title: Bee Gees discography

text: The discography of musical group the Bee Gees consists of thirty-nine albums (including 22 studio albums) and 83 singles. In a career spanning of fifty years, the “Kings of Disco” have already sold over 200 million records worldwide, becoming one of the best-selling music artists in history. Billboard ranked them as the 28th Greatest Artist of All Time. According to RIAA, Bee Gees has sold 28 million certified albums in the United States.


title: Bee Gees discography

text: "Saturday Night Fever" is the ninth best-selling album in history, selling over 40 million copies worldwide (16× Platinum in the US). Billboard also ranked them as the 14th Greatest Hot 100 Artist of all time. They have scored 9 No. 1 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including 15 top ten hits and 43 chart entries overall. "Spirits Having Flown" has sold 30 million copies worldwide, marking yet another huge success for the trio.


title: My Senpai Is Annoying

text: Futaba Igarashi, a diminutive and scrappy office worker who is often mistaken for a child, constantly complains about her big and boisterous coworker, Harumi Takeda. However, it is clear to Futaba's friends and coworkers she secretly harbors feelings for Takeda she is struggling with.


title: My Senpai Is Annoying

text: The manga series began serialization via Ichijinsha's "Comic POOL" web magazine in 2017. Seven Seas Entertainment holds the license to publish in English in North America.


title: My Senpai Is Annoying

text: On July 1, 2020, an anime television series adaptation produced by Doga Kobo was announced. The series was directed by Ryota Itoh, with Yoshimi Narita overseeing the series' scripts, Shigemitsu Abe designing the characters, and Hiroaki Tsutsumi composing the series' music. It aired from October 10 to December 26, 2021 on Tokyo MX, BS11, GYT, HTB, Animax, and TUF. Tomori Kusunoki, Saori Hayami, Reina Aoyama, and Aoi Koga performed the opening theme "Annoying! San-san Week!", while Yui Horie performed the ending theme "Niji ga Kakaru made no Hanashi" ("The Story Across the Rainbow"). Funimation licensed the series outside of Asia. Muse Communication has licensed this series in South Asia and Southeast Asia. They licensed the series to Animax Asia for TV broadcasts.


The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (, PFLP) is a secular Palestinian Marxist–Leninist and revolutionary socialist organization founded in 1967 by George Habash. It has consistently been the second-largest of the groups forming the Palestine Liberation Organization (the PLO, founded in 1964), the largest being Fatah (founded in 1959).


title: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

text: Ahmad Sa'adat has served as General Secretary of the PFLP since 2001. He was sentenced in December 2006 to 30 years in an Israeli prison. The PFLP currently considers both the Fatah-led government in the West Bank and the Hamas government in the Gaza Strip illegal because elections to the Palestinian National Authority have not been held since 2006. , the PFLP boycotts participation in the PLO Executive Committee and the Palestinian National Council.


text: The PFLP has generally taken a hard line on Palestinian national aspirations, opposing the more moderate stance of Fatah. It does not recognise the State of Israel, it opposes negotiations with the Israeli government, and favours a one-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The military wing of the PFLP is called the Abu Ali Mustapha Brigades. The PFLP is well known for pioneering armed aircraft-hijackings in the late 1960s and early 1970s.


text: and former aircraft-hijacker Leila Khaled, the PFLP does not see suicide bombing as a form of resistance to occupation or as a strategic action or policy and no longer carries out such attacks. The PFLP has been designated a terrorist organisation by the United States, Japan, Canada, Australia and the European Union.


text: From its foundation the PFLP sought superpower patrons, early on developing ties with the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, and, at various times, with regional powers such as Syria, South Yemen, Libya, North Korea, and Iraq, as well as with left-wing groups around the world, including the FARC and the Japanese Red Army. When that support diminished or stopped, in the late 1980s and 1990s, the PFLP sought new allies and developed contacts with Islamist groups linked to Iran, despite the PFLP's strong adherence to secularism and anti-clericalism. The relationship between the PFLP and the Islamic Republic of Iran has fluctuatedit strengthened as a result of Hamas moving away from Iran due to differing positions on the Syrian Civil War. Iran rewarded the PFLP for its pro-Assad stance with an increase in financial and military assistance. The PFLP has been accused by Israel of diverting European humanitarian aid from Palestinian NGOs to itself.


text: The PFLP grew out of the "Harakat al-Qawmiyyin al-Arab", or Arab Nationalist Movement (ANM), founded in 1953 by George Habash, a Palestinian Christian, from Lydda. In 1948, 19-year-old Habash, a medical student, went to his home town of Lydda during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War to help his family. While he was there, the Israel Defense Forces attacked the city and as a result, most of its civilian population was forced to leave. They marched for three days without food or water until they reached the Arab armies' front lines. Habash finished his medical education in Lebanon at the American University in Beirut, graduating in 1951.


text: In an interview with US journalist John K. Cooley, Habash identified the Arab defeat by the Zionists as "the scientific society of Israel as against our own backwardness in the Arab world. This called for the total rebuilding of Arab society into a twentieth-century society."


text: The ANM was founded in this nationalist spirit. "[We] held the 'Guevara view' of the 'revolutionary human being, Habash told Cooley. "A new breed of man had to emerge, among the Arabs as everywhere else. This meant applying everything in human power to the realization of a cause."


text: The ANM formed underground branches in several Arab countries, including Libya, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, then still under British rule. It adopted secularism and socialist economic ideas, and pushed for armed struggle. In collaboration with the Palestinian Liberation Army, the ANM established "Abtal al-Audah" (Heroes of the Return) as a commando group in 1966.


text: After the Six-Day War of June 1967, ANM merged in August with two other groups, Youth for Revenge and Ahmed Jibril's Syrian-backed Palestine Liberation Front, to form the PFLP, with Habash as leader.


text: By early 1968, the PFLP had trained between one and three thousand guerrillas. It had the financial backing of Syria, and was headquartered there, and one of its training camps was based in as-Salt, Jordan. In 1969, the PFLP declared itself a Marxist–Leninist organization, but it has remained faithful to Pan Arabism, seeing the Palestinian struggle as part of a wider uprising against Western imperialism, which also aims to unite the Arab world by overthrowing "reactionary" regimes. It published a newspaper, "al-Hadaf" (The Target, or Goal), which was edited by Ghassan Kanafani.


text: The PFLP gained notoriety in the late 1960s and early 1970s for a series of armed attacks and aircraft hijackings, including on non-Israeli targets. Their Abu Ali Mustapha Brigades also claimed responsibility for several suicide attacks during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. See #Armed attacks of the PFLP below.


text: In 1968, Ahmed Jibril broke away from the PFLP to form the Syrian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).


text: In 1969, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP) formed as a separate, ostensibly Maoist, organization under Nayef Hawatmeh and Yasser Abd Rabbo, initially as the PDFLP.


text: In 1972, the Popular Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Palestine was formed following a split in PFLP.


text: The PFLP had a troubled relationship with George Habash's one-time deputy, Wadie Haddad, who was eventually expelled because he refused orders to stop attacks and kidnapping operations abroad. Haddad has been identified in released Soviet archival documents as having been a KGB intelligence agent in place, who in 1975 received arms for the movement directly from Soviet sources in a nighttime transfer in the Sea of Aden.


text: The PFLP joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the umbrella organization of the Palestinian national movement, in 1968, becoming the second-largest faction after Yassir Arafat's Fatah. In 1974, it withdrew from the PLO Executive Committee (but not from the PLO) to join the Rejectionist Front following the creation of the PLO's Ten Point Program, accusing the PLO of abandoning the goal of destroying Israel outright in favor of a binational solution, which was opposed by the PFLP leadership. It rejoined the executive committee in 1981.


text: In December 1993 PFLP withdrew from the PLO and became one of the ten founding members of the Damascus-based Alliance of Palestinian Forces, eight of which had been members of the PLO, which was opposed to the Oslo Accords process. PFLP withdrew from APF in 1998. Currently, the PFLP is boycotting participation in the PLO Executive Committee and the Palestinian National Council.


text: In December 2009, around 70,000 supporters demonstrated in Gaza to celebrate the PFLP's 42nd anniversary.


text: After the occurrence of the First Intifada and the subsequent Oslo Accords the PFLP had difficulty establishing itself in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. At that time (1993–96) the popularity of Hamas was rapidly increasing in the wake of their successful strategy of suicide bombings devised by Yahya Ayyash ("the Engineer"). The dissolution of the Soviet Union together with the rise of Islamism—and particularly the increased popularity of the Islamist groups Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad—disoriented many left activists who had looked towards the Soviet Union, and has marginalised the PFLP's role in Palestinian politics and armed resistance. However, the organization retains considerable political influence within the PLO, since no new elections have been held for the organisation's legislative body, the PNC.


text: The PFLP developed contacts at this time with Islamic fundamentalist groups linked to Iranboth Palestinian Hamas, and the Lebanon-based Hizbullaha detour from its avowedly Marxist orientation. The PLO's agreement with Israel in September 1993, and negotiations which followed, further isolated it from the umbrella organization and led it to conclude a formal alliance with the Iranian backed groups.


text: As a result of its post-Oslo weakness, the PFLP has been forced to adapt slowly and find partners among politically active, preferably young, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, in order to compensate for their dependence on their aging commanders returning from or remaining in exile. The PFLP has therefore formed alliances with other leftist groups formed within the Palestinian Authority, including the Palestinian People's Party and the Popular Resistance Committees of Gaza.


text: In 1990, the PFLP transformed its Jordan branch into a separate political party, the Jordanian Popular Democratic Unity Party.


