Description.

When found as a summer annual, the scarlet pimpernel has a low-growing creeping habit, but as a winter annual, it forms a half-rosette with an upright stem. It has weak sprawling stems with square cross-section growing to about long. They bear bright green, soft, ovate sessile leaves in opposite pairs. The orange, red or blue, radially symmetric flowers, about in diameter, are produced singly in the leaf axils from spring to autumn. The petal margins are somewhat crenate and have small glandular hairs. The stamens have lollipop hairs and therefore attract a variety of pollinators, especially flies, but the flowers are also capable of autopollination. The dehiscent capsule fruits ripen from August to October in the northern hemisphere. The weight of the fruiting body bends the stem, and the seeds are transported by the wind or rain. Blue-flowered plants ("A. arvensis" Forma "azurea") are common in some areas, such as the Mediterranean region, and should not be confused with the related blue pimpernel, "Anagallis foemina", sometimes "Anagalis arvensis" ssp. "foemina". In 2007, a molecular phylogenetic study showed that "Anagallis foemina" is more closely related to "Anagallis monelli" than to "Anagallis arvensis", and should be treated as a separate species. The taxonomy has however not yet been resolved and various authorities propose either the subspecies "Anagallis arvensis subsp. foemina" (Mill.) Schinz & Thell, or the species "Anagallis foemina" Mill. The plant has a diploid chromosome count of 2n=40.  Scarlet pimpernel flowers open only when the sun shines, and even close in overcast conditions. This habit leads to names such as "shepherd's weather glass". It has recently started to occur along the verges of salted roads, creating a broad red band along the roadside.  Scarlet pimpernel has a wide variety of flower colours. The petals of the type "arvensis" are bright red to minium-coloured; "carnea" is deep peach, "lilacina" is lilac; "pallida" is white; and "azurea" is blue. The blue form can be difficult to distinguish from "A. foemina", but the petal margins are diagnostic: whereas "foemina" has clearly irregular petal margins with only 5 to 15 glandular hairs, "A. arvensis" f. "azurea" has 50 to 70 hairs on only slightly irregular margins.

Medical and agricultural significance.

"Anagallis arvensis" is generally unwelcome as a cosmopolitan invasive species; it is harmfully toxic in several respects and accordingly undesirable in pastures. Perhaps fortunately, the plant is and bitter, and grazing livestock generally avoid eating it except in conditions of overgrazing or grazing of unsatisfying stubble. Experimental feeding of the plant material to various animals, such as horses and dogs, caused gastroenteritis. Sufficiently high doses proved fatal. Less specifically the herb has been reported as being toxic to poultry and rabbits, and the seed to birds.  Understandably, "Anagallis arvensis" is less often used in folk medicine worldwide than where it has long been familiar in its countries of origin. In various countries however, the plant material has been applied externally to slow-healing ulcers and wounds. It also has been applied as an expectorant and as a remedy for pruritus, rheumatism, haemorrhoids, rabies, leprosy, and snake-bite. "Anagallis" has been used in treatment of non-specified types of phthisis, and of kidney-related conditions such as dropsy and chronic nephritis. It was used as an antidepressant in ancient Greece, and to treat various mental disorders in European folk medicine, leading to the German name "Gauchheil" ("Gauch" meaning "fool" or "cuckoo", and "heil" meaning "heal"). Generally however, documented evidence for clinical efficacy is lacking. "Anagallis arvensis" is traditionally known by pharmacists as "Arvensis Herba"  "Anagallis arvensis" is insecticidal, or at least is repellent to some insects, possibly by virtue of its pungent essential oil which has a characteristic smell. Taken by mouth, experimental doses of the liquid in humans caused twenty-four hours of intense nausea, headache and bodily pain. Some people also experience dermatitis from contact with the leaf. Reports from Australia state that when grain crops have been infested by the weed, chaff that contains much of the material becomes unpalatable to stock as fodder. When grazing in pasture, livestock usually leave the plant alone, but when they do nonetheless eat significant quantities, they suffer diuretic and narcotic effects sufficiently intense to justify regarding the plant as poisonous. Reportedly an Indian practice of expelling leeches from dog nostrils can lead to fatal results if the animal swallows the fluid.  The herb and its seed contain saponins, which could explain why fresh material is strongly haemolytic. Among other possible glycosides, the root yields the triterpenoid glycoside which is highly toxic and occurs in "Cyclamen" species, also a member of the subfamily Myrsinoideae, and arguably also in the Primulaceae.  The plant contains tanning agents, bitters, and the proteolytic enzyme primverase.  Antibacterial tests of the green parts failed to show any encouraging positive effect.

In literature.

Scarlet pimpernel ("anicham" in Tamil) is one of the two flowers mentioned in the Tirukkural.  "The Scarlet Pimpernel" is the alias of Sir Percy Blakeney in the novel of the same name by Baroness Emma Orczy.

Anagallis arvensis or Lysimachia arvensis, commonly known as scarlet pimpernel, blue-scarlet pimpernel, red pimpernel, red chickweed, poor man's barometer, poor man's weather-glass, shepherd's weather glass or shepherd's clock, is a low-growing annual plant with brightly coloured flowers, most often scarlet but also bright blue and sometimes pink. The native range of the species is Europe and Western Asia and North Africa. The species has been distributed widely by humans, either deliberately as an ornamental flower or accidentally. "A. arvensis" is now naturalised almost worldwide, with a range that encompasses the Americas, Central and East Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, Malesia, the Pacific Islands, Australasia and Southern Africa.


Life.

Ernst Neufert was born in Freyburg an der Unstrut. At the age of 17, after five years of working as a bricklayer, Neufert entered the school of construction (Baugewerbeschule) in Weimar. His teacher recommended him to Walter Gropius in 1919 as one of his first students of the Bauhaus. He finished his studies in 1920, and together with the expressionist architect Paul Linder (1897-1968) embarked on a year-long study tour of Spain, where he sketched medieval churches. In Barcelona he met Antonio Gaudi, whose architecture made a deep impression on the young student. Neufert later became one of the first advocates of Gaudi in Germany. After 1921 he returned to the Bauhaus and became chief architect under Gropius in one of the most prominent architecture studios of the Weimar Republic.  In 1923 he met the painter Alice Spies-Neufert, a student of the Bauhaus masters Georg Muche and Paul Klee, and married her in 1924. They had four children (Peter, Christa, Ingrid and Ilas).  In 1925 Neufert worked in close collaboration with Gropius on the realization of the new Bauhaus buildings in Dessau and the completion of the masters' houses for Muche, Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky. In 1926 he returned to Weimar and became a teacher under Otto Bartning at the Bauhochschule (Building College), known as "the other Bauhaus". From 1928 to 1930 he realized various projects, such as the Mensa am Philosophenweg and the Abbeanum in Jena. In 1929 he built his private home in Gelmeroda, a village near Weimar (today the home of the Neufert Foundation and Neufert Box, a small museum with changing exhibitions). After closure of the Bauhochschule by the Nazis, he moved to Berlin and worked in a private school for art and architecture founded by Johannes Itten, which was forced to close as well in 1934.  Very early Neufert recognized the possibilities for rationalization of building processes, but also the need for normative rules.  In 1934 he became the resident architect of Vereinigte Lausitzer Glaswerke (United Lusatia Glassworks). He designed the private home of its director Dr. Kindt (with colour glass by Charles Crodel) and various housing, office, and factory buildings in Weißwasser, Tschernitz and Kamenz. At the same time he worked on his "Architects' Data", which was published in March 1936 and which remains an essential reference work, having been translated into 18 languages.  In 1936 traveled to New York City and Taliesin to visit Frank Lloyd Wright and gauge his prospects of finding work in the United States. But in New York he was notified of the enormous success of the first edition of his book and returned to Berlin to prepare the second edition. New industrial commissions for his studio led to his decision to remain in Germany. In 1939 he was appointed by Albert Speer to work on the standardization of German industrial architecture.  After World War II, Neufert was appointed professor at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. He opened his own office, Neufert und Neufert, with his son Peter in 1953 and realized numerous projects, including many industrial buildings. He died in 1986 in his home in Bugneaux-sur-Rolle in Switzerland.

Ernst Neufert (15 March 1900 – 23 February 1986) was a German architect who is known as an assistant of Walter Gropius, as a teacher and member of various standardization organizations, and especially for his essential handbook "Architects' data".


Biography.

The son of a teacher, Amédée Hadamard, of Jewish descent, and Claire Marie Jeanne Picard, Hadamard was born in Versailles, France and attended the Lycée Charlemagne and Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where his father taught. In 1884 Hadamard entered the École Normale Supérieure, having placed first in the entrance examinations both there and at the École Polytechnique. His teachers included Tannery, Hermite, Darboux, Appell, Goursat and Picard. He obtained his doctorate in 1892 and in the same year was awarded the "Grand Prix des Sciences Mathématiques" for his essay on the Riemann zeta function.  In 1892 Hadamard married Louise-Anna Trénel, also of Jewish descent, with whom he had three sons and two daughters. The following year he took up a lectureship in the University of Bordeaux, where he proved his celebrated inequality on determinants, which led to the discovery of Hadamard matrices when equality holds. In 1896 he made two important contributions: he proved the prime number theorem, using complex function theory (also proved independently by Charles Jean de la Vallée-Poussin); and he was awarded the Bordin Prize of the French Academy of Sciences for his work on geodesics in the differential geometry of surfaces and dynamical systems. In the same year he was appointed Professor of Astronomy and Rational Mechanics in Bordeaux. His foundational work on geometry and symbolic dynamics continued in 1898 with the study of geodesics on surfaces of negative curvature. For his cumulative work, he was awarded the Prix Poncelet in 1898.  After the Dreyfus affair, which involved him personally because his second cousin Lucie was the wife of Dreyfus, Hadamard became politically active and a staunch supporter of Jewish causes though he professed to be an atheist in his religion.  In 1897 he moved back to Paris, holding positions in the Sorbonne and the Collège de France, where he was appointed Professor of Mechanics in 1909. In addition to this post, he was appointed to chairs of analysis at the École Polytechnique in 1912 and at the École Centrale in 1920, succeeding Jordan and Appell. In Paris Hadamard concentrated his interests on the problems of mathematical physics, in particular partial differential equations, the calculus of variations and the foundations of functional analysis. He introduced the idea of "well-posed problem" and the "method of descent" in the theory of partial differential equations, culminating in his seminal book on the subject, based on lectures given at Yale University in 1922. Later in his life he wrote on probability theory and mathematical education.  Hadamard was elected to the French Academy of Sciences in 1916, in succession to Poincaré, whose complete works he helped edit. He became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1920. He was elected a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1929. He visited the Soviet Union in 1930 and 1934 and China in 1936 at the invitation of Soviet and Chinese mathematicians.  Hadamard stayed in France at the beginning of the Second World War and escaped to southern France in 1940. The Vichy government permitted him to leave for the United States in 1941 and he obtained a visiting position at Columbia University in New York. He moved to London in 1944 and returned to France when the war ended in 1945.  Hadamard was awarded an honorary doctorate (LL.D.) by Yale University in October 1901, during celebrations for the bicentenary of the university. He was awarded the CNRS Gold medal for his lifetime achievements in 1956. He died in Paris in 1963, aged ninety-seven.  Hadamard's students included Maurice Fréchet, Paul Lévy, Szolem Mandelbrojt and André Weil.

