Propaganda e crítica social nas cronologias dos almanaques astrológicos durante a Guerra Civil inglesa no século XVII
This article is part of an extensive investigation carried out concerning the use of astrological almanacs during the English Civil War in the 17th century as a medium for propaganda and social criticism. During that conflict there were astrologers who were partisans of the Parliament, such as John Booker, and other who supported the King, such as George Wharton. This work analyses some of those publications, showing that the political commitment of the authors was noticeable in an explicit form (and sometimes in an indirect way) in those almanacs.
The Royalist War Effort
IN previous years a certain anecdote has received frequent quotation in works upon the Civil War. It concerns a husbandman at Marston Moor, who was ploughing his fields when the rival armies drew up there to fight the biggest battle of the war. On hearing that the conflict was produced by a quarrel between King and Parliament he replied ‘What, has they two fallen out again?’ It is time that this engaging character vanished from the pages of history. Not merely does the incident not occur in any contemporary source, but it is inherently ridiculous. The land concerned lies a few miles from York, site of a Royalist garrison to which such a farmer would have been forced to contribute money for the previous two years. For the past three months it had been besieged by an army of nearly 30,000 men, some of whom would certainly have requisitioned supplies from the hero of the story. His ignorance is as incredible as the flippancy with which he is said to have greeted the news of the fratricidal conflict between the two traditional guardians of the Common Weal. In place of this happy portrait of rural insouciance, successive local studies are drawing a picture of the Civil War as a terrible and protracted conflict which imposed unprecedented burdens upon the local community.
rPET detectors design and data processing
Small animal PET systems based on rotating planar detectors posses some interesting advantages for high sensitivity, high resolution imaging. We have designed the rPET detectors based on MLS crystals assembled on a 30times30 matrix optically coupled to a flat-panel PS-PMT. Weighted position readout circuits pre-process the 64 signals from the 8times8 anodes matrix, which are digitized using a charge-integrating converter. The amplification electronics, including the trigger output for coincidence detection, and the high voltage supply are integrated in a three PCBs stack that forms the base attached to the back of the PMT. The whole assembly is enclosed in a light tight, lead (Pb) shielded aluminum box. The detectors are mounted on a rotating gantry with more than 180 degrees rotation span. The digitized events are screened and histogramed, and a modified center of gravity algorithm removes from the position calculation those signals with poor signal to noise ratio. Apparent mean crystal size on the 511 keV field-flood images is 0.6 mm, mean peak-to-valley ratio is better than 8, and intrinsic resolution is 1.5 mm at the central row, with the energy window wide open. Sensitivity (CPS) for a pair of these detectors set in coincidence at 160 mm distance is 1%