text: Following the death of Yasser Arafat in November 2004, the PFLP entered discussions with the DFLP and the Palestinian People's Party aimed at nominating a joint left-wing candidate for the Palestinian presidential election to be held on 9 January 2005. These discussions were unsuccessful, so the PFLP decided to support the independent Palestinian National Initiative's candidate Mustafa Barghouti, who gained 19.48% of the vote.


text: In the municipal elections of December 2005 it had more success, e.g. in al-Bireh and Ramallah, and winning the mayorship of Bir Zeit. There are conflicting reports about the political allegiance of Janet Mikhail and Victor Batarseh, the mayors of Ramallah and Bethlehem; they may be close to the PFLP without being members.


text: The PFLP is powerful politically in the Ramallah area, the eastern districts and suburbs of Jerusalem and Bethlehem, the primarily Christian Refidyeh district of Nablus, but has far less strength in the rest of the West Bank, and is of little or no threat to the established Hamas and Fatah movements in Gaza.


text: The PFLP participated in the Palestinian legislative elections of 2006 as the "Martyr Abu Ali Mustafa List". It won 4.2% of the popular vote, winning three of the 132 seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council. Its deputies are Ahmad Sa'adat, Jamil Majdalawi, and Khalida Jarrar. In the lists, its best vote was 9.4% in Bethlehem, followed by 6.6% in Ramallah and al-Bireh, and 6.5% in North Gaza. Sa'adat was sentenced in December 2006 to 30 years in an Israeli prison.


text: At the PFLP's Sixth National Conference in 2000, Habash stepped down as General Secretary. Abu Ali Mustafa was elected to replace him, but was assassinated on 27 August 2001 when an Israeli helicopter fired rockets at his office in the West Bank town of Ramallah.


text: After Mustafa's death, the Central Committee of the PFLP on 3 October 2001 elected Ahmad Sa'adat General Secretary. He has held that position, though since 2002 he has been incarcerated in Palestinian and Israeli prisons.


text: When it was formed in the late 1960s the PFLP supported the established line of most Palestinian guerrilla fronts and ruled out any negotiated settlement with Israel that would result in two states between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Instead, George Habash in particular, and various other leaders in general advocated one state with an Arab identity in which Jews were entitled to live with the same rights as any minority. The PFLP declared that its goal was to "create a people's democratic Palestine, where Arabs and Jews would live without discrimination, a state without classes and national oppression, a state which allows Arabs and Jews to develop their national culture."


text: The PFLP platform never compromised on key points such as the overthrow of conservative or monarchist Arab states like Morocco and Jordan, the Right of Return of all Palestinian refugees to their homes in pre-1948 Palestine, or the use of the liberation of Palestine as a launching board for achieving Arab unityreflecting its beginnings in the Pan-Arab ANM. It opposed the Oslo Accords and was for a long time opposed to the idea of a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, but in 1999 came to an agreement with the PLO leadership regarding negotiations with the Israeli government. However, in May 2010, PFLP general secretary Ahmad Sa'adat called for an end to the PLO's negotiations with Israel, saying that only a one-state solution was possible.


text: In January 2011, the PFLP declared that the Camp David Accords stood for "subservience, submission, dictatorship and silence", and called for social and political revolution in Egypt.


text: In December 2013, the PFLP stated: "Hamas is a vital part of the Palestinian national movement, and this is the position of the PFLP."


text: The PFLP gained notoriety in the late 1960s and early 1970s for a series of armed attacks and aircraft hijackings, including on non-Israeli targets:


text: The PFLP's Abu Ali Mustapha Brigades has carried out attacks on both civilians and military targets during the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Some of these attacks are:


title: The Death of Socrates

text: The Death of Socrates () is an oil on canvas painted by French painter Jacques-Louis David in 1787. The painting was part of the neoclassical style, popular in the 1780s, that depicted subjects from the Classical age, in this case the story of the execution of Socrates as told by Plato in his "Phaedo". In this story, Socrates has been convicted of corrupting the youth of Athens and introducing strange gods, and has been sentenced to die by drinking poison hemlock. Socrates uses his death as a final lesson for his pupils rather than fleeing when the opportunity arises, and faces it calmly. The "Phaedo" depicts the death of Socrates and is also Plato's fourth and last dialogue to detail the philosopher's final days, which is also detailed in "Euthyphro", "Apology", and "Crito".


title: The Death of Socrates

text: In the painting, an elderly Socrates is dressed in a white robe and sits upright on a bed, one hand extended over a cup, the other gesturing in the air; he is still teaching. He is surrounded by his friends of varying ages, most showing emotional distress, unlike Socrates, who remains calm. The young man handing him the cup looks the other way, with his face in his free hand. Crito listens intently to his teacher's words while clutching his knee. An elderly man, Plato, sits at the end of the bed, slumped over and looking in his lap. To the left, other men are seen through an arch set in the background wall. On the stairway in the background, Socrates' wife Xanthippe, who had been dismissed earlier by her husband, takes a wistful glance backward at the scene.


title: The Death of Socrates

text: David uses color to highlight the emotion in this painting. The shades of red are more muted on the edges of the painting and become more vibrant in the center, culminating in the dark red robe of the man holding the cup of poison, generally taken as offering the cup to Socrates rather than receiving it after Socrates had consumed its contents. The only two serene men, Socrates and Plato, are garbed in a contrasting bluish-white. The more muted color scheme of this painting may be a response to critics of David's "Oath of the Horatii", who called his colors "garish".


title: The Death of Socrates

text: David simplifies the scene by removing many characters originally described in the dialogues of Plato. He also displayed some artistic license in representing the ages of many of the pupils of Socrates, including Plato. Socrates, while elderly, is depicted as rather more handsome and fit than a 70-year old of his era would be in a more realistic depiction; his face is also much more idealized than the classical bust that is typically used as a reference portrait of Socrates. Plato would have been a young man at the time of Socrates's death, but in this painting he is the old man sitting at the foot of the bed. David might have intended the painting to be set in Plato's imagination, where an elderly Plato attempts to conjure the scene in his imagination as he writes.


title: The Death of Socrates

text: David signed this painting in two places; he put his full signature under Crito, the young man clutching Socrates's thigh, and his initials under Plato. David's signature placement often had symbolic meaning – for example, in his painting of Stanisław Kostka Potocki, David signed in the collar of the dog that is barking at the sitter. In "Death of Socrates", his signatures also have meaning. His initials under Plato are a reference to the fact that the story comes from Plato, a thanks for the inspiration. His fuller signature under Crito means that this is the character whom the artist identifies most with. This may be a reference for Crito's position in the composition – clutching Socrates's thigh. In this way, David would be seen as a man who likewise clutches at the morals and values that Socrates represents.


title: The Death of Socrates

text: Rather than a royal commission, David received a direct private commission for the work in 1786 from the wealthy Charles-Michel Trudaine de la Sablière, the youngest son of and around 20 years old at the time. Trudaine was intrigued by a drama that Denis Diderot had considered writing but never completed. One of the dramatic scenes that Diderot's unfinished did include was his death, which led to the commission for a painting. David's friend at the time André Chénier was also a member of the "Trudaine society" circle, and David appears to have followed Chénier's suggestions on matters such as the pose of Socrates in reaching out for the cup while still teaching. More generally, Socrates was a popular subject at the time as an example of Enlightenment values: a man who kept to the truth with admirable rationality and self-control.


title: The Death of Socrates

text: David had created an initial treatment as early as 1782, and he returned to this early composition now that he had a commission. He consulted Father Jean Adry, a Hellenist and scholar on the subject, on the circumstances of Socrates death. One of Adry's letters has survived; he recommended that Plato should be shown as immobile (although Plato was not actually present), that Crito be shown with more emotion, and that Apollodorus (on the extreme right in the painting) should be visibly filled with emotion.


title: The Death of Socrates

text: It was during David's first trip to Rome that he began to study the depiction of funerary scenes and to draw many examples. Many of David's major works stem from these funerary drawings. In "The Death of Socrates", David examines a philosopher's approach to death. Socrates is stoic and calm because he sees death as a separate, actual realm, a different state of being from life but not an end to being. In the painting, Socrates's gesture shows us that he is still teaching, even in the moment before his death.


title: The Death of Socrates

text: Pierre Peyron, a contemporary of David's, also painted an artistic rendition of the Death of Socrates around 1787. Both Peyron's version and David's version were displayed at the same Salon of 1787. The two had something of a rivalry before, with both hoping to become Director of the French Academy in Rome when the position next opened; the critics felt the two paintings decisively settled the matter in favor of David. Count Potocki derisively stated that Peyron's work "has shown up the quality of David's picture by proving to the public how far beneath him one could be".


title: The Death of Socrates

text: Another painting depicting the death of Socrates was done by the Italian artist Giambettino Cignaroli in the first half of the 18th century. Cignaroli's work shows Socrates already dead, surrounded by his anguished followers.


title: The Death of Socrates

text: Yet another depiction of Socrates' death was done by the French artist Jacques-Philippe-Joseph de Saint-Quentin. The work, currently housed at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, dates to circa 1738.


title: The Death of Socrates

text: David debuted the painting at the Paris Salon of 1787, the official art exhibition. The painting received prompt acclaim among David's contemporaries. The English painter Joshua Reynolds wrote that "The Death of Socrates" was "the greatest work of art since the Sistine Chapel and Raphael's Stanze in the Vatican." The American minister to France, Thomas Jefferson, wrote that the painting was the best work at the Salon of 1787, and that the painting was "superb". The painting was sufficiently successful that David showed it again at the Salon of 1791; it still attracted interest due to the changed political environment, as heroic stories from an earlier age fit the mood of the early French Revolution.


title: The Death of Socrates

text: An 1826 exhibition intended to raise money for the Greek War of Independence displayed much of David's work at the "Galerie Lebrun", including "The Death of Socrates". The exhibition attracted much interest due to a backlash from the post-Bourbon Restoration royalist government, which disliked David and had refused permission for his body to be buried in France, albeit more for his Revolutionary-era paintings than "Socrates".


title: The Death of Socrates

text: After Charles-Michel Trudaine de la Sablière and his brother were executed in 1794 during the Reign of Terror, the painting passed to his brother's wife Louise Micault de Courbeton, Madame Trudaine de Montigny. The painting passed between several people in inheritances and private sales, notably including Olivier de Saint-Georges de Vérac and his wife from 1809–1870. In 1931, the painting was sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where it has stayed since.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: The Arecibo Observatory, also known as the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) and formerly known as the Arecibo Ionosphere Observatory, is an observatory in Barrio Esperanza, Arecibo, Puerto Rico owned by the US National Science Foundation (NSF).