On creativity.

In his book "Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field", Hadamard uses introspection to describe mathematical thought processes. In sharp contrast to authors who identify language and cognition, he describes his own mathematical thinking as largely wordless, often accompanied by mental images that represent the entire solution to a problem. He surveyed 100 of the leading physicists of the day (approximately 1900), asking them how they did their work.  Hadamard described the experiences of the mathematicians/theoretical physicists Carl Friedrich Gauss, Hermann von Helmholtz, Henri Poincaré and others as viewing entire solutions with "sudden spontaneousness".  Hadamard described the process as having four steps of the five-step Graham Wallas creative process model, with the first three also having been put forth by Helmholtz: Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, and Verification.

Jacques Salomon Hadamard ForMemRS (; 8 December 1865 – 17 October 1963) was a French mathematician who made major contributions in number theory, complex analysis, differential geometry and partial differential equations.


Discovery.

The first incomplete specimens of "Sivapithecus" were found in northern India in the late 19th century.  Another find was made in Nepal on the bank of Tinau River, dovan v.c. of Palpa; a western part of the country in 1932. Now it is in Nature Museum Kathmandu. This find was named ""Ramapithecus"". The discoverer, G. Edward Lewis, claimed that it was distinct from "Sivapithecus", as the jaw was more like a human's than any other fossil ape then known, a claim revived in the 1960s. At that time, it was believed that the ancestors of humans had diverged from other apes 14 million years ago. Biochemical studies upset this view, suggesting that there was an early split between orangutan ancestors and the common ancestors of chimpanzees, gorillas and humans.  Meanwhile, more complete specimens of "Ramapithecus" were found in 1975 and 1976, which showed that it was less human-like than had been thought. It began to look more and more like "Sivapithecus", meaning that the older name must take priority. It is also possible that fossils assigned to "Ramapithecus" belonged to the female form of "Sivapithecus". They were definitely members of the same genus. It is also likely that they were already separate from the common ancestor of chimps, gorillas and humans, which may be represented by the prehistoric great ape "Nakalipithecus nakayamai". Siwalik specimens once assigned to the genus "Ramapithecus" are now considered by most researchers to belong to one or more species of "Sivapithecus". "Ramapithecus" is no longer regarded as a likely ancestor of humans.  In 1982, David Pilbeam published a description of a significant fossil find, formed by a large part of the face and jaw of a "Sivapithecus". The specimen bore many similarities to the orangutan skull and strengthened the theory (previously suggested by others) that "Sivapithecus" was closely related to orangutans.

Description.

"Sivapithecus" was about in body length, similar in size to a modern orangutan. In most respects, it would have resembled a chimpanzee, but its face was closer to that of an orangutan. The shape of its wrists and general body proportions suggest that it spent a significant amount of its time on the ground, as well as in trees. It had large canine teeth, and heavy molars, suggesting a diet of relatively tough food, such as seeds and savannah grasses.

Species.

Currently three species are generally recognized:

Sivapithecus (Shiva's Ape) (syn: "Ramapithecus)" is a genus of extinct apes. Fossil remains of animals now assigned to this genus, dated from 12.2 million years old in the Miocene, have been found since the 19th century in the Siwalik Hills of the Indian subcontinent. Any one of the species in this genus may have been the ancestor to the modern orangutans.


Early life and early career.

Svetlana Savitskaya was born in a privileged family. Her father, Yevgeny Savitsky, was a highly decorated fighter pilot during the Second World War, which later brought him to the position of Deputy Commander-in-Chief of Soviet Air Defense.  Without the knowledge of her parents, Savitskaya began parachuting at the age of 16. When her father heard about it, he further promoted this tendency. On her seventeenth birthday she already had 450 parachute jumps. Over the next year, she led record stratosphere jumps from 13,800 m and 14,250 m.  After graduating in 1966, she enrolled in the Moscow State Aviation Institute (MAI), where she also took flight lessons. In 1971 she was licensed as a flight instructor. After graduating from the MAI in 1972, she trained as a test pilot at the Fedotov Test Pilot School, graduating in 1976. In May 1978 she went to work for the aircraft manufacturer Yakovlev, as a test pilot.  Between 1969 and 1977 she was a member of the Soviet national team for aerobatics. At the FAI World Aerobatic Championships in July 1970 at Hullavington, she flew a Yak-18 and won the world championship together with an all-female team. At the 1972 World Championships in Salon-de-Provence she placed third; in 1976 in Kiev with a Yak-50, fifth.

Soviet space program.

In 1979, Savitskaya participated in the selection process for the second group of female cosmonauts. On June 30, 1980, she was officially admitted to the cosmonaut group. She passed her exams on February 24, 1982.

First flight: Soyuz T-7 / T-5.

In December 1981, Savitskaya prepared for her first space flight, a short-term flight to the space station Salyut 7, replacing the original crew. The commander of this mission was Leonid Popov, with his third flight; it was flight engineer Alexander Serebrov's first flight.  The launch of Soyuz T-7 took place on August 19, 1982. This made Savitskaya the second woman in space, 19 years after Valentina Tereshkova. The three cosmonauts docked with the space station the following day, where they were welcomed by Anatoly Berezovoy and Valentin Lebedev. This was the first time a space station had a mixed gender crew. Savitskaya was assigned the orbital module of Soyuz T-7 as a private area, but slept as well as the men in the space station. On August 27, 1982, Popov, Savitskaya, and Serebrov returned to Earth in Soyuz T-5.  In 1995, Savitskaya gave an interview to "Baltimore Sun" journalist Clara Germani. She recalled encountering some sexism from her male crewmates and that upon entering Salyut 7 for the first time, Valentin Lebedev presented her with an apron and told her "to get to work". She stated that "I was quickly able to establish a working, professional relationship with them."

Second flight: Soyuz T-12.

In December 1983 she was assigned to her second flight, including an EVA, three weeks after American astronaut Kathy Sullivan's flight and EVA assignment were made public. Again, it was to be a short-term mission to Salyut 7, this time bringing tools to the station so that the third resident crew, the Salyut 7 EO-3, could repair a fuel line.  On July 17, 1984 Savitskaya launched aboard Soyuz T-12, together with Commander Vladimir Dzhanibekov and research cosmonaut Igor Volk. On July 25, 1984, Savitskaya became the first woman to spacewalk, conducting EVA outside the Salyut 7 space station for 3 hours and 35 minutes, during which she cut and welded metals in space along with her colleague Vladimir Dzhanibekov. Of the 57 Soviet/Russian spacewalkers through 2010, she is the only woman, and as of April 2020 is still the only Soviet/Russian woman to walk in space. The return to Earth took place on July 29, 1984.  Savitskaya recalled that, during her second mission, she expressed concern about the extravehicular welding exercises, as "I did not understand the point of it. We might burn our spacesuits or the exterior of the station." but her overall excellent performance on both flights silenced critics who questioned a woman's capability to perform space missions.

Possible third spaceflight.

Upon returning to Earth, Savitskaya was assigned as the commander of an all-female Soyuz crew to Salyut 7 in commemoration of International Women's Day. In February 1985, however, the radio contact with Salyut 7 was lost; the space station was rescued by the Soyuz T-13 mission in the summer of 1985. When the next mission had to be stopped in November 1985, due to an illness of the commander Vladimir Vasyutin, the women's flight was finally canceled. In addition, after two unsuccessful flights in 1983, Soyuz T-8 and Soyuz T-10-1, not enough Soyuz spacecraft were available. Later it would have been possible to fly with a Soyuz-TM to the space station Mir. However, this plan was not pursued due to Savitskaya's pregnancy in 1986.

Biography.

Savitskaya is married, with one child, a son born in 1986. In February 1986, she graduated from the Bauman Moscow Higher Technical School. From 1983 to 1994 Savitskaya held a position of Deputy Head of NPO Energia.  A committed communist, Savitskaya was elected as a people's deputy of the USSR from 1989 and a people's deputy of Russia in 1990, a position she held until 1992. She did not welcome the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, noting that everything her parents had worked hard to build was destroyed almost overnight and she was "glad they did not live to see it".  Savitskaya retired in 1993 from the Russian Air Force with the rank of Major. In 1994/95 she worked as an Assistant Professor in Economics and Investment at the Moscow State Aviation Institute. In 1996, she was elected a deputy of the State Duma representing the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, and has been re-elected four times since then. She presently serves as Deputy Chair of the Committee on Defence, and is also a member of the Coordination council presidium of the National Patriotic Union.

Honours and awards.

Savitskaya was one of five cosmonauts selected to raise the Russian flag at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics opening ceremony.  The asteroid 4118 Sveta is named after her.

Svetlana Yevgenyevna Savitskaya (; born 8 August 1948) is a retired Soviet aviator and cosmonaut who flew aboard Soyuz T-7 in 1982, becoming the second woman in space. On her 1984 Soyuz T-12 mission she became the first woman to fly to space twice, and the first woman to perform a spacewalk.


Family and early life.

Sophia was a member of the House of Wittelsbach and was the youngest child and only daughter of John II, Duke of Bavaria, and his spouse Catherine of Gorizia. Sophia's two brothers were Ernest, Duke of Bavaria, and William III, Duke of Bavaria.  Her paternal grandparents were Stephen II, Duke of Bavaria and his first wife Elisabetta of Sicily, daughter of Frederick III of Sicily and Eleanor of Anjou. Sophia was a cousin of Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France. Sophia's maternal grandparents were Count Meinhard VI of Gorizia and Catharina of Pfannberg.  Sophia grew up in the care of her uncle, Frederick, Duke of Bavaria, in Landshut. Sophia liked hunting, which was one thing she had in common with her future husband. In 1388 uncle took her to Prague, where he worked through political negotiations to have his niece married off. He said that the twelve-year-old princess was impressed with Wenceslaus, moreover, the marriage was for political reasons. Sophia's father was represented in the negotiation of the marriage by her uncle Duke Frederick.

