text:
Wikipedia:PHP script tech talk

Simply put, isn't this page dead? I can't see what is still in pending and what is fixed. Also, the intro says "do not add bugs and feature requests here", most of stuff are about features and bugs.

''Yup, this page is dead. Those curious should direct themselves to the Wikitech-l mailing list or set something up on meta under How to become a Wikipedia hacker.''

This is the place to discuss bug fixes and planned feature on a more "technical" level. (See also the new wikitech-l mailing list.)

Please, do not add bugs and feature requests here: instead, see PHP script for more details of how to report bugs.

Serious bugs
Things that should be repaired ASAP.

diff won't work
I can't get diffs. It could be the cache, if it is running here already. Somebody please fix this! --Magnus Manske

 * Yes, it's a cache bug. I checked a fix into CVS last night, but forgot to mention it here. (2002/2/8) --Brion VIBBER

#REDIRECTs that end in an eternal edit conflict

 * Suggestions? --Magnus Manske
 * I'm probably stating the obvious here, but this appears to be caused by the page trying to redirect to a different page than has been specified. If this page doesn't exist (as is usually the case) then the page goes into edit mode when you click Save, which gives an edit conflict. If the page does exist, then no edit conflict occurs, but the redirect does not go to the expected place (as for Zundark/Old_Talk, which is redirected to user:Zundark but actually ends up at user:Zundark/Old_Talk). --Zundark, 2002 Feb 3

 * (2002/02/03 20:43 PST) Fix is in CVS for the problem when the redirected page does exist. (s/$this->$subPageTitle/$this->subPageTitle/) Doesn't seem to have fixed the doesn't-exist problem, I'll look at it some more. --Brion VIBBER

Volunteers wanted
These tasks need volunteers to hack'em!

Mask minor edits on Recent Changes
Might be fixed by a patch from Brion VIBBER and myself --Magnus Manske

Fix the Recent Changes "(# changes)" counter
Might be fixed by a patch from Brion VIBBER and myself --Magnus Manske
 * I just looked in cvs (thats 2002/2/4 00:02 Amsterdam time) and it seems you still add a variable $addoriginal to the count. But I think that is silly because you should never count the current page if you are counting the changes. So just remove $addoriginal and the problem is solved. -- Jan Hidders (PS. Wouldn't it be nice if the sign-shortcut ~ ~ ~ would always be replaced with name and time? :-))
 * Hey, that's a good idea! Especially for the bug-report pages... Brion VIBBER (2002/2/4 15:18 PST)
 * Yes, unfortunately it's the only thing that made sense in my remark. :-/ What I should have said was the following. The variable $addoriginal should be 0 if the page did not already exist the previous day and current page is a minor edit and the user does not want to see minor edits. -- Jan Hidders (2001/2/5 8:45 GMT+1)

Fixing some parser bugs

 * Especially the
 tags.

 * I've replaced removeHTMLtags with behavior more like the old usemod version; ie instead of forbidding a few tags, it allows only a small number. Thus, no <'span>, <'object> etc. However it still needs to be able to strip out unknown elements/parameters; I can still write naughty things like this. {this is a 'link' that isn't a link, and runs some JavaScript code} (2002/02/04 20:48 PST) --Brion VIBBER

 * Also, I commented out the line in subParseContents that makes &amp; followed by text that could be an entity into the entity. I suspect it was put in to fix pages that were getting over-escaped during editing, but that bug seems to be gone now and it just makes it hard to write the name of an entity. Ie, "&amp;" should *not* appear as just an ampersand, but an ampersand followed by "amp;". --BV

Brainstorming
Ideas for solutions needed here.

Speeding up the PHP script
This file is getting quite large, resulting in high compilation times. I suggest two steps : I started doing this now. --Magnus Manske
 * Taking apart "specialPages.php"
 * 1) make pages like "special_userlogout.php" for each function ("userlogout", in this case)
 * 2) after that, change the include statement so it only includes the needed function. This, in turn, can include other shared functions

 * Caching of pages for reading only (Jimbo's idea).
 * Could be tricky. Would have to adapt to viewing preferences and newly created pages (red/blue links).
 * It may be possible to cache a 'common' almost-final version, which can then have a regexp run over it to set the link color and paragraph justification, and then inserted into the header/footer; this would at least save parsing the wiki page every time. Still need to deal with new pages though... Simplest way might be to run the "which pages link to this" check on a newly created page and expire the cached versions of anything that does. --Brion VIBBER
 * A lot of the regexp work could be skipped by using a quick preprocessor (ideally one that slaps in the header/footer without even looking at the text) and/or CSS. --Uriyan
 * Yup. CSS won't handle the difference between red links and [classic links]? for new pages, though. I recommend we change or eliminate one or the other. --Brion VIBBER

I take that back, CSS should do fine there. How does this sound: This is a [new link]?. where we define either: a.newlink { color: red; } .newlinkedge { display: none; } or a.newlink { color: black; text-decoration: none; } .newlinkedge { } in the style sheet? The text portion will still be clickable in the old-style case, though that could probably be "fixed" if desired. --Brion VIBBER
 * (2002/02/03 15:05 PST) I've changed the CVS version to use style sheets for the link colors, paragraph justification, and text/background color. (Try it at my test server, if you can find your way around the partially Esperanto-localized interface.) Keeps down the number of things that need to be changed if somebody wants to change the styles further, and should make the HTML-ized page guts cacheable.

