Germany
Germany the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central and Western Europe, lying between the Baltic and North Seas to the north, the Alps to the south. It borders Denmark to the north and the Czech Republic to the east and Switzerland to the south, France to the southwest, Luxembourg and the Netherlands to the west. Germany includes 16 constituent states, covers an area of 357,386 square kilometres, has a temperate seasonal climate. With 83 million inhabitants, it is the second most populous state of Europe after Russia, the most populous state lying in Europe, as well as the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is a decentralized country, its capital and largest metropolis is Berlin, while Frankfurt serves as its financial capital and has the country's busiest airport. Germany's largest urban area is the Ruhr, with its main centres of Essen; the country's other major cities are Hamburg, Cologne, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf, Dresden, Bremen and Nuremberg. Various Germanic tribes have inhabited the northern parts of modern Germany since classical antiquity.
A region named Germania was documented before 100 AD. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation. After the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire, the German Confederation was formed in 1815; the German revolutions of 1848–49 resulted in the Frankfurt Parliament establishing major democratic rights. In 1871, Germany became a nation state when most of the German states unified into the Prussian-dominated German Empire. After World War I and the revolution of 1918–19, the Empire was replaced by the parliamentary Weimar Republic; the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 led to the establishment of a dictatorship, the annexation of Austria, World War II, the Holocaust. After the end of World War II in Europe and a period of Allied occupation, Austria was re-established as an independent country and two new German states were founded: West Germany, formed from the American and French occupation zones, East Germany, formed from the Soviet occupation zone.
Following the Revolutions of 1989 that ended communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe, the country was reunified on 3 October 1990. Today, the sovereign state of Germany is a federal parliamentary republic led by a chancellor, it is a great power with a strong economy. As a global leader in several industrial and technological sectors, it is both the world's third-largest exporter and importer of goods; as a developed country with a high standard of living, it upholds a social security and universal health care system, environmental protection, a tuition-free university education. The Federal Republic of Germany was a founding member of the European Economic Community in 1957 and the European Union in 1993, it is part of the Schengen Area and became a co-founder of the Eurozone in 1999. Germany is a member of the United Nations, NATO, the G7, the G20, the OECD. Known for its rich cultural history, Germany has been continuously the home of influential and successful artists, musicians, film people, entrepreneurs, scientists and inventors.
Germany has a large number of World Heritage sites and is among the top tourism destinations in the world. The English word Germany derives from the Latin Germania, which came into use after Julius Caesar adopted it for the peoples east of the Rhine; the German term Deutschland diutisciu land is derived from deutsch, descended from Old High German diutisc "popular" used to distinguish the language of the common people from Latin and its Romance descendants. This in turn descends from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz "popular", derived from *þeudō, descended from Proto-Indo-European *tewtéh₂- "people", from which the word Teutons originates; the discovery of the Mauer 1 mandible shows that ancient humans were present in Germany at least 600,000 years ago. The oldest complete hunting weapons found anywhere in the world were discovered in a coal mine in Schöningen between 1994 and 1998 where eight 380,000-year-old wooden javelins of 1.82 to 2.25 m length were unearthed. The Neander Valley was the location where the first non-modern human fossil was discovered.