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: The observatory's main instrument was the Arecibo Telescope, a spherical reflector dish built into a natural sinkhole, with a cable-mount steerable receiver and several radar transmitters for emitting signals mounted above the dish. Completed in 1963, it was the world's largest single-aperture telescope for 53 years, surpassed in July 2016 by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) in China. Following two breaks in cables supporting the receiver platform in mid-2020, the NSF decommissioned the telescope. A partial collapse of the telescope occurred on December 1, 2020, before controlled demolition could be conducted. In 2022, the NSF announced the telescope will not be rebuilt, with an educational facility to be established on the site.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: The observatory also includes a smaller radio telescope, a LIDAR facility, and a visitor center, which remain operational after the telescope's collapse. The asteroid 4337 Arecibo is named after the observatory by Steven J. Ostro, in recognition of the observatory's contributions to the characterization of Solar System bodies.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: As part of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) missile defense program, ARPA had sought a means to try to detect incoming missiles while they traveled through the ionosphere. The Arecibo Telescope was funded as a means to study Earth's ionosphere for this purpose, and serving a dual-use as a general-purpose radio telescope. Construction of the telescope and its supporting facilities were started in mid-1950s, with the telescope operational by 1963. The telescope and supporting observatory were formally opened as the Arecibo Ionospheric Observatory on November 1, 1963.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: Ownership of the observatory transferred from the DoD to the National Science Foundation on October 1, 1969. NSF named Cornell University to manage the observatory's functions. By September 1971, NSF renamed the observatory as the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center (NAIC) and had made it a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC). NASA began contributing towards funding of the observatory alongside NSF as to support its planetary radar mission.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: In the early 2000s, NASA started to reduce their contribution to the Arecibo Observatory, putting more pressure on NSF to continue to fund the facility. In 2006, NSF made its first possible suggestion of significantly reducing its funding towards Arecibo and potentially decommissioning the observatory. Academics and politicians lobbied to increase funding bookmarked for Arecibo to stave off its closure, and NASA recommitted funding in 2011 for study of near-earth objects. However to further cut losses, in 2011 NSF delisted Arecibo as a FFRDC, removed Cornell as the site operator, and replaced them with a collaborative team led by SRI International, which allowed the observatory to be able to offer its facilities to a wider range of projects.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: Damage to the telescope from Hurricane Maria in 2017 led NSF again to consider the possibility of decommissioning the observatory as the costs of maintaining it had become too great. A consortium led by the University of Central Florida (UCF) stepped forward to offer to manage the observatory and cover a significant portion of the operations and maintenance costs, and in 2018, NSF made UCF's consortium the new site operators.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: After an auxiliary and main cable failure on the telescope in August and November 2020, respectively, the NSF announced the decision that they would decommission the telescope through controlled demolition, but that the other facilities on the observatory would remain operational in the future. However, before the safe decommission of the telescope could occur, remaining support cables from one tower rapidly failed in the morning of December 1, 2020, causing the instrument platform to crash through the dish, shearing off the tops of the support towers, and partially damaging some of the other buildings, though there were no injuries. NSF stated in 2020 that it is still their intention to continue to have the other observatory facilities operational as soon as possible and are looking at plans to rebuild a new telescope instrument in its place. In 2022, the NSF announced the telescope will not be rebuilt, with an educational facility to be established on the site.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: The observatory's main feature was its large radio telescope, whose main collecting dish was an inverted spherical dome in diameter with an radius of curvature, constructed inside a karst sinkhole. The dish's surface was made of 38,778 perforated aluminum panels, each about , supported by a mesh of steel cables. The ground beneath supported shade-tolerant vegetation.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: Since its completion in November 1963, the Telescope had been used for radar astronomy and radio astronomy, and had been part of the Search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) program. It was also used by NASA for Near-Earth object detection. Since around 2006, NSF funding support for the telescope had waned as the Foundation directed funds to newer instruments, though academics petitioned to the NSF and Congress to continue support for the telescope. Numerous hurricanes, including Hurricane Maria, had damaged parts of the telescope, straining the reduced budget.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: Two cable breaks, one in August 2020 and a second in November 2020, threatened the structural integrity of the support structure for the suspended platform and damaged the dish. The NSF determined in November 2020 that it was safer to decommission the telescope rather than to try to repair it, but the telescope collapsed before a controlled demolition could be carried out. The remaining support cables from one tower failed around 7:56 a.m. local time on December 1, 2020, causing the receiver platform to fall into the dish and collapsing the telescope.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: NASA led an extensive failure investigation and reported the findings, along with a technical bulletin with industry recommendations.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: The Arecibo Observatory also has other facilities beyond the main telescope, including a radio telescope intended for very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) with the main telescope; and a LIDAR facility whose research has continued since the main telescope's collapse.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: Opened in 1997, the Ángel Ramos Foundation Visitor Center features interactive exhibits and displays about the operations of the radio telescope, astronomy and atmospheric sciences. The center is named after the financial foundation that honors Ángel Ramos, owner of the "El Mundo" newspaper and founder of Telemundo. The Foundation provided half of the funds to build the Visitor Center, with the remainder received from private donations and Cornell University.


title: Arecibo Observatory

text: The center, in collaboration with the Caribbean Astronomical Society, hosts a series of Astronomical Nights throughout the year, which feature diverse discussions regarding exoplanets, astronomical phenomena, and discoveries (such as Comet ISON). The purposes of the center are to increase public interest in astronomy, the observatory's research successes, and space endeavors.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Fernando Cueto Amorsolo (born Fernando Amorsolo y Cueto; May 30, 1892 – April 24, 1972) was a portraitist and painter of rural Philippine landscapes. Nicknamed the "Grand Old Man of Philippine Art," he was the first-ever to be recognized as a National Artist of the Philippines. He was recognized as such for his "pioneering use of impressionistic technique" as well as his skill in the use of lighting and backlighting in his paintings, "significant not only in the development of Philippine art but also in the formation of Filipino notions of self and identity."


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Fernando Amorsolo was born on May 30, 1892, in Metro, Manila. His parents were Pedro Amorsolo and Bonifacia Cueto. His father quickly found work in Daet, Camarines Norte months after Fernando's birth, and the family lived there until his father died when Amorsolo was 11. While he studied in a public school in Daet, his parents taught him to read and write Spanish at home.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: After his father's death, the family moved back to Manila, where they stayed with one of his uncles, Don Fabián de la Rosa, his mother's cousin, who was also a Filipino painter. At the age of 13, Amorsolo became an apprentice to De la Rosa, who would eventually become the advocate and guide to Amorsolo's painting career. During this time, Amorsolo's mother did embroidery to earn money, while Amorsolo helped by selling water color postcards to a local bookstore for 10 centavos each. His younger brother, Pablo Amorsolo, also became a painter.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Amorsolo's first success as a young painter came in 1908, when his painting "Leyendo el periódico" took second place at the "Bazar Escolta", a contest organized by the "Asociacion Internacional de Artistas". Between 1909 and 1914, he enrolled at the Art School of the Liceo de Manila. His most notable work as a student at the "Liceo" was his painting of a young man and a young woman in a garden, which won him the first prize in the art school exhibition during his graduation year.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: After graduating from the "Liceo", he entered the University of Santo Tomas' School of Fine Arts, where De la Cruz taught at that time. During college, Fernando Amorsolo's primary influences were the Portuguese people court painter Diego Velázquez, John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, but mostly his contemporary Spanish masters Joaquín Sorolla Bastida and Ignacio Zuloaga. To make money during school, Amorsolo joined competitions and did illustrations for various Philippine publications, including Severino Reyes’ first novel in Tagalog language, "Parusa ng Diyos" ("Punishment of God"), Iñigo Ed. Regalado's "Madaling Araw" ("Dawn"), as well as illustrations for editions of the "Pasyon". Amorsolo graduated with medals from the University of the Philippines in 1914.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: He died while falling in line.. Waiting for medical assistance, Doctors and nurses did not even lift a finger to help...