Caching proposal --Magnus Manske
 * 1) Create a new field in the cur table named cur_cache (MEDIUMTEXT), empty by default
 * 2) When a pages is saved after edit, the cache is cleared
 * 3) When a page is viewed,
 * 4) and the cache has been used X times, it is cleared (enforced up-to-date)
 * 5) and the cache entry contains text, the cache is adapted to current user settings and displayed
 * 6) and the cache is empty, the text is rendered, displayed and stored in the cache field
 * 7) When a new page is created, the cache of all pages that link to the new page is cleared
 * 8) Pages with  are not cached

 * Why not simply update the cache field every time the page is edited? You have to parse the page then anyway because it is presented after the edit. -- Jan Hidders PS. I know I'm getting annoying but can I say again that we first should measure which pages are eating up the server CPU time? Otherwise the implementation of caching might be a waste of time and effort that unnecessarily complicates the code.

 * On viewing an uncached page, the contents is rendered anyway. The result can be slightly altered and stored as the cache. Generating the cache upon saving means it will have to be rendered especially for that purpose, thus wasting resources. Also, when the cache is flushed, the page won't be cached again until after the next edit.
 * That said, we should of course check the special pages and improve their speed. I already (kinda) cached the Most Wanted. The other candidate is Orphans, but I don't know how to cache that; anyway, with de-orphanising progressing, the orphans list will get shorter, and the popularity of that page might drop.
 * Also, the Main Page has to run a database request each time it is viewed, to keep the an up-to-date article count.
 * Editing this page, connected with 10MBit to the Internet, wikipedia performs quite well; I know this will change once the US goes online ;) --Magnus Manske

 * I must be misunderstanding someting. After submitting I am always redirected to the page I just edited, right? So are you now suggesting that you would allow that I would then see an older cached version without the changes I just made? Isn't that a bit confusing for the writer? -- Jan Hidders

 * I suspect the sane behavior would be to clear the cache field when a page is saved (and the cache fields of any pages that link to it, if it's a new page). Then, when the page is loaded up again (for the edited page, that would be immediately), the empty cache is noticed and the page is rerendered and stored.

 * Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry for being unclear. I added a line to the proposal. --Magnus Manske

 * But why then do you need the rule for "enforce up-to-date"? -- Jan Hidders

 * Just a safety mechanism to ensure every page is updated once in a while. Might not be necessary, but it won't do much harm if set to a high value. --Magnus Manske

 * As far as the mainpage... how many pages actually use those things? Should we not cache pages that contain them? -- Brion VIBBER

 * No other pages have these, AFAIK. We could count the number of "{{" occurrences before and after variable replacement, and if it is unchanged, the page can be cached, otherwise not. --Magnus Manske

What eats server time

I suspect the RecentChanges viewings eat tremendous resources and are the bottleneck. The web server and the PHP script are usually snappy, because previewing, which doesn't need db access, is fast. Everybody working on the site calls RecentChanges every couple of minutes. The server sped up noticeably when Jimbo changed the default from 250 down to 50 pages. It seems that to create RecentChanges, we search through the whole cur table and then sort and present the latest n changes, correct? This means as the database grows, it will only get slower. How about this suggestion: add a new table recent_edits, which only stores information about the recent edits (page title, user name, comment, timestamp), so that we only need to dump out the first n entries from that table for every RecentChanges view (hopefully without need to sort them)? Maybe recent_edits doesn't even have to be a mysql table, just a list somehow that we prune down every once in a while. Or maybe even keep a ready made RecentChanges HTML page always up to date and serve it statically. 2/7/2002 AxelBoldt

 * I think this is a good idea; after all, the list of recent changes doesn't exactly change completely every time it's loaded; new things pop up on the top, and old things drop out of the range of interest on the bottom or, occasionally, in the middle. I'll try implementing this tonight... Brion VIBBER

 * On second thought, is this really necessary? Can't we index the table by cur_timestamp as well as by title/id? The database could then easily ignore all entries that had not been modified up to a certain point. I'm not really a MySQL guru though, I don't know how to implement this (or if there's some good reason why it can't be done). Cacheing the default display of RecentChanges is easy enough though, and ought to save a few cycles -- there are probably more views than there are changes. Brion VIBBER

 * Implemented caching for RecentChanges default settings. On my small test database (457 pages) I see a roughly 100% speedup on loading special:Recentchanges. (2002-02-08 00:33) Brion VIBBER

(2002/02/07 22:29 PST) I've added a 5-minute minimum wait between refreshes of WantedPages (see revision 1.2 of special_wantedpages.php and 1.14 of wikiTextEn.php). Good idea? Bad idea? Shouldn't affect legitimate users, but makes it slightly more difficult for malicious or accidental otver-refreshing to overwhelm the server. --Brion VIBBER

How about decentralizing the Wiki? If it was relatively easy to get different Wiki servers to talk to each other and do some automatic linking then it should speed things up significantly. I find the Wikipedia a great idea and I am prepared to provide some serverspace (because of my interests preferably the medical bit). --Mathis