Queen.

On 2 May 1389 in Prague, Sophia married Wenceslaus, King of the Romans. Wenceslas and Sophie were probably married by the king's chancellor, Bishop Jan. Wenceslaus was in a dispute with the Archbishop of Prague, which threatened Sophia's coronation. She could have only been crowned queen by an archbishop.  Wenceslaus celebrated the marriage by making a number of excellent manuscripts such as the Wenceslas Bible. There was also a manuscript on marital fidelity. The relationship was described as happy. Sophia had no children.  Sophia's husband was certainly not an incompetent ruler, in chronicles he was described in a biased manner. Sophia is described as economically talented. In March 1393, her confessor John of Nepomuk died under torture. It was said that he died refusing to reveal her confession, but he was also at that time involved in a conflict with Jan of Jenštejn. During the rebellion and the imprisonment of her spouse in 1402–1403, she lived in Hradec Králové. Queen Sophia was initially a follower of Jan Hus and listened to his sermons, and like Wenceslas, she gave him her protection. After Hus was banned by the Pope in 1410, however, she withdraw her support. She was convinced that the death of Hus, in 1415, would lead to a riot.

Queen dowager and regent.

Wenceslaus died in 1419. As a queen dowager, Sophia sought refuge with her brother-in-law, Sigismund of Hungary, whose claims on the throne of Bohemia she supported. For a period of time, Sophia was the official regent of Bohemia. In October 1419, the leading Bohemians signed a treaty with queen dowager Sophia with a promise to protect law and order. She soon lost authority, however. Sophia and Sigismund were involved in managing a property in Prešpurk together. There were rumours that Sophia and Sigismund had an affair. Sigismund remarked that the Queen dowager of Bohemia would surely marry again – possibly to Wladyslaw II of Poland.  Sophia died on 4 November 1428.

Sophia of Bavaria (; ; 1376 – 4 November 1428) was a Queen of Bohemia and the spouse of Wenceslaus, King of Bohemia and King of the Romans. She was briefly interim regent of Bohemia after the death of Wenceslaus in 1419.


Early life.

He was born in Duchy of Gandía, Valencia, on 28 October 1510. His father was Juan Borgia, 3rd Duke of Gandía, the son of Giovanni Borgia, the son of Pope Alexander VI (Rodrigo Borgia). His mother was Juana, daughter of Alonso de Aragón, Archbishop of Zaragoza, who, in turn, was the illegitimate son of King Ferdinand II of Aragon. His brother, Tomás de Borja y Castro, also became a clergyman, becoming the Bishop of Málaga, and later the Archbishop of Zaragoza.  Although as a child he was very pious and wished to become a monk, his family sent him instead to the court of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (who was also King Charles I of Spain), where he was welcomed as a kinsman. He distinguished himself there, accompanying the Emperor on several campaigns.

Adult life and career.

In September 1529, he married a Portuguese noblewoman in Madrid, Leonor de Castro Mello y Meneses. They had eight children: Carlos in 1530, Isabel in 1532, Juan in 1533, Álvaro circa 1535, Juana also circa 1535, Fernando in 1537, Dorotea in 1538, and Alfonso in 1539. Charles V appointed him Marquess of Lombay, master of the hounds, and equerry to the empress.  In 1539, he convoyed the corpse of Isabella of Portugal, Philip II of Spain's mother, to her burial place in Granada. In that same year (1539), he became Viceroy of Catalonia, replacing Fadrique de Portugal y Noroña, though he was only 29.  He delighted above all in producing ecclesiastical compositions, and these display a remarkable contrapuntal style and bear witness to the skill of the composer, justifying indeed the assertion that, in the sixteenth century and prior to Palestrina, Borgia was one of the chief restorers of sacred music.  In 1543 upon the death of his father, the 3rd Duke, Francis became the 4th Duke of Gandía. His diplomatic abilities came into question when his attempt to arrange a marriage between Prince Philip and the Princess of Portugal failed, thus ending an attempt to bring these two countries together and resulting in his retirement. By then 33 years old, he had retired to his native place and devoted himself to religious activities.

Jesuit priest.

In 1546 his wife Eleanor died, and Francis then decided to enter the newly formed Society of Jesus, after making adequate provisions for his children. He put his affairs in order circa 1551, renounced his titles in favour of his eldest son Carlos de Borja-Aragon y de Castro-Melo, and became a Jesuit priest. He helped in the establishment of what is now the Gregorian University in Rome. Upon Francis’ return from a journey to Peru, Pope Julius III made known his intention to make him a cardinal. To prevent this, Borgia decided, in agreement with St. Ignatius, to leave the city secretly and go to the Basque Country, where it was thought he would be safe from the papal desires. He felt drawn to spend time in seclusion and prayer, but his administrative talents also made him a natural for other tasks. In time his friends persuaded him to accept the leadership role that nature and circumstances had destined him for: in 1554, he became the Jesuit commissary-general in Spain, where he founded a dozen colleges. After only two years, St. Francis was also given responsibility for missions in the East and West Indies. In 1565, he was elected the third "Father General" or Superior General of the Society of Jesus, after the death in January 1565 of Diego Laynez, (Almazán, Spain, 1512 – January 1565).  His successes during the period 1565–1572 have caused historians to describe Francis as the greatest General after Saint Ignatius. He founded the "Collegium Romanum", which was to become the Gregorian University, advised kings and popes, and closely supervised all the affairs of the rapidly expanding order. Yet, despite the great power of his office, Francis led a humble life and was widely regarded in his own lifetime as a saint.  Francis Borgia died in 1572.

Veneration.

Francis Borgia died on 30 September 1572, in Rome. He was beatified in Madrid on 23 November 1624, by Pope Urban VIII. He was canonized nearly 35 years later on 20 June 1670, by Pope Clement X. His liturgical feast was inserted into the General Roman Calendar in 1688 for celebration on 10 October, the date then free from other celebrations that was closest to that of his death.

Legacy.

Parishes are dedicated to St. Francis Borgia in Chicago, Illinois, Sturgis, Kentucky, Washington, Missouri, Blair, Nebraska, and Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Also in the village of Isio in the town of Cauayan, Negros Occidental, Philippines. The Jesuit-founded city of São Borja, in southern Brazil, is named after him.  Saint Francis Borgia Regional High School is located in Washington, Missouri.

Descendants.

As the great-great grandfather of Doña Luisa de Guzmán, queen consort of King John IV of Portugal, he is an ancestor of many of the royal houses of Europe.

Saint Francis Borgia, 4th Duke of Gandía (Valencian: "Francesc de Borja", ) (1510–1572) was a great-grandson of Pope Alexander VI, a Grandee of Spain, a Spanish Jesuit, and third Superior General of the Society of Jesus. He was canonized on 20 June 1670 by Pope Clement X.


Origins.

The Vorticism group began with the Rebel Art Centre which Wyndham Lewis and others established after disagreeing with Omega Workshops founder Roger Fry, and has roots in the Bloomsbury Group, Cubism and Futurism. Lewis himself saw Vorticism as an independent alternative to Cubism, Futurism and Expressionism.  Though the style grew out of Cubism, it is more closely related to Futurism in its embrace of dynamism, the machine age and all things modern (cf. Cubo-Futurism). However, Vorticism diverged from Futurism in the way it tried to capture movement in an image. In a Vorticist painting modern life is shown as an array of bold lines and harsh colours drawing the viewer's eye into the centre of the canvas.  The name "Vorticism" was given to the movement by Ezra Pound in 1913, although Lewis, usually seen as the central figure in the movement, had been producing paintings in the same style for a year or so previously.

Participants.

The eleven signatories of the Vorticist manifesto were:  Other contributors to the development of the movement were David Bomberg, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Jacob Epstein (notably "Rock Drill"), Frederick Etchells, Christopher Nevinson and Dorothy Shakespear.

"BLAST".

The Vorticists published two issues of the literary magazine "BLAST", edited by Lewis, in June 1914 and July 1915. It contained work by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot as well as by the Vorticists themselves. In the first issue, Ford Madox Ford, writing under his real name, Ford Madox Hueffer, submitted "The Saddest Story", a ten-page excerpt from the beginning of his novel, 'The Good Soldier'. Its typographical adventurousness was cited by El Lissitzky as one of the major forerunners of the revolution in graphic design in the 1920s and 1930s.

Demise and legacy.

Experimental paintings and sculpture using angular simplification and abstraction, by Lewis, Wadsworth, Shakespear and others, were shown at the Rebel Art Centre in 1914, before the formation of the Vorticist Group. This work was contemporary with and comparable to abstraction by European artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, František Kupka and the Russian Rayist Group. The Vorticists held only one exhibition, in 1915, at the Doré Gallery in London. The main section of the exhibition included work by Jessica Dismorr, Frederick Etchells, Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, William Roberts, Helen Saunders and Edward Wadsworth. There was a smaller section area titled "Those Invited To Show" that included several other artists. Jacob Epstein was notably not represented, although did have his drawings reproduced in "BLAST".  After this, the movement broke up, largely due to the onset of World War I and public apathy towards the work. Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in military service, while leading figures such as Epstein distanced themselves stylistically from Lewis. A brief attempt by Lewis to revive the movement in 1920 under the name "Group X" proved unsuccessful. Pound, however, through his correspondence with Lewis, was understood to hold a commitment to the goals of the movement as much as forty years after its demise.  While Lewis is generally seen as the central figure in the movement, it has been suggested that this was more due to his contacts and ability as a self-publicist and polemicist than the quality of his works. A 1956 exhibition at the Tate Gallery was called "Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism", highlighting his prominent place in the movement. This angered other members of the group. Bomberg and Roberts (who published a series of "Vortex Pamphlets" on the matter) both protested strongly the assertion of Lewis, which was printed in the exhibition catalogue: "Vorticism, in fact, was what I, personally, did, and said, at a certain period."

Vorticism was a short-lived modernist movement in British art and poetry of the early 20th century, partly inspired by Cubism. The movement was announced in 1914 in the first issue of "BLAST", which contained its manifesto and the movement's rejection of landscape and nudes in favour of a geometric style tending towards abstraction. Ultimately, it was their witnessing of unfolding human disaster in World War I that "drained these artists of their Vorticist zeal". Vorticism was based in London but was international in make-up and ambition.


