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laws to describe the physical world and will give you several other important problem solving tools. In trigonometry, you study triangles and trigonometric functions like sine, cosine, and tangent. Trigonometry has real world applications dealing with everything from radio waves and electricity to telescopes and ship n... |
step. Calculus uses special symbols and logic to do difficult calculations, like determining the orbit of a space vehicle, or predicting the time it takes a car to stop on a wet road. Calculus is a very powerful tool for solving complex problems. What about you? So do you have a favorite math class? Can you think of ot... |
The Hebrew Bible is the cornerstone of the Jewish people. Virtually all Jewish creativity refers to this fundamental text, and it has also left its imprint on Christianity and Islam. |
The exhibition at the Shrine of the Book Complex represents a journey through time, which, adopting a scholarly-historical approach, traces the evolution of the Book of Books. The upper galleries |
take the visitor from the oldest extant biblical manuscripts, which were discovered in the Judean Desert, through the story of the sectarians living at Qumran, who attempted to translate the |
biblical ideals embodied in these texts into a way of life. The lower galleries tell the remarkable tale of the Aleppo Codex – the most accurate manuscript of the Masoretic |
text and the closest to the text of the printed Hebrew Bibles used today. Generations of scribes and scholars dedicated themselves to copying the Bible, passing on the traditions related |
to its reading and cantillation, and interpreting its meaning. Those who cherished it did anything in their power to protect it from harm, at times even enduring martyrdom for its |
sake. Though the motivation for this esteem, which continues until the present day, may take different forms – belief in the divine origins of the biblical text, admiration for the |
profundity of its ideas, or acknowledgement of its historical cultural importance – one thing remains clear: as long as people continue to inquire about the nature of life and the |
world in which we live, the Bible will continue to inspire creativity, comfort the troubled, and provide hope for individuals wherever they may be. The Shrine of the Book was |
built as a repository for the first seven scrolls discovered at Qumran in 1947. This symbolic building, a kind of sanctuary intended to express profound spiritual meaning, is considered an |
international landmark of modern architecture. Designed by American Jewish architects Armand P. Bartos and Frederic J. Kiesler, it was dedicated in an impressive ceremony on April 20, 1965. Its location |
next to official institutions of the State of Israel – the Knesset (Israeli Parliament), key government offices, and the Jewish National and University Library – attests to the degree of |
national importance that has been accorded the ancient texts and the building that preserves them. The white dome symbolizes the lids of the jars in which the first scrolls were |
found; the contrast between the white dome and the black wall alongside it alludes to the tension evident in the scrolls between the spiritual world of the “Sons of Light” |
(as the Judean Desert sectarians called themselves) and the “Sons of Darkness” (the sect’s enemies). The corridor leading into the Shrine resembles a cave, recalling the site where the ancient |
Here, now, are two great whales, laying their heads together; let us join them, and lay together our own. Of the grand order of folio leviathans, the Sperm Whale and the Right Whale are by far the most noteworthy. They are the only whales regularly hunted by man. To the |
Nantucketer, they present the two extremes of all the known varieties of the whale. As the external difference between them is mainly observable in their heads; and as a head of each is this moment hanging from the Pequod's side; and as we may freely go from one to the |
other, by merely stepping across the deck:--where, I should like to know, will you obtain a better chance to study practical cetology than here? In the first place, you are struck by the general contrast between these heads. Both are massive enough in all conscience; but there is a certain |
mathematical symmetry in the Sperm Whale's which the Right Whale's sadly lacks. There is more character in the Sperm Whale's head. As you behold it, you involuntarily yield the immense superiority to him, in point of pervading dignity. In the present instance, too, this dignity is heightened by the pepper |
and salt colour of his head at the summit, giving token of advanced age and large experience. In short, he is what the fishermen technically call a "grey-headed whale." Let us now note what is least dissimilar in these heads--namely, the two most important organs, the eye and the ear. |
