title: History of surgery

text: In the late 19th century William Stewart Halstead (1852–1922) laid out basic surgical principles for asepsis known as Halsteads principles. Halsted also introduced the latex medical glove. After one of his nurses suffered skin damage due to having to sterilize her hands with carbolic acid, Halsted had a rubber glove that could be dipped in carbolic acid designed.


title: History of surgery

text: The use of X-rays as an important medical diagnostic tool began with their discovery in 1895 by German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen. He noticed that these rays could penetrate the skin, allowing the skeletal structure to be captured on a specially treated photographic plate.


title: History of surgery

text: In the past century, a number of technologies have had a significant impact on surgical practice. These include Electrosurgery in the early 20th century, practical Endoscopy beginning in the 1960s, and Laser surgery, Computer-assisted surgery and Robotic surgery, developed in the 1980s.


title: Honda CG125

text: The Honda CG125 or Honda CG is a commuter motorcycle made by Honda of Japan. It was in production from 1976 to 2008 in Japan and has been in production since 1992 in Pakistan. The CG was originally manufactured in Japan, but the source for the European market was eventually moved to Brazil in 1985, and to Pakistan and Turkey in 1992 for the W and M models.


title: Honda CG125

text: The CG125 is powered by a four-stroke, overhead valve, single-cylinder engine that has changed little over the years.


title: Honda CG125

text: The CG125 was developed from the CB125 for developing countries' markets. The two models were very similar, with many parts in common. The main difference was in the top ends: the CB had an overhead cam (OHC). One fault with many Honda OHC engines of that era (generally denoted CB), was that they had a tendency to wear the camshaft bearings if oil changes were skipped. The CG engine was developed specifically to address this problem (amongst others) as Honda realised that riders in developing countries performed little or no preventative maintenance. To make the bike more reliable with minimal servicing, the CG125 uses overhead valves (OHV) with pushrods, a washable foam air filter, and fully enclosed chain. The fully enclosed chain was dropped in 2004.


title: Honda CG125

text: In Pakistan the original CG125 is still being produced by Atlas Honda Ltd. Except for a few cosmetic changes, the Pakistani version has remained exactly the same as the original 1980s Japanese CG125 over the past years. It is currently available at a MSRP of ₨ 168,500 Pakistani Rupees as of 2022, equipped with a 9.2-liter tank, a Euro 2-complied overhead valve engine with kick-start mechanism, and a 4-speed transmission. The decoration graphics are redesigned, as well as the seat and the layout of the instrument cluster, to give this long-lasting model a refreshed appearance. Another variant called CG125 SE launched in 2019, has a 5-speed transmission instead of the original 4-speed and electric start. It is one of the few motorcycles offered by Honda in Pakistan.


title: Honda CG125

text: In China, numerous legal and illegal copies of the CG125, along with the imported original and licensed production variants, had been widely available in the market since the late 1980s. Despite being an outdated design, it had maintained high popularity and good sales figures for decades. Illegal copies of the CG125 had been exported globally due to the high demand in the developing countries, especially in Africa and the Middle East, at a starting price of as little as $700 US dollars, while their reputation is mixed and generally not as good as the original. Some of these clones came with updates and options that were never available in the original models, including front disc brakes, remote start and engines with a larger displacement of 175cc, 200cc or 250cc, and could be water-cooled. The classic CG125 design also spun off a variety of variants, including autorickshaws, sand bikes, and even half-tracked tricycles similar to the WWII German Sd.Kfz. 2 "Kettenkrad".


title: Honda CG125

text: The most recent version of the original CG125 without the European market restyling is still in production in China as of 2021 by the two joint-venture partners of Honda, Wuyang Honda as the WY125-19 and Sundiro Honda as the SDH125-7E, although both models were marketed simply as the CG125 CDi. Both versions are modernized with redesigned fuel-injected engines with electric start and 5-speed transmission, fulfilling the latest emission standard, China-IV, while maintaining the classic appearance from the 1980s. The China-IV standard is even stricter than the Euro 4, so in theory, these bikes could be imported to the European market. The Wuyang version retained the overhead valve engine while the Sundiro version switched to a more modern overhead camshaft design, thus could be differentiated by the appearance of their engines, but both versions kept the same displacement and produced similar power and torque.


title: Honda CG125

text: The Wuyang version had a redesigned engine with a compression ratio of 9.2:1, producing 10 horsepowers (7.3kw) at 8,000rpm and 9.5 newton-meters of torque at 6,500rpm, with a fuel consumption of 1.8 liters per 100km and a maximum speed of 93km/h. The fuel tank remained the old design and had a capacity of 8.6 liters. The kick-start mechanism is completely replaced by electric start, and gear indicators were added to the instrument cluster. The front drum brakes were enlarged and luggage racks were included as standard equipment. It is sold at a domestic MSRP of ￥6,980 Chinese Yuan ($ US dollars) and is exported to other markets including Japan, with a retail price of ￥139,000 Japanese Yen ($ US dollars) as a parallel-imported vehicle from the importers.


title: Honda CG125

text: In the UK, the CG125 was popular with learners due to licensing laws which allow a rider to operate a 125 cc motorbike with L plates by completing a Compulsory Basic Training (CBT) course.


title: Honda CG125

text: In Brazil, due to emission laws from 2009, the engine has been redesigned with an overhead camshaft (bore and stroke also changed from 56.5mm x 49.5mm to 52.4mm x 57.8mm). Due to Euro 3 emission laws the Honda CG125 has been replaced by the fuel injected CBF125 in the UK and Europe since 2009. Other manufacturers made overhead valve clones of the CG125 engine with same piston bore and stroke (56.5mm x 49.5mm) to comply with Euro 3 emission laws and they are widely available (as of 2020).


title: Honda CG125

text: The CG125 had also been produced in South Korea and Thailand in the past. The South Korean CG125s were produced by KIA motors as the KIA-Honda CG125.


title: Honda CG125

text: This last change is one of the very few changes that sacrificed functionality (longer chain life) in favour of aesthetics.


title: Siege of Tyre (332 BC)

text: The Siege of Tyre was orchestrated by Alexander the Great in 332 BC during his campaigns against the Persians. The Macedonian army was unable to capture the city, which was a strategic coastal base on the Mediterranean Sea, through conventional means because it was on an island and had walls right up to the sea. Alexander responded to this problem by first blockading and besieging Tyre for seven months, and then by building a causeway and placing siege towers with catapults built on top at the end after his soldiers discovered that they could not extend it any further due to a steep drop under the surface of the water, this allowed him to breach the fortifications.


title: Siege of Tyre (332 BC)

text: It is said that Alexander was so enraged at the Tyrians' defence of their city and the loss of his men that he destroyed half the city. According to Arrian, 8,000 Tyrian civilians were massacred after the city fell. Alexander granted pardon to all who had sought sanctuary in the temple, including Azemilcus and his family, as well as many nobles. 30,000 residents and foreigners, mainly women and children, were sold into slavery.


title: Siege of Tyre (332 BC)

text: Tyre, the largest and most important city-state of Phoenicia, was located both on the Mediterranean coast as well as a nearby island with two natural harbours on the landward side. The island lay about a kilometre from the coast in Alexander’s days, its high walls reaching above the sea on the eastern, landward facing, side of the island.


title: Siege of Tyre (332 BC)

text: At the time of the siege, the city held approximately 40,000 people, though the women and children had been evacuated to Carthage, the former Phoenician colony and then Mediterranean power. The Carthaginians also promised to send a fleet to their mother city’s aid. As Alexander did not have access to his own navy, he resolved to take the city and thus deny the Persians their last harbour in the region.


title: Siege of Tyre (332 BC)

text: Alexander knew of a temple to Melqart, whom he identified with Heracles, within the new city walls and informed the inhabitants that they would be spared if he were allowed to make a sacrifice in the temple (the old port had been abandoned and the Tyrians were now living on an offshore island a kilometre from the mainland). The defenders refused to allow this and suggested he use the temple on the mainland, saying that they would not let Persians or Macedonians within their new city. A second attempt at negotiation resulted in Alexander's representatives being killed and then thrown from the walls into the sea. Alexander was enraged at the Tyrian defiance and ordered the siege to commence.


title: Siege of Tyre (332 BC)

text: As Alexander could not attack the city from the sea, he built a kilometre-long two hundred foot wide(as claimed by Diodorus) causeway stretching out to the island on a natural land bridge no more than two meters deep.


title: Siege of Tyre (332 BC)

text: This causeway allowed his artillery to get in range of the walls, and is still there to this day, as it was made of stone. As the work came near the city walls, however, the water became much deeper, and the combined attacks from the walls and Tyrian navy made construction nearly impossible. Therefore, Alexander constructed two towers high and moved them to the end of the causeway. Like most of Alexander’s siege towers, these were moving artillery platforms, with catapults on the top to clear defenders off the walls, and ballista below to hurl rocks at the wall and attacking ships. The towers were made of wood, but were covered in rawhide to protect them from fire arrows. Although these towers were possibly the largest of their kind ever made, the Tyrians quickly devised a counter-attack. They used an old horse transport ship, filling it with dried branches, pitch, sulphur, and various other combustibles. They then hung cauldrons of oil from the masts, so that they would fall onto the deck once the masts burned through. They also weighed down the back of the ship so that the front rose above the water. They then set the ship on fire and ran it up onto the causeway. The fire spread quickly, engulfing both towers and other siege equipment that had been brought up. The Tyrian ships swarmed the pier, destroying any siege equipment that hadn’t caught fire, and driving off Macedonian crews who were trying to put out the fires.


title: Siege of Tyre (332 BC)

text: After this setback, Alexander was convinced that he would not be able to take Tyre without a navy. Fortunately for Alexander, his previous victory at Issus and subsequent conquests of the Phoenician city states of Byblos, Arwad and Sidon had meant that the fleets of these cities, which had composed most of the Persian navy, came under his banner. This immediately gave him command of a fleet of 80 ships. This development coincided also with the arrival of 120 war galleys sent by the king of Cyprus, who had heard of his victories and wished to join him. With the arrival of another 23 ships from the Greek city states of Ionia, Alexander had 223 galleys under his command, giving him command of the sea. Along with the navy he broadened the width of his mole to allow for more defensive engines to provide proper protection from the Tyrians.