Biography.

Early life.

Cesária Évora was born on 27 August 1941 in Mindelo, São Vicente, Cape Verde. When she was seven years old her father, Justino da Cruz Évora, who was a part-time musician, died, and at the age of ten she was placed in an orphanage, as her mother Dona Joana could not raise all six children. At the age of 16, she was persuaded by a friend to sing in a sailors' tavern.  She grew up at the house in Mindelo which other singers used from the 1940s to the 1970s, at 35 Rua de Moeda. Other Cape Verdean singers came to the house, including Djô d'Eloy, Bana, Eddy Moreno, Luis Morais and Manuel de Novas (also known as Manuel d'Novas), and it was there she received her musical education.

Musical career.

In the 1960s, she started singing on Portuguese cruise ships stopping at Mindelo and on the local radio. In 1985, at the invitation of Cape Verdean singer Bana, she went to perform in Portugal. In Lisbon she was discovered by the producer José da Silva and invited to record in Paris.  She recorded the track "Ausência", composed by Yugoslav musician Goran Bregovic, which was released as the second track of the soundtrack of the film "Underground" (1995) by Emir Kusturica.  Évora's international success came only in 1988 with the release of her first commercial album "La Diva Aux Pieds Nus", recorded in France. Before that album had been released, she recorded her first LP titled "Cesária" in 1987. This album was later released on CD in 1995 as Audiophile Legends. Her 1992 album "Miss Perfumado" sold over 300,000 copies worldwide. It included one of her most celebrated songs, "Sodade".  In 1994, Bau joined her touring band and two years later, he became her musical director up to September 1999.  Her 1995 album "Cesária" brought her international success and the first Grammy Award nomination. In 1997, she won the KORA All African Music Awards in three categories, including "Best Artist of West Africa", "Best Album" and "Merit of the Jury". In 2003, her album "Voz d'Amor" was awarded a Grammy in the World Music category.  In 2006, Cesária met with Alberto Zeppieri, an Italian songwriter, journalist and record producer and agreed to duet with Gianni Morandi, Gigi D'Alessio and Ron CESARIA EVORA & RON - La voce dell' amore (voz d'amor). The project, now in its fifth volume, gives visibility and raises funds for the UN World Food Programme, for which Cesária was the Ambassador from 2003.  Later in 2006, she released her next album "Rogamar". It was a success and charted in six European countries including France, Poland and the Netherlands. On her tour in Australia in 2008, she suffered a stroke. In 2009, she released her final album "Nha Sentimento" which was recorded in Mindelo and Paris by José da Silva. The album reached number 6 in Poland and number 21 in France.  In 2009, she was made a knightess of the French Legion of Honour by the French Minister of Culture and Communications, Christine Albanel, the first Cape Verdean to become one.  She received her last award at the 2010 Kora All African Music Awards, the "Merit of the Jury" award for the second time.

Personal life.

Cesária Évora dated Eduardo de Jon Xalino when she lived at Rua de Moeda. She was also a relative of the great Bana.  Her cousin was another singer Hermínia da Cruz Fortes. She was an aunt of António da Rocha Évora and Xavier da Cruz.

Death.

In 2010, Évora performed a series of concerts, the last of which was in Lisbon on 8 May. Two days later, after a heart attack, she underwent surgery at a local hospital in Paris. On the morning of 11 May 2010 she was taken off artificial pulmonary ventilation, and on 16 May she was discharged from the intensive-care unit and transported to a clinic for further treatment. In late September 2011, Évora's agent announced that she was ending her career due to poor health.  On 17 December 2011, aged 70, Évora died in São Vicente, Cape Verde, from respiratory failure and hypertension. A Spanish newspaper reported that 36 hours before her death she was still receiving people – and smoking – in her home in Mindelo, popular for always having its doors open.

Cesária Évora (; 27 August 194117 December 2011), more commonly known as Cize, was a Cape Verdean singer-songwriter. She received a Grammy Award in 2004 for her album Voz d'Amor. Nicknamed the "Barefoot Diva" for performing without shoes, she was known as the "Queen of Morna".


Life and career.

Frank Edwin Wright III was born in Frankfurt, West Germany, to American parents Frank Edwin Wright, Jr. and Linda Wright. He lived in Willits, California, with his father and elder sister Lori. He has German heritage, and his father was a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War. Wright's closest neighbor was Larry Livermore, who at the time was the singer of the punk band The Lookouts. When Wright was 12, Livermore recruited him as the drummer of The Lookouts and Tre took on the name of "Tré Cool," using both the French word "très" (meaning "very") and the English word "cool" as a way of saying he was "very cool." Trey, a play on Wright's family's generational titles, had already been Wright's nickname prior to the addition of "Cool."  When Green Day's drummer, John Kiffmeyer, left the band, the group recruited Tré Cool to be their drummer. In his second year, Tré Cool dropped out of high school and opted to earn a GED. He began taking classes at a local community college but would again drop out as the band became a more time-consuming priority. During this time the band considered breaking up because it took a long time to adjust to playing with Tré Cool. Tré Cool's father was supportive and overhauled a bookmobile to transport the band. He would later say: "I watched them go from a bunch of kids to a group of musicians with work ethic," also adding: "On their first tour or two, it was more of a party than anything else. I still scratch my head and say, 'How in the hell did they make it?' They used to practice in my living room here – a lot of the songs they did on Dookie. You hear it coming together, and you don't expect people are going to go out and buy it. But when it does, you just say, 'Wow that's so cool.'"  In 1998, after Green Day won a "Moon Man" Trophy at the MTV Music Awards, Tré Cool famously climbed on the Universal Globe at Universal Studios. He and Jai Brooks are the only two people to ever do this.  Tré Cool won "Best Punk Drummer" in DRUM! Magazine's 2011 Drummies, which recognizes some of the best drummers across music genres. He was also featured in the Nitpick Six: The Six Best Drum Fills and ranked in at number 6 for the intro to "Basket Case". In 2014, "LA Weekly" named Tré Cool #2 of the "Top 5 Punk Drummers of All Time."

Musical style.

Before joining Green Day, Tré Cool employed a more intricate drumming style. He explained that "When I started, I had too many drums. I was a little reggae-happy and into fancier beats than was needed. It took me a while to get it: play the song, don't play the instrument. I started figuring out how to make the band a stronger unit, to make it jump." After playing with Green Day bassist Mike Dirnt, Tré Cool adopted a more rhythmic style with fewer drum fills to match Dirnt's bass lines.  Greg Kot of the "Chicago Tribune" referred to Tré Cool as "Green Day's most potent weapon", adding that "His monstrous kick-drum wallop evokes John Bonham, while his manic fills make him punk's answer to Keith Moon." His stage persona has also been compared to Moon. Sound engineer Neill King, who worked with Green Day on "Dookie", noted that Tré Cool shares Moon's "wild animal approach" to playing drums, and explained that the band encountered difficulties while recording "Basket Case" due to his unpredictable style: "It's not that Tré wasn’t a good drummer, but in terms of his performances we wanted the best of the best...So, although we wanted him to do all of his wild fills and crazy drumming, we couldn’t just let him go. He’d drift in and out of time, which is terrific live, but which was unacceptable on radio at that time."

Influences and favorite drummers.

During a speech at Green Day's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction in 2015, Cool credited Ringo Starr from The Beatles, Keith Moon from The Who, John Bonham from Led Zeppelin, Mitch Mitchell from The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Charlie Watts from The Rolling Stones, jazz and big band drummer Buddy Rich, John Wright from NoMeansNo, Alex Van Halen from Van Halen and Dave Mello from Operation Ivy as his favourite drummers. Green Day performed the Beatles hit "Boys" with Starr at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony that same year, in which Cool drummed alongside his idol.

Singing and songwriting.

He also sang on "That Girl's from Outer Space" and "Sonny Boy" from Lookouts album "Spy Rock Road". He then sang and played the guitar on "Dominated Love Slave" from "Kerplunk" and the hidden track "All by Myself" from "Dookie", both of which he wrote and composed (on "Dominated Love Slave", guitarist and vocalist Billie Joe Armstrong played drums). He wrote and sang the subtrack "Rock and Roll Girlfriend" from the medley "Homecoming" featured on the album "American Idiot". He also sang and composed the track "DUI" ("Driving Under the Influence"), which was recorded for Green Day's fifth studio album "Nimrod" (1997) and was due to be released on the compilation album "Shenanigans" in 2002, but was omitted and can only be found on promotional unmastered copies of the album and online.  During a radio interview at Washington DC's alternative station DC 101, Tré Cool sang and played acoustic guitar on a short song entitled "Like a Rat Does Cheese," a song about the pleasure of fellatio.  Several live tracks also exist, usually from around 1993, such as "Food Around the Corner", a song from the 1943 Elmer Fudd cartoon "An Itch in Time". Another live track, "Billie Joe's Mom" was also recorded.  Tré Cool has also recorded a version of Tay Zonday's "Chocolate Rain."

Frank Edwin Wright III (born December 9, 1972), known professionally as Tré Cool, is an American musician, singer, and songwriter, best known as the drummer for the punk rock band Green Day. He replaced the band's former drummer, John Kiffmeyer, in 1990 as Kiffmeyer felt that he should focus on college. Cool has also played in The Lookouts, Samiam, Dead Mermaids, Bubu and the Brood and the Green Day side-projects The Network and the Foxboro Hot Tubs.


Early career.

Born in Lemberg, Galicia, Austrian Empire (now Lviv, Ukraine), Redl came from a relatively poor family, his father being a railway clerk. His ability enabled Redl to rise quickly within the officer ranks of the Austro-Hungarian Army, in spite of lacking the advantages of wealth or family connections. Redl attended the War School in Vienna, which normally accepted only 50 entrants a year from about a thousand applicants. Acquiring a specialist interest in Russian military issues, Redl joined the Intelligence Bureau of the Austro-Hungarian General Staff and in 1900 was assigned to the Russian Section.

Counter-intelligence work.

By 1907 Redl had become head of the counter-intelligence branch of the Intelligence Bureau. Promoted to the rank of colonel, Redl greatly improved the methods used by the Austro-Hungarian counter-espionage service, introducing such technological innovations as the use of cameras and primitive recording devices, while creating a database of fingerprint records of persons of interest. However, at the same time, Redl himself became a spy for Russia and his subsequent exposure was largely due to the improvements he had developed himself.