Far back on the side of the head, and low down, near the angle of either whale's jaw, if you narrowly search, you will at last see a lashless eye, which you would fancy to be a young colt's eye; so out of all proportion is it to the magnitude |
of the head. Now, from this peculiar sideway position of the whale's eyes, it is plain that he can never see an object which is exactly ahead, no more than he can one exactly astern. In a word, the position of the whale's eyes corresponds to that of a man's |
ears; and you may fancy, for yourself, how it would fare with you, did you sideways survey objects through your ears. You would find that you could only command some thirty degrees of vision in advance of the straight side-line of sight; and about thirty more behind it. If your |
bitterest foe were walking straight towards you, with dagger uplifted in broad day, you would not be able to see him, any more than if he were stealing upon you from behind. In a word, you would have two backs, so to speak; but, at the same time, also, two |
fronts (side fronts): for what is it that makes the front of a man--what, indeed, but his eyes? Moreover, while in most other animals that I can now think of, the eyes are so planted as imperceptibly to blend their visual power, so as to produce one picture and not |
two to the brain; the peculiar position of the whale's eyes, effectually divided as they are by many cubic feet of solid head, which towers between them like a great mountain separating two lakes in valleys; this, of course, must wholly separate the impressions which each independent organ imparts. The |
whale, therefore, must see one distinct picture on this side, and another distinct picture on that side; while all between must be profound darkness and nothingness to him. Man may, in effect, be said to look out on the world from a sentry-box with two joined sashes for his window. |
But with the whale, these two sashes are separately inserted, making two distinct windows, but sadly impairing the view. This peculiarity of the whale's eyes is a thing always to be borne in mind in the fishery; and to be remembered by the reader in some subsequent scenes. A curious |
and most puzzling question might be started concerning this visual matter as touching the Leviathan. But I must be content with a hint. So long as a man's eyes are open in the light, the act of seeing is involuntary; that is, he cannot then help mechanically seeing whatever objects |
are before him. Nevertheless, any one's experience will teach him, that though he can take in an undiscriminating sweep of things at one glance, it is quite impossible for him, attentively, and completely, to examine any two things--however large or however small--at one and the same instant of time; never |
mind if they lie side by side and touch each other. But if you now come to separate these two objects, and surround each by a circle of profound darkness; then, in order to see one of them, in such a manner as to bring your mind to bear on |
it, the other will be utterly excluded from your contemporary consciousness. How is it, then, with the whale? True, both his eyes, in themselves, must simultaneously act; but is his brain so much more comprehensive, combining, and subtle than man's, that he can at the same moment of time attentively |
examine two distinct prospects, one on one side of him, and the other in an exactly opposite direction? If he can, then is it as marvellous a thing in him, as if a man were able simultaneously to go through the demonstrations of two distinct problems in Euclid. Nor, strictly |
investigated, is there any incongruity in this comparison. It may be but an idle whim, but it has always seemed to me, that the extraordinary vacillations of movement displayed by some whales when beset by three or four boats; the timidity and liability to queer frights, so common to such |
whales; I think that all this indirectly proceeds from the helpless perplexity of volition, in which their divided and diametrically opposite powers of vision must involve them. But the ear of the whale is full as curious as the eye. If you are an entire stranger to their race, you |
might hunt over these two heads for hours, and never discover that organ. The ear has no external leaf whatever; and into the hole itself you can hardly insert a quill, so wondrously minute is it. It is lodged a little behind the eye. With respect to their ears, this |
important difference is to be observed between the sperm whale and the right. While the ear of the former has an external opening, that of the latter is entirely and evenly covered over with a membrane, so as to be quite imperceptible from without. Is it not curious, that so |
vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; |
would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.--Why then do you try to "enlarge" your mind? Subtilize it. Let us now with whatever levers and steam-engines we have at hand, cant over the sperm whale's head, that it may lie bottom up; then, |
ascending by a ladder to the summit, have a peep down the mouth; and were it not that the body is now completely separated from it, with a lantern we might descend into the great Kentucky Mammoth Cave of his stomach. But let us hold on here by this tooth, |
and look about us where we are. What a really beautiful and chaste-looking mouth! from floor to ceiling, lined, or rather papered with a glistening white membrane, glossy as bridal satins. But come out now, and look at this portentous lower jaw, which seems like the long narrow lid of |
an immense snuff-box, with the hinge at one end, instead of one side. If you pry it up, so as to get it overhead, and expose its rows of teeth, it seems a terrific portcullis; and such, alas! it proves to many a poor wight in the fishery, upon whom |
these spikes fall with impaling force. But far more terrible is it to behold, when fathoms down in the sea, you see some sulky whale, floating there suspended, with his prodigious jaw, some fifteen feet long, hanging straight down at right-angles with his body, for all the world like a |
ship's jib-boom. This whale is not dead; he is only dispirited; out of sorts, perhaps; hypochondriac; and so supine, that the hinges of his jaw have relaxed, leaving him there in that ungainly sort of plight, a reproach to all his tribe, who must, no doubt, imprecate lock-jaws upon him. |
In most cases this lower jaw--being easily unhinged by a practised artist--is disengaged and hoisted on deck for the purpose of extracting the ivory teeth, and furnishing a supply of that hard white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles, including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles t... |
riding-whips. With a long, weary hoist the jaw is dragged on board, as if it were an anchor; and when the proper time comes--some few days after the other work--Queequeg, Daggoo, and Tashtego, being all accomplished dentists, are set to drawing teeth. With a keen cutting-spade, Queequeg lances the gums; |
then the jaw is lashed down to ringbolts, and a tackle being rigged from aloft, they drag out these teeth, as Michigan oxen drag stumps of old oaks out of wild wood lands. There are generally forty-two teeth in all; in old whales, much worn down, but undecayed; nor filled |
after our artificial fashion. The jaw is afterwards sawn into slabs, and piled away like joists for building houses. - According to Melville, what is the meaning in life and what does he tell us about man's ability to understand that meaning? just some... - Identify Melville's intent and discuss |
important ideas in Moby Dick. - Why does Ishmael alone survive at the end of Melville's Moby Dick? - How do you imitate Melville's method of description? I am writing an essay to describe something using Melville's method. - In Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick, how are Ishmael's views about religion |
Hurricane Joan's passage westward across Nicaragua is a story of extremes. Joan built up strength as it moved across the Caribbean Sea until it came ashore at the town of Bluefields on Nicaragua's Atlantic Coast. The hurricane threw everything it had at Bluefields and Corn Island. Now there is nothing left of either co... |
hurricane's wake is more than that left by the 1972 earthquake, more than that wrought by Somoza's bombing of the cities during the 1979 insurrection, more than that inflicted by seven years of contra war. And Nicaraguans, who have almost nothing, are giving everything they can. While it is an exaggeration to say Nicar... |
backs, it may not be exaggerated to say that many Nicaraguans have each given their only spare shirt. The Tuesday after the weekend disaster young men from the disabled veterans organization arrived at a Red Cross post with 17 pairs of church. Two children showed up at a church in the poor neighborhood of Ciudad Sandin... |
of clothes and a donation of some 30 cents. Women in the Managua barrio of Adolfo Reyes cooked food for the refugees packed into their churches, the few buildings there that could be trusted to withstand the storm. At Red Cross headquarters in Managua volunteers sorted mountains of donated goods. At one end of the room... |
rose like the nearby volcanic cone of Momotombo. In the center was Momotombito, the volcano’s smaller island neighbor, a hill of well-used shoes. These were not the fine cast-offs nor the unsaleable new lines that are given to relief agencies in the developed world, but the scuffed and down-at-heel shoes of the poor be... |