title: Siege of Tyre (332 BC)

text: With his new fleet, Alexander's forces sailed on Tyre and quickly blockaded both ports with its superior numbers. Alexander had several of the slower galleys and a few barges refitted with battering rams. Finding that large underwater blocks of stone kept the rams from reaching the walls, Alexander had them removed by crane ships. The rams were then anchored near the walls, but the Tyrians sent out ships and divers to cut the anchor cables. Alexander responded by replacing the cables with chains.


title: Siege of Tyre (332 BC)

text: The Tyrians launched another counter-attack, but according to Arrian, were not so fortunate this time. The surprise attack went well initially. They noticed that Alexander returned to the mainland at the same time every afternoon for a meal and a rest along with much of his navy. The Tyrians were on the engineers and builders on the mole before they had to time to react. They slaughtered many soldiers before they were held by the remaining sailors until backup arrived and the attack was pushed back. For some reason on this day, Alexander had skipped his afternoon nap, and sailed around the city to capture those of the attacking force that had made an attempt to retreat.


title: Siege of Tyre (332 BC)

text: Alexander started testing the wall at various points with his rams, until the rams made a small breach in the south end of the island. He then coordinated an attack across the breach with a bombardment from all sides by his navy. Alexander is said to have personally taken part in the attack on the city, fighting from the top of a siege tower. Once his troops forced their way into the city, they easily overtook the garrison, and quickly captured the city.


title: Siege of Tyre (332 BC)

text: Those citizens who took shelter in the temple of Melqart were pardoned by Alexander, including the king of Tyre. According to Quintus Curtius Rufus 6,000 fighting men were killed within the city and 2,000 Tyrians were crucified on the beach. The others, some 30,000 people, were sold into slavery. The severity of reprisals reflected the length of the siege and Alexander's response to the Tyrians having executed some of his soldiers on the walls, in sight of the attackers.


title: Siege of Tyre (332 BC)

text: Polyaenus the Macedonian, in one of the two stratagems he gives about Alexander's siege of Tyre, provides a different account of Alexander’s conquest of the city. According to him, Alexander had marched into Arabia having left Parmenion in charge of the besieging force. The Tyrians found the courage to exit their walls and engage the Greeks, often beating them in various skirmishes. Alexander was informed and hurried back, reaching the city exactly when the Tyrians were fighting against a retreating Parmenion. Instead of attacking the Tyrians, he chose to march directly to the city, which he immediately took by force surprising its remaining garrison. Another view is that Alexander was so incensed at having to build a bridge to take the city of Tyre that he decided to kill or enslave most of Tyre's population.


title: Kodak Black discography

text: The discography of American rapper Kodak Black consists of four studio albums, seven mixtapes and thirty-five singles (including ten singles as a featured artist), and fifty music videos. His highest-charting song is "Zeze", which features Travis Scott and Offset, and debuted and peaked at number two in 2018, becoming Black's second top 10 hit on the US "Billboard" Hot 100. His highest-charting solo song is "Super Gremlin", which peaked at number three on the Hot 100 in 2022.


title: XO sauce

text: XO sauce is a spicy seafood sauce from Hong Kong with an umami flavour. It is commonly used in southern Chinese regions such as Guangdong.


title: XO sauce

text: Developed in the 1980s in Hong Kong for Cantonese cuisine, XO sauce is made of roughly-chopped dried seafood, including dried scallops ("conpoy"), fish, and shrimp, which are cooked with chilli peppers, onions, and garlic. This dried seafood-based sauce resembles the Fujianese shacha sauce. Spring Moon, the Chinese restaurant of the Peninsula Hong Kong hotel, is often credited with the invention of XO sauce, although some claim it came from other nearby restaurants in the Tsim Sha Tsui area of Kowloon.


title: XO sauce

text: The name "XO sauce" comes from fine XO (extra-old) cognac, which is a popular Western liquor in Hong Kong, and considered by many to be a chic product at the time. The name is a misnomer since the condiment contains no cognac, and it is not really a sauce in the traditional, smooth sense, but more chunky, like a relish. The term "XO" is often used in Hong Kong to denote high quality, prestige and luxury. Indeed, XO sauce has been marketed in the same manner as French liquor, using packaging of similar colour schemes.


title: XO sauce

text: Typical ingredients of XO sauce include dried scallop, red chilli pepper, Jinhua ham, dried shrimp, garlic and canola oil. Some other recipes also call for salted cured fish and diced onion.


title: XO sauce

text: XO sauce can be used as a table condiment or in cooking to enhance the flavour of fish, meats, vegetables, and otherwise bland foods such as tofu or noodles.


title: Xerox Alto

text: The Xerox Alto is a computer designed from its inception to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface (GUI), later using the desktop metaphor. The first machines were introduced on 1 March 1973, a decade before mass-market GUI machines became available.


title: Xerox Alto

text: The Alto is contained in a relatively small cabinet and uses a custom central processing unit (CPU) built from multiple SSI and MSI integrated circuits. Each machine cost tens of thousands of dollars despite its status as a personal computer. Only small numbers were built initially, but by the late 1970s, about 1,000 were in use at various Xerox laboratories, and about another 500 in several universities. Total production was about 2,000 systems.


title: Xerox Alto

text: The Alto became well known in Silicon Valley and its GUI was increasingly seen as the future of computing. In 1979, Steve Jobs arranged a visit to Xerox PARC, during which Apple Computer personnel would receive demonstrations of Xerox technology in exchange for Xerox being able to purchase stock options in Apple. After two visits to see the Alto, Apple engineers used the concepts to introduce the Apple Lisa and Macintosh systems.


title: Xerox Alto

text: Xerox eventually commercialized a heavily modified version of the Alto concepts as the Xerox Star, first introduced in 1981. A complete office system including several workstations, storage and a laser printer cost as much as $100,000, and like the Alto, the Star had little direct impact on the market.


title: Xerox Alto

text: The first computer with a graphical operating system, the Alto built on earlier graphical interface designs. It was conceived in 1972 in a memo written by Butler Lampson, inspired by the oN-Line System (NLS) developed by Douglas Engelbart and Dustin Lindberg at SRI International (SRI). Of further influence was the PLATO education system developed at the Computer-based Education Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois. The Alto was designed mostly by Charles P. Thacker. Industrial Design and manufacturing was sub-contracted to Xerox, whose Special Programs Group team included Doug Stewart as Program Manager, Abbey Silverstone Operations, Bob Nishimura, Industrial Designer. An initial run of 30 units was produced by Xerox El Segundo (Special Programs Group), working with John Ellenby at PARC and Doug Stewart and Abbey Silverstone at El Segundo, who were responsible for re-designing the Alto's electronics. Due to the success of the pilot run, the team went on to produce approximately 2,000 units over the next ten years.


title: Xerox Alto

text: Several Xerox Alto chassis are now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, one is on display at the Computer Museum of America in Roswell, Georgia, and several are in private hands. Running systems are on display at the System Source Computer Museum in Hunt Valley, Maryland. Charles P. Thacker was awarded the 2009 Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery on March 9, 2010, for his pioneering design and realization of the Alto. The 2004 Charles Stark Draper Prize was awarded to Thacker, Alan C. Kay, Butler Lampson, and Robert W. Taylor for their work on Alto.


title: Xerox Alto

text: On October 21, 2014, Xerox Alto's source code and other resources were released from the Computer History Museum.


title: Xerox Alto

text: Alto uses a microcoded design, but unlike many computers, the microcode engine is not hidden from the programmer in a layered design. Applications such as Pinball take advantage of this to accelerate performance. The Alto has a bit-slice arithmetic logic unit (ALU) based on the Texas Instruments 74181 chip, a ROM control store with a writable control store extension and has 128 (expandable to 512) KB of main memory organized in 16-bit words. Mass storage is provided by a hard disk drive that uses a removable 2.5 MB one-platter cartridge (Diablo Systems, a company Xerox later bought) similar to those used by the IBM 2310. The base machine and one disk drive are housed in a cabinet about the size of a small refrigerator; one more disk drive can be added via daisy-chaining.


title: Xerox Alto

text: Alto both blurred and ignored the lines between functional elements. Rather than a distinct central processing unit with a well-defined electrical interface (e.g., system bus) to storage and peripherals, the Alto ALU interacts directly with hardware interfaces to memory and peripherals, driven by microinstructions that are output from the control store. The microcode machine supports up to 16 cooperative multitasking tasks, each with fixed priority. The emulator task executes the normal instruction set to which most applications are written; that instruction set is similar to, but not the same as, that of a Data General Nova. Other tasks serve the display, memory refresh, disk, network, and other I/O functions. As an example, the bitmap display controller is little more than a 16-bit shift register; microcode moves display refresh data from main memory to the shift register, which serializes it into a display of pixels corresponding to the ones and zeros of the memory data. Ethernet is likewise supported by minimal hardware, with a shift register that acts bidirectionally to serialize output words and deserialize input words. Its speed was designed to be 3 Mbit/s because the microcode engine could not go faster and continue to support the video display, disk activity and memory refresh.


title: Xerox Alto

text: Unlike most minicomputers of the era, Alto does not support a serial terminal for user interface. Apart from an Ethernet connection, the Alto's only common output device is a bi-level (black and white) cathode-ray tube (CRT) display with a tilt-and-swivel base, mounted in portrait orientation rather than the more common "landscape" orientation. Its input devices are a custom detachable keyboard, a three-button mouse, and an optional 5-key chorded keyboard (chord keyset). The last two items had been introduced by SRI's On-Line System; while the mouse was an instant success among Alto users, the chord keyset never became popular.


