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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernacular] | [TOKENS: 6413] |
Contents Vernacular Vernacular is the ordinary, informal, spoken form of a language or dialect, particularly when perceived as having lower social status or less prestige than standard language, which is more codified, institutionally promoted, literary, or formal.[a] More narrowly, any particular variety of a natural language that does not hold a widespread high-status perception, and sometimes even carries social stigma, is also called a vernacular, vernacular dialect, nonstandard dialect, etc. and is typically its speakers' native variety. Regardless of any such stigma, all nonstandard dialects are full-fledged varieties of language with their own consistent grammatical structure, sound system, body of vocabulary, etc. Overview Like any native language variety, a vernacular has an internally coherent system of grammar. It may be associated with a particular set of vocabulary, and spoken using a variety of accents, styles, and registers. As American linguist John McWhorter describes about a number of dialects spoken in the American South in earlier U.S. history, including older African-American Vernacular English, "the often nonstandard speech of Southern white planters, nonstandard British dialects of indentured servants, and West Indian patois, [...] were nonstandard but not substandard." In other words, the adjective "nonstandard" should not be taken to mean that these various dialects were intrinsically incorrect, less logical, or otherwise inferior, only that they were not the socially perceived norm or mainstream considered prestigious or appropriate for public speech; however, nonstandard dialects are indeed often stigmatized as such, due to socially-induced post-hoc rationalization. Again, however, linguistics regards all varieties of a language as coherent, complex, and complete systems—even nonstandard varieties. A dialect or language variety that is a vernacular may not have historically benefited from the institutional support or sanction that a standard dialect has. According to another definition, a vernacular is a language that has not developed a standard variety, undergone codification, or established a literary tradition. Vernacular may vary from overtly prestigious speech varieties in different ways, in that the vernacular can be a distinct stylistic register, a regional dialect, a sociolect, or an independent language. Vernacular is a term for a type of speech variety, generally used to refer to a local language or dialect, as distinct from what is seen as a standard language. The vernacular is contrasted with higher-prestige forms of language, such as national, literary, liturgical or scientific idiom, or a lingua franca, used to facilitate communication across a large area. However, vernaculars usually carry covert prestige among their native speakers, in showcasing group identity or sub-culture affiliation. As a border case, a nonstandard dialect may even have its own written form, though it could then be assumed that the orthography is unstable, inconsistent, or unsanctioned by powerful institutions, like that of government or education. The most salient instance of nonstandard dialects in writing would likely be nonstandard phonemic spelling of reported speech in literature or poetry (e.g., the publications of Jamaican poet Linton Kwesi Johnson) where it is sometimes described as eye dialect. Nonstandard dialects have been used in classic literature throughout history. One famous example of this is Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. This classic piece of literature, commonly taught in schools in the U.S., includes dialogue from various characters in their own native vernaculars (including representations of Older Southern American English and African-American English), which are not written in standard English. In the case of the English language, while it has become common thought to assume that nonstandard varieties should not be taught, there has been evidence to prove that teaching nonstandard dialects in the classroom can encourage some children to learn English. Etymology The first known usage of the word "vernacular" in English is not recent. In 1688, James Howell wrote: Concerning Italy, doubtless there were divers before the Latin did spread all over that Country; the Calabrian, and Apulian spoke Greek, whereof some Relics are to be found to this day; but it was an adventitious, no Mother-Language to them: 'tis confess'd that Latium it self, and all the Territories about Rome, had the Latin for its maternal and common first vernacular Tongue; but Tuscany and Liguria had others quite discrepant, viz. the Hetruscane and Mesapian, whereof though there be some Records yet extant; yet there are none alive that can understand them: The Oscan, the Sabin and Tusculan, are thought to be but Dialects to these. Here, vernacular, mother language and dialect are in use in a modern sense. According to Merriam-Webster, "vernacular" was brought into the English language as early as 1601 from the Latin vernaculus ("native") which had been in figurative use in Classical Latin as "national" and "domestic", having originally been derived from verna, a slave born in the house rather than abroad. The figurative meaning was broadened from the diminutive extended words vernaculus, vernacula. Varro, the classical Latin grammarian, used the term vocabula vernacula, "termes de la langue nationale" or "vocabulary of the national language" as opposed to foreign words. Concepts of the vernacular In general linguistics, a vernacular is contrasted with a lingua franca, a third-party language in which persons speaking different vernaculars not understood by each other may communicate. For instance, in Western Europe until the 17th century, most scholarly works had been written in Latin, which was serving as a lingua franca. Works written in Romance languages are said to be in the vernacular. The Divina Commedia, the Cantar de Mio Cid, and The Song of Roland are examples of early vernacular literature in Italian, Spanish, and French, respectively. In Europe, Latin was used widely instead of vernacular languages in varying forms until c. 1701, in its latter stage as Neo-Latin. In religion, Protestantism was a driving force in the use of the vernacular in Christian Europe, the Bible having been translated from Latin into vernacular languages with such works as the Bible in Dutch: published in 1526 by Jacob van Liesvelt; Bible in French: published in 1528 by Jacques Lefevre d'Étaples (or Faber Stapulensis); German Luther Bible in 1534 (New Testament 1522); Bible in Spanish: published in Basel in 1569 by Casiodoro de Reina (Biblia del Oso); Bible in Czech: Bible of Kralice, printed between 1579 and 1593; Bible in English: King James Bible, published in 1611; Bible in Slovene, published in 1584 by Jurij Dalmatin. In Catholicism, vernacular bibles were later provided, but Latin was used at Tridentine Mass until the Second Vatican Council of 1965. Certain groups, notably Traditionalist Catholics, continue to practice Latin Mass. In Eastern Orthodox Church, four Gospels translated to vernacular Ukrainian language in 1561 are known as Peresopnytsia Gospel. In India, the 12th century Bhakti movement led to the translation of Sanskrit texts to the vernacular. In science, an early user of the vernacular was Galileo, writing in Italian c. 1600, though some of his works remained in Latin. A later example is Isaac Newton, whose 1687 Principia was in Latin, but whose 1704 Opticks was in English. Latin continues to be used in certain fields of science, notably binomial nomenclature in biology, while other fields such as mathematics use vernacular; see scientific nomenclature for details. In diplomacy, French displaced Latin in Europe in the 1710s, due to the military power of Louis XIV of France. Certain languages have both a classical form and various vernacular forms, with two widely used examples being Arabic and Chinese: see Varieties of Arabic and Chinese language. In the 1920s, due to the May Fourth Movement, Classical Chinese was replaced by written vernacular Chinese. The vernacular is also often contrasted with a liturgical language, a specialized use of a former lingua franca. For example, until the 1960s, the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church was generally celebrated in Latin rather than in vernaculars. The Eastern Orthodox Churches use their archaic language forms for their liturgies like Koine Greek for the Greek Orthodox Church and Church Slavonic for the Slavic Churches. The Coptic Church still holds liturgies in Coptic, not Arabic. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church holds liturgies in Ge'ez, but parts of the Mass are read in Amharic. Similarly, in Hindu culture, traditionally religious or scholarly works were written in Sanskrit (long after its use as a spoken language) or in Tamil in Tamil country. Sanskrit was a lingua franca among the non-Indo-European languages of the Indian subcontinent and became more of one as the spoken languages, or prakrits, began to diverge from it in different regions. With the rise of the bhakti movement from the 12th century onwards, religious works were created in other languages: Hindi, Kannada, Telugu and many others. For example, the Ramayana, one of Hinduism's sacred epics in Sanskrit, had vernacular versions such as Ranganadha Ramayanam composed in Telugu by Gona Buddha Reddy in the 15th century; and Ramacharitamanasa, a Awadhi version of the Ramayana by the 16th-century poet Tulsidas. These circumstances are a contrast between a vernacular and language variant used by the same speakers. According to one school of linguistic thought, all such variants are examples of a linguistic phenomenon termed diglossia ("split tongue", on the model of the genetic anomaly). In it, the language is bifurcated: the speaker learns two forms of the language and ordinarily uses one but under special circumstances uses the other. The one most frequently used is the low (L) variant, equivalent to the vernacular, while the special variant is the high (H). The concept was introduced to linguistics by Charles A. Ferguson (1959), but Ferguson explicitly excluded variants as divergent as dialects or different languages or as similar as styles or registers. It must not be a conversational form; Ferguson had in mind a literary language. For example, a lecture is delivered in a different variety than ordinary conversation. Ferguson's own example was classical and spoken Arabic, but the analogy between Vulgar Latin and Classical Latin is of the same type. Excluding the upper-class and lower-class register aspects of the two variants, Classical Latin was a literary language; the people spoke Vulgar Latin as a vernacular. Joshua Fishman redefined the concept in 1964 to include everything Ferguson had excluded. Fishman allowed both different languages and dialects and also different styles and registers as the H variants. The essential contrast between them was that they be "functionally differentiated"; that is, H must be used for special purposes, such as a liturgical or sacred language. Fasold expanded the concept still further by proposing that multiple H exist in society from which the users can select for various purposes. The definition of an H is intermediate between Ferguson's and Fishman's. Realizing the inappropriateness of the term diglossia (only two) to his concept, he proposes the term broad diglossia. Within sociolinguistics, the term "vernacular" has been applied to several concepts. Context, therefore, is crucial to determining its intended sense. In variation theory, pioneered by William Labov, language is a large set of styles or registers from which the speaker selects according to the social setting of the moment. The vernacular is "the least self-conscious style of people in a relaxed conversation", or "the most basic style"; that is, casual varieties used spontaneously rather than self-consciously, informal talk used in intimate situations. In other contexts the speaker does conscious work to select the appropriate variations. The one they can use without this effort is the first form of speech acquired. In another theory, the vernacular language is opposed to the standard language. The non-standard varieties thus defined are dialects, which are to be identified as complexes of factors: "social class, region, ethnicity, situation, and so forth". Both the standard and non-standard languages have dialects, but in contrast to the standard language, the non-standard language has "socially disfavored" structures. The standard language is primarily written (in traditional print media), whereas the non-standard language is spoken. An example of a vernacular dialect is African American Vernacular English. A vernacular is not a real language but is "an abstract set of norms". First vernacular grammars Vernaculars acquired the status of official languages through metalinguistic publications. Between 1437 and 1586, the first reference grammars of Italian, Spanish, French, Dutch, German and English were written, though not always immediately published. It is to be understood that the first precursors of those languages preceded their standardization by up to several hundred years. In the 16th century, the "rederijkerskamers" (learned, literary societies founded throughout Flanders and Holland from the 1420s onward) attempted to impose a Latin structure on Dutch, on the presumption that Latin grammar had a "universal character". However, in 1559, John III van de Werve, Lord of Hovorst published his grammar Den schat der Duytsscher Talen in Dutch; Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert (Eenen nieuwen ABC of Materi-boeck) followed five years after, in 1564. The Latinizing tendency changed course, with a joint publication, in 1584 by De Eglantier and the rhetoric society of Amsterdam; this was to be the first comprehensive Dutch grammar, Twe-spraack vande Nederduitsche letterkunst/ ófte Vant spellen ende eyghenscap des Nederduitschen taals. Hendrick Laurenszoon Spieghel was a major contributor, with others contributing as well. Modern English is considered to have begun at a conventional date of about 1550, most notably at the end of the Great Vowel Shift. It was created by the infusion of Old French into Old English, after the Norman Conquest of 1066 AD, and of Latin at the instigation of the clerical administration. While present-day English speakers may be able to read Middle English authors (such as Geoffrey Chaucer), Old English is much more difficult. Middle English is known for its alternative spellings and pronunciations. The British Isles, although geographically limited, have always supported populations of widely-varied dialects, as well as a few different languages; some examples of languages and regional accents (and/or dialects) within Great Britain include Scotland (Scottish Gaelic and Broad (Lowland) Scots), Northumbria, Yorkshire, Wales (Welsh), the Isle of Man (Manx), Devon, and Cornwall (Cornish). Being the language of a maritime power, English was (of necessity) formed from elements of many different languages. Standardisation has been an ongoing issue. Even in the age of modern communications and mass media, according to one study, "… although the Received Pronunciation of Standard English has been heard constantly on radio and then television for over 60 years, only 3 to 5% of the population of Britain actually speaks RP … new brands of English have been springing up even in recent times ...." What the vernacular would be in this case is a moot point: "… the standardisation of English has been in progress for many centuries." Modern English came into being as the standard Middle English (i.e., as the preferred dialect of the monarch, court and administration). That dialect was of the East Midland, which had spread to London, where the king resided and from which he ruled. It contained Danish forms not often used in the north or south, as the Danes had settled heavily in the midlands. Chaucer wrote in an early East Midland style; John Wycliffe translated the New Testament into it, and William Caxton, the first English printer, wrote in it. Caxton is considered the first modern English author. The first printed book in England was Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, published by Caxton in 1476. The first English grammars were written in Latin, with some in French, after a general plea for mother-tongue education in England: The first part of the elementary, published in 1582, by Richard Mulcaster. In 1586, William Bullokar wrote the first English grammar to be written in English, the Pamphlet for Grammar. This was followed by Bref Grammar, in that same year. Previously he had written the Booke at Large for the Amendment of Orthography for English Speech (1580), but his orthography was not generally accepted and was soon supplanted, thus his grammar shared a similar fate. Other grammars in English followed rapidly; Paul Greaves' Grammatica Anglicana (1594), Alexander Hume's Orthographie and Congruitie of the Britain Tongue (1617), and many others. Over the succeeding decades, many literary figures turned a hand to grammar in English; Alexander Gill, Ben Jonson, Joshua Poole, John Wallis, Jeremiah Wharton, James Howell, Thomas Lye, Christopher Cooper, William Lily, John Colet and more, all leading to the massive dictionary of Samuel Johnson. French (as Old French) emerged as a Gallo-Romance language from Colloquial Latin during late antiquity. The written language is known from at least as early as the 9th century. That language contained many forms still identifiable as Latin. Interest in standardizing French began in the 16th century. Because of the Norman conquest of England and the Anglo-Norman domains in both northwestern France and Britain, English scholars retained an interest in the fate of French as well as of English. Some of the numerous 16th-century surviving grammars are: The development of a standard German was impeded by political disunity and strong local traditions until the invention of printing made possible a "High German-based book language". This literary language was not identical to any specific variety of German. The first grammar evolved from pedagogical works that also tried to create a uniform standard from the many regional dialects for various reasons. Religious leaders wished to create a sacred language for Protestantism that would be parallel to the use of Latin for the Roman Catholic Church. Various administrations wished to create a civil service, or chancery, language that would be useful in more than one locality. And finally, nationalists wished to counter the spread of the French national language into German-speaking territories assisted by the efforts of the French Academy. With so many linguists moving in the same direction, a standard German (hochdeutsche Schriftsprache) did evolve without the assistance of a language academy. Its precise origin, the major constituents of its features, remains uncertainly known and debatable. Latin prevailed as a lingua franca until the 17th century, when grammarians began to debate the creation of an ideal language. Before 1550 as a conventional date, "supraregional compromises" were used in printed works, such as the one published by Valentin Ickelsamer (Ein Teutsche Grammatica) 1534. Books published in one of these artificial variants began to increase in frequency, replacing the Latin then in use. After 1550 the supraregional ideal broadened to a universal intent to create a national language from Early New High German by deliberately ignoring regional forms of speech, which practice was considered to be a form of purification parallel to the ideal of purifying religion in Protestantism. In 1617, the Fruitbearing Society, a language club, was formed in Weimar in imitation of the Accademia della Crusca in Italy. It was one of many such clubs; however, none became a national academy. In 1618–1619 Johannes Kromayer wrote the first all-German grammar. In 1641 Justin Georg Schottel in teutsche Sprachkunst presented the standard language as an artificial one. By the time of his work of 1663, ausführliche Arbeit von der teutschen Haubt-Sprache, the standard language was well established. Auraicept na n-Éces is a grammar of the Irish language which is thought to date back as far as the 7th century: the earliest surviving manuscripts are 12th-century. Italian appears before standardization as the lingua Italica of Isidore and the lingua vulgaris of subsequent medieval writers. Documents of mixed Latin and vernacular are known from the 12th century, which appears to be the start of writing in the volgare precursor of Italian. The first known grammar of a Romance language was a book written in manuscript form by Leon Battista Alberti between 1437 and 1441 and entitled Grammatica della lingua toscana, "Grammar of the Tuscan Language". In it Alberti sought to demonstrate that the vernacular – here Tuscan, the basis of modern Italian – was every bit as structured as Latin. He did so by mapping vernacular structures onto Latin. The book was never printed until 1908. It was not generally known, but it was known, as an inventory of the library of Lorenzo de'Medici lists it under the title Regule lingue florentine ("Rules of the Florentine language"). The only known manuscript copy, however, is included in the codex, Reginense Latino 1370, located at Rome in the Vatican library. It is therefore called the Grammatichetta vaticana. More influential perhaps were the 1516 Regole grammaticali della volgar lingua of Giovanni Francesco Fortunio and the 1525 Prose della vulgar lingua of Pietro Bembo. In those works the authors strove to establish a dialect that would qualify for becoming the Italian national language. The first grammar in a vernacular language in western Europe was published in Toulouse in 1327. Known as the Leys d'amor and written by Guilhèm Molinièr, an advocate of Toulouse, it was published in order to codify the use of the Occitan language in poetry competitions organized by the company of the Gai Saber in both grammar and rhetorical ways. Chronologically, Spanish (more accurately, lengua castellana) has a development similar to that of Italian. There was some vocabulary in Isidore of Seville, with traces afterward, writing from about the 12th century; standardisation began in the 15th century, concurrent with the rise of Castile as an international power. The first Spanish grammar by Antonio de Nebrija (Tratado de gramática sobre la lengua Castellana, 1492) was divided into parts for native and nonnative speakers, pursuing a different purpose in each. Books 1–4 describe the Spanish language grammatically, in order to facilitate the study of Latin for its Spanish-speaking readers. Book 5 contains a phonetical and morphological overview of Spanish for nonnative speakers. The Grammar Books of the Master-poets (Welsh: Gramadegau'r Penceirddiaid) are considered to have been composed in the early fourteenth century, and are present in manuscripts from soon after. These tractates draw on the traditions of the Latin grammars of Donatus and Priscianus and also on the teaching of the professional Welsh poets. The tradition of grammars of the Welsh Language developed from these through the Middle Ages and to the Renaissance. First vernacular dictionaries A dictionary is to be distinguished from a glossary. Although numerous glossaries publishing vernacular words had long been in existence, such as the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville, which listed many Spanish words, the first vernacular dictionaries emerged together with vernacular grammars. Glossaries in Dutch began about 1470 AD leading eventually to two Dutch dictionaries: Shortly after (1579) the Southern Netherlands came under the dominion of Spain, then of Austria (1713) and of France (1794). The Congress of Vienna created the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815 from which southern Netherlands (being Catholic) seceded in 1830 to form the Kingdom of Belgium, which was confirmed in 1839 by the Treaty of London. As a result of this political instability no standard Dutch was defined (even though much in demand and recommended as an ideal) until after World War II. Currently the Dutch Language Union, an international treaty organization founded in 1980, supports a standard Dutch in the Netherlands, while Afrikaans is regulated by Die Taalkommissie founded in 1909. Standard English remains a quasi-fictional ideal, despite the numerous private organizations publishing prescriptive rules for it.[citation needed] No language academy was ever established or espoused by any government past or present in the English-speaking world.[citation needed] In practice the British monarchy and its administrations established an ideal of what good English should be considered to be,[citation needed] and this in turn was based on the teachings of the major universities, such as Cambridge University and Oxford University, which relied on the scholars whom they hired. There is a general but far from uniform consensus among the leading scholars about what should or should not be said in standard English; but for every rule, examples from famous English writers can be found that break it.[citation needed] Uniformity of spoken English never existed and does not exist now,[citation needed] but usages do exist, which must be learnt by the speakers, and do not conform to prescriptive rules. Usages have been documented not by prescriptive grammars, which on the whole are less comprehensible to the general public, but by comprehensive dictionaries, often termed unabridged, which attempt to list all usages of words and the phrases in which they occur as well as the date of first use and the etymology where possible. These typically require many volumes, and yet not more so than the unabridged dictionaries of many languages. Bilingual dictionaries and glossaries precede modern English and were in use in the earliest written English. The first monolingual dictionary was Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall (1604) which was followed by Edward Phillips's A New World of English Words (1658) and Nathaniel Bailey's An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721). These dictionaries whetted the interest of the English-speaking public in greater and more prescriptive dictionaries until Samuel Johnson published Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language (1747), which would imitate the dictionary being produced by the French Academy. He had no problem acquiring the funding, but not as a prescriptive dictionary. This was to be a grand comprehensive dictionary of all English words at any period, A Dictionary of the English Language (1755). By 1858, the need for an update resulted in the first planning for a new comprehensive dictionary to document standard English, a term coined at that time by the planning committee. The dictionary, known as the Oxford English Dictionary, published its first fascicle in 1884. It attracted significant contributions from some singular minds, such as William Chester Minor, a former army surgeon who had become criminally insane and made most of his contributions while incarcerated. Whether the OED is the long-desired standard English Dictionary is debatable, but its authority is taken seriously by the entire English-speaking world. Its staff is currently working on a third edition. Surviving dictionaries are a century earlier than their grammars. The Académie française founded in 1635 was given the obligation of producing a standard dictionary. Some early dictionaries are: High German dictionaries began in the 16th century and were at first multi-lingual. They were preceded by glossaries of German words and phrases on various specialized topics. Finally interest in developing a vernacular German grew to the point where Maaler could publish a work called by Jacob Grimm "the first truly German dictionary", Joshua Maaler's Die Teutsche Spraach: Dictionarium Germanico-latinum novum (1561). It was followed along similar lines by Georg Heinisch: Teütsche Sprache und Weißheit (1616). After numerous dictionaries and glossaries of a less-than-comprehensive nature came a thesaurus that attempted to include all German, Kaspar Stieler's Der Teutschen Sprache Stammbaum und Fortwachs oder Teutschen Sprachschatz (1691), and finally the first codification of written German, Johann Christoph Adelung's Versuch eines vollständigen grammatisch-kritischen Wörterbuches Der Hochdeutschen Mundart (1774–1786). Schiller called Adelung an Orakel and Wieland is said to have nailed a copy to his desk. In the early 15th century a number of glossaries appeared, such as that of Lucillo Minerbi on Boccaccio in 1535, and those of Fabrizio Luna on Ariosto, Petrarca, Boccaccio and Dante in 1536. In the mid-16th the dictionaries began, as listed below. In 1582 the first language academy was formed, called Accademia della Crusca, "bran academy", which sifted language like grain. Once formed, its publications were standard-setting. Monolingual Italian / French Italian / English Italian / Spanish The first Spanish dictionaries in the 15th century were Latin-Spanish/Spanish-Latin, followed by monolingual Spanish. In 1713 the Real Academia Española, "Royal Spanish Academy", was founded to set standards. It published an official dictionary, 1726–1739. Metaphorical usage The term "vernacular" may also be applied metaphorically to any cultural product of the lower, common orders of society that is relatively uninfluenced by the ideas and ideals of the educated élite. Hence, vernacular has had connotations of a coarseness and crudeness. "Vernacular architecture", for example, is a term applied to buildings designed in any style based on practical considerations and local traditions, in contrast to the "polite architecture" produced by professionally trained architects to nationally or internationally agreed aesthetic standards. The historian Guy Beiner has developed the study of "vernacular historiography" as a more sophisticated conceptualization of folk history. See also Notes References Bibliography External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_1] | [TOKENS: 3145] |
Contents Osborne 1 The Osborne 1 is the first commercially successful portable computer, released on April 3, 1981, by Osborne Computer Corporation. It weighs 24.5 lb (11.1 kg), cost US$1,795, and runs the CP/M 2.2 operating system. It is powered from a wall socket, as it has no on-board battery, but it is still classed as a portable device since it can be hand-carried when the keyboard is closed. The computer shipped with a large bundle of software that was almost equivalent in value to the machine itself, a practice adopted by other CP/M computer vendors. Competitors quickly appeared, such as the Kaypro II. History The Osborne 1 was developed by Adam Osborne and designed by Lee Felsenstein, first announced in early 1981. Osborne, an author of computer books, decided that he wanted to break the price of computers. The computer's design was based largely on the Xerox NoteTaker, a prototype developed at Xerox PARC in 1976 by Alan Kay. It was designed to be portable, with a rugged ABS plastic case and a handle. The Osborne 1 is about the size and weight of a sewing machine and was advertised as the only computer that would fit underneath an airline seat. It is a luggable when compared to those later laptop designs such as the Epson HX-20. The Osborne 1 was described as "a cross between a World War II field radio and a shrunken instrument panel of a DC-3", and Felsenstein admitted that carrying two of them to a trade show "nearly pulled my arms out of their sockets". Although the computer's exterior did not impress West Coast Computer Faire attendees, it nonetheless amazed observers; InfoWorld reported that "By far the most frequently asked question ... was, 'What do you think of the new Osborne computer?'" BYTE Magazine wrote: "(1) it will cost $1795, and (2) it's portable!" The word processing, spreadsheet, and other bundled software alone was worth $1,500; as InfoWorld stated in an April 1981 front-page article on the new computer after listing the included software, "In case you think the price printed above was a mistake, we'll repeat it: $1795". West Coast Computer Faire attendees stated, InfoWorld said, that the Osborne 1 "represented an advancement of the price/performance ratio for microcomputers". Adam Osborne agreed but emphasized the price, stating that its performance was "merely adequate": "It is not the fastest microcomputer, it doesn't have huge amounts of disk storage space, and it is not especially expandable." Beyond the price, advertisements emphasized the computer's portability and bundled software. The company sold 11,000 units in the first eight months of sales, and sales at their peak reached 10,000 units per month. The Osborne 1's principal deficiencies are a tiny 5-inch (13 cm) display screen, use of single-sided, single-density floppy disk drives that store 90 kB per disk, and considerable unit weight. Adam Osborne decided to use single-sided disk drives out of concern about double-sided drives suffering head damage from rough handling.[citation needed] A single-density disk controller was used to keep costs down. In September 1981, Osborne Computer Company had its first $1 million sales month. Sales were hurt by the company's premature announcement of superior successor machines such as the Osborne Executive, which replaced the Osborne 1's 52-column screen with an 80-column screen. This phenomenon was later called the Osborne effect. From 1982 to 1985, the company published The Portable Companion, a magazine for Osborne users. The company initially had ten prototypes produced, as described in an email by Felstenstein: I can confirm that this is one of the first ten prototype units built, known as the "metal case" units. I don't think they had serial numbers. The cases were made by Galgon Industries in Hayward, California but their quote for production was prohibitive, so work immediately commenced on the plastic cases. The circuit board was ready in January 1981 and these were built shortly thereafter. They were used in the first ads ("the guy on the left doesn't stand a chance") in which the veins on the hand of the guy on the right bulge as he struggles with the 30-pound weight of his transformer-powered luggable. These were the units we took to the West Coast Computer Faire and the National Computer Conference in early 1981. The computer was widely imitated as several other computer companies began offering low-priced portable computers with bundled software. The Osborne's popularity was surpassed by the similar Kaypro II; which has a larger, 9-inch (23 cm) CRT that can display 80 characters on 24 lines, and double density floppies that can store twice as much data. Osborne Computer Corporation was unable to effectively respond to Kaypro until after 8-bit, CP/M-based computers were obsolete. In 1981, IBM released the IBM PC, which is significantly more powerful and expandable. Following the release of the IBM-compatible Compaq Portable in 1983, the market for CP/M computers shrank and Osborne was unable to compete. Architecture The 64 KB main memory is made of four rows of eight type 4116 dynamic RAM chips, each with 16,384 bits. Memory is shared, with 60 KB available for software and 4 KB reserved for video memory. No parity is provided and no provision for memory expansion exists on the motherboard. The boot program loader and significant parts of the BIOS are stored in a 4 kilobyte EPROM, which is bank-switched. A second EPROM is used as a fixed character generator, providing 96 upper and lower case ASCII characters and 32 graphic symbols; the character generator is not accessible to the CPU. The eighth bit of an ASCII character is used to select underlined characters. Serial communications are through a memory-mapped Motorola MC6850 Asynchronous Communications Interface Adapter (ACIA); a jumper on the motherboard allows the MC6850 to be set for either 300 and 1200 baud or 600 and 2400 baud communications, but other bit rates are not available. The floppy disk drives are interfaced through a Fujitsu 8877 disk controller integrated circuit, a second-source of the Western Digital 1793. The parallel port is connected through a memory-mapped Motorola MC6821 Peripheral Interface Adapter (PIA) which allows the port to be fully bidirectional; the Osborne manuals state that the port implemented the IEEE-488 interface bus but this is rarely used. The parallel port uses a card-edge connector etched on the main board, exposed through a hole in the case; any IEEE-488 or printer cable has to be modified for the Osborne. The diskette drives installed in the Osborne 1 are Siemens FDD 100-5s (MPI drives were also used later), which were actually manufactured in California by GSI, a drive manufacturer that the German firm had purchased. They utilize a custom controller board that Osborne produced, which among other things has a single connector for the power and data lines. The FDD 100-5 was trouble-prone as Osborne's quality control was lacking, and many of the controller boards have soldering defects. In addition, the drive cable is not keyed and can be easily installed upside-down, which shorts out components in the computer. There are also problems with the drive head going past track 0 and getting stuck in place. The combo power/data cable also has a tendency of overheating. The video system uses part of the main memory and TTL logic to provide video and sync to an internal 5-inch (13 cm) monochrome monitor. The same signals are provided on a card-edge connector for an external monitor; both internal and external monitor display the same video format. The internal monitor is specified as 3.55" horizontal, and 2.63" vertical making the actual viewing size even smaller at 4.42". Osborne also provided a 12" GM-12 external monitor. The processor, memory, floppy controller, PIA, ACIA and EPROMs are interconnected with standard TTL devices. The Osborne 1 has bank switched memory. Unusual for a system based on the Z80, all I/O is memory mapped, and the Z80 I/O instructions are only used to select memory banks. Bank 1 is "normal" mode, where user programs run; this includes a 4 KB area at the top of the address space which is video memory. Bank 2 is called "shadow". The first 4 KB of this address space is the ROM, and 4 KB is reserved for the on-board I/O ports: the disk controller, the keyboard, the parallel port PIA, the serial port ACIA, and a second PIA chip used for the video system. All memory above the first 16 KB is the same memory as Bank 1. This is the mode of the system on power up, because this is where the boot ROM was mapped. Bank 3 has only 4 KB by 1 bit of memory, used solely to hold the "dim" attribute of the video system. The computer runs on the CP/M 2.2 operating system. A complete listing of the ROM BIOS is in the Osborne technical manual. The Osborne 1 came with a bundle of application software with a retail value of more than US$1,500, including the WordStar word processor, SuperCalc spreadsheet, and the CBASIC and MBASIC programming languages. The exact contents of the bundled software varied depending on the time of purchase; for example, dBASE II was included with later systems but not with the first systems sold. There are 18 known commercial games for the Osborne 1: The Osborne 1 is powered by a wall plug with a switched-mode power supply, and has no internal battery. An aftermarket battery pack offering 1-hour run-time is available, and connects to the system through a front panel socket. OCC also sold the POWR-PAC inverter that allows running an Osborne from a 12 volt car cigarette lighter. Early models (tan case) are wired for 120 V or 240 V only. Later models (blue case, AKA Osborne 1A/1B, shipping after May 1982) can be switched by the user to run on either 120 V or 230 V, 50 or 60 Hz. There is no internal fan; a hatch at the top of the Osborne 1A/1B (blue case) can be slid open for ventilation. Osborne and other companies produced many Osborne 1 accessories: Aftermarket vendors offered several other upgrades to the basic model, including third-party double density disk drives, external hard disks, and a battery-backed RAM disk that fits in a disk storage compartment. Osborne Computer Corporation offered a "Screen-Pac" column upgrade that could be switched between original 52 column, 80 column and 104 column modes. Osborne 1 systems with the Screen-Pac upgrade have an RCA jack installed on the front panel to allow users to connect an external composite video monitor. This modification was developed in Australia by Geoff Cohen and Stuart Ritchie, and taken to the US by Stuart who turned up unannounced and sat outside Adam Osborne's office for two days. Osborne bought the mod and both of them worked with the company to implement the mod. As a nod toward where it came from, it was called the "Koala Project". Geoff Cohen developed other upgrades for Osbornes and was regarded as the Australian expert on the computers. Games Since, like most CP/M systems, the display of the Osborne does not support bit-mapped graphics, games are typically character-based games, like Hamurabi or text adventures (the 1982 game Deadline, for example, packaged in a dossier-type folder and shipped on two 51⁄4" diskettes.). Compiled and MBASIC-interpreted versions of Colossal Cave Adventure are available for the Osborne. Some type-in games use the Osborne's character-mode graphics. Reception InfoWorld reported that Osborne's booth at the April 1981 West Coast Computer Faire "was packed for the entire show". Some attendees praised the computer, while others said that the screen was too small; many agreed "that the Osborne 1 represented an advancement of the price/performance ratio for microcomputers", the magazine said. Jerry Pournelle wrote in BYTE that the small size of the screen surprised him by not being a problem, and stated that after using it at Caltech when Voyager 1 arrived at Saturn, "a dozen science writers were ready to go buy an Osborne 1". He reported that at the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy "I was able to type ... without disrupting the meeting at all. The Osborne 1 is quiet and efficient and not at all distracting". Pournelle said "You can't beat it for the price, under 2000 bucks with over a thousand dollars' worth of software. An Osborne and an Epson printer will put you in the computing/word-processing business cheaper than anything I can think of", and later described the computer as "the VW of the microcomputer field: It's cheap, reliable, handles standard programs well". A separate review in the magazine stated "If you need a solid, well-supported, well-documented business system at a reasonable price, you should give [the Osborne 1] a great deal of consideration". The reviewer calculated that after subtracting $1,530 for the retail price of the bundled software the price of the computer was "only $265 ... in a way you are getting a software package with a computer thrown in for (almost) free". He praised the quality of the documentation, and agreed with Pournelle that the screen's size did not cause difficulty. James Fallows agreed that the screen, although "the size of a postcard ... is much easier to read than that would suggest", and described the computer as "the best bargain on computer power in the business". Experts stated in 1983 that Osborne's bundled software was more appealing than portability, one stating "They are just so heavy. They are still not practical". In 1981, the daily Israeli newspaper Maariv, provided several Osborne 1 to its reporters. The computers were equipped with acoustic couplers. This configuration allowed a reporter to submit an article digitally directly from the field to the newsroom. Maariv used a localized version of Osborne 1 that supported Hebrew. [citation needed] Freelance journalist David Kline praised the Osborne 1's durability, reporting in 1982 that the "damage inflicted by arrogant customs officers, airport police, vengeful Paris bellhops and opium-fogged Pakistani cabbies were entirely cosmetic". He wrote in 1983 that Osborne and other portable computers had "radically transformed my work [and] begun to radically reshape the entire field of journalism". Stating that a computer that weighs 30 pounds (14 kg) "really isn't very portable", Creative Computing in 1984 concluded that "the main reason that the Osborne was a success was not that it was transportable, but that it came with a pile of bundled software". References Further reading External links |
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Contents Minecraft Minecraft is a sandbox game developed and published by Mojang Studios. Following its initial public alpha release in 2009, it was formally released in 2011 for personal computers. The game has since been ported to numerous platforms, including mobile devices and various video game consoles. In Minecraft, players explore a procedurally generated world with virtually infinite terrain made up of voxels (cubes). They can discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, build structures, fight hostile mobs, and cooperate with or compete against other players in multiplayer. The game's large community offers a wide variety of user-generated content, such as modifications, servers, player skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new game mechanics and possibilities. Originally created by Markus "Notch" Persson using the Java programming language, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten was handed control over the game's development following its full release. In 2014, Mojang and the Minecraft intellectual property were purchased by Microsoft for US$2.5 billion; Xbox Game Studios hold the publishing rights for the Bedrock Edition, the unified cross-platform version which evolved from the Pocket Edition codebase[i] and replaced the legacy console versions. Bedrock is updated concurrently with Mojang's original Java Edition, although with numerous, generally small, differences. Minecraft is the best-selling video game in history with over 350 million copies sold. It has received critical acclaim, winning several awards and being cited as one of the greatest video games of all time. Social media, parodies, adaptations, merchandise, and the annual Minecon conventions have played prominent roles in popularizing it. The wider Minecraft franchise includes several spin-off games, such as Minecraft: Story Mode, Minecraft Dungeons, and Minecraft Legends. A film adaptation, titled A Minecraft Movie, was released in 2025 and became the second highest-grossing video game film of all time. Gameplay Minecraft is a 3D sandbox video game that has no required goals to accomplish, giving players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. The game features an optional achievement system. Gameplay is in the first-person perspective by default, but players have the option of third-person perspectives. The game world is composed of rough 3D objects—mainly cubes, referred to as blocks—representing various materials, such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, and lava. The core gameplay revolves around picking up and placing these objects. These blocks are arranged in a voxel grid, while players can move freely around the world. Players can break, or mine, blocks and then place them elsewhere, enabling them to build things. Very few blocks are affected by gravity, instead maintaining their voxel position in the air. Players can also craft a wide variety of items, such as armor, which mitigates damage from attacks; weapons (such as swords or bows and arrows), which allow monsters and animals to be killed more easily; and tools (such as pickaxes or shovels), which break certain types of blocks more quickly. Some items have multiple tiers depending on the material used to craft them, with higher-tier items being more effective and durable. They may also freely craft helpful blocks—such as furnaces which can cook food and smelt ores, and torches that produce light—or exchange items with villagers (NPC) through trading emeralds for different goods and vice versa. The game has an inventory system, allowing players to carry a limited number of items. The in-game time system follows a day and night cycle, with one full cycle lasting for 20 real-time minutes. The game also contains a material called redstone, which can be used to make primitive mechanical devices, electrical circuits, and logic gates, allowing for the construction of many complex systems. New players are given a randomly selected default character skin out of nine possibilities, including Steve or Alex, but are able to create and upload their own skins. Players encounter various mobs (short for mobile entities) including animals, villagers, and hostile creatures. Passive mobs, such as cows, pigs, and chickens, spawn during the daytime and can be hunted for food and crafting materials, while hostile mobs—including large spiders, witches, skeletons, and zombies—spawn during nighttime or in dark places such as caves. Some hostile mobs, such as zombies and skeletons, burn under the sun if they have no headgear and are not standing in water. Other creatures unique to Minecraft include the creeper (an exploding creature that sneaks up on the player) and the enderman (a creature with the ability to teleport as well as pick up and place blocks). There are also variants of mobs that spawn in different conditions; for example, zombies have husk and drowned variants that spawn in deserts and oceans, respectively. The Minecraft environment is procedurally generated as players explore it using a map seed that is randomly chosen at the time of world creation (or manually specified by the player). Divided into biomes representing different environments with unique resources and structures, worlds are designed to be effectively infinite in traditional gameplay, though technical limits on the player have existed throughout development, both intentionally and not. Implementation of horizontally infinite generation initially resulted in a glitch termed the "Far Lands" at over 12 million blocks away from the world center, where terrain generated as wall-like, fissured patterns. The Far Lands and associated glitches were considered the effective edge of the world until they were resolved, with the current horizontal limit instead being a special impassable barrier called the world border, located 30 million blocks away. Vertical space is comparatively limited, with an unbreakable bedrock layer at the bottom and a building limit several hundred blocks into the sky. Minecraft features three independent dimensions accessible through portals and providing alternate game environments. The Overworld is the starting dimension and represents the real world, with a terrestrial surface setting including plains, mountains, forests, oceans, caves, and small sources of lava. The Nether is a hell-like underworld dimension accessed via an obsidian portal and composed mainly of lava. Mobs that populate the Nether include shrieking, fireball-shooting ghasts, alongside anthropomorphic pigs called piglins and their zombified counterparts. Piglins in particular have a bartering system, where players can give them gold ingots and receive items in return. Structures known as Nether Fortresses generate in the Nether, containing mobs such as wither skeletons and blazes, which can drop blaze rods needed to access the End dimension. The player can also choose to build an optional boss mob known as the Wither, using skulls obtained from wither skeletons and soul sand. The End can be reached through an end portal, consisting of twelve end portal frames. End portals are found in underground structures in the Overworld known as strongholds. To find strongholds, players must craft eyes of ender using an ender pearl and blaze powder. Eyes of ender can then be thrown, traveling in the direction of the stronghold. Once the player reaches the stronghold, they can place eyes of ender into each portal frame to activate the end portal. The dimension consists of islands floating in a dark, bottomless void. A boss enemy called the Ender Dragon guards the largest, central island. Killing the dragon opens access to an exit portal, which, when entered, cues the game's ending credits and the End Poem, a roughly 1,500-word work written by Irish novelist Julian Gough, which takes about nine minutes to scroll past, is the game's only narrative text, and the only text of significant length directed at the player.: 10–12 At the conclusion of the credits, the player is teleported back to their respawn point and may continue the game indefinitely. In Survival mode, players have to gather natural resources such as wood and stone found in the environment in order to craft certain blocks and items. Depending on the difficulty, monsters spawn in darker areas outside a certain radius of the character, requiring players to build a shelter in order to survive at night. The mode also has a health bar which is depleted by attacks from mobs, falls, drowning, falling into lava, suffocation, starvation, and other events. Players also have a hunger bar, which must be periodically refilled by eating food in-game unless the player is playing on peaceful difficulty. If the hunger bar is empty, the player starves. Health replenishes when players have a full hunger bar or continuously on peaceful. Upon losing all health, players die. The items in the players' inventories are dropped unless the game is reconfigured not to do so. Players then re-spawn at their spawn point, which by default is where players first spawn in the game and can be changed by sleeping in a bed or using a respawn anchor. Dropped items can be recovered if players can reach them before they despawn after 5 minutes. Players may acquire experience points (commonly referred to as "xp" or "exp") by killing mobs and other players, mining, smelting ores, animal breeding, and cooking food. Experience can then be spent on enchanting tools, armor and weapons. Enchanted items are generally more powerful, last longer, or have other special effects. The game features two more game modes based on Survival, known as Hardcore mode and Adventure mode. Hardcore mode plays identically to Survival mode, but with the game's difficulty setting locked to "Hard" and with permadeath, forcing them to delete the world or explore it as a spectator after dying. Adventure mode was added to the game in a post-launch update, and prevents the player from directly modifying the game's world. It was designed primarily for use in custom maps, allowing map designers to let players experience it as intended. In Creative mode, players have access to an infinite number of all resources and items in the game through the inventory menu and can place or mine them instantly. Players can toggle the ability to fly freely around the game world at will, and their characters usually do not take any damage nor are affected by hunger. The game mode helps players focus on building and creating projects of any size without disturbance. Multiplayer in Minecraft enables multiple players to interact and communicate with each other on a single world. It is available through direct game-to-game multiplayer, local area network (LAN) play, local split screen (console-only), and servers (player-hosted and business-hosted). Players can run their own server by making a realm, using a host provider, hosting one themselves or connect directly to another player's game via Xbox Live, PlayStation Network or Nintendo Switch Online. Single-player worlds have LAN support, allowing players to join a world on locally interconnected computers without a server setup. Minecraft multiplayer servers are guided by server operators, who have access to server commands such as setting the time of day and teleporting players. Operators can also set up restrictions concerning which usernames or IP addresses are allowed or disallowed to enter the server. Multiplayer servers have a wide range of activities, with some servers having their own unique rules and customs. The largest and most popular server is Hypixel, which has been visited by over 14 million unique players. Player versus player combat (PvP) can be enabled to allow fighting between players. In 2013, Mojang announced Minecraft Realms, a server hosting service intended to enable players to run server multiplayer games easily and safely without having to set up their own. Unlike a standard server, only invited players can join Realms servers, and these servers do not use server addresses. Minecraft: Java Edition Realms server owners can invite up to twenty people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at a time. Minecraft Realms server owners can invite up to 3,000 people to play on their server, with up to ten players online at one time. The Minecraft: Java Edition Realms servers do not support user-made plugins, but players can play custom Minecraft maps. Minecraft Bedrock Realms servers support user-made add-ons, resource packs, behavior packs, and custom Minecraft maps. At Electronic Entertainment Expo 2016, support for cross-platform play between Windows 10, iOS, and Android platforms was added through Realms starting in June 2016, with Xbox One and Nintendo Switch support to come later in 2017, and support for virtual reality devices. On 31 July 2017, Mojang released the beta version of the update allowing cross-platform play. Nintendo Switch support for Realms was released in July 2018. The modding community consists of fans, users and third-party programmers. Using a variety of application program interfaces that have arisen over time, they have produced a wide variety of downloadable content for Minecraft, such as modifications, texture packs and custom maps. Modifications of the Minecraft code, called mods, add a variety of gameplay changes, ranging from new blocks, items, and mobs to entire arrays of mechanisms. The modding community is responsible for a substantial supply of mods from ones that enhance gameplay, such as mini-maps, waypoints, and durability counters, to ones that add to the game elements from other video games and media. While a variety of mod frameworks were independently developed by reverse engineering the code, Mojang has also enhanced vanilla Minecraft with official frameworks for modification, allowing the production of community-created resource packs, which alter certain game elements including textures and sounds. Players can also create their own "maps" (custom world save files) that often contain specific rules, challenges, puzzles and quests, and share them for others to play. Mojang added an adventure mode in August 2012 and "command blocks" in October 2012, which were created specially for custom maps in Java Edition. Data packs, introduced in version 1.13 of the Java Edition, allow further customization, including the ability to add new achievements, dimensions, functions, loot tables, predicates, recipes, structures, tags, and world generation. The Xbox 360 Edition supported downloadable content, which was available to purchase via the Xbox Games Store; these content packs usually contained additional character skins. It later received support for texture packs in its twelfth title update while introducing "mash-up packs", which combined texture packs with skin packs and changes to the game's sounds, music and user interface. The first mash-up pack (and by extension, the first texture pack) for the Xbox 360 Edition was released on 4 September 2013, and was themed after the Mass Effect franchise. Unlike Java Edition, however, the Xbox 360 Edition did not support player-made mods or custom maps. A cross-promotional resource pack based on the Super Mario franchise by Nintendo was released exclusively for the Wii U Edition worldwide on 17 May 2016, and later bundled free with the Nintendo Switch Edition at launch. Another based on Fallout was released on consoles that December, and for Windows and Mobile in April 2017. In April 2018, malware was discovered in several downloadable user-made Minecraft skins for use with the Java Edition of the game. Avast stated that nearly 50,000 accounts were infected, and when activated, the malware would attempt to reformat the user's hard drive. Mojang promptly patched the issue, and released a statement stating that "the code would not be run or read by the game itself", and would run only when the image containing the skin itself was opened. In June 2017, Mojang released the "1.1 Discovery Update" to the Pocket Edition of the game, which later became the Bedrock Edition. The update introduced the "Marketplace", a catalogue of purchasable user-generated content intended to give Minecraft creators "another way to make a living from the game". Various skins, maps, texture packs and add-ons from different creators can be bought with "Minecoins", a digital currency that is purchased with real money. Additionally, users can access specific content with a subscription service titled "Marketplace Pass". Alongside content from independent creators, the Marketplace also houses items published by Mojang and Microsoft themselves, as well as official collaborations between Minecraft and other intellectual properties. By 2022, the Marketplace had over 1.7 billion content downloads, generating over $500 million in revenue. Development Before creating Minecraft, Markus "Notch" Persson was a game developer at King, where he worked until March 2009. At King, he primarily developed browser games and learned several programming languages. During his free time, he prototyped his own games, often drawing inspiration from other titles, and was an active participant on the TIGSource forums for independent developers. One such project was "RubyDung", a base-building game inspired by Dwarf Fortress, but with an isometric, three-dimensional