greater need. In contrast to the speed of Nicaraguans' response, support from many western nations has been slow in coming, especially given the scale of the disaster. The international relief is neither sufficient nor has it been dispatched quickly enough, said the chairman of the National Emergency Committee, Social ... |
the hurricane, 110 missing and 178 seriously injured. But without the comprehensive civil defense effort that evacuated almost 325,000 people, these tolls could have been much higher. Some 187,000 people were left homeless. Perhaps even more significant, in its long-term impact on the Nicaraguan people, is the damage t... |
direct damage to crops and infrastructure. Agricultural Vice Minister Salvador Mayorga estimates a loss of 1989 exports equaling 20-25% of last year's total. Fishing boats, roads, bridges and warehouses were destroyed across a wide sweep of the country. Years of development work were wiped out in a weekend. While there... |
Nicaragua Joan's timing was particularly devastating. Nicaragua is a poor country made poorer by seven years of the US-sponsored contra war and over three years of an economic embargo by the United States. It does not have the resources to rebuild and, with the embargo and US pressures on the World Bank and the IMF, it... |
to many sources of international funds. Acting without such assistance, Nicaragua was in the midst of a painful economic restructuring process when the hurricane hit. The most positive sign of economic change had been the mid-year resurgence in agricultural production; there were big increases in the area planted in ba... |
for the important coffee crop. These positive features have now been flooded, crushed or blown away. The double tragedy is that this has happened to Nicaragua. In Nicaragua, since the revolution, people have hoped and worked for more than just relief from poverty. This disaster has struck a country where the government... |
its poor majority can work constructively to cease being helpless victims of poverty or disaster. The government's development goals mesh closely with those of many international aid and development agencies and the government has struggled to meet those goals despite the costs imposed on it by the contra war. Over the... |
reach a dignified peace, a prelude to reconstruction. But now, after the hurricane, Nicaragua must fight just to survive. Can it? Yes. The commitment exists, within the government and among the Nicaraguan people. But reconstruction after war and tempest will require a special kind of international aid effort. There is ... |
to report it. The more heartrending signs of abject poverty don’t exist to draw sympathy and checks from an international viewing audience. Here what are most at risk are a model for third-world development and hope for change. These are abstract concepts, hard to capture on film but very real in the lives of Nicaragua... |
schools and health centers. A new rescue mission is needed, not mass media but mass action, drawing on the reservoir of inspiration that the Nicaraguan revolution has generated around the world in more than a decade of struggle. The build-up and the big blowJoan was an unusual hurricane. It moved west across the southe... |
or northwest the way hurricanes normally do. As a consequence, few ever menace Nicaragua. Joan was the first to do so since Hurricane Fifi in 1974 and tropical storm Irene three years earlier. On October 18, Nicaraguan meteorologists issued a national alert that Joan had grown to hurricane strength and was heading stra... |
the government declared a national emergency, giving them effective control over information relating to the hurricane, and activated the National Emergency Committee. Then Joan stalled for a day, a mixed blessing. It probably increased the strength of the hurricane but also gave Nicaraguans an extra day to prepare. Pr... |
2,000 people in Managua alone the night of the hurricane), the Red Cross, state workers, FSLN activists and members of the country's mass organizations, such as trade unions and neighborhood committees, were quickly mobilized, carrying out the brunt of preparatory work and actual evacuations. Their work saved hundreds,... |
to Bluefields and towns in the likely path of the hurricane. In Bluefields, a three-day supply of food, medicine and other emergency items was collected and stored as safely from damage as possible. More than 1,300 tons of medicine and food were distributed nationwide in the two days before the hurricane hit. On Octobe... |
went into effect. The special programming, heard across the radio dial, broadcast constant weather updates and warned people that the storm was likely to hit with an intensity never before seen in Nicaragua. People living in low-lying areas were urged to evacuate, and advised of the location of refugee centers being se... |