title: Xerox Alto

text: In the early mice, the buttons were three narrow bars, arranged top to bottom rather than side to side; they were named after their colors in the documentation. The motion was sensed by two wheels perpendicular to each other. These were soon replaced with a ball-type mouse, which was invented by Ronald E. Rider and developed by Bill English. These were photo-mechanical mice, first using white light, and then infrared (IR), to count the rotations of wheels inside the mouse.


title: Xerox Alto

text: The keyboard is interesting in that each key is represented as a separate bit in a set of memory locations. As a result, it is possible to read multiple key presses concurrently. This trait can be used to alter from where on the disk the Alto boots. The keyboard value is used as the sector address on the disk to boot from, and by holding specific keys down while pressing the boot button, different microcode and operating systems can be loaded. This gave rise to the expression "nose boot" where the keys needed to boot for a test OS release required more fingers than you could come up with. Nose boots were made obsolete by the "move2keys" program that shifted files on the disk so that a specified key sequence could be used.


title: Xerox Alto

text: Several other I/O devices were developed for the Alto, including a TV camera, the Hy-Type daisywheel printer and a parallel port, although these were quite rare. The Alto could also control external disk drives to act as a file server. This was a common application for the machine.


title: Xerox Alto

text: Early software for the Alto was written in the programming language BCPL, and later in Mesa, which was not widely used outside PARC but influenced several later languages, such as Modula. The Alto used an early version of ASCII which lacked the underscore character, instead having the left-arrow character used in ALGOL 60 and many derivatives for the assignment operator: this peculiarity may have been the source of the CamelCase style for compound identifiers. Altos were also microcode-programmable by users.


title: Xerox Alto

text: The Alto helped popularize the use of raster graphics model for all output, including text and graphics. It also introduced the concept of the "bit block transfer" operation (bit blit, BitBLT), as the fundamental programming interface to the display. Despite its small memory size, many innovative programs were written for the Alto, including:


title: Xerox Alto

text: There was no spreadsheet or database software. The first electronic spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, did not appear until 1979.


title: Xerox Alto

text: Technically, the Alto was a small minicomputer, but it could be considered a personal computer in the sense that it was used by one person sitting at a desk, in contrast with the mainframe computers and other minicomputers of the era. It was arguably "the first personal computer", although this title is disputed by others. More significantly (and perhaps less controversially), it may be considered to be one of the first workstation systems in the style of single-user machines such as the Apollo, based on the Unix operating system, and systems by Symbolics, designed to natively run Lisp as a development environment.


title: Xerox Alto

text: In 1976 to 1977 the Swiss computer pioneer Niklaus Wirth spent a sabbatical at PARC and was excited by the Alto. Unable to bring back one of the Alto systems to Europe, Wirth decided to build a new system from scratch and he designed with his group the Lilith. Lilith was ready to use around 1980, quite some time before Apple Lisa and Macintosh were released. Around 1985 Wirth started a complete redesign of the Lilith under the Name "Project Oberon".


title: Xerox Alto

text: In 1978 Xerox donated 50 Altos to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Rochester. The National Bureau of Standards's Institute for Computer Sciences in Gaithersburg, Maryland received one Alto in late 1978 along with Xerox Interim File System (IFS) file servers and Dover laser printers. These machines were the inspiration for the ETH Zürich Lilith and Three Rivers Company PERQ workstations, and the Stanford University Network (SUN) workstation, which was eventually marketed by a spin-off company, Sun Microsystems. The Apollo/Domain workstation was heavily influenced by the Alto.


title: Xerox Alto

text: Following the acquisition of an Alto, the White House information systems department sought to lead federal computer suppliers in its direction. The Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP) issued a request for proposal for a computer system to replace the aging Office of Management and Budget (OMB) budget system, using Alto-like workstations, connected to an IBM-compatible mainframe. The request was eventually withdrawn because no mainframe producer could supply such a configuration.


title: Xerox Alto

text: In December 1979, Apple Computer's co-founder Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC, where he was shown the Smalltalk-80 object-oriented programming environment, networking, and most importantly the WYSIWYG, mouse-driven graphical user interface provided by the Alto. At the time, he didn't recognize the significance of the first two, but was excited by the last one, promptly integrating it into Apple's products; first into the Lisa and then in the Macintosh, attracting several key researchers to work in his company.


title: Xerox Alto

text: In 1980–1981, Xerox Altos were used by engineers at PARC and at the Xerox System Development Department to design the Xerox Star workstations.


title: Xerox Alto

text: Xerox was slow to realize the value of the technology that had been developed at PARC. The Xerox corporate acquisition of Scientific Data Systems (SDS, later XDS) in the late 1960s had no interest with PARC. PARC built their own emulation of the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-10 named the MAXC. The MAXC was PARC's gateway machine to the ARPANET. The firm was reluctant to get into the computer business again with commercially untested designs, although many of the philosophies would ship in later products.


title: Xerox Alto

text: After the Alto, PARC developed more powerful workstations (none intended as projects) informally termed "the D-machines": Dandelion (least powerful, but the only to be made a product in one form), Dolphin; Dorado (most powerful; an emitter-coupled logic (ECL) machine); and hybrids like the Dandel-Iris.


title: Xerox Alto

text: Before the advent of personal computers such as the Apple II in 1977 and the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) in 1981, the computer market was dominated by costly mainframes and minicomputers equipped with dumb terminals that time-shared the processing time of the central computer. Through the 1970s, Xerox showed no interest in the work done at PARC. When Xerox finally entered the PC market with the Xerox 820, they pointedly rejected the Alto design and opted instead for a very conventional model, a CP/M-based machine with the then-standard 80 by 24 character-only monitor and no mouse.


title: Xerox Alto

text: With the help of PARC researchers, Xerox eventually developed the Xerox Star, based on the Dandelion workstation, and later the cost reduced Star, the 6085 office system, based on the Daybreak workstation. These machines, based on the 'Wildflower' architecture described in a paper by Butler Lampson, incorporated most of the Alto innovations, including the graphical user interface with icons, windows, folders, Ethernet-based local networking, and network-based laser printer services.


title: Xerox Alto

text: Xerox only realized their mistake in the early 1980s, after Apple's Macintosh revolutionized the PC market via its bitmap display and the mouse-centered interface. Both of these were copied from the Alto. While the Xerox Star series was a relative commercial success, it came too late. The expensive Xerox workstations could not compete against the cheaper GUI-based workstations that arose in the wake of the first Macintosh, and Xerox eventually quit the workstation market for good.


title: Tanghulu

text: Tanghulu () or Tang hulu (), also called bingtang hulu (), is a traditional Northern Chinese snack consisting of several rock sugar-coated fruits of Chinese hawthorn ("Crataegus pinnatifida") on a bamboo skewer. It is named for its calabash-like shape. Tanghulu is often mistaken for regular candied fruits; however, it is coated in a hardened sugar syrup. This sweet and sour treat has been made since the Song Dynasty and remains popular throughout northern China.


title: Tanghulu

text: Chinese hawthorn is the traditional fruit used for the skewering of fruit, but in recent times vendors have also used various other fruits, such as cherry tomatoes, mandarin oranges, strawberries, blueberries, pineapples, kiwifruit, bananas, or grapes. The pits and seeds of the hawthorn are emptied out and are commonly filled with sweet red bean paste before being skewered and dipped.


title: Jonathan Hickman

text: Jonathan Hickman (born September 3, 1972) is an American comic book writer and artist, best known for his creator-owned series "The Nightly News", "The Manhattan Projects" and "East of West", as well as his lengthy stints as a writer on Marvel's "Fantastic Four", "The Avengers" and "The New Avengers". Hickman's other notable work at Marvel includes the "S.H.I.E.L.D." limited series, the creation of the "Fantastic Four" spin-off title "FF", as well as two crossover limited series, "Infinity" and "Secret Wars", both of which acted as centerpieces for the eponymous company-wide crossover storylines. Between 2019 and 2021, Hickman worked on "Dawn of X", a relaunch of various X-Men-related titles for which he provided the core storyline and concepts.


title: Jonathan Hickman

text: Jonathan Hickman was born and raised in South Carolina. He graduated from South Florence High School in Florence, South Carolina. After high school, Hickman earned a degree in Architecture.


title: Jonathan Hickman

text: Before breaking into comics, Hickman worked in the fields of Web and CD-ROM development and later, advertising. Between 2006 and 2008, Hickman published his debut comic book series "The Nightly News" and "Pax Romana", both of which he wrote, drew, colored and lettered, through Image. Soon after, he was invited to write for Marvel, and, in 2009, Hickman launched his first ongoing series "Secret Warriors" which followed Nick Fury and a group of superpowered operatives as they undertook espionage operations in the wake of the company-wide crossover storyline "Secret Invasion". The following year, Hickman wrote the "S.H.I.E.L.D." limited series which detailed the secret history of the eponymous spy organization operating within the Marvel Universe. During this period, he continued to publish various creator-owned projects through Image: "Transhuman" with artist J. M. Ringuet, "A Red Mass for Mars" with artist Ryan Bodenheim and "The Red Wing" with Nick Pitarra.