perspective similar to RollerCoaster Tycoon. Among the features in RubyDung that he explored was a first-person view similar to Dungeon Keeper, though he ultimately discarded this idea, feeling the graphics were too pixelated at the time. Around March 2009, Persson left King and joined jAlbum, while continuing to work on his prototypes. Infiniminer, a block-based open-ended mining game first released in April 2009, inspired Persson's vision for RubyDung's future direction. Infiniminer heavily influenced the visual style of gameplay, including bringing back the first-person mode, the "blocky" visual style and the block-building fundamentals. However, unlike Infiniminer, Persson wanted Minecraft to have RPG elements. The first public alpha build of Minecraft was released on 17 May 2009 on TIGSource. Over the years, Persson regularly released test builds that added new features, including tools, mobs, and entire new dimensions. In 2011, partly due to the game's rising popularity, Persson decided to release a full 1.0 version—a second part of the "Adventure Update"—on 18 November 2011. Shortly after, Persson stepped down from development, handing the project's lead to Jens "Jeb" Bergensten. On 15 September 2014, Microsoft, the developer behind the Microsoft Windows operating system and Xbox video game console, announced a $2.5 billion acquisition of Mojang, which included the Minecraft intellectual property. Persson had suggested the deal on Twitter, asking a corporation to buy his stake in the game after receiving criticism for enforcing terms in the game's end-user license agreement (EULA), which had been in place for the past three years. According to Persson, Mojang CEO Carl Manneh received a call from a Microsoft executive shortly after the tweet, asking if Persson was serious about a deal. Mojang was also approached by other companies including Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts. The deal with Microsoft was arbitrated on 6 November 2014 and led to Persson becoming one of Forbes' "World's Billionaires". After 2014, Minecraft's primary versions received usually annual major updates—free to players who have purchased the game— each primarily centered around a specific theme. For instance, version 1.13, the Update Aquatic, focused on ocean-related features, while version 1.16, the Nether Update, introduced significant changes to the Nether dimension. However, in late 2024, Mojang announced a shift in their update strategy; rather than releasing large updates annually, they opted for a more frequent release schedule with smaller, incremental updates, stating, "We know that you want new Minecraft content more often." The Bedrock Edition has also received regular updates, now matching the themes of the Java Edition updates. Other versions of the game, such as various console editions and the Pocket Edition, were either merged into Bedrock or discontinued and have not received further updates. On 7 May 2019, coinciding with Minecraft's 10th anniversary, a JavaScript recreation of an old 2009 Java Edition build named Minecraft Classic was made available to play online for free. On 16 April 2020, a Bedrock Edition-exclusive beta version of Minecraft, called Minecraft RTX, was released by Nvidia. It introduced physically-based rendering, real-time path tracing, and DLSS for RTX-enabled GPUs. The public release was made available on 8 December 2020. Path tracing can only be enabled in supported worlds, which can be downloaded for free via the in-game Minecraft Marketplace, with a texture pack from Nvidia's website, or with compatible third-party texture packs. It cannot be enabled by default with any texture pack on any world. Initially, Minecraft RTX was affected by many bugs, display errors, and instability issues. On 22 March 2025, a new visual mode called Vibrant Visuals, an optional graphical overhaul similar to Minecraft RTX, was announced. It promises modern rendering features—such as dynamic shadows, screen space reflections, volumetric fog, and bloom—without the need of RTX-capable hardware. Vibrant Visuals was released as a part of the Chase the Skies update on 17 June 2025 for Bedrock Edition and is planned to release on Java Edition at a later date. Development began for the original edition of Minecraft—then known as Cave Game, and now known as the Java Edition—in May 2009,[k] and ended on 13 May, when Persson released a test video on YouTube of an early version of the game, dubbed the "Cave game tech test" or the "Cave game tech demo". The game was named Minecraft: Order of the Stone the next day, after a suggestion made by a player. "Order of the Stone" came from the webcomic The Order of the Stick, and "Minecraft" was chosen "because it's a good name". The title was later shortened to just Minecraft, omitting the subtitle. Persson completed the game's base programming over a weekend in May 2009, and private testing began on TigIRC on 16 May. The first public release followed on 17 May 2009 as a developmental version shared on the TIGSource forums. Based on feedback from forum users, Persson continued updating the game. This initial public build later became known as Classic. Further developmental phases—dubbed Survival Test, Indev, and Infdev—were released throughout 2009 and 2010. The first major update, known as Alpha, was released on 30 June 2010. At the time, Persson was still working a day job at jAlbum but later resigned to focus on Minecraft full-time as sales of the alpha version surged. Updates were distributed automatically, introducing new blocks, items, mobs, and changes to game mechanics such as water flow. With revenue generated from the game, Persson founded Mojang, a video game studio, alongside former colleagues Jakob Porser and Carl Manneh. On 11 December 2010, Persson announced that Minecraft would enter its beta phase on 20 December. He assured players that bug fixes and all pre-release updates would remain free. As development progressed, Mojang expanded, hiring additional employees to work on the project. The game officially exited beta and launched in full on 18 November 2011. On 1 December 2011, Jens "Jeb" Bergensten took full creative control over Minecraft, replacing Persson as lead designer. On 28 February 2012, Mojang announced the hiring of the developers behind Bukkit, a popular developer API for Minecraft servers, to improve Minecraft's support of server modifications. This move included Mojang taking apparent ownership of the CraftBukkit server mod, though this apparent acquisition later became controversial, and its legitimacy was questioned due to CraftBukkit's open-source nature and licensing under the GNU General Public License and Lesser General Public License. In August 2011, Minecraft: Pocket Edition was released as an early alpha for the Xperia Play via the Android Market, later expanding to other Android devices on 8 October 2011. The iOS version followed on 17 November 2011. A port was made available for Windows Phones shortly after Microsoft acquired Mojang. Unlike Java Edition, Pocket Edition initially focused on Minecraft's creative building and basic survival elements but lacked many features of the PC version. Bergensten confirmed on Twitter that the Pocket Edition was written in C++ rather than Java, as iOS does not support Java. On 10 December 2014, a port of Pocket Edition was released for Windows Phone 8.1. In July 2015, a port of the Pocket Edition to Windows 10 was released as the Windows 10 Edition, with full crossplay to other Pocket versions. In January 2017, Microsoft announced that it would no longer maintain the Windows Phone versions of Pocket Edition. On 20 September 2017, with the "Better Together Update", the Pocket Edition was ported to the Xbox One, and was renamed to the Bedrock Edition. The console versions of Minecraft debuted with the Xbox 360 edition, developed by 4J Studios and released on 9 May 2012. Announced as part of the Xbox Live Arcade NEXT promotion, this version introduced a redesigned crafting system, a new control interface, in-game tutorials, split-screen multiplayer, and online play via Xbox Live. Unlike the PC version, its worlds were finite, bordered by invisible walls. Initially, the Xbox 360 version resembled outdated PC versions but received updates to bring it closer to Java Edition before eventually being discontinued. The Xbox One version launched on 5 September 2014, featuring larger worlds and support for more players. Minecraft expanded to PlayStation platforms with PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 editions released on 17 December 2013 and 4 September 2014, respectively. Originally planned as a PS4 launch title, it was delayed before its eventual release. A PlayStation Vita version followed in October 2014. Like the Xbox versions, the PlayStation editions were developed by 4J Studios. Nintendo platforms received Minecraft: Wii U Edition on 17 December 2015, with a physical release in North America on 17 June 2016 and in Europe on 30 June. The Nintendo Switch version launched via the eShop on 11 May 2017. During a Nintendo Direct presentation on 13 September 2017, Nintendo announced that Minecraft: New Nintendo 3DS Edition, based on the Pocket Edition, would be available for download immediately after the livestream, and a physical copy available on a later date. The game is compatible only with the New Nintendo 3DS or New Nintendo 2DS XL systems and does not work with the original 3DS or 2DS systems. On 20 September 2017, the Better Together Update introduced Bedrock Edition across Xbox One, Windows 10, VR, and mobile platforms, enabling cross-play between these versions. Bedrock Edition later expanded to Nintendo Switch and PlayStation 4, with the latter receiving the update in December 2019, allowing cross-platform play for users with a free Xbox Live account. The Bedrock Edition released a native version for PlayStation 5 on 22 October 2024, while the Xbox Series X/S version launched on 17 June 2025. On 18 December 2018, the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Vita, Xbox 360, and Wii U versions of Minecraft received their final update and would later become known as "Legacy Console Editions". On 15 January 2019, the New Nintendo 3DS version of Minecraft received its final update, effectively becoming discontinued as well. An educational version of Minecraft, designed for use in schools, launched on 1 November 2016. It is available on Android, ChromeOS, iPadOS, iOS, MacOS, and Windows. On 20 August 2018, Mojang announced that it would bring Education Edition to iPadOS in Autumn 2018. It was released to the App Store on 6 September 2018. On 27 March 2019, it was announced that it would be operated by JD.com in China. On 26 June 2020, a public beta for the Education Edition was made available to Google Play Store compatible Chromebooks. The full game was released to the Google Play Store for Chromebooks on 7 August 2020. On 20 May 2016, China Edition (also known as My World) was announced as a localized edition for China, where it was released under a licensing agreement between NetEase and Mojang. The PC edition was released for public testing on 8 August 2017. The iOS version was released on 15 September 2017, and the Android version was released on 12 October 2017. The PC edition is based on the original Java Edition, while the iOS and Android mobile versions are based on the Bedrock Edition. The edition is free-to-play and had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. This version of Bedrock Edition is exclusive to Microsoft's Windows 10 and Windows 11 operating systems. The beta release for Windows 10 launched on the Windows Store on 29 July 2015. After nearly a year and a half in beta, Microsoft fully released the version on 19 December 2016. Called the "Ender Update", this release implemented new features to this version of Minecraft like world templates and add-on packs. On 7 June 2022, the Java and Bedrock Editions of Minecraft were merged into a single bundle for purchase on Windows; those who owned one version would automatically gain access to the other version. Both game versions would otherwise remain separate. Around 2011, prior to Minecraft's full release, Mojang collaborated with The Lego Group to create a Lego brick-based Minecraft game called Brickcraft. This would have modified the base Minecraft game to use Lego bricks, which meant adapting the basic 1×1 block to account for larger pieces typically used in Lego sets. Persson worked on an early version called "Project Rex Kwon Do", named after the character of the same name from the film Napoleon Dynamite. Although Lego approved the project and Mojang assigned two developers for six months, it was canceled due to the Lego Group's demands, according to Mojang's Daniel Kaplan. Lego considered buying Mojang to complete the game, but when Microsoft offered over $2 billion for the company, Lego stepped back, unsure of Minecraft's potential. On 26 June 2025, a build of Brickcraft dated 28 June 2012 was published on a community archive website Omniarchive. Initially, Markus Persson planned to support the Oculus Rift with a Minecraft port. However, after Facebook acquired Oculus in 2013, he abruptly canceled the plans, stating, "Facebook creeps me out." In 2016, a community-made mod, Minecraft VR, added VR support for Java Edition, followed by Vivecraft for HTC Vive. Later that year, Microsoft introduced official Oculus Rift support for Windows 10 Edition, leading to the discontinuation of the Minecraft VR mod due to trademark complaints. Vivecraft was endorsed by Minecraft VR contributors for its Rift support. Also available is a Gear VR version, titled Minecraft: Gear VR Edition. Windows Mixed Reality support was added in 2017. On 7 September 2020, Mojang Studios announced that the PlayStation 4 Bedrock version would receive PlayStation VR support later that month. In September 2024, the Minecraft team announced they would no longer support PlayStation VR, which received its final update in March 2025. Music and sound design Minecraft's music and sound effects were produced by German musician Daniel Rosenfeld, better known as C418. To create the sound effects for the game, Rosenfeld made extensive use of Foley techniques. On learning the processes for the game, he remarked, "Foley's an interesting thing, and I had to learn its subtleties. Early on, I wasn't that knowledgeable about it. It's a whole trial-and-error process. You just make a sound and eventually you go, 'Oh my God, that's it! Get the microphone!' There's no set way of doing anything at all." He reminisced on creating the in-game sound for grass blocks, stating "It turns out that to make grass sounds you don't actually walk on grass and record it, because grass sounds like nothing. What you want to do is get a VHS, break it apart, and just lightly touch the tape." According to Rosenfeld, his favorite sound to design for the game was the hisses of spiders. He elaborates, "I like the spiders. Recording that was a whole day of me researching what a spider sounds like. Turns out, there are spiders that make little screeching sounds, so I think I got this recording of a fire hose, put it in a sampler, and just pitched it around until it sounded like a weird spider was talking to you." Many of the sound design decisions by Rosenfeld were done accidentally or spontaneously. The creeper notably lacks any specific noises apart from a loud fuse-like sound when about to explode; Rosenfeld later recalled "That was just a complete accident by Markus and me [sic]. We just put in a placeholder sound of burning a matchstick. It seemed to work hilariously well, so we kept it." On other sounds, such as those of the zombie, Rosenfeld remarked, "I actually never wanted the zombies so scary. I intentionally made them sound comical. It's nice to hear that they work so well [...]." Rosenfeld remarked that the sound engine was "terrible" to work with, remembering "If you had two song files at once, it [the game engine] would actually crash. There were so many more weird glitches like that the guys never really fixed because they were too busy with the actual game and not the sound engine." The background music in Minecraft consists of instrumental ambient music. To compose the music of Minecraft, Rosenfeld used the package from Ableton Live, along with several additional plug-ins. Speaking on them, Rosenfeld said "They can be pretty much everything from an effect to an entire orchestra. Additionally, I've got some synthesizers that are attached to the computer. Like a Moog Voyager, Dave Smith Prophet 08 and a Virus TI." On 4 March 2011, Rosenfeld released a soundtrack titled Minecraft – Volume Alpha; it includes most of the tracks featured in Minecraft, as well as other music not featured in the game. Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku chose the music in Minecraft as one of the best video game soundtracks of 2011. On 9 November 2013, Rosenfeld released the second official soundtrack, titled Minecraft – Volume Beta, which included the music that was added in a 2013 "Music Update" for the game. A physical release of Volume Alpha, consisting of CDs, black vinyl, and limited-edition transparent green vinyl LPs, was issued by indie electronic label Ghostly International on 21 August 2015. On 14 August 2020, Ghostly released Volume Beta on CD and vinyl, with alternate color LPs and lenticular cover pressings released in limited quantities. The final update Rosenfeld worked on was 2018's 1.13 Update Aquatic. His music remained the only music in the game until 2020's "Nether Update", introducing pieces from Lena Raine. Since then, other composers have made contributions, including Kumi Tanioka, Samuel Åberg, Aaron Cherof, and Amos Roddy, with Raine remaining as the new primary composer. Ownership of all music besides Rosenfeld's independently released albums has been retained by Microsoft, with their label publishing all of the other artists' releases. Gareth Coker also composed some of the music for the game's mini games from the Legacy Console editions. Rosenfeld had stated his intent to create a third album of music for the game in a 2015 interview with Fact, and confirmed its existence in a 2017 tweet, stating that his work on the record as of then had tallied up to be longer than the previous two albums combined, which in total clocks in at over 3 hours and 18 minutes. However, due to licensing issues with Microsoft, the third volume has since not seen release. On 8 January 2021, Rosenfeld was asked in an interview with Anthony Fantano whether or not there was still a third volume of his music intended for release. Rosenfeld responded, saying, "I have something—I consider it finished—but things have become complicated, especially as Minecraft is now a big property, so I don't know." Reception Minecraft has received critical acclaim, with praise for the creative freedom it grants players in-game, as well as the ease of enabling emergent gameplay. Critics have expressed enjoyment in Minecraft's complex crafting system, commenting that it is an important aspect of the game's open-ended gameplay. Most publications were impressed by the game's "blocky" graphics, with IGN describing them as "instantly memorable". Reviewers also liked the game's adventure elements, noting that the game creates a good balance between exploring and building. The game's multiplayer feature has been generally received favorably, with IGN commenting that "adventuring is always better with friends". Jaz McDougall of PC Gamer said Minecraft is "intuitively interesting and contagiously fun, with an unparalleled scope for creativity and memorable experiences". It has been regarded as having introduced millions of children to the digital world, insofar as its basic game mechanics are logically analogous to computer commands. IGN was disappointed about the troublesome steps needed to set up multiplayer servers, calling it a "hassle". Critics also said that visual glitches occur periodically. Despite its release out of beta in 2011, GameSpot said the game had an "unfinished feel", adding that some game elements seem "incomplete or thrown together in haste". A review of the alpha version, by Scott Munro of the Daily Record, called it "already something special" and urged readers to buy it. Jim Rossignol of Rock Paper Shotgun also recommended the alpha of the game, calling it "a kind of generative 8-bit Lego Stalker". On 17 September 2010, gaming webcomic Penny Arcade began a series of comics and news posts about the addictiveness of the game. The Xbox 360 version was generally received positively by critics, but did not receive as much praise as the PC version. Although reviewers were disappointed by the lack of features such as mod support and content from the PC version, they acclaimed the port's addition of a tutorial and in-game tips and crafting recipes, saying that they make the game more user-friendly. The Xbox One Edition was one of the best received ports, being praised for its relatively large worlds. The PlayStation 3 Edition also received generally favorable reviews, being compared to the Xbox 360 Edition and praised for its well-adapted controls. The PlayStation 4 edition was the best received port to date, being praised for having 36 times larger worlds than the PlayStation 3 edition and described as nearly identical to the Xbox One edition. The PlayStation Vita Edition received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for its technical limitations. The Wii U version received generally positive reviews from critics but was noted for a lack of GamePad integration. The 3DS version received mixed reviews, being criticized for its high price, technical issues, and lack of cross-platform play. The Nintendo Switch Edition received fairly positive reviews from critics, being praised, like other modern ports, for its relatively larger worlds. Minecraft: Pocket Edition initially received mixed reviews from critics. Although reviewers appreciated the game's intuitive controls, they were disappointed by the lack of content. The inability to collect resources and craft items, as well as the limited types of blocks and lack of hostile mobs, were especially criticized. After updates added more content, Pocket Edition started receiving more positive reviews. Reviewers complimented the controls and the graphics, but still noted a lack of content. Minecraft surpassed over a million purchases less than a month after entering its beta phase in early 2011. At the same time, the game had no publisher backing and has never been commercially advertised except through word of mouth, and various unpaid references in popular media such as the Penny Arcade webcomic. By April 2011, Persson estimated that Minecraft had made €23 million (US$33 million) in revenue, with 800,000 sales of the alpha version of the game, and over 1 million sales of the beta version. In November 2011, prior to the game's full release, Minecraft beta surpassed 16 million registered users and 4 million purchases. By March 2012, Minecraft had become the 6th best-selling PC game of all time. As of 10 October 2014[update], the game had sold 17 million copies on PC, becoming the best-selling PC game of all time. On 25 February 2014, the game reached 100 million registered users. By May 2019, 180 million copies had been sold across all platforms, making it the single best-selling video game of all time. The free-to-play Minecraft China version had over 700 million registered accounts by September 2023. By 2023, the game had sold over 300 million copies. As of April 2025, Minecraft has sold over 350 million copies. The Xbox 360 version of Minecraft became profitable within the first day of the game's release in 2012, when the game broke the Xbox Live sales records with 400,000 players online. Within a week of being on the Xbox Live Marketplace, Minecraft sold a million copies. GameSpot announced in December 2012 that Minecraft sold over 4.48 million copies since the game debuted on Xbox Live Arcade in May 2012. In 2012, Minecraft was the most purchased title on Xbox Live Arcade; it was also the fourth most played title on Xbox Live based on average unique users per day. As of 4 April 2014[update], the Xbox 360 version has sold 12 million copies. In addition, Minecraft: Pocket Edition has reached a figure of 21 million in sales. The PlayStation 3 Edition sold one million copies in five weeks. The release of the game's PlayStation Vita version boosted Minecraft sales by 79%, outselling both PS3 and PS4 debut releases and becoming the largest Minecraft launch on a PlayStation console. The PS Vita version sold 100,000 digital copies in Japan within the first two months of release, according to an announcement by SCE Japan Asia. By January 2015, 500,000 digital copies of Minecraft were sold in Japan across all PlayStation platforms, with a surge in primary school children purchasing the PS Vita version. As of 2022, the Vita version has sold over 1.65 million physical copies in Japan, making it the best-selling Vita game in the country. Minecraft helped improve Microsoft's total first-party revenue by $63 million for the 2015 second quarter. The game, including all of its versions, had over 112 million monthly active players by September 2019. On its 11th anniversary in May 2020, the company announced that Minecraft had reached over 200 million copies sold across platforms with over 126 million monthly active players. By April 2021, the number of active monthly users had climbed to 140 million. In July 2010, PC Gamer listed Minecraft as the fourth-best game to play at work. In December of that year, Good Game selected Minecraft as their choice for Best Downloadable Game of 2010, Gamasutra named it the eighth best game of the year as well as the eighth best indie game of the year, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun named it the "game of the year". Indie DB awarded the game the 2010 Indie of the Year award as chosen by voters, in addition to two out of five Editor's Choice awards for Most Innovative and Best Singleplayer Indie. It was also awarded Game of the Year by PC Gamer UK. The game was nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Technical Excellence, and Excellence in Design awards at the March 2011 Independent Games Festival and won the Grand Prize and the community-voted Audience Award. At Game Developers Choice Awards 2011, Minecraft won awards in the categories for Best Debut Game, Best Downloadable Game and Innovation Award, winning every award for which it was nominated. It also won GameCity's video game arts award. On 5 May 2011, Minecraft was selected as one of the 80 games that would be displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of The Art of Video Games exhibit that opened on 16 March 2012. At the 2011 Spike Video Game Awards, Minecraft won the award for Best Independent Game and was nominated in the Best PC Game category. In 2012, at the British Academy Video Games Awards, Minecraft was nominated in the GAME Award of 2011 category and Persson received The Special Award. In 2012, Minecraft XBLA was awarded a Golden Joystick Award in the Best Downloadable Game category, and a TIGA Games Industry Award in the Best Arcade Game category. In 2013, it was nominated as the family game of the year at the British Academy Video Games Awards. During the 16th Annual D.I.C.E. Awards, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences nominated the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft for "Strategy/Simulation Game of the Year". Minecraft Console Edition won the award for TIGA Game Of The Year in 2014. In 2015, the game placed 6th on USgamer's The 15 Best Games Since 2000 list. In 2016, Minecraft placed 6th on Time's The 50 Best Video Games of All Time list. Minecraft was nominated for the 2013 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite App, but lost to Temple Run. It was nominated for the 2014 Kids' Choice Awards for Favorite Video Game, but lost to Just Dance 2014. The game later won the award for the Most Addicting Game at the 2015 Kids' Choice Awards. In addition, the Java Edition was nominated for "Favorite Video Game" at the 2018 Kids' Choice Awards, while the game itself won the "Still Playing" award at the 2019 Golden Joystick Awards, as well as the "Favorite Video Game" award at the 2020 Kids' Choice Awards. Minecraft also won "Stream Game of the Year" at inaugural Streamer Awards in 2021. The game later garnered a Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Award nomination for Favorite Video Game in 2021, and won the same category in 2022 and 2023. At the Golden Joystick Awards 2025, it won the Still Playing Award - PC and Console. Minecraft has been subject to several notable controversies. In June 2014, Mojang announced that it would begin enforcing the portion of Minecraft's end-user license agreement (EULA) which prohibits servers from giving in-game advantages to players in exchange for donations or payments. Spokesperson Owen Hill stated that servers could still require players to pay a fee to access the server and could sell in-game cosmetic items. The change was supported by Persson, citing emails he received from parents of children who had spent hundreds of dollars on servers. The Minecraft community and server owners protested, arguing that the EULA's terms were more broad than Mojang was claiming, that the crackdown would force smaller servers to shut down for financial reasons, and that Mojang was suppressing competition for its own Minecraft Realms subscription service. The controversy contributed to Notch's decision to sell Mojang. In 2020, Mojang announced an eventual change to the Java Edition to require a login from a Microsoft account rather than a Mojang account, the latter of which would be sunsetted. This also required Java Edition players to create Xbox network Gamertags. Mojang defended the move to Microsoft accounts by saying that improved security could be offered, including two-factor authentication, blocking cyberbullies in chat, and improved parental controls. The community responded with intense backlash, citing various technical difficulties encountered in the process and how account migration would be mandatory, even for those who do not play on servers. As of 10 March 2022, Microsoft required that all players migrate in order to maintain access the Java Edition of Minecraft. Mojang announced a deadline of 19 September 2023 for account migration, after which all legacy Mojang accounts became inaccessible and unable to be migrated. In June 2022, Mojang added a player-reporting feature in Java Edition. Players could report other players on multiplayer servers for sending messages prohibited by the Xbox Live Code of Conduct; report categories included profane language,[l] substance abuse, hate speech, threats of violence, and nudity. If a player was found to be in violation of Xbox Community Standards, they would be banned from all servers for a specific period of time or permanently. The update containing the report feature (1.19.1) was released on 27 July 2022. Mojang received substantial backlash and protest from community members, one of the most common complaints being that banned players would be forbidden from joining any server, even private ones. Others took issue to what they saw as Microsoft increasing control over its player base and exercising censorship, leading some to start a hashtag #saveminecraft and dub the version "1.19.84", a reference to the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The "Mob Vote" was an online event organized by Mojang in which the Minecraft community voted between three original mob concepts; initially, the winning mob was to be implemented in a future update, while the losing mobs were scrapped, though after the first mob vote this was changed, and losing mobs would now have a chance to come to the game in the future. The first Mob Vote was held during Minecon Earth 2017 and became an annual event starting with Minecraft Live 2020. The Mob Vote was often criticized for forcing players to choose one mob instead of implementing all three, causing divisions and flaming within the community, and potentially allowing internet bots and Minecraft content creators with large fanbases to conduct vote brigading. The Mob Vote was also blamed for a perceived lack of new content added to Minecraft since Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang in 2014. The 2023 Mob Vote featured three passive mobs—the crab, the penguin, and the armadillo—with voting scheduled to start on 13 October. In response, a Change.org petition was created on 6 October, demanding that Mojang eliminate the Mob Vote and instead implement all three mobs going forward. The petition received approximately 445,000 signatures by 13 October and was joined by calls to boycott the Mob Vote, as well as a partially tongue-in-cheek "revolutionary" propaganda campaign in which sympathizers created anti-Mojang and pro-boycott posters in the vein of real 20th century propaganda posters. Mojang did not release an official response to the boycott, and the Mob Vote otherwise proceeded normally, with the armadillo winning the vote. In September 2024, as part of a blog post detailing their future plans for Minecraft's development, Mojang announced the Mob Vote would be retired. Cultural impact In September 2019, The Guardian classified Minecraft as the best video game of the 21st century to date, and in November 2019, Polygon called it the "most important game of the decade" in its 2010s "decade in review". In June 2020, Minecraft was inducted into the World Video Game Hall of Fame. Minecraft is recognized as one of the first successful games to use an early access model to draw in sales prior to its full release version to help fund development. As Minecraft helped to bolster indie game development in the early 2010s, it also helped to popularize the use of the early access model in indie game development. Social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit have played a significant role in popularizing Minecraft. Research conducted by the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania showed that one-third of Minecraft players learned about the game via Internet videos. In 2010, Minecraft-related videos began to gain influence on YouTube, often made by commentators. The videos usually contain screen-capture footage of the game and voice-overs. Common coverage in the videos includes creations made by players, walkthroughs of various tasks, and parodies of works in popular culture. By May 2012, over four million Minecraft-related YouTube videos had been uploaded. The game would go on to be a prominent fixture within YouTube's gaming scene during the entire 2010s; in 2014, it was the second-most searched term on the entire platform. By 2018, it was still YouTube's biggest game globally. Some popular commentators have received employment at Machinima, a now-defunct gaming video company that owned a highly watched entertainment channel on YouTube. The Yogscast is a British company that regularly produces Minecraft videos; their YouTube channel has attained billions of views, and their panel at Minecon 2011 had the highest attendance. Another well-known YouTube personality is Jordan Maron, known online as CaptainSparklez, who has also created many Minecraft music parodies, including "Revenge", a parody of Usher's "DJ Got Us Fallin' in Love". Minecraft's popularity on YouTube was described by Polygon as quietly dominant, although in 2019, thanks in part to PewDiePie's playthroughs of the game, Minecraft experienced a visible uptick in popularity on the platform. Longer-running series include Far Lands or Bust, dedicated to reaching the obsolete "Far Lands" glitch by foot on an older version of the game. YouTube announced that on 14 December 2021 that the total amount of Minecraft-related views on the website had exceeded one trillion. Minecraft has been referenced by other video games, such as Torchlight II, Team Fortress 2, Borderlands 2, Choplifter HD, Super Meat Boy, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, The Binding of Isaac, The Stanley Parable, and FTL: Faster Than Light. Minecraft is officially represented in downloadable content for the crossover fighter Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, with Steve as a playable character with a moveset including references to building, crafting, and redstone, alongside an Overworld-themed stage. It was also referenced by electronic music artist Deadmau5 in his performances. The game is also referenced heavily in "Informative Murder Porn", the second episode of the seventeenth season of the animated television series South Park. In 2025, A Minecraft Movie was released. It made $313 million in the box office in the first week, a record-breaking opening for a video game adaptation. Minecraft has been noted as a cultural touchstone for Generation Z, as many of the generation's members played the game at a young age. The possible applications of Minecraft have been discussed extensively, especially in the fields of computer-aided design (CAD) and education. In a panel at Minecon 2011, a Swedish developer discussed the possibility of using the game to redesign public buildings and parks, stating that rendering using Minecraft was much more user-friendly for the community, making it easier to envision the functionality of new buildings and parks. In 2012, a member of the Human Dynamics group at the MIT Media Lab, Cody Sumter, said: "Notch hasn't just built a game. He's tricked 40 million people into learning to use a CAD program." Various software has been developed to allow virtual designs to be printed using professional 3D printers or personal printers such as MakerBot and RepRap. In September 2012, Mojang began the Block by Block project in cooperation with UN Habitat to create real-world environments in Minecraft. The project allows young people who live in those environments to participate in designing the changes they would like to see. Using Minecraft, the community has helped reconstruct the areas of concern, and citizens are invited to enter the Minecraft servers and modify their own neighborhood. Carl Manneh, Mojang's managing director, called the game "the perfect tool to facilitate this process", adding "The three-year partnership will support UN-Habitat's Sustainable Urban Development Network to upgrade 300 public spaces by 2016." Mojang signed Minecraft building community, FyreUK, to help render the environments into Minecraft. The first pilot project began in Kibera, one of Nairobi's informal settlements and is in the planning phase. The Block by Block project is based on an earlier initiative started in October 2011, Mina Kvarter (My Block), which gave young people in Swedish communities a tool to visualize how they wanted to change their part of town. According to Manneh, the project was a helpful way to visualize urban planning ideas without necessarily having a training in architecture. The ideas presented by the citizens were a template for political decisions. In April 2014, the Danish Geodata Agency generated all of Denmark in fullscale in Minecraft based on their own geodata. This is possible because Denmark is one of the flattest countries with the highest point at 171 meters (ranking as the country with the 30th smallest elevation span), where the limit in default Minecraft was around 192 meters above in-game sea level when the project was completed. Taking advantage of the game's accessibility where other websites are censored, the non-governmental organization Reporters Without Borders has used an open Minecraft server to create the Uncensored Library, a repository within the game of journalism by authors from countries (including Egypt, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam) who have been censored and arrested, such as Jamal Khashoggi. The neoclassical virtual building was created over about 250 hours by an international team of 24 people. Despite its unpredictable nature, Minecraft speedrunning, where players time themselves from spawning into a new world to reaching The End and defeating the Ender Dragon boss, is popular. Some speedrunners use a combination of mods, external programs, and debug menus, while other runners play the game in a more vanilla or more consistency-oriented way. Minecraft has been used in educational settings through initiatives such as MinecraftEdu, founded in 2011 to make the game affordable and accessible for schools in collaboration with Mojang. MinecraftEdu provided features allowing teachers to monitor student progress, including screenshot submissions as evidence of lesson completion, and by 2012 reported that approximately 250,000 students worldwide had access to the platform. Mojang also developed Minecraft: Education Edition with pre-built lesson plans for up to 30 students in a closed environment. Educators have used Minecraft to teach subjects such as history, language arts, and science through custom-built environments, including reconstructions of historical landmarks and large-scale models of biological structures such as animal cells. The introduction of redstone blocks enabled the construction of functional virtual machines such as a hard drive and an 8-bit computer. Mods have been created to use these mechanics for teaching programming. In 2014, the British Museum announced a project to reproduce its building and exhibits in Minecraft in collaboration with the public. Microsoft and Code.org have offered Minecraft-based tutorials and activities designed to teach programming, reporting by 2018 that more than 85 million children had used their resources. In 2025, the Musée de Minéralogie in Paris held a temporary exhibition titled "Minerals in Minecraft." Following the initial surge in popularity of Minecraft in 2010, other video games were criticised for having various similarities to Minecraft, and some were described as being "clones", often due to a direct inspiration from Minecraft, or a superficial similarity. Examples include Ace of Spades, CastleMiner, CraftWorld, FortressCraft, Terraria, BlockWorld 3D, Total Miner, and Luanti (formerly Minetest). David Frampton, designer of The Blockheads, reported that one failure of his 2D game was the "low resolution pixel art" that too closely resembled the art in Minecraft, which resulted in "some resistance" from fans. A homebrew adaptation of the alpha version of Minecraft for the Nintendo DS, titled DScraft, has been released; it has been noted for its similarity to the original game considering the technical limitations of the system. In response to Microsoft's acquisition of Mojang and their Minecraft IP, various developers announced further clone titles developed specifically for Nintendo's consoles, as they were the only major platforms not to officially receive Minecraft at the time. These clone titles include UCraft (Nexis Games), Cube Life: Island Survival (Cypronia), Discovery (Noowanda), Battleminer (Wobbly Tooth Games), Cube Creator 3D (Big John Games), and Stone Shire (Finger Gun Games). Despite this, the fears of fans were unfounded, with official Minecraft releases on Nintendo consoles eventually resuming. Markus Persson made another similar game, Minicraft, for a Ludum Dare competition in 2011. In 2025, Persson announced through a poll on his X account that he was considering developing a spiritual successor to Minecraft. He later clarified that he was "100% serious", and that he had "basically announced Minecraft 2". Within days, however, Persson cancelled the plans after speaking to his team. In November 2024, artificial intelligence companies Decart and Etched released Oasis, an artificially generated version of Minecraft, as a proof of concept. Every in-game element is completely AI-generated in real time and the model does not store world data, leading to "hallucinations" such as items and blocks appearing that were not there before. In January 2026, indie game developer Unomelon announced that their voxel sandbox game Allumeria would be playable in Steam Next Fest that year. On 10 February, Mojang issued a DMCA takedown of Allumeria on Steam through Valve, alleging the game was infringing on Minecraft's copyright. Some reports suggested that the takedown may have used an automatic AI copyright claiming service. The DMCA was later withdrawn. Minecon was an annual official fan convention dedicated to Minecraft. The first full Minecon was held in November 2011 at the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The event included the official launch of Minecraft; keynote speeches, including one by Persson; building and costume contests; Minecraft-themed breakout classes; exhibits by leading gaming and Minecraft-related companies; commemorative merchandise; and autograph and picture times with Mojang employees and well-known contributors from the Minecraft community. In 2016, Minecon was held in-person for the last time, with the following years featuring annual "Minecon Earth" livestreams on minecraft.net and YouTube instead. These livestreams, later rebranded to "Minecraft Live", included the mob/biome votes, and announcements of new game updates. In 2025, "Minecraft Live" became a biannual event as part of Minecraft's changing update schedule.[citation needed] Notes References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradition] | [TOKENS: 4272] |
Contents Tradition A tradition is a system of beliefs or behaviors (folk custom) passed down within a group of people or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common examples include holidays or impractical but socially meaningful clothes (like lawyers' wigs or military officers' spurs), but the idea has also been applied to social norms and behaviors such as greetings. Traditions can persist and evolve for thousands of years. The word tradition itself derives from the Latin word tradere literally meaning to transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping. While it is reportedly assumed that traditions have an ancient history, many traditions have been invented on purpose, whether it be political or cultural, over short periods of time. Various academic disciplines also use the word in a variety of ways. The phrase "according to tradition" or "by tradition" usually means that what follows is known only through oral tradition and is not supported (and might even be refuted) by solid evidence. Here, "tradition" describes the source or nature of the information. For example, "According to tradition, Homer was born on Chios, but many other places have historically claimed him as theirs." This tradition may never be proven or disproved. Another example is, "King Arthur, according to history, a true British king, has inspired many well loved stories." Whether the claims are supported by evidence or not does not reduce their value as cultural history and literature. Traditions are subject of study in several academic fields of learning, especially in the humanities and social sciences, including anthropology, archaeology, history, and sociology. The conceptualization of tradition, as the notion of holding on to a previous time, is also found in political and philosophical discourse. For example, it is the basis of the political concept of traditionalism, and also strands of many world religions including traditional Catholicism. In artistic contexts, tradition is used to decide the correct display of an art form. For example, in the performance of traditional genres (such as traditional dance), adherence to guidelines dictating how an art form should be composed are given greater importance than the performer's own preferences. A host of factors can exacerbate the loss of tradition, including industrialization, globalization, and the assimilation or marginalization of specific cultural groups. In response to this, tradition-preservation attempts and initiatives have now been started in many countries around the world, focusing on aspects such as traditional languages. Tradition is usually contrasted with the goal of modernity and should be differentiated from customs, conventions, laws, norms, routines, rules and similar concepts. Definition The English word tradition comes from the Latin traditio via French, the noun from the verb tradere (to transmit, to hand over, to give for safekeeping); it was originally used in Roman law to refer to the concept of legal transfers and inheritance. According to Anthony Giddens and others, the modern meaning of tradition evolved during the Enlightenment period, in opposition to modernity and progress. As with many other generic terms, there are many definitions of tradition. The concept includes a number of interrelated ideas; the unifying one is that tradition refers to beliefs, objects or customs performed or believed in the past, originating in it, transmitted through time by being taught by one generation to the other, and are performed or believed in the present. Tradition can also refer to beliefs or customs that are prehistoric, with lost or arcane origins, existing from time immemorial. Originally, traditions were passed orally, without the need for a writing system. Tools to aid this process include poetic devices such as rhyme, epic stories and alliteration. The stories thus preserved are also referred to as tradition, or as part of an oral tradition. Even such traditions, however, are presumed to have originated (been "invented" by humans) at some point. Traditions are often presumed to be ancient, unalterable, and deeply important, though they may sometimes be much less "natural" than is presumed. It is presumed that at least two transmissions over three generations are required for a practice, belief or object to be seen as traditional. Some traditions were deliberately introduced for one reason or another, often to highlight or enhance the importance of a certain institution or truth. Traditions may also be adapted to suit the needs of the day, and the changes can become accepted as a part of the ancient tradition. Tradition changes slowly, with changes from one generation to the other being seen as significant. Thus, those carrying out the traditions will not be consciously aware of the change, and even if a tradition undergoes major changes over many generations, it will be seen as unchanged. There are various origins and fields of tradition; they can refer to: Many objects, beliefs and customs can be traditional. Rituals of social interaction can be traditional, with phrases and gestures such as saying "thank you", sending birth announcements, greeting cards, etc. Tradition can also refer to larger concepts practiced by groups (family traditions at Christmas), organizations (company's picnic) or societies, such as the practice of national and public holidays. Some of the oldest traditions include monotheism (three millennia) and citizenship (two millennia). It can also include material objects, such as buildings, works of art or tools. Tradition is often used as an adjective, in contexts such as traditional music, traditional medicine, traditional values and others. In such constructions tradition refers to specific values and materials particular to the discussed context, passed through generations. Invention of tradition The term "invention of tradition", introduced by E. J. Hobsbawm, refers to situations when a new practice or object is introduced in a manner that implies a connection with the past that is not necessarily present. A tradition may be deliberately created and promulgated for personal, commercial, political, or national self-interest, as was done in colonial Africa; or it may be adopted rapidly based on a single highly publicized event, rather than developing and spreading organically in a population, as in the case of the white wedding dress, which only became popular after Queen Victoria wore a white gown at her wedding to Albert of Saxe-Coburg. An example of an invention of tradition is the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster (location of the British Parliament) in the Gothic style. Similarly, most of the traditions associated with monarchy of the United Kingdom, seen as rooted deep in history, actually date to 19th century. Other examples include the invention of tradition in Africa and other colonial holdings by the occupying forces. Requiring legitimacy, the colonial power would often invent a "tradition" which they could use to legitimize their own position. For example, a certain succession to a chiefdom might be recognized by a colonial power as traditional in order to favour their own candidates for the job. Often these inventions were based in some form of tradition, but were exaggerated, distorted, or biased toward a particular interpretation. Invented traditions are central components of modern national cultures, providing a commonality of experience and promoting the unified national identity espoused by nationalism. Common examples include public holidays (particularly those unique to a particular nation), the singing of national anthems, and traditional national cuisine (see national dish). Expatriate and immigrant communities may continue to practice the national traditions of their home nation. In scholarly discourse In science, tradition is often used in the literature in order to define the relationship of an author's thoughts to that of his or her field. In 1948, philosopher of science Karl Popper suggested that there should be a "rational theory of tradition" applied to science which was fundamentally sociological. For Popper, each scientist who embarks on a certain research trend inherits the tradition of the scientists before them as he or she inherits their studies and any conclusions that superseded it. Unlike myth, which is a means of explaining the natural world through means other than logical criticism, scientific tradition was inherited from Socrates, who proposed critical discussion, according to Popper. For Thomas Kuhn, who presented his thoughts in a paper presented in 1977, a sense of such a critical inheritance of tradition is, historically, what sets apart the best scientists who change their fields is an embracement of tradition. Traditions are a subject of study in several academic fields in social sciences—chiefly anthropology, archaeology, and biology—with somewhat different meanings in different fields. It is also used in varying contexts in other fields, such as history, psychology and sociology. Social scientists and others have worked to refine the commonsense concept of tradition to make it into a useful concept for scholarly analysis. In the 1970s and 1980s, Edward Shils explored the concept in detail. Since then, a wide variety of social scientists have criticized traditional ideas about tradition; meanwhile, "tradition" has come into usage in biology as applied to nonhuman animals. Tradition as a concept variously defined in different disciplines should not be confused with various traditions (perspectives, approaches) in those disciplines. Tradition is one of the key concepts in anthropology; it can be said that anthropology is the study of "tradition in traditional societies". There is however no "theory of tradition", as for most anthropologists the need to discuss what tradition is seems unnecessary, as defining tradition is both unnecessary (everyone can be expected to know what it is) and unimportant (as small differences in definition would be just technical). There are however dissenting views; scholars such as Pascal Boyer argue that defining tradition and developing theories about it are important to the discipline. In archaeology, the term tradition is a set of cultures or industries which appear to develop on from one another over a period of time. The term is especially common in the study of American archaeology. Biologists, when examining groups of non-humans, have observed repeated behaviors which are taught within communities from one generation to the next. Tradition is defined in biology as "a behavioral practice that is relatively enduring (i.e., is performed repeatedly over a period of time), that is shared among two or more members of a group, that depends in part on socially aided learning for its generation in new practitioners", and has been called a precursor to "culture" in the anthropological sense. Behavioral traditions have been observed in groups of fish, birds, and mammals. Groups of orangutans and chimpanzees, in particular, may display large numbers of behavioral traditions, and in chimpanzees, transfer of traditional behavior from one group to another (not just within a group) has been observed. Such behavioral traditions may have evolutionary significance, allowing adaptation at a faster rate than genetic change. In the field of musicology and ethnomusicology tradition refers to the belief systems, repertoire, techniques, style and culture that is passed down through subsequent generations. Tradition in music suggests a historical context with which one can perceive distinguishable patterns. Along with a sense of history, traditions have a fluidity that cause them to evolve and adapt over time. While both musicology and ethnomusicology are defined by being 'the scholarly study of music' they differ in their methodology and subject of research. 'Tradition, or traditions, can be presented as a context in which to study the work of a specific composer or as a part of a wide-ranging historical perspective.' The concept of tradition, in early sociological research (around the turn of the 19th and 20th century), referred to that of the traditional society, as contrasted by the more modern industrial society. This approach was most notably portrayed in Max Weber's concepts of traditional authority and modern rational-legal authority. In more modern works, One hundred years later, sociology sees tradition as a social construct used to contrast past with the present and as a form of rationality used to justify certain course of action. Traditional society is characterized by lack of distinction between family and business, division of labor influenced primarily by age, gender, and status, high position of custom in the system of values, self-sufficiency, preference to saving and accumulation of capital instead of productive investment, relative autarky. Early theories positing the simple, unilineal evolution of societies from traditional to industrial model are now seen as too simplistic. In 1981, Edward Shils in his book Tradition put forward a definition of tradition that became universally accepted. According to Shils, tradition is anything which is transmitted or handed down from the past to the present. Another important sociological aspect of tradition is the one that relates to rationality. It is also related to the works of Max Weber (see theories of rationality), and were popularized and redefined in 1992 by Raymond Boudon in his book Action. In this context tradition refers to the mode of thinking and action justified as "it has always been that way". This line of reasoning forms the basis of the logical flaw of the appeal to tradition (or argumentum ad antiquitatem), which takes the form "this is right because we've always done it this way." In most cases such an appeal can be refuted on the grounds that the "tradition" being advocated may no longer be desirable, or, indeed, may never have been despite its previous popularity. The idea of tradition is important in philosophy. Twentieth century philosophy is often divided between an 'analytic' tradition, dominant in Anglophone and Scandinavian countries, and a 'continental' tradition, dominant in German and Romance speaking Europe. Increasingly central to continental philosophy is the project of deconstructing what its proponents, following Martin Heidegger, call 'the tradition', which began with Plato and Aristotle. In contrast, some continental philosophers - most notably, Hans-Georg Gadamer - have attempted to rehabilitate the tradition of Aristotelianism. This move has been replicated within analytic philosophy by Alasdair MacIntyre. However, MacIntyre has himself deconstructed the idea of 'the tradition', instead posing Aristotelianism as one philosophical tradition in rivalry with others. In political and religious discourse The concepts of tradition and traditional values are frequently used in political and religious discourse to establish the legitimacy of a particular set of values. In the United States in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the concept of tradition has been used to argue for the centrality and legitimacy of conservative religious values. Similarly, strands of orthodox theological thought from a number of world religions openly identify themselves as wanting a return to tradition, although "tradition" or its plural can also refer simply to the core teaching of religious group: thus Paul in 1 Corinthians 11:2 refers to "the traditions, even as I delivered them to you". In contrast to the Protestant Christian doctrine of "scripture alone" (Latin: Sola scriptura), Catholic theological doctrine sees "tradition" alongside "scripture" as sources of authority: Sacred tradition, therefore, and Sacred Scripture of both the Old and New Testaments, are like a mirror in which the pilgrim Church on earth looks at God. The term "traditionalist Catholic" refers to those, such as Archbishop Lefebvre, who want the worship and practices of the Church to be as they were before the Second Vatican Council of 1962–65. Likewise, Sunni Muslims are referred to as Ahl el-Sunnah wa Al-Jamā‘ah (Arabic: أهل السنة والجماعة), literally "people of the tradition [of Muhammad] and the community", emphasizing their attachment to religious and cultural tradition. More generally, tradition has been used as a way of determining the political spectrum, with right-wing parties having a stronger affinity to certain ways of the past than left-wing ones. Here, the concept of adherence tradition is embodied by the political philosophy of traditionalist conservatism (or simply traditionalism), which emphasizes the need for the principles of natural law and transcendent moral order, hierarchy and organic unity, agrarianism, classicism and high culture, and the intersecting spheres of loyalty. Traditionalists would therefore reject the notions of individualism, liberalism, modernity, and social progress, but promote cultural and educational renewal, and revive interest in the Church, the family, the State and local community. This view has been criticised for including in its notion of tradition practices which are no longer considered to be desirable, for example, stereotypical views of the place of women in domestic affairs. In other societies, especially ones experiencing rapid social change, the idea of what is "traditional" may be widely contested, with different groups striving to establish their own values as the legitimate traditional ones. Defining and enacting traditions in some cases can be the means of building unity between subgroups in a diverse society; in other cases, tradition is a means of othering and keeping groups distinct from one another. In artistic discourse In artistic contexts, in the performance of traditional genres (such as traditional dance), adherence to traditional guidelines is of greater importance than performer's preferences. It is often the unchanging form of certain arts that leads to their perception as traditional. For artistic endeavors, tradition has been used as a contrast to creativity, with traditional and folk art associated with unoriginal imitation or repetition, in contrast to fine art, which is valued for being original and unique. More recent philosophy of art, however, considers interaction with tradition as integral to the development of new artistic expression. Relationship to other concepts In the social sciences, tradition is often contrasted with modernity, particularly in terms of whole societies. This dichotomy is generally associated with a linear model of social change, in which societies progress from being traditional to being modern. Tradition-oriented societies have been characterized as valuing filial piety, harmony and group welfare, stability, and interdependence, while a society exhibiting modernity would value "individualism (with free will and choice), mobility, and progress." Another author discussing tradition in relationship to modernity, Anthony Giddens, sees tradition as something bound to ritual, where ritual guarantees the continuation of tradition. Gusfield and others, though, criticize this dichotomy as oversimplified, arguing that tradition is dynamic, heterogeneous, and coexists successfully with modernity even within individuals. Tradition should be differentiated from customs, conventions, laws, norms, routines, rules and similar concepts. Whereas tradition is supposed to be invariable, they are seen as more flexible and subject to innovation and change. Whereas justification for tradition is ideological, the justification for other similar concepts is more practical or technical. Over time, customs, routines, conventions, rules and such can evolve into traditions, but that usually requires that they stop having (primarily) a practical purpose. For example, wigs worn by lawyers were at first common and fashionable; spurs worn by military officials were at first practical but now are both impractical and traditional. Preservation The legal protection of tradition includes a number of international agreements and national laws. In addition to the fundamental protection of cultural property, there is also cooperation between the United Nations, UNESCO and Blue Shield International in the protection or recording of traditions and customs. The protection of culture and traditions is becoming increasingly important nationally and internationally. In many countries, concerted attempts are being made to preserve traditions that are at risk of being lost. A number of factors can exacerbate the loss of tradition, including industrialization, globalization, and the assimilation or marginalization of specific cultural groups. Customary celebrations and lifestyles are among the traditions that are sought to be preserved. Likewise, the concept of tradition has been used to defend the preservation and reintroduction of minority languages such as Cornish under the auspices of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. Specifically, the charter holds that these languages "contribute to the maintenance and development of Europe's cultural wealth and traditions". The Charter goes on to call for "the use or adoption... of traditional and correct forms of place-names in regional or minority languages". Similarly, UNESCO includes both "oral tradition" and "traditional manifestations" in its definition of a country's cultural properties and heritage. So therefore it works to preserve tradition in countries such as Brazil. In Japan, certain artworks, structures, craft techniques and performing arts are considered by the Japanese government to be a precious legacy of the Japanese people, and are protected under the Japanese Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. This law also identifies people skilled at traditional arts as "National Living Treasures", and encourages the preservation of their craft. For native peoples like the Māori in New Zealand, there is conflict between the fluid identity assumed as part of modern society and the traditional identity with the obligations that accompany it; the loss of language heightens the feeling of isolation and damages the ability to perpetuate tradition. Traditional cultural expressions The phrase "traditional cultural expressions" is used by the World Intellectual Property Organization to refer to "any form of artistic and literary expression in which traditional culture and knowledge are embodied. They are transmitted from one generation to the next, and include handmade textiles, paintings, stories, legends, ceremonies, music, songs, rhythms and dance." See also References Further reading External links |