evacuated across the country (close to one in ten of all Nicaraguans), including over 100,000 in and around Managua, and some 60,000 from the southern Atlantic Coast. As of October 28, almost a week later, 60,000 people nationwide were still in temporary refugee shelters. Many people had been reluctant to move to the s... |
on contra radio stations that the hurricane threat was exaggerated or a hoax, others fearing their few belongings could be stolen if their houses were left unattended. Those who made eleventh-hour decisions to take refuge in local centers were assisted by the emergency crews who continued to work through most of the hu... |
force evacuated 11,000 people at the last minute, in the teeth of the advancing storm. The radio linkup was the heart and soul of the civil defense effort. It broadcast crucial information and helped to maintain calm, especially after Saturday night fell with most of the country without electricity and the storm headin... |
Joan spun furiously with winds of more than 150 miles per hour but advanced across Nicaragua at only 5 to 12 miles per hour. Corn Island was hit with Joan's first winds on Friday afternoon and it was not until early Sunday morning that the storm rumbled off into the Pacific Ocean. The radio network tracked it all the w... |
It broadcast Comandante William Ramirez based in Bluefields speaking with President Ortega by radio at about 1:30 Saturday morning as the storm's full force struck the town. Then even radio contact was lost. As Bluefields took a battering the band played on—reggae, calypso and soca from the Atlantic Coast, normally joy... |
On Saturday night, radio brought listeners the impassioned pleas of Daniel Ortega urging people to stay in their houses or, if they were in danger, to go to the nearest refuge. He stressed that people could replace their belongings but that Nicaragua could not replace its people. Then, just before midnight, Comandante ... |
of neighborhood committees and author of a best-selling book on his life as a Sandinista guerrilla, was the author of an inspired moment. He asked everyone listening—Christians, church leaders, all Nicaraguans and foreigners who reside in Nicaragua—to pray "for our brothers and sisters on the Atlantic Coast...and for N... |
us feel calm and not so alone,” said Concepción Martínez, a cook from the Villa Cuba Libre neighborhood in Managua. President Ortega and his brother, Defense Minister Humberto Ortega, traveled through the most vulnerable of Managua’s barrios on Saturday evening (the President had flown to Bluefields the day before and ... |
President (whom people referred to as “Danielito” as they spoke with him that night) had visited was helpful in convincing some people to leave who were otherwise inclined to pooh-pooh the danger. Eighty thousand in Managua were temporarily evacuated as hundreds of rescue workers transported people to the shelters, dis... |
to rescue people from certain drowning as drainage ditches turned into raging rivers in a matter of minutes with the torrential rains. The AftermathBy Sunday morning heavy rains on the Pacific Coast were all that remained of the hurricane. The devastation left behind was only revealed on a region-by-region basis over t... |
Managua had been spared the worst of the storm and the national death toll had clearly been kept down by the massive civil defense effort. From there on the new got worse. Corn Island was leveled by the 150-mph winds and all of its 7,50 residents lost their homes. On Saturday morning, a radio-telephone conversation bet... |
Hooker, a coast FSLN delegate to the National Assembly who was stationed on Corn Island, was the first time most Nicaraguans realized the true ferocity of the hurricane. "The situation is very difficult," reported Hooker. "There is not a single house with its roof on the island. Promar, the only seafood processing plan... |
the only clinic. All the churches and the stores were also destroyed. "Ninety-five percent of the fruit and non-fruit trees were downed by the intensity of the winds. The hurricane lashed us for 14 hours, from three in the afternoon yesterday until five o'clock this morning. There are still intense rains, the populatio... |
doctor.... I lived through the 72 earthquake in Managua and this was much worse." In Bluefields there was a similar tally of wreckage: 90% of houses destroyed; schools and government offices 90% destroyed; the hospital, post office, communications, electric plant and major fishing company facilities all damaged or dest... |