title: Jonathan Hickman

text: In 2009, Hickman began his run on "Fantastic Four" with the "Dark Reign: Fantastic Four" limited series, illustrated by Sean Chen, taking over the series proper with issue #570, drawn by Dale Eaglesham. In the storyline "Three", which concluded in "Fantastic Four" #587, the Human Torch appeared to die stopping a horde of monsters from the other-dimensional Negative Zone. The series ended with the following issue and was relaunched as simply "FF". Hickman finished his run on the Fantastic Four and became the writer of "The Avengers" and "The New Avengers" as part of the Marvel NOW! relaunch in late 2012. Hickman's run on the titles spawned two company-wide crossover storylines, "Infinity" in 2013 and "Secret Wars" in 2015. After taking a leave from Marvel to focus on his long-form creator-owned titles, Hickman returned to the publisher for "Dawn of X", the 2019 relaunch of the X-Men family of titles which began with the "House of X" and "Powers of X" limited series that laid out the new status quo developed by Hickman. He subsequently wrote the core "X-Men" series while the creators of other titles worked closely under his supervision. Hickman announced his departure from writing "X-Men" in August of 2021.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: The 1999 Seattle WTO protests, sometimes referred to as the Battle of Seattle, were a series of protests surrounding the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999, when members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) convened at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle, Washington on November 30, 1999. The Conference was to be the launch of a new millennial round of trade negotiations.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: The negotiations were quickly overshadowed by massive street protests outside the hotels and the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. The protests were nicknamed "N30", akin to J18 and similar mobilizations, and were deemed controversial by the media. The large scale of the demonstrations, estimated at no fewer than 40,000 protesters, dwarfed any previous demonstration in the United States against a world meeting of any of the organizations generally associated with economic globalization, such as the WTO, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: Planning for the actions began months in advance and included local, national, and international organizations. Among the most notable participants were national and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as Global Exchange (especially those concerned with labor issues, the environment, and consumer protection), labor unions (including the AFL–CIO), student groups, religion-based groups (Jubilee 2000), and anarchists (some of whom formed a black bloc). The protests also drew support from some political conservatives, such as American presidential candidate and commentator Pat Buchanan.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: The coalition was loose, with some opponent groups focused on opposition to WTO policies (especially those related to free trade), with others motivated by prolabor, anticapitalist, or environmental agendas. Many of the NGOs represented at the protests came with credentials to participate in the official meetings, while also planning various educational and press events. The AFL–CIO, with cooperation from its member unions, organized a large permitted rally and march from Seattle Center to downtown.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: However, others were more interested in taking direct action, including both civil disobedience and acts of vandalism and property destruction to disrupt the meeting. Several groups were loosely organized together under the Direct Action Network (DAN), with a plan to disrupt the meetings by blocking streets and intersections downtown to prevent delegates from reaching the convention center, where the meeting was to be held. The black bloc was not affiliated with DAN, but was responding to the original call for autonomous resistance actions on November 30 issued by People's Global Action.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: Of the different coalitions that aligned in protest were the "teamsters and turtles" – a blue–green alliance consisting of the teamsters (trade unions) and environmentalists.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: Certain activists, including locals and an additional group of anarchists from Eugene, Oregon (where they had gathered that summer for a music festival), advocated more confrontational tactics, and conducted vandalism of corporate properties in downtown Seattle. In a subsequent communique, they listed the particular corporations targeted, which they considered to have committed corporate crime.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: On July 12, the "Financial Times" reported that the latest United Nations Human Development report advocated "principles of performance for multinationals on labour standards, fair trade and environmental protection ... needed to counter the negative effects of globalisation on the poorest nations". The report itself argued, "An essential aspect of global governance is responsibility to people—to equity, to justice, to enlarging the choices of all".


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: On July 16, Helene Cooper of "The Wall Street Journal" warned of an impending "massive mobilization against globalization" being planned for the end-of-year Seattle WTO conference. Next day, the London "Independent" newspaper savaged the WTO and appeared to side with the organizers of the rapidly developing storm of protest:


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: The way it has used [its] powers is leading to a growing suspicion that its initials should really stand for World Take Over. In a series of rulings it has struck down measures to help the world's poor, protect the environment, and safeguard health in the interests of private—usually American—companies.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: "The WTO seems to be on a crusade to increase private profit at the expense of all other considerations, including the well-being and quality of life of the mass of the world's people," says Ronnie Hall, trade campaigner at Friends of the Earth International. "It seems to have a relentless drive to extend its power."


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: On November 16, two weeks before the conference, President Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 13141—Environmental Review of Trade Agreements, which committed the United States to a policy of "assessment and consideration of the environmental impacts of trade agreements" and stated, "Trade agreements should contribute to the broader goal of sustainable development."


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: Activists staged a spoof of Seattle daily newspaper the "Post-Intelligencer" on Wednesday November 24, inserting thousands of hoax editions of a four-page front-page wrap-around into piles of newspapers awaiting distribution to hundreds of street boxes and retail outlets. The spoof front-page stories were "Boeing to move overseas" (to Indonesia) and "Clinton pledges help for poorest nations". The byline on the Boeing story attributed it to Joe Hill (a union organizer who had been executed by firing squad in Utah in 1915). On the same day, the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development reported:


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: developing countries have remained steadfast in their demand that developed countries honour Uruguay Round commitments before moving forward full force with new trade negotiations.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: Specifically, developing countries are concerned over developed countries' compliance with agreements on market access for textiles, their use of antidumping measures against developing countries' exports, and over-implementation of the WTO Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs).


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: On the morning of Tuesday, November 30, 1999, the DAN's plan was put into effect. Several hundred activists arrived in the deserted streets near the convention center and began to take control of key intersections. Over the next few hours, a number of marchers began to converge on the area from different directions. These included a student march from the north, a march of citizens of the developing world who marched in from the south and, beginning around 09:00, militant anarchists (in a formation known as a black bloc) marching down Pike Street from 6th Avenue, blockading the streets with newspaper boxes and smashing windows. Some demonstrators held rallies, others held teach-ins and at least one group staged an early-morning street party. Meanwhile, a number of protesters still controlled the intersections using lockdown formations.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: That morning, the King County Sheriff's Office and Seattle Police Department fired pepper spray, tear gas canisters, and stun grenades at protesters at several intersections in an attempt to reopen the blocked streets and allow as many WTO delegates as possible through the blockade. At 6th Avenue and Union Street, the crowd threw objects back at the police.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: By late morning, the black bloc had swelled to 200 people and smashed dozens of shops and police cars. This seems to have set off a chain reaction of sorts, with previously nonviolent protesters throwing bottles at police and joining in the vandalism shortly before noon.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: The police were eventually overwhelmed by the mass of protesters downtown, including many who had chained themselves together and were blocking intersections. Meanwhile, the late-morning labor-organized rally and march drew tens of thousands; though the intended march route had them turning back before they reached the convention center, some ignored the marshals and joined what had become a chaotic scene downtown.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: At noon, the opening ceremony at the convention center was officially canceled. It took police much of the afternoon and evening to clear the streets. Seattle mayor Paul Schell declared a state of emergency, imposed a curfew, and a 50-block "no-protest zone."


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: Overnight, the governor of Washington, Gary Locke, called in two battalions of Army National Guardsmen, other law enforcement agencies sent support, and before daylight on Wednesday, troops and officers lined the perimeter of the no-protest zone. Police surrounded and arrested several groups of would-be protesters (and more than one bystander). Beginning at 21:00, a major clash took place on Broadway in the vicinity of Denny Way, involving rocks, bottles, and police concussion grenades. It did not involve a black bloc, but appears to have included local residents, although it is known that many local residents were treated as protesters, even being teargassed, despite having no part in the protests. Police called in from other cities mistook the typically crowded streets of Capitol Hill as groups of protesters. More than 500 people were jailed on Wednesday. Throughout the day, police used tear gas to disperse crowds downtown, although a permitted demonstration organized by the Steelworkers Union was held along the waterfront.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: Protests continued the following days. Thousands demonstrated outside the Seattle Police Department protesting their tactics and arrests of peaceful protestors. President Clinton arrived and attended the conference. On December 3 the conference ended as delegations were unable to reach agreements, partly in response to the protests.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: Confrontations with the police continued, albeit at a lower intensity. The primary goal of disrupting the trade talks achieved, some sought the horizons of possibility; it was determined quickly that the necessary ambition to achieve the broader goals of various anarchist factions was not sufficient.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: "The New York Times" printed an erroneous article that stated that protesters at the 1999 WTO convention in Seattle threw Molotov cocktails at police. Two days later, "The New York Times" printed a correction saying that the protest was mostly peaceful and no protesters were accused of throwing objects at delegates or the police, but the original error persisted in later accounts in the mainstream media.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: The level of panic among police is evident from radio communication and from their inflated crowd estimates, which exceed the numbers shown on news videotapes. ARC investigators found the rumors of "Molotov cocktails" and sale of flammables from a supermarket had no basis in fact. But, rumors were important in contributing to the police sense of being besieged and in considerable danger.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: An article in the magazine "The Nation" disputed that Molotov cocktails have ever been thrown at an antiglobalization protest within the US.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: Though media coverage of the Battle in Seattle condemned the violence of some of the protesters, the nature of this violence has been justified by some people. Specifically, the violence employed was not person-to-person violence, but "acts directed toward property, not people."


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: Though many still denounced the violent tactics used by protesters of the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle, this violence clearly resulted in increased media coverage of the event. The WTO meeting had an increase in evening news airtime from 10 minutes and 40 seconds on the first day of the meeting to 17 minutes on the first day of violence. In addition, WTO coverage was the lead or second story on CNN, ABC, CBS, and NBC after violence was reported. Two days after the start of violence, the meeting remained the top story on three of the four networks. Though these numbers alone are telling, the media coverage of subsequent demonstrations that did not include violence by protesters shows even more the effect of violence on coverage. For example, the World Bank/International Monetary Fund (WB/IMF) meetings in the spring showed a "coverage pattern that was almost the reverse of that in Seattle" and that "suggests the crucial role of violence in garnering time on the public screen." In an even more striking example of the effects of violence on media coverage, the 2001 WTO meeting in Doha, Qatar, included no reports of violence. As a result, "there was absolutely no TV evening news coverage by the four major networks."


