, the word "koalas" has semantic features (it denotes real-world objects, koalas), category features (it is a noun), number features (it is plural and must agree with verbs, pronouns, and demonstratives in its domain), phonological features (it is pronounced a certain way), etc.

Word boundaries.

The task of defining what constitutes a "word" involves determining where one word ends and another word begins—in other words, identifying word boundaries. There are several ways to determine where the word boundaries of spoken language should be placed:

Orthography.

In languages with a literary tradition, there is interrelation between orthography and the question of what is considered a single word. Word separators (typically spaces) are common in modern orthography of languages using alphabetic scripts, but these are (excepting isolated precedents) a relatively modern development (see also history of writing).  In English orthography, compound expressions may contain spaces. For example, "ice cream", "air raid shelter" and "get up" each are generally considered to consist of more than one word (as each of the components are free forms, with the possible exception of "get").  Not all languages delimit words expressly. Mandarin Chinese is a very analytic language (with few inflectional affixes), making it unnecessary to delimit words orthographically. However, there are many multiple-morpheme compounds in Mandarin, as well as a variety of bound morphemes that make it difficult to clearly determine what constitutes a word.  Sometimes, languages which are extremely close grammatically will consider the same order of words in different ways. For example, reflexive verbs in the French infinitive are separate from their respective particle, e.g. "se laver" ("to wash oneself"), whereas in Portuguese they are hyphenated, e.g. "lavar-se", and in Spanish they are joined, e.g. "lavarse".  Japanese uses orthographic cues to delimit words such as switching between kanji (Chinese characters) and the two kana syllabaries. This is a fairly soft rule, because content words can also be written in hiragana for effect (though if done extensively spaces are typically added to maintain legibility).  Vietnamese orthography, although using the Latin alphabet, delimits monosyllabic morphemes rather than words.  In character encoding, word segmentation depends on which characters are defined as word dividers.

Morphology.

Morphology is the study of word formation and structure. In synthetic languages, a single word stem (for example, "love") may have a number of different forms (for example, "loves", "loving", and "loved"). However, for some purposes these are not usually considered to be different words, but rather different forms of the same word. In these languages, words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes.  In Indo-European languages in particular, the morphemes distinguished are: Thus, the Proto-Indo-European " would be analyzed as consisting of

Philosophy.

Philosophers have found words objects of fascination since at least the 5th century BC, with the foundation of the philosophy of language. Plato analyzed words in terms of their origins and the sounds making them up, concluding that there was some connection between sound and meaning, though words change a great deal over time. John Locke wrote that the use of words "is to be sensible marks of ideas", though they are chosen "not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea". Wittgenstein's thought transitioned from a word as representation of meaning to "the meaning of a word is its use in the language."  Archaeology shows that even for centuries prior to this fascination by philosophers in the 5th century BC, many languages had various ways of expressing this verbal unit, which in turn diversified and evolved into a range of expressions with wide philosophical significance. Ancient manuscripts of the Gospel of John reveal in its 5th chapter Jesus chastising the pharisees expecting to find life in writings instead of himself. This perhaps could have led to John's introduction in chapter of a description in the Greek translation as "the logos". A famous early scientist, scholar and priest, Thomas Aquinas, influenced Cartesian philosophy and mathematics by interpreting such passages consistently with his philosophy of logic.

Classes.

Grammar classifies a language's lexicon into several groups of words. The basic bipartite division possible for virtually every natural language is that of nouns vs. verbs.  The classification into such classes is in the tradition of Dionysius Thrax, who distinguished eight categories: noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, preposition, adverb, conjunction and interjection.  In Indian grammatical tradition, Pāṇini introduced a similar fundamental classification into a nominal (nāma, suP) and a verbal (ākhyāta, tiN) class, based on the set of suffixes taken by the word. Some words can be controversial such as slang in formal contexts, misnomers due to them not meaning what they would imply or polysemous words due to the potential confusion of its multiple senses.

In linguistics, a word of a spoken language can be defined as the smallest sequence of phonemes that can be uttered in isolation with objective or practical meaning. For many languages, words also correspond to sequences of graphemes ("letters") in their standard writing systems that are delimited by spaces wider than the normal inter-letter space, or by other graphical conventions. The concept of "word" is usually distinguished from that of a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of speech which has a meaning, even if it will not stand on its own.


Background and early life.