Treason.

Redl's motives for treason are still unclear. He may have been caught in a compromising position by Russian agents, because he was homosexual and being exposed as such would have been fatal to his career prospects. Actually, Russian military intelligence, based in Warsaw at the time, under the command of Colonel Nikolai Batyushin, had discovered Redl's homosexuality as early as 1901, information that was used to blackmail him into revealing classified information. In 1902, he reportedly passed a copy of Austro-Hungarian war plans to the Russians. General von Gieslingen, head of Austro-Hungarian military intelligence, delegated Redl himself to investigate the source of this leak. In consultation with his Russian contacts, Redl identified several low-level agents as Russian spies, thereby protecting himself and enhancing his reputation for efficiency.  Redl was paid well by the Imperial Russian government for his services, and acquired a lifestyle far beyond what his official salary could cover. It would appear that there was also a strong element of vanity involved, as well as a taste for danger. A Russian report of 1907 describes Redl as "more sly and false than intelligent and talented", a cynic "who enjoys dissipation."  From 1903 to 1913, Redl was Russia's leading spy. Before World War I, he provided the Russians with information of Plan III, the entire Austrian invasion plan for Serbia. The Russians then informed the Serbian military command about Plan III. As a result, when the Austro-Hungarian Army invaded Serbia, the Serbians were well prepared. Redl not only provided many of Austria's military secrets and plans, but he also supplied incorrect estimates of Russian military strength to his own military authorities. Redl has been called one of history's greatest traitors because purportedly his actions were responsible for the deaths of half a million of his countrymen.  Redl is thought to have sold to Russia one of Austria's principal attack plans, along with its order of battle, its mobilization plans (at a time when mobilization was viewed as one of the critical keys to victory) and detailed plans of Austrian fortifications that were soon overrun by Russia. He is known beyond question to have sent Austrian agents into Russia and then to have sold them out. He also had Austrian agents within the Russian Imperial Staff, but betrayed them too, to be hanged or to commit suicide. He is also believed to have informed on various Russian officers who contacted Austro-Hungarian intelligence.

Exposure.

In 1912, Redl became chief of staff of the VIII Corps under his old commander, Arthur Giesl von Gieslingen. When he left the counter-intelligence service, Redl was succeeded by Major Maximilian Ronge, a man trained by Redl himself. Ronge instigated the practice of checking suspicious mail. One suspect envelope – a poste restante letter to be returned unclaimed – was found to contain a large sum of money as well as references to known espionage cover addresses.  On 9 May 1913, a duplicate letter with money was posted to the same cover name, "Nikon Nizetas". Police detectives were assigned to monitor the post office and follow whoever claimed it. When the letter was finally claimed on 25 May, police pursued, but lost contact when the person who had picked up the letter left in a taxi. But while the detectives stood wondering what to do, the taxi that the suspect had taken returned.  The police detectives took the taxi and asked to be driven to the address that the previous customer had been taken to. The taxi driver took them to the hotel Klomser and during the ride there, they found a pen-knife sheath in the taxi. Arriving at the hotel, they told the management to ask the guests if any of them had lost the sheath and then waited in the lobby. When a guest arrived to claim it, the detectives recognized their former boss, Colonel Alfred Redl.  Redl was subsequently confronted in his apartment by a party of military officers. In the course of a brief interrogation he admitted to having sold military intelligence to a foreign power. Field Marshall Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Austro-Hungarian Army's Chief of Staff, ordered that Colonel Redl was to be left alone with a loaded revolver. Redl shot himself in the early morning of 25 May 1913.

Legacy.

Redl's death was regretted both by the Emperor Franz Josef, who would have preferred that the colonel avoided dying in mortal sin, and by Austrian Intelligence, which would have preferred to interrogate him on the full extent of his disclosures to the Russians.  In the political post-mortem one Hungarian newspaper noted that "the Redl affair cannot be seen as a private matter. Redl is not an individual but a system. Whilst soldiers elsewhere are taught to love their homelands, lack of patriotism is held to be the greatest military virtue in this unfortunate monarchy. With us military education culminates in all national feeling being driven out of our soldiers... In the Redl affair this spirit has had its revenge. The Austrian and the Hungarian soldiers possess no fatherland; they only have a war lord."

Alfred Redl (14 March 1864 – 25 May 1913) was an Austrian military officer who rose to head the "Evidenzbureau", the counter-intelligence wing of the General Staff of the Austro-Hungarian Army. Redl was one of the leading figures of pre-World War I espionage; his term in office was marked by radical innovations and the use of advanced technology to ensnare foreign spies.


History.

Axel Heiberg Island has been inhabited in the past by Inuit people, but was uninhabited by the time it was named by Otto Sverdrup, who explored it in 1900–01. He named it after Axel Heiberg, financial director of the Norwegian Ringnes brewery which sponsored the expedition. Other explorers visited the island during the early 20th century, during which time it was claimed by Norway until 1930. It is now part of Nunavut Territory, Canada. It wasn't until the late 1940s that the island was aerially photographed by the United States Army Air Forces' Operation Polaris. In 1955 two geologists of the Geological Survey of Canada, N.J. McMillan and Souther traversed the interior as part of Operation Franklin. McMillan's observations of Bunde Glacier, in northwest Axel Heiberg Island, are the earliest glaciological observations on the ground to have found their way into a scientific publication.  In 1959, scientists from McGill University explored Expedition Fiord (previously Sør Fjord or South Fiord) in central Axel Heiberg Island. This resulted in the establishment of the McGill Arctic Research Station (), constructed inland from Expedition Fjord in 1960. It consists of a small research hut, a cookhouse and 2 temporary structures that can comfortably accommodate 8–12 persons. The station was initially heavily utilized during the early 1960s, during which a population of 20 was present. The McGill Arctic Research Station is active from March to August with research currently focused on polar geomorphology, geology, glaciology, permafrost, climate change, and polar microbiology. Over the last 10–15 years, it has served as a significant Mars analogue for astrobiology investigations studying life and habitability of polar cryoenvironments and field-testing planetary exploration instrumentation platforms.  In the summer of 1972, a British Army Mountaineering Association expedition resulted in the naming of Scaife Glacier.  During the summer of 1986, a Canadian expedition headed by Dr. James Basinger set out to investigate a very unusual fossil forest on Axel Heiberg. The findings of these and subsequent expeditions have since been popularly reported in Canada. Over 40 million years ago during the Eocene epoch, a forest of tall trees flourished on Axel Heiberg Island. The trees reached up to in height; some may have grown for 500 to 1,000 years. At the time, the polar climate was warm, but the winters were still continuously dark for three months. As the trees fell, the fine sediment in which the forest grew protected the plants. Instead of turning into petrified "stone" fossils, they were ultimately mummified by the cold, dry Arctic climate, and only recently exposed by erosion. As late as 1999, the preservation of this unique site was a concern, as the fossil wood was easily damaged and eroded once exposed. There were concerns that wood was being taken by Arctic cruise ship tourists, and that the site was being disturbed by Canadian military helicopters from a nearby base, and even by scientists themselves in their studies. There were calls for more protection for the area. It currently has no official status, in part because land claims had to be settled. But now Nunavut is looking at how best to protect the fossil forest, possibly by setting up a territorial park to be called Napaaqtulik, "where there are trees".  Interesting animal fossils have been discovered on the island, including a remarkably preserved specimen of an ancient "Aurorachelys" turtle and, identified in 2016, the humerus of a "Tingmiatornis" bird.

Glaciation.

White Glacier is a valley glacier occupying in the Expedition Fiord area of Axel Heiberg Island (). It extends in elevation from above sea level, a range which, as noted by Dyurgerov (2002), is exceeded only by Devon Ice Cap in the world list of glaciers with measured mass balance. Ice thickness reaches or exceeds. Its maximum extension in recent history, marking the advance of the glacier in response to the cooling of the Little Ice Age, was reached not earlier than the late 18th century, and more probably at the beginning of the 20th century. There is evidence that the retreat of the terminus, previously at about per year, is decelerating (Cogley et al. 1996a; Cogley and Adams 2000). White Glacier has been the subject of many papers in the glaciological literature since 1960, e.g. Müller (1962) was the source of a now-classical diagram elaborating and illustrating the concept of "glacier facies".

Population.

The island is uninhabited except for the seasonal McGill Arctic Research Station operated by McGill University.

Lost Hammer Spring.

The Lost Hammer Spring, located in the central west region of the island () is the coldest and saltiest of all Arctic springs described to date. It is characterized by a perennial hypersaline (24%) discharge at subzero temperatures (~) flowing to the surface through a hollow, high cone-shaped salt tufa structure. Continuous gas emissions from the spring indicate an underlying thermogenic methane source. On the basis of these properties, this spring is considered a significant astrobiology analogue site for possible habitats currently present on Mars and the cold moons Europa and Enceladus.

Axel Heiberg Island (Inuktitut: "ᐅᒥ<unk>ᒪᑦ ᓄ<unk>ᑦ," "Umingmat Nunaat") is an island in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, Nunavut, Canada. Located in the Arctic Ocean, it is the 32nd largest island in the world and Canada's seventh largest island. According to Statistics Canada, it has an area of. It is named after Axel Heiberg.


Name.

Originally, Ivry-sur-Seine was called simply Ivry. The name Ivry comes from Medieval Latin "Ivriacum" or "Ibriacum", perhaps meaning "estate of Eburius (the Latinized form of the Gallic patronym Eburos)", a Gallo-Roman landowner.  In 1897, the name of the commune officially became Ivry-sur-Seine (meaning "Ivry upon Seine"), in order to distinguish it from other communes of France also called Ivry.

History.

On 1 January 1860, the city of Paris was enlarged by annexing neighbouring communes. On that occasion, about a third of the commune of Ivry-sur-Seine was annexed to Paris, and now forms the Chinatown area of the 13th arrondissement of Paris.  Ivry-sur-Seine is perhaps most famous as the place of execution of Jean Bastien-Thiry in March 1963. Richard Ellman also notes that James Joyce's daughter, Lucia, received psychiatric treatment in the commune's hospital in 1936 and was visited by both Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

Economy.

Fnac has its head office in the commune. The head office moved there in 2008. E.Leclerc's head office is in the commune.

Transport.