The Neanderthal 1 fossils are known to be 40,000 years old. Evidence of modern humans dated, has been found in caves in the Swabian Jura near Ulm; the finds included 42,000-year-old bird bone and mammoth ivory flutes which are the oldest musical instruments found, the 40,000-year-old Ice Age Lion Man, the oldest uncontested figurative art discovered, the 35,000-year-old Venus of Hohle Fels, the oldest uncontested human figurative art discovered. The Nebra sky disk is a bronze artefact created during the European Bronze Age attributed to a site near Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt, it is part of UNESCO's Memory of the World Programme. The Germanic tribes are thought to date from the Pre-Roman Iron Age. From southern Scandinavia and north Germany, they expanded south and west from the 1st century BC, coming into contact with the Celtic tribes of Gaul as well
Eyepiece
An eyepiece, or ocular lens, is a type of lens, attached to a variety of optical devices such as telescopes and microscopes. It is so named because it is the lens, closest to the eye when someone looks through the device; the objective lens or mirror brings it to focus creating an image. The eyepiece is placed near the focal point of the objective to magnify this image; the amount of magnification depends on the focal length of the eyepiece. An eyepiece consists with a "barrel" on one end; the barrel is shaped to fit in a special opening of the instrument. The image can be focused by moving the eyepiece further from the objective. Most instruments have a focusing mechanism to allow movement of the shaft in which the eyepiece is mounted, without needing to manipulate the eyepiece directly; the eyepieces of binoculars are permanently mounted in the binoculars, causing them to have a pre-determined magnification and field of view. With telescopes and microscopes, eyepieces are interchangeable. By switching the eyepiece, the user can adjust.
For instance, eyepieces will be interchanged to increase or decrease the magnification of a telescope. Eyepieces offer varying fields of view, differing degrees of eye relief for the person who looks through them. Several properties of an eyepiece are to be of interest to a user of an optical instrument, when comparing eyepieces and deciding which eyepiece suits their needs. Eyepieces are optical systems, they must be designed for optimal performance for a specific distance to this entrance pupil. In a refracting astronomical telescope the entrance pupil is identical with the objective; this may be several feet distant from the eyepiece. Microscope eyepieces may be corrected differently from telescope eyepieces. Elements are the individual lenses, which may come as simple lenses or "singlets" and cemented doublets or triplets; when lenses are cemented together in pairs or triples, the combined elements are called groups. The first eyepieces had only a single lens element, which delivered distorted images.
Two and three-element designs were invented soon after, became standard due to the improved image quality. Today, engineers assisted by computer-aided drafting software have designed eyepieces with seven or eight elements that deliver exceptionally large, sharp views. Internal reflections, sometimes called "scatter", cause the light passing through an eyepiece to disperse and reduce the contrast of the image projected by the eyepiece; when the effect is bad, "ghost images" are seen, called "ghosting". For many years, simple eyepiece designs with a minimum number of internal air-to-glass surfaces were preferred to avoid this problem. One solution to scatter is to use thin film coatings over the surface of the element; these thin coatings are only one or two wavelengths deep, work to reduce reflections and scattering by changing the refraction of the light passing through the element. Some coatings may absorb light, not being passed through the lens in a process called total internal reflection where the light incident on the film is at a shallow angle.
Lateral or transverse chromatic aberration is caused because the refraction at glass surfaces differs for light of different wavelengths. Blue light, seen through an eyepiece element, will not focus to the same point but along the same axis as red light; the effect can create a ring of false colour around point sources of light and results in a general blurriness to the image. One solution is to reduce the aberration by using multiple elements of different types of glass. Achromats are lens groups that bring two different wavelengths of light to the same focus and exhibit reduced false colour. Low dispersion glass may be used to reduce chromatic aberration. Longitudinal chromatic aberration is a pronounced effect of optical telescope objectives, because the focal lengths are so long. Microscopes, whose focal lengths are shorter, do not tend to suffer from this effect; the focal length of an eyepiece is the distance from the principal plane of the eyepiece where parallel rays of light converge to a single point.
