Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was President of Iraq from 16 July 1979 until 9 April 2003. A leading member of the revolutionary Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party, the Baghdad-based Ba'ath Party and its regional organization the Iraqi Ba'ath Party—which espoused Ba'athism, a mix of Arab nationalism and socialism—Saddam played a key role in the 1968 coup that brought the party to power in Iraq; as vice president under the ailing General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, at a time when many groups were considered capable of overthrowing the government, Saddam created security forces through which he controlled conflicts between the government and the armed forces. In the early 1970s, Saddam nationalized oil and foreign banks leaving the system insolvent due to the Iran–Iraq War, the Gulf War, UN sanctions. Through the 1970s, Saddam cemented his authority over the apparatus of government as oil money helped Iraq's economy to grow at a rapid pace. Positions of power in the country were filled with Sunni Arabs, a minority that made up only a fifth of the population.
Saddam formally rose to power in 1979, although he had been the de facto head of Iraq for several years. He suppressed several movements Shi'a and Kurdish movements which sought to overthrow the government or gain independence and maintained power during the Iran–Iraq War and the Gulf War. Whereas some in the Arab world lauded Saddam for opposing the United States and attacking Israel, he was condemned for the brutality of his dictatorship; the total number of Iraqis killed by the security services of Saddam's government in various purges and genocides is conservatively estimated to be 250,000, or liberally estimated at 1.5 million. Saddam's invasions of Iran and Kuwait resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths, he acquired the title "Butcher of Baghdad". In 2003, a coalition led by the United States invaded Iraq to depose Saddam, in which U. S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair falsely accused him of possessing weapons of mass destruction and having ties to al-Qaeda.
Saddam's Ba'ath party was disbanded and elections were held. Following his capture on 13 December 2003, the trial of Saddam took place under the Iraqi Interim Government. On 5 November 2006, Saddam was convicted by an Iraqi court of crimes against humanity related to the 1982 killing of 148 Iraqi Shi'a, sentenced to death by hanging, he was executed on 30 December 2006. Before he was born, cancer killed both Saddam's brother; these deaths so depressed Saddam's mother that she attempted to abort her pregnancy and commit suicide. When her son was born, Sabha "would have nothing to do with him", Saddam was taken in by an uncle, his mother remarried, Saddam gained three half-brothers through this marriage. His stepfather, Ibrahim al-Hassan, treated Saddam harshly after his return. At about age 10, Saddam fled the family and returned to live in Baghdad with his uncle Kharaillah Talfah. Talfah, the father of Saddam's future wife, was a devout Sunni Muslim and a veteran of the 1941 Anglo-Iraqi War between Iraqi nationalists and the United Kingdom, which remained a major colonial power in the region.
In his life relatives from his native Tikrit became some of his closest advisors and supporters. Under the guidance of his uncle he attended a nationalistic high school in Baghdad. After secondary school Saddam studied at an Iraqi law school for three years, dropping out in 1957 at the age of 20 to join the revolutionary pan-Arab Ba'ath Party, of which his uncle was a supporter. During this time, Saddam supported himself as a secondary school teacher. Revolutionary sentiment was characteristic throughout the Middle East. In Iraq progressives and socialists assailed traditional political elites. Moreover, the pan-Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt profoundly influenced young Ba'athists like Saddam; the rise of Nasser foreshadowed a wave of revolutions throughout the Middle East in the 1950s and 1960s, with the collapse of the monarchies of Iraq and Libya. Nasser inspired nationalists throughout the Middle East by fighting the British and the French during the Suez Crisis of 1956, modernizing Egypt, uniting the Arab world politically.
In 1958, a year after Saddam had joined the Ba'ath party, army officers led by General Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew Faisal II of Iraq in the 14 July Revolution. Of the 16 members of Qasim's cabinet, 12 were Ba'ath Party members. To strengthen his own position within the government, Qasim created an alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party, opposed to any notion of pan-Arabism; that year, the Ba'ath Party leadership was planning to assassinate Qasim. Saddam was a leading member of the operation. At the time, the Ba'ath Party was more of an ideological experiment than a strong anti-government fighting machine; the majority of its members were either educated professionals or students, Saddam fit the bill. The choice of Saddam was, according to historian Con Coughlin, "hardly surprising"; the idea of assassinating Qasim may have been Nasser's, there is speculation that some of those who participated in the operation received training in Damascus, part of the UAR. However, "no evidence has been produced to implicate Nasser directly in the plot."