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: This coverage did not center exclusively on the violence. Instead, details of the protesters' message and antiglobalization campaign were included along with the discussions of symbolic violence taking place. DeLuca believes the violence served as a dense surface that opened viewers' and readers' minds to a whole new way of thinking about globalization and corporations' operations. That is, not only was this violence contained within the familiar setting of television, and not only did it meet the criteria of being dramatic and emotional enough to warrant air time, but it also shattered preconceived notions of globalization and the practices of corporations that drive so much of America's economy.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: To many in North American anarchist and radical circles, the Seattle WTO riots, protests, and demonstrations were viewed as a success. Prior to the "Battle of Seattle", almost no mention was made of "antiglobalization" in the US media, while the protests were seen as having forced the media to report on 'why' anybody would oppose the WTO.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: Previous mass demonstrations had taken place in Australia in December 1997, in which newly formed grass-roots organizations blockaded Melbourne, Perth, Sydney, and Darwin city centers.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: Controversy over the city's response to the protests resulted in the resignation of the police chief of Seattle, Norm Stamper, and arguably played a role in Schell's loss to Greg Nickels in the 2001 mayoral primary election. The massive size of the protest added $3 million to the city's estimated meeting budget of $6 million, partly due to city cleanup and police overtime bills. In addition, the damage to commercial businesses from vandalism and lost sales has been estimated at $20 million.


title: 1999 Seattle WTO protests

text: On January 16, 2004, the city of Seattle settled with 157 individuals arrested outside of the no-protest zone during the WTO events, agreeing to pay them a total of $250,000. On January 30, 2007, a federal jury found that the city had violated protesters' Fourth Amendment constitutional rights by arresting them without probable cause or evidence.


title: Matthew Needham

text: Matthew George Timothy Needham (born 13 April 1984) is a British actor. He has worked on stage and screen, appearing in television series such as "Casualty", "Endeavour", and "Sanditon". For his performance in the play "Britannicus", he was nominated the 2011 Ian Charleson Award.


title: Matthew Needham

text: As of 2022, Needham portrays Larys Strong on the HBO fantasy series "House of the Dragon". His performance in the series has received critical acclaim.


title: Matthew Needham

text: Needham is from Kingston upon Thames. He appeared in "The Wind in the Willows" at the National Theatre when he was six years old. He attended Claremont Fan Court School. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Acting from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art in 2007.


title: Matthew Needham

text: Needham has performed on stage for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Court Theatre, Royal National Theatre, Almeida Theatre, and Shakespeare's Globe. He was nominated for the 2011 Ian Charleson Award.


title: Matthew Needham

text: In 2015, Needham starred in the short film "Stutterer", written and directed by Benjamin Cleary and produced by Serena Armitage and Shan Christopher Ogilvie. The film won Best Live Action Short Film at the 88th Academy Awards.


title: Matthew Needham

text: In January 2017, he appeared in episode 2 of series 4 of the ITV drama series "Endeavour", "Canticle", in the role of Dudley Cavan. In March 2017, he played Stanley Kowalski in the BBC Radio 3 production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" by Tennessee Williams.


title: Matthew Needham

text: Needham played Mr Crowe in the first series of the ITV period drama "Sanditon". As of 2022, he plays Larys Strong on the HBO fantasy series "House of the Dragon".


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Athanasius Kircher (2 May 1602 – 27 November 1680) was a German Jesuit scholar and polymath who published around 40 major works, most notably in the fields of comparative religion, geology, and medicine. Kircher has been compared to fellow Jesuit Roger Joseph Boscovich and to Leonardo da Vinci for his enormous range of interests, and has been honoured with the title "Master of a Hundred Arts". He taught for more than 40 years at the Roman College, where he set up a wunderkammer. A resurgence of interest in Kircher has occurred within the scholarly community in recent decades.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher claimed to have deciphered the hieroglyphic writing of the ancient Egyptian language, but most of his assumptions and translations in this field were later found to be incorrect. He did, however, correctly establish the link between the ancient Egyptian and the Coptic languages, and some commentators regard him as the founder of Egyptology. Kircher was also fascinated with Sinology and wrote an encyclopedia of China, in which he noted the early presence there of Nestorian Christians while also attempting to establish links with Egypt and Christianity.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher's work in geology included studies of volcanoes and fossils. One of the first people to observe microbes through a microscope, Kircher was ahead of his time in proposing that the plague was caused by an infectious microorganism and in suggesting effective measures to prevent the spread of the disease. Kircher also displayed a keen interest in technology and mechanical inventions; inventions attributed to him include a magnetic clock, various automatons and the first megaphone. The invention of the magic lantern is often misattributed to Kircher, although he did conduct a study of the principles involved in his "Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae".


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: A scientific star in his day, towards the end of his life he was eclipsed by the rationalism of René Descartes and others. In the late 20th century, however, the aesthetic qualities of his work again began to be appreciated. One modern scholar, Alan Cutler, described Kircher as "a giant among seventeenth-century scholars", and "one of the last thinkers who could rightfully claim all knowledge as his domain". Another scholar, Edward W. Schmidt, referred to Kircher as "the last Renaissance man". In "A Man of Misconceptions," his 2012 book about Kircher, John Glassie writes that while "many of Kircher's actual ideas today seem wildly off-base, if not simply bizarre," he was "a champion of wonder, a man of awe-inspiring erudition and inventiveness," whose work was read "by the smartest minds of the time."


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher was born on 2 May in either 1601 or 1602 (he himself did not know) in Geisa, Buchonia, near Fulda, currently Thuringia, Germany. From his birthplace, he took the epithets "Bucho, Buchonius" and "Fuldensis" which he sometimes added to his name. He attended the Jesuit College in Fulda from 1614 to 1618, when he entered the novitiate of the Society.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: The youngest of nine children, Kircher studied volcanoes owing to his passion for rocks and eruptions. He was taught Hebrew by a rabbi in addition to his studies at school. He studied philosophy and theology at Paderborn, but fled to Cologne in 1622 to escape advancing Protestant forces. On the journey, he narrowly escaped death after falling through the ice crossing the frozen Rhine — one of several occasions on which his life was endangered. Later, traveling to Heiligenstadt, he was caught and nearly hanged by a party of Protestant soldiers.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: From 1622 to 1624 Kircher was sent to begin his regency period in Koblenz as a teacher. This was followed by his assignment to Heiligenstadt, where he taught mathematics, Hebrew and Syriac, and produced a show of fireworks and moving scenery for the visiting Elector Archbishop of Mainz, showing early evidence of his interest in mechanical devices. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1628 and became professor of ethics and mathematics at the University of Würzburg, where he also taught Hebrew and Syriac. Beginning in 1628, he also began to show an interest in Egyptian hieroglyphs.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: In 1631, while still at Würzburg, Kircher allegedly had a prophetic vision of bright light and armed men with horses in the city. Würzburg was shortly afterwards attacked and captured, leading to Kircher being accorded respect for predicting the disaster via astrology, though Kircher himself privately insisted that he had not relied on that art. This was the year that Kircher published his first book (the "Ars Magnesia", reporting his research on magnetism), but having been caught up in the Thirty Years' War he was driven to the papal University of Avignon in France. In 1633 he was called to Vienna by the emperor to succeed Kepler as Mathematician to the Habsburg court. On the intervention of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the order was rescinded, and he was sent instead to Rome to continue with his scholarly work, but he had already embarked for Vienna.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: On the way, his ship was blown off course and he arrived in Rome before he knew of the changed decision. He based himself in the city for the rest of his life, and from 1634 he taught mathematics, physics and Oriental languages at the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University) for several years before being released to devote himself to research. He studied malaria and the plague, amassing a collection of antiquities, which he exhibited along with devices of his own creation in the Museum Kircherianum.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: In 1661, Kircher discovered the ruins of a church said to have been constructed by Constantine on the site of Saint Eustace's vision of a crucifix in a stag's horns. He raised money to pay for the church's reconstruction as the "Santuario della Mentorella", and his heart was buried in the church on his death.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher published a large number of substantial books on a very wide variety of subjects, such as Egyptology, geology, and music theory. His syncretic approach disregarded the boundaries between disciplines which are now conventional: his "Magnes", for example, was ostensibly a discussion of magnetism, but also explored other forms of attraction such as gravity and love. Perhaps Kircher's best-known work today is his "Oedipus Aegyptiacus" (1652–54), a vast study of Egyptology and comparative religion.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: His books, written in Latin, were widely circulated in the 17th century, and they contributed to the dissemination of scientific information to a broader circle of readers. Kircher is not now considered to have made any significant original contributions, although a number of discoveries and inventions (e.g., the magic lantern) have sometimes been mistakenly attributed to him.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: In his foreword to "Ars Magna Sciendi Sive Combinatoria" (The Great Art of Knowledge, or the Combinatorial Art), the inscription reads:


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: The last known example of Egyptian hieroglyphics dates from AD 394, after which all knowledge of hieroglyphics was lost. Until Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion found the key to hieroglyphics in the 19th century, the main authority was the 4th-century Greek grammarian Horapollon, whose chief contribution was the misconception that hieroglyphics were "picture writing" and that future translators should look for symbolic meaning in the pictures.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: The first modern study of hieroglyphics came with Piero Valeriano Bolzani's "Hieroglyphica" (1556), and Kircher was the most famous of the "decipherers" between ancient and modern times and the most famous Egyptologist of his day. In his "Lingua Aegyptiaca Restituta" (1643), Kircher called hieroglyphics "this language hitherto unknown in Europe, in which there are as many pictures as letters, as many riddles as sounds, in short as many mazes to be escaped from as mountains to be climbed". While some of his notions are long discredited, portions of his work have been valuable to later scholars, and Kircher helped pioneer Egyptology as a field of serious study.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher's interest in Egyptology began in 1628 when he became intrigued by a collection of hieroglyphs in the library at Speyer. He learned Coptic in 1633 and published the first grammar of that language in 1636, the "Prodromus coptus sive aegyptiacus". Kircher then broke with Horapollon's interpretation of the language of the hieroglyphs with his "Lingua aegyptiaca restituta". Kircher argued that Coptic preserved the last development of ancient Egyptian. For this Kircher has been considered the true "founder of Egyptology", because his work was conducted "before the discovery of the Rosetta Stone rendered Egyptian hieroglyphics comprehensible to scholars". He also recognized the relationship between hieratic and hieroglyphic scripts.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Between 1650 and 1654, Kircher published four volumes of "translations" of hieroglyphs in the context of his Coptic studies. However, according to Steven Frimmer, "none of them even remotely fitted the original texts". In "Oedipus Aegyptiacus", Kircher argued under the impression of the "Hieroglyphica" that ancient Egyptian was the language spoken by Adam and Eve, that Hermes Trismegistus was Moses, and that hieroglyphs were occult symbols which "cannot be translated by words, but expressed only by marks, characters and figures." This led him to translate simple hieroglyphic texts now known to read as "ḏd Wsr" ("Osiris says") as "The treachery of Typhon ends at the throne of Isis; the moisture of nature is guarded by the vigilance of Anubis"