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: After graduating from the University of the Philippines, Amorsolo worked as a draftsman for the Bureau of Public Works as a chief artist at the Pacific Commercial Company and as a part-time instructor at the University of the Philippines. He taught at the University for 38 years, including 14 years as director of the Art Department.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: After three years as an instructor and commercial artist, Amorsolo was given a grant to study at the Academia de San Fernando in Madrid, Spain by Filipino businessman Enrique Zóbel de Ayala. During his seven months in Spain, Amorsolo sketched at museums and along the streets of Madrid experimenting with the use of light and color. Still through the Zóbel grant, Amorsolo was also able to travel to New York City, where he encountered postwar impressionism and cubism which would become major influences on his work.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Amorsolo set up his own studio upon his return to Manila and painted during the 1920s and the 1930s. His "Rice Planting" (1922), which appeared on posters and tourist brochures became one of the most popular images of the Commonwealth of the Philippines. Beginning in the 1930s, Amorsolo's work was exhibited widely in the Philippines and abroad.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Amorsolo was sought after by influential Filipinos including Luis Araneta, Antonio Araneta and Jorge B. Vargas. Due to his popularity, Amorsolo had to resort to photographing his works, sticking and mounting them in an album allowing patrons to choose from this catalog of his work. Amorsolo avoidedd creating exact replicas of his trademark themes by recreating the paintings by varying some elements.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: His works later appeared on the cover and pages of children textbooks, in novels, in commercial designs, in cartoons and illustrations for Philippine publications such "The Independent", "Philippine Magazine", "Telembang", "El Renacimiento Filipino", and "Excelsior". He served as the director of the University of the Philippine's College of Fine Arts from 1938 to 1952.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: During the 1950s until his death in 1972, Amorsolo averaged finishing 10 paintings a month. However, during his later years, diabetes, cataracts, arthritis, headaches, dizziness and the death of two of his sons affected the execution of his works. Amorsolo underwent a cataract operation when he was 70 years old, a surgery that did not impede him from drawing and painting.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Amorsolo was a close friend of the Philippine sculptor Guillermo Tolentino, the creator of Filipino patriot Andrés Bonifacio's monument in Caloocan City.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Amorsolo is best known for his illuminated landscapes, which often portrayed traditional Filipino customs, culture, fiestas and occupations. His pastoral works presented "an imagined sense of nationhood in counterpoint to American colonial rule" and were important to the formation of Filipino national identity.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: He was educated in the classical tradition and aimed "to achieve his Philippine version of the Greek ideal for the human form." In his paintings of Filipina women, Amorsolo rejected Western ideals of beauty in favor of Filipino ideals and was fond of basing the faces of his subjects on members of his family.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Amorsolo used natural light in his paintings and developed the backlighting technique, Chiaroscuro, which became his artistic trademark and his greatest contribution to Philippine painting. In a typical Amorsolo painting, figures are outlined against a characteristic glow, and intense light on one part of the canvas highlights nearby details. Philippine sunlight was a constant feature of Amorsolo's work; he is believed to have painted a rainy-day scene only once.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Amorsolo was an incessant sketch artist, often drawing sketches at his home, at Luneta Park, and in the countryside. He drew the people he saw around him, from farmers to city-dwellers coping with the Japanese occupation. Amorsolo's impressionistic tendencies, which may be seen in his paintings as well, were at their height in his sketches. His figures were not completely finished but were mere "suggestions" of the image.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Amorsolo also painted a series of historical paintings on pre-Colonial and Spanish Colonization events. Amorsolo's "Making of the Philippine Flag", in particular, was widely reproduced. His "The First Baptism in the Philippines" required numerous detailed sketches and colored studies of its elements. These diverse elements were meticulously and carefully set by the artist before being transferred to the final canvas. For his pre-colonial and 16th-century depiction of the Philippines, Amorsolo referred to the written accounts of Antonio Pigafetta, other available reading materials, and visual sources. He consulted with the Philippine scholars of the time, H. Pardo de Tavera and Epifanio de los Santos. His work on historical periods, especially his most famous work in popular culture, "Confeccion de la Standarte Nacionale" or "Making of the Philippine Flag" in 1955, has been frequently reproduced in commercial goods and has become a mainstay in Filipino popular culture.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Amorsolo also painted oil portraits of Presidents like General Emilio Aguinaldo, Manuel L. Quezon, and Elpidio Quirino, and other prominent individuals such as Don Alfredo Jacób and Doña Pura Garchitorena Toral of Camarines Sur. He also painted the wedding picture of Don Mariano Garchitorena and Doña Caridad Pamintuan of Pampanga.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: He also did a portrait of American Senator Warren Grant Magnuson (1905–1989), of the Democratic Party from Washington, whom the Warren G. Magnuson Health Sciences Building at the University of Washington, and the Warren G. Magnuson Clinical Center at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland are named after.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: After the onset of World War II, Amorsolo's typical pastoral scenes were replaced by the depictions of a war-torn nation. During the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during World War II, Amorsolo spent his days at his home near the Japanese garrison, where he sketched war scenes from the house's windows or rooftop.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: During the war, he documented the destruction of many landmarks in Manila and the pain, tragedy and death experienced by Filipino people, with his subjects including "women mourning their dead husbands, files of people with pushcarts and makeshift bags leaving a dark burning city tinged with red from fire and blood." Amorsolo frequently portrayed the lives and suffering of Filipina women during World War II. Other World War II-era paintings by Amorsolo include a portrait "in absentia" of General Douglas MacArthur as well as self-portraits and paintings of Japanese occupation soldiers. In 1948, Amorsolo's wartime paintings were exhibited at the Malacañang Palace.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Amorsolo's supporters consider his portrayals of the countryside as "the true reflections of the Filipino Soul."


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Amorsolo has been accused, however, of succumbing to commercialism and merely producing souvenir paintings for American soldiers. Critic Francisco Arcellana wrote in 1948 that Amorsolo's paintings "have nothing to say" and that they were not hard to understand because "there is nothing to understand." Critics have criticized Amorsolo's portraits of Philippine Commonwealth personalities, his large, mid-career anecdotal works, and his large historical paintings. Of the latter, critics have said that his "artistic temperament was simply not suited to generating the sense of dramatic tension necessary for such works."


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Another critic, however, while noting that most of Amorsolo's estimated ten thousand works were underwhelming, considering his talent, argues that Amorsolo's oeuvre should nonetheless be judged by his best works instead of his worst. Amorsolo's small landscapes, especially those of his early career, have been judged as his best works, "hold[ing] well together plastic-ally." Amorsolo may "be considered a master of the Philippine landscape as landscape, even outranking Luna and Hidalgo who also did some Philippine landscapes of the same dimensions."


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: After being confined at the St. Luke's Hospital in Quezon City for about two months, Amorsolo died of heart failure at the age of 79 on April 24, 1972.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Four days after his death, Amorsolo was posthumously honored as the first National Artist of the Philippines at the Cultural Center of the Philippines.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: The volume of paintings, sketches, and studies of Amorsolo is believed to have reached more than 10,000 pieces. Amorsolo was an important influence on contemporary Filipino art and artists, even beyond the so-called "Amorsolo school." Amorsolo's influence can be seen in many landscape paintings by Filipino artists, including early landscape paintings by abstract painter Federico Aguilar Alcuaz.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: In 2003, Amorsolo's children founded the Fernando C. Amorsolo Art Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving Fernando Amorsolo's legacy, promoting his style and vision, and preserving a national heritage through the conservation and promotion of his works.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Since the 2000s, works by Amorsolo have achieved record prices at auction with the growth of the Philippine art market. On April 28, 2002, an early work from 1915 called "Portrait of Fernanda de Jesus" sold for a record price of PHP19.136 million (US$376,177) at a Christie's auction in Hong Kong. This record on May 30, 2010, was later broken as a work from 1923 "Lavanderas" previously held by an American-based collector sold for PHP20.83 million (US$434,067) also at a Christie's auction in Hong Kong.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: By the 2010s, the prominence of local auction houses in the country has substantially increased the value of Amorsolo's works with the constant repatriation of Philippine art. On June 9, 2018, a 1931 work called the "Mango Gatherers" better known as the "Conde de Peracamps Amorsolo" as it was previously in the collection of Antonio Méilan Zóbel, the 4th Count of Peracamps, was sold at a Leon Gallery auction in Manila for a world record price of PHP46.720 million (US$883,883).


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: In its wake, other works by Amorsolo have surpassed the PHP20 million mark including a 1946 genre work by Amorsolo titled "Cooking under the Mango Tree" previously in the collection of the Compañía General de Tabacos de Filipinas (Tabacalera) was sold at another Leon Gallery auction in Manila for a record PHP 23.360 million on 23 February 2019. More recently, a 1949 genre work called "Planting Rice" reached PHP 30.368 million at a Salcedo Auctions sale on 13 March 2021, presently the world record price for a post-war work by the artist.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: The Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center in Manila displays a major collection of Amorsolo's work.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: In 1972, Fernando Amorsolo became the first Filipino to be distinguished as the Philippine's National Artist in Painting. He was named as the "Grand Old Man of Philippine Art" during the inauguration of the Manila Hilton's art center, where his paintings were exhibited on January 23, 1969.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: Outside the Philippines, his exhibitions were held in Belgium, at the Exposicion de Panama in 1914, at a one-man show at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City in 1925, and at the National Museum on November 6, 1948. During the 1931 Paris Exposition, Amorsolo exhibited one of his anecdotal paintings, "The Conversion of the Filipinos". Amorsolo's entries at the "Exposicion" in Panama were a portrait of U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and the piece "La Muerte de Socrates". In 1948 an Amorsolo exhibit was sponsored by the Art Association of the Philippines in the National Museum. In 1950, Amorsolo exhibited two more historical paintings, "Faith Among the Ruins" and "Baptism of Rajah Humabon" at the Missionary Art Exhibit in Rome. In 1979, Fernando Amorsolo's legacy as a painter was celebrated through an exhibition of his works at the Art Center of the Manila Hilton. His art was also featured in a 2007 exhibition in Havana.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: During his lifetime, Amorsolo had a total of 20 children from two marriages and a common-law-wife. In 1916, he married Salud Tolentino Jorge, with whom he had six children; Salud died in 1931. He then met and lived with common-law wife, Virginia Guevarra Santos, with whom he had three children, namely Manuel (who followed in his father's footstep, with a degree in Fine Arts from the University of the Philippines), Jorge and Norma before he met his would-be second wife, Maria del Carmen. While they were still together, Virginia found an engagement ring in one of Amorsolo's drawers; she knew the ring was for Maria, that prompted her to leave his house with her three children.