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Contents Sheryl Sandberg Sheryl Kara Sandberg (born August 28, 1969) is an American technology executive, philanthropist and writer. She was the chief operating officer of Meta Platforms from 2008 to 2022 and is the founder of LeanIn.Org. Sandberg is the first woman to have been elected to Facebook's board of directors. As head of the company's advertising business, Sandberg has been credited for making the company profitable. Prior to joining Facebook as its COO, Sandberg was vice president of global online sales and operations at Google and was involved in its philanthropic arm Google.org. Sandberg graduated from Harvard University, later serving as a research assistant to Lawrence Summers at the World Bank and subsequently his chief of staff when he became Bill Clinton's United States Secretary of the Treasury. In 2012, she was named in the Time 100, an annual list of the most influential people in the world. On Forbes Magazine's 2021 billionaires list, Sandberg is reported to have a net worth of US$1.7 billion, owing to her stock holdings in Facebook and in other companies. In 2022, she announced she would be stepping down from Meta in the fall but would remain on its board. In January 2024, she announced that she would not stand for re-election to the board in May 2024. As of July 2025, Sandberg's net worth is estimated to be $2.4 billion according to Forbes. Early life and education Sandberg was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C. into a Jewish family. She is the eldest of three children, born to Adele (née Einhorn) and Joel Sandberg. Her father is an ophthalmologist, while her mother, a college professor of French, has roots tracing back to Belarus, as her grandparents were immigrants from there. Her family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida, when she was two years old. She attended North Miami Beach High School, from which she graduated in 1987 ranked ninth in her class. She was sophomore class president, became a member of the National Honor Society, and was on the senior class executive board. Sandberg taught aerobics in the 1980s while in high school. In 1987, Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College. She graduated in 1991 summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics and was awarded the John H. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics. While at Harvard, she co-founded an organization called Women in Economics and Government. She also met Professor Lawrence Summers, who became her mentor and thesis adviser. Summers recruited her to be his research assistant at the World Bank, where she worked for approximately one year on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness. In 1993, she enrolled at Harvard Business School and in 1995 she earned her MBA degree, graduating with the highest distinction. In her first year of business school, she earned a fellowship. Career After graduating from business school in the spring of 1995, Sandberg worked as a management consultant for McKinsey & Company for approximately one year (1995–1996). From 1996 to 2001 she again worked for Lawrence Summers, who was then serving as the United States Secretary of the Treasury under President Bill Clinton, as his chief of staff. Sandberg assisted in the Treasury's work on forgiving debt in the developing world during the Asian financial crisis. Sandberg joined Google in 2001, where she was responsible for online sales of Google's advertising and publishing products as well as for sales operations of Google's consumer products and Google Book Search. During her time at Google, she grew the ad and sales team from four people to 4,000. In late 2007, Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of Facebook, met Sandberg at a Christmas party held by Dan Rosensweig. Zuckerberg had no formal search for a chief operating officer, but thought of Sandberg as "a perfect fit" for this role. In March 2008, Facebook announced the hiring of Sandberg for the role of COO and her leaving Google. After joining the company, Sandberg quickly began trying to figure out how to make Facebook profitable. Before she joined, the company was "primarily interested in building a really cool site; profits, they assumed, would follow." By late spring,[when?] Facebook's leadership had agreed to rely on advertising, "with the ads discreetly presented"; by 2010, Facebook became profitable. According to Facebook, (as of 2012) she oversaw the firm's business operations including sales, marketing, business development, human resources, public policy and communications. In 2012, she became the eighth member of Facebook's board of directors. In April 2014, it was reported that Sandberg had sold more than half of her shares in Facebook since the company went public. At the time of Facebook's IPO, she held approximately 41 million shares in the company; after several rounds of sales she is left with around 17.2 million shares, amounting to a stake of 0.5 per cent in the company, worth about $1 billion. The New York Times published a report in 2018 detailing Sandberg's role in handling Facebook's public relations after revelations of Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections and its Cambridge Analytica data scandal. According to The Wall Street Journal, during a meeting, Zuckerberg blamed Sandberg personally for the outcome of the scandal, and that Sandberg "confided in friends that the exchange rattled her, and she wondered if she should be worried about her job." On November 29, 2018, The New York Times reported that Sandberg had personally asked Facebook's communications staff to conduct research into George Soros's finances days after Soros publicly criticized tech companies, including Facebook, at the World Economic Forum. In a statement, Facebook said the research into Soros "was already underway when Sheryl [Sandberg] sent an email asking if Mr. Soros had shorted Facebook's stock." On June 1, 2022, Sandberg announced she would be leaving Meta as COO in the fall of 2022 but would remain on the board of directors. Stating a reason for stepping down, Sandberg stated "it is time for me to write the next chapter of my life." In January 2024, she announced that she would be stepping down from the board in May and not running for re-election. In January 2025, vice chancellor of the Delaware Chancery Court J. Travis Laster imposed sanctions on Sandberg for deleting emails from her personal account related to the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal. These emails were relevant to the 2018 shareholder lawsuit, and deleting them violated a litigation hold. In 2009, Sandberg was named to the board of The Walt Disney Company. She also serves on the boards of Women for Women International, the Center for Global Development, and V-Day. She was previously a board member of Meta, Starbucks, Brookings Institution, and Ad Council. In 2021, Sandberg and her husband, Tom Bernthal, launched Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners to invest their own capital in start-ups. In November 2023, Sandberg's investment company invested in Cercle, an AI healthcare business. In April 2024, she invested in Pigment SAS, a French software company, as part of a $145 million round. Other work and ventures In 2008, Sandberg wrote an article for The Huffington Post in support of her mentor, Larry Summers, who was under fire for his comments about women. She was a keynote speaker at the Jewish Community Federation's Business Leadership Council in 2010. In December 2010, she gave a TED speech titled "Why we have too few women leaders." In May 2011, she gave the Commencement Address at the Barnard College graduation ceremony. She spoke as the keynote speaker at the Class Day ceremony at the Harvard Business School in May 2012. In April 2013, she was the keynote speaker during the second annual Entrepreneur Weekend at Colgate University, in Hamilton, New York. In 2015, she signed an open letter which the ONE Campaign had been collecting signatures for; the letter was addressed to Angela Merkel and Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, urging them to focus on women as they serve as the head of the G7 in Germany and the AU in South Africa respectively, which will start to set the priorities in development funding before a main UN summit in September 2015 that will establish new development goals for the generation. In 2016, she delivered the Commencement Address at the University of California, Berkeley graduation ceremony. It was the first time she spoke publicly about her husband's death, and stressed the importance of resilience. The following year she delivered the Commencement Address to Virginia Tech's Class of 2017. On June 8, 2018, she gave the Commencement Address for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, MA. She has also served as a member of the advisory board of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. Sandberg released her first book, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, co-authored by Nell Scovell and published by Knopf on March 11, 2013. The book concerns business leadership and development, issues with the lack of women in government and business leadership positions, and feminism. As of the fall of 2013, the book had sold more than one million copies and was on top of the bestseller lists since its launch. The book has been reviewed by various media outlets. In Lean Out by former Facebook employee Marissa Orr, the point that women should not have to mimic men and that society needs to change to adapt to women's issues instead is made. The book has also been criticized by Vox Media for overlooking the struggles of mothers who may not be able to "lean in." Zoe Williams in The Guardian referred to Lean In as "an infantilising, reactionary guide for ambitious women." She emphasizes Sandberg's contradictory approach in both criticizing and upholding misogynistic workplace practices. She has further been perceived by The Guardian as a COO who avoids engaging in this crisis. Furthermore, following the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal, Sandberg's willingness to actually lean in has been put into question by Roger McNamee. "She's not leaning in at all," McNamee said, in a reference to Sandberg's widely read book published five years ago. "If ever there was a time for her to lean in, this is it." Sandberg released her second book, Option B, in April 2017. Option B is co-authored with Adam Grant, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The book puts emphasis on grief and resilience in challenges within life. It offers practical tips for creating resilience in the family and community. 2.75 million copies have been sold since publication. In March 2014, Sandberg and Lean In sponsored the Ban Bossy campaign, a television and social media campaign designed to discourage the word bossy from general use owing to its perceived harmful effect on young girls. Several video spots with spokespersons including Beyoncé, Jennifer Garner, and Condoleezza Rice among others were produced along with a web site providing school training material, leadership tips, and an online pledge form to which visitors can promise not to use the word. In April 2024, Screams Before Silence, a documentary fronted by Sandberg, was released to YouTube. The film concerns the reported sexual violence committed by Hamas on the October 7th attack on Israel. She has described this film as the most important work of her life. In a speech at the Jewish Federations of North America’s annual General Assembly, Sandberg declared herself to be a "proud Zionist." Philanthropy In November 2016, Sandberg renamed her Lean In Foundation to the Sheryl Sandberg & Dave Goldberg Family Foundation, after herself and her late husband. This new foundation serves as an umbrella for LeanIn.Org and a new organization around her book Option B. Sandberg also transferred roughly $100,000,000 in Facebook stock to fund the foundation and other charitable endeavors. In October 2024, Sandberg donated $5 million through her charitable foundation to Marshall University for its 'Marshall For All' program. Allegations Former Facebook employee, turned anti-Facebook activist Sarah Wynn-Williams's 2025 memoir Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism alleges that on at least two occasions, Sandberg requested that young female staffers, including Wynn-Williams, "come to bed" with her. These requests were allegedly made by Sandberg while traveling on Facebook's private jet, where she had a private bedroom. Other employees present at the time said that Sandberg was merely offering Wynn-Williams a place to sleep during travel, as she was visibly pregnant, and the plane had multiple beds. The first instance of the request is documented by Wynn-Williams in the chapter "Lean in and Lie Back", where Sandberg allegedly pressures Wynn-Williams to join her in bed. In Wynn-Williams's account, Sandberg admits that she has previously requested this of other young, female colleagues, particularly one named Sadie, noting that "Sadie's slept over lots of times". Wynn-Williams is able to avoid joining Sandberg in her private room in this instance and a second instance documented in a later chapter, "Let Them Eat Cake". Wynn-Williams also alleges that Sandberg invited Sadie, her assistant, to come to her house to try on expensive lingerie purchased with Sandberg’s money, and to stay over. Wynn-Williams’ claims have never been substantiated and several employees at Facebook during that time have stated publicly that her claims are “exaggerated” and that the stories she tells about Facebook executives “never happened”. After several investigations, it was determined that Wynn-Williams’ claims were “misleading and unfounded”, and that there had been no wrongdoing on the part of Facebook executives. Several former and current Meta employees have stated publicly that “a bunch of the stories are exaggerated or just didn't happen” and that Wynn-Williams’ book was “dishonest and distorted.” Personal life Sandberg married Brian Kraff in 1993 and divorced a year later. In 2004, she married Dave Goldberg, then an executive with Yahoo! and later CEO of SurveyMonkey. The couple had a son and a daughter. Sandberg and Goldberg frequently discussed being in a shared earning/shared parenting marriage. Sandberg also raised the issue of single parenting conflicting strongly with professional and economic development in America. On May 1, 2015, Dave Goldberg died unexpectedly, and his death was originally reported as resulting from sustaining a head trauma falling from a treadmill while the couple was vacationing in Mexico. However, an autopsy later suggested that the cause of death was an arrhythmia, as Sandberg subsequently confirmed in an interview. Sandberg dated Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick from 2016 to 2019. According to an April 21, 2022, report by The Wall Street Journal, Sandberg was part of a coordinated campaign to prevent the Daily Mail from publishing a story about a temporary restraining order towards Kotick by a former girlfriend in 2014. At the time of The Journal's report, Kotick's company was facing lawsuits over allegations of widespread sexual misconduct, which Kotick himself was alleged to have participated in. These campaigns occurred first in 2016 (when Sandberg and Kotick began dating), and again in 2019 (the year they broke up). The Journal stated that Facebook was reviewing whether Sandberg violated the company's rules. On February 3, 2020, she announced her engagement on Facebook to Kelton Global CEO Tom Bernthal. They were married in August 2022. Bernthal has three children and Sandberg has two, and they live together in Menlo Park, California. Sandberg supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. She declined to endorse Elizabeth Warren, an outspoken critic of Facebook, multiple times throughout the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, though she stated, "I imagine I will support a Democratic nominee" over incumbent Donald Trump. Sandberg endorsed Kamala Harris for president in 2024. Honors Books References External links |
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Contents Book sources This page allows users to search multiple sources for a book given a 10- or 13-digit International Standard Book Number. Spaces and dashes in the ISBN do not matter. This page links to catalogs of libraries, booksellers, and other book sources where you will be able to search for the book by its International Standard Book Number (ISBN). Online text Google Books and other retail sources below may be helpful if you want to verify citations in Wikipedia articles, because they often let you search an online version of the book for specific words or phrases, or you can browse through the book (although for copyright reasons the entire book is usually not available). At the Open Library (part of the Internet Archive) you can borrow and read entire books online. Online databases Subscription eBook databases Libraries Alabama Alaska California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Missouri Nebraska New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Washington state Wisconsin Bookselling and swapping Find your book on a site that compiles results from other online sites: These sites allow you to search the catalogs of many individual booksellers: Non-English book sources If the book you are looking for is in a language other than English, you might find it helpful to look at the equivalent pages on other Wikipedias, linked below – they are more likely to have sources appropriate for that language. Find other editions The WorldCat xISBN tool for finding other editions is no longer available. However, there is often a "view all editions" link on the results page from an ISBN search. Google books often lists other editions of a book and related books under the "about this book" link. You can convert between 10 and 13 digit ISBNs with these tools: Find on Wikipedia See also Get free access to research! Research tools and services Outreach Get involved |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lod#cite_ref-Frenkel_46-0] | [TOKENS: 4733] |
Contents Lod Lod (Hebrew: לוד, fully vocalized: לֹד), also known as Lydda (Ancient Greek: Λύδδα) and Lidd (Arabic: اللِّدّ, romanized: al-Lidd, or اللُّدّ, al-Ludd), is a city 15 km (9+1⁄2 mi) southeast of Tel Aviv and 40 km (25 mi) northwest of Jerusalem in the Central District of Israel. It is situated between the lower Shephelah on the east and the coastal plain on the west. The city had a population of 90,814 in 2023. Lod has been inhabited since at least the Neolithic period. It is mentioned a few times in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament. Between the 5th century BCE and up until the late Roman period, it was a prominent center for Jewish scholarship and trade. Around 200 CE, the city became a Roman colony and was renamed Diospolis (Ancient Greek: Διόσπολις, lit. 'city of Zeus'). Tradition identifies Lod as the 4th century martyrdom site of Saint George; the Church of Saint George and Mosque of Al-Khadr located in the city is believed to have housed his remains. Following the Arab conquest of the Levant, Lod served as the capital of Jund Filastin; however, a few decades later, the seat of power was transferred to Ramla, and Lod slipped in importance. Under Crusader rule, the city was a Catholic diocese of the Latin Church and it remains a titular see to this day.[citation needed] Lod underwent a major change in its population in the mid-20th century. Exclusively Palestinian Arab in 1947, Lod was part of the area designated for an Arab state in the United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine; however, in July 1948, the city was occupied by the Israel Defense Forces, and most of its Arab inhabitants were expelled in the Palestinian expulsion from Lydda and Ramle. The city was largely resettled by Jewish immigrants, most of them expelled from Arab countries. Today, Lod is one of Israel's mixed cities, with an Arab population of 30%. Lod is one of Israel's major transportation hubs. The main international airport, Ben Gurion Airport, is located 8 km (5 miles) north of the city. The city is also a major railway and road junction. Religious references The Hebrew name Lod appears in the Hebrew Bible as a town of Benjamin, founded along with Ono by Shamed or Shamer (1 Chronicles 8:12; Ezra 2:33; Nehemiah 7:37; 11:35). In Ezra 2:33, it is mentioned as one of the cities whose inhabitants returned after the Babylonian captivity. Lod is not mentioned among the towns allocated to the tribe of Benjamin in Joshua 18:11–28. The name Lod derives from a tri-consonantal root not extant in Northwest Semitic, but only in Arabic (“to quarrel; withhold, hinder”). An Arabic etymology of such an ancient name is unlikely (the earliest attestation is from the Achaemenid period). In the New Testament, the town appears in its Greek form, Lydda, as the site of Peter's healing of Aeneas in Acts 9:32–38. The city is also mentioned in an Islamic hadith as the location of the battlefield where the false messiah (al-Masih ad-Dajjal) will be slain before the Day of Judgment. History The first occupation dates to the Neolithic in the Near East and is associated with the Lodian culture. Occupation continued in the Levant Chalcolithic. Pottery finds have dated the initial settlement in the area now occupied by the town to 5600–5250 BCE. In the Early Bronze, it was an important settlement in the central coastal plain between the Judean Shephelah and the Mediterranean coast, along Nahal Ayalon. Other important nearby sites were Tel Dalit, Tel Bareqet, Khirbat Abu Hamid (Shoham North), Tel Afeq, Azor and Jaffa. Two architectural phases belong to the late EB I in Area B. The first phase had a mudbrick wall, while the late phase included a circulat stone structure. Later excavations have produced an occupation later, Stratum IV. It consists of two phases, Stratum IVb with mudbrick wall on stone foundations and rounded exterior corners. In Stratum IVa there was a mudbrick wall with no stone foundations, with imported Egyptian potter and local pottery imitations. Another excavations revealed nine occupation strata. Strata VI-III belonged to Early Bronze IB. The material culture showed Egyptian imports in strata V and IV. Occupation continued into Early Bronze II with four strata (V-II). There was continuity in the material culture and indications of centralized urban planning. North to the tell were scattered MB II burials. The earliest written record is in a list of Canaanite towns drawn up by the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III at Karnak in 1465 BCE. From the fifth century BCE until the Roman period, the city was a centre of Jewish scholarship and commerce. According to British historian Martin Gilbert, during the Hasmonean period, Jonathan Maccabee and his brother, Simon Maccabaeus, enlarged the area under Jewish control, which included conquering the city. The Jewish community in Lod during the Mishnah and Talmud era is described in a significant number of sources, including information on its institutions, demographics, and way of life. The city reached its height as a Jewish center between the First Jewish-Roman War and the Bar Kokhba revolt, and again in the days of Judah ha-Nasi and the start of the Amoraim period. The city was then the site of numerous public institutions, including schools, study houses, and synagogues. In 43 BC, Cassius, the Roman governor of Syria, sold the inhabitants of Lod into slavery, but they were set free two years later by Mark Antony. During the First Jewish–Roman War, the Roman proconsul of Syria, Cestius Gallus, razed the town on his way to Jerusalem in Tishrei 66 CE. According to Josephus, "[he] found the city deserted, for the entire population had gone up to Jerusalem for the Feast of Tabernacles. He killed fifty people whom he found, burned the town and marched on". Lydda was occupied by Emperor Vespasian in 68 CE. In the period following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, Rabbi Tarfon, who appears in many Tannaitic and Jewish legal discussions, served as a rabbinic authority in Lod. During the Kitos War, 115–117 CE, the Roman army laid siege to Lod, where the rebel Jews had gathered under the leadership of Julian and Pappos. Torah study was outlawed by the Romans and pursued mostly in the underground. The distress became so great, the patriarch Rabban Gamaliel II, who was shut up there and died soon afterwards, permitted fasting on Ḥanukkah. Other rabbis disagreed with this ruling. Lydda was next taken and many of the Jews were executed; the "slain of Lydda" are often mentioned in words of reverential praise in the Talmud. In 200 CE, emperor Septimius Severus elevated the town to the status of a city, calling it Colonia Lucia Septimia Severa Diospolis. The name Diospolis ("City of Zeus") may have been bestowed earlier, possibly by Hadrian. At that point, most of its inhabitants were Christian. The earliest known bishop is Aëtius, a friend of Arius. During the following century (200-300CE), it's said that Joshua ben Levi founded a yeshiva in Lod. In December 415, the Council of Diospolis was held here to try Pelagius; he was acquitted. In the sixth century, the city was renamed Georgiopolis after St. George, a soldier in the guard of the emperor Diocletian, who was born there between 256 and 285 CE. The Church of Saint George and Mosque of Al-Khadr is named for him. The 6th-century Madaba map shows Lydda as an unwalled city with a cluster of buildings under a black inscription reading "Lod, also Lydea, also Diospolis". An isolated large building with a semicircular colonnaded plaza in front of it might represent the St George shrine. After the Muslim conquest of Palestine by Amr ibn al-'As in 636 CE, Lod which was referred to as "al-Ludd" in Arabic served as the capital of Jund Filastin ("Military District of Palaestina") before the seat of power was moved to nearby Ramla during the reign of the Umayyad Caliph Suleiman ibn Abd al-Malik in 715–716. The population of al-Ludd was relocated to Ramla, as well. With the relocation of its inhabitants and the construction of the White Mosque in Ramla, al-Ludd lost its importance and fell into decay. The city was visited by the local Arab geographer al-Muqaddasi in 985, when it was under the Fatimid Caliphate, and was noted for its Great Mosque which served the residents of al-Ludd, Ramla, and the nearby villages. He also wrote of the city's "wonderful church (of St. George) at the gate of which Christ will slay the Antichrist." The Crusaders occupied the city in 1099 and named it St Jorge de Lidde. It was briefly conquered by Saladin, but retaken by the Crusaders in 1191. For the English Crusaders, it was a place of great significance as the birthplace of Saint George. The Crusaders made it the seat of a Latin Church diocese, and it remains a titular see. It owed the service of 10 knights and 20 sergeants, and it had its own burgess court during this era. In 1226, Ayyubid Syrian geographer Yaqut al-Hamawi visited al-Ludd and stated it was part of the Jerusalem District during Ayyubid rule. Sultan Baybars brought Lydda again under Muslim control by 1267–8. According to Qalqashandi, Lydda was an administrative centre of a wilaya during the fourteenth and fifteenth century in the Mamluk empire. Mujir al-Din described it as a pleasant village with an active Friday mosque. During this time, Lydda was a station on the postal route between Cairo and Damascus. In 1517, Lydda was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire as part of the Damascus Eyalet, and in the 1550s, the revenues of Lydda were designated for the new waqf of Hasseki Sultan Imaret in Jerusalem, established by Hasseki Hurrem Sultan (Roxelana), the wife of Suleiman the Magnificent. By 1596 Lydda was a part of the nahiya ("subdistrict") of Ramla, which was under the administration of the liwa ("district") of Gaza. It had a population of 241 households and 14 bachelors who were all Muslims, and 233 households who were Christians. They paid a fixed tax-rate of 33,3 % on agricultural products, including wheat, barley, summer crops, vineyards, fruit trees, sesame, special product ("dawalib" =spinning wheels), goats and beehives, in addition to occasional revenues and market toll, a total of 45,000 Akçe. All of the revenue went to the Waqf. In 1051 AH/1641/2, the Bedouin tribe of al-Sawālima from around Jaffa attacked the villages of Subṭāra, Bayt Dajan, al-Sāfiriya, Jindās, Lydda and Yāzūr belonging to Waqf Haseki Sultan. The village appeared as Lydda, though misplaced, on the map of Pierre Jacotin compiled in 1799. Missionary William M. Thomson visited Lydda in the mid-19th century, describing it as a "flourishing village of some 2,000 inhabitants, imbosomed in noble orchards of olive, fig, pomegranate, mulberry, sycamore, and other trees, surrounded every way by a very fertile neighbourhood. The inhabitants are evidently industrious and thriving, and the whole country between this and Ramleh is fast being filled up with their flourishing orchards. Rarely have I beheld a rural scene more delightful than this presented in early harvest ... It must be seen, heard, and enjoyed to be appreciated." In 1869, the population of Ludd was given as: 55 Catholics, 1,940 "Greeks", 5 Protestants and 4,850 Muslims. In 1870, the Church of Saint George was rebuilt. In 1892, the first railway station in the entire region was established in the city. In the second half of the 19th century, Jewish merchants migrated to the city, but left after the 1921 Jaffa riots. In 1882, the Palestine Exploration Fund's Survey of Western Palestine described Lod as "A small town, standing among enclosure of prickly pear, and having fine olive groves around it, especially to the south. The minaret of the mosque is a very conspicuous object over the whole of the plain. The inhabitants are principally Moslim, though the place is the seat of a Greek bishop resident of Jerusalem. The Crusading church has lately been restored, and is used by the Greeks. Wells are found in the gardens...." From 1918, Lydda was under the administration of the British Mandate in Palestine, as per a League of Nations decree that followed the Great War. During the Second World War, the British set up supply posts in and around Lydda and its railway station, also building an airport that was renamed Ben Gurion Airport after the death of Israel's first prime minister in 1973. At the time of the 1922 census of Palestine, Lydda had a population of 8,103 inhabitants (7,166 Muslims, 926 Christians, and 11 Jews), the Christians were 921 Orthodox, 4 Roman Catholics and 1 Melkite. This had increased by the 1931 census to 11,250 (10,002 Muslims, 1,210 Christians, 28 Jews, and 10 Bahai), in a total of 2475 residential houses. In 1938, Lydda had a population of 12,750. In 1945, Lydda had a population of 16,780 (14,910 Muslims, 1,840 Christians, 20 Jews and 10 "other"). Until 1948, Lydda was an Arab town with a population of around 20,000—18,500 Muslims and 1,500 Christians. In 1947, the United Nations proposed dividing Mandatory Palestine into two states, one Jewish state and one Arab; Lydda was to form part of the proposed Arab state. In the ensuing war, Israel captured Arab towns outside the area the UN had allotted it, including Lydda. In December 1947, thirteen Jewish passengers in a seven-car convoy to Ben Shemen Youth Village were ambushed and murdered.In a separate incident, three Jewish youths, two men and a woman were captured, then raped and murdered in a neighbouring village. Their bodies were paraded in Lydda’s principal street. The Israel Defense Forces entered Lydda on 11 July 1948. The following day, under the impression that it was under attack, the 3rd Battalion was ordered to shoot anyone "seen on the streets". According to Israel, 250 Arabs were killed. Other estimates are higher: Arab historian Aref al Aref estimated 400, and Nimr al Khatib 1,700. In 1948, the population rose to 50,000 during the Nakba, as Arab refugees fleeing other areas made their way there. A key event was the Palestinian expulsion from Lydda and Ramle, with the expulsion of 50,000-70,000 Palestinians from Lydda and Ramle by the Israel Defense Forces. All but 700 to 1,056 were expelled by order of the Israeli high command, and forced to walk 17 km (10+1⁄2 mi) to the Jordanian Arab Legion lines. Estimates of those who died from exhaustion and dehydration vary from a handful to 355. The town was subsequently sacked by the Israeli army. Some scholars, including Ilan Pappé, characterize this as ethnic cleansing. The few hundred Arabs who remained in the city were soon outnumbered by the influx of Jews who immigrated to Lod from August 1948 onward, most of them from Arab countries. As a result, Lod became a predominantly Jewish town. After the establishment of the state, the biblical name Lod was readopted. The Jewish immigrants who settled Lod came in waves, first from Morocco and Tunisia, later from Ethiopia, and then from the former Soviet Union. Since 2008, many urban development projects have been undertaken to improve the image of the city. Upscale neighbourhoods have been built, among them Ganei Ya'ar and Ahisemah, expanding the city to the east. According to a 2010 report in the Economist, a three-meter-high wall was built between Jewish and Arab neighbourhoods and construction in Jewish areas was given priority over construction in Arab neighborhoods. The newspaper says that violent crime in the Arab sector revolves mainly around family feuds over turf and honour crimes. In 2010, the Lod Community Foundation organised an event for representatives of bicultural youth movements, volunteer aid organisations, educational start-ups, businessmen, sports organizations, and conservationists working on programmes to better the city. In the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis, a state of emergency was declared in Lod after Arab rioting led to the death of an Israeli Jew. The Mayor of Lod, Yair Revivio, urged Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu to deploy Israel Border Police to restore order in the city. This was the first time since 1966 that Israel had declared this kind of emergency lockdown. International media noted that both Jewish and Palestinian mobs were active in Lod, but the "crackdown came for one side" only. Demographics In the 19th century and until the Lydda Death March, Lod was an exclusively Muslim-Christian town, with an estimated 6,850 inhabitants, of whom approximately 2,000 (29%) were Christian. According to the Israel Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), the population of Lod in 2010 was 69,500 people. According to the 2019 census, the population of Lod was 77,223, of which 53,581 people, comprising 69.4% of the city's population, were classified as "Jews and Others", and 23,642 people, comprising 30.6% as "Arab". Education According to CBS, 38 schools and 13,188 pupils are in the city. They are spread out as 26 elementary schools and 8,325 elementary school pupils, and 13 high schools and 4,863 high school pupils. About 52.5% of 12th-grade pupils were entitled to a matriculation certificate in 2001.[citation needed] Economy The airport and related industries are a major source of employment for the residents of Lod. Other important factories in the city are the communication equipment company "Talard", "Cafe-Co" - a subsidiary of the Strauss Group and "Kashev" - the computer center of Bank Leumi. A Jewish Agency Absorption Centre is also located in Lod. According to CBS figures for 2000, 23,032 people were salaried workers and 1,405 were self-employed. The mean monthly wage for a salaried worker was NIS 4,754, a real change of 2.9% over the course of 2000. Salaried men had a mean monthly wage of NIS 5,821 (a real change of 1.4%) versus NIS 3,547 for women (a real change of 4.6%). The mean income for the self-employed was NIS 4,991. About 1,275 people were receiving unemployment benefits and 7,145 were receiving an income supplement. Art and culture In 2009-2010, Dor Guez held an exhibit, Georgeopolis, at the Petach Tikva art museum that focuses on Lod. Archaeology A well-preserved mosaic floor dating to the Roman period was excavated in 1996 as part of a salvage dig conducted on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority and the Municipality of Lod, prior to widening HeHalutz Street. According to Jacob Fisch, executive director of the Friends of the Israel Antiquities Authority, a worker at the construction site noticed the tail of a tiger and halted work. The mosaic was initially covered over with soil at the conclusion of the excavation for lack of funds to conserve and develop the site. The mosaic is now part of the Lod Mosaic Archaeological Center. The floor, with its colorful display of birds, fish, exotic animals and merchant ships, is believed to have been commissioned by a wealthy resident of the city for his private home. The Lod Community Archaeology Program, which operates in ten Lod schools, five Jewish and five Israeli Arab, combines archaeological studies with participation in digs in Lod. Sports The city's major football club, Hapoel Bnei Lod, plays in Liga Leumit (the second division). Its home is at the Lod Municipal Stadium. The club was formed by a merger of Bnei Lod and Rakevet Lod in the 1980s. Two other clubs in the city play in the regional leagues: Hapoel MS Ortodoxim Lod in Liga Bet and Maccabi Lod in Liga Gimel. Hapoel Lod played in the top division during the 1960s and 1980s, and won the State Cup in 1984. The club folded in 2002. A new club, Hapoel Maxim Lod (named after former mayor Maxim Levy) was established soon after, but folded in 2007. Notable people Twin towns-sister cities Lod is twinned with: See also References Bibliography External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#cite_note-Throne-1994-12] | [TOKENS: 13839] |
Contents Black hole A black hole is an astronomical body so compact that its gravity prevents anything, including light, from escaping. Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that a sufficiently compact mass will form a black hole. The boundary of no escape is called the event horizon. In general relativity, a black hole's event horizon seals an object's fate but produces no locally detectable change when crossed. General relativity also predicts that every black hole should have a central singularity, where the curvature of spacetime is infinite. In many ways, a black hole acts like an ideal black body, as it reflects no light. Quantum field theory in curved spacetime predicts that event horizons emit Hawking radiation, with the same spectrum as a black body of a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. This temperature is of the order of billionths of a kelvin for stellar black holes, making it essentially impossible to observe directly. Objects whose gravitational fields are too strong for light to escape were first considered in the 18th century by John Michell and Pierre-Simon Laplace. In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild found the first modern solution of general relativity that would characterise a black hole. Due to his influential research, the Schwarzschild metric is named after him. David Finkelstein, in 1958, first interpreted Schwarzschild's model as a region of space from which nothing can escape. Black holes were long considered a mathematical curiosity; it was not until the 1960s that theoretical work showed they were a generic prediction of general relativity. The first black hole known was Cygnus X-1, identified by several researchers independently in 1971. Black holes typically form when massive stars collapse at the end of their life cycle. After a black hole has formed, it can grow by absorbing mass from its surroundings. Supermassive black holes of millions of solar masses may form by absorbing other stars and merging with other black holes, or via direct collapse of gas clouds. There is consensus that supermassive black holes exist in the centres of most galaxies. The presence of a black hole can be inferred through its interaction with other matter and with electromagnetic radiation such as visible light. Matter falling toward a black hole can form an accretion disk of infalling plasma, heated by friction and emitting light. In extreme cases, this creates a quasar, some of the brightest objects in the universe. Merging black holes can also be detected by observation of the gravitational waves they emit. If other stars are orbiting a black hole, their orbits can be used to determine the black hole's mass and location. Such observations can be used to exclude possible alternatives such as neutron stars. In this way, astronomers have identified numerous stellar black hole candidates in binary systems and established that the radio source known as Sagittarius A*, at the core of the Milky Way galaxy, contains a supermassive black hole of about 4.3 million solar masses. History The idea of a body so massive that even light could not escape was first proposed in the late 18th century by English astronomer and clergyman John Michell and independently by French scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace. Both scholars proposed very large stars in contrast to the modern concept of an extremely dense object. Michell's idea, in a short part of a letter published in 1784, calculated that a star with the same density but 500 times the radius of the sun would not let any emitted light escape; the surface escape velocity would exceed the speed of light.: 122 Michell correctly hypothesized that such supermassive but non-radiating bodies might be detectable through their gravitational effects on nearby visible bodies. In 1796, Laplace mentioned that a star could be invisible if it were sufficiently large while speculating on the origin of the Solar System in his book Exposition du Système du Monde. Franz Xaver von Zach asked Laplace for a mathematical analysis, which Laplace provided and published in a journal edited by von Zach. In 1905, Albert Einstein showed that the laws of electromagnetism would be invariant under a Lorentz transformation: they would be identical for observers travelling at different velocities relative to each other. This discovery became known as the principle of special relativity. Although the laws of mechanics had already been shown to be invariant, gravity remained yet to be included.: 19 In 1907, Einstein published a paper proposing his equivalence principle, the hypothesis that inertial mass and gravitational mass have a common cause. Using the principle, Einstein predicted the redshift and half of the lensing effect of gravity on light; the full prediction of gravitational lensing required development of general relativity.: 19 By 1915, Einstein refined these ideas into his general theory of relativity, which explained how matter affects spacetime, which in turn affects the motion of other matter. This formed the basis for black hole physics. Only a few months after Einstein published the field equations describing general relativity, astrophysicist Karl Schwarzschild set out to apply the idea to stars. He assumed spherical symmetry with no spin and found a solution to Einstein's equations.: 124 A few months after Schwarzschild, Johannes Droste, a student of Hendrik Lorentz, independently gave the same solution. At a certain radius from the center of the mass, the Schwarzschild solution became singular, meaning that some of the terms in the Einstein equations became infinite. The nature of this radius, which later became known as the Schwarzschild radius, was not understood at the time. Many physicists of the early 20th century were skeptical of the existence of black holes. In a 1926 popular science book, Arthur Eddington critiqued the idea of a star with mass compressed to its Schwarzschild radius as a flaw in the then-poorly-understood theory of general relativity.: 134 In 1939, Einstein himself used his theory of general relativity in an attempt to prove that black holes were impossible. His work relied on increasing pressure or increasing centrifugal force balancing the force of gravity so that the object would not collapse beyond its Schwarzschild radius. He missed the possibility that implosion would drive the system below this critical value.: 135 By the 1920s, astronomers had classified a number of white dwarf stars as too cool and dense to be explained by the gradual cooling of ordinary stars. In 1926, Ralph Fowler showed that quantum-mechanical degeneracy pressure was larger than thermal pressure at these densities.: 145 In 1931, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar calculated that a non-rotating body of electron-degenerate matter below a certain limiting mass is stable, and by 1934 he showed that this explained the catalog of white dwarf stars.: 151 When Chandrasekhar announced his results, Eddington pointed out that stars above this limit would radiate until they were sufficiently dense to prevent light from exiting, a conclusion he considered absurd. Eddington and, later, Lev Landau argued that some yet unknown mechanism would stop the collapse. In the 1930s, Fritz Zwicky and Walter Baade studied stellar novae, focusing on exceptionally bright ones they called supernovae. Zwicky promoted the idea that supernovae produced stars with the density of atomic nuclei—neutron stars—but this idea was largely ignored.: 171 In 1939, based on Chandrasekhar's reasoning, J. Robert Oppenheimer and George Volkoff predicted that neutron stars below a certain mass limit, later called the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff limit, would be stable due to neutron degeneracy pressure. Above that limit, they reasoned that either their model would not apply or that gravitational contraction would not stop.: 380 John Archibald Wheeler and two of his students resolved questions about the model behind the Tolman–Oppenheimer–Volkoff (TOV) limit. Harrison and Wheeler developed the equations of state relating density to pressure for cold matter all the way through electron degeneracy and neutron degeneracy. Masami Wakano and Wheeler then used the equations to compute the equilibrium curve for stars, relating mass to circumference. They found no additional features that would invalidate the TOV limit. This meant that the only thing that could prevent black holes from forming was a dynamic process ejecting sufficient mass from a star as it cooled.: 205 The modern concept of black holes was formulated by Robert Oppenheimer and his student Hartland Snyder in 1939.: 80 In the paper, Oppenheimer and Snyder solved Einstein's equations of general relativity for an idealized imploding star, in a model later called the Oppenheimer–Snyder model, then described the results from far outside the star. The implosion starts as one might expect: the star material rapidly collapses inward. However, as the density of the star increases, gravitational time dilation increases and the collapse, viewed from afar, seems to slow down further and further until the star reaches its Schwarzschild radius, where it appears frozen in time.: 217 In 1958, David Finkelstein identified the Schwarzschild surface as an event horizon, calling it "a perfect unidirectional membrane: causal influences can cross it in only one direction". In this sense, events that occur inside of the black hole cannot affect events that occur outside of the black hole. Finkelstein created a new reference frame to include the point of view of infalling observers.: 103 Finkelstein's new frame of reference allowed events at the surface of an imploding star to be related to events far away. By 1962 the two points of view were reconciled, convincing many skeptics that implosion into a black hole made physical sense.: 226 The era from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s was the "golden age of black hole research", when general relativity and black holes became mainstream subjects of research.: 258 In this period, more general black hole solutions were found. In 1963, Roy Kerr found the exact solution for a rotating black hole. Two years later, Ezra Newman found the cylindrically symmetric solution for a black hole that is both rotating and electrically charged. In 1967, Werner Israel found that the Schwarzschild solution was the only possible solution for a nonspinning, uncharged black hole, meaning that a Schwarzschild black hole would be defined by its mass alone. Similar identities were later found for Reissner-Nordstrom and Kerr black holes, defined only by their mass and their charge or spin respectively. Together, these findings became known as the no-hair theorem, which states that a stationary black hole is completely described by the three parameters of the Kerr–Newman metric: mass, angular momentum, and electric charge. At first, it was suspected that the strange mathematical singularities found in each of the black hole solutions only appeared due to the assumption that a black hole would be perfectly spherically symmetric, and therefore the singularities would not appear in generic situations where black holes would not necessarily be symmetric. This view was held in particular by Vladimir Belinski, Isaak Khalatnikov, and Evgeny Lifshitz, who tried to prove that no singularities appear in generic solutions, although they would later reverse their positions. However, in 1965, Roger Penrose proved that general relativity without quantum mechanics requires that singularities appear in all black holes. Astronomical observations also made great strides during this era. In 1967, Antony Hewish and Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars and by 1969, these were shown to be rapidly rotating neutron stars. Until that time, neutron stars, like black holes, were regarded as just theoretical curiosities, but the discovery of pulsars showed their physical relevance and spurred a further interest in all types of compact objects that might be formed by gravitational collapse. Based on observations in Greenwich and Toronto in the early 1970s, Cygnus X-1, a galactic X-ray source discovered in 1964, became the first astronomical object commonly accepted to be a black hole. Work by James Bardeen, Jacob Bekenstein, Carter, and Hawking in the early 1970s led to the formulation of black hole thermodynamics. These laws describe the behaviour of a black hole in close analogy to the laws of thermodynamics by relating mass to energy, area to entropy, and surface gravity to temperature. The analogy was completed: 442 when Hawking, in 1974, showed that quantum field theory implies that black holes should radiate like a black body with a temperature proportional to the surface gravity of the black hole, predicting the effect now known as Hawking radiation. While Cygnus X-1, a stellar-mass black hole, was generally accepted by the scientific community as a black hole by the end of 1973, it would be decades before a supermassive black hole would gain the same broad recognition. Although, as early as the 1960s, physicists such as Donald Lynden-Bell and Martin Rees had suggested that powerful quasars in the center of galaxies were powered by accreting supermassive black holes, little observational proof existed at the time. However, the Hubble Space Telescope, launched decades later, found that supermassive black holes were not only present in these active galactic nuclei, but that supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies were ubiquitous: Almost every galaxy had a supermassive black hole at its center, many of which were quiescent. In 1999, David Merritt proposed the M–sigma relation, which related the dispersion of the velocity of matter in the center bulge of a galaxy to the mass of the supermassive black hole at its core. Subsequent studies confirmed this correlation. Around the same time, based on telescope observations of the velocities of stars at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, independent work groups led by Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel concluded that the compact radio source in the center of the galaxy, Sagittarius A*, was likely a supermassive black hole. On 11 February 2016, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration announced the first direct detection of gravitational waves, named GW150914, representing the first observation of a black hole merger. At the time of the merger, the black holes were approximately 1.4 billion light-years away from Earth and had masses of 30 and 35 solar masses.: 6 In 2017, Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish, who had spearheaded the project, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. Since the initial discovery in 2015, hundreds more gravitational waves have been observed by LIGO and another interferometer, Virgo. On 10 April 2019, the first direct image of a black hole and its vicinity was published, following observations made by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) in 2017 of the supermassive black hole in Messier 87's galactic centre. In 2022, the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration released an image of the black hole in the center of the Milky Way galaxy, Sagittarius A*; The data had been collected in 2017. In 2020, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for work on black holes. Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel shared one-half for their discovery that Sagittarius A* is a supermassive black hole. Penrose received the other half for his work showing that the mathematics of general relativity requires the formation of black holes. Cosmologists lamented that Hawking's extensive theoretical work on black holes would not be honored since he died in 2018. In December 1967, a student reportedly suggested the phrase black hole at a lecture by John Wheeler; Wheeler adopted the term for its brevity and "advertising value", and Wheeler's stature in the field ensured it quickly caught on, leading some to credit Wheeler with coining the phrase. However, the term was used by others around that time. Science writer Marcia Bartusiak traces the term black hole to physicist Robert H. Dicke, who in the early 1960s reportedly compared the phenomenon to the Black Hole of Calcutta, notorious as a prison where people entered but never left alive. The term was used in print by Life and Science News magazines in 1963, and by science journalist Ann Ewing in her article "'Black Holes' in Space", dated 18 January 1964, which was a report on a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science held in Cleveland, Ohio. Definition A black hole is generally defined as a region of spacetime from which no information-carrying signals or objects can escape. However, verifying an object as a black hole by this definition would require waiting for an infinite time and at an infinite distance from the black hole to verify that indeed, nothing has escaped, and thus cannot be used to identify a physical black hole. Broadly, physicists do not have a precisely-agreed-upon definition of a black hole. Among astrophysicists, a black hole is a compact object with a mass larger than four solar masses. A black hole may also be defined as a reservoir of information: 142 or a region where space is falling inwards faster than the speed of light. Properties The no-hair theorem postulates that, once it achieves a stable condition after formation, a black hole has only three independent physical properties: mass, electric charge, and angular momentum; the black hole is otherwise featureless. If the conjecture is true, any two black holes that share the same values for these properties, or parameters, are indistinguishable from one another. The degree to which the conjecture is true for real black holes is currently an unsolved problem. The simplest static black holes have mass but neither electric charge nor angular momentum. According to Birkhoff's theorem, these Schwarzschild black holes are the only vacuum solution that is spherically symmetric. Solutions describing more general black holes also exist. Non-rotating charged black holes are described by the Reissner–Nordström metric, while the Kerr metric describes a non-charged rotating black hole. The most general stationary black hole solution known is the Kerr–Newman metric, which describes a black hole with both charge and angular momentum. The simplest static black holes have mass but neither electric charge nor angular momentum. Contrary to the popular notion of a black hole "sucking in everything" in its surroundings, from far away, the external gravitational field of a black hole is identical to that of any other body of the same mass. While a black hole can theoretically have any positive mass, the charge and angular momentum are constrained by the mass. The total electric charge Q and the total angular momentum J are expected to satisfy the inequality Q 2 4 π ϵ 0 + c 2 J 2 G M 2 ≤ G M 2 {\displaystyle {\frac {Q^{2}}{4\pi \epsilon _{0}}}+{\frac {c^{2}J^{2}}{GM^{2}}}\leq GM^{2}} for a black hole of mass M. Black holes with the maximum possible charge or spin satisfying this inequality are called extremal black holes. Solutions of Einstein's equations that violate this inequality exist, but they do not possess an event horizon. These are so-called naked singularities that can be observed from the outside. Because these singularities make the universe inherently unpredictable, many physicists believe they could not exist. The weak cosmic censorship hypothesis, proposed by Sir Roger Penrose, rules out the formation of such singularities, when they are created through the gravitational collapse of realistic matter. However, this theory has not yet been proven, and some physicists believe that naked singularities could exist. It is also unknown whether black holes could even become extremal, forming naked singularities, since natural processes counteract increasing spin and charge when a black hole becomes near-extremal. The total mass of a black hole can be estimated by analyzing the motion of objects near the black hole, such as stars or gas. All black holes spin, often fast—One supermassive black hole, GRS 1915+105 has been estimated to spin at over 1,000 revolutions per second. The Milky Way's central black hole Sagittarius A* rotates at about 90% of the maximum rate. The spin rate can be inferred from measurements of atomic spectral lines in the X-ray range. As gas near the black hole plunges inward, high energy X-ray emission from electron-positron pairs illuminates the gas further out, appearing red-shifted due to relativistic effects. Depending on the spin of the black hole, this plunge happens at different radii from the hole, with different degrees of redshift. Astronomers can use the gap between the x-ray emission of the outer disk and the redshifted emission from plunging material to determine the spin of the black hole. A newer way to estimate spin is based on the temperature of gasses accreting onto the black hole. The method requires an independent measurement of the black hole mass and inclination angle of the accretion disk followed by computer modeling. Gravitational waves from coalescing binary black holes can also provide the spin of both progenitor black holes and the merged hole, but such events are rare. A spinning black hole has angular momentum. The supermassive black hole in the center of the Messier 87 (M87) galaxy appears to have an angular momentum very close to the maximum theoretical value. That uncharged limit is J ≤ G M 2 c , {\displaystyle J\leq {\frac {GM^{2}}{c}},} allowing definition of a dimensionless spin magnitude such that 0 ≤ c J G M 2 ≤ 1. {\displaystyle 0\leq {\frac {cJ}{GM^{2}}}\leq 1.} Most black holes are believed to have an approximately neutral charge. For example, Michal Zajaček, Arman Tursunov, Andreas Eckart, and Silke Britzen found the electric charge of Sagittarius A* to be at least ten orders of magnitude below the theoretical maximum. A charged black hole repels other like charges just like any other charged object. If a black hole were to become charged, particles with an opposite sign of charge would be pulled in by the extra electromagnetic force, while particles with the same sign of charge would be repelled, neutralizing the black hole. This effect may not be as strong if the black hole is also spinning. The presence of charge can reduce the diameter of the black hole by up to 38%. The charge Q for a nonspinning black hole is bounded by Q ≤ G M , {\displaystyle Q\leq {\sqrt {G}}M,} where G is the gravitational constant and M is the black hole's mass. Classification Black holes can have a wide range of masses. The minimum mass of a black hole formed by stellar gravitational collapse is governed by the maximum mass of a neutron star and is believed to be approximately two-to-four solar masses. However, theoretical primordial black holes, believed to have formed soon after the Big Bang, could be far smaller, with masses as little as 10−5 grams at formation. These very small black holes are sometimes called micro black holes. Black holes formed by stellar collapse are called stellar black holes. Estimates of their maximum mass at formation vary, but generally range from 10 to 100 solar masses, with higher estimates for black holes progenated by low-metallicity stars. The mass of a black hole formed via a supernova has a lower bound: If the progenitor star is too small, the collapse may be stopped by the degeneracy pressure of the star's constituents, allowing the condensation of matter into an exotic denser state. Degeneracy pressure occurs from the Pauli exclusion principle—Particles will resist being in the same place as each other. Smaller progenitor stars, with masses less than about 8 M☉, will be held together by the degeneracy pressure of electrons and will become a white dwarf. For more massive progenitor stars, electron degeneracy pressure is no longer strong enough to resist the force of gravity and the star will be held together by neutron degeneracy pressure, which can occur at much higher densities, forming a neutron star. If the star is still too massive, even neutron degeneracy pressure will not be able to resist the force of gravity and the star will collapse into a black hole.: 5.8 Stellar black holes can also gain mass via accretion of nearby matter, often from a companion object such as a star. Black holes that are larger than stellar black holes but smaller than supermassive black holes are called intermediate-mass black holes, with masses of approximately 102 to 105 solar masses. These black holes seem to be rarer than their stellar and supermassive counterparts, with relatively few candidates having been observed. Physicists have speculated that such black holes may form from collisions in globular and star clusters or at the center of low-mass galaxies. They may also form as the result of mergers of smaller black holes, with several LIGO observations finding merged black holes within the 110-350 solar mass range. The black holes with the largest masses are called supermassive black holes, with masses more than 106 times that of the Sun. These black holes are believed to exist at the centers of almost every large galaxy, including the Milky Way. Some scientists have proposed a subcategory of even larger black holes, called ultramassive black holes, with masses greater than 109-1010 solar masses. Theoretical models predict that the accretion disc that feeds black holes will be unstable once a black hole reaches 50-100 billion times the mass of the Sun, setting a rough upper limit to black hole mass. Structure While black holes are conceptually invisible sinks of all matter and light, in astronomical settings, their enormous gravity alters the motion of surrounding objects and pulls nearby gas inwards at near-light speed, making the area around black holes the brightest objects in the universe. Some black holes have relativistic jets—thin streams of plasma travelling away from the black hole at more than one-tenth of the speed of light. A small faction of the matter falling towards the black hole gets accelerated away along the hole rotation axis. These jets can extend as far as millions of parsecs from the black hole itself. Black holes of any mass can have jets. However, they are typically observed around spinning black holes with strongly-magnetized accretion disks. Relativistic jets were more common in the early universe, when galaxies and their corresponding supermassive black holes were rapidly gaining mass. All black holes with jets also have an accretion disk, but the jets are usually brighter than the disk. Quasars, typically found in other galaxies, are believed to be supermassive black holes with jets; microquasars are believed to be stellar-mass objects with jets, typically observed in the Milky Way. The mechanism of formation of jets is not yet known, but several options have been proposed. One method proposed to fuel these jets is the Blandford-Znajek process, which suggests that the dragging of magnetic field lines by a black hole's rotation could launch jets of matter into space. The Penrose process, which involves extraction of a black hole's rotational energy, has also been proposed as a potential mechanism of jet propulsion. Due to conservation of angular momentum, gas falling into the gravitational well created by a massive object will typically form a disk-like structure around the object.: 242 As the disk's angular momentum is transferred outward due to internal processes, its matter falls farther inward, converting its gravitational energy into heat and releasing a large flux of x-rays. The temperature of these disks can range from thousands to millions of Kelvin, and temperatures can differ throughout a single accretion disk. Accretion disks can also emit in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, depending on the disk's turbulence and magnetization and the black hole's mass and angular momentum. Accretion disks can be defined as geometrically thin or geometrically thick. Geometrically thin disks are mostly confined to the black hole's equatorial plane and have a well-defined edge at the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO), while geometrically thick disks are supported by internal pressure and temperature and can extend inside the ISCO. Disks with high rates of electron scattering and absorption, appearing bright and opaque, are called optically thick; optically thin disks are more translucent and produce fainter images when viewed from afar. Accretion disks of black holes accreting beyond the Eddington limit are often referred to as polish donuts due to their thick, toroidal shape that resembles that of a donut. Quasar accretion disks are expected to usually appear blue in color. The disk for a stellar black hole, on the other hand, would likely look orange, yellow, or red, with its inner regions being the brightest. Theoretical research suggests that the hotter a disk is, the bluer it should be, although this is not always supported by observations of real astronomical objects. Accretion disk colors may also be altered by the Doppler effect, with the part of the disk travelling towards an observer appearing bluer and brighter and the part of the disk travelling away from the observer appearing redder and dimmer. In Newtonian gravity, test particles can stably orbit at arbitrary distances from a central object. In general relativity, however, there exists a smallest possible radius for which a massive particle can orbit stably. Any infinitesimal inward perturbations to this orbit will lead to the particle spiraling into the black hole, and any outward perturbations will, depending on the energy, cause the particle to spiral in, move to a stable orbit further from the black hole, or escape to infinity. This orbit is called the innermost stable circular orbit, or ISCO. The location of the ISCO depends on the spin of the black hole and the spin of the particle itself. In the case of a Schwarzschild black hole (spin zero) and a particle without spin, the location of the ISCO is: r I S C O = 3 r s = 6 G M c 2 , {\displaystyle r_{\rm {ISCO}}=3\,r_{\text{s}}={\frac {6\,GM}{c^{2}}},} where r I S C O {\displaystyle r_{\rm {_{ISCO}}}} is the radius of the ISCO, r s {\displaystyle r_{\text{s}}} is the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole, G {\displaystyle G} is the gravitational constant, and c {\displaystyle c} is the speed of light. The radius of this orbit changes slightly based on particle spin. For charged black holes, the ISCO moves inwards. For spinning black holes, the ISCO is moved inwards for particles orbiting in the same direction that the black hole is spinning (prograde) and outwards for particles orbiting in the opposite direction (retrograde). For example, the ISCO for a particle orbiting retrograde can be as far out as about 9 r s {\displaystyle 9r_{\text{s}}} , while the ISCO for a particle orbiting prograde can be as close as at the event horizon itself. The photon sphere is a spherical boundary for which photons moving on tangents to that sphere are bent completely around the black hole, possibly orbiting multiple times. Light rays with impact parameters less than the radius of the photon sphere enter the black hole. For Schwarzschild black holes, the photon sphere has a radius 1.5 times the Schwarzschild radius; the radius for non-Schwarzschild black holes is at least 1.5 times the radius of the event horizon. When viewed from a great distance, the photon sphere creates an observable black hole shadow. Since no light emerges from within the black hole, this shadow is the limit for possible observations.: 152 The shadow of colliding black holes should have characteristic warped shapes, allowing scientists to detect black holes that are about to merge. While light can still escape from the photon sphere, any light that crosses the photon sphere on an inbound trajectory will be captured by the black hole. Therefore, any light that reaches an outside observer from the photon sphere must have been emitted by objects between the photon sphere and the event horizon. Light emitted towards the photon sphere may also curve around the black hole and return to the emitter. For a rotating, uncharged black hole, the radius of the photon sphere depends on the spin parameter and whether the photon is orbiting prograde or retrograde. For a photon orbiting prograde, the photon sphere will be 1-3 Schwarzschild radii from the center of the black hole, while for a photon orbiting retrograde, the photon sphere will be between 3-5 Schwarzschild radii from the center of the black hole. The exact location of the photon sphere depends on the magnitude of the black hole's rotation. For a charged, nonrotating black hole, there will only be one photon sphere, and the radius of the photon sphere will decrease for increasing black hole charge. For non-extremal, charged, rotating black holes, there will always be two photon spheres, with the exact radii depending on the parameters of the black hole. Near a rotating black hole, spacetime rotates similar to a vortex. The rotating spacetime will drag any matter and light into rotation around the spinning black hole. This effect of general relativity, called frame dragging, gets stronger closer to the spinning mass. The region of spacetime in which it is impossible to stay still is called the ergosphere. The ergosphere of a black hole is a volume bounded by the black hole's event horizon and the ergosurface, which coincides with the event horizon at the poles but bulges out from it around the equator. Matter and radiation can escape from the ergosphere. Through the Penrose process, objects can emerge from the ergosphere with more energy than they entered with. The extra energy is taken from the rotational energy of the black hole, slowing down the rotation of the black hole.: 268 A variation of the Penrose process in the presence of strong magnetic fields, the Blandford–Znajek process, is considered a likely mechanism for the enormous luminosity and relativistic jets of quasars and other active galactic nuclei. The observable region of spacetime around a black hole closest to its event horizon is called the plunging region. In this area it is no longer possible for free falling matter to follow circular orbits or stop a final descent into the black hole. Instead, it will rapidly plunge toward the black hole at close to the speed of light, growing increasingly hot and producing a characteristic, detectable thermal emission. However, light and radiation emitted from this region can still escape from the black hole's gravitational pull. For a nonspinning, uncharged black hole, the radius of the event horizon, or Schwarzschild radius, is proportional to the mass, M, through r s = 2 G M c 2 ≈ 2.95 M M ⊙ k m , {\displaystyle r_{\mathrm {s} }={\frac {2GM}{c^{2}}}\approx 2.95\,{\frac {M}{M_{\odot }}}~\mathrm {km,} } where rs is the Schwarzschild radius and M☉ is the mass of the Sun.: 124 For a black hole with nonzero spin or electric charge, the radius is smaller,[Note 1] until an extremal black hole could have an event horizon close to r + = G M c 2 , {\displaystyle r_{\mathrm {+} }={\frac {GM}{c^{2}}},} half the radius of a nonspinning, uncharged black hole of the same mass. Since the volume within the Schwarzschild radius increase with the cube of the radius, average density of a black hole inside its Schwarzschild radius is inversely proportional to the square of its mass: supermassive black holes are much less dense than stellar black holes. The average density of a 108 M☉ black hole is comparable to that of water. The defining feature of a black hole is the existence of an event horizon, a boundary in spacetime through which matter and light can pass only inward towards the center of the black hole. Nothing, not even light, can escape from inside the event horizon. The event horizon is referred to as such because if an event occurs within the boundary, information from that event cannot reach or affect an outside observer, making it impossible to determine whether such an event occurred.: 179 For non-rotating black holes, the geometry of the event horizon is precisely spherical, while for rotating black holes, the event horizon is oblate. To a distant observer, a clock near a black hole would appear to tick more slowly than one further from the black hole.: 217 This effect, known as gravitational time dilation, would also cause an object falling into a black hole to appear to slow as it approached the event horizon, never quite reaching the horizon from the perspective of an outside observer.: 218 All processes on this object would appear to slow down, and any light emitted by the object to appear redder and dimmer, an effect known as gravitational redshift. An object falling from half of a Schwarzschild radius above the event horizon would fade away until it could no longer be seen, disappearing from view within one hundredth of a second. It would also appear to flatten onto the black hole, joining all other material that had ever fallen into the hole. On the other hand, an observer falling into a black hole would not notice any of these effects as they cross the event horizon. Their own clocks appear to them to tick normally, and they cross the event horizon after a finite time without noting any singular behaviour. In general relativity, it is impossible to determine the location of the event horizon from local observations, due to Einstein's equivalence principle.: 222 Black holes that are rotating and/or charged have an inner horizon, often called the Cauchy horizon, inside of the black hole. The inner horizon is divided up into two segments: an ingoing section and an outgoing section. At the ingoing section of the Cauchy horizon, radiation and matter that fall into the black hole would build up at the horizon, causing the curvature of spacetime to go to infinity. This would cause an observer falling in to experience tidal forces. This phenomenon is often called mass inflation, since it is associated with a parameter dictating the black hole's internal mass growing exponentially, and the buildup of tidal forces is called the mass-inflation singularity or Cauchy horizon singularity. Some physicists have argued that in realistic black holes, accretion and Hawking radiation would stop mass inflation from occurring. At the outgoing section of the inner horizon, infalling radiation would backscatter off of the black hole's spacetime curvature and travel outward, building up at the outgoing Cauchy horizon. This would cause an infalling observer to experience a gravitational shock wave and tidal forces as the spacetime curvature at the horizon grew to infinity. This buildup of tidal forces is called the shock singularity. Both of these singularities are weak, meaning that an object crossing them would only be deformed a finite amount by tidal forces, even though the spacetime curvature would still be infinite at the singularity. This is as opposed to a strong singularity, where an object hitting the singularity would be stretched and squeezed by an infinite amount. They are also null singularities, meaning that a photon could travel parallel to the them without ever being intercepted. Ignoring quantum effects, every black hole has a singularity inside, points where the curvature of spacetime becomes infinite, and geodesics terminate within a finite proper time.: 205 For a non-rotating black hole, this region takes the shape of a single point; for a rotating black hole it is smeared out to form a ring singularity that lies in the plane of rotation.: 264 In both cases, the singular region has zero volume. All of the mass of the black hole ends up in the singularity.: 252 Since the singularity has nonzero mass in an infinitely small space, it can be thought of as having infinite density. Observers falling into a Schwarzschild black hole (i.e., non-rotating and not charged) cannot avoid being carried into the singularity once they cross the event horizon. As they fall further into the black hole, they will be torn apart by the growing tidal forces in a process sometimes referred to as spaghettification or the noodle effect. Eventually, they will reach the singularity and be crushed into an infinitely small point.: 182 However any perturbations, such as those caused by matter or radiation falling in, would cause space to oscillate chaotically near the singularity. Any matter falling in would experience intense tidal forces rapidly changing in direction, all while being compressed into an increasingly small volume. Alternative forms of general relativity, including addition of some quatum effects, can lead to regular, or nonsingular, black holes without singularities. For example, the fuzzball model, based on string theory, states that black holes are actually made up of quantum microstates and need not have a singularity or an event horizon. The theory of loop quantum gravity proposes that the curvature and density at the center of a black hole is large, but not infinite. Formation Black holes are formed by gravitational collapse of massive stars, either by direct collapse or during a supernova explosion in a process called fallback. Black holes can result from the merger of two neutron stars or a neutron star and a black hole. Other more speculative mechanisms include primordial black holes created from density fluctuations in the early universe, the collapse of dark stars, a hypothetical object powered by annihilation of dark matter, or from hypothetical self-interacting dark matter. Gravitational collapse occurs when an object's internal pressure is insufficient to resist the object's own gravity. At the end of a star's life, it will run out of hydrogen to fuse, and will start fusing more and more massive elements, until it gets to iron. Since the fusion of elements heavier than iron would require more energy than it would release, nuclear fusion ceases. If the iron core of the star is too massive, the star will no longer be able to support itself and will undergo gravitational collapse. While most of the energy released during gravitational collapse is emitted very quickly, an outside observer does not actually see the end of this process. Even though the collapse takes a finite amount of time from the reference frame of infalling matter, a distant observer would see the infalling material slow and halt just above the event horizon, due to gravitational time dilation. Light from the collapsing material takes longer and longer to reach the observer, with the delay growing to infinity as the emitting material reaches the event horizon. Thus the external observer never sees the formation of the event horizon; instead, the collapsing material seems to become dimmer and increasingly red-shifted, eventually fading away. Observations of quasars at redshift z ∼ 7 {\displaystyle z\sim 7} , less than a billion years after the Big Bang, has led to investigations of other ways to form black holes. The accretion process to build supermassive black holes has a limiting rate of mass accumulation and a billion years is not enough time to reach quasar status. One suggestion is direct collapse of nearly pure hydrogen gas (low metalicity) clouds characteristic of the young universe, forming a supermassive star which collapses into a black hole. It has been suggested that seed black holes with typical masses of ~105 M☉ could have formed in this way which then could grow to ~109 M☉. However, the very large amount of gas required for direct collapse is not typically stable to fragmentation to form multiple stars. Thus another approach suggests massive star formation followed by collisions that seed massive black holes which ultimately merge to create a quasar.: 85 A neutron star in a common envelope with a regular star can accrete sufficient material to collapse to a black hole or two neutron stars can merge. These avenues for the formation of black holes are considered relatively rare. In the current epoch of the universe, conditions needed to form black holes are rare and are mostly only found in stars. However, in the early universe, conditions may have allowed for black hole formations via other means. Fluctuations of spacetime soon after the Big Bang may have formed areas that were denser then their surroundings. Initially, these regions would not have been compact enough to form a black hole, but eventually, the curvature of spacetime in the regions become large enough to cause them to collapse into a black hole. Different models for the early universe vary widely in their predictions of the scale of these fluctuations. Various models predict the creation of primordial black holes ranging from a Planck mass (~2.2×10−8 kg) to hundreds of thousands of solar masses. Primordial black holes with masses less than 1015 g would have evaporated by now due to Hawking radiation. Despite the early universe being extremely dense, it did not re-collapse into a black hole during the Big Bang, since the universe was expanding rapidly and did not have the gravitational differential necessary for black hole formation. Models for the gravitational collapse of objects of relatively constant size, such as stars, do not necessarily apply in the same way to rapidly expanding space such as the Big Bang. In principle, black holes could be formed in high-energy particle collisions that achieve sufficient density, although no such events have been detected. These hypothetical micro black holes, which could form from the collision of cosmic rays and Earth's atmosphere or in particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, would not be able to aggregate additional mass. Instead, they would evaporate in about 10−25 seconds, posing no threat to the Earth. Evolution Black holes can also merge with other objects such as stars or even other black holes. This is thought to have been important, especially in the early growth of supermassive black holes, which could have formed from the aggregation of many smaller objects. The process has also been proposed as the origin of some intermediate-mass black holes. Mergers of supermassive black holes may take a long time: As a binary of supermassive black holes approach each other, most nearby stars are ejected, leaving little for the remaining black holes to gravitationally interact with that would allow them to get closer to each other. This phenomenon has been called the final parsec problem, as the distance at which this happens is usually around one parsec. When a black hole accretes matter, the gas in the inner accretion disk orbits at very high speeds because of its proximity to the black hole. The resulting friction heats the inner disk to temperatures at which it emits vast amounts of electromagnetic radiation (mainly X-rays) detectable by telescopes. By the time the matter of the disk reaches the ISCO, between 5.7% and 42% of its mass will have been converted to energy, depending on the black hole's spin. About 90% of this energy is released within about 20 black hole radii. In many cases, accretion disks are accompanied by relativistic jets that are emitted along the black hole's poles, which carry away much of the energy. The mechanism for the creation of these jets is currently not well understood, in part due to insufficient data. Many of the universe's most energetic phenomena have been attributed to the accretion of matter on black holes. Active galactic nuclei and quasars are believed to be the accretion disks of supermassive black holes. X-ray binaries are generally accepted to be binary systems in which one of the two objects is a compact object accreting matter from its companion. Ultraluminous X-ray sources may be the accretion disks of intermediate-mass black holes. At a certain rate of accretion, the outward radiation pressure will become as strong as the inward gravitational force, and the black hole should unable to accrete any faster. This limit is called the Eddington limit. However, many black holes accrete beyond this rate due to their non-spherical geometry or instabilities in the accretion disk. Accretion beyond the limit is called Super-Eddington accretion and may have been commonplace in the early universe. Stars have been observed to get torn apart by tidal forces in the immediate vicinity of supermassive black holes in galaxy nuclei, in what is known as a tidal disruption event (TDE). Some of the material from the disrupted star forms an accretion disk around the black hole, which emits observable electromagnetic radiation. The correlation between the masses of supermassive black holes in the centres of galaxies with the velocity dispersion and mass of stars in their host bulges suggests that the formation of galaxies and the formation of their central black holes are related. Black hole winds from rapid accretion, particularly when the galaxy itself is still accreting matter, can compress gas nearby, accelerating star formation. However, if the winds become too strong, the black hole may blow nearly all of the gas out of the galaxy, quenching star formation. Black hole jets may also energize nearby cavities of plasma and eject low-entropy gas from out of the galactic core, causing gas in galactic centers to be hotter than expected. If Hawking's theory of black hole radiation is correct, then black holes are expected to shrink and evaporate over time as they lose mass by the emission of photons and other particles. The temperature of this thermal spectrum (Hawking temperature) is proportional to the surface gravity of the black hole, which is inversely proportional to the mass. Hence, large black holes emit less radiation than small black holes.: Ch. 9.6 A stellar black hole of 1 M☉ has a Hawking temperature of 62 nanokelvins. This is far less than the 2.7 K temperature of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Stellar-mass or larger black holes receive more mass from the cosmic microwave background than they emit through Hawking radiation and thus will grow instead of shrinking. To have a Hawking temperature larger than 2.7 K (and be able to evaporate), a black hole would need a mass less than the Moon. Such a black hole would have a diameter of less than a tenth of a millimetre. The Hawking radiation for an astrophysical black hole is predicted to be very weak and would thus be exceedingly difficult to detect from Earth. A possible exception is the burst of gamma rays emitted in the last stage of the evaporation of primordial black holes. Searches for such flashes have proven unsuccessful and provide stringent limits on the possibility of existence of low mass primordial black holes, with modern research predicting that primordial black holes must make up less than a fraction of 10−7 of the universe's total mass. NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, launched in 2008, has searched for these flashes, but has not yet found any. The properties of a black hole are constrained and interrelated by the theories that predict these properties. When based on general relativity, these relationships are called the laws of black hole mechanics. For a black hole that is not still forming or accreting matter, the zeroth law of black hole mechanics states the black hole's surface gravity is constant across the event horizon. The first law relates changes in the black hole's surface area, angular momentum, and charge to changes in its energy. The second law says the surface area of a black hole never decreases on its own. Finally, the third law says that the surface gravity of a black hole is never zero. These laws are mathematical analogs of the laws of thermodynamics. They are not equivalent, however, because, according to general relativity without quantum mechanics, a black hole can never emit radiation, and thus its temperature must always be zero.: 11 Quantum mechanics predicts that a black hole will continuously emit thermal Hawking radiation, and therefore must always have a nonzero temperature. It also predicts that all black holes have entropy which scales with their surface area. When quantum mechanics is accounted for, the laws of black hole mechanics become equivalent to the classical laws of thermodynamics. However, these conclusions are derived without a complete theory of quantum gravity, although many potential theories do predict black holes having entropy and temperature. Thus, the true quantum nature of black hole thermodynamics continues to be debated.: 29 Observational evidence Millions of black holes with around 30 solar masses derived from stellar collapse are expected to exist in the Milky Way. Even a dwarf galaxy like Draco should have hundreds. Only a few of these have been detected. By nature, black holes do not themselves emit any electromagnetic radiation other than the hypothetical Hawking radiation, so astrophysicists searching for black holes must generally rely on indirect observations. The defining characteristic of a black hole is its event horizon. The horizon itself cannot be imaged, so all other possible explanations for these indirect observations must be considered and eliminated before concluding that a black hole has been observed.: 11 The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) is a global system of radio telescopes capable of directly observing a black hole shadow. The angular resolution of a telescope is based on its aperture and the wavelengths it is observing. Because the angular diameters of Sagittarius A* and Messier 87* in the sky are very small, a single telescope would need to be about the size of the Earth to clearly distinguish their horizons using radio wavelengths. By combining data from several different radio telescopes around the world, the Event Horizon Telescope creates an effective aperture the diameter size of the Earth. The EHT team used imaging algorithms to compute the most probable image from the data in its observations of Sagittarius A* and M87*. Gravitational-wave interferometry can be used to detect merging black holes and other compact objects. In this method, a laser beam is split down two long arms of a tunnel. The laser beams reflect off of mirrors in the tunnels and converge at the intersection of the arms, cancelling each other out. However, when a gravitational wave passes, it warps spacetime, changing the lengths of the arms themselves. Since each laser beam is now travelling a slightly different distance, they do not cancel out and produce a recognizable signal. Analysis of the signal can give scientists information about what caused the gravitational waves. Since gravitational waves are very weak, gravitational-wave observatories such as LIGO must have arms several kilometers long and carefully control for noise from Earth to be able to detect these gravitational waves. Since the first measurements in 2016, multiple gravitational waves from black holes have been detected and analyzed. The proper motions of stars near the centre of the Milky Way provide strong observational evidence that these stars are orbiting a supermassive black hole. Since 1995, astronomers have tracked the motions of 90 stars orbiting an invisible object coincident with the radio source Sagittarius A*. In 1998, by fitting the motions of the stars to Keplerian orbits, the astronomers were able to infer that Sagittarius A* must be a 2.6×106 M☉ object must be contained within a radius of 0.02 light-years. Since then, one of the stars—called S2—has completed a full orbit. From the orbital data, astronomers were able to refine the calculations of the mass of Sagittarius A* to 4.3×106 M☉, with a radius of less than 0.002 light-years. This upper limit radius is larger than the Schwarzschild radius for the estimated mass, so the combination does not prove Sagittarius A* is a black hole. Nevertheless, these observations strongly suggest that the central object is a supermassive black hole as there are no other plausible scenarios for confining so much invisible mass into such a small volume. Additionally, there is some observational evidence that this object might possess an event horizon, a feature unique to black holes. The Event Horizon Telescope image of Sagittarius A*, released in 2022, provided further confirmation that it is indeed a black hole. X-ray binaries are binary systems that emit a majority of their radiation in the X-ray part of the electromagnetic spectrum. These X-ray emissions result when a compact object accretes matter from an ordinary star. The presence of an ordinary star in such a system provides an opportunity for studying the central object and to determine if it might be a black hole. By measuring the orbital period of the binary, the distance to the binary from Earth, and the mass of the companion star, scientists can estimate the mass of the compact object. The Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit (TOV limit) dictates the largest mass a nonrotating neutron star can be, and is estimated to be about two solar masses. While a rotating neutron star can be slightly more massive, if the compact object is much more massive than the TOV limit, it cannot be a neutron star and is generally expected to be a black hole. The first strong candidate for a black hole, Cygnus X-1, was discovered in this way by Charles Thomas Bolton, Louise Webster, and Paul Murdin in 1972. Observations of rotation broadening of the optical star reported in 1986 lead to a compact object mass estimate of 16 solar masses, with 7 solar masses as the lower bound. In 2011, this estimate was updated to 14.1±1.0 M☉ for the black hole and 19.2±1.9 M☉ for the optical stellar companion. X-ray binaries can be categorized as either low-mass or high-mass; This classification is based on the mass of the companion star, not the compact object itself. In a class of X-ray binaries called soft X-ray transients, the companion star is of relatively low mass, allowing for more accurate estimates of the black hole mass. These systems actively emit X-rays for only several months once every 10–50 years. During the period of low X-ray emission, called quiescence, the accretion disk is extremely faint, allowing detailed observation of the companion star. Numerous black hole candidates have been measured by this method. Black holes are also sometimes found in binaries with other compact objects, such as white dwarfs, neutron stars, and other black holes. The centre of nearly every galaxy contains a supermassive black hole. The close observational correlation between the mass of this hole and the velocity dispersion of the host galaxy's bulge, known as the M–sigma relation, strongly suggests a connection between the formation of the black hole and that of the galaxy itself. Astronomers use the term active galaxy to describe galaxies with unusual characteristics, such as unusual spectral line emission and very strong radio emission. Theoretical and observational studies have shown that the high levels of activity in the centers of these galaxies, regions called active galactic nuclei (AGN), may be explained by accretion onto supermassive black holes. These AGN consist of a central black hole that may be millions or billions of times more massive than the Sun, a disk of interstellar gas and dust called an accretion disk, and two jets perpendicular to the accretion disk. Although supermassive black holes are expected to be found in most AGN, only some galaxies' nuclei have been more carefully studied in attempts to both identify and measure the actual masses of the central supermassive black hole candidates. Some of the most notable galaxies with supermassive black hole candidates include the Andromeda Galaxy, Messier 32, Messier 87, the Sombrero Galaxy, and the Milky Way itself. Another way black holes can be detected is through observation of effects caused by their strong gravitational field. One such effect is gravitational lensing: The deformation of spacetime around a massive object causes light rays to be deflected, making objects behind them appear distorted. When the lensing object is a black hole, this effect can be strong enough to create multiple images of a star or other luminous source. However, the distance between the lensed images may be too small for contemporary telescopes to resolve—this phenomenon is called microlensing. Instead of seeing two images of a lensed star, astronomers see the star brighten slightly as the black hole moves towards the line of sight between the star and Earth and then return to its normal luminosity as the black hole moves away. The turn of the millennium saw the first 3 candidate detections of black holes in this way, and in January 2022, astronomers reported the first confirmed detection of a microlensing event from an isolated black hole. This was also the first determination of an isolated black hole mass, 7.1±1.3 M☉. Alternatives While there is a strong case for supermassive black holes, the model for stellar-mass black holes assumes of an upper limit for the mass of a neutron star: objects observed to have more mass are assumed to be black holes. However, the properties of extremely dense matter are poorly understood. New exotic phases of matter could allow other kinds of massive objects. Quark stars would be made up of quark matter and supported by quark degeneracy pressure, a form of degeneracy pressure even stronger than neutron degeneracy pressure. This would halt gravitational collapse at a higher mass than for a neutron star. Even stronger stars called electroweak stars would convert quarks in their cores into leptons, providing additional pressure to stop the star from collapsing. If, as some extensions of the Standard Model posit, quarks and leptons are made up of the even-smaller fundamental particles called preons, a very compact star could be supported by preon degeneracy pressure. While none of these hypothetical models can explain all of the observations of stellar black hole candidates, a Q star is the only alternative which could significantly exceed the mass limit for neutron stars and thus provide an alternative for supermassive black holes.: 12 A few theoretical objects have been conjectured to match observations of astronomical black hole candidates identically or near-identically, but which function via a different mechanism. A dark energy star would convert infalling matter into vacuum energy; This vacuum energy would be much larger than the vacuum energy of outside space, exerting outwards pressure and preventing a singularity from forming. A black star would be gravitationally collapsing slowly enough that quantum effects would keep it just on the cusp of fully collapsing into a black hole. A gravastar would consist of a very thin shell and a dark-energy interior providing outward pressure to stop the collapse into a black hole or formation of a singularity; It could even have another gravastar inside, called a 'nestar'. Open questions According to the no-hair theorem, a black hole is defined by only three parameters: its mass, charge, and angular momentum. This seems to mean that all other information about the matter that went into forming the black hole is lost, as there is no way to determine anything about the black hole from outside other than those three parameters. When black holes were thought to persist forever, this information loss was not problematic, as the information can be thought of as existing inside the black hole. However, black holes slowly evaporate by emitting Hawking radiation. This radiation does not appear to carry any additional information about the matter that formed the black hole, meaning that this information is seemingly gone forever. This is called the black hole information paradox. Theoretical studies analyzing the paradox have led to both further paradoxes and new ideas about the intersection of quantum mechanics and general relativity. While there is no consensus on the resolution of the paradox, work on the problem is expected to be important for a theory of quantum gravity.: 126 Observations of faraway galaxies have found that ultraluminous quasars, powered by supermassive black holes, existed in the early universe as far as redshift z ≥ 7 {\displaystyle z\geq 7} . These black holes have been assumed to be the products of the gravitational collapse of large population III stars. However, these stellar remnants were not massive enough to produce the quasars observed at early times without accreting beyond the Eddington limit, the theoretical maximum rate of black hole accretion. Physicists have suggested a variety of different mechanisms by which these supermassive black holes may have formed. It has been proposed that smaller black holes may have also undergone mergers to produce the observed supermassive black holes. It is also possible that they were seeded by direct-collapse black holes, in which a large cloud of hot gas avoids fragmentation that would lead to multiple stars, due to low angular momentum or heating from a nearby galaxy. Given the right circumstances, a single supermassive star forms and collapses directly into a black hole without undergoing typical stellar evolution. Additionally, these supermassive black holes in the early universe may be high-mass primordial black holes, which could have accreted further matter in the centers of galaxies. Finally, certain mechanisms allow black holes to grow faster than the theoretical Eddington limit, such as dense gas in the accretion disk limiting outward radiation pressure that prevents the black hole from accreting. However, the formation of bipolar jets prevent super-Eddington rates. In fiction Black holes have been portrayed in science fiction in a variety of ways. Even before the advent of the term itself, objects with characteristics of black holes appeared in stories such as the 1928 novel The Skylark of Space with its "black Sun" and the "hole in space" in the 1935 short story Starship Invincible. As black holes grew to public recognition in the 1960s and 1970s, they began to be featured in films as well as novels, such as Disney's The Black Hole. Black holes have also been used in works of the 21st century, such as Christopher Nolan's science fiction epic Interstellar. Authors and screenwriters have exploited the relativistic effects of black holes, particularly gravitational time dilation. For example, Interstellar features a black hole planet with a time dilation factor of over 60,000:1, while the 1977 novel Gateway depicts a spaceship approaching but never crossing the event horizon of a black hole from the perspective of an outside observer due to time dilation effects. Black holes have also been appropriated as wormholes or other methods of faster-than-light travel, such as in the 1974 novel The Forever War, where a network of black holes is used for interstellar travel. Additionally, black holes can feature as hazards to spacefarers and planets: A black hole threatens a deep-space outpost in 1978 short story The Black Hole Passes, and a binary black hole dangerously alters the orbit of a planet in the 2018 Netflix reboot of Lost in Space. Notes References Further reading External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_resolution] | [TOKENS: 3092] |
Contents Display resolution The display resolution or display modes of a digital television, computer monitor, or other display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. It can be an ambiguous term especially as the displayed resolution is controlled by different factors in cathode-ray tube (CRT) displays, flat-panel displays (including liquid-crystal displays) and projection displays using fixed picture-element (pixel) arrays. It is usually quoted as width × height, with the units in pixels: for example, 1024 × 768 means the width is 1024 pixels and the height is 768 pixels. This example would normally be spoken as "ten twenty-four by seven sixty-eight" or "ten twenty-four by seven six eight". One use of the term display resolution applies to fixed-pixel-array displays such as plasma display panels (PDP), liquid-crystal displays (LCD), Digital Light Processing (DLP) projectors, OLED displays, and similar technologies, and is simply the physical number of columns and rows of pixels creating the display (e.g. 1920 × 1080). A consequence of having a fixed-grid display is that, for multi-format video inputs, all displays need a "scaling engine" (a digital video processor that includes a memory array) to match the incoming picture format to the display. For device displays such as phones, tablets, monitors and televisions, the use of the term display resolution as defined above is a misnomer, though common. The term display resolution is usually used to mean pixel dimensions, the maximum number of pixels in each dimension (e.g. 1920 × 1080), which does not tell anything about the pixel density of the display on which the image is actually formed: resolution properly refers to the pixel density, the number of pixels per unit distance or area, not the total number of pixels. In digital measurement, the display resolution would be given in pixels per inch (PPI). In analog measurement, if the screen is 10 inches high, then the horizontal resolution is measured across a square 10 inches wide. For television standards, this is typically stated as "lines horizontal resolution, per picture height"; for example, analog NTSC TVs can typically display about 340 lines of "per picture height" horizontal resolution from over-the-air sources, which is equivalent to about 440 total lines of actual picture information from left edge to right edge. Background Some commentators also use display resolution to indicate a range of input formats that the display's input electronics will accept and often include formats greater than the screen's native grid size even though they have to be down-scaled to match the screen's parameters (e.g. accepting a 1920 × 1080 input on a display with a native 1366 × 768 pixel array). In the case of television inputs, many manufacturers will take the input and zoom it out to "overscan" the display by as much as 5% so input resolution is not necessarily display resolution. The eye's perception of display resolution can be affected by a number of factors – see image resolution and optical resolution. One factor is the display screen's rectangular shape, which is expressed as the ratio of the physical picture width to the physical picture height. This is known as the aspect ratio. A screen's physical aspect ratio and the individual pixels' aspect ratio may not necessarily be the same. An array of 1280 × 720 on a 16:9 display has square pixels, but an array of 1024 × 768 on a 16:9 display has oblong pixels. An example of pixel shape affecting "resolution" or perceived sharpness: displaying more information in a smaller area using a higher resolution makes the image much clearer or "sharper". However, most recent screen technologies are fixed at a certain resolution; making the resolution lower on these kinds of screens will greatly decrease sharpness, as an interpolation process is used to "fix" the non-native resolution input into the display's native resolution output. While some CRT-based displays may use digital video processing that involves image scaling using memory arrays, ultimately "display resolution" in CRT-type displays is affected by different parameters such as spot size and focus, astigmatic effects in the display corners, the color phosphor pitch shadow mask (such as Trinitron) in color displays, and the video bandwidth. Aspects Most television display manufacturers "overscan" the pictures on their displays (CRTs and PDPs, LCDs etc.), so that the effective on-screen picture may be reduced from 720 × 576 (480) to 680 × 550 (450), for example. The size of the invisible area somewhat depends on the display device. Some HD televisions do this as well, to a similar extent. Computer displays including projectors generally do not overscan although many models (particularly CRT displays) allow it. CRT displays tend to be underscanned in stock configurations, to compensate for the increasing distortions at the corners. Interlaced video (also known as interlaced scan) is a technique for doubling the perceived frame rate of a video display without consuming extra bandwidth. The interlaced signal contains two fields of a video frame captured consecutively. This enhances motion perception to the viewer, and reduces flicker by taking advantage of the phi phenomenon. The European Broadcasting Union has argued against interlaced video in production and broadcasting. The main argument is that no matter how complex the deinterlacing algorithm may be, the artifacts in the interlaced signal cannot be completely eliminated because some information is lost between frames. Despite arguments against it, television standards organizations continue to support interlacing. It is still included in digital video transmission formats such as DV, DVB, and ATSC. New video compression standards like High Efficiency Video Coding are optimized for progressive scan video, but sometimes do support interlaced video. Progressive scanning (alternatively referred to as noninterlaced scanning) is a format of displaying, storing, or transmitting moving images in which all the lines of each frame are drawn in sequence. This is in contrast to interlaced video used in traditional analog television systems where only the odd lines, then the even lines of each frame (each image called a video field) are drawn alternately, so that only half the number of actual image frames are used to produce video. Televisions Televisions are of the following resolutions: Film industry As far as digital cinematography is concerned, video resolution standards depend first on the frames' aspect ratio in the film stock (which is usually scanned for digital intermediate post-production) and then on the actual points' count. Although there is not a unique set of standardized sizes, it is commonplace within the motion picture industry to refer to "nK" image "quality", where n is a (small, usually even) integer number which translates into a set of actual resolutions, depending on the film format. As a reference consider that, for a 4:3 (around 1.33:1) aspect ratio which a film frame (no matter what is its format) is expected to horizontally fit in, n is the multiplier of 1024 such that the horizontal resolution is exactly 1024•n points.[citation needed] For example, 2K reference resolution is 2048 × 1536 pixels, whereas 4K reference resolution is 4096 × 3072 pixels. Nevertheless, 2K may also refer to resolutions like 2048 × 1556 (full-aperture), 2048 × 1152 (HDTV, 16:9 aspect ratio) or 2048 × 872 pixels (Cinemascope, 2.35:1 aspect ratio). It is also worth noting that while a frame resolution may be, for example, 3:2 (720 × 480 NTSC), that is not what you will see on-screen (i.e. 4:3 or 16:9 depending on the intended aspect ratio of the original material). Computer monitors Computer monitors have traditionally possessed higher resolutions than most televisions. Many personal computers introduced in the late 1970s and the 1980s were designed to use television receivers as their display devices, making the resolutions dependent on the television standards in use, including PAL and NTSC. Picture sizes were usually limited to ensure the visibility of all the pixels in the major television standards and the broad range of television sets with varying amounts of over scan. The actual drawable picture area was, therefore, somewhat smaller than the whole screen, and was usually surrounded by a static-colored border (see image below). Also, the interlace scanning was usually omitted in order to provide more stability to the picture, effectively halving the vertical resolution in progress. 160 × 200, 320 × 200 and 640 × 200 on NTSC were relatively common resolutions in the era (224, 240 or 256 scanlines were also common). In the IBM PC world, these resolutions came to be used by 16-color EGA video cards. One of the drawbacks of using a classic television is that the computer display resolution is higher than the television could decode. Chroma resolution for NTSC/PAL televisions are bandwidth-limited to a maximum 1.5 MHz, or approximately 160 pixels wide, which led to blurring of the color for 320- or 640-wide signals, and made text difficult to read (see example image below). Many users upgraded to higher-quality televisions with S-Video or RGBI inputs that helped eliminate chroma blur and produce more legible displays. The earliest, lowest cost solution to the chroma problem was offered in the Atari 2600 Video Computer System and the Apple II+, both of which offered the option to disable the color and view a legacy black-and-white signal. On the Commodore 64, the GEOS mirrored the Mac OS method of using black-and-white to improve readability. The 640 × 400i resolution (720 × 480i with borders disabled) was first introduced by home computers such as the Amiga and, later, Atari Falcon. These computers used interlace to boost the maximum vertical resolution. These modes were only suited to graphics or gaming, as the flickering interlace made reading text in word processor, database, or spreadsheet software difficult. (Modern game consoles solve this problem by pre-filtering the 480i video to a lower resolution. For example, Final Fantasy XII suffers from flicker when the filter is turned off, but stabilizes once filtering is restored. The computers of the 1980s lacked sufficient power to run similar filtering software.) The advantage of a 720 × 480i overscanned computer was an easy interface with interlaced TV production, leading to the development of Newtek's Video Toaster. This device allowed Amigas to be used for CGI creation in various news departments (example: weather overlays), drama programs such as NBC's seaQuest and The WB's Babylon 5. In the PC world, the IBM PS/2 VGA (multi-color) on-board graphics chips used a non-interlaced (progressive) 640 × 480 × 16 color resolution that was easier to read and thus more useful for office work. It was the standard resolution from 1990 to around 1996.[citation needed] The standard resolution was 800 × 600 until around 2000. Microsoft Windows XP, released in 2001, was designed to run at 800 × 600 minimum, although it is possible to select the original 640 × 480 in the Advanced Settings window. Programs designed to mimic older hardware such as Atari, Sega, or Nintendo game consoles (emulators) when attached to multiscan CRTs, routinely use much lower resolutions, such as 160 × 200 or 320 × 400 for greater authenticity, though other emulators have taken advantage of pixelation recognition on circle, square, triangle and other geometric features on a lesser resolution for a more scaled vector rendering. Some emulators, at higher resolutions, can even mimic the aperture grille and shadow masks of CRT monitors. In 2002, 1024 × 768 eXtended Graphics Array was the most common display resolution. Many web sites and multimedia products were re-designed from the previous 800 × 600 format to the layouts optimized for 1024 × 768. The availability of inexpensive LCD monitors made the 5∶4 aspect ratio resolution of 1280 × 1024 more popular for desktop usage during the first decade of the 21st century. Many computer users including CAD users, graphic artists and video game players ran their computers at 1600 × 1200 resolution (UXGA) or higher such as 2048 × 1536 QXGA if they had the necessary equipment. Other available resolutions included oversize aspects like 1400 × 1050 SXGA+ and wide aspects like 1280 × 800 WXGA, 1440 × 900 WXGA+, 1680 × 1050 WSXGA+, and 1920 × 1200 WUXGA; monitors built to the 720p and 1080p standard were also not unusual among home media and video game players, due to the perfect screen compatibility with movie and video game releases. A new more-than-HD resolution of 2560 × 1600 WQXGA was released in 30-inch LCD monitors in 2007. In 2010, 27-inch LCD monitors with the 2560 × 1440 resolution were released by multiple manufacturers, and in 2012, Apple introduced a 2880 × 1800 display on the MacBook Pro. Panels for professional environments, such as medical use and air traffic control, support resolutions up to 4096 × 2160 (or, more relevant for control rooms, 1∶1 2048 × 2048 pixels). In recent years the 16:9 aspect ratio has become more common in notebook displays, and 1366 × 768 (HD) has become popular for most low-cost notebooks, while 1920 × 1080 (FHD) and higher resolutions are available for more premium notebooks. When a computer display resolution is set higher than the physical screen resolution (native resolution), some video drivers make the virtual screen scrollable over the physical screen thus realizing a two dimensional virtual desktop with its viewport. Most LCD manufacturers do make note of the panel's native resolution as working in a non-native resolution on LCDs will result in a poorer image, due to dropping of pixels to make the image fit (when using DVI) or insufficient sampling of the analog signal (when using VGA connector). Few CRT manufacturers will quote the true native resolution, because CRTs are analog in nature and can vary their display from as low as 320 × 200 (emulation of older computers or game consoles) to as high as the internal board will allow, or the image becomes too detailed for the vacuum tube to recreate (i.e., analog blur). Thus, CRTs provide a variability in resolution that fixed resolution LCDs cannot provide. See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Koine_Greek] | [TOKENS: 696] |