 * Database operations & efficiency
 * I notice there are a lot of mysql_connect/mysql_close pairs in the code; depending on the page loaded, the database can be opened and closed from 5 to 12 times. This seems excessive to me... mysql_connect doesn't open a new connection if one is left open, and the connection is automatically closed when the script finishes. Surely the overhead of opening and closing multiple connection is worse than the overhead of having one connection open for the whole fraction of a second that it takes to run the several database operations needed by each page? Taking them out doesn't seem to affect performance significantly on my test machine, but I have a small database and I'm the only one using it. (Indeed, it may even make sense to use persistent connections.) --Brion VIBBER (2002/02/06 02:37 PST)
 * I can't access the CVS from here. Why don't you outcomment the mysql_close lines, and see what happens when Jimbo actually updates the running version (in a month or so;). If that works out, we could try the persistent connections, if not, we just remove the # again. --Magnus Manske
 * Okay, done. Guess we'll see what happens... mwoooh haa haa haa... Also, turns out I missed a lot of them in my initial count; revise that to "the database can be opened and closed from 10 to 21 times" per page. Brion VIBBER

We definitely should use persistent database connections (mysql_pconnect instead of mysql_connect). There's no point in constantly transmitting the same passwords and usernames. mysql_pconnect is a faster drop-in replacement for mysql_connect. It only speeds things up if php is running as an apache module, and I assume that's the case. 8/2/2002 AxelBoldt

 * Browser-specific page layout
 * I notice though, that the tables in the page layout are setting their border properties based on whether the user agent is Internet Explorer. This explains why the tables have thin black borders in Internet Explorer and no borders in Mozilla... Magnus, is there any reason for this? I'd prefer to replace the table with some CSS markup in any case. --Brion VIBBER
 * The reason is that I like the thin black lines in IE, but other browsers don't support that, they draw all lines black, which looks ugly (try it!). If you know how to change it, go right ahead :) --Magnus Manske
 * Done, checked in. Looks ever so slightly different in IE and Mozilla, but approximately the same as the previous behavior in IE. Also looks okay in Konqueror 2.2.1, ugly but visible in Opera 6 (some beta version I have), but still doesn't show in Netscape 4.x. Brion VIBBER 2002/02/04 15:21 PST

 * Pre-compiling of the PHP code.
 * Perhaps the Alternative PHP Cache could help? (I haven't tried it.) --Clifford Adams

 * Optimize slow code parts (where? why?)
 * Do we actually know what the slow parts are? My gut feeling is that the Recent Changes page is the slowest, but it would be nice if we could do some actual measurements on a server that is serving only one client but has a large database. (Does somebody have a big SQL dump?) Anyway, presuming that it is, I looked at the code and I think it can be made much much more optimal by combining the two SQL queries into one. Right now it computes a JOIN and a GROUP BY in PHP which can be done far more efficiently by the database. However, it should then be possible to do a GROUP BY on the day, which is now hidden in the time stamp. So we would split this column into a day column and a time column. Do I have your permission to attempt this? (But first I would like to know if it is worth it, i.e., if the Recent Changes page plays a major part in the slowing down. I thought Magnus said something about a memory leak in Apache, so perhaps we should try to find that first.) -- Jan Hidders
 * My (old) suggestion for Recent Changes optimization was to make it a separate table containing the last 5000+ changes. (The table would store only the RC-related data, not the actual page contents.  It could be simply added to by the edit function, and trimmed in daily/weekly maintenance.)  This table would eliminate the need for each RC page to search the *entire* DB looking for the most-recently-updated pages.  --Clifford Adams
 * It doesn't, it uses the indexes to do that. That's the whole point of using a database; they are usually very clever at these things. :-) I would like to add the remark that letting the database do the joins for you does often lead to a performance improvent of orders of magnitude. If I'm right this could be a major boost. -- Jan Hidders (2001/2/5 8:48 GMT+1)
 * But right now, as far as I can see, we don't index on cur_timestamp and we actually do search through the whole database for every RecentChanges request. That needs to be fixed asap. I agree that the RecentChanges code could be written a lot more elegantly using SQL joins. 2/8/2002 AxelBoldt

 * Eliminate the access count function ("This page has been accessed 6 times"). I have a feeling that the huge number of writes to the database may be killing performance.  A much less way to do this would be to process the Apache log files daily or hourly with a separate script.   --Clifford Adams
 * i think it'd be cool to make a new statistics module for logging all accesses in the db, this can be done as a mod to apache i belive, instead of sending hits to the log, you send em to a db, and using that for the hit counter, to keep db access sane using INSERT DELAYED would be a good compromise between realtime stats and efficiency, if you added database replication itd be one cool, scalable beast

 * The search could be sped up if we used a fulltext index and the match operation as described in http://www.mysql.com/doc/F/u/Fulltext_Search.html AxelBoldt

Resolved issues
These could probably be deleted or moved to a separate "what were we thinking? / what did we do when this broke before?" page.

Pages with "wiki.phtml" subpages

 * Anone has an idea why this is? I couldn't reproduce it with my local copy. --Magnus Manske
 * I haven't seen any of these lately. I *think* it was fixed by using an absolute path for $THESCRIPT. --Brion VIBBER

130.94.122.xxx bug

 * This is serious, because of its potential for masking vandalism.

