Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, short story writer, theatre director and literary translator who lived in Paris for most of his adult life. He wrote in both French. Beckett's work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human existence coupled with black comedy and gallows humor, became minimalist in his career, he is considered one of the last modernist writers, one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation", he was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. Samuel Beckett was born in Dublin on Good Friday, 13 April 1906, to William Frank Beckett, a quantity surveyor and descendant of the Huguenots, Maria Jones Roe, a nurse, when both were 35, they had married in 1901. Beckett had Frank Edward Beckett. At the age of five, Beckett attended a local playschool in Dublin, where he started to learn music, moved to Earlsfort House School in Dublin city centre near Harcourt Street.
The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. The family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuel's father, William; the house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and plays. In 1919/1920, Beckett went to Portora Royal School in County Fermanagh, he left 3 years in 1923. A natural athlete, Beckett excelled at cricket as a left-handed batsman and a left-arm medium-pace bowler, he was to play for Dublin University and played two first-class games against Northamptonshire. As a result, he became the only Nobel literature laureate to have played first-class cricket. Beckett studied French and English at Trinity College, Dublin from 1923 to 1927, he was elected a Scholar in Modern Languages in 1926.
Beckett graduated with a BA and, after teaching at Campbell College in Belfast, took up the post of lecteur d'anglais at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from November 1928 to 1930. While there, he was introduced to renowned Irish author James Joyce by Thomas MacGreevy, a poet and close confidant of Beckett who worked there; this meeting had a profound effect on the young man. Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, one of, research towards the book that became Finnegans Wake. In 1929, Beckett published his first work, a critical essay entitled "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce"; the essay defends Joyce's work and method, chiefly from allegations of wanton obscurity and dimness, was Beckett's contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress. Beckett's close relationship with Joyce and his family cooled, when he rejected the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia owing to her progressing schizophrenia. Beckett's first short story, "Assumption", was published in Jolas's periodical transition.
The next year he won a small literary prize for his hastily composed poem "Whoroscope", which draws on a biography of René Descartes that Beckett happened to be reading when he was encouraged to submit. In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer. In November 1930, he presented a paper in French to the Modern Languages Society of Trinity on the Toulouse poet Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called le Concentrisme, it was a literary parody, for Beckett had in fact invented the poet and his movement that claimed to be "at odds with all, clear and distinct in Descartes". Beckett insisted that he had not intended to fool his audience; when Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, his brief academic career was at an end. He commemorated it with the poem "Gnome", inspired by his reading of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and published in The Dublin Magazine in 1934: Spend the years of learning squanderingCourage for the years of wanderingThrough a world politely turningFrom the loutishness of learning Beckett travelled in Europe.
He spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust, his critical study of French author Marcel Proust. Two years following his father's death, he began two years' treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst Dr. Wilfred Bion. Aspects of it became evident in Beckett's works, such as Watt and Waiting for Godot. In 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women, but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it. Despite his inability to get it published, the novel served as a source for many of Beckett's early poems, as well as for his first full-length book, the 1933 short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks. Beckett published essays and reviews, including "Recent Irish Poetry" and "Humanistic Quietism", a review of his friend Thomas MacGreevy's Poems, they focused on the work of MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin and Blanaid Salkeld, despite their slender achievements at the time, comparing them favourably with their Celtic Revival contemporaries and invoking Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, the French symbolists as
Force de dissuasion
The Force de frappe, or Force de dissuasion after 1961, is the designation of what used to be a triad of air-, sea- and land-based nuclear weapons intended for dissuasion, the French term for deterrence. The French Nuclear Force, part of the Armed Forces of France, is the third largest nuclear-weapons force in the world, following the nuclear triads of the Russian Federation and the United States. France has deactivated all land-based nuclear missiles. On 27 January 1996, France conducted its last nuclear test before signing the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in September 1996. In March 2008, President Nicolas Sarkozy confirmed reports giving the actual size of France's nuclear arsenal and he announced that France would reduce its French Air Force-carried nuclear arsenal by 30%, leaving the Force de Frappe with 290 warheads. In addition to its nuclear military programme, France has a large peaceful nuclear programme and ranks as one of the world's largest generators of nuclear power.
