Return To the Middle Ages
D URING the First World War it was usual for the Allies to represent their cause as that of democracy, which was defined as the free and spontaneous movement of the human spirit, unfettered by logic. Germany, on the other hand, stood for machine-like regularity and cold, calculating rationality. Henri Bergson and Gustav LeBon grew quite eloquent on this theme. During the Second War, the roles were reversed. This time Germany was the country of blind instinct and wild emotional surges, moving in a kind of somnambulism and thinking with its blood. The West stood for reason and logic, for an ordered view of life in conformity with permanent rational values. In defiance of all respectable historiography, the United Nations were made the heirs of the cool and tranquil culture of Rome, with Christian universalism added, whereas Germany represented the survival of the frenetic barbarism of the Nordic pagans. Even the boundary line was supplied: it was the Wall of Limes in southern Germany, which marked the farthest outpost of permanent Roman settlement. Now that the Third War is in the offing, the boundary line has been changed, but the protagonists remain much the same. The Wall of Limes has moved to the Elbe, a shift which makes naturalized democrats of the Germans, who a short time ago were regarded as the mortal foes of democracy. On the west bank of the Elbe today stands Christian democracy, a sort of Joan of Arc, the champion of reason and natural law, while atheistic Bolshevism, foe of this two-millenial culture, glowers from the east bank. The reader can document this picture from his daily paper. There is nothing new or out of the way about this. The Incas, before conquering an adjoining people, used always to spread the story that their enemies were cannibals and deserved what they were about to get. What the Incas said may or may not have been true, but it is certain that the current representation of the East-West dispute is false. The idea of a unified Christendom with a common heritage was always a myth, and the myth itself was shattered at the Reformation. Democracy, again, is the product of the spiritual individualism and the secular rationalism which replaced the theocratic conception of a law of nature of the middle ages, and is altogether inconsistent with that conception. Ten years ago no one would have had the face to talk the kind of history that is now current.
Chinese Dreams of the Middle Ages
Dreams of a return to a golden age in remote antiquity were common tropes in imperial Chinese philosophy, literature and art. But such yearnings could also relate to the more recent past of a diffuse ‘Middle Period’ situated flexibly between the time of the legendary sage kings and the respective present. This article illustrates how evocations of this unwieldy era were re-signified through its association with Europe’s ‘Middle Ages’. Far from producing a unified image, the uneasy coupling opened up a space in between the normative poles of ‘antiquity’ and ‘modernity’ that served as a platform to negotiate competing visions of China’s past, present and future. Alternately romanticised or demonised, the Chinese medieval could be enlisted as a site of cultural nostalgia, social utopia or a tool of political propaganda. By reviewing a selection of these diverse uses, I aim to understand the limited but persistent appeal of medievalism in modern China. At the same time, I will explore what this example can teach us about the ways in which ‘colligatory concepts’ such as the Middle Ages and the obsessions that may be attached to them travel across cultural and linguistic boundaries.
Quantitative and qualitative relationship between swirl burner operatingconditions and pulverized coal flame length
Abstract Currently, there are used in power plants two types of burners to combustion the pulverized coal: jet burners and swirl burners. Most of the published works in the field of analysis of burners operating conditions are related to jet burners and are limited to initial region of the flame at the outlet of the burner. For jet burners an offset between the burner outlet and the flame beginning point could be analyzed. In the case of swirl burners with the pre-mixing diffuser chamber an offset between flame ignition point and burner outlet is usually not visible. Because already in the pre-mixing diffuser chamber of swirl burner occurs the ignition of coal-dust together with oxidant-gas cloud and thereby the formation of the flame. Therefore, the analysis of operating conditions for this types of burners requires a different approach. There is a lack of researches, in which will be analyzed changes of the flame length, that are caused by changes of design and operating parameters of swirl burner with the pre-mixing diffuser chamber. Therefore the aim of this study was to implement and verify the methodology for estimating the flame length, which will allow monitoring changes of operating conditions, that are caused by changes of design and operating parameters of swirl burner with the pre-mixing diffuser chamber. To carry out the analysis of the image of the coal flame, the two algorithms have been presented. This two algorithms, being based on the video images of the coal flame allows to specify and detect the end point of the flame and on that basis the length of the flame, as well as the fluctuation changes of flame length can be later determined. Both, the change thermal loads of coal burner, streams of secondary air, as well as the constructional change of the angle of swirler assemblies, resulted in distinct changes in the length of the pulverized coal flame.