When in use, the focal length of an eyepiece, combined with the focal length of the telescope or microscope objective, to which it is attached, determines the magnification. It is expressed in millimetres when referring to the eyepiece alone; when interchanging a set of eyepieces on a single instrument, some users prefer to refer to identify each eyepiece by the magnification produced. For a telescope, the angular magnification MA produced by the combination of a particular eyepiece and objective can be calculated with the following formula: M A = f O f E where: f O is the focal length of the objective, f E is the focal length of the eyepiece. Magnification increases, when the focal length of the eyepiece is shorter or the focal length of the objective is longer. For example, a 25 mm eyepiece in a telescope with a 1200 mm focal length would magnify objects 48 times. A 4 mm eyepiece in the same telescope would magnify 300 times. Amateur astronomers tend to refer t
Zeeland
Zeeland is the westernmost and least populous province of the Netherlands. The province, located in the south-west of the country, consists of a number of islands and peninsulas and a strip bordering Belgium, its capital is Middelburg. Its area is about 2,930 square kilometres, of which 1,140 square kilometres is water, it has a population of about 380,000. Large parts of Zeeland are below sea level; the last great flooding of the area was in 1953. Tourism is an important economic activity. In the summer, its beaches make it a popular destination for tourists German tourists. In some areas, the population can be two to four times higher during the high summer season; the coat of arms of Zeeland shows a lion half-emerged from water, the text luctor et emergo. The country of New Zealand was named after Zeeland after it was sighted by Dutch explorer Abel Tasman. Nehalennia is a mythological goddess of an ancient religion known around the province of Zeeland, her worship dates back at least to the 2nd century BC, flourished in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD.
She was a regional god, either Celtic or pre-Germanic – but sources differ on the culture that first worshipped her. During the Roman era, her main function appeared to be the protection of travelers seagoing travelers crossing the North Sea. Most of what is known about her mythology comes from the remains of carved stone offerings which have been dredged up from the Oosterschelde since 1970. Two more Nehalennia offering stones have been found in Cologne, Germany. Zeeland was a contested area between the counts of Holland and Flanders until 1299, when the last count of Holland died, the Counts of Hainaut gained control of the countship of Zeeland, followed by the counts of Bavaria and Habsburg. After 1585 Zeeland followed, as one of the 7 independent provinces, the fate of the Northern part of The Netherlands. In 1432 it became part of the Low Countries possessions of Philip the Good of Burgundy, the Seventeen Provinces. Through marriage, the Seventeen Provinces became the property of the Habsburgs in 1477.
In the Eighty Years' War, Zeeland was on the side of the Union of Utrecht, became one of the United Provinces. The area now called Zeeuws-Vlaanderen was not part of Zeeland, but a part of the county of Flanders, conquered by the United Provinces, hence called Staats-Vlaanderen. After the French occupation and the formation of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in 1815, the present province Zeeland was formed. During World War II, Zeeland was occupied by Nazi Germany between June 1940 and November 1944. In 1944, Zeeland was devastated by the Battle of the Scheldt and the Walcheren Landings, which brought about the Inundation of Walcheren, between British and Canadian forces, the occupying Germans; the catastrophic North Sea flood of 1953, which killed over 1800 people in Zeeland, led to the construction of the protective Delta Works. The province of Zeeland is a large river delta situated at the mouth of several major rivers, namely Scheldt and Meuse. Most of the province was reclaimed from the sea by inhabitants over time.
What used to be a muddy landscape, flooding at high tide and reappearing at low tide, became a series of small man-made hills that stayed dry at all times. The people of the province would connect the hills by creating dikes, which led to a chain of dry land that grew into bigger islands and gave the province its current shape; the shape of the islands has changed over time at the hands of both nature. The North Sea flood of 1953 inundated vast amounts of land that were only reclaimed; the subsequent construction of the Delta Works changed the face of the province. The infrastructure, although distinct by the number of bridges and dams, has not shaped the geography of the province so much as the geography of the province has shaped its infrastructure; the dams and bridges that are a vital part of the province's road system were constructed over the span of decades and came to replace old ferry lines. The final touch to this process came in 2003, it was the first solid connection between both banks of the Western Scheldt and ended the era of water separating the islands and peninsulas of Zeeland.