The decision to arm France with nuclear weapons was made in 1954 by the administration of Pierre Mendès-France under the Fourth Republic. President Charles de Gaulle, upon his return to power in 1958, solidified the initial vision into the well-defined concept of a independent Force de Frappe capable of protecting France from a Soviet or other foreign attack, independent of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which President de Gaulle considered to be dominated by the United States to an unacceptable degree. In particular, France was concerned that in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, the US—already bogged down in the War in Vietnam and afraid of Soviet retaliation against the United States proper—would not come to the aid of its Allies in Western Europe. According to de Gaulle, France should never trust its defense and therefore its existence to a foreign and thus unreliable protector; the strategic concept behind the Force de Frappe is one of countervalue, i.e. the capacity to inflict so much damage on a potential adversary's population that the potential adversary will be deterred from attacking no matter how much destruction they themselves are capable of inflicting.
This principle is referred to in French political debate as dissuasion du faible au fort and was summarized in a statement attributed to President de Gaulle himself: Within ten years, we shall have the means to kill 80 million Russians. I believe that one does not light-heartedly attack people who are able to kill 80 million Russians if one can kill 800 million French, if there were 800 million French. General Pierre Marie Gallois said "Making the most pessimistic assumptions, the French nuclear bombers could destroy ten Russian cities. In his book La paix nucléaire, French Navy Admiral Marc de Joybert explained deterrence as: Sir, I have no quarrel with you, but I warn you in advance and with all possible clarity that if you invade me, I shall answer at the only credible level for my scale, the nuclear level. Whatever your defenses, you shan't prevent at least some of my missiles from reaching your home and causing the devastation that you are familiar with. So, renounce your endeavour and let us remain good friends.
While not referred to as such, the French nuclear posture of the time bears some significant similarities to other common policies of the era such as Mutually Assured Destruction and Massive Retaliation. It remains unknown whether the French government seriously considered their policy different from other NATO member strategies or if their public statements were more aimed to improve morale and confidence in the French population. France's position in the 1960s and the 1970s required some changes in posture. After the French withdrawal from the integrated command structure of NATO to pursue their own defense systems, their position with their NATO allies was less clear. Both the French government and the French public took pride in their independence from US control and their ability to defend their own interests without NATO aid against the Warsaw Pact, if necessary; as a result, statements of nuclear policy spoke of a confrontation with the Soviet Union directly and without allied support, but, unlikely as France remained in NATO.
However, no matter the scenario it would have been impolitic for France to imply they would not join a wider NATO war but wait for a threat on their own soil or to say that they would use nuclear weapons against West Germany, Italy or Belgium, the only places from which Soviet forces could advance on France. It may seem on the surface that an avowed policy of attacking civilians was a significant departure from the typical nuclear policies of the time, but it was common for states to refer to their nuclear abilities in terms of numbers of cities destroyed, the power of hydrogen bombs makes it is unclear how different attacks on populations and military forces would be; the most significant difference in French strategy is that it includes the option of a first strike attack in response to non-nuclear provocation. France carried out its first test of an atomic bomb in Algeria in 1960 and some operational French nuclear weapons became available in 1964. France executed its first test of the much more powerful hydrogen bomb over its South Pacific Ocean test range in 1968.
President de Gaulle's vision of the Force de Frappe featured the same triad of air-based, land-based and sea-based weapons deployed by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Work on these components had started in the late 1950s and was accelerated as soon as de Gaulle became the Presi
Cabrières-d'Aigues
Cabrières-d'Aigues is a commune in the Vaucluse department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in southeastern France. Côtes du Luberon AOC Communes of the Vaucluse department Étang de la Bonde Luberon INSEE
Elevation
The elevation of a geographic location is its height above or below a fixed reference point, most a reference geoid, a mathematical model of the Earth's sea level as an equipotential gravitational surface. The term elevation is used when referring to points on the Earth's surface, while altitude or geopotential height is used for points above the surface, such as an aircraft in flight or a spacecraft in orbit, depth is used for points below the surface. Elevation is not to be confused with the distance from the center of the Earth. Due to the equatorial bulge, the summits of Mount Everest and Chimborazo have the largest elevation and the largest geocentric distance. GIS or geographic information system is a computer system that allows for visualizing, manipulating and storage of data with associated attributes. GIS offers better understanding of relationships of the landscape at different scales. Tools inside the GIS allow for manipulation of data for spatial cartography. A topographical map is the main type of map used to depict elevation through use of contour lines.