The assassination attempt was conceived as revenge for communist massacres that killed h
Collectible card game
A collectible card game called a trading card game or many other names, is a kind of strategy card game, created in 1993 and consists of specially designed sets of playing cards. These cards use proprietary artwork or images to embellish the card. CCGs may depict anything from fantasy or science fiction genres, horror themes, cartoons, or sports. Game text is on the card and is used to interact with the other cards in a strategic fashion. Games are played between two players, though multiplayer formats are common. Players may use dice, card sleeves, or play mats to complement their gameplay. CCGs can be played with or collected, both. A CCG is played using a starter deck; this deck may be modified by adding cards from booster packs, which contain around 8 to 15 random cards. As a player obtains more cards, they may create new decks from scratch; when enough players have been established, tournaments are formed to compete for prizes. Successful CCGs have thousands of unique cards extended through expansion sets that add new mechanics.
Magic: The Gathering, the first developed and most successful, has over 18,000 distinct cards. By the end of 1994, Magic: The Gathering had sold over 1 billion cards, between the time period of 2008 to 2016 sold over 20 billion. Other successful CCGs include Yu-Gi-Oh! which sold over 25 billion cards as of March 2011, Pokémon which has sold over 25 billion cards as of March 2018. Other notable CCGs have come and gone, including Legend of the Five Rings, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Vampire: The Eternal Struggle, World of Warcraft. Many other CCGs had little or no commercial success. Digital collectible card games have gained popularity, spurred by the success of Hearthstone. DCCGs do not use physical cards and instead use digital representations, with newer DCCGs foregoing card images altogether by using basic icons. A collectible card game is defined as a game where players acquire cards into a personal collection from which they create customized decks of cards and challenge other players in matches.
Players start by purchasing a starter deck, ready to play, but additional cards are obtained from randomized booster packs or by trading with other players. The goal of most CCGs is to beat your opponent by crafting customized decks that play to synergies of card combinations. Refined decks will try to account for randomness as well as opponent's actions, by using the most complementary and efficient cards possible; the exact definition of what makes a CCG is varied, as many games are marketed under the "collectible card game" moniker. The basic definition requires the game to resemble trading cards in shape and function, be mass-produced for trading and/or collectibility, have rules for strategic gameplay; the definition of CCGs is further refined as being a card game in which the player uses his own deck with cards sold in random assortments. If every card in the game can be obtained by making a small number of purchases, or if the manufacturer does not market it as a CCG it is not a CCG. CCGs can further be designated as dead games.
Dead games are those CCGs which are no longer supported by their manufacturers and have ceased releasing expansions. Living games are those CCGs; this means that new expansions are being created for the game and official game tournaments are occurring in some fashion. Card games that should not be mistaken for CCGs: Deck-Building Games - Construction of the deck is the main focus of gameplay. Collectible Common-Deck Card Games are card games where players share a common deck rather than their own personal deck. No customization of decks nor trading occurs, no metagame is developed. There is little to no interest in collecting the cards. Non-Collectible Customizable Card Games are those games where each player has their own deck, but no randomness occurs when acquiring the cards. Many of these games are sold as complete sets. A few were intended to have booster packs; this category may be referred to as an ECG, or Expandable Card Game. This category includes LCGs. Living Card Games - LCGs are a type of non-collectible customizable card game, a registered trademark of Fantasy Flight Games.
They don't use the randomized booster packs like CCGs and instead are bought in a single purchase. LCGs are known for costing much less; each CCG system has a fundamental set of rules that describes the players' objectives, the categories of cards used in the game, the basic rules by which the cards interact. Each card will have additional text explaining that specific card's effect on the game, they generally represent some specific element derived from the game's genre, setting, or source material. The cards are illustrated and named for these source elements, the card's game function may relate to the subject. For example, Magic: The Gathering is based on the fantasy genre, so many of the cards represent creatures and magical spells from that setting. In the game, a dragon is illustrated as a reptilian beast and has the flying ability and higher combat stats than smaller creatures; the bulk of CCGs are designed around a resource system. The cards which constitute a player's deck are considered a resource, with the frequency of cards moving from the deck to the play area or player's hand being controlled.