 * Possible fix submitted; I suspect that there's some kind of proxying going on at the server end. But I could be totally wrong. --Brion VIBBER
 * We'll see, it is in the mail now... --Magnus Manske
 * Fixed as of Feb 4 02.

Change password does not work
For more details, see Bug Reports. Until this is fixed any users who change their password cannot log in (like me). --User:Chuck Smith
 * Strange. It works fine on my local copy. Tried to log in with your old password? --Magnus Manske

 * Apparently fixed sometime before 2002/2/8. Brion VIBBER

title: Wikipedia:PHP script tech talk


text:
Drought

A drought is a period of drier-than-normal conditions. A drought can last for days, months or years. Drought often has large impacts on the ecosystems and agriculture of affected regions, and causes harm to the local economy. Annual dry seasons in the tropics significantly increase the chances of a drought developing, with subsequent increased wildfire risks. Heat waves can significantly worsen drought conditions by increasing evapotranspiration. This dries out forests and other vegetation, and increases the amount of fuel for wildfires.

Drought is a recurring feature of the climate in most parts of the world, becoming more extreme and less predictable due to climate change, which dendrochronological studies date back to 1900. There are three kinds of drought effects, environmental, economic and social. Environmental effects include the drying of wetlands, more and larger wildfires, loss of biodiversity.

Economic impacts include disruption of water supplies for people, less agricultural productivity and therefore more expensive food production. Another impact is shortages of water for irrigation or hydropower. Social and health costs include the negative effect on the health of people directly exposed to this phenomenon (excessive heat waves), high food costs, stress caused by failed harvests, water scarcity, etc. Prolonged droughts have caused mass migrations and humanitarian crisis.

Examples for regions with increased drought risks are the Amazon basin, Australia, the Sahel region and India. For example, in 2005, parts of the Amazon basin experienced the worst drought in 100 years. Australia could experience more severe droughts and they could become more frequent in the future, a government-commissioned report said on July 6, 2008. The long Australian Millennial drought broke in 2010. The 2020–2022 Horn of Africa drought has surpassed the horrific drought in 2010–2011 in both duration and severity. More than 150 districts in India are drought vulnerable, mostly concentrated in the state of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and its adjoining Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, northern Karnataka and adjoining Maharashtra of the country.

Throughout history, humans have usually viewed droughts as disasters due to the impact on food availability and the rest of society. People have viewed drought as a natural disaster or as something influenced by human activity, or as a result of supernatural forces.

Definition
The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report defines a drought simply as "drier than normal conditions". This means that a drought is "a moisture deficit relative to the average water availability at a given location and season".

According to National Integrated Drought Information System, a multi-agency partnership, drought is generally defined as "a deficiency of precipitation over an extended period of time (usually a season or more), resulting in a water shortage". The National Weather Service office of the NOAA defines drought as "a deficiency of moisture that results in adverse impacts on people, animals, or vegetation over a sizeable area".

Drought is a complex phenomenon − relating to the absence of water − which is difficult to monitor and define. By the early 1980s, over 150 definitions of "drought" had already been published. The range of definitions reflects differences in regions, needs, and disciplinary approaches.

Categories
There are three major categories of drought based on where in the water cycle the moisture deficit occurs: meteorological drought, hydrological drought, and agricultural or ecological drought. A meteorological drought occurs due to lack of precipitation. A hydrological drought is related to low runoff, streamflow, and reservoir storage. An agricultural or ecological drought is causing plant stress from a combination of evaporation and low soil moisture. Some organizations add another category: socioeconomic drought occurs when the demand for an economic good exceeds supply as a result of a weather-related shortfall in water supply. The socioeconomic drought is a similar concept to water scarcity.

The different categories of droughts have different causes but similar effects:
 * 1) Meteorological drought occurs when there is a prolonged time with less than average precipitation. Meteorological drought usually precedes the other kinds of drought. As a drought persists, the conditions surrounding it gradually worsen and its impact on the local population gradually increases.
 * 2) Hydrological drought is brought about when the water reserves available in sources such as aquifers, lakes and reservoirs fall below a locally significant threshold. Hydrological drought tends to show up more slowly because it involves stored water that is used but not replenished. Like an agricultural drought, this can be triggered by more than just a loss of rainfall. For instance, around 2007 Kazakhstan was awarded a large amount of money by the World Bank to restore water that had been diverted to other nations from the Aral Sea under Soviet rule. Similar circumstances also place their largest lake, Balkhash, at risk of completely drying out.
 * 3) Agricultural or ecological droughts affect crop production or ecosystems in general. This condition can also arise independently from any change in precipitation levels when either increased irrigation or soil conditions and erosion triggered by poorly planned agricultural endeavors cause a shortfall in water available to the crops.