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Although Kircher's approach to deciphering texts was based on a fundamental misconception, some modern commentators have described Kircher as the pioneer of the serious study of hieroglyphs. The data which he collected were later consulted by Champollion in his successful efforts to decode the script. According to Joseph MacDonnell, it was "because of Kircher's work that scientists knew what to look for when interpreting the Rosetta stone". Another scholar of ancient Egypt, Erik Iversen, concluded:


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher was also actively involved in the erection of the Pamphilj obelisk, and added "hieroglyphs" of his design in the blank areas. Rowland 2002 concluded that Kircher made use of Pythagorean principles to read hieroglyphs of the Pamphili Obelisk, and used the same form of interpretation when reading scripture.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher had an early interest in China, telling his superior in 1629 that he wished to become a missionary to that country. In 1667 he published a treatise whose full title was "China monumentis, qua sacris qua profanis, nec non variis naturae & artis spectaculis, aliarumque rerum memorabilium argumentis illustrata", and which is commonly known simply as "China Illustrata", i.e. "China Illustrated". It was a work of encyclopedic breadth, combining material of unequal quality, from accurate cartography to mythical elements, such as a study of dragons. The work drew heavily on the reports of Jesuits working in China, in particular Michael Boym and Martino Martini.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: "China Illustrata" emphasized the Christian elements of Chinese history, both real and imagined: the book noted the early presence of Nestorian Christians (with a Latin translation of the Nestorian Stele of Xi'an provided by Boym and his Chinese collaborator, Andrew Zheng), but also claimed that the Chinese were descended from the sons of Ham, that Confucius was Hermes Trismegistus/Moses and that the Chinese characters were abstracted hieroglyphs.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: In Kircher's system, ideograms were inferior to hieroglyphs because they referred to specific ideas rather than to mysterious complexes of ideas, while the signs of the Maya and Aztecs were yet lower pictograms which referred only to objects. Umberto Eco comments that this idea reflected and supported the ethnocentric European attitude toward Chinese and native American civilizations:


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: "China was presented not as an unknown barbarian to be defeated but as a prodigal son who should return to the home of the common father". (p. 69)


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: In 1675, he published "Arca Noë", the results of his research on the biblical Ark of Noah — following the Counter-Reformation, allegorical interpretation was giving way to the study of the Old Testament as literal truth among Scriptural scholars. Kircher analyzed the dimensions of the Ark; based on the number of species known to him (excluding insects and other forms thought to arise spontaneously), he calculated that overcrowding would not have been a problem. He also discussed the logistics of the Ark voyage, speculating on whether extra livestock was brought to feed carnivores and what the daily schedule of feeding and caring for animals must have been.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher was sent the Voynich Manuscript in 1666 by Johannes Marcus Marci in the hope of Kircher being able to decipher it. The manuscript remained in the Collegio Romano until Victor Emmanuel II of Italy annexed the Papal States in 1870, though scepticism as to the authenticity of the story and of the origin of the manuscript itself exists. In his "Polygraphia Nova" (1663), Kircher proposed an artificial universal language.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: On a visit to southern Italy in 1638, the ever-curious Kircher was lowered into the crater of Vesuvius, then on the brink of eruption, to examine its interior. He was also intrigued by the subterranean rumbling which he heard at the Strait of Messina. His geological and geographical investigations culminated in his "Mundus Subterraneus" of 1664, in which he suggested that the tides were caused by water moving to and from a subterranean ocean.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher was also puzzled by fossils. He understood that fossils were the remains of animals. He ascribed large bones to giant races of humans. Not all the objects which he was attempting to explain were in fact fossils, hence the diversity of explanations. He interpreted mountain ranges as the Earth's skeletal structures exposed by weathering.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: "Mundus Subterraneus" includes several pages about the legendary island of Atlantis including a map with the Latin caption "Situs Insulae Atlantidis, a Mari olim absorpte ex mente Egyptiorum et Platonis Description," translating as "Site of the island of Atlantis, in the sea, from Egyptian sources and Plato's description."


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: In his book "Arca Noë", Kircher argued that after the Flood new species were transformed as they moved into different environments, for example, when a deer moved into a colder climate, it became a reindeer. Additionally, he held that many species were hybrids of other species, for example, armadillos from a combination of turtles and porcupines. He also advocated the theory of spontaneous generation. Because of such hypotheses, some historians have held that Kircher was a proto-evolutionist.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher took a notably modern approach to the study of diseases, as early as 1646 using a microscope to investigate the blood of plague victims. In his "Scrutinium Pestis" of 1658, he noted the presence of "little worms" or "animalcules" in the blood and concluded that the disease was caused by microorganisms. The conclusion was correct, although it is likely that what he saw were in fact red or white blood cells and not the plague agent, "Yersinia pestis". He also proposed hygienic measures to prevent the spread of disease, such as isolation, quarantine, burning clothes worn by the infected and wearing facemasks to prevent the inhalation of germs.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: In 1646, Kircher published "Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae", on the subject of the display of images on a screen using an apparatus similar to the magic lantern as developed by Christiaan Huygens and others. Kircher described the construction of a "catastrophic lamp" that used reflection to project images on the wall of a darkened room. Although Kircher did not invent the device, he made improvements over previous models, and suggested methods by which exhibitors could use his device. Much of the significance of his work arises from Kircher's rational approach towards the demystification of projected images.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Previously such images had been used in Europe to mimic supernatural appearances (Kircher himself cites the use of displayed images by the rabbis in the court of King Solomon). Kircher stressed that exhibitors should take great care to inform spectators that such images were purely naturalistic, and not magical in origin.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher also constructed a magnetic clock, the mechanism of which he explained in his "Magnes" (1641). The device had originally been invented by another Jesuit, Fr. Linus of Liege, and was described by an acquaintance of Line's in 1634. Kircher's patron Peiresc had claimed that the clock's motion supported the Copernican cosmological model, the argument being that the magnetic sphere in the clock was caused to rotate by the magnetic force of the sun.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher's model disproved the hypothesis, showing that the motion could be produced by a water clock in the base of the device. Although Kircher wrote against the Copernican model in his "Magnes", supporting instead that of Tycho Brahe, his later "Itinerarium exstaticum" (1656, revised 1671), presented several systems — including the Copernican — as distinct possibilities. The clock has been reconstructed by Caroline Bouguereau in collaboration with Michael John Gorman and is on display at the Green Library at Stanford University.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: The "Musurgia Universalis" (1650) sets out Kircher's views on music: he believed that the harmony of music reflected the proportions of the universe. The book includes plans for constructing water-powered automatic organs, notations of birdsong and diagrams of musical instruments. One illustration shows the differences between the ears of humans and other animals. In "Phonurgia Nova" (1673) Kircher considered the possibilities of transmitting music to remote places.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Other machines designed by Kircher include an aeolian harp, automatons such as a statue which spoke and listened via a speaking tube, a perpetual motion machine, and a Katzenklavier ("cat piano"). The last of these would have driven spikes into the tails of cats, which would yowl to specified pitches, although Kircher is not known to have actually constructed the instrument.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: In "Phonurgia Nova", literally new methods of sound production, Kircher examined acoustic phenomena. He explores the use of horns and cones in amplifying sound with architectural applications. He also examines the phenomena of echoes in rooms with domes of different shapes including the muffling effect of an elliptical dome from Heidelberg. In one section he also explores the therapeutic effects of music especially in tarantism, a theme from southern Italy.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Although Kircher's work was not mathematically based, he did develop various systems for generating and counting all combinations of a finite collection of objects (i.e., a finite set), based on the previous work of Ramon Llull. His methods and diagrams are discussed in "Ars Magna Sciendi, sive Combinatoria", 1669. They include what may be the first recorded drawings of complete bipartite graphs, extending a similar technique used by Llull to visualize complete graphs. Kircher also employed combinatorics in his Arca Musarithmica, an aleatoric music composition device capable of producing millions of church hymns by combining randomly selected musical phrases.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: For most of his professional life, Kircher was one of the scientific stars of his world: according to historian Paula Findlen, he was "the first scholar with a global reputation". His importance was twofold: to the results of his own experiments and research he added information gleaned from his correspondence with over 760 scientists, physicians and above all his fellow Jesuits in all parts of the globe. The "Encyclopædia Britannica" calls him a "one-man intellectual clearing house". His works, illustrated to his orders, were extremely popular, and he was the first scientist to be able to support himself through the sale of his books. His near-exact contemporary, the English philosopher-physician, Sir Thomas Browne (1605–82) collected his books avidly while his eldest son Edward Browne in 1665 visited the Jesuit priest resident at Rome. Towards the end of Kircher's life, however, his stock fell, as the rationalist Cartesian approach began to dominate (Descartes himself described Kircher as "more quacksalver than savant").