Friedrich Merz was born in Brilon in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in then-West Germany to Roman Catholic parents Joachim Merz and Paula née Sauvigny. His father was a judge and a CDU member until he left the party in 2007. The Sauvigny family was a prominent patrician family in Brilon, of French Huguenot ancestry; his grandfather Josef Paul Sauvigny was a lawyer and served as mayor of Brilon from 1917 to 1937.  After finishing his Abitur exam in 1975 Merz served his military service as a soldier with a self-propelled artillery unit of the German Army. From 1976 he studied law with a scholarship from the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, first at the University of Bonn, later at the University of Marburg. He became a member of, a Catholic student fraternity founded in 1844 that is part of the Cartellverband. After finishing law school in 1985 he became a judge in Saarbrücken. In 1986 he quit his position as a judge in order to work as an in-house attorney-at-law at the German Chemical Industry Association in Bonn and Frankfurt from 1986 to 1989.  Merz speaks German, French and English.

Political career prior to 2009.

In 1972, at the age of seventeen, he became a member of the CDU's youth wing, the Young Union, and he has been described by German media as a member of the "Andean Pact," a supposed network of influential CDU members formed by members of the Young Union during a trip to the South American Andes region in 1979. He became President of the Brilon branch of the Young Union in 1980.

Member of the European Parliament, 1989–1994.

Merz successfully ran as a candidate in the 1989 European Parliament election and served one term as a Member of the European Parliament until 1994. He was a member of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and of the parliament's delegation for relations with Malta.

Member of the German Bundestag, 1994–2009.

From the 1994 German elections, he served as member of the Bundestag for his constituency, the Hochsauerland. In his first term, he was a member of the Finance Committee.  In October 1998 Merz became vice-chairman and in February 2000 Chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group (alongside Michael Glos), succeeding Wolfgang Schäuble. In this capacity, he was the opposition leader in the Bundestag during Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's first term.  Ahead of the 2002 elections, Edmund Stoiber included Merz in his shadow cabinet for the Christian Democrats’ campaign to unseat incumbent Schröder as chancellor. During the campaign, Merz served as Stoiber's expert for financial markets and the national budget. After Stoiber's electoral defeat, Angela Merkel assumed the leadership of the parliamentary group; Merz again served as vice-chairman until 2004. From 2002 to 2004, he was also a member of the executive board of the CDU, again under the leadership of Merkel.  Between 2005 and 2009, Merz was a member of the Committee on Legal Affairs. By 2007, he announced he would not be running for political office in the 2009 elections.

Career in the private sector.

Upon leaving politics, Merz has worked as a corporate lawyer. Since 2004 he has been a Senior Counsel at Mayer Brown's Düsseldorf office, where he works on the corporate finance team; before 2004 he was a senior counsel with Cornelius Bartenbach Haesemann. His work as a lawyer has made him a multimillionaire. He has also taken on numerous positions on corporate boards, including the following:  Between 2010 and 2011, Merz represented the shareholders of WestLB, a publicly owned institution that had previously been Germany's third-largest lender, in talks with bidders. In 2012, he joined Norbert Röttgen’s campaign team for the North Rhine-Westphalia state election as advisor on economic policy. He served as a CDU delegate to the Federal Convention for the purpose of electing the President of Germany in 2012 and in 2017.  In November 2017, Merz was appointed by Minister-President Armin Laschet of North Rhine-Westphalia as his Commissioner for Brexit and Transatlantic Relations, an unpaid advisory position.

Return to politics.

After Angela Merkel announced her intention to step down as Leader of the CDU party, Merz announced he would run in the subsequent party leadership election in December 2018. His candidacy was promoted by the former CDU chairman and "crown prince" of the Kohl era, Wolfgang Schäuble (current President of the Bundestag, ranked second in federal precedence). In the second round of the leadership election, Merz was defeated by Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. On February 25, 2020, he announced his candidacy in the 2020 CDU leadership election.

Political positions.

Merz has focused on economic policy, foreign and security policy and family policy. He has described himself as socially conservative and economically liberal, and is seen as a representative of the conservative and pro-business wings of the CDU. He has been chairman of the Atlantik-Brücke association which promotes German-American understanding and Atlanticism, and is a staunch supporter of the European Union and NATO. As a young politician in the 1970s and 1980s, he was a staunch supporter of anticommunism, the dominant state doctrine of West Germany and a core tenet of the CDU. In 2018, he described himself as "a truly convinced European, a convinced transatlanticist" and said that "I stand for a cosmopolitan Germany whose roots lie in Christian ethics and the European Enlightenment and whose most important political allies are the democracies of the West. I gladly use this expression again: The democracies of the West." He especially advocates closer relations between Germany and France. Merz has criticized Donald Trump more harshly than Angela Merkel did and has especially criticized Trump's trade war against Europe. In 2018, he co-authored an article in defence of the European project, which among other things called for "an army for Europe."