Contents Jewish Koine Greek Jewish Koine Greek, or Jewish Hellenistic Greek, is the variety of Koine Greek or "common Attic" found in numerous Alexandrian dialect texts of Hellenistic Judaism, most notably in the Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible and associated literature, as well as in Greek Jewish texts from the Levant. The term is largely equivalent with Greek of the Septuagint as a cultural and literary concept rather than a linguistic category. The minor syntax and vocabulary variations in the Koine Greek of Jewish authors are not as linguistically distinctive as the later language Yevanic, or Judeo-Greek, spoken by the Romaniote Jews in Greece. The term "Jewish Koine" is to be distinguished from the concept of a "Jewish koine" as a literary-religious—not a linguistic—concept. History of scholarship Primary work on this area was conducted by scholars such as Henry Barclay Swete in chapter 4 of his Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek. However, Swete's emphasis on the peculiarity of the Greek of the Septuagint compared to other Greek texts of the period has largely been retracted by later scholars as plentiful non-Jewish Koine domestic and administrative papyri and inscriptions have been better recovered and studied. Since Swete the equation of Jewish common Attic with the "Greek of the Septuagint" has also been broadened, placing the Septuagint in the context of a wide range of Jewish texts of the period, most recently including the Greek texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls. No ancient or medieval writer recognizes a distinct Jewish dialect of Greek. General academic consensus is that the Greek used in the Jewish Koine Greek texts does not differ significantly enough from pagan Koine Greek texts to be described as "Jewish Greek." This also applies to the language of the New Testament. Because of the dominant influence of the Septuagint the first documents of "Christian Greek" and early "Patristic Greek" are both an extension of classical Greek on the one hand, and of biblical and Jewish-Hellenistic Greek on the other. Only a thousand years later did there arise a true Jewish dialect of Greek, Yevanic. Grammar Koine Greek grammar already departs from earlier Greek grammar in several areas, but the Jewish texts are generally consistent with Gentile texts, with the exception of a small number of grammatical semitisms. As would be expected, many Jewish texts show virtually no departures from the Koine or "common Attic" used by Gentile authors. Authors writing for Gentile audiences such as Josephus and Philo of Alexandria observe a standard of Greek grammar well above that of many surviving pagan sources. Neologisms A major difference between the Septuagint and associated literature, and contemporary non-Jewish Koine texts is the presence of pure neologisms (new coinages) or new usage of vocabulary. However, hapax legomena may not always be neologisms, given the specialist subject matter of the Septuagint. Also, some of the "neologisms" of the Septuagint may not be wholly new coinages but rather "morphological neologisms"—new combinations of existing words (in the same manner as German neubildungen), such as the large number of compound words made up of two or more Hebrew words. See also References |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drak_(mythology)] | [TOKENS: 2646] |
Contents Drak (mythology) The Drak (German: [dʁaːk]), Drâk, Dråk, Drakel or Fürdrak (either for-Drak or fire Drak), in Oldenburg also Drake (f.), is a household spirit from German folklore often identified with the Kobold or the devil (German Teufel), both of which are also used as synonymous terms for Drak. Otherwise it is also known as Drache (dragon) but has nothing much to do with the reptilian monster in general. Nomenclature The etymology of drak, it has been argued, does not descend directly from Latin draco (German: Drachen, Middle High German: trachen) for "dragon", but rather from the name mandragora (which is sometimes misconceived of as relating to the dragon, as in the English name "man-drake"). The creature is also known in the Alpine region (Switzerland, etc.) by such "cute" names as Tragerl, Stutzli (diminutive of Stutz, a Swiss franc coin), Geldhühndl, but also calling it drak in Switzerland is apparently an adoption of the Low German form: this local house kobold exhibits an overlap with the Alpine "field dragons" (tatzelwurm, etc.),[a] as well as conflation with the lucky mandrake (called Alraun[e]) in German). While name Tragerl (also used in Austria) has been folklorically connected to the sprite's penchant to carry (tragen) goods or riches to its owner, the similarity of this name to Trache (var. German for "dragon") is also noted. The Drak is known under various other names. Some names given to the Drak hint at its elfish or Kobold descent, such as Alf, Alber, Alp, Alrun (mandrake), Kolbuck, Koberchen, Pûks, and Erdhühnlein (earth chicken). Names based on clothing are typical for both Drak and Kobold, e.g. Hauslätzchen (house bib), Rôdjackte or Rodjackte (the one with the red jacket), Jackerl (the one with the jacket; a devil name), Langwams (long doublet), and Kortwämsken (little short doublet). Yet other names are rather proper names like they are also given to the Kobold or even the devil, such as Mårten (Martin), Mertche (diminutive of Martin), Lütche Ohle (little old one, a devil name), Steppchen, Steppken or Steffchen (devil names), Hänschen (Johnnie), and Federhänschen (feather-Johnnie, another devil name). Appearances The appearance of the Drak is very variable. Although humanoid shape is attested, as manikin, sometimes with a red cap and a red jacket, the Drak predominantly takes the shape of an animal. Especially frequently mentioned is the appearance of a cat or kitten, be it black or brown-black, even a so-called Teufelskatze (devil cat), or of a chicken (cock or hen) be it black or even wet. Such a Drachenhuhn (dragon chicken) is sometimes capable of laying Taler (thaler) or silver eggs, in the latter case two per day. Other attested bird shapes, besides bird in general, are the partridge, a gray hawk, an owl, and a jackdaw. The Drak might also appear as a (pied) calf, a (three-legged or fiery) hare, a wingless red snake, or a black ant. The Drak might take the shape of an animal by day and that of a Kobold by night, or it appears as a chicken inside the house and in fiery appearance outside of it. Various fiery appearances are also typical for the Drak when it flies out at night. A shooting star, meteor, will-o'-the-wisp (German: Irrlicht) or lightning flash might thus very well be the Drak. The fiery appearance of the Drak it too variable to describe exhaustingly, thus only a few examples shall suffice. It might appear as a fire column or fire pillar, as various objects with a fiery tail (a broom, a glowing ball, a star), as a fiery red lump, a firelight, a fiery grain sack, and quite frequently as a fiery boom (with a broad head, a big head like a stove pot, or surrounded by blue firelight). Other appearances are more like animals, such as a fiery snake, cat, or chicken, a being with a big fiery head and a long black-blue tail, and a being with a big dog head and a glowing snake tail. Where the Drak is flying everything burns down. Because of that it is regarded as an omen of firestorm. The Drak might also burn down its owner's house if it feels mistreated. Names associated with the Drak's fiery and tailed appearance are Herbrand (shooting star), Langschwanz (long tail), Kortschwanz (short tail), Schlingsteert (either gobble tail or entwining tail), Gluhswanz, Gluhstert or Glüsteert (all: glowing tail), and Salamander. It further is accompanied by infernal sulfur stench. Owning a Drak To win a Drak as one's domestic spirit a deal with the devil signed with one's own blood is necessary, thus the owners are often said to be witches (German: Hexen, sg. Hexe) or freemasons (German: Freimaurer (sg., pl.)). What makes owning a Drak so desirable despite the price of one's soul is the fact that the Drak brings its owner whatever they might covet by stealing it from the neighbors. A Drak's owner is not allowed to pray or to go to church for communion. The Drak will take every third owner back to hell. There are several types of Drak. The first is the Gelddrache or money dragon which brings its owner money, gold and treasures, might also show where the latter are hidden. In accordance to both activity and appearance other names for the Drak are Geldhühndel (money chicken), Tragerl (carrier), and Stutzli (money). The money it brings can be spent but will return to the owner without fail. Owning a Drak can be bound to owning a specific Taler which will always return to its owner if not sold lower than its value. Otherwise it can only be inherited or given away as part of a dowry. Occasionally, such a Feuerpûz (fire bogey) might also be enclosed in a glass bottle. Owning a Drak makes the process of dying very difficult its owner. Placing the dying person on the dunghill or placing dung under the dying person's pillow is the only way to ease dying for a Drak owner. But even then the Drak might still scratch its owners face. Contrarily, a sudden death might also be the fate of a Drak owner, particularly as it kills its owner by various means if it believes its owner to live too long. People who get rich quickly are said to have a Drak. The Drak brings its money load through the chimney or the skylight. Sometimes this load also can be horse dung turning into gold afterwards. The Drak carrying gold or money appears distinctly colored (red-hot, half red, half blue, blue generally or when carrying a particularly big amount, black or dazzlingly yellow) or flies particularly low. For this job the Drak expects to be well fed with millet gruel, though, to be placed on the stove the Drak dwells inside. If the feeding ceases, the Drak can't fulfill a task or its lair is discovered, then the Drak will escape never to return again. When the gruel is burnt, then the Drak rages in the stove so that it seems it would soon explode. Another is the Getreidedrache, Korndrache or Weizendrache (crop dragon, grain dragon, and wheat dragon respectively) which is also known as Roggenkatze (rye cat). This kind of Drak accordingly brings its owner loads of cereals. When doing so its color is blue, gray, black, or variously colorful. The Drak usually transports grain in an eggshell or a nutshell. Sometimes it carries so much that it has to throw away a part of its load during its flight. The Drak often appears as a wet or freezing chicken at the wayside. If someone takes it home for it to warm at the fireplace, it will bring cereals to show its gratitude. The third type is the Butterdrache (butter dragon), Milchdrache (milk dragon) or Quarkdrache (quark dragon). Accordingly, this Drak brings its owner milk or dairy goods, among them cheese and quark but never the good one. The milk might look like cherry stones, though. It might even bring all ingredients needed to bake a cake, e.g. cream, butter, and raisins. It sucks other people's cows dry so that they only give blood instead of milk. In the shape of a squirrel it sits on a cow when the cattle get milked. Stealing butter is rather difficult for the Drak, as it needs to visit a hundred villages to gather a spoonful of butter. The same can also be true for milk, for it will take one "Nödel" (measurement? spoon?) of milk per house in a hundred villages. The Drak brings other goods too, such as wood lugs turning into smoked beef, sausages (accordingly it is called Wurstdrache or sausage dragon), bread, flour and eggs, linen, dung, and frogs which can be used to make chicken soup. It only readily unloads its gifts if there is nobody else looking, though, and also guards its owner's goods. Hence, it will disappear if eavesdropped on. The Wurstdrache is offered milk containing chunks of bread roll for its services. In the guise of a black dog, the Drak vomits dumplings. The Drak can also vomit milk. As a black cat, it defecates knöpfle, a type of Southern German noodle dish. Only that the knöpfle are cat dirt in reality. The toad-shaped Knöpflekröte (knöpfle toad), too, poops knöpfle. The Drak is milked through a thread. There is further differentiation between a guter Drache (good dragon) and a armer Drache (poor dragon). The former enters the chimney as a fireball and pours out milk, eggs, and money. The latter appears as a long boom, enters through the window's pendentive and leaves behind a gruesome stench. Driving the Drak away Other people can drive the Drak away or force it to part with its load by swearing (e.g. "Schwinsdreck!" = "pig dirt!"), calling it by its name, calling at it through a wheel hub, or shouting commandos such as "Halbpart!" ("half part!") "Schütte, schütte!" ("Pour out, pour out!"), "Losch loh!" ("Let go!" in Silesian dialect = "Lass los!" in Standard German). Reciting the rhyme "Es fährt kein Fuhrmann über Land und Brück', Er lässet seinen Zoll zurück!" ("No teamster drives overland and over bridges, He leaves behind his toll!") has the same effect, as has showing one's naked behind, and shooting or throwing at the Drak, best with inherited silver, iron, or steel. Yet another method is pulling off a wheel from a wagon and putting it back on inverted. But one shouldn't stand directly beneath the Drak and flee under a roof as otherwise it will throw down a load of lice or filth, or sulfur stench which will never go away. A yellow sulfuric smelling substance left behind by the Drak is called Drachenschmalz (dragon lard) or Drachengspei (dragon spit). This is the load the Drak had to drop because it flew over manure or tan, thought to be yellow, pungent milk. Otherwise it might also enter the house of its owner, setting it on fire and burning itself to death. Explanatory notes References |
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Contents Western Wall The Western Wall (Hebrew: הַכּוֹתֶל הַמַּעֲרָבִי, romanized: HaKotel HaMa'aravi, lit. 'the western wall'; pronunciationⓘ; Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation: HaKosel HaMa'arovi) is an ancient retaining wall of the built-up hill known to Jews and Christians as the Temple Mount of Jerusalem. Its most famous section, known by the same name, often shortened by Jews to the Kotel or Kosel, is known in the West as the Wailing Wall, and in Arab world and Islamic world as the Buraq Wall (Arabic: حَائِط ٱلْبُرَاق, romanized: Ḥā'iṭ al-Burāq; ['ħaːʔɪtˤ albʊ'raːq]). In a Jewish religious context, the term Western Wall and its variations is used in the narrow sense, for the section used for Jewish prayer; in its broader sense it refers to the entire 488-metre-long (1,601 ft) retaining wall on the western side of the Temple Mount. At the prayer section, just over half the wall's total height, including its 17 courses located below street level, dates from the end of the Second Temple period, and is believed to have been begun by Herod the Great. The very large stone blocks of the lower courses are Herodian, the courses of medium-sized stones above them were added during the Umayyad period, while the small stones of the uppermost courses are of more recent date, especially from the Ottoman period. The Western Wall plays an important role in Judaism due to it being part of the man-made "Temple Mount", an artificially expanded hilltop best known as the traditional site of the Jewish Temple. Because of the Temple Mount entry restrictions, the Wall is the holiest place where Jews are permitted to pray outside the Temple Mount platform, because the presumed site of the Holy of Holies, the most sacred site in the Jewish faith, presumably lies just above and behind it. The original, natural, and irregular-shaped Temple Mount was gradually extended to allow for an ever-larger Temple compound to be built at its top. The earliest source possibly mentioning this specific site as a place of Jewish worship is from the 10th century. The Western Wall, in the narrow sense, i.e. referring to the section used for Jewish prayer, is also known as the "Wailing Wall", in reference to the practice of Jews weeping at the site. During the period of Christian Roman rule over Jerusalem (ca. 324–638), Jews were completely barred from Jerusalem except on Tisha B'Av, the day of national mourning for the Temples. The term "Wailing Wall" has historically been used mainly by Christians, with use by Jews becoming marginal. Of the entire retaining wall, the section ritually used by Jews now faces a large plaza in the Jewish Quarter, near the southwestern corner of the Temple Mount, while the rest of the wall is concealed behind structures in the Muslim Quarter, with the small exception of an 8-metre (26 ft) section, the so-called "Little Western Wall" or "Small Wailing Wall". This segment of the western retaining wall derives particular importance from having never been fully obscured by medieval buildings, and displaying much of the original Herodian stonework. In religious terms, the "Little Western Wall" is presumed to be even closer to the Holy of Holies and thus to the "presence of God" (Shechina), and the underground Warren's Gate, which has been out of reach for Jews from the 12th century till its partial excavation in the 20th century. The entire Western Wall constitutes the western border of al-Haram al-Sharif ("the Noble Sanctuary"), or the Al-Aqsa compound. It is believed to be the site where the Islamic Prophet Muhammad tied his winged steed, the Burāq, on his Night Journey, which tradition connects to Jerusalem, before ascending to heaven. While the wall was considered an integral part of the Haram esh-Sharif and waqf property of the Moroccan Quarter under Muslim rule, a right of Jewish prayer and pilgrimage has long existed as part of the Status Quo regulations. This position was confirmed in a 1930 international commission during the British Mandate period. With the rise of the Zionist movement in the early 20th century, the wall became a source of friction between the Jewish and Muslim communities, the latter being worried that the wall could be used to further Jewish claims to the Temple Mount and thus Jerusalem. During this period outbreaks of violence at the foot of the wall became commonplace, with a particularly deadly riot in 1929 in which 133 Jews and 116 Arabs were killed, with many more people injured. After the 1948 Arab–Israeli War the eastern portion of Jerusalem was occupied by Jordan. Under Jordanian control Jews were completely expelled from the Old City including the Jewish Quarter, effectively banning Jewish prayer at the site of the Western Wall for 19 years. This period ended on June 10, 1967, when Israel gained control of the site following the Six-Day War. Three days after establishing control over the Western Wall site, the Moroccan Quarter was bulldozed by Israeli authorities to create space for what is now the Western Wall plaza. Etymology Early Jewish texts referred to a "western wall of the Temple", but there is doubt whether the texts were referring to the outer, retaining wall called today "the Western Wall", or to the western wall of the actual Temple. The earliest Jewish use of the Hebrew term "ha-kotel ha-ma'aravi", "the Western Wall", as referring to the wall visible today, was by the 11th-century poet Ahimaaz ben Paltiel. The name "Wailing Wall", and descriptions such as "wailing place", appeared regularly in English literature during the 19th century. The name Mur des Lamentations was used in French and Klagemauer in German. This description stemmed from the Jewish practice of coming to the site to mourn and bemoan the destruction of the Temple and the loss of national freedom it symbolized. Jews may often be seen sitting for hours at the Wailing-place bent in sorrowful meditation over the history of their race, and repeating oftentimes the words of the Seventy-ninth Psalm. On Fridays especially, Jews of both sexes, of all ages, and from all countries, assemble in large numbers to kiss the sacred stones and weep outside the precincts they may not enter. Arab world and Islamic world have associated the name Al-Buraq with the wall at least since the 1860s. Location, dimensions, stones The term Western Wall commonly refers to a 187-foot (57 m) exposed section of a much longer retaining wall, built by Herod on the western flank of the Temple Mount. Only when used in this sense is it synonymous with the term Wailing Wall. This section faces a large plaza and is set aside for prayer. In its entirety, the western retaining wall of the Herodian Temple Mount complex stretches for 1,600 feet (488 m), most of which is hidden behind medieval residential structures built along its length. There are only two other revealed sections: the southern part of the Wall (see Robinson's Arch area), which measures approximately 80 metres (262 ft), and is separated from the prayer area by just a narrow stretch of archaeological remains; and another, much shorter section, known as the Little Western Wall, which is located close to the Iron Gate. The entire western wall functions as a retaining wall, supporting and enclosing the ample substructures built by Herod the Great around 19 BCE. Herod's project was to create an artificial extension to the small quasi-natural plateau on which the First Temple stood, already widened in Hasmonean times during the Second Temple period, by finally transforming it into the almost rectangular, wide expanse of the Temple Mount platform visible today. At the Western Wall Plaza, the total height of the Wall from its foundation is estimated at 105 feet (32 m), with the above-ground section standing approximately 62 feet (19 m) high. The Wall consists of 45 stone courses, 28 of them above ground and 17 underground. The first seven above-ground layers are from the Herodian period. This section of wall is built from enormous meleke limestone blocks, possibly quarried at either Zedekiah's Cave situated under the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, or at Ramat Shlomo 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) northwest of the Old City. Most of them weigh between 2 and 8 short tons (1.8 and 7.3 tonnes) each, but others weigh even more, with one extraordinary stone located slightly north of Wilson's Arch measuring 13.55 metres (44.5 ft) long, 3.3 metres (11 ft) high, approximately 1.8 to 2.5 metres (5.9 to 8.2 ft) deep, and weighing between 250 and 300 tonnes (280 and 330 short tons). Each of these ashlars is framed by fine-chiseled borders. The margins themselves measure between 5 and 20 centimetres (2 and 8 in) wide, with their depth measuring 1.5 centimetres (0.59 in). In the Herodian period, the upper 10 metres (33 ft) of wall were 1 metre (39 in) thick and served as the outer wall of the double colonnade of the Temple platform. This upper section was decorated with pilasters, the remainder of which were destroyed when the Byzantines reconquered Jerusalem from the Persians in 628. The next four courses, consisting of smaller plainly dressed stones, are Umayyad work (8th century, Early Muslim period). Above that are 16 to 17 courses of small stones from the Mamluk period (13th–16th centuries) and later. History According to the Hebrew Bible, Solomon's Temple was built atop what is known as the Temple Mount in the 10th century BCE and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, and the Second Temple completed and dedicated in 516 BCE. Around 19 BCE Herod the Great began a massive expansion project on the Temple Mount. In addition to fully rebuilding and enlarging the Temple, he artificially expanded the platform on which it stood, doubling it in size. Today's Western Wall formed part of the retaining perimeter wall of this platform. In 2011, Israeli archaeologists announced the surprising discovery of Roman coins minted well after Herod's death, found under the foundation stones of the wall. The excavators came upon the coins inside a ritual bath that predates Herod's building project, which was filled in to create an even base for the wall and was located under its southern section. This seems to indicate that Herod did not finish building the entire wall by the time of his death in 4 BCE. The find confirms the description by historian Josephus Flavius, which states that construction was finished only during the reign of King Agrippa II, Herod's great-grandson. Given Josephus' information, the surprise mainly regarded the fact that an unfinished retaining wall in this area could also mean that at least parts of the splendid Royal Stoa and the monumental staircase leading up to it could not have been completed during Herod's lifetime. Also surprising was the fact that the usually very thorough Herodian builders had cut corners by filling in the ritual bath, rather than placing the foundation course directly onto the much firmer bedrock. Some scholars are doubtful of the interpretation and have offered alternative explanations, such as, for example, later repair work. Herod's Temple was destroyed by the Romans, along with the rest of Jerusalem, in 70 CE, during the First Jewish–Roman War. During much of the 2nd–5th centuries of the Common Era, after the Roman defeat of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, Jews were banned from Jerusalem. There is some evidence that Roman emperors in the 2nd and 3rd centuries did permit them to visit the city to worship on the Mount of Olives and sometimes on the Temple Mount itself. When the empire started becoming Christian under Constantine I, they were given permission to enter the city once a year, on the Tisha B'Av, to lament the loss of the Temple at the wall. The Bordeaux Pilgrim, who wrote in 333 CE, suggests that it was probably to the perforated stone or the Rock of Moriah, "to which the Jews come every year and anoint it, bewail themselves with groans, rend their garments, and so depart". This was because an imperial decree from Rome barred Jews from living in Jerusalem. Just once per year they were permitted to return and bitterly grieve about the fate of their people. Comparable accounts survive, including those by the Church Father, Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329–390) and by Jerome in his commentary to Zephaniah written in 392 CE. In the 4th century, Christian sources reveal that the Jews encountered great difficulty in buying the right to pray near the Western Wall, at least on the 9th of Av. In 425 CE, the Jews of the Galilee wrote to Byzantine empress Aelia Eudocia seeking permission to pray by the ruins of the Temple. Permission was granted and they were officially permitted to resettle in Jerusalem. Discovery of underground rooms that could have been used as food storage carved out of the bedrock under the 1,400-year-old mosaic floor of Byzantine structure was announced by Israel Antiquities Authority in May in 2020. "At first we were very disappointed because we found we hit the bedrock, meaning that the material culture, the human activity here in Jerusalem ended. What we found here was a rock-cut system—three rooms, all hewn in the bedrock of ancient Jerusalem" said co-director of the excavation Barak Monnickendam-Givon. Several Jewish authors of the 10th and 11th centuries write about the Jews resorting to the Western Wall for devotional purposes. Ahimaaz relates that Samuel ben Paltiel (980–1010) gave money for oil at "the sanctuary at the Western Wall." Benjamin of Tudela (1170) wrote "In front of this place is the western wall, which is one of the walls of the Holy of Holies. This is called the Gate of Mercy, and hither come all the Jews to pray before the Wall in the open court." The account gave rise to confusion about the actual location of Jewish worship, and some suggest that Benjamin in fact referred to the Eastern Wall along with its Gate of Mercy. While Nahmanides (d. 1270) did not mention a synagogue near the Western Wall in his detailed account of the temple site, shortly before the Crusader period a synagogue existed at the site. Obadiah of Bertinoro (1488) states "the Western Wall, part of which is still standing, is made of great, thick stones, larger than any I have seen in buildings of antiquity in Rome or in other lands." Shortly after Saladin's 1187 siege of the city, in 1193, the sultan's son and successor al-Afdal established the land adjacent to the wall as a charitable trust (waqf). The largest part of it was named after an important mystic, Abu Madyan Shu'aib. The Abu Madyan waqf was dedicated to Maghrebian pilgrims and scholars who had taken up residence there, and houses were built only metres away from the wall, from which they were thus separated by just a narrow passageway, some 4 metres (13 ft) wide.[citation needed] The first likely mention of the Islamic tradition that Buraq was tethered at the site is from the 14th century. A manuscript by Ibrahim b. Ishaq al-Ansari (known as Ibn Furkah, d. 1328) refers to Bab al-Nabi (lit. 'Gate of the Prophet'), an old name for Barclay's Gate below the Maghrebi Gate. Charles D. Matthews however, who edited al-Firkah's work, notes that other statements of al-Firkah might seem to point to the Double Gate in the southern wall. In 1517, the Turkish Ottomans under Selim I conquered Jerusalem from the Mamluks who had held it since 1250. Selim's son, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, ordered the construction of an imposing wall to be built around the entire city, which still stands today. Various folktales relate Suleiman's quest to locate the Temple site and his order to have the area "swept and sprinkled, and the Western Wall washed with rosewater" upon its discovery. According to a legend cited by Moses Hagiz, Jews received official permission to worship at the site and Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan built an oratory for them there, but, as of Purim 1625, Jews were banned from praying on the Temple Mount and only sometimes dared to pray at the Western Wall, for which purpose a special liturgy had been arranged. Gedaliah of Siemiatycze, who lived in Jerusalem from 1700 to 1706, reports that Jews then had access to the wall and would pray there as often as possible. Over the centuries, land close to the Wall became built up. Public access to the Wall was through the Moroccan Quarter, a labyrinth of narrow alleyways. In May 1840 a firman issued by Ibrahim Pasha forbade the Jews to pave the passageway in front of the Wall. It also cautioned them against "raising their voices and displaying their books there." They were, however, allowed "to pay visits to it as of old." Rabbi Joseph Schwarz [he] writing in the mid-19th century records: This wall is visited by all our brothers on every feast and festival; and the large space at its foot is often so densely filled up, that all cannot perform their devotions here at the same time. It is also visited, though by less numbers, on every Friday afternoon, and by some nearly every day. No one is molested in these visits by the Mahomedans, as we have a very old firman from the Sultan of Constantinople that the approach shall not be denied to us, though the Porte obtains for this privilege a special tax, which is, however, quite insignificant. Over time the increased numbers of people gathering at the site resulted in tensions between the Jewish visitors who wanted easier access and more space, and the residents, who complained of the noise. This gave rise to Jewish attempts at gaining ownership of the land adjacent to the Wall. In the late 1830s a wealthy Jew named Shemarya Luria attempted to purchase houses near the Wall, but was unsuccessful, as was Jewish sage Abdullah of Bombay who tried to purchase the Western Wall in the 1850s. In 1869 Rabbi Hillel Moshe Gelbstein settled in Jerusalem. He arranged that benches and tables be brought to the Wall on a daily basis for the study groups he organised and the minyan which he led there for years. He also formulated a plan whereby some of the courtyards facing the Wall would be acquired, with the intention of establishing three synagogues—one each for the Sephardim, the Hasidim and the Perushim. He also endeavoured to re-establish an ancient practice of "guards of honour", which according to the mishnah in Middot, were positioned around the Temple Mount. He rented a house near the Wall and paid men to stand guard there and at various other gateways around the mount. However, this set-up lasted only for a short time due to lack of funds or because of Arab resentment. In 1874, Mordechai Rosanes paid for the repaving of the alleyway adjacent to the wall. In 1887 Baron Rothschild conceived a plan to purchase and demolish the Moroccan Quarter as "a merit and honor to the Jewish People." The proposed purchase was considered and approved by the Ottoman Governor of Jerusalem, Rauf Pasha, and by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Mohammed Tahir Husseini. Even after permission was obtained from the highest secular and Muslim religious authority to proceed, the transaction was shelved after the authorities insisted that after demolishing the quarter no construction of any type could take place there, only trees could be planted to beautify the area. Additionally the Jews would not have full control over the area. This meant that they would have no power to stop people from using the plaza for various activities, including the driving of mules, which would cause a disturbance to worshippers. Other reports place the scheme's failure on Jewish infighting as to whether the plan would foster a detrimental Arab reaction. In 1895 Hebrew linguist and publisher Rabbi Chaim Hirschensohn became entangled in a failed effort to purchase the Western Wall and lost all his assets. The attempts of the Palestine Land Development Company to purchase the environs of the Western Wall for the Jews just before the outbreak of World War I also never came to fruition. In the first two months following the Ottoman Empire's entry into the First World War, the Turkish governor of Jerusalem, Zakey Bey, offered to sell the Moroccan Quarter, which consisted of about 25 houses, to the Jews in order to enlarge the area available to them for prayer. He requested a sum of £20,000 which would be used to both rehouse the Muslim families and to create a public garden in front of the Wall. However, the Jews of the city lacked the necessary funds. A few months later, under Muslim Arab pressure on the Turkish authorities in Jerusalem, Jews became forbidden by official decree to place benches and light candles at the Wall. This sour turn in relations was taken up by the Chacham Bashi who managed to get the ban overturned. In 1915 it was reported that Djemal Pasha, closed off the wall to visitation as a sanitary measure. Probably meant was the "Great", rather than the "Small" Djemal Pasha. Decrees (firman)s issued regarding the Wall: In December 1917, Allied forces under Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem from the Turks. Allenby pledged "that every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, pious bequest, or customary place of prayer of whatsoever form of the three religions will be maintained and protected according to the existing customs and beliefs of those to whose faith they are sacred". In 1919 Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann approached the British Military Governor of Jerusalem, Colonel Sir Ronald Storrs, and offered between £75,000 and £100,000 (approx. £5m in modern terms) to purchase the area at the foot of the Wall and rehouse the occupants. Storrs was enthusiastic about the idea because he hoped some of the money would be used to improve Muslim education. Although they appeared promising at first, negotiations broke down after strong Muslim opposition. Storrs wrote two decades later: The acceptance of the proposals, had it been practicable, would have obviated years of wretched humiliations, including the befouling of the Wall and pavement and the unmannerly braying of the tragi-comic Arab band during Jewish prayer, and culminating in the horrible outrages of 1929. In early 1920, the first Jewish-Arab dispute over the Wall occurred when the Muslim authorities were carrying out minor repair works to the Wall's upper courses. The Jews, while agreeing that the works were necessary, appealed to the British that they be made under supervision of the newly formed Department of Antiquities, because the Wall was an ancient relic. According to Hillel Halkin, in the 1920s, among rising tensions with the Jews regarding the wall, the Arabs ceased using the more traditional name El-Mabka, "the Place of Weeping", which related to Jewish practices, and replaced it with El-Burak, a name with Muslim connotations. In 1926 an effort was made to lease the Maghrebi waqf, which included the wall, with the plan of eventually buying it. Negotiations were begun in secret by the Jewish judge Gad Frumkin, with financial backing from American millionaire Nathan Straus. The chairman of the Palestine Zionist Executive, Colonel F. H. Kisch, explained that the aim was "quietly to evacuate the Moroccan occupants of those houses which it would later be necessary to demolish" to create an open space with seats for aged worshippers to sit on. However, Straus withdrew when the price became excessive and the plan came to nothing. The Va'ad Leumi, against the advice of the Palestine Zionist Executive, demanded that the British expropriate the wall and give it to the Jews, but the British refused. In 1928 the World Zionist Organization reported that John Chancellor, High Commissioner of Palestine, believed that the Western Wall should come under Jewish control and wondered "why no great Jewish philanthropist had not bought it yet". In 1922, a Status Quo agreement issued by the mandatory authority forbade the placing of benches or chairs near the Wall. The last occurrence of such a ban was in 1915, but the Ottoman decree was soon retracted after intervention of the Chacham Bashi. In 1928 the District Commissioner of Jerusalem, Edward Keith-Roach, acceded to an Arab request to implement the ban. This led to a British officer being stationed at the Wall making sure that Jews were prevented from sitting. Nor were Jews permitted to separate the sexes with a screen. In practice, a flexible modus vivendi had emerged and such screens had been put up from time to time when large numbers of people gathered to pray. On September 24, 1928, the Day of Atonement, British police resorted to removing by force a screen used to separate men and women at prayer. Women who tried to prevent the screen being dismantled were beaten by the police, who used pieces of the broken wooden frame as clubs. Chairs were then pulled out from under elderly worshipers. The episode made international news and Jews the world over objected to the British action. Yosef Chaim Sonnenfeld, the Chief Rabbi of the Haredi Jews in Jerusalem, issued a protest letter on behalf of his community, the Edah HaChareidis and Agudas Yisroel, strongly condemning the desecration of the holy site. Various communal leaders called for a general strike. A large rally was held in the Etz Chaim Yeshiva, following which an angry crowd attacked the local police station in which they believed Douglas Valder Duff, the British officer involved, was sheltering. Commissioner Edward Keith-Roach described the screen as violating the Ottoman status quo that forbade Jews from making any construction in the Western Wall area. He informed the Jewish community that the removal had been carried out under his orders after receiving a complaint from the Supreme Muslim Council. The Arabs were concerned that the Jews were trying to extend their rights at the wall and with this move, ultimately intended to take possession of the Masjid Al-Aqsa. The British government issued an announcement explaining the incident and blaming the Jewish beadle at the Wall. It stressed that the removal of the screen was necessary, but expressed regret over the ensuing events. A widespread Arab campaign to protest against presumed Jewish intentions and designs to take possession of the Al Aqsa Mosque swept the country and a "Society for the Protection of the Muslim Holy Places" was established. The Jewish National Council (Vaad Leumi) responding to these Arab fears declared in a statement that "We herewith declare emphatically and sincerely that no Jew has ever thought of encroaching upon the rights of Moslems over their own Holy places, but our Arab brethren should also recognise the rights of Jews in regard to the places in Palestine which are holy to them." The committee also demanded that the British administration expropriate the wall for the Jews. From October 1928 onward, Mufti Amin al-Husayni organised a series of measures to demonstrate the Arabs' exclusive claims to the Temple Mount and its environs. He ordered new construction next to and above the Western Wall. The British granted the Arabs permission to convert a building adjoining the Wall into a mosque and to add a minaret. A muezzin was appointed to perform the Islamic call to prayer and Sufi rites directly next to the Wall. These were seen as a provocation by the Jews who prayed at the Wall. The Jews protested and tensions increased. A British inquiry into the disturbances and investigation regarding the principal issue in the Western Wall dispute, namely the rights of the Jewish worshipers to bring appurtenances to the wall, was convened. The Supreme Muslim Council provided documents dating from the Turkish regime supporting their claims. However, repeated reminders to the Chief Rabbinate to verify which apparatus had been permitted failed to elicit any response. They refused to do so, arguing that Jews had the right to pray at the Wall without restrictions. Subsequently, in November 1928, the Government issued a White Paper entitled "The Western or Wailing Wall in Jerusalem: Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Colonies", which emphasised the maintenance of the status quo and instructed that Jews could only bring "those accessories which had been permitted in Turkish times." A few months later, Haj Amin complained to Chancellor that "Jews were bringing benches and tables in increased numbers to the wall and driving nails into the wall and hanging lamps on them." In the summer of 1929, the Mufti Haj Amin Al Husseinni ordered an opening be made at the southern end of the alleyway which straddled the Wall. The former cul-de-sac became a thoroughfare which led from the Temple Mount into the prayer area at the Wall. Mules were herded through the narrow alley, often dropping excrement. This, together with other construction projects in the vicinity, and restricted access to the Wall, resulted in Jewish protests to the British, who remained indifferent. On August 14, 1929, after attacks on individual Jews praying at the Wall, 6,000 Jews demonstrated in Tel Aviv, shouting "The Wall is ours." The next day, the Jewish fast of Tisha B'Av, 300 youths raised the Zionist flag and sang Hatikva at the Wall. The day after, on August 16, an organized mob of 2,000 Muslim Arabs descended on the Western Wall, injuring the beadle and burning prayer books, liturgical fixtures and notes of supplication. The rioting spread to the Jewish commercial area of town, and was followed a few days later by the Hebron massacre. One hundred and thirty-three Jews were killed and 339 injured in the Arab riots, and in the subsequent process of quelling the riots 110 Arabs were killed by British police. This was by far the deadliest attack on Jews during the period of British Rule over Palestine. In 1930, in response to the 1929 riots, the British Government appointed a commission "to determine the rights and claims of Muslims and Jews in connection with the Western or Wailing Wall", and to determine the causes of the violence and prevent it in the future. The League of Nations approved the commission on condition that the members were not British. The Commission noted that "the Jews do not claim any proprietorship to the Wall or to the Pavement in front of it (concluding speech of Jewish Counsel, Minutes, page 908)." The Commission concluded that the wall, and the adjacent pavement and Moroccan Quarter, were solely owned by the Muslim waqf. However, Jews had the right to "free access to the Western Wall for the purpose of devotions at all times", subject to some stipulations that limited which objects could be brought to the Wall and forbade the blowing of the shofar, which was made illegal. Muslims were forbidden to disrupt Jewish devotions by driving animals or other means. The recommendations of the Commission were brought into law by the Palestine (Western or Wailing Wall) Order in Council, 1931, which came into effect on June 8, 1931. Persons violating the law were liable to a fine of 50 pounds or imprisonment up to 6 months, or both. During the 1930s, at the conclusion of Yom Kippur, young Jews persistently flouted the shofar ban each year and blew the shofar resulting in their arrest and prosecution. They were usually fined or sentenced to imprisonment for three to six months. The Shaw commission determined that the violence occurred due to "racial animosity on the part of the Arabs, consequent upon the disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future." During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War the Old City together with the Wall was controlled by Jordan. Article VIII of the 1949 Armistice Agreement called for a Special Committee to make arrangements for (amongst other things) "free access to the Holy Places and cultural institutions and use of the cemetery on the Mount of Olives". The committee sat multiple times during 1949, but both sides made additional demands and at the same time the Palestine Conciliation Commission was pressing for the internationalization of Jerusalem against the wishes of both parties. No agreement was ever reached, leading to recriminations in both directions. Neither Israeli Arabs nor Israeli Jews could visit their holy places in the Jordanian territories. An exception was made for Christians to participate in Christmas ceremonies in Bethlehem. Some sources claim Jews could only visit the wall if they traveled through Jordan (which was not an option for Israelis) and did not have an Israeli visa stamped in their passports. Only Jordanian soldiers and tourists were to be found there. A vantage point on Mount Zion, from which the Wall could be viewed, became the place where Jews gathered to pray. For thousands of pilgrims, the mount, being the closest location to the Wall under Israeli control, became a substitute site for the traditional priestly blessing ceremony which takes place on the Three Pilgrimage Festivals. During the Jordanian rule of the Old City, a ceramic street sign in Arabic and English was affixed to the stones of the ancient wall. Attached 2.1 metres (6.9 ft) up, it was made up of eight separate ceramic tiles and said Al Buraq Road in Arabic at the top with the English "Al-Buraq (Wailing Wall) Rd" below. When Israeli soldiers arrived at the wall in June 1967, one attempted to scrawl Hebrew lettering on it. The Jerusalem Post reported that on June 8, Ben-Gurion went to the wall and "looked with distaste" at the road sign; "this is not right, it should come down" and he proceeded to dismantle it. This act signaled the climax of the capture of the Old City and the ability of Jews to once again access their holiest sites. Emotional recollections of this event are related by David Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres. Following Israel's victory during the 1967 Six-Day War, the Western Wall came under Israeli control. Brigadier Rabbi Shlomo Goren proclaimed after its capture that "Israel would never again relinquish the Wall", a stance supported by Israeli Minister for Defence Moshe Dayan and Chief of Staff General Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin described the moment Israeli soldiers reached the Wall: "There was one moment in the Six-Day War which symbolized the great victory: that was the moment in which the first paratroopers—under Gur's command—reached the stones of the Western Wall, feeling the emotion of the place; there never was, and never will be, another moment like it. Nobody staged that moment. Nobody planned it in advance. Nobody prepared it and nobody was prepared for it; it was as if Providence had directed the whole thing: the paratroopers weeping—loudly and in pain—over their comrades who had fallen along the way, the words of the Kaddish prayer heard by Western Wall's stones after 19 years of silence, tears of mourning, shouts of joy, and the singing of 'Hatikvah'". Forty-eight hours after capturing the wall, the military, without explicit government order, hastily proceeded to demolish the entire Moroccan Quarter, which stood 4 metres (13 ft) from the Wall. The Sheikh Eid Mosque, built on the site of one of Jerusalem's earliest Islamic schools (the Afdiliyyah), was pulled down to make way for the plaza. 106 Arab families consisting of 650 people were ordered to leave their homes at night. When they refused, bulldozers began to demolish the buildings with people still inside, killing one person and injuring a number of others. According to Eyal Weizman, Chaim Herzog, who later became Israel's sixth president, took much of the credit for the destruction of the neighbourhood: When we visited the Wailing Wall we found a toilet attached to it ... we decided to remove it and from this we came to the conclusion that we could evacuate the entire area in front of the Wailing Wall ... a historical opportunity that will never return. ... We knew that the following Saturday [sic Wednesday], June 14, would be the Jewish festival of Shavuot and that many will want to come to pray ... it all had to be completed by then. The narrow pavement, which could accommodate a maximum of 12,000 per day, was transformed into an enormous plaza that could hold in excess of 400,000. Several months later, the pavement close to the wall was excavated to a depth of two and half metres, exposing an additional two courses of large stones. A complex of buildings against the wall at the southern end of the plaza, that included Madrasa Fakhriya and the house that the Abu al-Sa'ud family had occupied since the 16th century, were spared in the 1967 destruction, but demolished in 1969. The section of the wall dedicated to prayers was thus extended southwards to double its original length, from 28 to 60 metres (92 to 197 ft), while the 4 metres (13 ft) space facing the wall grew to 40 metres (130 ft). The narrow, approximately 120 square metres (1,300 sq ft) pre-1948 alley along the wall, used for Jewish prayer, was enlarged to 2,400 square metres (26,000 sq ft), with the entire Western Wall Plaza covering 20,000 square metres (4.9 acres), stretching from the wall to the Jewish Quarter. Plaza The new plaza created in 1967 is used for worship and public gatherings, including Bar mitzvah celebrations and the swearing-in ceremonies of newly full-fledged soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces. Tens of thousands of Jews flock to the wall on the Jewish holidays, and particularly on the fast of Tisha B'Av, which marks the destruction of the Temple and on Jerusalem Day, which commemorates the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 and the delivery of the Wall into Jewish hands. In November 2010, the government approved a NIS 85 million ($23 million) plan to improve access from the Jewish Quarter and upgrade infrastructure at the Wall. Conflicts over prayer at the national monument began a little more than a year after Israel's victory in the Six-Day War, which again made the site accessible to Jews. In July 1968 the World Union for Progressive Judaism, which had planned the group's international convention in Jerusalem, appealed to the Knesset after the Ministry of Religious Affairs prohibited the organization from hosting mixed-gender services at the Wall. The Knesset committee on internal affairs backed the Ministry of Religious Affairs in disallowing the Jewish convention attendees, who had come from over 24 countries, from worshiping in their fashion. The Orthodox held that services at the Wall should follow traditional Jewish law for segregated seating followed in synagogues, while the non-Orthodox perspective was that "the Wall is a shrine of all Jews, not one particular branch of Judaism." Wilson's Arch area In September 1983, U.S. Sixth Fleet Chaplain, Rabbi Arnold Resnicoff was allowed to hold an unusual interfaith service—the first interfaith service ever conducted at the Wall during the time it was under Israeli control—that included men and women sitting together. The ten-minute service included the Priestly Blessing, recited by Resnicoff, who is a Kohen. A Ministry of Religions representative was present, responding to press queries that the service was authorized as part of a special welcome for the U.S. Sixth Fleet. In 2005, the Western Wall Heritage Foundation initiated a major renovation effort under Rabbi-of-the-Wall Shmuel Rabinovitch. Its goal was to renovate and restructure the area within Wilson's Arch, the covered area to the left of worshipers facing the Wall in the open prayer plaza, in order to increase access for visitors and for prayer. The restoration of the men's section included a Torah ark that can house over 100 Torah scrolls, in addition to new bookshelves, a library, heating for the winter, and air conditioning for the summer. A new room was also built for the scribes who maintain and preserve the Torah scrolls used at the Wall. New construction also included a women's section, overlooking the men's prayer area, so that women could use this separate area to "take part in the services held inside under the Arch" for the first time. On July 25, 2010, a ner tamid, an oil-burning "eternal light," was installed within the prayer hall within Wilson's Arch, the first eternal light installed in the area of the Western Wall. According to the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, requests had been made for many years that "an olive oil lamp be placed in the prayer hall of the Western Wall Plaza, as is the custom in Jewish synagogues, to represent the menorah of the Temple in Jerusalem as well as the continuously burning fire on the altar of burnt offerings in front of the Temple," especially in the closest place to those ancient flames. A number of special worship events have been held since the renovation. They have taken advantage of the cover, temperature control, and enhanced security. Robinson's Arch area At the southern end of the Western Wall, Robinson's Arch along with a row of vaults once supported stairs ascending from the street to the Temple Mount.[better source needed] The so-called Isaiah Stone, located under Robinson's Arch, has a carved inscription in Hebrew with a partial and slightly faulty quote from (or paraphrase of) Isaiah 66:14: "And you will see and your heart will rejoice and their bones like an herb [will flourish]" (the correct line from Isaiah would read "... your bones".) This gave room to various interpretations, some speculating about it being written during a period of hope for Jews. Alternatively, it might be connected to nearby graves. The inscription has tentatively been dated to the 4th–8th century, some extending the possible timespan all the way to the 11th century. Because it does not come under the direct control of the Rabbi of the Wall or the Ministry of Religious Affairs, the site has been opened to religious groups that hold worship services that would not be approved by the Rabbi of the Western Wall or the Ministry of Religious Affairs in the major men's and women's prayer areas against the Wall.[better source needed] The worship site was inaugurated in 2004 and has since hosted services by Reform and Conservative groups, as well as services by the Women of the Wall. A platform has been added in 2013 in order to expand the prayer area. In Judaism Jews were banned from Jerusalem by the Roman authorities after the Second Jewish revolt (2nd century CE) and, although there are intermittent accounts of limited 9th of Av services on the Temple Mount, no sources from before the 7th-century Islamic conquest attest to any other Jewish services allowed near the Mount and many report that none were permitted. Sources conflict with regard to the Mount's status under Islamic rule, but Karaite commentator Salmon ben Jeroham (c. 950 CE) reports that Jews were initially granted wide access to the Mount, then restricted to gathering near "one of its gates", then banned entirely before his own time. However, a synagogue was apparently founded by the Western Wall (in the broader sense) shortly after the time of Salmon. The Scroll of Ahimaaz, a historical chronicle written in 1050 CE, describes: Samuel his son arose to replace [Paltiel], and this great man filled his father's place [in c. 980 CE] ... [He] dedicated 20,000 golden drachmas to the One Who Dwells on High, to entreat the favor of the Rider of Clouds. These were alms for the poor...; oil for the synagogue in the western wall, for [the lamps on] its bema ... This account of Jewish prayer at the edge of the Mount in confirmed by Daniel ben Azariah, who writes (c. 1055 CE) that Jews were then permitted to "pray near the Mount's gates". In 1099 CE the Crusader army captured Jerusalem, killing almost every Jew inside, and banned Jewish pilgrims from approaching the Mount. In his Scroll of Revelation (c. 1125 CE), Abraham bar Hiyya records that: ... the Romans who destroyed the Temple in the days of the evil Titus, though they despoiled its sanctuary, never claimed any ownership of the holy Mount or any need to pray there. But ever since the evil Constantine converted to Christianity, they have begun to make these claims ... Since [1099 CE] the Christians have desecrated the Mount, made the citadel their church, brought their idols within it, and prevented Jews from praying there. Ever since those villains took over the Mount, no Jew has been allowed to enter it, and none are to be found in all Jerusalem. In another reversal by c. 1167 CE, during the later Crusader period, the Western Wall was reopened to Jewish prayer. Benjamin of Tudela attests: . . . and the Gate of Jehoshaphat, which faced the Temple in ancient times. There is the Templi Domini, which is the site of the Temple, and on it is a large and very beautiful dome built by Umar bin al-Khataab. Although they come to pray, the gentiles do not bring any images or effigies onto the site. And in front of this place is the western wall, which was one of the walls in[a] the Holy of Holies; this is called the Gate of Mercy[b] and hither come all the Jews to pray before the wall in the courtyard[c]. In 1625, David Finzi reported to the Jewish leadership of Carpi that: . . . from there we went up to the Temple Mount, passing mundane structures until we reached the peak of the Mount, where once the Temple stood, which was destroyed for our sins. Now a mosque is built upon it, and Jews are prohibited from entering it; only outside it, near the Western Wall, are Jews allowed to gather, and even this only in peaceful times—in difficult times, such as these, the Jewish community has decreed that no one go there. But in the first week of our visit, before this decree, we went all the way in, and kissed it, and I prostrated myself before its base, and there I said the ordered prayers, and also entreated God to bless all the Jews of Carpi ... Though it is called the Western Wall, nothing of the Temple whatever survived the destruction, the looting by thieves, and the construction of the mosque. They built a citadel on the site of the Foundation Stone, surpassingly lovely ... Tensions eventually calmed again. Gedaliah of Siemiatycze, who lived in Jerusalem from 1700 to 1706, records that: Only Muslims are permitted to enter the Mount and not Jews or other peoples, unless they convert to the Muslim faith. They say that not just any faith is worthy of the Mount, and they continually remind us that the Muslims have superseded the Jews in the eyes of God. When we go to pray at the Wall, we press right up against it, like the lover in Song of Songs who "standeth behind our wall". On the eve of the New Moon, on Tisha ba'Av, and on other fast days, we go there to pray, and the women to raise their plangent cries, but no one challenges us, and even the qadi who lives there does not object. Though the Arab youths sometimes come to prey on us, they are easily bribed to leave us alone, and if caught by their own elders they are rebuked ... Prayer by the Wall usually meets with God's favor ... . Once in olden times, or so I heard, there was a terrible drought. The Jews declared a day of fasting, and they went with a Torah scroll to the Western Wall to pray, and God answered their prayers so readily that they had to wrap the scroll in their clothes on their return to the synagogue. Every Sabbath morning, after the services at the synagogue, we immediately set off for the Western Wall ... every single one of us, Ashkenazic and Sephardic, old and young ... there we recite those Psalms that mention Jerusalem, and Pitom haQtores, and Aleinu l'Shabeach, and the Kaddish, and we bless those in the diaspora who fundraise for Eretz Yisrael ... . (Rev. James W. Lee, 1863) The writings of various travellers in the Holy Land, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, tell of how the Wall and its environs continued to be a place of devotion for the Jews. Isaac Yahuda, a prominent member of the Sephardic community in Jerusalem recalled how men and women used to gather in a circle at the Wall to hear sermons delivered in Ladino. His great-grandmother, who arrived in Palestine in 1841, "used to go to the Western Wall every Friday afternoon, winter and summer, and stay there until candle-lighting time, reading the entire Book of Psalms and the Song of Songs...she would sit there by herself for hours." In the past[dubious – discuss] women could be found sitting at the entrance to the Wall every Sabbath holding fragrant herbs and spices in order to enable worshipers to make additional blessings. In the hot weather they would provide cool water. The women also used to cast lots for the privilege of sweeping and washing the alleyway at the foot of the Wall. Throughout several centuries, the Wall is where Jews have gathered to express gratitude to God or to pray for divine mercy. On news of the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944 thousands of Jews went to the Wall to offer prayers for the "success of His Majesty's and Allied Forces in the liberation of all enemy-occupied territory." On October 13, 1994, 50,000 gathered to pray for the safe return of kidnapped soldier Nachshon Wachsman. August 10, 2005 saw a massive prayer rally at the Wall. Estimates of people protesting Israel's unilateral disengagement plan ranged from 50,000 to 250,000 people.