Relative card strength is balanced by the number or type of resources needed in order to play the card, pacing after that may be determined by the flow of car
Shangri-La
Shangri-La is a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton. Hilton describes Shangri-La as a mystical, harmonious valley guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains. Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise a mythical Himalayan utopia – a permanently happy land, isolated from the world. In the novel, the people who live at Shangri-La are immortal, living hundreds of years beyond the normal lifespan and only slowly aging in appearance; the name evokes the imagery of the exoticism of the Orient. In the ancient Tibetan scriptures, the existence of seven such places is mentioned as Nghe-Beyul Khembalung. Khembalung is one of several beyuls believed to have been created by Padmasambhava in the 9th century as idyllic, sacred places of refuge for Buddhists during times of strife; the phrase "Shangri-La" most comes from the Tibetan ཞང་,"Shang" – a district of Ü-Tsang, north of Tashilhunpo" + རི, pronounced "ri", "Mountain" = "Shang Mountain" + ལ, Mountain Pass, which suggests that the area is accessed to, or is named by, "Shang Mountain Pass".
While the name Shangri-La is of recent origin, the concept existed. Some scholars believe that the Shangri-La story owes a literary debt to Shambhala, a mythical kingdom in Tibetan Buddhist tradition, sought by Eastern and Western explorers. Jewish sources describe a city named Luz, "in which the angel of death has no permission to enter for a thousand years: its citizens have the ability to live forever." The same description is given for a location named Kushta - based on the Aramaic word for truth. In this city, the only reason for death was. Academic scholars have debunked the myth of Shangri-La and argued that this has less to do with an unexplored place and is more connected to a fantasy of the Western world. In China, the poet Tao Yuanming of the Jin Dynasty described a kind of Shangri-La in his work The Tale of the Peach Blossom Spring; the story goes that there was a fisherman from Wuling, who came across a beautiful peach grove, he discovered happy and content people who lived cut off from the troubles in the outside world since the Qin Dynasty.
Shambhala is a core concept in Tibetan Buddhism that describes a realm of harmony between man and nature, connected with the Kalachakra or "wheel of time". The Shambhala ideal is described in detail in the Shambhala Sutra, a historical text written by the Sixth Panchen Lama which describes some of the Shambhala locations as being in Ngari, the western prefecture of Tibet. Folklore from the Altai Mountains describe Belukha Mountain as a gateway to Shambhala; the Kun Lun Mountains offer another possible place for valleys like the Shangri-La, since Hilton described the “Kuen-Lun” mountains as its location in the book, Hilton is not known to have visited or studied the area. Parts of the Kunlun Mountains lie within Ngari, mentioned in the Shambhala Sutra. In a New York Times interview in 1936, Hilton states that he used "Tibetan material" from the British Museum the travelogue of two French priests, Evariste Regis Huc and Joseph Gabet, to provide the Tibetan cultural and Buddhist spiritual inspiration for Shangri-La.
Huc and Gabet travelled a roundtrip between Beijing and Lhasa in 1844–1846 on a route more than 250 kilometres north of Yunnan. Their famous travelogue, first published in French in 1850, went through many editions in many languages. A popular "condensed translation" was published in England in 1928, at the time that Hilton would have been gathering inspiration for – or writing – Lost Horizon. Today various places, such as parts of southern Kham in northwestern Yunnan province, including the tourist destinations of Lijiang and Zhongdian, claim the title. In modern China, Zhongdian county was renamed to attract tourists. Hilton visited the Hunza Valley in northern Pakistan Kashmir, close to the Chinese border, a few years before Lost Horizon was published. Being an isolated green valley surrounded by mountains, enclosed on the western end of the Himalayas, it matches the description in the novel. However, because the Hunza Valley does not have Tibetan culture and lacks Buddhist religion, it could not have been the inspiration for the cultural context for Hilton's story.