Ivry-sur-Seine is served by two railway stations on the Paris Métro Line 7: Pierre et Marie Curie and Mairie d'Ivry.  The east of the commune is served by Ivry-sur-Seine station on Paris RER line C with stops at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the city centre.  Orly Airport is located to the south of Ivry-sur-Seine.

Education.

Senior high schools:  Colleges and universities:

Demographics.

Immigration.

As of circa 1998 Ivry and Vitry-sur-Seine had a combined Asian population of 3,600. That year about 250 Asians from those communes worked in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, and the overall demographics of Ivry and Vitry Asians were similar to those in the 13th arrondissement.

Ivry-sur-Seine () is a commune in the Val-de-Marne department in the southeastern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris.


Description.

"Forsythia" are deciduous shrubs typically growing to a height of and, rarely, up to with rough grey-brown bark. The leaves are borne oppositely and are usually simple, though sometimes trifoliate with a basal pair of small leaflets; they range between in length and, rarely, up to, with a margin that is serrated or entire (smooth).  The flowers are produced in the early spring before the leaves, bright yellow with a deeply four-lobed flower, the petals joined only at the base. These become pendent in rainy weather thus shielding the reproductive parts. The fruit is a dry capsule, containing several winged seeds.  It is widely stated that forsythia flowers are able to produce lactose (the milk sugar). Lactose is very rarely established in other natural sources except milk. However, the presence of lactose could not be confirmed.  The genus is named after William Forsyth (1737–1804), a Scottish botanist who was royal head gardener and a founding member of the Royal Horticultural Society.

Species.

The following species of Forsythia have been documented:  A genetic study does not fully match the traditionally accepted species listed above, and groups the species in four clades: (1) "F. suspensa"; (2) "F. europaea—F. giraldiana"; (3) "F. ovata—F. japonica—F. viridissima"; and (4) "F. koreana—F. mandschurica—F. saxatilis". Of the additional species, "F. koreana" is usually cited as a variety of "F. viridissima", and "F. saxatilis" as a variety of "F. japonica"; the genetic evidence suggests they may be better treated as distinct species.  Forsythias are used as food plants by the larvae of some Lepidoptera species including the brown-tail and Gothic.

Garden history.

Two species of forsythia are at the heart of the selected forms, for both species are variable, and garden hybrids: "Forsythia suspensa" and "F. viridissima". "These two species are, as it were, the founder-members of the forsythia family" writes Alice Coats; they were the earliest species brought into Western gardens from the Far East and they have each played a role in the modern garden shrubs.  "Forsythia suspensa", the first to be noticed by a Westerner, was seen in a Japanese garden by the botanist-surgeon Carl Peter Thunberg, who included it (as a lilac) in his "Flora Japonica" 1784. Thunberg's professional connections lay with the Dutch East India Company, and "F. suspensa" reached Holland first, by 1833. In England, when it was being offered by Veitch Nurseries in Exeter at mid-century, it was still considered a rarity. Not all the varieties of "suspensa" are splaying and drooping, best seen hanging over a retaining wall; an erect form found by Fortune near Peking in 1861 was for a time classed as a species—"F. fortunei".  "Forsythia viridissma", meanwhile, had overtaken it in European gardens. The Scottish plant-hunter Robert Fortune "discovered" it—in a mandarin's garden of the coastal city of Chusan (Zhoushan)—before he ever saw it growing wild in the mountains in Zhejiang's province, Zhejiang.  "Forsythia" × "intermedia", as its name suggests, is a hybrid of "F. suspensa" and "F. viridissima", introduced in continental Europe about 1880. Repeated crosses of the same two parents have made reiterations of "F." × "intermedia" quite variable. A bud sport of a particularly showy ("spectabilis") form is widely marketed as "F." × "intermedia" 'Lynwood Variety'. This cultivar has gained the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit, as have "F." × "intermedia" 'Courtalyn' and "F." 'Courtasol'.  About the time of the First World War further species were discovered by plant hunters in China: "F. giraldian" (found in Gansu, 1910) and "F. ovata" (collected from seed in Korea by E.H. "Chinese" Wilson) have been particularly useful as seed parents in 20th-century American crosses.

Cultivation and uses.

The hybrids "Forsythia × intermedia" ("F. suspensa" × "F. viridissima") and "Forsythia" × "×variabilis" ("F. ovata" × "F. suspensa") have been produced in cultivation. "Forsythia intermedia" is a hybrid between "F. suspensa" and "F. viridissima". Many cultivars have been selected from this cross including dwarf and compact forms.  Forsythias are popular early spring flowering shrubs in gardens and parks, especially during Eastertide; Forsythias are nicknamed the "Easter Tree", the symbol of the coming spring.. Two are commonly cultivated for ornament, "Forsythia × intermedia" and "Forsythia suspensa". They are both spring flowering shrubs, with yellow flowers. They are grown and prized for being tough, reliable garden plants. "Forsythia × intermedia" is the more commonly grown, is smaller, has an upright habit, and produces strongly coloured flowers. "Forsythia suspensa" is a large to very large shrub, can be grown as a weeping shrub on banks, and has paler flowers. Many named garden cultivars can also be found. Forsythia is frequently kept indoors in the early spring.  Commercial propagation is usually by cuttings, taken from green wood after flowering in late spring to early summer; alternatively, cuttings may be taken between November and February. Low hanging boughs often take root, and can be removed for transplanting. A common practice (known as layering) is to place a weight over a branch to keep it on the ground and, after it has rooted, to dig up the roots and cut the rooted part from the main branch; this can then be planted.  "Forsythia suspensa" is considered one of the 50 fundamental herbs in Chinese herbology. Forsythia sticks are used to bow a Korean string instrument called "ajaeng".

In popular culture.

Forsythia is used as a conspiracy theorist's supposed "cure", causing pharmacies to be over-run in the 2011 film "Contagion".

Forsythia is a genus of flowering plants in the olive family Oleaceae. There are about 11 species, mostly native to eastern Asia, but one native to southeastern Europe. Forsythia is also one of the plant's common names, along with Easter tree; the genus is named after William Forsyth.


Description.

They are distinctive in appearance, with dark, often black stipes and rachises, and bright green, often delicately cut leaf tissue. The sori are borne submarginally, and are covered by reflexed flaps of leaf tissue which resemble indusia. Dimorphism between sterile and fertile fronds is generally subtle.  They generally prefer humus-rich, moist, well-drained sites, ranging from bottomland soils to vertical rock walls. Many species are especially known for growing on rock walls around waterfalls and water seepage areas.  The highest species diversity is in the Andes. Fairly high diversity also occurs in eastern Asia, with nearly 40 species in China.  Species native to North America include "A. pedatum" (five-fingered fern) and the closely related "A. aleuticum", which are distinctive in having a bifurcating frond that radiates pinnae on one side only. The cosmopolitan "A. capillus-veneris" (Venus-hair fern) has a native distribution that extends into the eastern continent. "A. jordanii" (California Maidenhair) is native to the west coast.  There is a rich "Adiantum" flora in New Zealand with 3 endemic species ("A. cunninghamii", "A. viridescens" and "A. fulvum") in a total of 10 recorded species. Many of these are common especially in the west and south of the islands.

Cladistics.

It is now known that this genus is paraphyletic, and that the vittarioid ferns are derived from this larger paraphyletic genus. However, if "Adiantum raddianum", and possibly a few other species, are removed, the remaining plants (genus type: "Adiantum capillus-veneris") are then monophyletic.

Cultivation.

Many species are grown in the horticultural trade, including all three of the species mentioned, as well as a number of tropical species, including "A. raddianum" and "A. peruvianum". Both "A. pedatum" and "A. aleuticum" are hardy to zone 3, and are by far the most cold-hardy members of the genus. "A. venustum" is also cold-hardy to zone 5. "A. capillus-veneris" is hardy to zone 7.

Adiantum, the maidenhair fern, is a genus of about 250 species of ferns in the Vittarioideae subfamily of the family Pteridaceae, though some researchers place it in its own family, "Adiantaceae". The genus name comes from Greek, meaning "unwetted", referring to the fronds' ability to shed water without becoming wet.


Jules Rimet Trophy.

The Jules Rimet Trophy was the original prize for winning the FIFA World Cup. Originally called "Victory", but generally known simply as the "World Cup" or "Coupe du Monde", it was renamed in 1946 to honour the FIFA President Jules Rimet who in 1929 passed a vote to initiate the competition. It was designed by French sculptor Abel Lafleur and made of gold-plated sterling silver on a lapis lazuli base. In 1954 this base was replaced with a taller version to accommodate more winner's details. It stood 35 centimetres (14 in) high and weighed 3.8 kilograms (8.4 lb). It comprised a decagonal cup, supported by a winged figure representing Nike, the ancient Greek goddess of victory. The Jules Rimet Trophy was taken to Uruguay for the first FIFA World Cup aboard the "Conte Verde", which set sail from Villefranche-sur-Mer, just southeast of Nice, on 21 June 1930. This was the same ship that carried Jules Rimet and the footballers representing France, Romania, and Belgium who were participating in the tournament that year. The first team to be awarded the trophy was Uruguay, the winners of the 1930 World Cup.  During World War II, the trophy was held by 1938 champion Italy. Ottorino Barassi, the Italian vice-president of FIFA and president of FIGC, secretly transported the trophy from a bank in Rome and hid it in a shoe-box under his bed to prevent the Nazis from taking it. The 1958 FIFA World Cup in Sweden marked the beginning of a tradition regarding the trophy. As Brazilian captain Hilderaldo Bellini heard photographers' requests for a better view of the Jules Rimet Trophy, he lifted it up in the air. Every Cup-winning captain ever since has repeated the gesture. On 20 March 1966, four months before the 1966 FIFA World Cup in England, the trophy was stolen during a public exhibition at Westminster Central Hall. It was found just seven days later wrapped in newspaper at the bottom of a suburban garden hedge on Beulah Hill, Upper Norwood, South London, by a black and white mongrel dog named Pickles.  As a security measure, The Football Association secretly manufactured a replica of the trophy for use in exhibitions rather than the original. This replica was used on subsequent occasions up until 1970 when the original trophy had to be handed back to FIFA for the next competition. Since FIFA had explicitly denied the FA permission to create a replica, the replica also had to disappear from public view and was for many years kept under its creator's bed. This replica was eventually sold at an auction in 1997 for £254,500, when it was purchased by FIFA. The high auction price, ten times the reserve price of £20,000–£30,000, was led by speculation that the auctioned trophy was not the replica trophy but the original itself. Subsequent testing by FIFA, however, confirmed the auctioned trophy was indeed a replica and FIFA soon afterwards arranged for the replica to be lent for display at the English National Football Museum, which was then based in Preston but is now in Manchester.  The Brazilian team won the tournament for the third time in 1970, allowing them to keep the real trophy in perpetuity, as had been stipulated by Jules Rimet in 1930. It was put on display at the Brazilian Football Confederation headquarters in Rio de Janeiro in a cabinet with a front of bullet-proof glass.  On 19 December 1983, the wooden rear of the cabinet was opened by force with a crowbar and the cup was stolen again. Four men were tried and convicted in absentia for the crime. The trophy has never been recovered, and it is widely believed to have been melted down and sold. Only one piece of the Jules Rimet Trophy has been found, the original base which FIFA had kept in a basement of the federation's Zürich headquarters prior to 2015.  The Confederation commissioned a replica of their own, made by Eastman Kodak, using of gold. This replica was presented to Brazilian military president João Figueiredo in 1984. The trophy was the subject of a 2014 documentary "Mysteries of the Rimet Trophy" shown as part of ESPN's series during the 2014 World Cup.