homes, were simply gone—melded into the public domain of timbers and twisted sheets of corrugated zinc roofing that lay several feet deep everywhere. To the horror of those who took refuge inside seemingly strong churches and government buildings, not even cement withstood the 12-hour battering. When nails could hold n... |
ceiling panels were sucked out and the wooden roof frame flew off. If there were no concrete girders, the unsupported walls undulated visibly and finally collapsed. One woman, who escaped her house only moments before it collapsed and then struggled through the wind, rain, and flying debris to a refuge only to have par... |
at some point in the endless night. The Red Cross, charged with distributing government and other provisions, immediately designated posts in each of the barrios and quickly developed a census of most of the remaining families, which changed daily. By the week's end, people were receiving 15-day supplies from the gover... |
of condensed milk, oil, and canned tuna and juices. Others were at the Ministry of Health Post, which was giving typhoid shots. The traditional hostility of older Creoles toward the government had been fanned by contra radio reports that the army was stealing food, and some blamed the Cuban milk rather than the fouled ... |
President Ortega’s visits right before and after the storm touched many. At El Rama the rivers rose 46 feet and stayed high for days. When they receded, much of the town had been destroyed. Two days after the water level had dropped, Mayor Samuel Mejía told a group of visiting aid agency representatives that 25,000 peo... |
in the town and surrounding area. About 5,000 homes and food for 10,000 families for 6 months are needed. The dock, the transfer point for goods going by road and river from Managua to Bluefields, has disappeared. The school has lost its roof, the special school and the high school are destroyed, the bank and the wareh... |
Mejla the houses of the town were in disarray: some without roofs, others with walls missing, some leaning, others fallen, some lifted and dropped in the middle of the road, others reduced to a small wet woodpile. Mud was everywhere. The town was monochromatic brown. A once two-story building rose from the chaos. The t... |
above this was the wind's work. On the upper story only two walls remained, providing a splash of blue to the encompassing brown. A woman in a ripped green nylon skirt and gray blouse too big for her, clutching her small bag of possessions, said she had refused to leave, and been badly knocked about by the hurricane. S... |
bruises on her thigh but kept repeating that the worst was a tree branch that came through the house and hit her on the chest. She seemed in shock. A man, working to salvage something from the ruins of his house, said: "The army, the MINT [Ministry of the Interior] and the Red Cross, they are the ones who did |
the most here. That has to be acknowledged, they have to be thanked.” Extensive areas of Region V were either flooded or affected by high winds. Whole towns, including Acoyapa, Santo Domingo, Villa Sandino and La Gateada, were virtually wiped out. Eighty percent of the region’s houses lost their roofs, 90% of the bean ... |
100,000 acres of forest were destroyed. Two regions lying out of the direct path of the hurricane were particularly badly hit by flooding. Damages sustained in coffee—rich Region VI (Jinotega-Matagalpa), threaten the country’s already weakened economy. Forty-eight lives were lost, 10 bridges (including one of lost, 10 ... |
of roadway was rendered unusable. The loss of roads and bridges may make it impossible to harvest much of the region’s essential coffee crop, now prematurely ripening. In Region IV, in the hills west of the town of Rivas there was especially heavy flooding. Some 34,000 acres of crops were destroyed and 23 people were k... |
said one peasant. Health and education infrastructure, already stretched to the limit, was also affected. Nationally 339 schools have been destroyed, 110 in the southern region of the Atlantic Coast, and 190 health centers and 18 local health posts were damaged. The relief effortRelief efforts were underway even before... |
through advance briefing for members of the diplomatic corps and representatives of international aid organizations. It was the Cubans who got their goods to Nicaragua first and kept them coming. By Saturday afternoon, before Joan had reached Managua, the first planeload of Cuban supplies was being unloaded at Bluefiel... |
in. The Swedish government has donated $3 million, the West Germans (government and churches), $2 million. The Soviets have promised 11,000 tons of rice and a boatload of supplies from the Soviet Red Cross and planeloads of aid are expected or have arrived from a host of other countries, including Argentina, Belgium, C... |
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