Places like Sichuan and Tibet claim the real Shangri-La was in its territory. In 2001, Tibet Autonomous Region put forward a proposal that the three regions optimise all Shangri-La tourism resources and promote them as one. After failed attempts to establish a China Shangri-la Ecological Tourism Zone in 2002 and 2003, government representatives of Sichuan and Yunnan provinces and Tibet Autonomous Region signed a declaration of co-operation in 2004. In 2001, Zhongdian County in northwestern Yunnan renamed itself Shangri-La County. American explorers Ted Vaill and Peter Klika visited the Muli area of southern Sichuan Province in 1999, claimed that the Muli monastery in this remote region was the model for James Hilton's Shangri-La, which they thought Hilton learned about from articles on this area in several National Geographic magazine articles in the late 1920s and early 1930s written by Austrian-American explorer Joseph Rock. Vaill completed a film based on their resear
Wiley (publisher)
John Wiley & Sons, Inc. branded as Wiley in recent years, is a global publishing company that specializes in academic publishing and instructional materials. The company produces books and encyclopedias, in print and electronically, as well as online products and services, training materials, educational materials for undergraduate and continuing education students. Founded in 1807, Wiley is known for publishing the For Dummies book series. In 2017, the company had a revenue of $1.7 billion. Wiley was established in 1807; the company was the publisher of such 19th century American literary figures as James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, as well as of legal and other non-fiction titles. Wiley worked in partnership with Cornelius Van Winkle, George Long, George Palmer Putnam, Robert Halsted; the firm took its current name in 1865. Wiley shifted its focus to scientific and engineering subject areas, abandoning its literary interests. Charles Wiley's son John took over the business when his father died in 1826.
The firm was successively named Wiley, Lane & Co. Wiley & Putnam, John Wiley; the company acquired its present name in 1876, when John's second son William H. Wiley joined his brother Charles in the business. Through the 20th century, the company expanded its publishing activities, the sciences, higher education. Since the establishment of the Nobel Prize in 1901, Wiley and its acquired companies have published the works of more than 450 Nobel Laureates, in every category in which the prize is awarded. One of the world's oldest independent publishing companies, Wiley marked its bicentennial in 2007 with a year-long celebration, hosting festivities that spanned four continents and ten countries and included such highlights as ringing the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange on May 1. In conjunction with the anniversary, the company published Knowledge for Generations: Wiley and the Global Publishing Industry, 1807-2007, depicting Wiley's pivotal role in the evolution of publishing against a social and economic backdrop.
Wiley has created an online community called Wiley Living History, offering excerpts from Knowledge for Generations and a forum for visitors and Wiley employees to post their comments and anecdotes. In December 2010, Wiley opened an office in Dubai; the company has had an office in Beijing, since 2001, China is now its sixth-largest market for STEM content. Wiley established publishing operations in India in 2006, has established a presence in North Africa through sales contracts with academic institutions in Tunisia and Egypt. On April 16, 2012, the company announced the establishment of Wiley Brasil Editora LTDA in São Paulo, effective May 1, 2012. Wiley's scientific and medical business was expanded by the acquisition of Blackwell Publishing in February 2007; the combined business, named Scientific, Technical and Scholarly, publishes, in print and online, 1,400 scholarly peer-reviewed journals and an extensive collection of books, major reference works and laboratory manuals in the life and physical sciences and allied health, the humanities, the social sciences.
Through a backfile initiative completed in 2007, 8.2 million pages of journal content have been made available online, a collection dating back to 1799. Wiley-Blackwell publishes on behalf of about 700 professional and scholarly societies. Other major journals published include Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials, International Finance and Liver Transplantation. Launched commercially in 1999, Wiley InterScience provided online access to Wiley journals, major reference works, books, including backfile content. Journals from Blackwell Publishing were available online from Blackwell Synergy until they were integrated into Wiley InterScience on June 30, 2008. In December 2007, Wiley began distributing its technical titles through the Safari Books Online e-reference service. On February 17, 2012, Wiley announced the acquisition of Inscape Holdings Inc. which provides DISC assessments and training for interpersonal business skills. Wiley described the acquisition as complementary to the workplace learning products published under its Pfeiffer imprint, one that would help Wiley advance its digital delivery strategy and extend its global reach through Inscape's international distributor network.