Personal life.

Friedrich Merz is married to the judge Charlotte Merz. He has three children and resides in Arnsberg in the Sauerland region. In 2005, the couple established the Friedrich und Charlotte Merz Stiftung, a foundation supporting projects in the education sector.  On 17 March 2020 Merz was tested positive for COVID-19.

Friedrich Merz (born 11 November 1955) is a German lawyer and politician of the centre-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU). He served as a Member of the European Parliament 1989–1994, a member of the Bundestag 1994–2009, and as the chairman of CDU/CSU parliamentary group 2000–2002. In 2018 he announced his candidacy in the CDU leadership election in December 2018.


Summary.

The book consists of five separate poems. In the first (chapter 1), the city sits as a desolate weeping widow overcome with miseries. In Chapter 2 these miseries are described in connection with national sins and acts of God. Chapter 3 speaks of hope for the people of God: the chastisement would only be for their good; a better day would dawn for them. Chapter 4 laments the ruin and desolation of the city and temple, but traces it to the people's sins. Chapter 5 is a prayer that Zion's reproach may be taken away in the repentance and recovery of the people.

Themes.

Lamentations combines elements of the "qinah", a funeral dirge for the loss of the city, and the "communal lament" pleading for the restoration of its people. It reflects the view, traceable to Sumerian literature of a thousand years earlier, that the destruction of the holy city was a punishment by God for the communal sin of its people.  Beginning with the reality of disaster, Lamentations concludes with the bitter possibility that God may have finally rejected Israel (chapter 5:22). Sufferers in the face of grief are not urged to a confidence in the goodness of God; in fact God is accountable for the disaster. The poet acknowledges that this suffering is a just punishment, still God is held to have had choice over whether to act in this way and at this time. Hope arises from a recollection of God's past goodness, but although this justifies a cry to God to act in deliverance, there is no guarantee that he will. Repentance will not persuade God to be gracious, since he is free to give or withhold grace as he chooses. In the end, the possibility is that God has finally rejected his people and may not again deliver them. Nevertheless, it also affirms confidence that the mercies of Yahweh (the God of Israel) never end, but are new every morning (3:22–33).

Structure.

Lamentations consists of five distinct poems, corresponding to its five chapters. Two of its defining characteristic features are the alphabetic acrostic and its qinah meter.

Acrostic.

The first four are written as acrostics. Chapters 1, 2, and 4 each have 22 verses, corresponding to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet, the first lines beginning with the first letter of the alphabet, the second with the second letter, and so on. Chapter 3 has 66 verses, so that each letter begins three lines. Unlike standard alphabetical order, in the middle chapters of Lamentations, the letter Pe (the 17th letter) comes before Ayin (the 16th). The first chapter uses standard alphabetical order.  The fifth poem, corresponding to the fifth chapter, is not acrostic but still has 22 lines.  Although some claim that purpose or function of the acrostic form is unknown, it is frequently thought that a complete alphabetical order expresses a principle of completeness, from Alef (first letter) to Tav (22nd letter); the English equivalent would be "from A to Z".  Very few English translations even attempt to capture this acrostic nature. One which attempts to do so is that by Ronald Knox although its mapping of the 22 Hebrew letters into the Western alphabet's 26 uses 'A' to 'V' (omitting W, X, Y and Z), so lacks that "from A to Z" sense of completeness.

Qinah.

Its first four chapters have a well defined qinah rhythm of three stresses followed by two, although the fifth chapter lacks this. Dobbs-Allsopp describes this meter as "the rhythmic dominance of unbalanced and enjambed lines". Again, few English translations attempt to capture this. Exceptions include Robert Alter's "The Hebrew Bible" and the "New American Bible Revised Edition".

Composition.

Lamentations has traditionally been ascribed to Jeremiah, probably on the grounds of the reference in 2 Chronicles 35:25 to the prophet composing a lament on the death of King Josiah, but there is no reference to Josiah in the book and no reason to connect it to Jeremiah. The language fits an Exilic date (586–520 BCE), and the poems probably originated from Judeans who remained in the land. Scholars are divided over whether they are the work of one or multiple authors. One clue pointing to multiple authors is that the gender and situation of the first-person witness changes – the narration is feminine in the first and second lamentation, and masculine in the third, while the fourth and fifth are eyewitness reports of Jerusalem's destruction; conversely, the similarities of style, vocabulary, and theological outlook, as well as the uniform historical setting, are arguments for one author.

Later interpretation and influence.