Zeeland consists of several peninsulas. These are, from north to south, Schouwen-Duiveland, Noord-Beveland and Zuid-Beveland, it includes a strip of land bordering the Belgian region of Flanders, the Zeelandic Flanders. The province of Zeeland has 13 municipalities: The largest cities are: Middelburg: 41.000, Vlissingen: 34.000, Goes: 27.000 and Terneuzen: 25.000 inhabitants. As of 1 January 2014, Zeeland has a population of 380,621 and a population density of 210/km2, it is the 12th most populous or least populous province and the 2nd least densely populated province of the Netherlands. Zeeland is a Protestant region. There are adherents of the Roman Catholic Church. After being long part of the vast Franco-Flemish Roman Catholic Diocese of Cambrai, Zeeland got its own bishopric, the Diocese of Middelburg, on 5 December 1559, suppressed in 1603, its territory being merged into the Apostolic Vicariate of Batavia, only to be'restored' on March 22, 1803 as the Apostolic Vicariate of Breda, prom
Zacharias Janssen
Zacharias Janssen was a Dutch spectacle-maker from Middelburg associated with the invention of the first optical telescope. Janssen is sometimes credited for inventing the first compound microscope. However, the origin of the microscope, just like the origin of the telescope, is a matter of debate. Zacharias Janssen was born in The Hague. Local records seem to indicate he was born in 1585 although a date of birth as early as 1580 or as late a 1588 are given, his parents were Hans Martens and Maeyken Meertens, both from Antwerp, Belgium. He grew up with his sister Sara in Middelburg, at the time the second most important city of the Netherlands, he was known as a "street seller", in trouble with the local authorities. He stated he was born in The Hague on the marriage file of his first marriage, with Catharina de Haene, on October 23, 1610; when this file was refound by Cornelis de Waard in 1906, De Waard found the following excerpt: Sacharias Jansen, j.g. uut Den Haag, "Zacharias Jansen, bachelor from The Hague" Before, it was thought that Janssen was a native of Middelburg.
In 1612, Zacharias and Catharina had a son. In 1615 Zacharias was appointed guardian of two children of Lowys Lowyssen "geseyt Henricxen brilmakers", it is surmised that Zacharias took possession of Lowys Lowyssen's spectacle-making tools because the first record of Zacharias Janssen being a spectacle maker appears in 1616. The family had to move to Arnemuiden in 1618 after Zacharias's counterfeiting activities were exposed. There Zacharias was again accused of counterfeiting in 1619 causing him to be on the move again, ending up back in Middleburg in 1621. A year after the death of Janssen's first wife in 1624, he married Anna Couget from Antwerp, the widow of a Willem Jansen, he moved to Amsterdam in November 1626 with a profession of a spectacle maker, but was bankrupt by 1628. Janssen has been given a death date as late as 1638 although his sister said he was dead in 1632 testimony and his son Johannes declared his parents had died by the time of his marriage in April 1632. Over the years there have been claims Zacharias Janssen invented the telescope and/or the microscope in Middelburg between 1590 and 1618.
Zacharias worked for some period of his life as spectacle-maker and at one time lived next door to Middelburg spectacle maker Hans Lippershey claimed to have invented the telescope. Janssen's attribution to these discoveries is debatable since there is no concrete evidence as to the actual inventor, there are a whole series of confusing and conflicting claims from the testimony of his son and fellow countrymen; the claim that Zacharias Janssen invented the telescope and the microscope dates back to the year 1655. During that time Dutch diplomat Willem Boreel conducted an investigation trying to figure out who invented the telescope, he had a local magistrate in Middelburg follow up on a 45 year old recollection of a spectacle maker named "Hans" who told a young Boreel in 1610 about inventing the telescope. In his investigation the magistrate was contacted by a unknown claimant, Middelburg spectacle maker Johannes Zachariassen, the son of Zacharias Janssen, who testified under oath that his father invented the telescope and the microscope as early as 1590 and that Hans Lippershey had stolen his father's invention of the telescope.