On March 7, 2012, Wiley announced its intention to divest assets in the areas of travel, general interest, nautical and crafts, as well as the Webster's New World and CliffsNotes brands. The planned divestiture was aligned with Wiley's "increased strategic focus on content and services for research and professional practices, on lifelong learning through digital technology". On August 13, 2012, Wiley announced it entered into a definitive agreement to sell all of its travel assets, including all of its interests in the Frommer's brand, to Google Inc. On November 6, 2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt acquired Wiley's cookbooks and study guides. In 2013, Wiley sold its pets and general interest lines to Turner Publishing Company and its nautical line to Fernhurst Books. H
Robert Anton Wilson
Robert Anton Wilson was an American author, essayist, playwright, poet and self-described agnostic mystic. Recognized by Discordianism as an Episkopos and saint, Wilson helped publicize the group through his writings and interviews. Wilson described his work as an "attempt to break down conditioned associations, to look at the world in a new way, with many models recognized as models or maps, no one model elevated to the truth", his goal being "to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone but agnosticism about everything." "Is", "is." "is"—the idiocy of the word haunts me. If it were abolished, human thought might begin to make sense. I don't know what anything "is". Born Robert Edward Wilson in Methodist Hospital, in Brooklyn, New York, he spent his first years in Flatbush, moved with his family to lower middle class Gerritsen Beach around the age of four or five, where they stayed until relocating to the steadfastly middle class neighborhood of Bay Ridge when Wilson was thirteen.
He suffered from polio as a child, found effective treatment with the Kenny Method which the American Medical Association repudiated at that time. Polio's effects remained with Wilson throughout his life manifesting as minor muscle spasms causing him to use a cane until 2000, when he experienced a major bout with post-polio syndrome that would continue until his death. Wilson attended Catholic grammar school the school associated with Gerritsen Beach's Resurrection Church, attended Brooklyn Technical High School to remove himself from the Catholic influence, he would recall that the family was "living so well... compared to the Depression" during this period "that I imagined we were lace-curtain Irish at last."Following his graduation in 1950, Wilson was employed in a succession of jobs and absorbed various philosophers and cultural practices while writing in his spare time. He studied electrical engineering and mathematics at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute from 1952 to 1957 and English education at New York University from 1957 to 1958 but failed to take a degree from either institution.
After smoking marijuana for nearly a decade, he first experimented with mescaline in Yellow Springs, Ohio on December 28, 1961. Wilson began to work as a freelance advertising copywriter in the late 1950s, he adopted his maternal grandfather's name, for his writings, telling himself that he would save the "Edward" for when he wrote the Great American Novel and finding that "Robert Anton Wilson" had become an established identity. He assumed co-editorship of the School for Living's Brookville, Ohio-based Balanced Living magazine in 1962 and returned to New York as associate editor of Ralph Ginzburg's quarterly fact: before leaving for Playboy, where he served as an associate editor from 1965 to 1971. According to Wilson, Playboy "paid me a higher salary than any other magazine at which I had worked and never expected me to become a conformist or sell my soul in return. I enjoyed my years in the Bunny Empire. I only resigned when I reached 40 and felt I could not live with myself if I didn't make an effort to write full-time at last."
Along with frequent collaborator Robert Shea, Wilson edited the magazine's Playboy Forum, a letters section consisting of responses to the Playboy Philosophy editorial column. During this period, he covered Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert's Millbrook, New York-based Castalia Foundation at the instigation of Alan Watts in The Realist, cultivated important friendships with William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, lectured at the Free University of New York on'Anarchist and Synergetic Politics' in 1965, he received a B. A. M. A. and Ph. D. in psychology from Paideia University, an unaccredited institution that has since closed. Wilson reworked his dissertation, it found publication in 1983 as Prometheus Rising. Wilson married freelance writer and poet Arlen Riley in 1958, they had four children, including Patricia Luna Wilson. Luna was beaten to death in an apparent robbery in the store where she worked in 1976 at the age of 15, became the first person to have her brain preserved by the Bay Area Cryonics Society.