title: Fernando Amorsolo

text: In 1935, Fernando married Maria del Carmen who gave him eight more children. Among her daughters with her are Sylvia Amorsolo-Lazo and Luz. But while they were married and Maria was giving birth to his children, Fernando had three more children with Virginia. His reputation was growing as fast as his brood and his work was more than enough to provide for his rather large family. Six of Amorsolo's children became artists themselves.


title: Daniel Mays

text: Born in Epping, Essex, the third of four boys, Mays was brought up in Buckhurst Hill, Essex, by his electrician father and bank cashier mother. He attended the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts before going on to win a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA).


title: Daniel Mays

text: Mays graduated from RADA in 2000. Mike Leigh cast him in both "All or Nothing" and "Vera Drake" and Mays has said that working with Leigh was decisive in making him the kind of actor he wanted to be. "You leave no stone unturned in the pursuit of truthful, believable characters." In 2005 he was cast in the BBC drama "Rehab" and in 2008 played the role of Michael Myshkin in Channel 4's adaptation of David Peace's "Red Riding" trilogy.


title: Daniel Mays

text: His appearance in the independent British film "Shifty", co-starring Riz Ahmed, earned him a nomination for best supporting actor at the British Independent Film Awards.


title: Daniel Mays

text: Mays starred as Eddie O'Grady in the 2010 film "Made in Dagenham." In the same year, he played DCI Jim Keats in the third series of "Ashes to Ashes", in which he portrayed a character that was the antagonist of Philip Glenister's Gene Hunt.


title: Daniel Mays

text: He had roles in "No One Gets Off in This Town" and a supporting role in the Steven Spielberg film "". He then played a criminal on a curfew after serving a 10-year sentence for the murder of his girlfriend when he was 19 in the programme "Public Enemies", which aired on BBC One in early January 2012. He played Ronnie Biggs in a 5-part drama called "Mrs Biggs".


title: Daniel Mays

text: For much of the latter half of 2013, Mays performed on stage. Performing in Nick Payne's "Same Deep Water As Me" at the Donmar Warehouse alongside Nigel Lindsay and in the first major revival of Jez Butterworth's debut play "Mojo" at the Harold Pinter Theatre. He starred alongside Ben Whishaw, Brendan Coyle, Rupert Grint and Colin Morgan.


title: Daniel Mays

text: Mays starred in Series 3 of BBC drama "Line of Duty" as Sergeant Danny Waldron, an armed response officer whose troubled and abusive childhood comes under investigation as part of wider investigation of police corruption throughout the serial. He was nominated for a BAFTA Television Award for Supporting Actor for his role.


title: Daniel Mays

text: In 2016 Mays played the part of Aston in Harold Pinter's play "The Caretaker" directed by Matthew Warchus at The Old Vic Theatre in London opposite Timothy Spall and George MacKay.


title: Daniel Mays

text: He starred as lead investigator Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay in the three-part television drama miniseries "Des", about the 1983 arrest of Scottish serial killer Dennis Nilsen, first screened on ITV on 14 September 2020 in the UK.


title: Daniel Mays

text: Mays has a son and a daughter with makeup artist Louise Burton. As of 2005, he was living in Crouch End, an area in the London Borough of Haringey. A keen football fan, he is a supporter of Leyton Orient.


title: Daniel Mays

text: He is a friend of Grant Nicholas, lead singer of rock band Feeder, and appeared in the 2012 music video for the band's single "Idaho".


title: National Security Advisor (United States)

text: The Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (APNSA), commonly referred to as the National Security Advisor (NSA), is a senior aide in the Executive Office of the President, based at the West Wing of the White House. The National Security Advisor serves as the principal advisor to the President of the United States on all national security issues. The National Security Advisor is appointed by the President and does not require confirmation by the United States Senate. An appointment of a three- or four-star General to the role requires Senate confirmation to maintain that rank in the new position. The National Security Advisor participates in meetings of the National Security Council (NSC) and usually chairs meetings of the Principals Committee of the NSC with the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense (those meetings not attended by the President). The NSA also sits on the Homeland Security Council (HSC).The National Security Advisor is supported by NSC staff who produce classified research and briefings for the National Security Advisor to review and present, either to the National Security Council or directly to the President.


text: The influence and role of the National Security Advisor varies from administration to administration and depends not only on the qualities of the person appointed to the position, but also on the style and management philosophy of the incumbent president. Ideally, the National Security Advisor serves as an honest broker of policy options for the president in the field of national security, rather than as an advocate for his or her own policy agenda.


text: The National Security Advisor is a staff position in the Executive Office of the President and does not have line or budget authority over either the Department of State or the Department of Defense, unlike the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, who are Senate-confirmed officials with statutory authority over their departments. The National Security Advisor is able to offer daily advice (due to the proximity) to the president independently of the vested interests of the large bureaucracies and clientele of those departments.


text: In times of crisis, the National Security Advisor is likely to operate from the White House Situation Room or the Presidential Emergency Operations Center (as on September 11, 2001), updating the president on the latest events in a crisis situation.


text: The National Security Council was created at the start of the Cold War under the National Security Act of 1947 to coordinate defense, foreign affairs, international economic policy, and intelligence; this was part of a large reorganization that saw the creation of the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. The Act did not create the position of the National Security Advisor per se, but it did create an executive secretary in charge of the staff. In 1949, the NSC became part of the Executive Office of the President.


text: Robert Cutler was the first National Security Advisor in 1953, and held the job twice, both times during the Eisenhower administration. The system has remained largely unchanged since then, particularly since President John Kennedy, with powerful National Security Advisors and strong staff but a lower importance given to formal NSC meetings. This continuity persists despite the tendency of each new president to replace the advisor and senior NSC staff.


text: President Richard Nixon's National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, enhanced the importance of the role, controlling the flow of information to the president and meeting with him multiple times per day. Kissinger also holds the distinction of serving as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at the same time from September 22, 1973, until November 3, 1975. He holds the record for longest term of service (2,478 days); Michael Flynn holds the record for shortest term, at just 24 days.


text: Brent Scowcroft held the job in two non-consecutive administrations: the Ford administration and the George H. W. Bush administration.


title: We Built This City

text: "We Built This City" is a 1985 song by American rock band Starship. It was released as their debut single on their album "Knee Deep in the Hoopla". It was written by English musicians Martin Page and Bernie Taupin, who were both living in Los Angeles at the time, and was originally intended as a lament against the closure of many of that city's live music clubs.


title: We Built This City

text: The song peaked at number one on the "Billboard" Hot 100. Outside the United States, "We Built This City" topped the charts in Australia and Canada, peaked inside the top ten of the charts in Germany, the Republic of Ireland, Sweden, and Switzerland, the top twenty on the charts in Belgium, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, and the top thirty of the charts in Austria and the Netherlands.


title: We Built This City

text: The song has gained significant scorn, both for the seeming inscrutability of its lyrics (notably the line "Marconi plays the mamba"), and for the contrast between the song's anti-corporate message and its polished, "corporate rock" sound. It has appeared on several "worst song" lists, topping a 2011 "Rolling Stone" poll of worst songs of the 1980s by a wide margin.


title: We Built This City

text: Song co-writers Martin Page and Bernie Taupin have stated that the song is about the decline of live performance clubs in Los Angeles during the 1980s. The lyrics are structured as a plea to corporate interests who are shutting down rock music clubs ("We just want to dance here/ Someone stole the stage") because the corporations are concerned only with profits and respectability ("Too many runaways"), and have forgotten that rock music was what brought people to the city in the first place ("Don't you remember? We built this city on rock and roll!").


title: We Built This City

text: Though the song was originally written about Los Angeles, the Starship rendition references San Francisco instead (the hometown of both Starship and its predecessors, Jefferson Airplane and Jefferson Starship), with a spoken-word interlude in which a radio DJ states, "I'm looking out over that Golden Gate Bridge". However, the DJ then says, "Here's your favorite radio station in your favorite radio city, the city by the bay, the city that rocks, the city that never sleeps", stressing the universality of the message: while "the city by the bay" is a nickname for San Francisco, the other two phrases are not, and "The City That Never Sleeps" is a well-known nickname for New York City. Capitalizing on the ambiguity, several radio stations added descriptions of their own local areas when they broadcast the song or added their own ident in its place.


title: We Built This City

text: The song was engineered by producer Bill Bottrell, written by Bernie Taupin, Martin Page, Dennis Lambert, and Peter Wolf, and arranged by Bottrell and Jasun Martz. The song was based on a demo by Page and Taupin, which had a darker feel to it and was based on how clubs were dying out in Los Angeles at the time, leaving live performers without work. Producer Wolf reworked the song's arrangement into a more upbeat one.


title: We Built This City

text: The song features Mickey Thomas and Grace Slick sharing lead vocals. MTV executive and former DJ Les Garland provided the DJ voice-over during the song's bridge. Additionally, some radio stations, with the help of jingle company JAM Creative Productions in Dallas, Texas, inserted their own opening line to promote their stations.


title: We Built This City

text: "Billboard" said that this "unusual rock 'n' roll anthem is as wise as it is rebellious." "Cash Box" called it "an ear-catching tune" and described it as "dance rock with sharp hooks."


title: We Built This City

text: "We Built This City" received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Rock Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group in 1986.


title: We Built This City

text: The magazine "Blender"s ranking of the song as the worst song ever was in conjunction with a VH1 Special of "The 50 Most Awesomely Bad Songs...Ever". In order to qualify for the distinction, the songs on the list had to be a popular hit at some point, thus disqualifying many songs that would by consensus be considered much worse. "Blender" editor Craig Marks said of the song, "It purports to be anti-commercial but reeks of '80s corporate-rock commercialism. It's a real reflection of what practically killed rock music in the '80s." When asked about why the song was listed as No. 1 on the review, Marks referred to the line of the song "Marconi plays the mamba" by asking, "Who is Marconi? And what is the mamba? The mamba is the deadliest snake in the world, so he must have meant the mambo, but it sounds so much like 'mamba' that every lyric website writes it that way. It makes sense neither way."