Indices and monitoring
Several indices have been defined to quantify and monitor drought at different spatial and temporal scales. A key property of drought indices is their spatial comparability, and they must be statistically robust. Drought indices include: High-resolution drought information helps to better assess the spatial and temporal changes and variability in drought duration, severity, and magnitude at a much finer scale. This supports the development of site-specific adaptation measures.
 * Palmer drought index (sometimes called the Palmer drought severity index (PDSI)): a regional drought index commonly used for monitoring drought events and studying areal extent and severity of drought episodes. The index uses precipitation and temperature data to study moisture supply and demand using a simple water balance model.
 * Keetch-Byram Drought Index: an index that is calculated based on rainfall, air temperature, and other meteorological factors.
 * Standardized precipitation index (SPI): It is computed based on precipitation, which makes it a simple and easy-to-apply indicator for monitoring and prediction of droughts in different parts of the world. The World Meteorological Organization recommends this index for identifying and monitoring meteorological droughts in different climates and time periods.
 * Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI): a multiscalar drought index based on climatic data. The SPEI accounts also for the role of the increased atmospheric evaporative demand on drought severity. Evaporative demand is particularly dominant during periods of precipitation deficit. The SPEI calculation requires long-term and high-quality precipitation and atmospheric evaporative demand datasets. These can be obtained from ground stations or gridded data based on reanalysis as well as satellite and multi-source datasets.
 * Indices related to vegetation: root-zone soil moisture, vegetation condition index (VDI) and vegetation health index (VHI). The VCI and VHI are computed based on vegetation indices such as the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and temperature datasets.
 * Deciles index
 * Standardized runoff index

The application of multiple indices using different datasets helps to better manage and monitor droughts than using a single dataset, This is particularly the case in regions of the world where not enough data is available such as Africa and South America. Using a single dataset can be limiting, as it may not capture the full spectrum of drought characteristics and impacts.

Careful monitoring of moisture levels can also help predict increased risk for wildfires.

General precipitation deficiency
Mechanisms of producing precipitation include convective, stratiform, and orographic rainfall. Convective processes involve strong vertical motions that can cause the overturning of the atmosphere in that location within an hour and cause heavy precipitation, while stratiform processes involve weaker upward motions and less intense precipitation over a longer duration.

Precipitation can be divided into three categories, based on whether it falls as liquid water, liquid water that freezes on contact with the surface, or ice.

Droughts occur mainly in areas where normal levels of rainfall are, in themselves, low. If these factors do not support precipitation volumes sufficiently to reach the surface over a sufficient time, the result is a drought. Drought can be triggered by a high level of reflected sunlight and above average prevalence of high pressure systems, winds carrying continental, rather than oceanic air masses, and ridges of high pressure areas aloft can prevent or restrict the developing of thunderstorm activity or rainfall over one certain region. Once a region is within drought, feedback mechanisms such as local arid air, hot conditions which can promote warm core ridging, and minimal evapotranspiration can worsen drought conditions.

Dry season
Within the tropics, distinct, wet and dry seasons emerge due to the movement of the Intertropical Convergence Zone or Monsoon trough. The dry season greatly increases drought occurrence, and is characterized by its low humidity, with watering holes and rivers drying up. Because of the lack of these watering holes, many grazing animals are forced to migrate due to the lack of water in search of more fertile lands. Examples of such animals are zebras, elephants, and wildebeest. Because of the lack of water in the plants, bushfires are common. Since water vapor becomes more energetic with increasing temperature, more water vapor is required to increase relative humidity values to 100% at higher temperatures (or to get the temperature to fall to the dew point). Periods of warmth quicken the pace of fruit and vegetable production, increase evaporation and transpiration from plants, and worsen drought conditions.

El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO)
The El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon can sometimes play a significant role in drought. ENSO comprises two patterns of temperature anomalies in the central Pacific Ocean, known as La Niña and El Niño. La Niña events are generally associated with drier and hotter conditions and further exacerbation of drought in California and the Southwestern United States, and to some extent the U.S. Southeast. Meteorological scientists have observed that La Niñas have become more frequent over time.

Conversely, during El Niño events, drier and hotter weather occurs in parts of the Amazon River Basin, Colombia, and Central America. Winters during the El Niño are warmer and drier than average conditions in the Northwest, northern Midwest, and northern Mideast United States, so those regions experience reduced snowfalls. Conditions are also drier than normal from December to February in south-central Africa, mainly in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Botswana. Direct effects of El Niño resulting in drier conditions occur in parts of Southeast Asia and Northern Australia, increasing bush fires, worsening haze, and decreasing air quality dramatically. Drier-than-normal conditions are also in general observed in Queensland, inland Victoria, inland New South Wales, and eastern Tasmania from June to August. As warm water spreads from the west Pacific and the Indian Ocean to the east Pacific, it causes extensive drought in the western Pacific. Singapore experienced the driest February in 2014 since records began in 1869, with only 6.3 mm of rain falling in the month and temperatures hitting as high as 35 °C on 26 February. The years 1968 and 2005 had the next driest Februaries, when 8.4 mm of rain fell.

Climate change

Globally, the occurrence of droughts has increased as a result of the increase in temperature and atmospheric evaporative demand. In addition, increased climate variability has increased the frequency and severity of drought events. Moreover, the occurrence and impact of droughts are aggravated by anthropogenic activities such as land use change and water management and demand.

The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report also pointed out that "Warming over land drives an increase in atmospheric evaporative demand and in the severity of drought events" and "Increased atmospheric evaporative demand increases plant water stress, leading to agricultural and ecological drought".

There is a rise of compound warm-season droughts in Europe that are concurrent with an increase in potential evapotranspiration.