New trophy.

A replacement trophy was commissioned by FIFA for the 1974 World Cup. Fifty-three submissions were received from sculptors in seven countries. Italian artist Silvio Gazzaniga was awarded the commission. The trophy stands tall and is made of of 18 carat (75%) gold, worth approximately US$161,000 in 2018, with a base in diameter containing two layers of malachite. It has been asserted by Sir Martyn Poliakoff of "Periodic Videos" that the trophy is hollow; if, as is claimed, it were solid, the trophy would weigh and would be too heavy to lift. Produced by "Bertoni, Milano" in Paderno Dugnano, it weighs in total and depicts two human figures holding up the Earth. Gazzaniga described the trophy thus, "The lines spring out from the base, rising in spirals, stretching out to receive the world. From the remarkable dynamic tensions of the compact body of the sculpture rise the figures of two athletes at the stirring moment of victory". Miguel Delaney, football writer for "The Independent", wrote, "Those two arms on the trophy "stretching out to receive the world... at the stirring moment of victory" – in the words of designer Silvio Gazzinaga – are so representative in more ways than one. This is what everyone in the game is ultimately reaching for: immortality.”  The trophy has the engraving "FIFA World Cup" on its base. After the 1994 FIFA World Cup a plate was added to the bottom side of the trophy on which the names of winning countries are engraved, names therefore not visible when the trophy is standing upright. The inscriptions state the year in figures and the name of the winning nation in its national language; for example, "1974 Deutschland" or "1994 Brasil". In 2010, however, the name of the winning nation was engraved as "2010 Spain", in English, not in Spanish. As of 2018, twelve winners have been engraved on the base. The plate is replaced each World Cup cycle and the names of the trophy winners are rearranged into a spiral to accommodate future winners, with Spain on later occasions written in Spanish ("España"). FIFA's regulations now state that the trophy, unlike its predecessor, cannot be won outright: the winners of the tournament receive a bronze replica which is gold-plated rather than solid gold. Germany became the first nation to win the new trophy for the third time when they won the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

Winners.

Jules Rimet Trophy  FIFA World Cup Trophy

The World Cup is a gold trophy that is awarded to the winners of the FIFA World Cup association football tournament. Since the advent of the World Cup in 1930, two trophies have been used: the Jules Rimet Trophy from 1930 to 1970, and the FIFA World Cup Trophy from 1974 to the present day.


History.

Originally, the château belonged to the See of Grenoble. In 1084, Saint Hugh gave it to hermit Saint Bruno and his followers who founded the Carthusian Order.  The recipe of the alcoholic beverage Chartreuse is said to have been given to the monks of Grande Chartreuse in 1605 by the French Marshal François Annibal d'Estrées. For over a century, the monks worked on perfecting the 130-ingredient recipe. In 1764, the monks expanded their distillery for the first time to meet the demand of their popular "Elixir Végétal de la Grande Chartreuse". The distillery has then been moved several times in more remote areas because it represents a major explosion hazard for the surrounding habitations.  The château went through many severe casualties, reconstructions and renovations. The building standing today (2019) was erected in 1688. In 1789, following the French Revolution, the monks were expelled from the monastery, and waited until 1838 to be reauthorized on the premises.  Following the establishment of the Association Law of 1901 and its interpretation that effectively banned religious associations en masse, many notable religious institutions across France, including Grand Chartreuse, were closed by the French government. While some monks found refuge in Italy until 1929, others settled in the Tarragona region of Spain and relaunched a liqueur-producing activity. Private companies bought back the Chartreuse brand and tried to recreate the monk's beverage, to no avail. The Grande Chartreuse was sold in 1927 to a group of local entrepreneurs who invited the monks back in their monastery.  In 1940, the Grande Chartreuse was reopened under the Pétain regime. At the end of World War II, the Grand Chartreuse was used as a hospital by the Allied Forces.

Description.

Visitors are not permitted at Grand Chartreuse, and motor vehicles are prohibited on the surrounding roads.  A museum of the Carthusian order and the lives of its monks and nuns is located about two kilometers away. The order is supported by the sales of Chartreuse liqueur which has been popular in France and later around the world since the early 18th century. In 2015, the order sold 1.5 million bottles of Chartreuse (50 euros a bottle), and all the proceedings went into financing the order and its charity projects.

In literature.

English poet Matthew Arnold wrote one of his finest poems, "Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse", while briefly staying at the monastery around 1850. The quiet, serenity, and monastic calm became, for him, the susurrations of a dying world which contrasted with what he saw as the violent emerging age of machinery. Grand Chartreuse was also described by William Wordsworth's in his 1792 "Descriptive Sketches" (lines 53-73), and in the 1850 revision of "The Prelude, Book VI" (lines 416-18), (Wordsworth visited the monastery in 1790, but he describes the 1792 expulsion of the monks by French forces); and John Ruskin's "Praeterita".

Grande Chartreuse () is the head monastery of the Carthusian religious order. It is located in the Chartreuse Mountains, north of the city of Grenoble, in the commune of Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse (Isère), France.


Early years.

Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. was born on December 17, 1923, in Akron, Ohio, to a Slovak father and Slovak mother from Sid in Serbia, Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Sr. and Anna Buzekova Pelikan. His father was pastor of Trinity Slovak Lutheran Church in Chicago, Illinois, and his paternal grandfather a bishop of the Synod of Evangelical Lutheran Churches, then known as the Slovak Lutheran Church in America.  According to family members, Pelikan's mother taught him how to use a typewriter when he was three years old, as he could not yet hold a pen properly but wanted to write. Pelikan's facility with languages may be traced to his multilingual childhood and early training. That facility was to serve him well in the career he ultimately chose (after contemplating becoming a concert pianist) as an historian of Christian doctrine. He did not confine his studies to Roman Catholic and Protestant theological history, but also embraced that of the Christian East.  In 1946 when he was 22, he earned both a seminary degree from Concordia Seminary in Saint Louis, Missouri, and a PhD at the University of Chicago.

Writings and interviews.

Pelikan wrote more than 30 books, including the five-volume "The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine" (1971–1989). Some of his later works attained crossover appeal, reaching beyond the scholarly sphere into the general reading public (notably, "Mary Through the Centuries", "Jesus Through the Centuries" and "Whose Bible Is It?").  His 1983 Jefferson Lecture, "The Vindication of Tradition" included an often quoted one liner, which he elaborated in a 1989 interview in "U.S. News & World Report". He said:

Yale University professor.

He joined Yale University in 1962 as the Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History and in 1972 was named Sterling Professor of History, a position he held until achieving emeritus status in 1996. He served as acting dean and then dean of the Graduate School from 1973 to 1978 and was the William Clyde DeVane Lecturer 1984–1986 and again in the fall of 1995. Awards include the Graduate School's 1979 Wilbur Cross Medal and the Medieval Academy of America's 1985 Haskins Medal.  While at Yale, Pelikan won a contest sponsored by "Field & Stream" magazine for Ed Zern's column "Exit Laughing" to translate the motto of the Madison Avenue Rod, Gun, Bloody Mary & Labrador Retriever Benevolent Association ("Keep your powder, your trout flies and your martinis dry") into Latin. Pelikan's winning entry mentioned the martini first, but Pelikan explained that it seemed no less than fitting to have the apéritif come first. His winning entry:  <poem>Semper siccandae sunt: potio Pulvis, et pelliculatio.</poem>  Pelikan was appointed to numerous leadership positions in American intellectual life. He was the president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was editor of the religion section of "Encyclopædia Britannica", and in 1980 he founded the Council of Scholars at the Library of Congress.  In 1983 the National Endowment for the Humanities selected him to deliver the 12th annual Jefferson Lecture, the highest honor conferred by the federal government for outstanding achievement in the humanities. Pelikan's lecture became the basis for his book "The Vindication of Tradition".  Pelikan gave the 1992–1993 Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen, which were published as the book "Christianity and Classical Culture".  President Bill Clinton appointed Pelikan to serve on the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities. Pelikan received honorary degrees from 42 universities around the world. At the age of 80, he was appointed scholarly director for the "Institutions of Democracy Project" at the Annenberg Foundation.  In 2004, having received the John W. Kluge Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Human Sciences, an honor he shared with the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, Pelikan donated his award ($500,000) to Saint Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, of which he was a trustee. At the ceremony, he quoted a leitmotif passage from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe that had moved him all his life: ""Was du ererbt von deinen Vaetern hast, Erwirb es um es zu besitzen"" ("Take what you have inherited from your fathers and work to make it your own.").

Lutheran pastor to Orthodox layman.

For most of his life Pelikan was a Lutheran and was an ordained pastor in that tradition. In 1998, however, he and his wife Sylvia were received into the Orthodox Church in America at the Chapel of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary in Crestwood, New York. According to family members (with some mild dislike of the conversion), his conversion followed his meeting Pope John Paul II. Members of Pelikan's family remember him saying that he had not as much converted to Orthodoxy as "returned to it, peeling back the layers of my own belief to reveal the Orthodoxy that was always there." Delighted with this turn of phrase, he used it (or close variants) several times among family and friends, including during a visit to St. Vladimir's for Divine Liturgy, the "last before his death."  Nevertheless, Pelikan was still ecumenical in many ways. Not long before his own death, he praised Pope John Paul II in an article in "The New York Times" when the pope died in 2005:  It will be a celebration of the legacy of Pope John Paul II and an answer to his prayers (and to those of all Christians, beginning with their Lord himself) if the Eastern and Western churches can produce the necessary mixture of charity and sincere effort to continue to work toward the time when they all may be one.