Arlen Riley Wilson died in 1999 following a series of strokes. Among Wilson's 35 books, many other works his best-known volumes remain the cult classic series The Illuminatus! Trilogy, co-authored with Shea. Advertised as "a fairy tale for paranoids," the three books—The Eye in the Pyramid, The Golden Apple, Leviathan, soon offered as a single volume—philosophically and humorously examined, among many other themes and magical symbolism and history, the counterculture of the 1960s, secret societies, data concerning author H. P. Lovecraft and author and occultist Aleister Crowley, American paranoia about conspiracies and conspiracy theories; the book was intended to poke fun at the conspiratorial frame of mind. Wilson and Shea derived much of the odder material from letters sent to Playboy m
Steve Jackson (American game designer)
Steve Jackson is an American game designer. His notable creations include the card game Munchkin. Steve Jackson is a 1974 graduate of Rice University, where he was a resident of Baker College before moving to Sid Richardson College when it opened in 1971. Jackson attended the UT Law School, but left to pursue a career in game design. While working at Metagaming Concepts, Jackson developed Monsters! Monsters! based on a design by Ken St. Andre related to his Tunnels & Trolls role-playing game, Godsfire, a 3D space conquest game designed by Lynn Willis. Jackson's first design for the company was Ogre, followed by G. E. V. which were set in the same futuristic universe that Jackson created. Jackson became interested in Dungeons & Dragons, but found the various-sized dice irritating and the combat rules confusing and unsatisfying, did not like the lack of tactics, so he designed Melee in response. Jackson joined the SCA to gain a better understanding of combat, but he soon became more interested and started fighting in SCA live-action combat as Vargskol, the Viking-Celt.
Metagaming published his game Wizard. While designing Melee, Jackson realized this idea could be expanded into a full fantasy role-playing game to compete with D&D, started working on The Fantasy Trip. While the game was scheduled for release in February 1978, the design and development required more work than Jackson had anticipated and the game was not released until March 1980. Howard Thompson, owner of Metagaming, decided to release The Fantasy Trip as four separate books instead of a boxed set, changed his production methods so that Jackson would not be able to check the final proofs of the game; as a result of these actions, Jackson left Metagaming and founded Steve Jackson Games that year. His game Raid on Iran was an immediate success. Jackson bought The Space Gamer from Metagaming, sold the rights to The Fantasy Trip to Metagaming. However, Thompson sought legal action against SJG for the rights to a short wargame called One-Page Bulge, the lawsuit was settled with an agreement, reached on November 26, 1981 which gave Jackson full rights to One-Page Bulge, to Ogre and G.
E. V.. Jackson tried to purchase The Fantasy Trip from Thompson after Metagaming ceased operations in April 1983, but Thompson declined the offered price of $250,000. Jackson designed or co-designed many of the games published by SJ Games, including minigames such as Car Wars and Illuminati, a published version of an informal game played on college campuses, called Killer. Jackson wanted to get into computer gaming software in the early 1980s, but instead wound up licensing gaming rights to Origin Systems, which produced games such as Autoduel and Ogre. Jackson became interested in designing and publishing a new roleplaying system in the middle of 1981, intending it to be detailed and realistic and well-organized, adaptable to any setting and any level of play. In 1995, Sean Punch took over for Jackson as the GURPS line editor. Jackson designed the strategy card games Munchkin and Ninja Burger, the dice games Zombie Dice and Cthulhu Dice, as well as Zombie Dice variants Trophy Buck and Dino Hunt Dice.
Jackson has exhibited his elaborate Chaos Machine at several science fiction or wargaming conventions, including the 2006 Worldcon. On May 11, 2012, Steve Jackson's Kickstarter funding project for the 6th Edition of his Ogre game became the highest grossing boardgame project at Kickstarter, with 5,512 backers pledging a total of $923,680; the success of the Ogre Designer's Edition project has prompted a new project to help re-launch the popular Car Wars franchise as well. The use of Kickstarter as a combination of market research tool and funding program for development is a first in the gaming industry. Jackson is mistaken for Steve Jackson, a British gamebook and video game writer who co-founded Games Workshop; the confusion is exacerbated by the fact that while the UK Jackson was co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy gamebook series, the US Jackson wrote three books in this series, the books did not acknowledge that this was a different'Steve Jackson'. On March 1, 1990, the United States Secret Service raided the offices of Steve Jackson Games based on suspicion of illegal hacker activity by game designer Loyd Blankenship, seized his manuscript for GURPS Cyberpunk.