Erosion and human activities
Human activity can directly trigger exacerbating factors such as over-farming, excessive irrigation, deforestation, and erosion adversely impact the ability of the land to capture and hold water. In arid climates, the main source of erosion is wind. Erosion can be the result of material movement by the wind. The wind can cause small particles to be lifted and therefore moved to another region (deflation). Suspended particles within the wind may impact on solid objects causing erosion by abrasion (ecological succession). Wind erosion generally occurs in areas with little or no vegetation, often in areas where there is insufficient rainfall to support vegetation.

Impacts
Drought is one of the most complex and major natural hazards, and it has devastating impacts on the environment, economy, water resources, agriculture, and society worldwide.

One can divide the impacts of droughts and water shortages into three groups: environmental, economic and social (including health).

Environmental and economic impacts
Environmental effects of droughts include: lower surface and subterranean water-levels, lower flow-levels (with a decrease below the minimum leading to direct danger for amphibian life), increased pollution of surface water, the drying out of wetlands, more and larger wildfires, higher deflation intensity, loss of biodiversity, worse health of trees and the appearance of pests and dendroid diseases.

Economic losses as a result of droughts include lower agricultural, forests, game and fishing output, higher food-production costs, lower energy-production levels in hydro plants, losses caused by depleted water tourism and transport revenue, problems with water supply for the energy sector and for technological processes in metallurgy, mining, the chemical, paper, wood, foodstuff industries etc., disruption of water supplies for municipal economies.

Further examples of common environmental and economic consequences of drought include:
 * Alteration of diversity of plant communities, which can have an impact on net primary production and other ecosystem services.
 * Wildfires, such as Australian bushfires and wildfires in the United States, become more common during times of drought and may cause human deaths.
 * Dust Bowls, themselves a sign of erosion, which further erode the landscape
 * Dust storms, when drought hits an area suffering from desertification and erosion
 * Habitat damage, affecting both terrestrial and aquatic wildlife
 * Snake migration, which results in snake-bites
 * Reduced electricity production due to reduced water-flow through hydroelectric dams
 * Shortages of water for industrial users

Agricultural impacts
Droughts can cause land degradation and loss of soil moisture, resulting in the destruction of cropland productivity. This can result in diminished crop growth or yield productions and carrying capacity for livestock. Drought in combination with high levels of grazing pressure can function as the tipping point for an ecosystem, causing woody encroachment.

Water stress affects plant development and quality in a variety of ways: firstly drought can cause poor germination and impaired seedling development. At the same time plant growth relies on cellular division, cell enlargement, and differentiation. Drought stress impairs mitosis and cell elongation via loss of turgor pressure which results in poor growth. Development of leaves is also dependent upon turgor pressure, concentration of nutrients, and carbon assimilates all of which are reduced by drought conditions, thus drought stress lead to a decrease in leaf size and number. Plant height, biomass, leaf size and stem girth has been shown to decrease in maize under water limiting conditions. Crop yield is also negatively effected by drought stress, the reduction in crop yield results from a decrease in photosynthetic rate, changes in leaf development, and altered allocation of resources all due to drought stress. Crop plants exposed to drought stress suffer from reductions in leaf water potential and transpiration rate. Water-use efficiency increases in crops such as wheat while decreasing in others, such as potatoes.

Plants need water for the uptake of nutrients from the soil, and for the transport of nutrients throughout the plant: drought conditions limit these functions leading to stunted growth. Drought stress also causes a decrease in photosynthetic activity in plants due to the reduction of photosynthetic tissues, stomatal closure, and reduced performance of photosynthetic machinery. This reduction in photosynthetic activity contributes to the reduction in plant growth and yields. Another factor influencing reduced plant growth and yields include the allocation of resources; following drought stress plants will allocate more resources to roots to aid in water uptake increasing root growth and reducing the growth of other plant parts while decreasing yields.

Social and health impacts
The most negative impacts of drought for humans include crop failure, food crisis, famine, malnutrition, and poverty, which lead to loss of life and mass migration of people.

There are negative effects on the health of people who are directly exposed to this phenomenon (excessive heat waves). Droughts can also cause limitations of water supplies, increased water pollution levels, high food-costs, stress caused by failed harvests, water scarcity, etc. Reduced water quality can occur because lower water-flows reduce dilution of pollutants and increase contamination of remaining water sources.

This explains why droughts and water scarcity operate as a factor which increases the gap between developed and developing countries.

Effects vary according to vulnerability. For example, subsistence farmers are more likely to migrate during drought because they do not have alternative food-sources. Areas with populations that depend on water sources as a major food-source are more vulnerable to famine. Further examples of social and health consequences include:
 * Water scarcity, crop failure, famine and hunger – drought provides too little water to support food crops; malnutrition, dehydration and related diseases
 * Mass migration, resulting in internal displacement and international refugees
 * Social unrest
 * War over natural resources, including water and food
 * Cyanotoxin accumulation within food chains and water supply (some of which are among the most potent toxins known to science) can cause cancer with low exposure over the long term. High levels of microcystin appeared in San Francisco Bay Area salt-water shellfish and fresh-water supplies throughout the state of California in 2016.