[citation needed] Every year on Tisha B'Av large crowds congregate at the Wall to commemorate the destruction of the Temple. In 2007 over 100,000 gathered. During the month of Tishrei 2009, a record 1.5 million people visited the site. In Judaism, the Western Wall is venerated as the sole remnant of the Holy Temple. It has become a place of pilgrimage for Jews, as it is the closest permitted accessible site to the holiest spot in Judaism, namely the Even ha-shetiya or Foundation Stone, which lies on the Temple Mount. According to one rabbinic opinion, Jews may not set foot upon the Temple Mount and doing so is a sin punishable by Kareth. While almost all historians and archaeologists and some rabbinical authorities believe that the rocky outcrop in the Dome of the Rock is the Foundation Stone, some rabbis say it is located directly opposite the exposed section of the Western Wall, near the El-kas fountain. This spot was the site of the Holy of Holies when the Temple stood. Rabbinic tradition teaches that the western wall was built upon foundations laid by the biblical King Solomon from the time of the First Temple. Some medieval rabbis claimed that today's Western Wall is a surviving wall of the Temple itself and cautioned Jews from approaching it, lest they enter the Temple precincts in a state of impurity. Many contemporary rabbis believe that the rabbinic traditions were made in reference to the Temple Mount's Western Wall, which accordingly endows the Wall with inherent holiness. A 7th-century Midrash refers to a western wall of the Temple which "would never be destroyed", and a 6th-century Midrash mentions how Rome was unable to topple the western wall due to the Divine oath promising its eternal survival. An 11th-century Midrash quotes a 4th-century scholar: "Rav Acha said that the Divine Presence has never departed from the Western Wall", and the Zohar (13th century) similarly writes that "the Divine Presence rests upon the Western Wall". Eighteenth-century scholar Jonathan Eybeschutz writes that "after the destruction of the Temple, God removed His Presence from His sanctuary and placed it upon the Western Wall where it remains in its holiness and honour". It is told that great Jewish sages, including Isaac Luria and the Radvaz, experienced a revelation of the Divine Presence at the wall. Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kaindenover discusses the mystical aspect of the Hebrew word kotel when discussing the significance of praying against a wall. He cites the Zohar which writes that the word kotel, meaning wall, is made up of two parts: "Ko", which has the numerical value of God's name, and "Tel", meaning mount, which refers to the Temple and its Western Wall. Many contemporary Orthodox scholars rule that the area in front of the Wall has the status of a synagogue and must be treated with due respect. This is the view upheld by the authority in charge of the wall. As such, men and married women are expected to cover their heads upon approaching the Wall, and to dress appropriately. When departing, the custom is to walk backwards away from the Wall to show its sanctity. On Saturdays, it is forbidden to enter the area with electronic devices, including cameras, which infringe on the sanctity of the Sabbath. Some Orthodox Jewish codifiers warn against inserting fingers into the cracks of the Wall as they believe that the breadth of the Wall constitutes part of the Temple Mount itself and retains holiness, while others who permit doing so claim that the Wall is located outside the Temple area.[non-primary source needed] In the past, some visitors would write their names on the Wall, or based upon various scriptural verses, would drive nails into the crevices. These practices stopped after rabbis determined that such actions compromised the sanctity of the Wall. Another practice also existed whereby pilgrims or those intending to travel abroad would hack off a chip from the Wall or take some of the sand from between its cracks as a good luck charm or memento. In the late 19th century the question was raised as to whether this was permitted and a long responsa appeared in the Jerusalem newspaper Havatzelet in 1898. It concluded that even if according to Jewish Law it was permitted, the practices should be stopped as it constituted a desecration. More recently the Yalkut Yosef rules that it is forbidden to remove small chips of stone or dust from the Wall, although it is permissible to take twigs from the vegetation which grows in the Wall for an amulet, as they contain no holiness. Cleaning the stones is also problematic from a halachic point of view. Blasphemous graffiti once sprayed by a tourist was left visible for months until it began to peel away. There was once an old custom of removing one's shoes upon approaching the Wall. A 17th-century collection of special prayers to be said at holy places mentions that "upon coming to the Western Wall one should remove his shoes, bow and recite...". Rabbi Moses Reicher wrote[year needed] that "it is a good and praiseworthy custom to approach the Western Wall in white garments after ablution, kneel and prostrate oneself in submission and recite "This is nothing other than the House of God and here is the gate of Heaven." When within four cubits of the Wall, one should remove their footwear." Over the years the custom of standing barefoot at the Wall has ceased, as there is no need to remove one's shoes when standing by the Wall, because the plaza area is outside the sanctified precinct of the Temple Mount. According to Jewish Law, one is obliged to grieve and rend one's garment upon visiting the Western Wall and seeing the desolate site of the Temple. Bach (17th century) instructs that "when one sees the Gates of Mercy which are situated in the Western Wall, which is the wall King David built, he should recite: Her gates are sunk into the ground; he hath destroyed and broken her bars: her king and her princes are among the nations: the law is no more; her prophets also find no vision from the Lord". Some scholars write that rending one's garments is not applicable nowadays as Jerusalem is under Jewish control. Others disagree, pointing to the fact that the Temple Mount is controlled by the Muslim waqf and that the mosques which sit upon the Temple site should increase feelings of distress. If one hasn't seen the Wall for over 30 days, the prevailing custom is to rend one's garments, but this can be avoided if one visits on the Sabbath or on festivals. According to Donneal Epstein, a person who has not seen the Wall within the last 30 days should recite: "Our Holy Temple, which was our glory, in which our forefathers praised You, was burned and all of our delights were destroyed". The Sages of the Talmud stated that anyone who prays at the Temple in Jerusalem, "it is as if he has prayed before the throne of glory because the gate of heaven is situated there and it is open to hear prayer." Jewish Law stipulates that the Silent Prayer should be recited facing towards Jerusalem, the Temple and ultimately the Holy of Holies, as God's bounty and blessing emanates from that spot. It is generally believed that prayer by the Western Wall is particularly beneficial since it was that wall which was situated closest to the Holy of Holies. Rabbi Jacob Ettlinger (1798–1871) writes, making reference to a medieval rabbi, "since the Theology and ritual Israel's prayers ascend on high there... as one of the great ancient kabbalists Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla said, when the Jews send their prayers from the Diaspora in the direction of Jerusalem, from there they ascend by way of the Western Wall." A well-known segula (efficacious remedy) for finding one's soulmate is to pray for 40 consecutive days at the Western Wall, a practice apparently conceived by Rabbi Yisroel Yaakov Fisher (1928–2003). While during the late 19th century, no formal segregation of men and women was to be found at the Wall, conflict erupted in July 1968 when members of the World Union for Progressive Judaism were denied the right to host a mixed-gender service at the site after the Ministry of Religious Affairs insisted on maintaining the gender segregation customary at Orthodox places of worship. The progressives responded by claiming that "the Wall is a shrine of all Jews, not one particular branch of Judaism." In 1988, the small but vocal group called Women of the Wall launched a campaign for recognition of non-Orthodox prayer at the Wall. Their form and manner of prayer elicited a violent response from some Orthodox worshippers and they were subsequently banned from holding services at the site. After repeated attacks by haredim, in 1989 the Women of the Wall petitioned to secure the right of women to pray at the wall without restrictions. A decade on, some commentators called for the closure of the Wall unless an acceptable solution to the controversy was found. In 2003 Israel's Supreme Court upheld the ban on non-Orthodox worship at the Wall,[better source needed] disallowing any women from reading publicly from the Torah or wearing traditional prayer shawls at the plaza itself, but instructed the Israeli government to prepare the site of Robinson's Arch to host such events, given that this area does not come under the direct control of the Rabbi of the Wall or the Ministry of Religious Affairs.[better source needed] The government responded by allocating Robinson's Arch for such purposes. The Robinson's Arch worship site was inaugurated in August 2004 and has since hosted services by Reform and Conservative groups, as well as services by the Women of the Wall. In 2012, critics still complained about the restrictions at the Western Wall, saying Israel had "turned a national monument into an ultra-Orthodox synagogue." In April 2013 things came to a head. In response to the repeated arrest of women, including Anat Hoffman, found flouting the law, the Jewish Agency observed 'the urgent need to reach a permanent solution and make the Western Wall once again a symbol of unity among the Jewish people, and not one of discord and strife." Jewish Agency leader Natan Sharansky spearheaded a concept that would expand and renovate the Robinson's Arch area into an area where people may "perform worship rituals not based on the Orthodox interpretation of Jewish tradition." The Jerusalem District Court ruled that as long as there was no other appropriate area for pluralistic prayer, prayer according to non-Orthodox custom should be allowed at the Wall, and a judge ruled that the 2003 Israeli Supreme Court ruling prohibiting women from carrying a Torah or wearing prayer shawls had been misinterpreted and that Women of the Wall prayer gatherings at the Wall should not be deemed as disturbing the public order. On August 25, 2013, a new 4,480 square foot prayer platform named "Ezrat Yisrael Plaza" was completed as part of this plan of facilitating non-Orthodox worship, with access to the platform at all hours, even when the rest of the area's archaeological park is closed to visitors. After some controversy regarding the question of authority over this prayer area, the announcement was made that it would come under the authority of a future government-appointed "pluralist council" that would include non-Orthodox representatives. In January 2016, the Israeli Cabinet approved a plan to designate a new space at the Kotel that would be available for egalitarian prayer and that would not be controlled by the Rabbinate. Women of the Wall welcomed the decision, although Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar of Jerusalem said creating a mixed-gender prayer section was paramount to destroying the Wall. The Chief Rabbinate said it would create an alternate plan. In June 2017, it was announced that the plan approved in January 2016 had been suspended. There is a much publicised practice of placing slips of paper containing written prayers into the crevices of the Wall. The earliest account of this practice describes Chaim ibn Attar (d. 1743) writing an amulet for a petitioner and instructing him to place it inside the wall. More than a million notes are placed each year and the opportunity to e-mail notes is offered by a number of organisations. It has become customary for visiting dignitaries to place notes too. Shortly after the Western Wall came under Israeli control in 1967, a stand of the Chabad movement offering phylacteries (tefillin) was erected with permission from Rabbi Yehuda Meir Getz, the first rabbi of the Kotel. The stand offers male visitors the chance to put on tefillin, a daily Jewish prayer ritual. In the months following the Six-Day War an estimated 400,000 Jews observed this ritual at the stand. The stand is staffed by multilingual Chabad volunteers and an estimated 100,000 male visitors put on tefillin there annually.[better source needed] In Islam Muslim reverence for the site is derived from the belief that the Islamic prophet Muhammad tied his winged mount Buraq nearby during his night journey to Jerusalem. Various places have been suggested for the exact spot where Buraq was tethered, but for several centuries the preferred location has been the al-Buraq Mosque, which is just inside the wall at the south end of the present Western Wall plaza. The mosque is located above an ancient passageway, which once came out through the long-sealed Barclay's Gate whose huge lintel is still visible directly below the Maghrebi Gate. There are four different locations, along the southern, eastern, and western wall, with gates known successively or simultaneously as the Gate of the Prophet and al-Buraq. US scholar Charles D. Matthews wrote in 1932 that, based on the work of Muslim authors of the 10th to 11th centuries (the later part of the Early Muslim period), the place where Prophet Muhammad had tethered Buraq and entered the haram was considered at the time to be the Double Gate of the Temple Mount's southern wall. To reach this conclusion, which he shares with Charles Wilson and Guy Le Strange, he analysed the relevant texts by Ibn al-Faqih (903), Ibn Abd Rabbih (913), and mainly by Muqaddasi (985) and Nasir-i-Khusrau (1047). One of the earliest authors who are more ambiguous, opening the possibility of identifying the Gate of the Prophet and al-Buraq with either the Double or Barclay's Gate, is Burhan ad-Din ibn al-Firkah of Damascus (d. 1329). Another Mamluk-period writer, Mujir ad-Din (1496), is the first one to unambiguously identify Barclay's Gate as the Gate of al-Buraq or of the Prophet. However, Mujir ad-Din's work is effectively a rework of earlier texts, with as-Suyuti (1471) being the main source—and he fails to mention that as—Suyuti stated that the Gate of the Inspector, located close to the northern end of the western wall, was also known as the Gate of al-Buraq or of the Prophet. To the previously mentioned variations in identification adds yet another gate, the now walled-up Funeral Gate (bab al-jana'iz), just south of the Golden Gate, also known as 'Gate of al-Buraq' and marked as such on a 1864 Temple Mount map by Melchior de Vogüé, based on the 1833 survey by Frederick Catherwood (see Bab al-Rahmah Cemetery at MadainProject.com for a photo and short description). When a British Jew asked the Egyptian authorities in 1840 for permission to re-pave the ground in front of the Western Wall, the governor of Syria wrote: Carl Sandreczki, who was charged with compiling a list of place names for Charles Wilson's Ordnance Survey of Jerusalem in 1865, reported that the street leading to the Western Wall, including the part alongside the wall, belonged to the Hosh (court/enclosure) of al Burâk, "not Obrâk, nor Obrat". In 1866, the Prussian Consul and Orientalist Georg Rosen wrote that "The Arabs call Obrâk the entire length of the wall at the wailing place of the Jews, southwards down to the house of Abu Su'ud and northwards up to the substructure of the Mechkemeh [Shariah court]. Obrâk is not, as was formerly claimed, a corruption of the word Ibri (Hebrews), but simply the neo-Arabic pronunciation of Bōrâk, ... which, whilst (Muhammad) was at prayer at the holy rock, is said to have been tethered by him inside the wall location mentioned above." The name Hosh al Buraq appeared on the maps of Wilson's 1865 survey, its revised editions of 1876 and 1900, and other maps in the early 20th century. In 1922, Hosh al Buraq was the street name specified by the official Pro-Jerusalem Council. In Christianity Some scholars[who?] believe that when Jerusalem came under Christian rule in the 4th century, there was a purposeful "transference" of respect for the Temple Mount and the Western Wall in terms of sanctity to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, while the sites around the Temple Mount became a refuse dump for Christians. However, the actions of many modern Christian leaders, including Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI, who visited the Wall and left prayer messages in its crevices, have symbolized for many Christians a restoration of respect and even veneration for this ancient religious site. Ideological views Most Jews, religious and secular, consider the wall to be important to the Jewish people since it was originally built to hold the Second Temple. They consider the capture of the wall by Israel in 1967 as a historic event since it restored Jewish access to the site after a 19-year gap. Israeli philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz referred to the attitude towards the Western Wall as "idolatry" and publicly decried the Israelis' triumphalism following the 1967 victory. Dan Bahat, former district archaeologist of Jerusalem who headed the Western Wall Tunnel excavations in the years 1986–2007, decried in 2018 the transformation of this iconic historical site into a regulated place of worship: "The Western Wall is sacrosanct. But out of a national monument, it has become a synagogue." A poll carried out in 2007 by the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies indicated that 96% of Israeli Jews were against Israel relinquishing the Western Wall. Yitzhak Reiter writes that "the Islamization and de-Judaization of the Western Wall are a recurrent motif in publications and public statements by the heads of the Islamic Movement in Israel." In December 1973, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia stated that "Only Muslims and Christians have holy places and rights in Jerusalem". The Jews, he maintained, had no rights there at all. As for the Western Wall, he said, "Another wall can be built for them. They can pray against that". The Palestinian National Authority's State Information Service (SIS) stated as fact that the Jews did not consider the Wall as a place for worship until after the Balfour Declaration was issued in 1917. In 2006, Dr. Hassan Khader, founder of the Al Quds Encyclopedia, told PA television that the first connection of the Jews to the Wall is "a recent one, which began in the 16th century...not ancient...like the roots of the Islamic connection". The Mufti of Jerusalem, Sheikh Ekrima Sa'id Sabri said in 2007 that "there never was a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount" and that "there is not a single stone with any relation at all to the history of the Hebrews." In November 2010, an official paper published by the PA Ministry of Information denied Jewish rights to the Wall. It stated that "Al-Buraq Wall is in fact the western wall of Al-Aksa Mosque" and that Jews had only started using the site for worship after the 1917 Balfour Declaration. While recognizing the difficulties inherent in any ultimate peace agreement that involves the status of Jerusalem, the official position of the United States includes a recognition of the importance of the Wall to the Jewish people, and has condemned statements that seek to "delegitimize" the relationship between Jews and the area in general, and the Western Wall in particular. For example, in November 2010, the Obama administration "strongly condemned a Palestinian official's claim that the Western Wall in the Old City has no religious significance for Jews and is actually Muslim property." The U.S. State Department noted that the United States rejects such a claim as "factually incorrect, insensitive and highly provocative." Administration After the 1967 Arab–Israeli war, Rabbi Yehuda Meir Getz was named the overseer of proceedings at the wall. After Rabbi Getz's death in 1995, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz was given the position. The Western Wall Heritage Foundation is the administrative body put in charge of the Wall. See also Footnotes References External links Photographs Google Street View Gates1. Jaffa 2. Zion 3. Dung 4. Golden 5. Lions 6. Herod7. Damascus 8. New (Double, Single, Tanners')Al-Mawazin |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixel] | [TOKENS: 3334] |
Contents Pixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable physical element of a raster image or the smallest controllable element of a display device or dot matrix printer. Pixels are arranged in a regular, two-dimensional grid, and each pixel serves as a sample of an original image, with a greater number of samples typically providing more accurate representations. Each pixel possesses a specific intensity or color, often composed of three or four component intensities, such as red, green, and blue (RGB), or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (CMYK). The intensity of each pixel is variable, and in color imaging systems, these components are combined to produce a wide spectrum of colors. The concept of a picture element has existed since the early days of television, appearing as "Bildpunkt" in a 1888 German patent, and the term "pixel" has been used in various U.S. patents since 1911. In most digital display devices, pixels are the smallest element that can be manipulated through software. Each pixel is a sample of an original image; more samples typically provide more accurate representations of the original. The intensity of each pixel is variable. In color imaging systems, a color is typically represented by three or four component intensities such as red, green, and blue, or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. In some contexts (such as descriptions of camera sensors), pixel refers to a single scalar element of a multi-component representation (called a photosite in the camera sensor context, although sensel 'sensor element' is sometimes used), while in yet other contexts (like MRI) it may refer to a set of component intensities for a spatial position. Software on early consumer computers was necessarily rendered at a low resolution, with large pixels visible to the naked eye; graphics made under these limitations may be called pixel art, especially in reference to video games. Modern computers and displays, however, can easily render orders of magnitude more pixels than was previously possible, necessitating the use of large measurements like the megapixel (one million pixels). Etymology The word pixel is a combination of pix (from "pictures", shortened to "pics") and el (for "element"); similar formations with 'el' include the words voxel 'volume pixel', and texel 'texture pixel'. The word pix appeared in Variety magazine headlines in 1932, as an abbreviation for the word pictures, in reference to movies. By 1938, "pix" was being used in reference to still pictures by photojournalists. The word "pixel" was first published in 1965 by Frederic C. Billingsley of JPL, to describe the picture elements of scanned images from space probes to the Moon and Mars. Billingsley had learned the word from Keith E. McFarland, at the Link Division of General Precision in Palo Alto, who in turn said he did not know where it originated. McFarland said simply it was "in use at the time" (c. 1963). The concept of a "picture element" dates to the earliest days of television, for example as "Bildpunkt" (the German word for pixel, literally 'picture point') in the 1888 German patent of Paul Nipkow. According to various etymologies, the earliest publication of the term picture element itself was in Wireless World magazine in 1927, though it had been used earlier in various U.S. patents filed as early as 1911. Some authors explain pixel as picture cell, as early as 1972. In graphics and in image and video processing, pel is often used instead of pixel. For example, IBM used it in their Technical Reference for the original PC. Pixilation, spelled with a second i, is an unrelated filmmaking technique that dates to the beginnings of cinema, in which live actors are posed frame by frame and photographed to create stop-motion animation. An archaic British word meaning "possession by spirits (pixies)", the term has been used to describe the animation process since the early 1950s; various animators, including Norman McLaren and Grant Munro, are credited with popularizing it. Technical A pixel is generally thought of as the smallest single component of a digital image. However, the definition is highly context-sensitive. For example, there can be "printed pixels" in a page, or pixels carried by electronic signals, or represented by digital values, or pixels on a display device, or pixels in a digital camera (photosensor elements). This list is not exhaustive and, depending on context, synonyms include pel, sample, byte, bit, dot, and spot. Pixels can be used as a unit of measure such as: 2400 pixels per inch, 640 pixels per line, or spaced 10 pixels apart. The measures "dots per inch" (dpi) and "pixels per inch" (ppi) are sometimes used interchangeably, but have distinct meanings, especially for printer devices, where dpi is a measure of the printer's density of dot (e.g. ink droplet) placement. For example, a high-quality photographic image may be printed with 600 ppi on a 1200 dpi inkjet printer. Even higher dpi numbers, such as the 4800 dpi quoted by printer manufacturers since 2002, do not mean much in terms of achievable resolution. The more pixels used to represent an image, the closer the result can resemble the original. The number of pixels in an image is sometimes called the resolution, though resolution has a more specific definition. Pixel counts can be expressed as a single number, as in a "three-megapixel" digital camera, which has a nominal three million pixels, or as a pair of numbers, as in a "640 by 480 display", which has 640 pixels from side to side and 480 from top to bottom (as in a VGA display) and therefore has a total number of 640 × 480 = 307,200 pixels, or 0.3 megapixels. The pixels, or color samples, that form a digitized image (such as a JPEG file used on a web page) may or may not be in one-to-one correspondence with screen pixels, depending on how a computer displays an image. In computing, an image composed of pixels is known as a bitmapped image or a raster image. The word raster originates from television scanning patterns, and has been widely used to describe similar halftone printing and storage techniques. For convenience, pixels are normally arranged in a regular two-dimensional grid. By using this arrangement, many common operations can be implemented by uniformly applying the same operation to each pixel independently. Other arrangements of pixels are possible, with some sampling patterns even changing the shape (or kernel) of each pixel across the image. For this reason, care must be taken when acquiring an image on one device and displaying it on another, or when converting image data from one pixel format to another. For example: Computer monitors (and TV sets) generally have a fixed native resolution. What it is depends on the monitor, and size. See below for historical exceptions. Computers can use pixels to display an image, often an abstract image that represents a GUI. The resolution of this image is called the display resolution and is determined by the video card of the computer. Flat-panel monitors (and TV sets), e.g. OLED or LCD monitors, or E-ink, also use pixels to display an image, and have a native resolution, and it should (ideally) be matched to the video card resolution. Each pixel is made up of triads, with the number of these triads determining the native resolution. On older, historically available, CRT monitors the resolution was possibly adjustable (still lower than what modern monitor achieve), while on some such monitors (or TV sets) the beam sweep rate was fixed, resulting in a fixed native resolution. Most CRT monitors do not have a fixed beam sweep rate, meaning they do not have a native resolution at all – instead they have a set of resolutions that are equally well supported. To produce the sharpest images possible on a flat-panel, e.g. OLED or LCD, the user must ensure the display resolution of the computer matches the native resolution of the monitor. The pixel scale used in astronomy is the angular distance between two objects on the sky that fall one pixel apart on the detector (CCD or infrared chip). The scale s measured in radians is the ratio of the pixel spacing p and focal length f of the preceding optics, s = p / f. (The focal length is the product of the focal ratio by the diameter of the associated lens or mirror.) Because s is usually expressed in units of arcseconds per pixel, because 1 radian equals (180/π) × 3600 ≈ 206,265 arcseconds, and because focal lengths are often given in millimeters and pixel sizes in micrometers which yields another factor of 1,000, the formula is often quoted as s = 206 p / f. The number of distinct colors that can be represented by a pixel depends on the number of bits per pixel (bpp). A 1 bpp image uses 1 bit for each pixel, so each pixel can be either on or off. Each additional bit doubles the number of colors available, so a 2 bpp image can have 4 colors, and a 3 bpp image can have 8 colors: For color depths of 15 or more bits per pixel, the depth is normally the sum of the bits allocated to each of the red, green, and blue components. Highcolor, usually meaning 16 bpp, normally has five bits for red and blue each, and six bits for green, as the human eye is more sensitive to errors in green than in the other two primary colors. For applications involving transparency, the 16 bits may be divided into five bits each of red, green, and blue, with one bit left for transparency. A 24-bit depth allows 8 bits per component. On some systems, 32-bit depth is available: this means that each 24-bit pixel has an extra 8 bits to describe its opacity (for purposes of combining with another image). Many display and image-acquisition systems are not capable of displaying or sensing the different color channels at the same site. Therefore, the pixel grid is divided into single-color regions that contribute to the displayed or sensed color when viewed at a distance. In some displays, such as LCD, LED, and plasma displays, these single-color regions are separately addressable elements, which have come to be known as subpixels, mostly RGB colors. For example, LCDs typically divide each pixel vertically into three subpixels. When the square pixel is divided into three subpixels, each subpixel is necessarily rectangular. In display industry terminology, subpixels are often referred to as pixels, as they are the basic addressable elements in a viewpoint of hardware, and hence pixel circuits rather than subpixel circuits is used. Most digital camera image sensors use single-color sensor regions, for example using the Bayer filter pattern, and in the camera industry these are known as pixels just like in the display industry, not subpixels. For systems with subpixels, two different approaches can be taken: This latter approach, referred to as subpixel rendering, uses knowledge of pixel geometry to manipulate the three colored subpixels separately, producing an increase in the apparent resolution of color displays. While CRT displays use red-green-blue-masked phosphor areas, dictated by a mesh grid called the shadow mask, it would require a difficult calibration step to be aligned with the displayed pixel raster, and so CRTs do not use subpixel rendering. The concept of subpixels is related to samples. In graphic, web design, and user interfaces, a "pixel" may refer to a fixed length rather than a true pixel on the screen to accommodate different pixel densities. A typical definition, such as in CSS, is that a "physical" pixel is 1⁄96 inch (0.26 mm). Doing so makes sure a given element will display as the same size no matter what screen resolution views it. There may, however, be some further adjustments between a "physical" pixel and an on-screen logical pixel. As screens are viewed at difference distances (consider a phone, a computer display, and a TV), the desired length (a "reference pixel") is scaled relative to a reference viewing distance (28 inches (71 cm) in CSS). In addition, as true screen pixel densities are rarely multiples of 96 dpi, some rounding is often applied so that a logical pixel is an integer amount of actual pixels. Doing so avoids render artifacts. The final "pixel" obtained after these two steps becomes the "anchor" to which all other absolute measurements (e.g. the "centimeter") are based on. Worked example, with a 30-inch (76 cm) 2160p TV placed 56 inches (140 cm) away from the viewer: A browser will then choose to use the 1.721× pixel size, or round to a 2× ratio. Megapixel A megapixel (MP) is a million pixels; the term is used not only for the number of pixels in an image but also to express the number of image sensor elements of digital cameras or the number of display elements of digital displays. For example, a camera that makes a 2048 × 1536 pixel image (3,145,728 finished image pixels) typically uses a few extra rows and columns of sensor elements and is commonly said to have "3.2 megapixels" or "3.4 megapixels", depending on whether the number reported is the "effective" or the "total" pixel count. The number of pixels is sometimes quoted as the "resolution" of a photo. This measure of resolution can be calculated by multiplying the width and height of a sensor in pixels. Digital cameras use photosensitive electronics, either charge-coupled device (CCD) or complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors, consisting of a large number of single sensor elements, each of which records a measured intensity level. In most digital cameras, the sensor array is covered with a patterned color filter mosaic having red, green, and blue regions in the Bayer filter arrangement so that each sensor element can record the intensity of a single primary color of light. The camera interpolates the color information of neighboring sensor elements, through a process called demosaicing, to create the final image. These sensor elements are often called "pixels", even though they only record one channel (only red or green or blue) of the final color image. Thus, two of the three color channels for each sensor must be interpolated and a so-called N-megapixel camera that produces an N-megapixel image provides only one-third of the information that an image of the same size could get from a scanner. Thus, certain color contrasts may look fuzzier than others, depending on the allocation of the primary colors (green has twice as many elements as red or blue in the Bayer arrangement). DxO Labs invented the Perceptual MegaPixel (P-MPix) to measure the sharpness that a camera produces when paired to a particular lens – as opposed to the MP a manufacturer states for a camera product, which is based only on the camera's sensor. P-MPix claims to be a more accurate and relevant value for photographers to consider when weighing up camera sharpness. As of mid-2013, the Sigma 35 mm f/1.4 DG HSM lens mounted on a Nikon D800 has the highest measured P-MPix. However, with a value of 23 MP, it still wipes off[clarification needed] more than one-third of the D800's 36.3 MP sensor. In August 2019, Xiaomi released the Redmi Note 8 Pro as the world's first smartphone with 64 MP camera. On December 12, 2019, Samsung released Samsung A71 that also has a 64 MP camera. In late 2019, Xiaomi announced the first camera phone with 108 MP 1/1.33-inch across sensor. The sensor is larger than most of bridge camera with 1/2.3-inch across sensor. See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maor_Farid#Personal_life] | [TOKENS: 1458] |
Contents Maor Farid Dr. Maor Farid (Hebrew: מאור פריד; born April 20, 1992) is an Israeli scientist, engineer and artificial intelligence researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, social activist, and author. He is the founder and CEO of Learn to Succeed (Hebrew: ללמוד להצליח) for empowering of youths from the Israeli socio-economic periphery and youths at risk, a regional manager of the Israeli center of ScienceAbroad at MIT, and an activist in the American Technion Society. He is an alumnus of Unit 8200, and a fellow of Fulbright Program and the Israel Scholarship Educational Foundation [he]. Dr. Farid was elected to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of 2019, and won the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism. Early life Maor was born in Ness Ziona, a city in central Israel, as the eldest son for parents from immigrating families of Mizrahi Jews from Iraq and Libya. Maor suffered from Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from a young age, and was classified as a problematic and violent student. His ADHD issues were diagnosed only after he began his university studies. However, inspired by his parents' background, he aspired to excel at school for a better future for his family. During elementary school, Maor attended local quizzes about Jewish history and Zionism, which significantly shaped his identity and national perspective. Farid graduated high school with the highest GPA in school. Later he was recruited to the Israel Defense Forces and drafted to the Brakim Program [he] – an excellence program of the Israeli Intelligence Corps for training leading R&D officers for the Israeli military and defense industry. Maor graduated the program with honors and was elected by the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and Unit 8200, where he served as an artificial intelligence researcher, officer, and commander. During his Military service, he received various honors and awards, such as the Excellent Scientist Award, given to the top three academics serving in the Israel Defense Forces. In 2019, Farid completed his military service in the rank of a Captain. Education and academic career As part of the (4 years) Brakim Program, Maor completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the Technion in Mechanical Engineering with honors. Then, he initiated his Ph.D. research as a collaboration with the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) in parallel to his duty military service. The main goals of his Ph.D. research were predicting irreversible effects of major earthquakes on Israel's nuclear facilities, and improving their seismic resistance using energy absorption technologies. The mathematical models developed by Farid were able to forecast earthquake effects on facilities with major hazard potential, and predicted the failure of liquid storage tanks due to earthquakes took place in Italy (2012) and Mexico (2017). The energy absorption technologies used, increased in up to 90% the seismic resistance abilities of those sensitive facilities. The research results were published in multiple papers in peer-reviewed academic journals and presented in international academic conferences. Later, this research expanded to an official collaboration between the Technion and the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, which aims to implement the findings obtained on existing sensitive systems, and won funding of 1.5 million NIS from the Pazy foundation of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and the Council for Higher Education. In 2017, Farid completed his Ph.D. and as the youngest graduate at the Technion for that year, at the age of 24. In the graduation ceremonies, he honored his parents to receive the diplomas on his behalf. At the same year, he served as a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University in an original course he developed as a solution for knowledge gaps he identified in the Israeli defense industry. In 2018, Dr. Farid served as an artificial intelligence researcher at a Data Science team of Unit 8200, where he developed machine learning-based solutions for military and operational needs. In 2019, Farid won the Fulbright and the Israel Scholarship Educational Foundation scholarships, and was accepted to post-doctoral position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he develops real-time methods for predicting earthquake effects using machine learning techniques. In 2020, Farid was accepted to the Emerging Leaders Program at Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the same year, he received the excellence research grant of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities for leading his research in collaboration between MIT and the Technion. Social activism Farid social activism focuses on empowering youths from disadvantaged backgrounds from an early age. In 2010–2015, he served as a mentor of a robotics team from Dimona in FIRST Robotics Competition, a mathematics tutor in "Aharai!" [he] program for high-school students at risk in Dimona and Be'er Sheva, and a mentor and private tutor of adolescence and reserve duty soldiers from disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2010, he initiated "Learn to Succeed" (Hebrew: ללמוד להצליח) project, for mitigating the social gaps in the Israeli society by empowering youths from the social, economical, and geographical periphery for excellence, self-fulfillment and gaining formal education. In 2018, Learn to Succeed became an official non-profit organization. At the same year, Farid led a crowdfunding project of 150,000 NIS in order to expand the organization to a national scale. In 2019, he published the book "Learn to Succeed", in which he describes his struggle with ADHD, the violent environment in which he grew up, and the changing process he went through from being a violent teenager to becoming the youngest Ph.D. graduate at the Technion. The book was given to more than two thousand youths at risk and became a top seller in Israel shortly after its publication. Maor dedicated the book to his parents and to the memorial of his friend Captain Tal Nachman who was killed in operational activity during his military service in 2014. The organization consists of hundreds of volunteers, gives full scholarships to STEM students from the periphery who serve as mentors of youths, both Jews and Arabs, from disadvantaged backgrounds, runs a hotline which gives online practical and mental support to hundreds of youths, parents and educators, initiates inspirational activities with military orientation to increase the motivation of its teen-age members for significant military service, and gives inspirational lectures to more than 5,000 youths each year. In 2019, Maor initiated a collaboration with Unit 8200 in which tens of the program's members are being interviewed to the unit. This opportunity is usually given to students with the highest grades in the matriculate exams in each class. In 2020, Dr. Farid established the ScienceAbroad center at MIT, aiming to strengthen the connections between Israeli researchers in the institute and the state of Israel. Moreover, he serves as a volunteer in the American Technion Society. Honors and awards Personal life Farid is married to Michal. Interviews and articles References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPMorgan_Chase] | [TOKENS: 13024] |
Contents JPMorgan Chase JPMorgan Chase & Co. (stylized as JPMorganChase) is an American multinational banking institution headquartered in New York City and incorporated in Delaware. It is the largest bank in the United States, and the world's largest bank by market capitalization as of 2025. As the largest of the Big Four banks in America, the firm is considered systemically important by the Financial Stability Board. Its size and scale have often led to enhanced regulatory oversight as well as the development of an internal "Fortress Balance Sheet". The firm has had its global headquarters on 270 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan since 2025. JPMorgan Chase was created in 2000 by the merger of New York City banks J.P. Morgan & Co. and Chase Manhattan Company. Through its predecessors, the firm's early history can be traced to 1799, with the founding of what became the Bank of the Manhattan Company. J.P. Morgan & Co. was founded in 1871 by the American financier J. P. Morgan, who launched the House of Morgan on 23 Wall Street as a national purveyor of commercial, investment, and private banking services. Today, the firm is a major provider of investment banking services, through corporate advisory, mergers and acquisitions, sales and trading, and public offerings. Their private banking franchise and asset management division are among the world's largest in terms of total assets. Its retail banking and credit card offerings are provided via the Chase brand worldwide. JPMorgan Chase is the world's fifth-largest bank by total assets, with $4 trillion in assets as of 2025. The firm operates the largest investment bank in the world by revenue. It occupies the 11th spot on the Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. corporations by revenue. In 2025, JPMorgan Chase was ranked #1 in the Forbes Global 2000 ranking for the third consecutive year. The company's balance sheet, geographic footprint, and thought leadership have yielded a substantial market share in banking and a high level of brand loyalty. It receives routine criticism for its risk management, broad financing activities, and large-scale legal settlements. History JPMorgan Chase is the result of the combination of several large U.S. banking companies that merged since 1996, combining Chase Manhattan Bank, J.P. Morgan & Co., and Bank One, as well as asset assumptions of Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, and First Republic. Predecessors included additional historic, major banking firms, among which are Chemical Bank, Manufacturers Hanover, First Chicago Bank, National Bank of Detroit, Texas Commerce Bank, Providian Financial and Great Western Bank. The company's oldest predecessor institution, The Bank of the Manhattan Company, was established on September 1, 1799, by Aaron Burr. The Chase Manhattan Bank was formed upon the 1955 purchase of Chase National Bank (established in 1877) by The Bank of the Manhattan Company (established in 1799), the company's oldest predecessor institution. The Bank of the Manhattan Company was the creation of Aaron Burr, who transformed the company from a water carrier into a bank. According to page 115 of An Empire of Wealth by John Steele Gordon, the origin of this strand of JPMorgan Chase's history runs as follows: At the turn of the nineteenth century, obtaining a bank charter required an act of the state legislature. This, of course, injected a powerful element of politics into the process and invited what today would be called corruption but then was regarded as business as usual. Hamilton's political enemy—and eventual murderer—Aaron Burr was able to create a bank by sneaking a clause into a charter for a company called The Manhattan Company to provide clean water to New York City. The innocuous-looking clause allowed the company to invest surplus capital in any lawful enterprise. Within six months of the company's creation, and long before it had laid a single section of water pipe, the company opened a bank, the Bank of the Manhattan Company. Still in existence, it is today JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States. Led by David Rockefeller during the 1970s and 1980s, Chase Manhattan emerged as one of the largest and most prestigious banks, with leadership positions in syndicated lending, treasury and securities services, credit cards, mortgages, and retail financial services. Weakened by the real estate collapse in the early 1990s, it was acquired by Chemical Bank in 1996, retaining the Chase name. Before its merger with J.P. Morgan & Co., the new Chase expanded the investment and asset management groups through two acquisitions. In 1999, it acquired San Francisco–based Hambrecht & Quist for $1.35 billion. In April 2000, UK-based Robert Fleming & Co. was purchased by the new Chase Manhattan Bank for $7.7 billion. The New York Chemical Manufacturing Company was founded in 1823 as a maker of various chemicals. In 1824, the company amended its charter to perform banking activities and created the Chemical Bank of New York. After 1851, the bank was separated from its parent and grew organically and through a series of mergers, most notably with Corn Exchange Bank in 1954, Texas Commerce Bank (a large bank in Texas) in 1986, and Manufacturer's Hanover Trust Company in 1991 (the first major bank merger "among equals"). In the 1980s and early 1990s, Chemical emerged as one of the leaders in the financing of leveraged buyout transactions. In 1984, Chemical launched Chemical Venture Partners to invest in private equity transactions alongside various financial sponsors. By the late 1980s, Chemical developed its reputation for financing buyouts, building a syndicated leveraged finance business and related advisory businesses under the auspices of investment banker, Jimmy Lee. At many points throughout this history, Chemical Bank was the largest bank, either in terms of assets or deposit market share, in the United States.[citation needed] In 1996, Chemical Bank acquired Chase Manhattan. Although Chemical was the nominal survivor, it took the better-known Chase name. To this day, JPMorgan Chase retains Chemical's pre-1996 stock price history, as well as Chemical's former headquarters site at 270 Park Avenue. The House of Morgan was born out of the partnership of Drexel, Morgan & Co., which in 1895 was renamed J.P. Morgan & Co. J.P. Morgan & Co. financed the formation of the United States Steel Corporation, which took over the business of Andrew Carnegie and others and was the world's first billion dollar corporation. In 1895, J.P. Morgan & Co. supplied the United States government with $62 million in gold to float a bond issue and restore the treasury surplus of $100 million. In 1892, the company began to finance the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad and led it through a series of acquisitions that made it the dominant railroad transporter in New England. Built in 1914, 23 Wall Street was the bank's headquarters for decades. On September 16, 1920, a terrorist bomb exploded in front of the bank, injuring 400 and killing 38. Shortly before the bomb went off, a warning note was placed in a mailbox at the corner of Cedar Street and Broadway. The case has never been solved, and was rendered inactive by the FBI in 1940. In August 1914, Henry P. Davison, a Morgan partner, made a deal with the Bank of England to make J.P. Morgan & Co. the monopoly underwriter of war bonds for the UK and France. The Bank of England became a "fiscal agent" of J.P. Morgan & Co., and vice versa. The company also invested in the suppliers of war equipment to Britain and France. The company profited from the financing and purchasing activities of the two European governments. Since the U.S. federal government withdrew from world affairs under successive isolationist Republican administrations in the 1920s, J.P. Morgan & Co. continued playing a major role in global affairs since most European countries still owed war debts. In the 1930s, J.P. Morgan & Co. and all integrated banking businesses in the United States were required by the provisions of the Glass–Steagall Act to separate their investment banking from their commercial banking operations. J.P. Morgan & Co. chose to operate as a commercial bank. In 1935, after being barred from the securities business for over a year, the heads of J.P. Morgan spun off its investment-banking operations. Led by J.P. Morgan partners, Henry S. Morgan (son of Jack Morgan and grandson of J. Pierpont Morgan) and Harold Stanley, Morgan Stanley was founded on September 16, 1935, with $6.6 million of nonvoting preferred stock from J.P. Morgan partners.[better source needed] To bolster its position, in 1959, J.P. Morgan merged with the Guaranty Trust Company of New York to form the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company. The bank would continue to operate as Morgan Guaranty Trust until the 1980s, before migrating back to the use of the J.P. Morgan brand. In 1984, the group purchased the Purdue National Corporation of Lafayette, Indiana. In 1988, the company once again began operating exclusively as J.P. Morgan & Co. The Bank began operations in Japan in 1924, in Australia during the later part of the nineteenth century, and in Indonesia during the early 1920s. An office of the Equitable Eastern Banking Corporation (one of J.P. Morgan's predecessors) opened a branch in China in 1921 and Chase National Bank was established there in 1923. The bank has operated in Saudi Arabia and India since the 1930s. Chase Manhattan Bank opened an office in South Korea in 1967. The firm's presence in Greece dates to 1968. An office of JPMorgan was opened in Taiwan in 1970, in Russia (Soviet Union) in 1973, and Nordic operations began during the same year. Operations in Poland began in 1995. In 2004, JPMorgan Chase merged with Chicago-based Bank One Corp., bringing on board current chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon as president and COO. He succeeded former CEO William B. Harrison Jr. Dimon introduced new cost-cutting strategies, and replaced former JPMorgan Chase executives in key positions with Bank One executives—many of whom were with Dimon at Citigroup. Dimon became CEO in December 2005 and chairman in December 2006. Bank One Corporation was formed with the 1998 merger of Banc One of Columbus, Ohio and First Chicago NBD. This merger was considered a failure until Dimon took over and reformed the new firm's practices. Dimon effected changes to make Bank One Corporation a viable merger partner for JPMorgan Chase. Bank One Corporation, formerly First Bancgroup of Ohio, was founded as a holding company for City National Bank of Columbus, Ohio, and several other banks in that state, all of which were renamed "Bank One" when the holding company was renamed Banc One Corporation. With the beginning of interstate banking they spread into other states, always renaming acquired banks "Bank One". After the First Chicago NBD merger, adverse financial results led to the departure of CEO John B. McCoy, whose father and grandfather had headed Banc One and predecessors. JPMorgan Chase completed the merger with Bank One in the third quarter of 2004. At the end of 2007, Bear Stearns was the fifth largest investment bank in the United States but its market capitalization had deteriorated through the second half of the year. On Friday, March 14, 2008, Bear Stearns lost 47% of its equity market value as rumors emerged that clients were withdrawing capital from the bank. Over the following weekend, it emerged that Bear Stearns might prove insolvent, and on March 15, 2008, the Federal Reserve engineered a deal to prevent a wider systemic crisis from the collapse of Bear Stearns. On March 16, 2008, after a weekend of intense negotiations between JPMorgan, Bear, and the federal government, JPMorgan Chase announced its plans to acquire Bear Stearns in a stock swap worth $2.00 per share or $240 million pending shareholder approval scheduled within 90 days. In the interim, JPMorgan Chase agreed to guarantee all Bear Stearns trades and business process flows. On March 18, 2008, JPMorgan Chase formally announced the acquisition of Bear Stearns for $236 million. The stock swap agreement was signed that night. On March 24, 2008, after public discontent over the low acquisition price threatened the deal's closure, a revised offer was announced at approximately $10 per share. Under the revised terms, JPMorgan also immediately acquired a 39.5% stake in Bear Stearns using newly issued shares at the new offer price and gained a commitment from the board, representing another 10% of the share capital, that its members would vote in favor of the new deal. With sufficient commitments to ensure a successful shareholder vote, the merger was completed on May 30, 2008. On September 25, 2008, JPMorgan Chase bought most of the banking operations of Washington Mutual from the receivership of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. That night, the Office of Thrift Supervision, in what was by far the largest bank failure in American history, had seized Washington Mutual Bank and placed it into receivership. The FDIC sold the bank's assets, secured debt obligations, and deposits to JPMorgan Chase & Co for $1.836 billion, which re-opened the bank the following day. However, Chase did not purchase any mortgages in the FDIC receivership as the loans had already been sold off into Washington Mutual-branded mortgage-backed securities long before the receivership happened on September 25, 2008. If Chase wanted ownership of any Washington Mutual mortgages, they had to purchase them from the FDIC by way of a Receiver's Deed or Bill of Sale. This could not occur, as there were no mortgages on Washington Mutual Bank's books at time of receivership. Any recorded Assignments of Mortgage claiming that Chase was "successor in interest" and that the transfer occurred "by operation of law", would be incorrect. The FDIC was "successor in interest" to Washington Mutual Bank. Chase's purchase of the bank from the FDIC was for Washington Mutual Bank only and it occurred by a Purchase & Assumption Agreement and not "by operation of law" from the receivership. As a result of the takeover, Washington Mutual shareholders lost all their equity. JPMorgan Chase raised $10 billion in a stock sale to cover writedowns and losses after taking on deposits and branches of Washington Mutual. Through the acquisition, JPMorgan now owns the former accounts of Providian Financial, a credit card issuer WaMu acquired in 2005. The company announced plans to complete the rebranding of Washington Mutual branches to Chase by late 2009.[citation needed] Chief executive Alan H. Fishman received a $7.5 million sign-on bonus and cash severance of $11.6 million after being CEO for 17 days.