title: We Built This City

text: However, an article in the "Sydney Morning Herald" pointed out that ""Blender"s list—compiled via an arbitrary and anecdotal data collection process and ranked by Marks—included several whimsical criteria. One was to go easy on novelty songs. In a discussion with the band's manager, Bill Thompson, he was surprised at the ranking, but also "thrilled" because of the other high-profile groups on the list, saying, "I wish Blender had called us for a group shot. I'd love to have my picture taken with Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney." Mickey Thomas, one of the singers of Starship, said in 2010 regarding the review from the by-then defunct "Blender" magazine: "From what I heard, they got so much flak about it that they sort of retracted their statements in a way about the song. And not only that, but "Blender"s folded, and we're still here." "Richmond Times-Dispatch" music critic Melissa Ruggieri argued that "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" and "Sara" were Starship songs that were more suitable for the top of the list than "We Built This City", a song Ruggieri said "references Marconi, the father of the radio...inserted a cool snippet of DJ chatter from the band's beloved San Francisco...[and] found Grace Slick enunciating the phrase 'corporation games' with nutty abandon."


title: We Built This City

text: In 2011, a "Rolling Stone" magazine online readers poll named "We Built This City" the worst song of the 1980s. The song's winning margin was so large that the magazine reported it "could be the biggest blow-out victory in the history of the "Rolling Stone" Readers Poll".


title: We Built This City

text: In August 2016, "GQ" magazine declared this song as the worst of all time, referring to it as "the most detested song in human history". The article covered Bernie Taupin and Martin Page's roles in writing an early version of the song, the song's development into its final version, its massive success and backlash, and Grace Slick's inconsistent statements about whether she liked the song or not.


title: We Built This City

text: In December 2018, British blogger LadBaby released a comedy version of the song with a sausage roll theme (the refrain being "We Built This City on Sausage Rolls") as a charity single whose profits went to The Trussell Trust. It debuted at number one on the UK Singles Chart, beating Ava Max's "Sweet but Psycho" and Ariana Grande's "Thank U, Next" to the 2018 Christmas number one.


title: Early history of video games

text: The history of video games spans a period of time between the invention of the first electronic games and today, covering many inventions and developments. Video gaming reached mainstream popularity in the 1970s and 1980s, when arcade video games, gaming consoles and home computer games were introduced to the general public. Since then, video gaming has become a popular form of entertainment and a part of modern culture in most parts of the world. The early history of video games, therefore, covers the period of time between the first interactive electronic game with an electronic display in 1947, the first true video games in the early 1950s, and the rise of early arcade video games in the 1970s ("Pong" and the beginning of the first generation of video game consoles with the Magnavox Odyssey, both in 1972). During this time there was a wide range of devices and inventions corresponding with large advances in computing technology, and the actual first video game is dependent on the definition of "video game" used.


title: Early history of video games

text: Following the 1947 invention of the cathode-ray tube amusement device—the earliest known interactive electronic game as well as the first to use an electronic display—the first true video games were created in the early 1950s. Initially created as technology demonstrations, such as the "Bertie the Brain" and Nimrod computers in 1950 and 1951, video games also became the purview of academic research. A series of games, generally simulating real-world board games, were created at various research institutions to explore programming, human–computer interaction, and computer algorithms. These include "OXO" and Christopher Strachey's draughts program in 1952, the first software-based games to incorporate a CRT display, and several chess and checkers programs. Possibly the first video game created simply for entertainment was 1958's "Tennis for Two", featuring moving graphics on an oscilloscope. As computing technology improved over time, computers became smaller and faster, and the ability to work on them was opened up to university employees and undergraduate students by the end of the 1950s. These new programmers began to create games for non-academic purposes, leading up to the 1962 release of "Spacewar!" as one of the earliest known digital computer games to be available outside a single research institute.


title: Early history of video games

text: Throughout the rest of the 1960s increasing numbers of programmers wrote digital computer games, which were sometimes sold commercially in catalogs. As the audience for video games expanded to more than a few dozen research institutions with the falling cost of computers, and programming languages that would run on multiple types of computers were created, a wider variety of games began to be developed. Video games transitioned into a new era in the early 1970s with the launch of the commercial video game industry in 1971 with the display of the coin-operated arcade game "Galaxy Game" and the release of the first arcade video game "Computer Space", and then in 1972 with the release of the immensely successful arcade game "Pong" and the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, which launched the first generation of video-game consoles.


title: Early history of video games

text: The term "video game" has evolved over the decades from a purely technical definition to a general concept defining a new class of interactive entertainment. Technically, for a product to be a video game under early definitions, it needed to transmit a video signal to a display.


title: Early history of video games

text: This can (but not always) include a cathode ray tube (CRT), oscilloscope, liquid crystal display, vector-scan monitor, etc. This definition would preclude early computer games that outputted results to a printer or teletype rather than a display, as well as games that used static LCD graphics, for example Nintendo's Game & Watch, or most Tiger Electronics handhelds. From a technical standpoint, these would more properly be called "electronic games" or "computer games".


title: Early history of video games

text: Today the term "video game" has completely shed its purely hardware-dependent definition and encompasses a wider range of technology. While still rather ill-defined, the term "video game" now generally encompasses any game played on hardware built with electronic logic circuits that incorporates an element of interactivity and outputs the results of the player's actions to a display. Going by this broader definition, the first video games appeared in the early 1950s; they were tied largely to research projects at universities and large corporations, though, and had little influence on each other due to their primary purpose as academic and promotional devices rather than entertainment games.


title: Early history of video games

text: The ancestors to these games include the cathode-ray tube amusement device, the earliest known interactive electronic game as well as the first to incorporate a cathode-ray tube screen. The player simulates an artillery shell trajectory on a CRT screen connected to an oscilloscope, with a set of knobs and switches. The device uses purely analog electronics and does not use any digital computer or memory device or execute a program. It was patented by Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann in 1947. While the idea behind the game was potentially to use a television set as the display and thus sell the invention to consumers, as Goldsmith and Mann worked at television designer DuMont Laboratories, the patent, the first for an electronic game, was never used and the device never manufactured beyond the original handmade prototypes.


title: Early history of video games

text: This, along with the lack of electronic logic circuits, keeps the device from being considered the first video game. In 1948, shortly after the patenting of this device, Alan Turing and David Champernowne developed the earliest known written computer game - a chess simulation called Turochamp, though it was never actually implemented on a computer as the code was too complicated to run on the machines of the time. Turing tested the code in a game in 1952 where he mimicked the operation of the code in a real chess-game against an opponent, but was never able to run the program on a computer.


title: Early history of video games

text: The first electronic digital computers, Colossus and ENIAC, were built during World War II to aid the Allied war effort. Shortly after the war, the promulgation of the first stored program architectures at the University of Manchester (Manchester Mark 1), University of Cambridge (EDSAC), the University of Pennsylvania (EDVAC), and Princeton University (IAS machine) allowed computers to be easily reprogrammed to undertake a variety of tasks, which facilitated commercializing computers in the early 1950s by companies like Remington Rand, Ferranti, and IBM. This in turn promoted the adoption of computers by universities, government organizations, and large corporations as the decade progressed. It was in this environment that the first video games were born.


title: Early history of video games

text: The computer games of the 1950s can generally be divided into three categories: training and instructional programs, research programs in fields such as artificial intelligence, and demonstration programs intended to impress or entertain the public. Because these games were largely developed on unique hardware in a time when porting between systems was difficult and were often dismantled or discarded after serving their limited purposes, they did not generally influence further developments in the industry. For the same reason, it is impossible to be certain who developed the first computer game or who originally modeled many of the games or play mechanics introduced during the decade, as there are likely several games from this period that were never publicized and are thus unknown today.


title: Early history of video games

text: The earliest known publicly demonstrated electronic game was created in 1950. "Bertie the Brain" was an arcade game of tic-tac-toe, built by Josef Kates for the 1950 Canadian National Exhibition. To showcase his new miniature vacuum tube, the additron tube, he designed a specialized computer to use it, which he built with the assistance of engineers from Rogers Majestic. The large metal computer, which was four meters tall, could only play tic-tac-toe on a lightbulb-backed display, and was installed in the Engineering Building at the Canadian National Exhibition from August 25 to September 9, 1950. The game was a success at the two-week exhibition, with attendees lining up to play it as Kates adjusted the difficulty up and down for players. After the exhibition, "Bertie" was dismantled, and "largely forgotten" as a novelty. Kates has said that he was working on so many projects at the same time that he had no energy to spare for preserving it, despite its significance.


title: Early history of video games

text: Nearly a year later on May 5, 1951, the Nimrod computer—created by engineering firm and nascent computer developer Ferranti—was presented at the Festival of Britain, and then showcased for three weeks in October at the Berlin Industrial Show before being dismantled. Using a panel of lights for its display, it was designed exclusively to play the game of Nim; moves were made by players pressing buttons which corresponded with the lights. Nimrod could play either the traditional or "reverse" form of the game. The machine was twelve feet wide, nine feet deep, and five feet tall. It was based on an earlier Nim-playing machine, "Nimatron", designed by Edward Condon and built by Westinghouse Electric in 1940 for display at the New York World's Fair. "Nimatron" had been constructed from electromechanical relays and weighed over a ton. The Nimrod was primarily intended to showcase Ferranti's computer design and programming skills rather than entertain, and was not followed up by any future games. Despite this, most of the onlookers at the Festival of Britain were more interested in playing the game than in the programming and engineering logic behind it.