This testimony seemed to convincing to Boreel, who modified his recollections, concluding that Zacharias must have been who he remembered. Boreel's conclusion that Zacharias Janssen invented the telescope a little ahead of spectacle maker Hans Lippershey was adopted by Pierre Borel in his 1656 book on the subject. In Boreel's investigation Johannes claimed his father, Zacharias Jansen, invented the compound microscope in 1590; this pushes the date so early it is sometimes assumed, for the claim to be true grandfather Hans Martens must have invented it. Other claims have come forward over the years. Physicist Jean Henri van Swinden's 1822-23 investigation reached the conclusion supporting Janssen and in 1841 a collector named Zacharias Snijder came forward with 4 iron tubes with lenses in them purported to be Janssen original telescopes. In historian Cornelis de Waard's 1906 book on the history of the telescope he recounted his discovery of note written in 1634 by the Dutch philosopher Isaac Beeckman in which Beeckman mentioned that Johannes Zachariassen claimed his father created his first telescope in 1604.
The German astronomer Simon Marius's account to his patron Johan Philip Fuchs von Bimbach about meeting an unnamed Dutchman at the 1608 Autumn Frankfurt Fair who tried to sell him a device that sounded like a broken telescope has led to speculation this unnamed Dutchman could have been Zacharias Janssen. The confusion surrounding the claim to invention of the telescope and the microscope arises in part from the testimony of Zacharias Janssen's son, Johannes Zachariassen. Johannes claims include that his father invented the telescope in 1590, that his father invented the telescope in 1604, that he and his father invented the telescope in 1618, that Jacob Metius and Cornelis Drebbel bought a telescope from him and his father in 1620 and copied it. Johannes seems to have lied about his own date of birth, maybe so he could stake his own claim as inventor of the telescope along with his father; the 1655 investigation by William Boreel (who may have been a childhood friend of Zacharias
Virtual International Authority File
The Virtual International Authority File is an international authority file. It is a joint project of several national libraries and operated by the Online Computer Library Center. Discussion about having a common international authority started in the late 1990s. After a series of failed attempts to come up with a unique common authority file, the new idea was to link existing national authorities; this would present all the benefits of a common file without requiring a large investment of time and expense in the process. The project was initiated by the US Library of Congress, the German National Library and the OCLC on August 6, 2003; the Bibliothèque nationale de France joined the project on October 5, 2007. The project transitioned to being a service of the OCLC on April 4, 2012; the aim is to link the national authority files to a single virtual authority file. In this file, identical records from the different data sets are linked together. A VIAF record receives a standard data number, contains the primary "see" and "see also" records from the original records, refers to the original authority records.
The data are available for research and data exchange and sharing. Reciprocal updating uses the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting protocol; the file numbers are being added to Wikipedia biographical articles and are incorporated into Wikidata. VIAF's clustering algorithm is run every month; as more data are added from participating libraries, clusters of authority records may coalesce or split, leading to some fluctuation in the VIAF identifier of certain authority records. Authority control Faceted Application of Subject Terminology Integrated Authority File International Standard Authority Data Number International Standard Name Identifier Wikipedia's authority control template for articles Official website VIAF at OCLC
Paolo Sarpi
Paolo Sarpi was an Italian historian, scientist, canon lawyer, statesman active on behalf of the Venetian Republic during the period of its successful defiance of the papal interdict and its war with Austria over the Uskok pirates. His writings, frankly polemical and critical of the Catholic Church and its Scholastic tradition, "inspired both Hobbes and Edward Gibbon in their own historical debunkings of priestcraft." Sarpi's major work, the History of the Council of Trent, was published in London in 1619. Organized around single topics, they are early examples of the genre of the historical monograph; as a defender of the liberties of Republican Venice and proponent of the separation of Church and state, Sarpi attained fame as a hero of republicanism and free thought and possible crypto Protestant. His last words, "Esto perpetua", were recalled by John Adams in 1820 in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, when Adams "wished'as devoutly as Father Paul for the preservation of our vast American empire and our free institutions', as Sarpi had wished for the preservation of Venice and its institutions."Sarpi was an experimental scientist, a proponent of the Copernican system, a friend and patron of Galileo Galilei, a keen follower of the latest research on anatomy and ballistics at the University of Padua.