Lamentations is recited annually by Jews on the fast day of Tisha B'Av ("Ninth of Av"), mourning the destruction of both the First Temple and the Second.  In Western Christianity, readings (often chanted) and choral settings of extracts from the book are used in the Lenten religious service known as Tenebrae (Latin for "darkness"). In the Church of England, readings are used at Morning and Evening Prayer on the Monday and Tuesday of Holy Week, and at Evening Prayer on Good Friday.  In the Coptic Orthodox Church, the book's third chapter is chanted on the twelfth hour of the Good Friday service, that commemorates the burial of Jesus.

The Book of Lamentations (, "‘Êykhôh", from its incipit meaning "how") is a collection of poetic laments for the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE. In the Hebrew Bible it appears in the Ketuvim ("Writings"), beside the Song of Songs, Book of Ruth, Ecclesiastes and the Book of Esther (the Megilot or "Five Scrolls"), although there is no set order; in the Christian Old Testament it follows the Book of Jeremiah, as the prophet Jeremiah is its traditional author. Jeremiah's authorship is no longer generally accepted, although it is generally accepted that the destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon in 586 BC forms the background to the poems.


Construction.

The construction of the "Buran" spaceplanes began in 1980, and by 1984 the first full-scale orbiter was rolled-out. The Buran spaceplane was made to be launched on the Soviet Union's super-heavy lift vehicle, Energia. The Buran programme ended in 1993.

Operational history.

Orbital flight.

The only orbital launch of a "Buran"-class orbiter, 1K1 (first orbiter, first flight) occurred at 03:00:02 UTC on 15 November 1988 from Baikonur Cosmodrome launch pad 110/37. "Buran" was lifted into space, on an uncrewed mission, by the specially designed Energia rocket. The automated launch sequence performed as specified, and the Energia rocket lifted the vehicle into a temporary orbit before the orbiter separated as programmed. After boosting itself to a higher orbit and completing two orbits around the Earth, the ODU (, сombined propulsion system) engines fired automatically to begin the descent into the atmosphere, return to the launch site, and horizontal landing on a runway.  After making an automated approach to Site 251, "Buran" touched down under its own control at 06:24:42 UTC and came to a stop at 06:25:24, 206 minutes after launch. Despite a lateral wind speed of, "Buran" landed only laterally and longitudinally from the target mark. It was the first spaceplane to perform an uncrewed flight, including landing in fully automatic mode. It was later found that "Buran" had lost only eight of its 38,000 thermal tiles over the course of its flight.

Projected flights.

In 1989, it was projected that Buran would have an uncrewed second flight by 1993, with a duration of 15–20 days. Although the Buran programme was never officially cancelled, the dissolution of the Soviet Union led to funding drying up and this never took place.

Specifications.

The mass of "Buran" is quoted as 62 tons, with a maximum payload of 30 tons, for a total lift-off weight of 105 tons.  Unlike the US Space Shuttle, which was propelled by a combination of solid boosters and the orbiter's own liquid-propellant engines fuelled from a large tank, the Soviet/Russian shuttle system used thrust from each booster's four RD-170 liquid oxygen/kerosene engines, developed by Valentin Glushko, and another four RD-0120 liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen engines attached to the central block.

Fate and destruction.

In June 1989, "Buran", carried on the back of the Antonov An-225, took part in the 1989 Paris Air Show at Le Bourget Airfield.  Together with the Energia rocket, "Buran" was put in a hangar at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan.  After the first flight of a Buran shuttle, the programme was suspended due to lack of funds and the political situation in the Soviet Union. The two subsequent orbiters, which were due in 1990 (informally "Ptichka") and 1992 (informally "Baikal") were never completed. The programme was officially terminated on 30 June 1993, by President Boris Yeltsin. At the time of its cancellation, 20 billion rubles had been spent on the Buran programme.  On 12 May 2002, a hangar roof at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan collapsed because of a structural failure due to poor maintenance. The collapse killed 8 workers and destroyed one of the Buran craft (Orbiter K1), which flew the test flight in 1988, as well as a mock-up of an Energia booster rocket.  Two further Buran shuttles (one for ground use and one that was 90% ready to spaceflight), together with an Energia-M rocket prototype carrier are still stored at the base, according to an article in 2017.

Buran (,, meaning "Snowstorm" or "Blizzard"; GRAU index serial number: 11F35 1K) was the first spaceplane to be produced as part of the Soviet/Russian Buran programme. Besides describing the first operational Soviet/Russian shuttle orbiter, "Buran" was also the designation for the entire Soviet/Russian spaceplane project and its orbiters, which were known as ""Buran"-class spaceplanes".