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher was largely neglected until the late 20th century. One writer attributes his rediscovery to the similarities between his eclectic approach and postmodernism.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: As few of Kircher's works have been translated, the contemporary emphasis has been on their aesthetic qualities rather than their actual content, and a succession of exhibitions have highlighted the beauty of their illustrations. Historian Anthony Grafton has said that "the staggeringly strange dark continent of Kircher's work [is] the setting for a Borges story that was never written", while Umberto Eco has written about Kircher in his novel "The Island of the Day Before", as well as in his non-fiction works "The Search for the Perfect Language" and "Serendipities". In "Where Tigers Are At Home", by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès, the protagonist works on a translation of a bogus 17th-century biography of Kircher. The contemporary artist Cybèle Varela has paid tribute to Kircher in her exhibition "Ad Sidera per Athanasius Kircher", held in the Collegio Romano, in the same place where the Museum Kircherianum was.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles has a hall dedicated to the life of Kircher. His ethnographic collection is in the Pigorini National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in Rome.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: John Glassie's book, "A Man of Misconceptions," traces connections between Kircher and figures such as Gianlorenzo Bernini, René Descartes, and Isaac Newton. It also suggests influences on Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Anton Mesmer, Jules Verne, and Marcel Duchamp.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: In the end, Glassie writes, Kircher should be acknowledged “for his effort to know everything and to share everything he knew, for asking a thousand questions about the world around him, and for getting so many others to ask questions about his answers; for stimulating, as well as confounding and inadvertently amusing, so many minds; for having been a source of so many ideas—right, wrong, half-right, half-baked, ridiculous, beautiful, and all-encompassing.”


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: Kircher's life and research are central to the plot of James Rollin's 2015 novel "The Bone Labyrinth".


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: He is also mentioned in "The Book of Life", the third book in the All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: The permanent exhibition "The World Is Bound with Secret Knots" at the Museum of Jurassic Technology is based on the life and work of Kircher and uses elaborate 3D technology to highlight the magical quality of many of his ideas and images.


title: Athanasius Kircher

text: He is also a character (though largely off-stage, he is often mentioned by other characters) in the "Ring of Fire" alternate history series (published by Baen). In it, he was sent back to Germany in the early 1630s, where he became the unofficial pastor of the Catholic church in the temporally-transplanted town of Grantville, Thuringia-Franconia.


title: Ryona

text: The word refers to a type of sexual fetish in hentai wherein a protagonist, usually female, is subject to physical or psychological abuse from an offender who is usually male. The term is mostly used in connection to Japanese culture, although the theme itself is seen in many other cultures.


title: Ryona

text: The term "ryona" almost exclusively refers to the action of a woman being abused by a man. In a case where the target is male, it is more commonly called . The genre focuses exclusively on fictional characters in these situations. In some cases, the perpetrator could be a monster or other non-human being.


title: Ryona

text: The term is contrasted with sexual sadism and rape pornography, in that ryona is a voyeuristic fantasy fetish, a romanticized subgenre aimed at a female target demographic and are almost always of non-explicit sexual nature.


title: Ryona

text: Works in the ryona genre usually depict two characters meeting and developing a relationship with each other, which may begin in or devolve into a state of hostility.


title: Maria Goretti (actress)

text: Maria Goretti Warsi is an Indian MTV VJ. She has hosted several TV shows including "Do It Sweet" on the NDTV Good Times channel and "I Love Cooking" on Living Foodz.


title: Maria Goretti (actress)

text: Goretti was a popular MTV VJ before being married to Arshad Warsi. She also hosted the TV show "Do It Sweet" on the NDTV Good Times channel. Goretti made a special appearance in the movie "Salaam Namaste" along with her son Zeke Warsi.


title: Maria Goretti (actress)

text: She did a small role in the movie "Raghu Romeo" directed by Rajat kapoor and a sci-fi movie Jaane Hoga Kya. She performed the famous song of Harbhajan Mann in album Oye-Hoye "Kudi Kad Ke Kalja Leigi, Gallan Goriyan Harbhajan Mann".


title: Maria Goretti (actress)

text: Goretti married Hindi Film actor Arshad Warsi on 14 February 1999, whom she met in 1991, when he was invited to judge a dance competition in college, in which she was participating. She completed the Mumbai Marathon in 2016.


title: Anna Hopkins

text: Anna Hopkins (born February 12, 1987) is a Canadian actress. She is best known for her role as Lilith in Freeform's original series "Shadowhunters" and documentary filmmaker Monica Stuart in "The Expanse".


title: Anna Hopkins

text: Hopkins was born in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, to Rita Hopkins, a graphic designer, and visual artist Tom Hopkins. She is of Jewish Romanian and Hungarian descent from her mother's side, and Scottish, Welsh descent on her father's side. She is fluent in French and English. She trained in hip hop dancing and planned to start a dancing career after high-school when her interests shifted to theatre.


title: Anna Hopkins

text: In 2012 Hopkins achieved a Bachelor of Arts in Communication Studies from the Concordia University and a Bachelor of Arts and Science from the Paris Institute of Political Studies in Paris.


title: Anna Hopkins

text: Hopkins first appeared in the miniseries "Human Trafficking" in 2005, and thenafter in Canadian television series and television films, among them the character of Samantha Clayton in a crossover of "The Flash" and "Arrow" in 2014, and was credited as writer for "Girl Couch". She also played in "Barney's Version" (2010) alongside Paul Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman, and "The Grand Seduction" starring Brendan Gleeson in 2013. One of her better-known roles was the recurring character Jessica 'Berlin' Rainer in the second and third seasons of the sci-fi series "Defiance". Hopkins was promoted to series regular for the third, and last season; "Defiance" was cancelled by SyFy on 16 October 2015.


title: Anna Hopkins

text: She was a Canadian Screen Award nominee for Best Lead Performance in a Web Program or Series at the 10th Canadian Screen Awards in 2022 for the web series "For the Record".


title: Nicky Arnstein

text: Julius Wilford "Nicky" Arnstein (born Arndstein; July 1, 1879October 2, 1965) was an American professional gambler and con artist. He was known primarily as Julius Arnold, but among his aliases were "Jules Arndtsteyn", "Nick Arnold," "Nicholas Arnold", "Wallace Ames", "John Adams", and "J. Willard Adair". He was best known as the second husband of entertainer Fanny Brice.


title: Nicky Arnstein

text: Arnstein was born Julius Arndstein in Berlin, German Empire. His father, Moses Arndstein, was a German Jew from Berlin who fought in the Franco-Prussian War. His mother, born Thekla van Shaw, was Dutch. The couple raised their children in the Episcopal Church. First settling in New Jersey, the couple had two other children besides middle-child Nicky; son Louis (born 1877), and daughter Gesina (born 1883).


title: Nicky Arnstein

text: "Nicky" was short for nickel plate, a sobriquet bestowed in the 1890s when, as a boy, Arnstein rode a gleaming nickel-plated bicycle in the then-popular bike racing craze. However, he spent more time throwing races than winning them. He graduated to gambling on transatlantic liners and in European casinos, and eventually fell in with Arnold Rothstein, a loan shark, bookmaker, fence, Wall Street swindler, real estate speculator, and labor racketeer, who was best known for fixing the 1919 World Series.


title: Nicky Arnstein

text: In 1915, Arnstein was convicted of swindling, and the following year he entered Sing Sing to serve out his term. Fanny Brice visited him every week while he was there, and in 1918 Arnstein's wife Carrie sued her for alienation of his affection. She subsequently divorced him, leaving him free to marry Brice in October of that year.


title: Nicky Arnstein

text: Arnstein and Brice had two children, daughter Frances Arnstein Stark (1919-1992) and son William Arnstein (1921-2008), a graphic artist later known professionally as William Brice.


title: Nicky Arnstein

text: On May 16, 1924, having been convicted of conspiracy to carry stolen securities into the District of Columbia, Arnstein entered Leavenworth prison, where he remained for three years. Brice divorced him on September 17, 1927, soon after his release.


title: Nicky Arnstein

text: Arnstein remained out of trouble for the rest of his life. He lived long enough to see himself immortalized in the 1964 Broadway musical "Funny Girl", in which he was portrayed by Sydney Chaplin. In the musical, Arnstein is found guilty of embezzlement, has never been married to anyone but Fanny, and serves only one prison sentence – after being married for several years. Omar Sharif assumed the role in the 1968 film and its 1975 sequel, "Funny Lady".


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: "Sonic and the Black Knight" received mixed reviews, with praise for its graphics, presentation and abundance of bonus content, but criticism of the game's controls, swordplay mechanics and multiplayer aspect. "Sonic and the Black Knight" was de-listed from retailers in 2010, following Sega's decision to remove all Sonic series titles with sub-average Metacritic scores in order to increase the value of the brand.


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: Gameplay differs from traditional games in the "Sonic" series by mixing in the new element of swordplay with the traditional "Sonic" platforming and speed. Swordplay is implemented through the Wii Remote. Gameplay is heavily inspired from "Sonic and the Secret Rings" with many of the same abilities and restrictions shared exclusively between the two games. Unlike other 3D Sonic games, Sonic cannot turn around, and is funneled into a set path automatically, only able to strafe left and right, move and backflip in reverse, or keep running forward. Unlike Sonic and the Secret Rings, however, Sonic's movement is controlled with the analog stick, making forward and backward movement more streamlined.


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: The stages feature townspeople that cheer the player on, and some that Sonic can interact with; these actions and the player's deeds will be judged at the end of each stage, updating his "knight ranking" accordingly. By interacting with these characters the player may do a quick-time button input. Doing so correctly will take away twenty of Sonic's rings and give them to the townsperson, and in return, he receives a gift at the end of the stage. In some stages, it is required to give a specific amount of rings to townspeople before reaching the goal. In stages where this is not required the townsperson will reward Sonic with an item. There are 242 items in the game, some of which can be gained by opening treasure chests in the stages. Any items collected during a stage must be identified at the end of the stage by using Sonic's "ID points". Rarer items cost more ID points than others. An online mode allows treasures to be traded between registered friends.


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: The game changes the traditional level items, such as springs and speed pads, into "fairies." These fairies come in varying colors; Yellow elements will be used as a group of one to twenty rings, Blue fairies will be used as speed boosts and springs, and Red will be used to fill the "Soul gauge." This gauge is filled by defeating enemies and collecting Red Fairies, and is used to unleash a powerful lock-on attack, Soul Surge. On only the first few stages, the "pearls" from the previous game, "Sonic and the Secret Rings", appear as apples.