title: Early history of video games

text: Around this time, non-visual games were being developed at various research computer laboratories; for example, Christopher Strachey developed a simulation of the game draughts, or checkers, for the Pilot ACE that he unsuccessfully attempted to run for the first time in July 1951 at the British National Physical Laboratory and completed in 1952; this is the first known computer game to be created for a general-purpose computer, rather than a machine specifically made for the game like "Bertie". Strachey's program inspired Arthur Samuel to develop his own checkers game in 1952 for the IBM 701; successive iterations developed rudimentary artificial intelligence by 1955 and a version was shown on television in 1956. Also in 1951, Dietrich Prinz wrote the first limited program of chess for the University of Manchester's general-purpose Ferranti Mark 1 computer, one of the first commercially available computers. The program was only capable of computing "mate-in-two" problems as it was not powerful enough to play a full game, and it had no video output. Around the same time in the early 1950s, military research organizations like the RAND Corporation developed a series of combat simulation games of increasing complexity, such as Carmonette, where the player would enter orders to intercept enemy aircraft, or set up their forces to counter an enemy army invasion. These simulations were not yet true video games, as they required human intervention to interpret the player's orders and the final results; the computer only controlled the paths that the enemies would take, and the program was focused on simulating events and probabilities.


title: Early history of video games

text: In 1952, Alexander S. Douglas created "OXO", a software program for the EDSAC computer, which simulates a game of tic-tac-toe. The EDSAC was one of the first stored-program computers, with memory that could be read from or written to, and filled an entire room; it included three 35×16 dot matrix cathode ray tubes to graphically display the state of the computer's memory. As a part of a thesis on human–computer interaction, Douglas used one of these screens to portray other information to the user; he chose to do so via displaying the current state of a game. The player entered input using a rotary telephone controller, selecting which of the nine squares on the board they wished to move next. Their move would appear on the screen, and then the computer's move would follow. The game was not available to the general public, and was only available to be played in the University of Cambridge's Mathematical Laboratory, by special permission, as the EDSAC could not be moved. Like other early video games, after serving Douglas's purpose, the game was discarded. Around the same time, Strachey expanded his draughts program for another mainframe computer, the Manchester Mark 1, culminating in a version for the Ferranti Mark 1 in 1952, which had a CRT display. Like "OXO", the display was mostly static, updating only when a move was made. "OXO" and Strachey's draughts program are the earliest known games to display visuals on an electronic screen.


title: Early history of video games

text: The first known game incorporating graphics that updated in real time, rather than only when the player made a move, was a simulation of a bouncing ball created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) student Oliver Aberth for the Whirlwind I computer. He initially created the simulation in February 1951, which allowed users to adjust the frequency of the bounces with a knob, and sometime between late 1951 and 1953 made it into a game by adding a hole in the floor for players to aim for. The game was used in classes at MIT by Charles W. Adams, assistant professor of digital computers. It was followed by a pool game programmed by William Brown and Ted Lewis specifically for a demonstration of the University of Michigan-developed MIDSAC computer at the university in 1954. The game, developed over six months by the pair, featured a pool stick controlled by a joystick and a knob, and a full rack of 15 balls on a table seen in an overhead view. The computer calculated the movements of the balls as they collided and moved around the table, disappearing when they reached a pocket, and updated the graphics continuously, forty times a second, so as to show real-time motion. Like previous video games, the pool game was intended primarily to showcase the computing power of the MIDSAC computer.


title: Early history of video games

text: While further games like checkers and chess were developed on research computers, the next milestone in video games came in 1958 with "Tennis for Two". Perhaps the first game created solely for entertainment rather than as a technology demonstration or a research tool, the program simulated a game of tennis. Created by American physicist William Higinbotham for visitors at the Brookhaven National Laboratory to be more entertaining for visitors on their public day than the usual static exhibits about nuclear power, the game ran on a Donner Model 30 analog computer and displayed a side view of a tennis court on an oscilloscope. The players controlled the angle of their shots with attached controllers, and the game calculated and simulated the trajectory of the ball, including the possibility of hitting the net. The game was first shown on October 18, 1958. Hundreds of visitors lined up to play the new game during its debut. Due to the game's popularity, an upgraded version was shown the following year, with enhancements including a larger screen and different levels of simulated gravity. Afterwards, having served its purpose, the game was dismantled for its component parts. While the game had no innovations in game design or technological development, its status as an entertainment-focused game, rather than an academic project or technological showpiece, has led it to be considered one of the first "real" video games as they are generally thought of today.


title: Early history of video games

text: Over the next few years, during 1957–61, various computer games continued to be created in the context of academic computer and programming research, particularly as computer technology improved to include smaller, transistor-based computers on which programs could be created and run in real time, rather than operations run in batches. A few programs, however, while used to showcase the power of the computer they ran on were also intended as entertainment products; these were generally created by undergraduate students, such as at MIT where they were allowed on occasion to develop programs for the TX-0 experimental computer. These interactive graphical games were created by a community of programmers, many of them students affiliated with the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) led by Alan Kotok, Peter Samson, and Bob Saunders. The games included "Tic-Tac-Toe", which used a light pen to play a simple game of noughts and crosses against the computer, and "Mouse in the Maze". "Mouse in the Maze" allowed users to use a light pen to set up a maze of walls on the monitor, and spots that represented bits of cheese or glasses of martini. A virtual mouse was then released and would traverse the maze to find the objects. Additionally, the wargame simulations from the early 1950s by the RAND Corporation had expanded into more complicated simulations which required little human intervention, and had also sparked the creation of business management simulation games such as "The Management Game", which was used in business schools such as at Carnegie Mellon University by 1958. By 1961, there were over 89 different business simulation games in use, with various graphical capabilities. As the decade ended, despite several video games having been developed, there was no such thing as a commercial video game industry; almost all games had been developed on or as a single machine for specific purposes, and the few simulation games were neither commercial nor for entertainment.


title: Early history of video games

text: By 1961, MIT had acquired the DEC PDP-1 minicomputer, the successor to the TX-0, which also used a vector display system. The system's comparatively small size and processing speed meant that, like with the TX-0, the university allowed its undergraduate students and employees to write programs for the computer which were not directly academically related whenever it was not in use. In 1961–62, Harvard and MIT employees Martin Graetz, Steve Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen created the game "Spacewar!" on the PDP-1, inspired by science fiction books such as the "Lensman" series. The game was copied to several of the early minicomputer installations in American academic institutions, making it potentially the first video game to be available outside a single research institute.


title: Early history of video games

text: The two-player game has the players engaged in a dogfight between two spaceships set against the backdrop of a randomly generated background starfield. The game was developed to meet three precepts: to use as much of the computer's resources as possible, to be consistently interesting and therefore have every run be different, and to be entertaining and therefore a game. The game was a multiplayer game because the computer had no resources left over to handle controlling the other ship. After the game's initial development, members of the TMRC worked to improve the game, adding an accurate starfield and a gravitational body, and spread it to the couple dozen other institutions with a PDP-1, a process which continued over the next few years. As the computer was uncomfortable to use for extended periods of time, Kotok and Saunders created a detached control device, essentially an early gamepad. "Spacewar" was reportedly used as a smoke test by DEC technicians on new PDP-1 systems before shipping, since it was the only available program that exercised every aspect of the hardware. Although the game was widespread for the era, it was still very limited in its direct reach: the PDP-1 was priced at US$120,000 () and only 55 were ever sold, many without a monitor, which prohibited "Spacewar" or any game of the time from reaching beyond a narrow, academic audience. Russell has been quoted as saying that the aspect of the game that he was most pleased with was the number of other programmers it inspired to write their own games.


title: Early history of video games

text: Although the market for commercial games—and software in general—was small, due to the cost of computers limiting their spread to research institutions and large corporations, several were still created by programmers and distributed by the computer manufacturers. A number of games could be found in an April 1962 IBM program catalog. These included board games, "BBC Vik The Baseball Demonstrator", and "Three Dimensional Tic-Tack-Toe". Following the spread of "Spacewar", further computer games developed by programmers at universities were also developed and distributed over the next few years. These included the Socratic System, a question and answer game designed to teach medical students how to diagnose patients by Wallace Feurzeig in 1962, and a dice game by Edward Steinberger in 1965. Mainframe games were developed outside of the IBM and DEC communities as well, such as the 1962 Polish "Marienbad" for the Odra 1003. A joint research project between IBM and the Board of Cooperative Educational Services of Westchester County, New York led to the creation of "The Sumerian Game", one of the first strategy video games ever made, the first game with a narrative, and the first edutainment game; it was also the first known game to be designed by a woman, teacher Mabel Addis.


title: Early history of video games

text: The creation of general programming languages like BASIC, which could be run on different hardware types, allowed for programs to be written for more than one specific computer, in turn letting games written in them to spread to more end players in the programming community than before. These games included a baseball simulation game written in BASIC by John Kemeny in 1965; a BASIC bingo game by Larry Bethurum in 1966; a basketball simulation game written in BASIC by Charles R. Bacheller in May 1967; another baseball game that simulates the 1967 World Series written in BASIC by Jacob Bergmann in August 1967; "Space Travel", written by Ken Thompson for a Multics system in 1969 and which led in part to the development of the Unix operating system; and "Hamurabi", a text-based FOCAL game written by Doug Dyment in 1968 based on a description of "The Sumerian Game" and converted to BASIC by David H. Ahl in 1969. "Hamurabi" and "Space Travel" were among several early mainframe games that were written during the time, and spread beyond their initial mainframe computers to general-purpose languages like BASIC.


title: Early history of video games

text: At the beginning of the 1970s, video games existed almost entirely as novelties passed around by programmers and technicians with access to computers, primarily at research institutions and large companies. The history of video games transitioned into a new era early in the decade, however, with the rise of the commercial video game industry.