[importance?] On May 1, 2023, in what was now the second largest bank failure behind JPMorgan's acquisition of Washington Mutual fifteen years earlier, the company acquired "the substantial majority of assets" and inherited the deposits of First Republic Bank. Under terms disclosed by JPMorgan Chase, it will make a $10.6 billion payment to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, return $25 billion in funds that other banks deposited with First Republic in March in a lifeline negotiated with the US Department of Treasury at that time, and will eliminate a $5 billion deposit it had made with First Republic. As a result of the takeover, First Republic Bank shareholders lost all their equity. The FDIC estimates that the cost to the Deposit Insurance Fund will be about $13 billion. In 2006, JPMorgan Chase purchased Collegiate Funding Services, a portfolio company of private equity firm Lightyear Capital, for $663 million. CFS was used as the foundation for the Chase Student Loans, previously known as Chase Education Finance. In April 2006, JPMorgan Chase acquired Bank of New York Mellon's retail and small business banking network. The acquisition gave Chase access to 339 additional branches in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. In 2008, J.P. Morgan acquired the UK-based carbon offsetting company ClimateCare. JPMorgan Chase was the biggest bank at the end of 2008 as an individual bank (exclusive of its subsidiaries) during the 2008 financial crisis. On October 28, 2008, $25 billion in funds were transferred from the U.S. Treasury Department to JPMorgan Chase, under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). This was the fifth largest amount transferred under Section A of TARP to help troubled assets related to residential mortgages. It has been widely reported that JPMorgan Chase was in much better financial shape than other banks and did not need TARP funds but accepted the funds because the government did not want to single out only the banks with capital issues. JPMorgan Chase stated in February 2009 that it would be using its capital-base monetary strength to acquire new businesses. By February 2009, the U.S. government had not moved forward in enforcing TARP's intent of funding JPMorgan Chase with $25 billion. In the face of the government's lack of action, Jamie Dimon was quoted during the week of February 1, 2009, as saying: JPMorgan would be fine if we stopped talking about the damn nationalization of banks. We've got plenty of capital. To policymakers, I say where were they? ... They approved all these banks. Now they're beating up on everyone, saying look at all these mistakes, and we're going to come and fix it. JPMorgan Chase was arguably the healthiest of the nine largest U.S. banks and did not need to take TARP funds. To encourage smaller banks with troubled assets to accept this money, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson allegedly coerced the CEOs of the nine largest banks to accept TARP money under short notice. In November 2009, J.P. Morgan announced it would acquire the balance of J.P. Morgan Cazenove, an advisory and underwriting joint venture established in 2004 with the Cazenove Group. Earlier in 2011, the company announced that by the use of field-programmable gate array-based supercomputers, the time taken to assess risk had been greatly reduced, from arriving at a conclusion within hours to what is now minutes. In 2013, J.P. Morgan acquired Bloomspot, a San Francisco-based startup. Shortly after the acquisition, the service was shut down and Bloomspot's talent was left unused. In 2013, after teaming up with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GlaxoSmithKline and Children's Investment Fund, JPMorgan Chase, under Dimon launched a $94 million fund with a focus on "late-stage healthcare technology trials". The fund will "give money to final-stage drug, vaccine, and medical device studies that are otherwise stalled at companies because of their relatively high failure risk and low consumer demand. Examples of problems that could be addressed by the fund include malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and maternal and infant mortality", according to the Gates and JPMorgan Chase led-group. The 2014 JPMorgan Chase data breach, disclosed in September 2014, compromised the JPMorgan Chase accounts of over 83 million customers. The attack was discovered by the bank's security team in late July 2014, but not completely halted until the middle of August. In October 2014, J.P. Morgan sold its commodities trader unit to Mercuria for $800 million, a quarter of the initial valuation of $3.5 billion, as the transaction excluded some oil and metal stockpiles and other assets. In March 2016, J.P. Morgan decided not to finance coal mines and coal power plants in wealthy countries. In October 2016, J.P.Morgan unveiled its permissioned blockchain called Quorum, based on Ethereum's GO programming language. In December 2016, 14 former executives of the Wendel investment company faced trial for tax fraud while JPMorgan Chase was to be pursued for complicity. Jean-Bernard Lafonta was convicted December 2015 for spreading false information and insider trading, and fined 1.5 million euros. In March 2017, Lawrence Obracanik, a former JPMorgan Chase & Co. employee, pleaded guilty to criminal charges that he stole more than $5 million from his employer to pay personal debts. In June 2017, Matt Zames, then-COO of the bank, decided to leave the firm. In December 2017, J.P. Morgan was sued by the Nigerian government for $875 million, which Nigeria alleges was transferred by J.P. Morgan to a corrupt former minister. Nigeria accused J.P. Morgan of being "grossly negligent". In February 2019, J.P. Morgan announced the launch of JPM Coin, a digital token that will be used to settle transactions between clients of its wholesale payments business. It would be the first cryptocurrency issued by a United States bank. On April 19, 2021, JP Morgan pledged $5 billion towards the European Super League. a controversial breakaway group of football clubs seeking to create a monopolistic structure where the founding members would be guaranteed entry to the competition in perpetuity. They funded the failed attempt to create the league, which, if successful, would have ended the meritocratic European pyramid soccer system. J.P. Morgan's role in the creation of the Super League was instrumental; the investment bank was reported to have worked on it for several years. After a strong backlash, the owners/management of the teams that proposed creating the league pulled out of it. After the attempt to end the European football hierarchy failed, J.P. Morgan apologized for its role in the scheme. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said the company "kind of missed" that football supporters would respond negatively to the Super League. While the absence of promotion and relegation is a common sports model in the US, this is an antithesis to the European competition-based pyramid model and has led to widespread condemnation from Football federations internationally as well as at government level. However, even at the time, JPMorgan had been involved in European football for almost 20 years. In 2003, they advised the Glazer ownership of Manchester United. It also advised Rocco Commisso, the owner of Mediacom, to purchase ACF Fiorentina, and Dan Friedkin on his takeover of A.S. Roma. Moreover, It aided Inter Milan and A.S. Roma to sell bonds backed by future media revenue, and Spain's Real Madrid CF to raise funds to refurbish their Santiago Bernabeu Stadium. In September 2021, JPMorgan Chase entered the UK retail banking market by launching an app-based current account under the Chase brand Chase UK. This is the company's first retail banking operation outside of the United States. In 2021, the company made more than over 30 acquisitions including OpenInvest and Nutmeg. In March 2022, JPMorgan Chase announced that would acquire Global Shares (now is J.P. Morgan Workplace solutions), a cloud-based provider of equity management software. In November 2021, JPMorgan Chase acquired restaurant recommendation website and owner of Zagat, The Infatuation. In June 2021, JPMorgan Chase invested in Brazilian digital bank C6, acquiring 40% of the company. The amount of investment was not disclosed, but 6 months before the deal C6 was valued at 2.28 billion dollars. In 2022, JPMorgan Chase was ranked 24 on the Fortune 500 rankings of the largest U.S. corporations by total revenue. In March 2022, JPMorgan Chase announced to wind down its business in Russia in compliance with regulatory and licensing requirements. On May 20, 2022, JPMorgan Chase used blockchain for collateral settlements, the latest Wall Street experimentation with the technology in the trading of traditional financial assets. In September 2022, the company announced it was acquiring California-based Renovite Technologies to expand its payments processing business amid heavy competition from fintech firms like Stripe and Adyen. This comes on top of previous, similar moves of buying a 49% stake in fintech Viva Wallet and a majority sake in Volkswagen's payments business, among many other acquisitions in other areas of finance. In November 2022, JPMorgan Chase sent COO Daniel Pinto to the Global Financial Leaders' Investment Summit in Hong Kong. The attendance of US financial executives drew heavy criticism from some US lawmakers, who had previously urged the US financial executives to cancel their attendance to the summit. In May 2023, CNBC reported JPMorgan Chase was developing a new tool for investment advisers using artificial intelligence called IndexGPT. Via trademark filing, this would rely on a "disruptive form of artificial intelligence" and cloud computing software to select investments for customers. This move was a sign the bank intended to launch a product in the near term, given the requirements around filing, and it came amid a flurry of development around ChatGPT and this technology from financial institutions. This came amid a period of job cuts, including for technology roles, even as the company emphasize its commitment to AI and created a model to detect potential changes in Federal Reserve policy. JP increased its stake in Brazilian digital bank C6 to 46% in 2023: the bank has increased the number of customers from 8 million to 25 million since 2021 and its loan portfolio from R$9.5 billion (about $2 billion) to R$40 billion ($8.2 billion). In February 2025, Matt Sable and Melissa Smith were appointed as co-heads of commercial banking by JPMorgan Chase. In February 2025, JPMorgan Chase hired Jonathan Slaughter from Goldman Sachs to join its business services unit within the investment bank. Slaughter was hired to focus on bolstering the expansion of JPMorgan's business services in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In March 2025, Charlie Javice, founder of the college financial aid startup Frank, was convicted on all counts of fraud related to JPMorgan Chase's $175 million acquisition of her company. Alongside Frank's chief growth officer, Olivier Amar, Javice was found guilty of securities fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy. The fraud centered on Javice and Amar falsely representing Frank's user base to JPMorgan. Prosecutors revealed that the company claimed to have 4.25 million users, when in reality, it had only about 300,000. Amar had purchased fake customer lists from third parties to create the illusion of a much larger client base. JPMorgan only realized the fraud when it attempted to contact Frank's customers and received fewer responses than expected. Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan's CEO, has since called the Frank acquisition a "huge mistake." On September 8, 2025, the New York Times Magazine revealed a Times investigation which found that JP Morgan Chase "enabled the crimes" of former major financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. On November 14, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump directed the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate former financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's relationship with, among others, JP Morgan Chase. However, some, including U.S. House of Representatives member Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), noted that this and the other new Department of Justice investigations against Epstein may have been intended to distract the U.S. Department of Justice and prevent release of the Epstein Files at an earlier date. In August 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal banking regulators to investigate "politicized or unlawful debanking" by financial institutions and remove "reputational risk" from their guidance and examination standards. In an interview days before signing the order, Trump claimed that JPMorgan Chase had given him 20 days to close his account and that Bank of America had subsequently refused his business. JPMorgan responded that it does not close accounts for political reasons and said it agreed with Trump that "regulatory change is desperately needed." In November 2025, both JPMorgan and Bank of America disclosed in SEC filings that they were responding to government inquiries related to the executive order. Later that month, Trump Media & Technology Group CEO Devin Nunes alleged that JPMorgan Chase had "debanked" the company in March 2024, immediately after it completed its merger and went public, and had provided the company's banking records to federal investigators pursuant to subpoenas issued as part of the Arctic Frost investigation. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier subsequently opened an investigation into whether JPMorgan improperly coordinated with the federal government, noting that the DOJ had subpoenaed Trump Media's records in March 2023, before the company went public and covering a period before the company existed. In December 2025, CEO Jamie Dimon responded to the allegations, stating "people have to grow up here... stop making up things" and denying that JPMorgan debanks customers for political or religious reasons, while acknowledging the bank complies with government subpoenas and calling for regulatory reform. In January 2026, Trump sued JPMorgan and CEO Jamie Dimon for $5 billion in damages. He alleged that, in February 2021, JPMorgan gave him and his businesses 60-day notice that it would close his accounts. Lawsuits and legal settlements by years Chase paid out over $2 billion in fines and legal settlements for their role in financing Enron Corporation with aiding and abetting Enron Corp.'s securities fraud, which collapsed amid a financial scandal in 2001. In 2003, Chase paid $160 million in fines and penalties to settle claims by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Manhattan district attorney's office. In 2005, Chase paid $2.2 billion to settle a lawsuit filed by investors in Enron. In December 2002, Chase paid fines totaling $80 million, with the amount split between the states and the federal government. The fines were part of a settlement involving charges that ten banks, including Chase, deceived investors with biased research. The total settlement with the ten banks was $1.4 billion. The settlement required that the banks separate investment banking from research, and ban any allocation of IPO shares. JPMorgan Chase, which helped underwrite $15.4 billion of WorldCom's bonds, agreed in March 2005 to pay $2 billion; that was 46 percent, or $630 million, more than it would have paid had it accepted an investor offer in May 2004 of $1.37 billion. J.P. Morgan was the last big lender to settle. Its payment is the second largest in the case, exceeded only by the $2.6 billion accord reached in 2004 by Citigroup. In March 2005, 16 of WorldCom's 17 former underwriters reached settlements with the investors. In 2005, JPMorgan Chase acknowledged that its two predecessor banks had received ownership of thousands of slaves as collateral prior to the Civil War. The company apologized for contributing to the "brutal and unjust institution" of slavery. The bank paid $5 million in reparations in the form of a scholarship program for Black students. In 2008 and 2009, 14 lawsuits were filed against JPMorgan Chase in various district courts on behalf of Chase credit card holders claiming the bank violated the Truth in Lending Act, breached its contract with the consumers, and committed a breach of the implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. The consumers contended that Chase, with little or no notice, increased minimum monthly payments from 2% to 5% on loan balances that were transferred to consumers' credit cards based on the promise of a fixed interest rate. In May 2011, the United States District Court for the Northern District of California certified the class action lawsuit. On July 23, 2012, Chase agreed to pay $100 million to settle the claim. In November 2009, a week after Birmingham, Alabama Mayor Larry Langford was convicted for financial crimes related to bond swaps for Jefferson County, Alabama,[importance?] JPMorgan Chase & Co. agreed to a $722 million settlement with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to end a probe into the sales of derivatives that allegedly contributed to the near-bankruptcy of the county. JPMorgan had been chosen by the county commissioners to refinance the county's sewer debt, and the SEC had alleged that JPMorgan made undisclosed payments to close friends of the commissioners in exchange for the deal and made up for the costs by charging higher interest rates on the swaps. In June 2010, J.P. Morgan Securities was fined a record £33.32 million ($49.12 million) by the UK Financial Services Authority (FSA) for failing to protect an average of £5.5 billion of clients' money from 2002 to 2009. FSA requires financial firms to keep clients' funds in separate accounts to protect the clients in case such a firm becomes insolvent. The firm had failed to properly segregate client funds from corporate funds following the merger of Chase and J.P. Morgan, resulting in a violation of FSA regulations but no losses to clients. The clients' funds would have been at risk had the firm become insolvent during this period. J.P. Morgan Securities reported the incident to the FSA, corrected the errors, and cooperated in the ensuing investigation, resulting in the fine being reduced 30% from an original amount of £47.6 million. In January 2011, JPMorgan Chase admitted that it wrongly overcharged several thousand military families for their mortgages. The bank also admitted it improperly foreclosed on more than a dozen military families; both actions were in clear violation of the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act which automatically lowers mortgage rates to 6 percent, and bars foreclosure proceedings of active-duty personnel. The overcharges may have never come to light were it not for legal action taken by Captain Jonathan Rowles. Both Captain Rowles and his spouse Julia accused Chase of violating the law and harassing the couple for nonpayment. An official stated that the situation was "grim" and Chase initially stated it would be refunding up to $2,000,000 to those who were overcharged, and that families improperly foreclosed on have gotten or will get their homes back. Chase has acknowledged that as many as 6,000 active duty military personnel were illegally overcharged, and more than 18 military families homes were wrongly foreclosed. In April, Chase agreed to pay a total of $27 million in compensation to settle the class-action suit. At the company's 2011 shareholders' meeting, Dimon apologized for the error and said the bank would forgive the loans of any active-duty personnel whose property had been foreclosed. In June 2011, lending chief Dave Lowman was forced out over the scandal. On August 25, 2011, JPMorgan Chase agreed to settle fines with regard to violations of the sanctions under the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) regime.[undue weight? – discuss] The U.S. Department of Treasury released the following civil penalties information under the heading: "JPMorgan Chase Bank N.A. Settles Apparent Violations of Multiple Sanctions Programs":[importance?] JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A, New York, NY ("JPMC") has agreed to remit $88,300,000 to settle a potential civil liability for apparent violations of the Cuban Assets Control Regulations ("CACR"), 31 C.F.R. part 515; the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferators Sanctions Regulations ("WMDPSR"), 31 C.F.R. part 544; Executive Order 13382, "Blocking Property of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferators and Their Supporters;" the Global Terrorism Sanctions Regulations ("GTSR"), 31 C.F.R. part 594; the Iranian Transactions Regulations ("ITR"), 31 C.F.R. part 560; the Sudanese Sanctions Regulations ("SSR"), 31 C.F.R. part 538; the Former Liberian Regime of Charles Taylor Sanctions Regulations ("FLRCTSR"), 31 C.F.R. part 593; and the Reporting, Procedures, and Penalties Regulations ("RPPR"), 31 C.F.R. part 501, that occurred between December 15, 2005, and March 1, 2011. — U.S. Department of the Treasury Resource Center, OFAC Recent Actions. Retrieved June 18, 2013. On February 9, 2012, it was announced that the five largest mortgage servicers (Ally/GMAC, Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo) agreed to a historic settlement with the federal government and 49 states. The settlement, known as the National Mortgage Settlement (NMS), required the servicers to provide about $26 billion in relief to distressed homeowners and in direct payments to the states and federal government. This settlement amount makes the NMS the second largest civil settlement in U.S. history, only trailing the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. The five banks were also required to comply with 305 new mortgage servicing standards. Oklahoma held out and agreed to settle with the banks separately. In 2012, JPMorgan Chase & Co was charged for misrepresenting and failing to disclose that the Chief Investment Office (CIO) had engaged in speculative trades that exposed JPMorgan to significant losses. In July 2013, The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved a stipulation and consent agreement under which JPMorgan Ventures Energy Corporation (JPMVEC), a subsidiary of JPMorgan Chase & Co., agreed to pay $410 million in penalties and disgorgement to ratepayers for allegations of market manipulation stemming from the company's bidding activities in electricity markets in California and the Midwest from September 2010 through November 2012.[undue weight? – discuss] JPMVEC agreed to pay a civil penalty of $285 million to the U.S. Treasury and to disgorge $125 million in unjust profits. JPMVEC admitted the facts set forth in the agreement, but neither admitted nor denied the violations. The case stemmed from multiple referrals to FERC from market monitors in 2011 and 2012 regarding JPMVEC's bidding practices. FERC investigators determined that JPMVEC engaged in 12 manipulative bidding strategies designed to make profits from power plants that were usually out of the money in the marketplace. In each of them, the company made bids designed to create artificial conditions that forced California and Midcontinent Independent System Operators (ISOs) to pay JPMVEC outside the market at premium rates. FERC investigators further determined that JPMVEC knew that the California ISO and Midcontinent ISO received no benefit from making inflated payments to the company, thereby defrauding the ISOs by obtaining payments for benefits that the company did not deliver beyond the routine provision of energy. FERC investigators also determined that JPMVEC's bids displaced other generation and altered day ahead and real-time prices from the prices that would have resulted had the company not submitted the bids. Under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Congress directed FERC to detect, prevent, and appropriately sanction the gaming of energy markets. According to FERC, the Commission approved the settlement as in the public interest. FERC's investigation of energy market manipulations led to a subsequent investigation into possible obstruction of justice by employees of JPMorgan Chase. Various newspapers reported in September 2013 that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and US Attorney's Office in Manhattan were investigating whether employees withheld information or made false statements during the FERC investigation. The reported impetus for the investigation was a letter from Massachusetts Senators Elizabeth Warren and Edward Markey, in which they asked FERC why no action was taken against people who impeded the FERC investigation. At the time of the FBI investigation, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was also looking into whether JPMorgan Chase employees impeded the FERC investigation. Reuters reported that JPMorgan Chase was facing over a dozen investigations at the time. Bernie Madoff opened a business account at Chemical Bank in 1986 and maintained it until 2008, long after Chemical acquired Chase.[undue weight? – discuss] In 2010, Irving Picard, the SIPC receiver appointed to liquidate Madoff's company, alleged that JPMorgan Chase failed to prevent Madoff from defrauding his customers. According to the suit, Chase "knew or should have known" that Madoff's wealth management business was a fraud. However, Chase did not report its concerns to regulators or law enforcement until October 2008, when it notified the UK Serious Organised Crime Agency. Picard argued that even after Morgan's investment bankers reported its concerns about Madoff's performance to UK officials, Chase's retail banking division did not put any restrictions on Madoff's banking activities until his arrest two months later. The receiver's suit against JPMorgan Chase was dismissed by the Court for failing to set forth any legally cognizable claim for damages. In the fall of 2013, JPMorgan Chase began talks with prosecutors and regulators regarding compliance with anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer banking regulations in connection with Madoff.[citation needed] In August 2013, JPMorgan Chase announced that it was being investigated by the United States Department of Justice over its offerings of mortgage-backed securities leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. The company said that the Department of Justice had preliminarily concluded that the firm violated federal securities laws in offerings of subprime and Alt-A residential mortgage securities during the period 2005 to 2007. On November 19, 2013, the Justice Department announced that JPMorgan Chase agreed to a $13 billion settlement for its business practices pertaining to mortgage-backed securities. Of that amount, $9 billion was penalties and fines, and the remaining $4 billion was consumer relief; $11 billion of the total was tax deductible. This was the second largest settlement behind Bank of America's $16.65 billion in relation to the mis-selling of mortgage-backed securities in the years leading up to the 2007–2008 financial crisis. The agreement did not settle criminal charges. Dimon described the settlement as "unfair", and said he "had to control his rage" regarding the topic, with most of the government claims against his company being for dealings that took place at companies before JPMorgan Chase bought them, as a result of the financial crisis. It is estimated that 70–80% of the dealmaking for the settlement was due to the outstanding legal exposures of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual, which JPMorgan Chase had acquired at the encouragement of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, and other federal officials who helped broker the acquisitions, encouraged communication among the parties, and even contributed financially to facilitate the transactions. On January 7, 2014, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay a total of $2.05 billion in fines and penalties to settle civil and criminal charges related to its role in the Madoff scandal.[undue weight? – discuss] The government filed a two-count criminal information charging JPMorgan Chase with Bank Secrecy Act violations, but the charges would be dismissed within two years provided that JPMorgan Chase reforms its anti-money laundering procedures and cooperates with the government in its investigation. The bank agreed to forfeit $1.7 billion. The lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of shareholders against chief executive Jamie Dimon and other high-ranking JPMorgan Chase employees, used statements made by Bernie Madoff during interviews conducted while in prison in Butner, North Carolina claiming that JPMorgan Chase officials knew of the fraud. The lawsuit stated that "JPMorgan was uniquely positioned for 20 years to see Madoff's crimes and put a stop to them ... But faced with the prospect of shutting down Madoff's account and losing lucrative profits, JPMorgan – at its highest level – chose to turn a blind eye."[neutrality is disputed] JPMorgan Chase also agreed to pay a $350 million fine to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and settle the suit filed against it by Picard for $543 million. In November 2016, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $264 million in fines to settle civil and criminal charges involving a systematic bribery scheme spanning 2006 to 2013 in which the bank secured business deals in Hong Kong by agreeing to hire hundreds of friends and relatives of Chinese government officials, resulting in more than $100 million in revenue for the bank. In January 2017, the United States sued the company, accusing it of discriminating against "thousands" of black and Hispanic mortgage borrowers between 2006 and at least 2009. On December 26, 2018, as part of an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) into abusive practices related to American depositary receipts (ADRs), JPMorgan agreed to pay more than $135 million to settle charges of improper handling of "pre-released" ADRs without admitting or denying the SEC's findings. The sum consisted of $71 million in ill-gotten gains plus $14.4 million in prejudgment interest and an additional penalty of $49.7 million. On May 14, 2020, Financial Times, citing a report which revealed how companies are treating employees, their supply chains and other stakeholders, during the COVID-19 pandemic, documented that J.P. Morgan Asset Management alongside Fidelity Investments and Vanguard have been accused of paying lip services to cover human rights violations. The UK based media also referenced that a few of the world's biggest fund houses took the action to lessen the impact of abuses, such as modern slavery, at the companies they invest in. J.P. Morgan, in responding to the report, said that it took "human rights violations very seriously" and "any company with alleged or proven violations of principles, including human rights abuses, is scrutinized and may result in either enhanced engagement or removal from a portfolio." In September 2020, the company admitted that it manipulated precious metals futures and government bond markets in a span period of eight years. It settled with the United States Department of Justice, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for $920 million. J.P. Morgan will not face criminal charges, however, it will launch into a deferred prosecution agreement for three years. On November 24, 2022, two women who accused Jeffrey Epstein of sex trafficking and sexual abuse also sued JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank, accusing them of benefiting and closing their eyes to Epstein's sex trafficking operations. According to the lawsuits, banks knew that Epstein's accounts were used to finance sex trafficking crimes. In June 2023, after the allegations reached class-action status, the parties reached a settlement, with JPMorgan agreeing to pay $290 million. In September 2023, JPMorgan agreed to a $75 million settlement with the United States Virgin Islands Department of Justice for its alleged facilitation and failure to notify law enforcement of Epstein's illegal activities. Epstein's relationship with J.P. Morgan went back a long time. In 2003, J.P. Morgan earned $8 million in fees from Epstein. J.P. Morgan allowed Epstein to keep accounts at the bank, even amid internal concerns that Epstein was using the accounts for illicit activities. The bank maintained its relationship with Epstein even after his 2011 conviction and incarceration. On April 24, after Russian state-owned VTB Bank filed suit against JPMorgan to recoup assets frozen under international sanctions during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a Russian court ordered the seizure of JPMorgan funds totalling $439.5 million. JPMorgan launched a countersuit the following day, citing its inability to reclaim VTB's stranded US funds. On April 26, a Russian court authorized the seizure of $13.34 million of assets held in Russia by a European subsidiary of JPMorgan and Commerzbank. In July, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its affiliates became substantial holders in Telix Pharmaceuticals Ltd., acquiring a 5.04% voting power with 16,881,167 ordinary shares. On October 31, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $151 million to resolve five U.S. SEC enforcement cases, including allegations of misleading brokerage disclosures On December 2, JPMorgan Chase was fined S$2.4 million by the Monetary Authority of Singapore after providing inaccurate and incomplete information to clients in 24 over-the-counter bond transactions by relationship managers, overcharging the clients and refusing to pay back the money difference from the pre-agreed spreads to the spreads given to clients. In November 2025, JPMorgan Chase unveiled details of their proposed office block in Canary Wharf, London. The plans propose that the new space would have a floor space of three million square feet, more than double that of the Shard. In December 2025, JPMorgan Chase was fined $45 million by Germany's BaFin after its Frankfurt based subsidiary failed to submit suspicious transaction reports. Financial data Note: Financial data in billions of US dollars and employee data in thousands. For years 1998, 1999, and 2000 figures are combined for Chase Manhattan and J.P. Morgan & Co., for consistency, pre-dating their official merger in 2000. The data is sourced from the company's SEC Form 10-K from 1998 to 2020. Structure The corporate structure of JPMorgan Chase & Co. has changed throughout its history through various mergers and acquisitions as well as geographic expansion. In the United States, it owns and operates two key legal subsidiaries: The modern JPMorgan Chase is broken up into the following three business segments: The company, known previously as Chase Manhattan International Limited, was founded on September 18, 1968. In August 2008, the bank announced plans to construct a new European headquarters at Canary Wharf, London. These plans were subsequently suspended in December 2010, when the bank announced the purchase of a nearby existing office tower at 25 Bank Street for use as the European headquarters of its investment bank. 25 Bank Street had originally been designated as the European headquarters of Enron and was subsequently used as the headquarters of Lehman Brothers International.[importance?] The regional office is in London with offices in Bournemouth, Glasgow, and Edinburgh for asset management, private banking, and investment banking. In September 2021, JPMorgan Chase entered the UK retail banking market by launching an app-based current account and savings account under the Chase UK brand. The following is an illustration of the company's major mergers and acquisitions and historical predecessors, although this is not a comprehensive list: Political contributions JPMorgan Chase's political action committee (PAC), registered as the "JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. FEDERAL POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE", and its employees contributed $2.6 million to federal campaigns in 2014 and financed its lobbying team with $4.7 million in the first three-quarters of 2014. JPMorgan's giving has been focused on Republicans, with 62 percent of its donations going to GOP recipients in 2014. 78 House Democrats received campaign cash from JPMorgan's PAC in the 2014 cycle at an average of $5,200 and a total of 38 of the Democrats who voted for the 2015 spending bill took money from JPMorgan's PAC in 2014. JPMorgan Chase's PAC made maximum donations to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the leadership PACs of Steny Hoyer and Jim Himes in 2014. Climate change JPMorgan has come under criticism for investing in new fossil fuels projects since the Paris climate change agreement. From 2016 to the first half of 2019 it provided $75 billion (£61 billion) to companies expanding in sectors such as fracking and Arctic oil and gas exploration. According to Rainforest Action Network its total fossil fuel financing was $64 billion in 2018, $69 billion in 2017 and $62 billion in 2016. From 2015, which is when the Paris Agreement was adopted, until 2021, JP Morgan Chase provided $317 billion in fossil fuel financing; 33% more than any other bank. On October 21, 2021, JP Morgan Chase joined the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which supports "the global transition of the real economy to net-zero emissions." An internal study, 'Risky business: the climate and macroeconomy', by bank economists David Mackie and Jessica Murray was leaked in early‑2020.[importance?] The report, dated 14 January 2020, states that under our current unsustainable trajectory of climate change "we cannot rule out catastrophic outcomes where human life as we know it is threatened". JPMorgan subsequently distanced itself from the content of the study. In May 2023, JPMorgan Chase announced that it would purchase $200 million in carbon credits representing 800,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from multiple companies (including Climeworks and Charm Industrial) after announcing the previous month that it would join the Frontier CDR initiative formed by Alphabet Inc., McKinsey & Company, Meta Platforms, Shopify, and Stripe, Inc. under a $925 million advance market commitment to the CDR industry the previous year.[list 1] In November 2024, JPMorgan Chase said it was seeking opportunities to finance the early shutdown of coal-fired power plants. According to Bloomberg, "there's a growing effort to provide the funding needed to help wean energy systems off the fossil fuel. Closing coal plants early, however, is both complex and costly, particularly in emerging economies." Offices The old Chase Manhattan Bank's headquarters were at One Chase Manhattan Plaza (now 28 Liberty Street) in Lower Manhattan, the current temporary world headquarters for JPMorgan Chase & Co. are located at 383 Madison Avenue. In 2018, JPMorgan announced they would demolish the current headquarters building at 270 Park Avenue, which was also Union Carbide's former headquarters, to make way for a newer building at 270 Park Avenue that will be 681 feet (208 m) taller than the previous building. Demolition was completed in the spring of 2021, and the new building will be completed in 2025. The replacement 1,388 feet (423 m) and 70-story headquarters will contain 2,500,000 square feet (230,000 m2), and will be able to fit 15,000 employees, whereas the current headquarters fits 6,000 employees in a space that has a capacity of 3,500. The new headquarters is part of the East Midtown rezoning plan. When construction is completed in 2025, the headquarters will then move back into the new building at 270 Park Avenue. As the new headquarters is replaced, the bulk of North American operations take place in five nearby buildings on or near Park Avenue in New York City: the former Bear Stearns Building at 383 Madison Avenue (just south of 270 Park Avenue), the former Chemical Bank Building at 277 Park Avenue just to the east, 237 Park Avenue, and 390 Madison Avenue. The bank entered into an agreement to purchase 250 Park Avenue in July 2024. In October 2025, the company opened its new headquarters in New York, after six years of redevelopment. The new development has 2.5 million square feet of office space and reportedly cost $3 billion. Approximately 11,050 employees are located in Columbus, Ohio, at the McCoy Center, the former Bank One Corporation offices. The building is the largest JPMorgan Chase & Co. facility in the world and the second-largest single-tenant office building in the United States behind The Pentagon. The bank moved some of its operations to the JPMorgan Chase Tower in Houston, when it purchased Texas Commerce Bank.[citation needed] The Global Corporate Bank's main headquarters are in London, with regional headquarters in Hong Kong, New York and São Paulo. The Card Services division has its headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, with Card Services offices in Elgin, Illinois; Springfield, Missouri; San Antonio, Texas; Mumbai, India; and Cebu, Philippines. Additional large operation centers are located in Phoenix, Arizona; Los Angeles, California, Newark, Delaware; Orlando, Florida; Tampa, Florida; Jacksonville, Florida; Brandon, Florida; Indianapolis, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; Brooklyn, New York; Rochester, New York; Columbus, Ohio; Dallas, Texas; Fort Worth, Texas; Plano, Texas; and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Operation centers in Canada are located in Burlington, Ontario; and Toronto, Ontario. Additional offices and technology operations are located in Manila, Philippines; Cebu, Philippines; Mumbai, India; Bangalore, India; Hyderabad, India; New Delhi, India; Buenos Aires, Argentina; São Paulo; Mexico City, Mexico, and Jerusalem, Israel. In late 2017, JPMorgan Chase opened a new global operations center in Warsaw, Poland. The Asia Pacific headquarters for JPMorgan is located in Hong Kong at Chater House.[citation needed] Operations centers in the United Kingdom are located in Bournemouth, Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Liverpool, and Swindon. The London location also serves as the European headquarters. Credit derivatives The derivatives team at JPMorgan, led by Blythe Masters, was a pioneer in the invention of credit derivatives such as the credit default swap. The first CDS was created to allow Exxon to borrow money from JPMorgan while JPMorgan transferred the risk to the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. JPMorgan's team later created the 'BISTRO', a bundle of credit default swaps that was the progenitor of the Synthetic CDO. As of 2013 JPMorgan had the largest credit default swap and credit derivatives portfolio by total notional amount of any US bank. In April 2012, hedge fund insiders became aware that the market in credit default swaps was possibly being affected by the activities of Bruno Iksil, a trader for JPMorgan Chase & Co., referred to as "the London whale" in reference to the huge positions he was taking. Heavy opposing bets to his positions are known to have been made by traders, including another branch of J.P. Morgan, who purchased the derivatives offered by J.P. Morgan in such high volume. Early reports were denied and minimized by the firm in an attempt to minimize exposure. Major losses, $2 billion, were reported by the firm in May 2012, in relation to these trades and updated to $4.4 billion on July 13, 2012. The disclosure, which resulted in headlines in the media, did not disclose the exact nature of the trading involved, which remained in progress as of June 28, 2012, and continued to produce losses which could total as much as $9 billion under worst-case scenarios. In the end, the trading produced actual losses of only $6 billion. The item traded, possibly related to CDX IG 9, an index based on the default risk of major U.S. corporations, has been described as a "derivative of a derivative". On the company's emergency conference call, JPMorgan Chase chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon said the strategy was "flawed, complex, poorly reviewed, poorly executed, and poorly monitored". The episode was investigated by the Federal Reserve, the SEC, and the FBI. On September 18, 2013, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay a total of $920 million in fines and penalties to American and UK regulators for violations related to the trading loss and other incidents. The fine was part of a multiagency and multinational settlement with the Federal Reserve, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States and the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK. The company also admitted breaking American securities law. The fines amounted to the third biggest banking fine levied by US regulators, and the second-largest by UK authorities. As of September 19, 2013[update], two traders face criminal proceedings. It is also the first time in several years that a major American financial institution has publicly admitted breaking the securities laws. A report by the SEC was critical of the level of oversight from senior management on traders, and the FCA said the incident demonstrated "flaws permeating all levels of the firm: from portfolio level right up to senior management." On the day of the fine, the BBC reported from the New York Stock Exchange that the fines "barely registered" with traders there, the news had been an expected development, and the company had prepared for the financial hit. Art collection The collection was begun in 1959 by David Rockefeller, and comprises over 30,000 objects, of which over 6,000 are photographic-based, as of 2012 containing more than one hundred works by Middle Eastern and North African artists. The One Chase Manhattan Plaza building was the original location at the start of collection by the Chase Manhattan Bank, the current collection containing both this and also those works that the First National Bank of Chicago had acquired prior to assimilation into the JPMorgan Chase organization. L. K. Erf has been the director of acquisitions of works since 2004 for the bank, whose art program staff is completed by an additional three full-time members and one registrar. The advisory committee at the time of the Rockefeller initiation included A. H. Barr, and D. Miller, and also J. J. Sweeney, R. Hale, P. Rathbone and G. Bunshaft. Major sponsorships Ownership JPMorgan Chase is mainly owned by institutional investors, with over 70% of shares held. The 10 largest shareholder of the bank in December 2023 were: Leadership Jamie Dimon is the chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase. The acquisition deal of Bank One in 2004, was designed in part to recruit Dimon to JPMorgan Chase. He became chief executive at the end of 2005. Dimon has been recognized for his leadership during the 2008 financial crisis. Under his leadership, JPMorgan Chase rescued two ailing banks during the crisis. As of May 1, 2023: Notable former employees See also References Further reading External links |
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Contents Kiva (organization) Kiva Microfunds is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California. Kiva distributes funds that it receives to microfinance institutions, social impact businesses, schools or non-profit organizations and does not generally directly provide funds to specific individuals. These organizations are charged fees by Kiva and borrowers pay interest on most loans. Kiva is supported by grants, loans, and donations from its users, corporations, and national institutions. Since 2005, Kiva has crowd-funded more than 1.6 million loans, totaling over $1.68 billion, with a repayment rate of 96.3 percent. Over 2 million lenders worldwide use the Kiva platform. An independent review by GiveWell in 2009 failed to find evidence that the organization produces significant social benefit, with at least one partner supposedly vetted by Kiva earning high profits while having a very high recipient drop-out rate. History Kiva was founded in October 2005 by Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley. The couple's initial interest in microfinance was inspired by a 2003 lecture given by Grameen Bank's Muhammad Yunus at Stanford Business School. Jackley worked at the school and invited Flannery to attend the presentation. Soon after, Jackley began working as a consultant for the nonprofit Village Enterprise, which worked to help start small businesses in East Africa. While Flannery was visiting Jackley in Africa, the two spent time interviewing entrepreneurs about the problems they faced in starting ventures and found the lack of access to start-up capital was a common theme. After returning from Africa, the two began developing their plan for a microfinance project that would grow into Kiva, which means "unity" in Swahili. In April 2005, Kiva's first seven loans were funded, totaling $3,500, and the original entrepreneurs were subsequently deemed the "Dream Team". Lending process Kiva works with more than 300 microfinance institutions, social impact businesses, schools and non-profit organizations around the world, called "Field Partners", that post profiles of qualified local entrepreneurs on the Kiva website. Lenders browse borrower profiles on kiva.org and choose an entrepreneur they wish to fund. The lenders transfer their funds to Kiva through credit card processing or PayPal, which waives its transaction fee in these cases. Lenders can loan money in increments of $25. After receiving lenders' money, Kiva aggregates loan capital from the individual lenders and transfers it to the appropriate Field Partners, which disburse the loan to the borrower. Kiva does not charge interest on the capital sent to Field Partners, but often Field Partners do charge some level of interest to borrowers to cover administration costs. Interest is typically higher on loans from microfinance institutions in developing countries than interest rates on larger loans in developed countries because of the administrative costs of overseeing many tiny loans, and the increased risk. As the entrepreneurs repay their loans with interest, the Field Partners remit funds back to Kiva. As the loan is repaid, the Kiva lenders can withdraw their principal or re-lend it to another entrepreneur. Finances As of March 15, 2016, Kiva had distributed $827,356,850 in loans from 1,394,336 lenders to 1,928,760 borrowers, and a total of 1,036,558 loans had been funded through Kiva. The average loan size is $411.26, and the average Kiva user has made 10.17 loans. Kiva's current repayment rate for all its partners is 97.1%. For the fiscal year 2012, Kiva made $15,632,786 in total revenue and had $12,482,528 in total expenses, leaving $3,150,258 to invest. The organization's net assets in 2012 totaled $16,248,638. Kiva itself does not charge interest on its loans; they supply capital to microfinancing institutions for free. These microfinancing institutions then lend out money with high interest compared to bank finance in mature markets, averaging a portfolio yield of over 30%. The organization's main sources of funding are grants, financial backing, and discounted services from many major national corporations and institutions. Chevron Corporation, Visa Inc., and Skoll Foundation awarded Kiva a two-year $1 million grant, $1.5 million grant, and $1 million grant respectively. Kiva also won a $1 million grant in Sam's Club's "Giving Made Simple" campaign and $500,000 in American Express's "Take Part" competition. Additionally, Omidyar Network awarded Kiva a $5 million grant over five years to help Kiva expand its field partners and support due diligence. In 2023, according to their 990 tax form, Kiva's then-CEO Neville Crawley's salary was $424,238. Their total revenue in 2023 was $34.7M. The non-profit had thirteen staff members with salaries ranging from $200,000 to over $400,000 that year. Kiva began paying interns in 2019. Areas of work and loan use As of October 2017, 81% of Kiva's loans have been made to women. In their non-fiction book Half the Sky, Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn highlight Kiva's work along with that of some field partner organizations, such as the Kashf Foundation in Pakistan. Kristof and WuDunn noted the risky nature of microloans as a path out of poverty, but endorsed Kiva and similar microfinance efforts, writing that "microfinance has done more to bolster the status of women, and to protect them from abuse, than any laws could accomplish." In 2011 Kiva added a new category of loans to help borrowers move to cleaner and safer forms of energy, green agriculture, transport and recycling. Green Kiva loans help fund solar panels, organic fertilizers, high-efficiency stoves, drip irrigation systems, and biofuels. As of December 2013, Kiva lenders had crowd-funded 4,600 green loans. In 2010, Kiva began a Student Microloans program that allowed lenders to help support students seeking access to higher education. Student loans are funded with the same crowd-funding approach, and typically students have 1–3 years to pay back their loans. In 2014, the education offerings on Kiva expanded greatly when the organization began a deeper partnership with Vittana. Vittana works on the ground in countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, developing loan alternatives for low-income students. Through the partnership, all loans sourced by Vittana now appear on Kiva for funding. Some Kiva field partners, such as Alivio Capital, specialize in funding medical loans. Others may fund medical loans as well as other loans. A development scholar in Ghana has suggested that microfinance medical loans can be an effective way to close the gap in medical care access in developing countries. In July 2017, Kiva launched a World Refugee Fund, a $250,000 matching fund to provide support to refugees and host communities in countries including Lebanon, Jordan, and Turkey. As refugees repay the loans, they build a track record in their new locations. The fund is to be followed by a rotating fund of up to $9M in loan capital. Other Kiva programs In 2011, Kiva launched Kiva U.S., a 0% interest peer-to-peer lending pilot program for entrepreneurs in the United States, as part of efforts to "cut lending costs through technology". The loans posted to Kiva U.S. are often from borrowers who have been rejected for loans by traditional banking institutions, but on Kiva U.S. they do not need to be able to produce high credit scores or collateral. Kiva U.S. uses a system of trustees, who vouch for the borrowers. Kiva U.S. trustees can be local non-profits, service organizations, businesses, faith organizations or community leaders. The average loan size for US borrowers is $5,000. US borrowers average about two years to repay loans. Google awarded a $3 million Global Impact Award to Kiva in 2013 to fund the Kiva Labs project, which looks for ways to increase the flexibility and impact of microfinance. Labs initiatives include lowering interest rates, providing more flexible repayment terms that accommodate issues like seasonal profits in farming, and offering longer-term loans for investments like education. Labs also focuses on providing access to clean energy technology and using mobile technology in ways that will bridge the knowledge gap. At the time of the lab's launch, Kiva lenders had crowdfunded "132,000 agricultural loans; 4,600 green loans, and 670 mobile tech loans." Kiva City provides local business owners and entrepreneurs in U.S. cities with the opportunity to crowdsource loans. It was launched by Kiva and former US President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative America conference in Chicago in 2011. Kiva City locations include: Detroit, New Orleans, Los Angeles, Washington D.C., Newark, Richmond, Little Rock, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Louisville, San Francisco, New York City, and Oakland. In less than a year, the Kiva City programs in Richmond, Virginia, helped fund more than $100,000 in loans to local businesses. Controversies A group of Kiva lenders are protesting Kiva controversial practices. They have formed a group on Kiva's website called Lenders on Strike. As of November 2018, a total of 1,530,180 loans had been funded on Kiva. The following table shows these loans sorted according to interest rate. Some people, including microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus, argue that the interest rates of many microcredit institutions are unreasonably high. In his 2007 book he argues that microfinance institutions that charge more than 15% above their long-term operating costs should face penalties. According to its web site, Kiva quotes interest rates as the "self reported average rate charged by the Field Partner to the entrepreneur." Kiva does not publish the interest rates charged for the individual loans funded through its website. However, it does publish the average "Portfolio Yield" of each of its field partners, as a way for prospective lenders to estimate the cost to the borrower of the loans they consider funding. The "Portfolio Yield" measures the average income earned from the field partner's outstanding loan portfolio. Some observers have pointed out that the "Portfolio Yield" measure is unreliable, and does not directly reflect the actual price that borrowers are paying for the loans. Kiva defends the interest rates of its field partners, however, saying its field partners provide much better rates than local alternatives, but must charge what they do because "the costs of making a micro-loan in the developing world are higher versus larger loans in the West." Kiva itself does not keep any of the interest collected, but operates instead exclusively on donations. For example, in 2009, micro-loans from Kiva partners in Guatemala averaged 23.16% for the equivalent of US$430 lent on average, comparable to the commercial BanRural rate of 24.5% for a loan of US$635. (For reference, the inflation rate for Guatemala typically varies between 5 and 10% and was just 0.62% in 2009). Kiva launched a more direct peer-to-peer microlending platform, called Kiva Zip, in 2012. Kiva Zip transferred funds directly to borrowers without outsourcing disbursements and repayment collection to field partners. Instead, the program partnered with local institutions in the United States and Kenya called Trustees, who vetted loan applicants and provided mentorship. Kiva Zip borrowers did not pay any interest or fees and the repayment rate was 89.4%. As of March 13, 2017, the Kiva Zip subdomain redirects to the Kiva homepage, and the program appears to be discontinued. As of November 2018, there are a total of 332 field partners listed on the Kiva website and their status is as follows: 173 Active, 41 Inactive, 14 Paused, and 104 Experimental. In addition, 178 former field partners are listed as Closed. The following table shows the "portfolio yield" of a sampling of field partners. "Portfolio yield" figures are calculated by dividing all interest and fees paid by borrowers to the field partner by the average loan portfolio of the field partner that given year. The figure provides a more accurate insight into the costs of borrowing because it includes fees associated with borrowing. When Kiva began, borrowers had to wait until their loans were funded on the Kiva website to receive the funds. Since then, the system has changed, so that loans are disbursed to borrowers before their stories are posted to Kiva's website. Disbursing loans sooner has a positive impact on the borrowers, who no longer need to wait weeks to receive their funding and can thus take advantage of time-sensitive business opportunities. This is disclosed on Kiva's site; each loan proposal states whether funds were pre-disbursed. Thus, lenders' loan funds are likely to go to borrowers other than those chosen by the lenders. However, since the pay-back behaviour of the specific borrower chosen by the lender does influence whether or not the lender gets their funds back (except when an MFI has chosen to cover for borrower defaults), there is at least some connection between the lender and the specific borrower. Whether lenders' preferences are used for lender preference trend analysis by any field partners or Kiva is not stated. Kiva's response has been to keep pre-disbursing but be clearer about the process. Whether defaults are extremely low has been questioned on the ground that a field partner may pay Kiva for loans defaulted to the field partner in order to maintain the field partner's good credit with Kiva. Whether interest rates collected by field partners are enough to pay for significant defaults depends on local economic conditions for each field partner. In 2008, Kiva featured the borrowing profile of a Peruvian woman asking for a loan to buy equipment for her cockfighting business. This sparked debate among the Kiva lending community; many complained that the organization was promoting cruelty to animals. Matt Flannery defended Kiva's decision to allow the post to remain; he asserted that removing the post would be "paternalistic" and that "Cockfighting in Peru is legal and part of a rich cultural tradition," adding that lenders could "be the ones voting with their dollars." Promotions and marketing strategies In March 2012, Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn's co-founder, lent Kiva $1 million. Kiva then allowed 40,000 people to lend $25 for "free". Lenders still choose a borrower, but the borrower will pay back Hoffman instead of the lender who chose them. Kiva hopes that the "free" users will lend to more of their projects, and thus increase their overall user base. In his 2007 book Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World, Bill Clinton covers Kiva.org and the work the organization is currently doing and has done in the past. External reviews The following independent entities have reviewed Kiva. See also References External links |
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Editing Template:MUDs Copy and paste: – — ° ′ ″ ≈ ≠ ≤ ≥ ± − × ÷ ← → · § Sign your posts on talk pages: ~~~~ Cite your sources: <ref></ref> {{}} {{{}}} | [] [[]] [[Category:]] #REDIRECT [[]] <s></s> <sup></sup> <sub></sub> <code></code> <pre></pre> <blockquote></blockquote> <ref></ref> <ref name="" /> {{Reflist}} <references /> <includeonly></includeonly> <noinclude></noinclude> {{DEFAULTSORT:}} <nowiki></nowiki> <!-- --> <span class="plainlinks"></span> Symbols: ~ | ¡ ¿ † ‡ ↔ ↑ ↓ • ¶ # ∞ ‹› «» ¤ ₳ ฿ ₵ ¢ ₡ ₢ $ ₫ ₯ € ₠ ₣ ƒ ₴ ₭ ₤ ℳ ₥ ₦ ₧ ₰ £ ៛ ₨ ₪ ৳ ₮ ₩ ¥ ♠ ♣ ♥ ♦ 𝄫 ♭ ♮ ♯ 𝄪 © ¼ ½ ¾ Latin: A a Á á À à  â Ä ä Ǎ ǎ Ă ă Ā ā à ã Å å Ą ą Æ æ Ǣ ǣ B b C c Ć ć Ċ ċ Ĉ ĉ Č č Ç ç D d Ď ď Đ đ Ḍ ḍ Ð ð E e É é È è Ė ė Ê ê Ë ë Ě ě Ĕ ĕ Ē ē Ẽ ẽ Ę ę Ẹ ẹ Ɛ ɛ Ǝ ǝ Ə ə F f G g Ġ ġ Ĝ ĝ Ğ ğ Ģ ģ H h Ĥ ĥ Ħ ħ Ḥ ḥ I i İ ı Í í Ì ì Î î Ï ï Ǐ ǐ Ĭ ĭ Ī ī Ĩ ĩ Į į Ị ị J j Ĵ ĵ K k Ķ ķ L l Ĺ ĺ Ŀ ŀ Ľ ľ Ļ ļ Ł ł Ḷ ḷ Ḹ ḹ M m Ṃ ṃ N n Ń ń Ň ň Ñ ñ Ņ ņ Ṇ ṇ Ŋ ŋ O o Ó ó Ò ò Ô ô Ö ö Ǒ ǒ Ŏ ŏ Ō ō Õ õ Ǫ ǫ Ọ ọ Ő ő Ø ø Œ œ Ɔ ɔ P p Q q R r Ŕ ŕ Ř ř Ŗ ŗ Ṛ ṛ Ṝ ṝ S s Ś ś Ŝ ŝ Š š Ş ş Ș ș Ṣ ṣ ß T t Ť ť Ţ ţ Ț ț Ṭ ṭ Þ þ U u Ú ú Ù ù Û û Ü ü Ǔ ǔ Ŭ ŭ Ū ū Ũ ũ Ů ů Ų ų Ụ ụ Ű ű Ǘ ǘ Ǜ ǜ Ǚ ǚ Ǖ ǖ V v W w Ŵ ŵ X x Y y Ý ý Ŷ ŷ Ÿ ÿ Ỹ ỹ Ȳ ȳ Z z Ź ź Ż ż Ž ž ß Ð ð Þ þ Ŋ ŋ Ə ə Greek: Ά ά Έ έ Ή ή Ί ί Ό ό Ύ ύ Ώ ώ Α α Β β Γ γ Δ δ Ε ε Ζ ζ Η η Θ θ Ι ι Κ κ Λ λ Μ μ Ν ν Ξ ξ Ο ο Π π Ρ ρ Σ σ ς Τ τ Υ υ Φ φ Χ χ Ψ ψ Ω ω {{Polytonic|}} Cyrillic: А а Б б В в Г г Ґ ґ Ѓ ѓ Д д Ђ ђ Е е Ё ё Є є Ж ж З з Ѕ ѕ И и І і Ї ї Й й Ј ј К к Ќ ќ Л л Љ љ М м Н н Њ њ О о П п Р р С с Т т Ћ ћ У у Ў ў Ф ф Х х Ц ц Ч ч Џ џ Ш ш Щ щ Ъ ъ Ы ы Ь ь Э э Ю ю Я я ́ IPA: t̪ d̪ ʈ ɖ ɟ ɡ ɢ ʡ ʔ ɸ β θ ð ʃ ʒ ɕ ʑ ʂ ʐ ç ʝ ɣ χ ʁ ħ ʕ ʜ ʢ ɦ ɱ ɳ ɲ ŋ ɴ ʋ ɹ ɻ ɰ ʙ ⱱ ʀ ɾ ɽ ɫ ɬ ɮ ɺ ɭ ʎ ʟ ɥ ʍ ɧ ʼ ɓ ɗ ʄ ɠ ʛ ʘ ǀ ǃ ǂ ǁ ɨ ʉ ɯ ɪ ʏ ʊ ø ɘ ɵ ɤ ə ɚ ɛ œ ɜ ɝ ɞ ʌ ɔ æ ɐ ɶ ɑ ɒ ʰ ʱ ʷ ʲ ˠ ˤ ⁿ ˡ ˈ ˌ ː ˑ ̪ {{IPA|}} Wikidata entities used in this page Pages transcluded onto the current version of this page (help): |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Server_Gateway_Interface] | [TOKENS: 623] |