Death.

Pelikan died on May 13, 2006, at his home in Hamden, Connecticut, at the age of 82, after a seventeen-month battle with lung cancer. He was interred at Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 17, 2006. Pelikan was honored by a memorial service in Yale's Battell Chapel on October 10, 2006, with speeches by distinguished scholars and musical performances by cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Yale Russian Chorus.

Jaroslav Jan Pelikan Jr. (December 17, 1923 – May 13, 2006) was an American scholar of the history of Christianity, Christian theology, and medieval intellectual history at Yale University.


Components.

The SILC protocol can be divided in three main parts: SILC Key Exchange (SKE) protocol, SILC Authentication protocol and SILC Packet protocol. SILC protocol additionally defines SILC Commands that are used to manage the SILC session. SILC provides channels (groups), nicknames, private messages, and other common features. However, SILC nicknames, in contrast to many other protocols ("e.g." IRC), are not unique; a user is able to use any nickname, even if one is already in use. The real identification in the protocol is performed by unique Client ID. The SILC protocol uses this to overcome nickname collision, a problem present in many other protocols. All messages sent in a SILC network are binary, allowing them to contain any type of data, including text, video, audio, and other multimedia data. The SKE protocol is used to establish session key and other security parameters for protecting the SILC Packet protocol. The SKE itself is based on the Diffie–Hellman key exchange algorithm (a form of asymmetric cryptography) and the exchange is protected with digital signatures. The SILC Authentication protocol is performed after successful SKE protocol execution to authenticate a client and/or a server. The authentication may be based on passphrase or on digital signatures, and if successful gives access to the relevant SILC network. The SILC Packet protocol is intended to be a secure binary packet protocol, assuring that the content of each packet (consisting of a packet header and packet payload) is secured and authenticated. The packets are secured using algorithms based on symmetric cryptography and authenticated by using Message Authentication Code algorithm, HMAC.  SILC channels (groups) are protected by using symmetric channel keys. It is optionally possible to digitally sign all channel messages. It is also possible to protect messages with a privately generated channel key that has been previously agreed upon by channel members. Private messages between users in a SILC network are protected with session keys. It is, however, possible to execute SKE protocol between two users and use the generated key to protect private messages. Private messages may be optionally digitally signed. When messages are secured with key material generated with the SKE protocol or previously agreed upon key material (for example, passphrases) SILC provides security even when the SILC server may be compromised.

History.

SILC was designed by Pekka Riikonen between 1996 and 1999 and first released in public in summer 2000. A client and a server were written. Protocol specifications were proposed, but ultimately request for publication was denied in June 2004 by IESG and no RFC has been published to date.  At present time, there are several clients, the most advanced being the official SILC client and an irssi plugin. SILC protocol is also integrated to the popular Pidgin instant messaging client. Other GUI clients are Silky and Colloquy. The Silky client was put on hold and abandoned on the 18th of July 2007, due to inactivity for several years. The latest news on the Silky website was that the client was to be completely rewritten.  As of 2008, three SILC protocol implementations have been written. Most SILC clients use libsilc, part of the SILC Toolkit. The SILC Toolkit is dual-licensed and distributed under both the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the revised BSD license.

Security.

As described in the SILC FAQ, chats are secured through the generation of symmetric encryption keys. These keys have to be generated somewhere, and this occurs on the server. This means that chats might be compromised, if the server itself is compromised. This is just a version of the man-in-the-middle attack. The solution offered is that chat members generate their own public-private keypair for asymmetric encryption. The private key is shared only by the chat members, and this is done out of band. The public key is used to encrypt messages into the channel. This approach is still open to compromise, if one of the members of the chat should have their private key compromised, or if they should share the key with another, without agreement of the group.

Networks.

SILC uses a similar pattern to IRC, in that there is no global "SILC network" but many small independent networks consisting of one or several servers each, although it is claimed that SILC can scale better with many servers in a single network.  The "original" network is called SILCNet, at the silc.silcnet.org round-robin. However, as of May 2014, it has only one active (though unstable) server out of four.  Most SILC networks have shut down due to declining popularity of SILC.

SILC (Secure Internet Live Conferencing protocol) is a protocol that provides secure synchronous conferencing services (very much like IRC) over the Internet.


Description.

The R-7 was long, in diameter and weighed ; it had two stages, powered by rocket engines using liquid oxygen (LOX) and kerosene and capable of delivering its payload up to, with an accuracy (CEP) of around. A single thermonuclear warhead was carried with a nominal yield of 3 megatons of TNT. The initial launch was boosted by four strap-on liquid rocket boosters making up the first stage, with a central'sustainer' engine powering through both the first and the second stage. Each strap-on booster included two vernier thrusters and the core stage included four. The guidance system was inertial with radio control of the vernier thrusters.

Development.

Design work began in 1953 at OKB-1 in Kaliningrad in Moscow Oblast (presently Korolyov, Moscow Oblast) and other divisions with the requirement for a two-stage missile of with a range of and the maximum speed of 20 mach carrying a warhead. Following first ground tests in late 1953 the initial design was heavily reworked and the final design was not approved until May 1954 and Korolev reportedly reviewed more than 100 design proposals. In 1954, the draft project was completed. For the first time the development of the project was created a separate volume dedicated to the testing of missile technology. This volume was developed under the leadership of Arcady Ilyich Ostashev. Instead of using jet vanes for control, which increased resistance generated at the engine nozzle exhaust outlet, the R-7 used special control engines. These same engines served as the last stage's vernier thrusters.  Because of clustered design, each booster had its own propellant tanks. The design team had to develop a system to regulate the propellant component consumption ratio and to synchronize the consumption between the boosters.  Starting from the R-1, which was a copy of the German V-2, a free-standing missile was launched from a horizontal pad. It turned out that assembling a cluster of a central core and four boosters on the pad is almost impossible without it falling apart. Also, a wind gust could knock the missile off of the pad. The solution was to eliminate the pad and to suspend the entire rocket in the trusses that bear both vertical weight load as well as horizontal wind forces. The launch system simulated flight conditions with strap-on boosters pushing the central core forward.  The R-7 rocket was another Soviet attempt to build a successful rocket to get to space. The rocket had some key features to it that made it unique. One of the main features to the rocket were the many different engines that were utilized for propulsion. Of the four strap on propulsion engines, they were all powered by the RD-107 engine. Vernier engines were utilized for steering, and the R-7 contained four of them. Powering the vernier capabilities for the rocket was the RD-108 engine.  The new missile's GRAU index was 8K71. The first flight-ready vehicle was delivered to the Baikonur Cosmodrome on 1 May 1957, and flown on 15 May. A fire broke out in the Blok D strap-on almost immediately at liftoff. It broke away from the booster at T+88 seconds, which crashed 400 km (248 miles) downrange. The next attempt on 11 June (the same day the United States conducted its first test launch of an ICBM), an electrical short caused the missile to start rolling uncontrollably and disintegrate 33 seconds after liftoff. The first successful long flight, of, was made on 21 August 1957. The dummy warhead impacted in the Pacific Ocean and five days later, TASS announced that the Soviet Union had "successfully tested a multi-stage intercontinental ballistic missile". A modified version of the missile (8K71PS) placed Sputnik 1 in orbit from Baikonur on 4 October 1957 and Sputnik 2 on 3 November 1957.  The next ICBM test took place on 30 January 1958, but the strap-ons failed to separate cleanly and damaged plumbing in the core stage, which lost thrust and impacted far off target. These early flights revealed assorted design flaws in the R-7 which necessitated multiple modifications to the missile. Testing continued into December 1959, and the last original 8K71 flew on 27 February 1961. The additional development resulted in the 8K74 (also known as R-7A), which was lighter, had better navigation systems, more powerful engines, extended its range to 12,000 km by carrying more fuel, and increased payload to. Aside from the initial Sputnik launches, the 8K71 formed the basis of the 8K72 booster used for the first generation Luna probes. Six out of nine Luna probes launched on the 8K72 failed. Combined with the failed Sputnik launch on 27 April 1958, this brought the booster's total space launch record to 6 successes in 13 attempts. The improved 8K74 formed the basis for the later Vostok and Molniya boosters, greatly increasing reliability.

Operational history.

The first strategic-missile unit became operational on 9 February 1959 at Plesetsk in the north-west of the USSR. On 15 December 1959 the R-7 missile was tested at Plesetsk for the first time. The missiles were fully deployed by 1962.  Total service was limited to no more than ten nuclear-armed missiles active at any time. A single launch pad was operational at Baikonur and from six to eight were in operation at Plesetsk.  The costs of the system were high, mostly due to the difficulty of constructing in remote areas the large launch sites required. At one point, each launch site was projected to cost 5% of the total Soviet defense budget.  Besides the cost, the missile system faced other operational challenges. With the U-2 overflights, the huge R-7 launch complexes could not be hidden and therefore could be expected to be destroyed quickly in any nuclear war. Also, the R-7 took almost twenty hours to prepare for launching, and it could not be left on alert for more than a day due to its cryogenic fuel system. Therefore, the Soviet force could not be kept on permanent alert and could have been subject to an air strike before launching. Additionally, the huge payload for which it was designed, adapted to early heavy H-bombs, became irrelevant with the coming of lighter bomb technology.  The limitations of the R-7 pushed the Soviet Union into rapidly developing second-generation missiles which would be more viable weapons systems. The R-7 was phased out of military service by 1968.  While the R-7 turned out to be impractical as a weapon, it became the basis for a series of Soviet expendable space launch vehicles, the Soyuz family of launchers. As of 2018, in modified versions (Soyuz-U, Soyuz-FG, and the Soyuz-2 (including the boosterless 2.1v variant), the vehicle is still in service, having launched over 1840 times.

Variants.

Note: Much developed variants of the R-7 are still active:

The R-7 Semyorka () was a Soviet missile developed during the Cold War, and the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. The R-7 made 28 launches between 1957 and 1961, but was never deployed operationally. A derivative, the R-7A, was deployed from 1959 to 1968. To the West it was known by the NATO reporting name SS-6 Sapwood and within the Soviet Union by the GRAU index 8K71. In modified form, it launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into orbit, and became the basis for the R-7 family which includes Sputnik, Luna, Molniya, Vostok, and Voskhod space launchers, as well as later Soyuz variants.