title: Early history of video games

text: The arcade video game industry grew out of the pre-existing arcade game industry, which was previously dominated by electro-mechanical games (EM games). Following the arrival of Sega's EM game "Periscope" (1966), the arcade industry was experiencing a "technological renaissance" driven by "audio-visual" EM novelty games, establishing the arcades as a healthy environment for the introduction of commercial video games in the early 1970s. The first commercial arcade video game was "Computer Space" (1971), which was developed by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney and was based on "Spacewar". Bushnell, who had previously worked at an arcade, wanted to recreate "Spacewar" as an arcade game. They had found the Data General Nova, a US$4,000 computer that they thought would be powerful enough to run four games of "Spacewar" at once; the computer turned out to not actually be powerful enough for the project. While investigating the concept of replacing some of the computer with purpose-built hardware, however, the pair discovered that making a system explicitly for running such a game, rather than general programs, would be much less expensive: as low as $100. A prototype version had been successfully displayed for a short time in August 1971 in a local bar, the design was nearly finished, and the pair had founded a company around it called Syzygy. Bushnell had also found a manufacturer for the game, Nutting Associates, who would make the final game cabinets and sell them to distributors.


title: Early history of video games

text: Another early coin-operated arcade video game was "Galaxy Game" (1971), developed by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck at Stanford University using a DEC PDP-11 computer with vector displays. The pair was also inspired to make the game by "Spacewar"; Tuck had remarked in 1966 while playing the game that a coin-operated version of the game would be very successful. Such a device was unfeasible in 1966 due to the cost of computers, but in 1969 DEC released the PDP-11 for US$20,000 (); while this was still too high for a commercially viable product, as most games in arcades cost around US$1,000 at the time, the pair felt it was low enough to build a prototype to determine interest and optimal per-game pricing. Only prototype units were ever built, though the second prototype was adapted to run up to eight games at once; a few months before the initial installation at Stanford in November 1971, the pair met with Nolan Bushnell, who informed them of his own game he was making for a much lower price.


title: Early history of video games

text: Bushnell felt that "Galaxy Game" was not a real competitor to "Computer Space", due to its high price. Pitts and Tuck believed, however, that despite the economic argument their game was superior, as they felt that "Galaxy Game" was a true expansion of "Spacewar", while "Computer Space" just a pale imitation. Some players at the time, however, believed "Galaxy Game" to actually be just a version of "Spacewar!". "Galaxy Game"s prototype installation was very popular, though at a low price-per-game, and the pair developed a second version to display at the same location; they were never able to enter production, though, as they eventually had to abandon the idea after spending US$65,000 developing it due to the high cost and lack of business plan.


title: Early history of video games

text: Around the same time as "Galaxy Game"s prototype installation, "Computer Space" was released. It was the first coin-operated video game to be commercially sold and the first widely available video game of any kind. While it did well in its initial locations near college campuses, it performed very poorly in bars and arcades where pinball and other arcade games were typically placed; while it was commercially successful and made over US$1,000,000, it did not meet the high expectations of Nutting, who had expected to sell more than 1,500 units. Bushnell and Dabney immediately started work on another game, using the same television set design as "Computer Space", as well as founding their own company Atari, Inc. to back their projects. Initially, this game was intended to be a driving video game that Bushnell planned to design, influenced by Chicago Coin's "Speedway" (1969). Instead, the project was given to Atari's first employee, Allan Alcorn, and as Bushnell believed the driving game would be too complicated as a first project he suggested a prototype ping-pong game. Alcorn expanded the idea, and designed a game the company immediately seized on. They were unable to find a manufacturer, but on the evidence of the success of their prototype installation, decided to produce the game cabinets themselves. "Pong" was released in 1972, a year after "Computer Space". It was immensely commercially successful, selling over 8,000 units. It inspired copycat games to be sold in America, Europe, and Japan, and led to the popularization of the medium.


title: Early history of video games

text: That same year saw the release of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console which could be connected to a television set. The inventor, Ralph H. Baer, had initially had the idea in 1951 to make an interactive game on a television set. Unable to do so with the technological constraints at the time, he began work on a device that would attach to a television set and display games in 1966, and the "Brown Box", the last prototype of seven, was licensed to Magnavox to adapt and produce. They announced the console in May 1972, and it went on sale that September. The console and its games featured numerous innovations beyond being the first video game device for home consumers: it was the first game to use a raster-scan video display, or television set, directly displayed via modification of a video signal; it was also the first video gaming device to be displayed in a television commercial. It sold for US$100 and shipped with several games, including "Table tennis", which Bushnell had seen a demo of and which "Pong" had been based on. The Odyssey sold over 100,000 units in 1972, and more than 350,000 by the end of 1975, buoyed by the popularity of the table tennis game, in turn driven by the success of "Pong". "Pong" and the Odyssey kicked off a new era of video gaming, with numerous other competitors starting up in the video game industry as it grew in popularity.


title: Thesaurus

text: A thesaurus (plural "thesauri" or "thesauruses") or synonym dictionary is a reference work for finding synonyms and sometimes antonyms of words. They are often used by writers to help find the best word to express an idea:


title: Thesaurus

text: Synonym dictionaries have a long history. The word 'thesaurus' was used in 1852 by Peter Mark Roget for his "Roget's Thesaurus".


title: Thesaurus

text: While some thesauri, such as "Roget's Thesaurus", group words in a hierarchical hypernymic taxonomy of concepts, others are organized alphabetically or in some other way.


title: Thesaurus

text: Some thesauri and dictionary synonym notes characterize the distinctions between similar words, with notes on their "connotations and varying shades of meaning". Some synonym dictionaries are primarily concerned with differentiating synonyms by meaning and usage. Usage manuals such as Fowler's "Dictionary of Modern English Usage" often prescribe appropriate usage of synonyms.


title: Thesaurus

text: Writers sometimes use thesauri to avoid repetition of words — elegant variation — which is often criticized by usage manuals: "writers sometimes use them not just to vary their vocabularies but to dress them up too much".


title: Thesaurus

text: The word "thesaurus" comes from Latin "thēsaurus", which in turn comes from Greek ("thēsauros") 'treasure, treasury, storehouse'. The word "thēsauros" is of uncertain etymology.


title: Thesaurus

text: Until the 19th century, a thesaurus was any dictionary or encyclopedia, as in the "Thesaurus Linguae Latinae" ("Dictionary of the Latin Language", 1532), and the "Thesaurus Linguae Graecae" ("Dictionary of the Greek Language", 1572). It was Roget who introduced the meaning "collection of words arranged according to sense", in 1852.


title: Thesaurus

text: In antiquity, Philo of Byblos authored the first text that could now be called a thesaurus. In Sanskrit, the Amarakosha is a thesaurus in verse form, written in the 4th century.


title: Thesaurus

text: The study of synonyms became an important theme in 18th-century philosophy, and Condillac wrote, but never published, a dictionary of synonyms.


title: Thesaurus

text: "Roget's Thesaurus", first compiled in 1805 by Peter Mark Roget, and published in 1852, follows John Wilkins' semantic arrangement of 1668. Unlike earlier synonym dictionaries, it does not include definitions or aim to help the user to choose among synonyms. It has been continuously in print since 1852, and remains widely used across the English-speaking world. Roget described his thesaurus in the foreword to the first edition:


title: Thesaurus

text: It is now nearly fifty years since I first projected a system of verbal classification similar to that on which the present work is founded. Conceiving that such a compilation might help to supply my own deficiencies, I had, in the year 1805, completed a classed catalogue of words on a small scale, but on the same principle, and nearly in the same form, as the Thesaurus now published.


title: Thesaurus

text: Roget's original thesaurus was organized into 1000 conceptual Heads (e.g., 806 Debt) organized into a four-level taxonomy. For example, debt is classed under V..iv:


title: Thesaurus

text: Each head includes direct synonyms: Debt, obligation, liability, ...; related concepts: interest, usance, usury; related persons: debtor, debitor, ... defaulter (808); verbs: to be in debt, to owe, ... "see" Borrow (788); phrases: to run up a bill or score, ...; and adjectives: in debt, indebted, owing, ... Numbers in parentheses are cross-references to other Heads.


title: Thesaurus

text: The book starts with a Tabular Synopsis of Categories laying out the hierarchy, then the main body of the thesaurus listed by Head, and then an alphabetical index listing the different Heads under which a word may be found: Liable, "subject to", 177; "debt", 806; "duty", 926.


title: Thesaurus

text: Some recent versions have kept the same organization, though often with more detail under each Head. Others have made modest changes such as eliminating the four-level taxonomy and adding new heads: one has 1075 Heads in fifteen Classes.


title: Thesaurus

text: In addition to its taxonomic organization, the "Historical Thesaurus of English" (2009) includes the date when each word came to have a given meaning. It has the novel and unique goal of "charting the semantic development of the huge and varied vocabulary of English".


title: Thesaurus

text: Different senses of a word are listed separately. For example, three difference senses of "debt" are listed in three different places in the taxonomy:


title: Thesaurus

text: A third system interfiles words and conceptual headings. Francis March's "Thesaurus Dictionary" gives for "liability": , each of which is a conceptual heading. The article has multiple subheadings, including Nouns of Agent, Verbs, Verbal Expressions, "etc." Under each are listed synonyms with brief definitions, "e.g." "Credit. Transference of property on promise of future payment." The conceptual headings are not organized into a taxonomy.


title: Thesaurus

text: Benjamin Lafaye's "Synonymes français" (1841) is organized around morphologically related families of synonyms ("e.g." "logis, logement"), and his "Dictionnaire des synonymes de la langue française" (1858) is mostly alphabetical, but also includes a section on morphologically related synonyms, which is organized by prefix, suffix, or construction.