In a Geographic Information System, digital elevation models are used to represent the surface of a place, through a raster dataset of elevations. Digital terrain models are another way to represent terrain in GIS. USGS is developing a 3D Elevation Program to keep up with growing needs for high quality topographic data. 3DEP is a collection of enhanced elevation data in the form of high quality LiDAR data over the conterminous United States and the U. S. territories. There are three bare earth DEM layers in 3DEP which are nationally seamless at the resolution of 1/3, 1, 2 arcseconds; this map is derived from GTOPO30 data that describes the elevation of Earth's terrain at intervals of 30 arcseconds. It uses shading instead of contour lines to indicate elevation. Height Orthometric height Hypsography Geodesy Geodesy of North America Sea Level Datum of 1929 National Geodetic Vertical Datum of 1929 North American Vertical Datum of 1988 List of European cities by elevation List of highest mountains List of highest towns by country Normaal Amsterdams Peil Normalhöhennull Physical geography Table of the highest major summits of North America Temperature lapse rate Topographic isolation Topographic prominence Topography Vertical pressure variation U.
S. National Geodetic Survey website Geodetic Glossary @ NGS NGVD 29 to NAVD 88 online elevation converter @ NGS United States Geological Survey website Geographical Survey Institute Downloadable ETOPO2 Raw Data Database Downloadable ETOPO5 Raw Data Database Find the elevation of any place
World War II
World War II known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. The vast majority of the world's countries—including all the great powers—eventually formed two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. A state of total war emerged, directly involving more than 100 million people from over 30 countries; the major participants threw their entire economic and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, blurring the distinction between civilian and military resources. World War II was the deadliest conflict in human history, marked by 50 to 85 million fatalities, most of whom were civilians in the Soviet Union and China, it included massacres, the genocide of the Holocaust, strategic bombing, premeditated death from starvation and disease, the only use of nuclear weapons in war. Japan, which aimed to dominate Asia and the Pacific, was at war with China by 1937, though neither side had declared war on the other. World War II is said to have begun on 1 September 1939, with the invasion of Poland by Germany and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and the United Kingdom.
From late 1939 to early 1941, in a series of campaigns and treaties, Germany conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, formed the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Under the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, Finland and the Baltic states. Following the onset of campaigns in North Africa and East Africa, the fall of France in mid 1940, the war continued between the European Axis powers and the British Empire. War in the Balkans, the aerial Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the long Battle of the Atlantic followed. On 22 June 1941, the European Axis powers launched an invasion of the Soviet Union, opening the largest land theatre of war in history; this Eastern Front trapped most crucially the German Wehrmacht, into a war of attrition. In December 1941, Japan launched a surprise attack on the United States as well as European colonies in the Pacific. Following an immediate U. S. declaration of war against Japan, supported by one from Great Britain, the European Axis powers declared war on the U.
S. in solidarity with their Japanese ally. Rapid Japanese conquests over much of the Western Pacific ensued, perceived by many in Asia as liberation from Western dominance and resulting in the support of several armies from defeated territories; the Axis advance in the Pacific halted in 1942. Key setbacks in 1943, which included a series of German defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasions of Sicily and Italy, Allied victories in the Pacific, cost the Axis its initiative and forced it into strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded German-occupied France, while the Soviet Union regained its territorial losses and turned toward Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in Central China, South China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key Western Pacific islands; the war in Europe concluded with an invasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union, culminating in the capture of Berlin by Soviet troops, the suicide of Adolf Hitler and the German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945.
Following the Potsdam Declaration by the Allies on 26 July 1945 and the refusal of Japan to surrender under its terms, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August respectively. With an invasion of the Japanese archipelago imminent, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, the Soviet entry into the war against Japan and its invasion of Manchuria, Japan announced its intention to surrender on 15 August 1945, cementing total victory in Asia for the Allies. Tribunals were set up by fiat by the Allies and war crimes trials were conducted in the wake of the war both against the Germans and the Japanese. World War II changed the political social structure of the globe; the United Nations was established to foster international co-operation and prevent future conflicts. The Soviet Union and United States emerged as rival superpowers, setting the stage for the nearly half-century long Cold War. In the wake of European devastation, the influence of its great powers waned, triggering the decolonisation of Africa and Asia.