Contents Web Server Gateway Interface The Web Server Gateway Interface (WSGI, pronounced whiskey or WIZ-ghee) is a simple calling convention for web servers to forward requests to web applications or frameworks written in the Python programming language. The current version of WSGI, version 1.0.1, is specified in Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) 3333. WSGI was originally specified as PEP-333 in 2003. PEP-3333, published in 2010, updates the specification for Python 3. Background In 2003, Python web frameworks were typically written against only CGI, FastCGI, mod_python, or some other custom API of a specific web server. To quote PEP 333: Python currently boasts a wide variety of web application frameworks, such as Zope, Quixote, Webware, SkunkWeb, PSO, and Twisted Web -- to name just a few. This wide variety of choices can be a problem for new Python users, because generally speaking, their choice of web framework will limit their choice of usable web servers, and vice versa... By contrast, although Java has just as many web application frameworks available, Java's "servlet" API makes it possible for applications written with any Java web application framework to run in any web server that supports the servlet API. WSGI was thus created as an implementation-neutral interface between web servers and web applications or frameworks to promote common ground for portable web application development. Specification overview The WSGI has two sides: Between the server and the application, there may be one or more WSGI middleware components, which implement both sides of the API, typically in Python code. WSGI does not specify how the Python interpreter should be started, nor how the application object should be loaded or configured, and different frameworks and webservers achieve this in different ways. WSGI middleware A WSGI middleware component is a Python callable that is itself a WSGI application, but may handle requests by delegating to other WSGI applications. These applications can themselves be WSGI middleware components. A middleware component can perform such functions as: Examples A WSGI-compatible "Hello, World!" application written in Python: Where: A full example of a WSGI network server is outside the scope of this article. Below is a sketch of how one would call a WSGI application and retrieve its HTTP status line, response headers, and response body, as Python objects. Details of how to construct the environ dict have been omitted. WSGI-compatible applications and frameworks Numerous web frameworks support WSGI: Currently wrappers are available for FastCGI, CGI, SCGI, AJP (using flup), twisted.web, Apache (using mod_wsgi or mod_python), Nginx (using ngx_http_uwsgi_module), Nginx Unit (using the Python language module), and Microsoft IIS (using WFastCGI, isapi-wsgi, PyISAPIe, or an ASP gateway). See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(constellation)#cite_ref-27] | [TOKENS: 4993] |
Contents Orion (constellation) Orion is a prominent set of stars visible during winter in the northern celestial hemisphere. It is one of the 88 modern constellations; it was among the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century AD/CE astronomer Ptolemy. It is named after a hunter in Greek mythology. Orion is most prominent during winter evenings in the Northern Hemisphere, as are five other constellations that have stars in the Winter Hexagon asterism. Orion's two brightest stars, Rigel (β) and Betelgeuse (α), are both among the brightest stars in the night sky; both are supergiants and slightly variable. There are a further six stars brighter than magnitude 3.0, including three making the short straight line of the Orion's Belt asterism. Orion also hosts the radiant of the annual Orionids, the strongest meteor shower associated with Halley's Comet, and the Orion Nebula, one of the brightest nebulae in the sky. Characteristics Orion is bordered by Taurus to the northwest, Eridanus to the southwest, Lepus to the south, Monoceros to the east, and Gemini to the northeast. Covering 594 square degrees, Orion ranks 26th of the 88 constellations in size. The constellation boundaries, as set by Belgian astronomer Eugène Delporte in 1930, are defined by a polygon of 26 sides. In the equatorial coordinate system, the right ascension coordinates of these borders lie between 04h 43.3m and 06h 25.5m , while the declination coordinates are between 22.87° and −10.97°. The constellation's three-letter abbreviation, as adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1922, is "Ori". Orion is most visible in the evening sky from January to April, winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and summer in the Southern Hemisphere. In the tropics (less than about 8° from the equator), the constellation transits at the zenith. From May to July (summer in the Northern Hemisphere, winter in the Southern Hemisphere), Orion is in the daytime sky and thus invisible at most latitudes. However, for much of Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere's winter months, the Sun is below the horizon even at midday. Stars (and thus Orion, but only the brightest stars) are then visible at twilight for a few hours around local noon, just in the brightest section of the sky low in the North where the Sun is just below the horizon. At the same time of day at the South Pole itself (Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station), Rigel is only 8° above the horizon, and the Belt sweeps just along it. In the Southern Hemisphere's summer months, when Orion is normally visible in the night sky, the constellation is actually not visible in Antarctica because the Sun does not set at that time of year south of the Antarctic Circle. In countries close to the equator (e.g. Kenya, Indonesia, Colombia, Ecuador), Orion appears overhead in December around midnight and in the February evening sky. Navigational aid Orion is very useful as an aid to locating other stars. By extending the line of the Belt southeastward, Sirius (α CMa) can be found; northwestward, Aldebaran (α Tau). A line eastward across the two shoulders indicates the direction of Procyon (α CMi). A line from Rigel through Betelgeuse points to Castor and Pollux (α Gem and β Gem). Additionally, Rigel is part of the Winter Circle asterism. Sirius and Procyon, which may be located from Orion by following imaginary lines (see map), also are points in both the Winter Triangle and the Circle. Features Orion's seven brightest stars form a distinctive hourglass-shaped asterism, or pattern, in the night sky. Four stars—Rigel, Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, and Saiph—form a large roughly rectangular shape, at the center of which lie the three stars of Orion's Belt—Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. His head is marked by an additional eighth star called Meissa, which is fairly bright to the observer. Descending from the Belt is a smaller line of three stars, Orion's Sword (the middle of which is in fact not a star but the Orion Nebula), also known as the hunter's sword. Many of the stars are luminous hot blue supergiants, with the stars of the Belt and Sword forming the Orion OB1 association. Standing out by its red hue, Betelgeuse may nevertheless be a runaway member of the same group. Orion's Belt, or The Belt of Orion, is an asterism within the constellation. It consists of three bright stars: Alnitak (Zeta Orionis), Alnilam (Epsilon Orionis), and Mintaka (Delta Orionis). Alnitak is around 800 light-years away from Earth, 100,000 times more luminous than the Sun, and shines with a magnitude of 1.8; much of its radiation is in the ultraviolet range, which the human eye cannot see. Alnilam is approximately 2,000 light-years from Earth, shines with a magnitude of 1.70, and with an ultraviolet light that is 375,000 times more luminous than the Sun. Mintaka is 915 light-years away and shines with a magnitude of 2.21. It is 90,000 times more luminous than the Sun and is a double star: the two orbit each other every 5.73 days. In the Northern Hemisphere, Orion's Belt is best visible in the night sky during the month of January at around 9:00 pm, when it is approximately around the local meridian. Just southwest of Alnitak lies Sigma Orionis, a multiple star system composed of five stars that have a combined apparent magnitude of 3.7 and lying at a distance of 1150 light-years. Southwest of Mintaka lies the quadruple star Eta Orionis. Orion's Sword contains the Orion Nebula, the Messier 43 nebula, Sh 2-279 (also known as the Running Man Nebula), and the stars Theta Orionis, Iota Orionis, and 42 Orionis. Three stars comprise a small triangle that marks the head. The apex is marked by Meissa (Lambda Orionis), a hot blue giant of spectral type O8 III and apparent magnitude 3.54, which lies some 1100 light-years distant. Phi-1 and Phi-2 Orionis make up the base. Also nearby is the young star FU Orionis. Stretching north from Betelgeuse are the stars that make up Orion's club. Mu Orionis marks the elbow, Nu and Xi mark the handle of the club, and Chi1 and Chi2 mark the end of the club. Just east of Chi1 is the Mira-type variable red giant star U Orionis. West from Bellatrix lie six stars all designated Pi Orionis (π1 Ori, π2 Ori, π3 Ori, π4 Ori, π5 Ori, and π6 Ori) which make up Orion's shield. Around 20 October each year, the Orionid meteor shower (Orionids) reaches its peak. Coming from the border with the constellation Gemini, as many as 20 meteors per hour can be seen. The shower's parent body is Halley's Comet. Hanging from Orion's Belt is his sword, consisting of the multiple stars θ1 and θ2 Orionis, called the Trapezium and the Orion Nebula (M42). This is a spectacular object that can be clearly identified with the naked eye as something other than a star. Using binoculars, its clouds of nascent stars, luminous gas, and dust can be observed. The Trapezium cluster has many newborn stars, including several brown dwarfs, all of which are at an approximate distance of 1,500 light-years. Named for the four bright stars that form a trapezoid, it is largely illuminated by the brightest stars, which are only a few hundred thousand years old. Observations by the Chandra X-ray Observatory show both the extreme temperatures of the main stars—up to 60,000 kelvins—and the star forming regions still extant in the surrounding nebula. M78 (NGC 2068) is a nebula in Orion. With an overall magnitude of 8.0, it is significantly dimmer than the Great Orion Nebula that lies to its south; however, it is at approximately the same distance, at 1600 light-years from Earth. It can easily be mistaken for a comet in the eyepiece of a telescope. M78 is associated with the variable star V351 Orionis, whose magnitude changes are visible in very short periods of time. Another fairly bright nebula in Orion is NGC 1999, also close to the Great Orion Nebula. It has an integrated magnitude of 10.5 and is 1500 light-years from Earth. The variable star V380 Orionis is embedded in NGC 1999. Another famous nebula is IC 434, the Horsehead Nebula, near Alnitak (Zeta Orionis). It contains a dark dust cloud whose shape gives the nebula its name. NGC 2174 is an emission nebula located 6400 light-years from Earth. Besides these nebulae, surveying Orion with a small telescope will reveal a wealth of interesting deep-sky objects, including M43, M78, and multiple stars including Iota Orionis and Sigma Orionis. A larger telescope may reveal objects such as the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024), as well as fainter and tighter multiple stars and nebulae. Barnard's Loop can be seen on very dark nights or using long-exposure photography. All of these nebulae are part of the larger Orion molecular cloud complex, which is located approximately 1,500 light-years away and is hundreds of light-years across. Due to its proximity, it is one of the most intense regions of stellar formation visible from Earth. The Orion molecular cloud complex forms the eastern part of an even larger structure, the Orion–Eridanus Superbubble, which is visible in X-rays and in hydrogen emissions. History and mythology The distinctive pattern of Orion is recognized in numerous cultures around the world, and many myths are associated with it. Orion is used as a symbol in the modern world. In Siberia, the Chukchi people see Orion as a hunter; an arrow he has shot is represented by Aldebaran (Alpha Tauri), with the same figure as other Western depictions. In Greek mythology, Orion was a gigantic, supernaturally strong hunter, born to Euryale, a Gorgon, and Poseidon (Neptune), god of the sea. One myth recounts Gaia's rage at Orion, who dared to say that he would kill every animal on Earth. The angry goddess tried to dispatch Orion with a scorpion. This is given as the reason that the constellations of Scorpius and Orion are never in the sky at the same time. However, Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer, revived Orion with an antidote. This is said to be the reason that the constellation of Ophiuchus stands midway between the Scorpion and the Hunter in the sky. The constellation is mentioned in Horace's Odes (Ode 3.27.18), Homer's Odyssey (Book 5, line 283) and Iliad, and Virgil's Aeneid (Book 1, line 535). In old Hungarian tradition, Orion is known as "Archer" (Íjász), or "Reaper" (Kaszás). In recently rediscovered myths, he is called Nimrod (Hungarian: Nimród), the greatest hunter, father of the twins Hunor and Magor. The π and o stars (on upper right) form together the reflex bow or the lifted scythe. In other Hungarian traditions, Orion's Belt is known as "Judge's stick" (Bírópálca). In Ireland and Scotland, Orion was called An Bodach, a figure from Irish folklore whose name literally means "the one with a penis [bod]" and was the husband of the Cailleach (hag). In Scandinavian tradition, Orion's Belt was known as "Frigg's Distaff" (friggerock) or "Freyja's distaff". The Finns call Orion's Belt and the stars below it "Väinämöinen's scythe" (Väinämöisen viikate). Another name for the asterism of Alnilam, Alnitak, and Mintaka is "Väinämöinen's Belt" (Väinämöisen vyö) and the stars "hanging" from the Belt as "Kaleva's sword" (Kalevanmiekka). There are claims in popular media that the Adorant from the Geißenklösterle cave, an ivory carving estimated to be 35,000 to 40,000 years old, is the first known depiction of the constellation. Scholars dismiss such interpretations, saying that perceived details such as a belt and sword derive from preexisting features in the grain structure of the ivory. The Babylonian star catalogues of the Late Bronze Age name Orion MULSIPA.ZI.AN.NA,[note 1] "The Heavenly Shepherd" or "True Shepherd of Anu" – Anu being the chief god of the heavenly realms. The Babylonian constellation is sacred to Papshukal and Ninshubur, both minor gods fulfilling the role of "messenger to the gods". Papshukal is closely associated with the figure of a walking bird on Babylonian boundary stones, and on the star map the figure of the Rooster is located below and behind the figure of the True Shepherd—both constellations represent the herald of the gods, in his bird and human forms respectively. In ancient Egypt, the stars of Orion were regarded as a god, called Sah. Because Orion rises before Sirius, the star whose heliacal rising was the basis for the Solar Egyptian calendar, Sah was closely linked with Sopdet, the goddess who personified Sirius. The god Sopdu is said to be the son of Sah and Sopdet. Sah is syncretized with Osiris, while Sopdet is syncretized with Osiris' mythological wife, Isis. In the Pyramid Texts, from the 24th and 23rd centuries BC, Sah is one of many gods whose form the dead pharaoh is said to take in the afterlife. The Armenians identified their legendary patriarch and founder Hayk with Orion. Hayk is also the name of the Orion constellation in the Armenian translation of the Bible. The Bible mentions Orion three times, naming it "Kesil" (כסיל, literally – fool). Though, this name perhaps is etymologically connected with "Kislev", the name for the ninth month of the Hebrew calendar (i.e. November–December), which, in turn, may derive from the Hebrew root K-S-L as in the words "kesel, kisla" (כֵּסֶל, כִּסְלָה, hope, positiveness), i.e. hope for winter rains.: Job 9:9 ("He is the maker of the Bear and Orion"), Job 38:31 ("Can you loosen Orion's belt?"), and Amos 5:8 ("He who made the Pleiades and Orion"). In ancient Aram, the constellation was known as Nephîlā′, the Nephilim are said to be Orion's descendants. In medieval Muslim astronomy, Orion was known as al-jabbar, "the giant". Orion's sixth brightest star, Saiph, is named from the Arabic, saif al-jabbar, meaning "sword of the giant". In China, Orion was one of the 28 lunar mansions Sieu (Xiù) (宿). It is known as Shen (參), literally meaning "three", for the stars of Orion's Belt. The Chinese character 參 (pinyin shēn) originally meant the constellation Orion (Chinese: 參宿; pinyin: shēnxiù); its Shang dynasty version, over three millennia old, contains at the top a representation of the three stars of Orion's Belt atop a man's head (the bottom portion representing the sound of the word was added later). The Rigveda refers to the constellation as Mriga (the Deer). Nataraja, "the cosmic dancer", is often interpreted as the representation of Orion. Rudra, the Rigvedic form of Shiva, is the presiding deity of Ardra nakshatra (Betelgeuse) of Hindu astrology. The Jain Symbol carved in the Udayagiri and Khandagiri Caves, India in 1st century BCE has a striking resemblance with Orion. Bugis sailors identified the three stars in Orion's Belt as tanra tellué, meaning "sign of three". The Seri people of northwestern Mexico call the three stars in Orion's Belt Hapj (a name denoting a hunter) which consists of three stars: Hap (mule deer), Haamoja (pronghorn), and Mojet (bighorn sheep). Hap is in the middle and has been shot by the hunter; its blood has dripped onto Tiburón Island. The same three stars are known in Spain and most of Latin America as "Las tres Marías" (Spanish for "The Three Marys"). In Puerto Rico, the three stars are known as the "Los Tres Reyes Magos" (Spanish for The Three Wise Men). The Ojibwa/Chippewa Native Americans call this constellation Mesabi for Big Man. To the Lakota Native Americans, Tayamnicankhu (Orion's Belt) is the spine of a bison. The great rectangle of Orion is the bison's ribs; the Pleiades star cluster in nearby Taurus is the bison's head; and Sirius in Canis Major, known as Tayamnisinte, is its tail. Another Lakota myth mentions that the bottom half of Orion, the Constellation of the Hand, represented the arm of a chief that was ripped off by the Thunder People as a punishment from the gods for his selfishness. His daughter offered to marry the person who can retrieve his arm from the sky, so the young warrior Fallen Star (whose father was a star and whose mother was human) returned his arm and married his daughter, symbolizing harmony between the gods and humanity with the help of the younger generation. The index finger is represented by Rigel; the Orion Nebula is the thumb; the Belt of Orion is the wrist; and the star Beta Eridani is the pinky finger. The seven primary stars of Orion make up the Polynesian constellation Heiheionakeiki which represents a child's string figure similar to a cat's cradle. Several precolonial Filipinos referred to the belt region in particular as "balatik" (ballista) as it resembles a trap of the same name which fires arrows by itself and is usually used for catching pigs from the bush. Spanish colonization later led to some ethnic groups referring to Orion's Belt as "Tres Marias" or "Tatlong Maria." In Māori tradition, the star Rigel (known as Puanga or Puaka) is closely connected with the celebration of Matariki. The rising of Matariki (the Pleiades) and Rigel before sunrise in midwinter marks the start of the Māori year. In Javanese culture, the constellation is often called Lintang Waluku or Bintang Bajak, referring to the shape of a paddy field plow. The imagery of the Belt and Sword has found its way into popular Western culture, for example in the form of the shoulder insignia of the 27th Infantry Division of the United States Army during both World Wars, probably owing to a pun on the name of the division's first commander, Major General John F. O'Ryan. The film distribution company Orion Pictures used the constellation as its logo. In artistic renderings, the surrounding constellations are sometimes related to Orion: he is depicted standing next to the river Eridanus with his two hunting dogs Canis Major and Canis Minor, fighting Taurus. He is sometimes depicted hunting Lepus the hare. He sometimes is depicted to have a lion's hide in his hand. There are alternative ways to visualise Orion. From the Southern Hemisphere, Orion is oriented south-upward, and the Belt and Sword are sometimes called the saucepan or pot in Australia and New Zealand. Orion's Belt is called Drie Konings (Three Kings) or the Drie Susters (Three Sisters) by Afrikaans speakers in South Africa and are referred to as les Trois Rois (the Three Kings) in Daudet's Lettres de Mon Moulin (1866). The appellation Driekoningen (the Three Kings) is also often found in 17th and 18th-century Dutch star charts and seaman's guides. The same three stars are known in Spain, Latin America, and the Philippines as "Las Tres Marías" (The Three Marys), and as "Los Tres Reyes Magos" (The Three Wise Men) in Puerto Rico. Even traditional depictions of Orion have varied greatly. Cicero drew Orion in a similar fashion to the modern depiction. The Hunter held an unidentified animal skin aloft in his right hand; his hand was represented by Omicron2 Orionis and the skin was represented by the five stars designated Pi Orionis. Saiph and Rigel represented his left and right knees, while Eta Orionis and Lambda Leporis were his left and right feet, respectively. As in the modern depiction, Mintaka, Alnilam, and Alnitak represented his Belt. His left shoulder was represented by Betelgeuse, and Mu Orionis made up his left arm. Meissa was his head, and Bellatrix his right shoulder. The depiction of Hyginus was similar to that of Cicero, though the two differed in a few important areas. Cicero's animal skin became Hyginus's shield (Omicron and Pi Orionis), and instead of an arm marked out by Mu Orionis, he holds a club (Chi Orionis). His right leg is represented by Theta Orionis and his left leg is represented by Lambda, Mu, and Epsilon Leporis. Further Western European and Arabic depictions have followed these two models. Future Orion is located on the celestial equator, but it will not always be so located due to the effects of precession of the Earth's axis. Orion lies well south of the ecliptic, and it only happens to lie on the celestial equator because the point on the ecliptic that corresponds to the June solstice is close to the border of Gemini and Taurus, to the north of Orion. Precession will eventually carry Orion further south, and by AD 14000, Orion will be far enough south that it will no longer be visible from the latitude of Great Britain. Further in the future, Orion's stars will gradually move away from the constellation due to proper motion. However, Orion's brightest stars all lie at a large distance from Earth on an astronomical scale—much farther away than Sirius, for example. Orion will still be recognizable long after most of the other constellations—composed of relatively nearby stars—have distorted into new configurations, with the exception of a few of its stars eventually exploding as supernovae, for example Betelgeuse, which is predicted to explode sometime in the next million years. See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maor_Farid#External_links] | [TOKENS: 1458] |
Contents Maor Farid Dr. Maor Farid (Hebrew: מאור פריד; born April 20, 1992) is an Israeli scientist, engineer and artificial intelligence researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, social activist, and author. He is the founder and CEO of Learn to Succeed (Hebrew: ללמוד להצליח) for empowering of youths from the Israeli socio-economic periphery and youths at risk, a regional manager of the Israeli center of ScienceAbroad at MIT, and an activist in the American Technion Society. He is an alumnus of Unit 8200, and a fellow of Fulbright Program and the Israel Scholarship Educational Foundation [he]. Dr. Farid was elected to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list of 2019, and won the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism. Early life Maor was born in Ness Ziona, a city in central Israel, as the eldest son for parents from immigrating families of Mizrahi Jews from Iraq and Libya. Maor suffered from Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from a young age, and was classified as a problematic and violent student. His ADHD issues were diagnosed only after he began his university studies. However, inspired by his parents' background, he aspired to excel at school for a better future for his family. During elementary school, Maor attended local quizzes about Jewish history and Zionism, which significantly shaped his identity and national perspective. Farid graduated high school with the highest GPA in school. Later he was recruited to the Israel Defense Forces and drafted to the Brakim Program [he] – an excellence program of the Israeli Intelligence Corps for training leading R&D officers for the Israeli military and defense industry. Maor graduated the program with honors and was elected by the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and Unit 8200, where he served as an artificial intelligence researcher, officer, and commander. During his Military service, he received various honors and awards, such as the Excellent Scientist Award, given to the top three academics serving in the Israel Defense Forces. In 2019, Farid completed his military service in the rank of a Captain. Education and academic career As part of the (4 years) Brakim Program, Maor completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the Technion in Mechanical Engineering with honors. Then, he initiated his Ph.D. research as a collaboration with the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) in parallel to his duty military service. The main goals of his Ph.D. research were predicting irreversible effects of major earthquakes on Israel's nuclear facilities, and improving their seismic resistance using energy absorption technologies. The mathematical models developed by Farid were able to forecast earthquake effects on facilities with major hazard potential, and predicted the failure of liquid storage tanks due to earthquakes took place in Italy (2012) and Mexico (2017). The energy absorption technologies used, increased in up to 90% the seismic resistance abilities of those sensitive facilities. The research results were published in multiple papers in peer-reviewed academic journals and presented in international academic conferences. Later, this research expanded to an official collaboration between the Technion and the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, which aims to implement the findings obtained on existing sensitive systems, and won funding of 1.5 million NIS from the Pazy foundation of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and the Council for Higher Education. In 2017, Farid completed his Ph.D. and as the youngest graduate at the Technion for that year, at the age of 24. In the graduation ceremonies, he honored his parents to receive the diplomas on his behalf. At the same year, he served as a lecturer at Ben-Gurion University in an original course he developed as a solution for knowledge gaps he identified in the Israeli defense industry. In 2018, Dr. Farid served as an artificial intelligence researcher at a Data Science team of Unit 8200, where he developed machine learning-based solutions for military and operational needs. In 2019, Farid won the Fulbright and the Israel Scholarship Educational Foundation scholarships, and was accepted to post-doctoral position at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he develops real-time methods for predicting earthquake effects using machine learning techniques. In 2020, Farid was accepted to the Emerging Leaders Program at Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At the same year, he received the excellence research grant of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities for leading his research in collaboration between MIT and the Technion. Social activism Farid social activism focuses on empowering youths from disadvantaged backgrounds from an early age. In 2010–2015, he served as a mentor of a robotics team from Dimona in FIRST Robotics Competition, a mathematics tutor in "Aharai!" [he] program for high-school students at risk in Dimona and Be'er Sheva, and a mentor and private tutor of adolescence and reserve duty soldiers from disadvantaged backgrounds. In 2010, he initiated "Learn to Succeed" (Hebrew: ללמוד להצליח) project, for mitigating the social gaps in the Israeli society by empowering youths from the social, economical, and geographical periphery for excellence, self-fulfillment and gaining formal education. In 2018, Learn to Succeed became an official non-profit organization. At the same year, Farid led a crowdfunding project of 150,000 NIS in order to expand the organization to a national scale. In 2019, he published the book "Learn to Succeed", in which he describes his struggle with ADHD, the violent environment in which he grew up, and the changing process he went through from being a violent teenager to becoming the youngest Ph.D. graduate at the Technion. The book was given to more than two thousand youths at risk and became a top seller in Israel shortly after its publication. Maor dedicated the book to his parents and to the memorial of his friend Captain Tal Nachman who was killed in operational activity during his military service in 2014. The organization consists of hundreds of volunteers, gives full scholarships to STEM students from the periphery who serve as mentors of youths, both Jews and Arabs, from disadvantaged backgrounds, runs a hotline which gives online practical and mental support to hundreds of youths, parents and educators, initiates inspirational activities with military orientation to increase the motivation of its teen-age members for significant military service, and gives inspirational lectures to more than 5,000 youths each year. In 2019, Maor initiated a collaboration with Unit 8200 in which tens of the program's members are being interviewed to the unit. This opportunity is usually given to students with the highest grades in the matriculate exams in each class. In 2020, Dr. Farid established the ScienceAbroad center at MIT, aiming to strengthen the connections between Israeli researchers in the institute and the state of Israel. Moreover, he serves as a volunteer in the American Technion Society. Honors and awards Personal life Farid is married to Michal. Interviews and articles References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AberMUD] | [TOKENS: 445] |
Contents AberMUD AberMUD /ˈæbərmʌd/ was the first popular open source MUD. It was named after the town Aberystwyth, where it was written. The first version was written in B by Alan Cox, Richard Acott, Jim Finnis, and Leon Thrane based at University of Wales, Aberystwyth for an old Honeywell mainframe and opened in 1987. The gameplay was heavily influenced by MUD1, created by Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle at the University of Essex, which Alan Cox had played. In late 1988, AberMUD was ported to C by Alan Cox so it could run on Unix at Southampton University's Maths machines. This version was named AberMUD2. In early 1989, there were three instances of AberMUD running in the UK, the Southampton one, one at Leeds University and a third at the IBM PC User Group in London, run by Ian Smith. In January 1989 Michael Lawrie sent a licensed copy of AberMUD3 to Vijay Subramaniam and Bill Wisner, both American Essex MIST players. Bill Wisner subsequently spread AberMUD around the world. AberMUD3 was renamed AberMUD II by Rich Salz in February 1989 after he cleaned up the source code and ported it to UNIX. In 1991, Alan Cox wrote AberMUD IV (unrelated to AberMUD 4) and then AberMUD V, which was also used, with graphical extensions, in the Elvira game by Horror Soft, a trading name of Adventure Soft. AberMUD V was later released under the GNU GPL. AberMUD4 was improved by Alf Salte and Gjermund "Nicknack" Sørseth to create Dirt. Their May 1993 final release of Dirt 3.1.2 is used by most of the remaining AberMUD games on the internet. AberMUD's legacy lives on in the three major codebases it inspired: TinyMUD, LPMud and DikuMUD. See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simonside_Dwarfs] | [TOKENS: 387] |
Contents Simonside Dwarfs The Simonside Dwarfs, also known as Brownmen, Bogles and Duergar, are in English folklore a race of dwarfs, particularly associated with the Simonside Hills of Northumberland, in northern England. Their leader was said to be known as Heslop. In F. Grice's telling of the traditional story The Duergar in Folk Tales of the North Country (1944), one of them is described as being short, wearing a lambskin coat, moleskin trousers and shoes, and a hat made of moss stuck with a feather. The legendary dwarfs of Simonside were mentioned in the local newspaper, the Morpeth Gazette, in 1889, and in Tyndale's Legends and Folklore of Northumbria, 1930. They delighted in leading travellers astray, especially after dark, often carrying lighted torches to lead them into bogs, rather like a Will-o'-the-wisp. The menacing creatures would often disappear at dawn. The word duergar is likely to be derived from the dialectal words for "dwarf" on the Anglo-Scottish border which include dorch, dwerch, duerch, Duergh and Duerwe amongst others with a later, mistakenly added Norse -ar plural, perhaps as a result of linguistic misattestation. It may also come from the Old Norse word for dwarf or dwarfs (dvergar). These Border words for "dwarf", like the Standard English form, all derive from the Old English dweorh or dweorg via the Middle English dwerg. In the 2004 film Van Helsing, the Duergi are the minions of Count Dracula. See also References External links This article relating to a European folklore is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by adding missing information. |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PureScript] | [TOKENS: 552] |
Contents PureScript PureScript is a strongly typed, purely functional programming language that transpiles to JavaScript and, with alternate backends, to C++11, Erlang, and Go. It can be used to develop web applications, server side apps, and also desktop applications with use of Electron or via C++11 and Go compilers with suitable libraries. Its syntax is mostly comparable to that of Haskell. Also, it introduces row polymorphism and extensible records. Also, contrary to Haskell, the PureScript language is defined as having a strict evaluation strategy, although there are non-conforming back-ends which implement a lazy evaluation strategy. It is free and open-source software released under a BSD 3-clause license. History PureScript was initially designed by Phil Freeman in 2013. He began work on it because he was unsatisfied by other attempts to transpile Haskell to JavaScript (e.g., using Fay, Haste, or GHCJS). Since then it has been adopted by the community and is developed on GitHub. Further community-developed core tools include the dedicated build tool Pulp, the documentation directory Pursuit, and the package manager Spago. Features PureScript features strict evaluation, persistent data structures, and type inference. Its data type system shares many features with those of similar functional languages like Haskell: algebraic data types and pattern matching, higher kinded types, type classes, functional dependencies, and higher-rank polymorphism. Its type system adds support for row polymorphism and extensible records, but does not support some of the more advanced features of Haskell such as the generalized algebraic data type (GADT) and the type family. The PureScript transpilers attempt to produce readable code, where possible. Through a simple foreign function interface (FFI), it also allows code reuse of extant source code in JavaScript, C++11, and Go, usually as an intermediate representation. PureScript supports incremental compilation, and the transpiler to JavaScript distribution supports building source-code editor plug-ins for iterative development. Editor plug-ins exist for many popular text editors, including Vim, Emacs, Sublime Text, Atom and Visual Studio Code. PureScript supports type-driven development via its typed holes feature, in which a program can be constructed with missing subexpressions. The JavaScript transpiler will subsequently attempt to infer the types of the missing subexpressions, and report those types to the user. This feature inspired similar work in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). Examples Here is a minimal "Hello, World!" program in PureScript: Here, the type of the program is inferred and checked by the PureScript transpiler. A more verbose version of the same program might include explicit type annotations: See also References External links |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Xaver_von_Zach] | [TOKENS: 753] |
Contents Franz Xaver von Zach Baron Franz Xaver von Zach (Franz Xaver Freiherr von Zach; 4 June 1754 – 2 September 1832) was an Austrian astronomer born in Pest, Hungary (now Budapest). Biography Zach studied physics at the Royal University of Pest, and served for some time in the Austrian army. He taught at the University of Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine) and worked in its observatory. He lived in Paris in 1780–83, and in London from 1783 to 1786 as tutor in the house of the Saxon ambassador, Hans Moritz von Brühl. In Paris and London he entered the circles of astronomers like Jérôme Lalande, Pierre-Simon Laplace and William Herschel. In 1786 he was appointed by Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg director of the new observatory on Seeberg hill at Gotha, which was finished in 1791. At the close of the 18th century, he organised the first European congress of astronomers in 1798 and established the "celestial police", a group of twenty-four astronomers, to prepare for a systematic search for the "missing planet" predicted by the Titius–Bode law between Mars and Jupiter. Ceres was discovered by accident just as the search was getting underway. Using predictions made of the position of Ceres by Carl Friedrich Gauss, on 31 December 1801/1 January 1802, Zach (and, independently one night later, Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers) recovered Ceres after it was lost during its passage behind the Sun. After the death of the duke in 1804, Zach accompanied the duke's widow on her travels in the south of Europe, and the two settled in Genoa in 1815 where he directed an observatory. He moved back to Paris in 1827 and died there in 1832. Zach published Tables of the Sun (Gotha, 1792; new and improved edition, Gotha, 1804), and numerous papers on geographical subjects, particularly on the geographical positions of many towns and places, which he determined on his travels with a sextant. His principal importance was, however, as editor of three scientific journals of great value: Allgemeine Geographische Ephemeriden (4 vols., Gotha, 1798–1799), Monatliche Correspondenz zur Beförderung der Erd- und Himmels-Kunde (28 vols., Gotha, 1800–1813, from 1807 edited by Bernhard von Lindenau), and Correspondance astronomique, geographique, hydrographique, et statistique (Genoa, 1818–1826, 14 vols., and one number of the 15th, the suppression of which was instigated by the Jesuits). He was elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1794, a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1798, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1804, and an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1832. In 1808, von Zach was in Marseille where he observed and explained the phenomenon of the Canigou mountain in eastern Pyrénées which can be seen twice a year from there, 250 km away, by refraction of light. Asteroid 999 Zachia and the crater Zach on the Moon are named after him, while asteroid 64 Angelina is named after an astronomical station he set up near Marseille. Works References Further reading |
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[SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_(constellation)#cite_ref-28] | [TOKENS: 4993] |
Contents Orion (constellation) Orion is a prominent set of stars visible during winter in the northern celestial hemisphere. It is one of the 88 modern constellations; it was among the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century AD/CE astronomer Ptolemy. It is named after a hunter in Greek mythology. Orion is most prominent during winter evenings in the Northern Hemisphere, as are five other constellations that have stars in the Winter Hexagon asterism. Orion's two brightest stars, Rigel (β) and Betelgeuse (α), are both among the brightest stars in the night sky; both are supergiants and slightly variable. There are a further six stars brighter than magnitude 3.0, including three making the short straight line of the Orion's Belt asterism. Orion also hosts the radiant of the annual Orionids, the strongest meteor shower associated with Halley's Comet, and the Orion Nebula, one of the brightest nebulae in the sky. Characteristics Orion is bordered by Taurus to the northwest, Eridanus to the southwest, Lepus to the south, Monoceros to the east, and Gemini to the northeast. Covering 594 square degrees, Orion ranks 26th of the 88 constellations in size. The constellation boundaries, as set by Belgian astronomer Eugène Delporte in 1930, are defined by a polygon of 26 sides. In the equatorial coordinate system, the right ascension coordinates of these borders lie between 04h 43.3m and 06h 25.5m , while the declination coordinates are between 22.87° and −10.97°. The constellation's three-letter abbreviation, as adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1922, is "Ori". Orion is most visible in the evening sky from January to April, winter in the Northern Hemisphere, and summer in the Southern Hemisphere. In the tropics (less than about 8° from the equator), the constellation transits at the zenith. From May to July (summer in the Northern Hemisphere, winter in the Southern Hemisphere), Orion is in the daytime sky and thus invisible at most latitudes. However, for much of Antarctica in the Southern Hemisphere's winter months, the Sun is below the horizon even at midday. Stars (and thus Orion, but only the brightest stars) are then visible at twilight for a few hours around local noon, just in the brightest section of the sky low in the North where the Sun is just below the horizon. At the same time of day at the South Pole itself (Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station), Rigel is only 8° above the horizon, and the Belt sweeps just along it. In the Southern Hemisphere's summer months, when Orion is normally visible in the night sky, the constellation is actually not visible in Antarctica because the Sun does not set at that time of year south of the Antarctic Circle. In countries close to the equator (e.g. Kenya, Indonesia, Colombia, Ecuador), Orion appears overhead in December around midnight and in the February evening sky. Navigational aid Orion is very useful as an aid to locating other stars. By extending the line of the Belt southeastward, Sirius (α CMa) can be found; northwestward, Aldebaran (α Tau). A line eastward across the two shoulders indicates the direction of Procyon (α CMi). A line from Rigel through Betelgeuse points to Castor and Pollux (α Gem and β Gem). Additionally, Rigel is part of the Winter Circle asterism. Sirius and Procyon, which may be located from Orion by following imaginary lines (see map), also are points in both the Winter Triangle and the Circle. Features Orion's seven brightest stars form a distinctive hourglass-shaped asterism, or pattern, in the night sky. Four stars—Rigel, Betelgeuse, Bellatrix, and Saiph—form a large roughly rectangular shape, at the center of which lie the three stars of Orion's Belt—Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. His head is marked by an additional eighth star called Meissa, which is fairly bright to the observer. Descending from the Belt is a smaller line of three stars, Orion's Sword (the middle of which is in fact not a star but the Orion Nebula), also known as the hunter's sword. Many of the stars are luminous hot blue supergiants, with the stars of the Belt and Sword forming the Orion OB1 association. Standing out by its red hue, Betelgeuse may nevertheless be a runaway member of the same group. Orion's Belt, or The Belt of Orion, is an asterism within the constellation. It consists of three bright stars: Alnitak (Zeta Orionis), Alnilam (Epsilon Orionis), and Mintaka (Delta Orionis). Alnitak is around 800 light-years away from Earth, 100,000 times more luminous than the Sun, and shines with a magnitude of 1.8; much of its radiation is in the ultraviolet range, which the human eye cannot see. Alnilam is approximately 2,000 light-years from Earth, shines with a magnitude of 1.70, and with an ultraviolet light that is 375,000 times more luminous than the Sun. Mintaka is 915 light-years away and shines with a magnitude of 2.21. It is 90,000 times more luminous than the Sun and is a double star: the two orbit each other every 5.73 days. In the Northern Hemisphere, Orion's Belt is best visible in the night sky during the month of January at around 9:00 pm, when it is approximately around the local meridian. Just southwest of Alnitak lies Sigma Orionis, a multiple star system composed of five stars that have a combined apparent magnitude of 3.7 and lying at a distance of 1150 light-years. Southwest of Mintaka lies the quadruple star Eta Orionis. Orion's Sword contains the Orion Nebula, the Messier 43 nebula, Sh 2-279 (also known as the Running Man Nebula), and the stars Theta Orionis, Iota Orionis, and 42 Orionis. Three stars comprise a small triangle that marks the head. The apex is marked by Meissa (Lambda Orionis), a hot blue giant of spectral type O8 III and apparent magnitude 3.54, which lies some 1100 light-years distant. Phi-1 and Phi-2 Orionis make up the base. Also nearby is the young star FU Orionis. Stretching north from Betelgeuse are the stars that make up Orion's club. Mu Orionis marks the elbow, Nu and Xi mark the handle of the club, and Chi1 and Chi2 mark the end of the club. Just east of Chi1 is the Mira-type variable red giant star U Orionis. West from Bellatrix lie six stars all designated Pi Orionis (π1 Ori, π2 Ori, π3 Ori, π4 Ori, π5 Ori, and π6 Ori) which make up Orion's shield. Around 20 October each year, the Orionid meteor shower (Orionids) reaches its peak. Coming from the border with the constellation Gemini, as many as 20 meteors per hour can be seen. The shower's parent body is Halley's Comet. Hanging from Orion's Belt is his sword, consisting of the multiple stars θ1 and θ2 Orionis, called the Trapezium and the Orion Nebula (M42). This is a spectacular object that can be clearly identified with the naked eye as something other than a star. Using binoculars, its clouds of nascent stars, luminous gas, and dust can be observed. The Trapezium cluster has many newborn stars, including several brown dwarfs, all of which are at an approximate distance of 1,500 light-years. Named for the four bright stars that form a trapezoid, it is largely illuminated by the brightest stars, which are only a few hundred thousand years old. Observations by the Chandra X-ray Observatory show both the extreme temperatures of the main stars—up to 60,000 kelvins—and the star forming regions still extant in the surrounding nebula. M78 (NGC 2068) is a nebula in Orion. With an overall magnitude of 8.0, it is significantly dimmer than the Great Orion Nebula that lies to its south; however, it is at approximately the same distance, at 1600 light-years from Earth. It can easily be mistaken for a comet in the eyepiece of a telescope. M78 is associated with the variable star V351 Orionis, whose magnitude changes are visible in very short periods of time. Another fairly bright nebula in Orion is NGC 1999, also close to the Great Orion Nebula. It has an integrated magnitude of 10.5 and is 1500 light-years from Earth. The variable star V380 Orionis is embedded in NGC 1999. Another famous nebula is IC 434, the Horsehead Nebula, near Alnitak (Zeta Orionis). It contains a dark dust cloud whose shape gives the nebula its name. NGC 2174 is an emission nebula located 6400 light-years from Earth. Besides these nebulae, surveying Orion with a small telescope will reveal a wealth of interesting deep-sky objects, including M43, M78, and multiple stars including Iota Orionis and Sigma Orionis. A larger telescope may reveal objects such as the Flame Nebula (NGC 2024), as well as fainter and tighter multiple stars and nebulae. Barnard's Loop can be seen on very dark nights or using long-exposure photography. All of these nebulae are part of the larger Orion molecular cloud complex, which is located approximately 1,500 light-years away and is hundreds of light-years across. Due to its proximity, it is one of the most intense regions of stellar formation visible from Earth. The Orion molecular cloud complex forms the eastern part of an even larger structure, the Orion–Eridanus Superbubble, which is visible in X-rays and in hydrogen emissions. History and mythology The distinctive pattern of Orion is recognized in numerous cultures around the world, and many myths are associated with it. Orion is used as a symbol in the modern world. In Siberia, the Chukchi people see Orion as a hunter; an arrow he has shot is represented by Aldebaran (Alpha Tauri), with the same figure as other Western depictions. In Greek mythology, Orion was a gigantic, supernaturally strong hunter, born to Euryale, a Gorgon, and Poseidon (Neptune), god of the sea. One myth recounts Gaia's rage at Orion, who dared to say that he would kill every animal on Earth. The angry goddess tried to dispatch Orion with a scorpion. This is given as the reason that the constellations of Scorpius and Orion are never in the sky at the same time. However, Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer, revived Orion with an antidote. This is said to be the reason that the constellation of Ophiuchus stands midway between the Scorpion and the Hunter in the sky. The constellation is mentioned in Horace's Odes (Ode 3.27.18), Homer's Odyssey (Book 5, line 283) and Iliad, and Virgil's Aeneid (Book 1, line 535). In old Hungarian tradition, Orion is known as "Archer" (Íjász), or "Reaper" (Kaszás). In recently rediscovered myths, he is called Nimrod (Hungarian: Nimród), the greatest hunter, father of the twins Hunor and Magor. The π and o stars (on upper right) form together the reflex bow or the lifted scythe. In other Hungarian traditions, Orion's Belt is known as "Judge's stick" (Bírópálca). In Ireland and Scotland, Orion was called An Bodach, a figure from Irish folklore whose name literally means "the one with a penis [bod]" and was the husband of the Cailleach (hag). In Scandinavian tradition, Orion's Belt was known as "Frigg's Distaff" (friggerock) or "Freyja's distaff". The Finns call Orion's Belt and the stars below it "Väinämöinen's scythe" (Väinämöisen viikate). Another name for the asterism of Alnilam, Alnitak, and Mintaka is "Väinämöinen's Belt" (Väinämöisen vyö) and the stars "hanging" from the Belt as "Kaleva's sword" (Kalevanmiekka). There are claims in popular media that the Adorant from the Geißenklösterle cave, an ivory carving estimated to be 35,000 to 40,000 years old, is the first known depiction of the constellation. Scholars dismiss such interpretations, saying that perceived details such as a belt and sword derive from preexisting features in the grain structure of the ivory. The Babylonian star catalogues of the Late Bronze Age name Orion MULSIPA.ZI.AN.NA,[note 1] "The Heavenly Shepherd" or "True Shepherd of Anu" – Anu being the chief god of the heavenly realms. The Babylonian constellation is sacred to Papshukal and Ninshubur, both minor gods fulfilling the role of "messenger to the gods". Papshukal is closely associated with the figure of a walking bird on Babylonian boundary stones, and on the star map the figure of the Rooster is located below and behind the figure of the True Shepherd—both constellations represent the herald of the gods, in his bird and human forms respectively. In ancient Egypt, the stars of Orion were regarded as a god, called Sah. Because Orion rises before Sirius, the star whose heliacal rising was the basis for the Solar Egyptian calendar, Sah was closely linked with Sopdet, the goddess who personified Sirius. The god Sopdu is said to be the son of Sah and Sopdet. Sah is syncretized with Osiris, while Sopdet is syncretized with Osiris' mythological wife, Isis. In the Pyramid Texts, from the 24th and 23rd centuries BC, Sah is one of many gods whose form the dead pharaoh is said to take in the afterlife. The Armenians identified their legendary patriarch and founder Hayk with Orion. Hayk is also the name of the Orion constellation in the Armenian translation of the Bible. The Bible mentions Orion three times, naming it "Kesil" (כסיל, literally – fool). Though, this name perhaps is etymologically connected with "Kislev", the name for the ninth month of the Hebrew calendar (i.e. November–December), which, in turn, may derive from the Hebrew root K-S-L as in the words "kesel, kisla" (כֵּסֶל, כִּסְלָה, hope, positiveness), i.e. hope for winter rains.: Job 9:9 ("He is the maker of the Bear and Orion"), Job 38:31 ("Can you loosen Orion's belt?"), and Amos 5:8 ("He who made the Pleiades and Orion"). In ancient Aram, the constellation was known as Nephîlā′, the Nephilim are said to be Orion's descendants. In medieval Muslim astronomy, Orion was known as al-jabbar, "the giant". Orion's sixth brightest star, Saiph, is named from the Arabic, saif al-jabbar, meaning "sword of the giant". In China, Orion was one of the 28 lunar mansions Sieu (Xiù) (宿). It is known as Shen (參), literally meaning "three", for the stars of Orion's Belt. The Chinese character 參 (pinyin shēn) originally meant the constellation Orion (Chinese: 參宿; pinyin: shēnxiù); its Shang dynasty version, over three millennia old, contains at the top a representation of the three stars of Orion's Belt atop a man's head (the bottom portion representing the sound of the word was added later). The Rigveda refers to the constellation as Mriga (the Deer). Nataraja, "the cosmic dancer", is often interpreted as the representation of Orion. Rudra, the Rigvedic form of Shiva, is the presiding deity of Ardra nakshatra (Betelgeuse) of Hindu astrology. The Jain Symbol carved in the Udayagiri and Khandagiri Caves, India in 1st century BCE has a striking resemblance with Orion. Bugis sailors identified the three stars in Orion's Belt as tanra tellué, meaning "sign of three". The Seri people of northwestern Mexico call the three stars in Orion's Belt Hapj (a name denoting a hunter) which consists of three stars: Hap (mule deer), Haamoja (pronghorn), and Mojet (bighorn sheep). Hap is in the middle and has been shot by the hunter; its blood has dripped onto Tiburón Island. The same three stars are known in Spain and most of Latin America as "Las tres Marías" (Spanish for "The Three Marys"). In Puerto Rico, the three stars are known as the "Los Tres Reyes Magos" (Spanish for The Three Wise Men). The Ojibwa/Chippewa Native Americans call this constellation Mesabi for Big Man. To the Lakota Native Americans, Tayamnicankhu (Orion's Belt) is the spine of a bison. The great rectangle of Orion is the bison's ribs; the Pleiades star cluster in nearby Taurus is the bison's head; and Sirius in Canis Major, known as Tayamnisinte, is its tail. Another Lakota myth mentions that the bottom half of Orion, the Constellation of the Hand, represented the arm of a chief that was ripped off by the Thunder People as a punishment from the gods for his selfishness. His daughter offered to marry the person who can retrieve his arm from the sky, so the young warrior Fallen Star (whose father was a star and whose mother was human) returned his arm and married his daughter, symbolizing harmony between the gods and humanity with the help of the younger generation. The index finger is represented by Rigel; the Orion Nebula is the thumb; the Belt of Orion is the wrist; and the star Beta Eridani is the pinky finger. The seven primary stars of Orion make up the Polynesian constellation Heiheionakeiki which represents a child's string figure similar to a cat's cradle. Several precolonial Filipinos referred to the belt region in particular as "balatik" (ballista) as it resembles a trap of the same name which fires arrows by itself and is usually used for catching pigs from the bush. Spanish colonization later led to some ethnic groups referring to Orion's Belt as "Tres Marias" or "Tatlong Maria." In Māori tradition, the star Rigel (known as Puanga or Puaka) is closely connected with the celebration of Matariki. The rising of Matariki (the Pleiades) and Rigel before sunrise in midwinter marks the start of the Māori year. In Javanese culture, the constellation is often called Lintang Waluku or Bintang Bajak, referring to the shape of a paddy field plow. The imagery of the Belt and Sword has found its way into popular Western culture, for example in the form of the shoulder insignia of the 27th Infantry Division of the United States Army during both World Wars, probably owing to a pun on the name of the division's first commander, Major General John F. O'Ryan. The film distribution company Orion Pictures used the constellation as its logo. In artistic renderings, the surrounding constellations are sometimes related to Orion: he is depicted standing next to the river Eridanus with his two hunting dogs Canis Major and Canis Minor, fighting Taurus. He is sometimes depicted hunting Lepus the hare. He sometimes is depicted to have a lion's hide in his hand. There are alternative ways to visualise Orion. From the Southern Hemisphere, Orion is oriented south-upward, and the Belt and Sword are sometimes called the saucepan or pot in Australia and New Zealand. Orion's Belt is called Drie Konings (Three Kings) or the Drie Susters (Three Sisters) by Afrikaans speakers in South Africa and are referred to as les Trois Rois (the Three Kings) in Daudet's Lettres de Mon Moulin (1866). The appellation Driekoningen (the Three Kings) is also often found in 17th and 18th-century Dutch star charts and seaman's guides. The same three stars are known in Spain, Latin America, and the Philippines as "Las Tres Marías" (The Three Marys), and as "Los Tres Reyes Magos" (The Three Wise Men) in Puerto Rico. Even traditional depictions of Orion have varied greatly. Cicero drew Orion in a similar fashion to the modern depiction. The Hunter held an unidentified animal skin aloft in his right hand; his hand was represented by Omicron2 Orionis and the skin was represented by the five stars designated Pi Orionis. Saiph and Rigel represented his left and right knees, while Eta Orionis and Lambda Leporis were his left and right feet, respectively. As in the modern depiction, Mintaka, Alnilam, and Alnitak represented his Belt. His left shoulder was represented by Betelgeuse, and Mu Orionis made up his left arm. Meissa was his head, and Bellatrix his right shoulder. The depiction of Hyginus was similar to that of Cicero, though the two differed in a few important areas. Cicero's animal skin became Hyginus's shield (Omicron and Pi Orionis), and instead of an arm marked out by Mu Orionis, he holds a club (Chi Orionis). His right leg is represented by Theta Orionis and his left leg is represented by Lambda, Mu, and Epsilon Leporis. Further Western European and Arabic depictions have followed these two models. Future Orion is located on the celestial equator, but it will not always be so located due to the effects of precession of the Earth's axis. Orion lies well south of the ecliptic, and it only happens to lie on the celestial equator because the point on the ecliptic that corresponds to the June solstice is close to the border of Gemini and Taurus, to the north of Orion. Precession will eventually carry Orion further south, and by AD 14000, Orion will be far enough south that it will no longer be visible from the latitude of Great Britain. Further in the future, Orion's stars will gradually move away from the constellation due to proper motion. However, Orion's brightest stars all lie at a large distance from Earth on an astronomical scale—much farther away than Sirius, for example. Orion will still be recognizable long after most of the other constellations—composed of relatively nearby stars—have distorted into new configurations, with the exception of a few of its stars eventually exploding as supernovae, for example Betelgeuse, which is predicted to explode sometime in the next million years. See also References External links |
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