Loss of fertile soils
Wind erosion is much more severe in arid areas and during times of drought. For example, in the Great Plains, it is estimated that soil loss due to wind erosion can be as much as 6100 times greater in drought years than in wet years.

Loess is a homogeneous, typically nonstratified, porous, friable, slightly coherent, often calcareous, fine-grained, silty, pale yellow or buff, windblown (Aeolian) sediment. It generally occurs as a widespread blanket deposit that covers areas of hundreds of square kilometers and tens of meters thick. Loess often stands in either steep or vertical faces. Loess tends to develop into highly rich soils. Under appropriate climatic conditions, areas with loess are among the most agriculturally productive in the world. Loess deposits are geologically unstable by nature, and will erode very readily. Therefore, windbreaks (such as big trees and bushes) are often planted by farmers to reduce the wind erosion of loess.

Amazon basin
In 2005, parts of the Amazon basin experienced the worst drought in 100 years. A 2006 article reported results showing that the forest in its present form could survive only three years of drought. Scientists at the Brazilian National Institute of Amazonian Research argue in the article that this drought response, coupled with the effects of deforestation on regional climate, are pushing the rainforest towards a "tipping point" where it would irreversibly start to die. It concludes that the rainforest is on the brink of being turned into savanna or desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world's climate. According to the WWF, the combination of climate change and deforestation increases the drying effect of dead trees that fuels forest fires.

Australia
The 1997–2009 Millennium Drought in Australia led to a water supply crisis across much of the country. As a result, many desalination plants were built for the first time (see list).

By far the largest part of Australia is desert or semi-arid lands commonly known as the outback. A 2005 study by Australian and American researchers investigated the desertification of the interior, and suggested that one explanation was related to human settlers who arrived about 50,000 years ago. Regular burning by these settlers could have prevented monsoons from reaching interior Australia. In June 2008 it became known that an expert panel had warned of long term, maybe irreversible, severe ecological damage for the whole Murray-Darling basin if it did not receive sufficient water by October 2008. Australia could experience more severe droughts and they could become more frequent in the future, a government-commissioned report said on July 6, 2008. Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery, predicted that unless it made drastic changes, Perth in Western Australia could become the world's first ghost metropolis, an abandoned city with no more water to sustain its population. The long Australian Millennial drought broke in 2010.

East Africa and Sahel
Recurring droughts leading to desertification in East Africa have created grave ecological catastrophes, prompting food shortages in 1984–85, 2006 and 2011. During the 2011 drought, an estimated 50,000 to 150,000 people were reported to have died, though these figures and the extent of the crisis are disputed. In February 2012, the UN announced that the crisis was over due to a scaling up of relief efforts and a bumper harvest. Aid agencies subsequently shifted their emphasis to recovery efforts, including digging irrigation canals and distributing plant seeds. The 2020–2022 Horn of Africa drought has surpassed the horrific drought in 2010–2011 in both duration and severity. The Darfur conflict in Sudan, also affecting Chad, was fueled by decades of drought; combination of drought, desertification and overpopulation are among the causes of the Darfur conflict, because the Arab Baggara nomads searching for water have to take their livestock further south, to land mainly occupied by non-Arab farming people. In 2012, a severe drought struck the western Sahel. More than 10 million people in the region were at risk of famine due to a month-long heat wave that was hovering over Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso.

Himalayan river basins
Approximately 2.4 billion people live in the drainage basin of the Himalayan rivers. India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Myanmar could experience floods followed by droughts in coming decades. More than 150 districts in India are drought vulnerable, mostly concentrated in the state of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and its adjoining Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, northern Karnataka and adjoining Maharashtra of the country. Drought in India affecting the Ganges is of particular concern, as it provides drinking water and agricultural irrigation for more than 500 million people.

North America
The west coast of North America, which gets much of its water from glaciers in mountain ranges such as the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada, also would be affected.

By country or region
Droughts in particular countries:

See also:
 * Droughts and famines in Russia and USSR
 * Droughts in California
 * 2021 Madagascar food crisis
 * 2010 China drought and dust storms
 * Cape Town water crisis in 2015–2018

Protection, mitigation and relief

Agriculturally, people can effectively mitigate much of the impact of drought through irrigation and crop rotation. Failure to develop adequate drought mitigation strategies carries a grave human cost in the modern era, exacerbated by ever-increasing population densities.

Strategies for drought protection or mitigation include: When water is scarce due to droughts, there are a range of options for people to access other sources of water, such as wastewater reuse, rainwater harvesting and stormwater recovery, or seawater desalination.
 * Dams – many dams and their associated reservoirs supply additional water in times of drought.
 * Cloud seeding – a form of intentional weather modification to induce rainfall. This remains a hotly debated topic, as the United States National Research Council released a report in 2004 stating that to date, there is still no convincing scientific proof of the efficacy of intentional weather modification.
 * Land use – Carefully planned crop rotation can help to minimize erosion and allow farmers to plant less water-dependent crops in drier years.
 * Transvasement – Building canals or redirecting rivers as massive attempts at irrigation in drought-prone areas.