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: The skill system from "Sonic and the Secret Rings" also returns, but has been revised into a more standard linear progression system, Each playable character has three styles to choose from. At first, only the balanced "Knight" style is available, but later, "Cavalier" and "Paladin" styles are unlocked. They deal with the aspects of speed and power, respectively. As levels are completed, the player gains a number of "Followers" that is used as Experience and as the number of followers goes up, the number of skills the player has in a certain style are permanently increased. The "styles" of characters beside Sonic are not increased; Rather, their swords' abilities and skills are enhanced.


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: Once the "Knight's Quest" part of the story is reached, Sir Gawain (Knuckles the Echidna), Sir Lancelot (Shadow the Hedgehog), and Sir Percival (Blaze the Cat) will be playable from that point on. Each has their own characteristics; for instance, Knuckles wields dual swords that double as boomerangs and has the ability to glide, Blaze can surround herself with fire and use more lunge attacks than Sonic, and Shadow can use Chaos Powers. In story mode, they can use different swords than their own swords, unlike Sonic, who can only wield Caliburn.


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: Up to four players can play in the game's multiplayer, choosing between one of 12 characters to partake in a number of different kinds of battles. Characters include Sonic, Lancelot (Shadow), Gawain (Knuckles), Percival (Blaze), Blacksmith (Tails), Lady of the Lake (Amy Rose), Galahad (Silver the Hedgehog), Lamorak (Jet the Hawk), regular Shadow, regular Knuckles, regular Blaze and King Arthur.


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: A wizard named Merlina, granddaughter of Merlin, attempts to flee from a black knight and his forces. Cornered, she performs a spell calling forth a champion to save her, summoning Sonic the Hedgehog. As they retreat, Merlina explains to Sonic that the black knight is actually King Arthur, who has been corrupted by the immortality granted by Excalibur's scabbard, and that Sonic must defeat him to restore peace to the kingdom. With Sonic's speed alone being insufficient to defeat the King, he takes up the talking sword Caliburn.


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: At Caliburn's suggestion, Sonic meets up with the Lady of the Lake, Nimue (this world's version of Amy Rose), who tests Sonic to prove he is a worthy Knight. After completing her tasks, Nimue tells him that he must collect the sacred swords wielded by Lancelot, Gawain and Percival of the Round Table (this world's versions of Shadow, Knuckles and Blaze respectively) in order to dispel the immortality granted by Excalibur's scabbard. Defeating each of the Knights, Sonic claims all three swords and challenges the King once more, destroying him.


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: Sonic takes the scabbard back to Merlina, who reveals that there was never any King Arthur, and what he defeated was an illusion created by her grandfather Merlin, with Merlina manipulating Sonic in order to claim Excalibur's scabbard as her own. Merlina plans to use its power to make the kingdom changeless and eternal in hopes of averting the kingdom's fate from the legends. However, her plan is completely flawed, as such a world, going against the natural order of things, would not function properly, and it would come at the cost of innocent lives. She summons the underworld directly into the kingdom, creating the Dark Hollow and forcing Sonic and the Knights to flee. Nimue explains that the sacred swords can be used to form a barrier to prevent the Dark Hollow's spread, so Sonic and the Knights split up and journey to the kingdom's corners to form the barrier, but it proves to be too weak and the hollow continues to grow.


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: Sonic enters the Dark Hollow himself to confront Merlina, who has now become the Dark Queen, but she proves too powerful, destroying Caliburn and badly injuring Sonic. Seeing Sonic's continued resolve to stop the witch, Nimue and the Knights give Sonic the power of the sacred swords to restore Caliburn – now revealed to be the true Excalibur – and Sonic transforms into an armored super form called Excalibur Sonic. He defeats Merlina, destroying the Dark Hollow. After the battle, Sonic tells Merlina that, while everything has an end, people should live their lives to the fullest until that day comes. With King Arthur revealed as an illusion, the Knights of the Round Table prepare to disband, but Caliburn reminds them that he is the one who chooses the true king, now revealed to be Sonic.


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: In a post-credits cutscene, Sonic returns to his world and tells Amy about his adventures, but she believes it to be an excuse for missing their planned date. The game ends in a similar manner to "Sonic and the Secret Rings", with the title of the book "King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table" changing to "Sonic and the Black Knight".


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: "Sonic and the Black Knight" was first revealed at Nintendo's pre-Tokyo Game Show (TGS) 2008 press conference. Developer Sonic Team, a subsidiary of publisher Sega, decided to focus on combat and cinematic presentation for the game rather than the level design-oriented "Sonic Unleashed" (2008).


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: "Face to Faith: Sonic and the Black Knight Vocal Trax" is the game's official vocal songs soundtrack that was released on April 8, 2009 in Japan. It features five vocal tracks that were featured in the game, with "Seven Rings in Hand ~Fairytales in Trance~" by Bentley Jones and "With Me ~Massive Power Mix~" by Crush 40 as brand new bonus tracks created especially for the album.


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: "Tales of Knighthood: Sonic and the Black Knight Original Soundtrax" is the game's original soundtrack. It was released by Wave Music Entertainment in Japan on April 8, 2009.


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: "Sonic and the Black Knight" was met with mixed reviews from critics. It received a score of 55.19% on GameRankings and 54/100 on Metacritic, indicating "mixed or average reviews". The game entered the Japanese sales chart at 30th place, and the North American Wii charts at tenth. It was de-listed in 2010, following on from Sega's decision to remove all Sonic titles with mixed Metacritic scores from retail stores in order to increase the value of the brand after positive reviews for "" and "Sonic Colors".


title: Sonic and the Black Knight

text: "IGN"s Matt Casamassina praised the game's visuals and the overall presentation, but went on to state that the gameplay was "broken" and cited the controls as "unresponsive". GameDaily criticized the "repetitive combat, easy missions and limited controls keep it from greatness," but acknowledged its "attractive presentation, decent combat and bonus content." Chris Scullion from the UK's "Official Nintendo Magazine" praised the game's visuals and soundtrack, but criticized the swordplay mechanics and multiplayer element. GameSpot's Carolyn Petit noted that, while the sword is useful slashing through enemies, there is a noticeable delay from the time swinging the Wii Remote and the time Sonic actually swings. 1Up.com's Sam Kennedy gave the game a C+ stating, "Black Knight is a competent action game starring Sonic and friends, but one that's replaced the classic gameplay Sonic fans seek with overly simple swordplay. It'll do the trick just fine for younger players still infatuated with the blue porcupine, but everyone else will likely be just as let down as I was." "Videogamer.com" gave the game a 5 out of 10 which read, "Even if you accept that the Sonic games aren’t built for hardcore gamers, that they’re now designed to appeal to the mainstream, that’s no reason to accept shoddy gameplay."


title: And I Love Her

text: "And I Love Her" is a song recorded by English rock band the Beatles, written primarily by Paul McCartney and credited to the Lennon–McCartney partnership. It is the fifth track of their third UK album "A Hard Day's Night" and was released 20 July 1964, along with "If I Fell", as a single release by Capitol Records in the United States, reaching No. 12 on the "Billboard" Hot 100.


title: And I Love Her

text: The Beatles performed "And I Love Her" just once outside EMI Studios; on 14 July 1964 they played it for an edition of the BBC's "Top Gear" radio show, which was broadcast two days later. "And I Love Her" has been covered by a variety of artists, including Esther Phillips, Kurt Cobain and Cliff Richard.


title: And I Love Her

text: A majority of the composition shifts back and forth between the key of E and its relative minor C#m. It also changes keys altogether just before the solo, to F. The final chord is a D major. This technique of ending is known as Picardy third resolution.


title: And I Love Her

text: McCartney called "And I Love Her" "the first ballad I impressed myself with". Lennon called it McCartney's "first 'Yesterday'".


title: And I Love Her

text: Though the song was written mainly by McCartney, John Lennon claimed in an interview with "Playboy" that his major contribution was the middle eight section ("A love like ours/Could never die/As long as I/Have you near me").


title: And I Love Her

text: Beatles publisher Dick James lends support to this claim, saying that the middle eight was added during recording at the suggestion of producer George Martin (an early take of the song was released on "Anthology 1" in 1995, and the middle eight had not yet been added). According to James, Lennon called for a break and "within half an hour [Lennon and McCartney] wrote ... a very constructive middle to a very commercial song." McCartney, on the other hand, maintains that "the middle eight is mine ... I wrote this on my own. I would say that John probably helped with the middle eight, but he can't say 'It's mine'." McCartney has credited George Harrison with composing the signature guitar riff, saying it "made a stunning difference to the song".


title: And I Love Her

text: "The 'And' in the title was an important thing – 'And I Love Her,' it came right out of left field, you were right up to speed the minute you heard it," McCartney said. "The title comes in the second verse and it doesn't repeat. You would often go to town on the title, but this was almost an aside: 'Oh ... and I love you.'"


title: And I Love Her

text: "Cash Box" described the song as an "extremely pretty, soft beat cha cha opus" that the Beatles "wax in soft and tender fashion."


title: And I Love Her

text: An instrumental version of "And I Love Her", orchestrated by George Martin, was released as a single with "Ringo's Theme (This Boy)" as the B-side on 18 July 1964. It failed to chart on the US "Billboard" Hot 100, peaking at number 105, while "Ringo's Theme (This Boy)" peaked at number 53 later that year. "And I Love Her" was included on Martin's Parlophone album "Off the Beatle Track" and the EP "Music From A Hard Day's Night" by the George Martin Orchestra, released on 19 February 1965. It was also included on the American "A Hard Day's Night" soundtrack album.


title: And I Love Her

text: Recorded by the Beatles over three days, in Abbey Road Studio Two, the sessions were produced by George Martin and engineered by Norman Smith. The second engineer was Richard Langham.