Most countries whose industries had been damaged moved towards economic expansion. Political integration in Europe, emerged as an effort to end pre-war enmities and create a common identity; the start of the war in Europe is held to be 1 September 1939, beginning with the German invasion of Poland. The dates for the beginning of war in the Pacific include the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War on 7 July 1937, or the Japanese invasion of Manchuria on 19 September 1931. Others follow the British historian A. J. P. Taylor, who held that the Sino-Japanese War and war in Europe and its colonies occurred and the two wars merged in 1941; this article uses the conventional dating. Other starting dates sometimes used for World War II include the Italian invasion of Abyssinia on 3 October 1935; the British historian Antony Beevor views the beginning of World War II as the Battles of Khalkhin Gol fought between Japan and the fo
Fossil
A fossil is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved in amber, petrified wood, coal, DNA remnants; the totality of fossils is known as the fossil record. Paleontology is the study of fossils: their age, method of formation, evolutionary significance. Specimens are considered to be fossils if they are over 10,000 years old; the oldest fossils are around 3.48 billion years old to 4.1 billion years old. The observation in the 19th century that certain fossils were associated with certain rock strata led to the recognition of a geological timescale and the relative ages of different fossils; the development of radiometric dating techniques in the early 20th century allowed scientists to quantitatively measure the absolute ages of rocks and the fossils they host. There are many processes that lead to fossilization, including permineralization and molds, authigenic mineralization and recrystallization, adpression and bioimmuration.
Fossils vary in size from one-micrometre bacteria to dinosaurs and trees, many meters long and weighing many tons. A fossil preserves only a portion of the deceased organism that portion, mineralized during life, such as the bones and teeth of vertebrates, or the chitinous or calcareous exoskeletons of invertebrates. Fossils may consist of the marks left behind by the organism while it was alive, such as animal tracks or feces; these types of fossil are called trace ichnofossils, as opposed to body fossils. Some fossils are called chemofossils or biosignatures; the process of fossilization varies according to external conditions. Permineralization is a process of fossilization; the empty spaces within an organism become filled with mineral-rich groundwater. Minerals precipitate from the groundwater; this process can occur in small spaces, such as within the cell wall of a plant cell. Small scale permineralization can produce detailed fossils. For permineralization to occur, the organism must become covered by sediment soon after death, otherwise decay commences.
The degree to which the remains are decayed when covered determines the details of the fossil. Some fossils consist only of skeletal teeth; this is a form of diagenesis. In some cases, the original remains of the organism dissolve or are otherwise destroyed; the remaining organism-shaped hole in the rock is called an external mold. If this hole is filled with other minerals, it is a cast. An endocast, or internal mold, is formed when sediments or minerals fill the internal cavity of an organism, such as the inside of a bivalve or snail or the hollow of a skull; this is a special form of mold formation. If the chemistry is right, the organism can act as a nucleus for the precipitation of minerals such as siderite, resulting in a nodule forming around it. If this happens before significant decay to the organic tissue fine three-dimensional morphological detail can be preserved. Nodules from the Carboniferous Mazon Creek fossil beds of Illinois, USA, are among the best documented examples of such mineralization.
Replacement occurs. In some cases mineral replacement of the original shell occurs so and at such fine scales that microstructural features are preserved despite the total loss of original material. A shell is said to be recrystallized when the original skeletal compounds are still present but in a different crystal form, as from aragonite to calcite. Compression fossils, such as those of fossil ferns, are the result of chemical reduction of the complex organic molecules composing the organism's tissues. In this case the fossil consists of original material, albeit in a geochemically altered state; this chemical change is an expression of diagenesis. What remains is a carbonaceous film known as a phytoleim, in which case the fossil is known as a compression. However, the phytoleim is lost and all that remains is an impression of the organism in the rock—an impression fossil. In many cases, however and impressions occur together. For instance, when the rock is broken open, the phytoleim will be attached to one part, whereas the counterpart will just be an impression.
For this reason, one term covers the two modes of preservation: adpression. Because of their antiquity, an unexpected exception to the alteration of an organism's tissues by chemical reduction of the complex organic molecules during fossilization has been the discovery of soft tissue in dinosaur fossils, including blood vessels, the isolation of proteins and evidence for DNA fragments. In 2014, Mary Schweitzer and her colleagues reported the presence of iron particles associated with soft tissues recovered from dinosaur fossils. Based on various experiments that studied the interaction of iron in haemoglobin with blood vessel tissue they proposed that solution hypoxia coupled with iron chelation enhances the stability and preservation of soft tissue and provides the basis for an explanation for the unforeseen preservation of fossil soft tissues. However, a older study based on eight taxa ranging in time from the Devonian to the Jurassic found that reasonably well-preserved fibrils that represent collagen were preser
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