SJG filed a successful lawsuit against the government, which went to trial in 1993 as Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service, made possible through the newly created civil-rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation. Jackson is an avid collector of pirate-themed Lego sets, he has written a miniatures game that uses Pirate sets, Evil Stevie's Pirate Game, has run it at several conventions. Jackson has combined his fondness for model trains and LEGO through the LEGO train community and has been an active member of several LEGO users groups including TBRR and the Texas LEGO Users Group. Jackson has received ov
Mathematics
Mathematics includes the study of such topics as quantity, structure and change. Mathematicians use patterns to formulate new conjectures; when mathematical structures are good models of real phenomena mathematical reasoning can provide insight or predictions about nature. Through the use of abstraction and logic, mathematics developed from counting, calculation and the systematic study of the shapes and motions of physical objects. Practical mathematics has been a human activity from as far back; the research required to solve mathematical problems can take years or centuries of sustained inquiry. Rigorous arguments first appeared in Greek mathematics, most notably in Euclid's Elements. Since the pioneering work of Giuseppe Peano, David Hilbert, others on axiomatic systems in the late 19th century, it has become customary to view mathematical research as establishing truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions. Mathematics developed at a slow pace until the Renaissance, when mathematical innovations interacting with new scientific discoveries led to a rapid increase in the rate of mathematical discovery that has continued to the present day.
Mathematics is essential in many fields, including natural science, medicine and the social sciences. Applied mathematics has led to new mathematical disciplines, such as statistics and game theory. Mathematicians engage in pure mathematics without having any application in mind, but practical applications for what began as pure mathematics are discovered later; the history of mathematics can be seen as an ever-increasing series of abstractions. The first abstraction, shared by many animals, was that of numbers: the realization that a collection of two apples and a collection of two oranges have something in common, namely quantity of their members; as evidenced by tallies found on bone, in addition to recognizing how to count physical objects, prehistoric peoples may have recognized how to count abstract quantities, like time – days, years. Evidence for more complex mathematics does not appear until around 3000 BC, when the Babylonians and Egyptians began using arithmetic and geometry for taxation and other financial calculations, for building and construction, for astronomy.
The most ancient mathematical texts from Mesopotamia and Egypt are from 2000–1800 BC. Many early texts mention Pythagorean triples and so, by inference, the Pythagorean theorem seems to be the most ancient and widespread mathematical development after basic arithmetic and geometry, it is in Babylonian mathematics that elementary arithmetic first appear in the archaeological record. The Babylonians possessed a place-value system, used a sexagesimal numeral system, still in use today for measuring angles and time. Beginning in the 6th century BC with the Pythagoreans, the Ancient Greeks began a systematic study of mathematics as a subject in its own right with Greek mathematics. Around 300 BC, Euclid introduced the axiomatic method still used in mathematics today, consisting of definition, axiom and proof, his textbook Elements is considered the most successful and influential textbook of all time. The greatest mathematician of antiquity is held to be Archimedes of Syracuse, he developed formulas for calculating the surface area and volume of solids of revolution and used the method of exhaustion to calculate the area under the arc of a parabola with the summation of an infinite series, in a manner not too dissimilar from modern calculus.
Other notable achievements of Greek mathematics are conic sections, trigonometry (Hipparchus of Nicaea, the beginnings of algebra. The Hindu–Arabic numeral system and the rules for the use of its operations, in use throughout the world today, evolved over the course of the first millennium AD in India and were transmitted to the Western world via Islamic mathematics. Other notable developments of Indian mathematics include the modern definition of sine and cosine, an early form of infinite series. During the Golden Age of Islam during the 9th and 10th centuries, mathematics saw many important innovations building on Greek mathematics; the most notable achievement of Islamic mathematics was the development of algebra. Other notable achievements of the Islamic period are advances in spherical trigonometry and the addition of the decimal point to the Arabic numeral system. Many notable mathematicians from this period were Persian, such as Al-Khwarismi, Omar Khayyam and Sharaf al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī. During the early modern period, mathematics began to develop at an accelerating pace in Western Europe.
The development of calculus by Newton and Leibniz in the 17th century revolutionized mathematics. Leonhard Euler was the most notable mathematician of the 18th century, contributing numerous theorems and discoveries; the foremost mathematician of the 19th century was the German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss, who made numerous contributions to fields such as algebra, differential geometry, matrix theory, number theory, statistics. In the early 20th century, Kurt Gödel transformed mathematics by publishing his incompleteness theorems, which show that any axiomatic system, consistent will contain unprovable propositions. Mathematics has since been extended, there has been a fruitful interaction between mathematics and science, to