His extensive network of correspondents included William Harvey. Sarpi believed that government institutions should rescind their censorship of Avvisi—the newsletters which started to be common in his time—and instead of censorship publish their own version so as to combat enemy publication. Acting himself in that spirit, Sarpi published several pamphlets in defense of Venice's rights over the Adriatic; as such, Sarpi could be considered as an early advocate of the Freedom of the Press, though the concept did not yet exist in his lifetime. He was born Pietro Sarpi in Venice, his father was a merchant, although his mother a Venetian noblewoman. While he was still a child his father died; the brilliant and precocious boy was educated by his maternal uncle, a school teacher, by Giammaria Capella, monk in the Augustinian Servite order. At the age of thirteen he entered the Servite order in 1566, assuming the name of Fra Paolo, by which, with the epithet Servita, he was always known to his contemporaries.
Sarpi was assigned to a monastery in Mantua around 1567. In 1570 he sustained theses at a disputation there, was invited to remain as court theologian to Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga. Sarpi remained four years at Mantua, studying oriental languages, he went to Milan in 1575, where he was an adviser to Charles Borromeo, the saint and bishop but was transferred by his superiors to Venice, as professor of philosophy at the Servite convent. In 1579, he became Provincial of the Venetian Province of the Servite order, while studying at the University of Padua. At the age of twenty-seven he was appointed Procurator General for the order. In this capacity he was sent to Rome, where he interacted with three successive popes, as well as the grand inquisitor and other influential people. Sarpi returned to Venice in 1588 and passed the next 17 years in study interrupted by the internal disputes of his community. In 1601, he was recommended by the Venetian senate for the bishopric of Caorle, but the papal nuncio, who wished to obtain it for a protégé of his own, accused Sarpi of having denied the immortality of the soul and controverted the authority of Aristotle.
An attempt to obtain another bishopric in the following year failed, Pope Clement VIII having taken offense at Sarpi's habit of corresponding with learned heretics. Clement VIII died in March 1605, the attitude of his successor Pope Paul V strained the limits of papal prerogative. Venice adopted measures to restrict it: the right of the secular tribunals to take cognizance of the offences of ecclesiastics had been asserted in two leading cases and the scope of two ancient laws of the city, that were: one forbidding the foundation of churches or ecclesiastical congregations without the consent of the state, the other forbidding acquisition of property by priests or religious bodies; these laws had been extended over the entire territory of the republic. In January 1606, the papal nuncio delivered a brief demanding the unconditional submission of the Venetians; the senate promised protection to all ecclesiastics who should in this emergency aid the republic by their counsel. Sarpi presented a memoir, pointing out that the threatened censures might be met in two ways – de facto, by prohibiting their publication, de jure, by an appeal to a general council.
The document was well received, Sarpi was made canonist and theological counsellor to the republic. The following April, hopes of compromise were dispelled by Paul's excommunication of the Venetians and his attempt to lay their dominions under an interdict. Sarpi entered energetically into the controversy, it was unprecedented for an ecclesiastic of his eminence to argue the subjection of the clergy to the state. He began by republishing the anti-papal opinions of the canonist Jean Gerson. In an anonymous tract published shortly afterwards, he laid down principles which struck radically at papal authority in secular matters; this book was promptly included in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, Cardinal Bellarmine attacked Gerson's work with severity. Sarpi replied in an Apologia; the Considerazioni sulle censure and the Trattato d
Lippershey (crater)
Lippershey is a tiny lunar impact crater located in the southeast section of the Mare Nubium. It was named after Dutch optician Hans Lippershey, it is a cup-shaped feature surrounded by the lunar mare. Lippershey lies to the northeast of the crater Pitatus. By convention these features are identified on lunar maps by placing the letter on the side of the crater midpoint, the closest to Lippershey