History

Throughout history, humans have usually viewed droughts as disasters due to the impact on food availability and the rest of society. Drought is among the earliest documented climatic events, present in the Epic of Gilgamesh and tied to the Biblical story of Joseph's arrival in and the later Exodus from ancient Egypt. Hunter-gatherer migrations in 9,500 BC Chile have been linked to the phenomenon, as has the exodus of early humans out of Africa and into the rest of the world around 135,000 years ago.

Droughts can be scientifically explained in terms of physical mechanisms, which underlie natural disasters and are influenced by human impact on the environment. Beliefs about drought are further shaped by cultural factors including local knowledge, perceptions, values, beliefs and religion. In some places and times, droughts have been interpreted as the work of supernatural forces. Globally, people in many societies have been more likely to explain natural events like drought, famine and disease in terms of the supernatural than they are to explain social phenomena like war, murder, and theft.

Historically, rituals have been used in an attempt to prevent or avert drought. Rainmaking rituals have ranged from dances to scapegoating to human sacrifices. Many ancient practices are now a matter of folklore while others may still be practiced.

In areas where people have limited understanding of the scientific basis of drought, beliefs about drought continue to reflect indigenous beliefs in the power of spirits and Christian philosophies that see drought as a divine punishment. Such beliefs can influence people's thinking and affect their resilience and ability to adapt to stress and respond to crises. In the case of Creationism, curricula sometimes give religious explanations of natural phenomena rather than scientific ones. Teaching explicitly denies evolution, that human agency is affecting climate, and that climate change is occurring.

Some historical droughts include:
 * The longest drought in recorded history started 400 years ago in the Atacama Desert in Chile and still continues.
 * Drought might have been a contributing factor to Classic Maya collapse between the 7th and 9th centuries
 * 1540 Central Europe, said to be the "worst drought of the millennium" with eleven months without rain and temperatures of 5–7 °C above the average of the 20th century
 * 1900 India killing between 250,000 and 3.25 million.
 * 1921–22 Soviet Union in which over 5 million perished from starvation due to drought.
 * 1928–30 Northwest China resulting in over 3 million deaths by famine.
 * 1936 and 1941 Sichuan Province China resulting in 5 million and 2.5 million deaths respectively.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Drought


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Proleptic Julian calendar

The proleptic Julian calendar is produced by extending the Julian calendar backwards to dates preceding AD 8 when the quadrennial leap year stabilized. The leap years that were actually observed between the implementation of the Julian calendar in 45 BC and AD 8 were erratic (see the Julian calendar article for details).

A calendar obtained by extension earlier in time than its invention or implementation is called the "proleptic" version of the calendar. Likewise, the proleptic Gregorian calendar is occasionally used to specify dates before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1582. Because the Julian calendar was used before that time, one must explicitly state that a given quoted date is based on the proleptic Gregorian calendar if that is the case.

The Julian calendar itself was introduced by Julius Caesar, and as such is older than the introduction of the Anno Domini era (or the "Common Era"), counting years since the birth of Christ as calculated by Dionysus Exiguus in the 6th century, and widely used in medieval European annals since about the 8th century, notably by Bede. The proleptic Julian calendar uses Anno Domini throughout, including for dates of Late Antiquity when the Julian calendar was in use but Anno Domini was not, and for times predating the introduction of the Julian calendar. Years are given cardinal numbers, using inclusive counting (AD 1 is the first year of the Anno Domini era, immediately preceded by 1 BC, the first year preceding the Anno Domini era; there is no "zeroth" year). Thus, the year 1 BC of the proleptic Julian calendar is a leap year.

This is to be distinguished from the astronomical year numbering, introduced in 1740 by French astronomer Jacques Cassini, which considers each New Year an integer on a time axis, with year 0 corresponding to 1 BC, and "year −1" corresponding to 2 BC, so that in this system, Julian leap years have a number divisible by four.

The determination of leap years in the proleptic Julian calendar (in either numbering) is distinct from the question of which years were historically considered leap years during the Roman era, due to the leap year error: Between 45 BC and AD 8, the leap day was somewhat unsystematic. Thus there is no simple way to find an equivalent in the proleptic Julian calendar of a date quoted using either the Roman pre-Julian calendar or the Julian calendar before AD 8. The year 46 BC itself is a special case: because of the historical introduction of the Julian calendar in that year, it was allotted 445 days. Before then, the Roman Republican calendar used a system of intercalary months rather than leap days.

title: Proleptic Julian calendar


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Soldier

A soldier is any person who is a member of an army. A soldier can be a conscripted or volunteer enlisted person, a non-commissioned officer, a warrant officer, or an officer.

Etymology
The word soldier derives from the Middle English word soudeour, from Old French soudeer or soudeour, meaning mercenary, from soudee, meaning shilling's worth or wage, from sou or soud, shilling. The word is also related to the Medieval Latin soldarius, meaning soldier (literally, "one having pay"). These words ultimately derive from the Late Latin word solidus, referring to an ancient Roman coin used in the Byzantine Empire.

Occupational and other designations

In most armies, the word "soldier" has a general meaning that refers to all members of any army, distinct from more specialized military occupations that require different areas of knowledge and skill sets. "Soldiers" may be referred to by titles, names, nicknames, or acronyms that reflect an individual's military occupation specialty arm, service, or branch of military employment, their type of unit, or operational employment or technical use such as: trooper, tanker (a member of tank crew), commando, dragoon, infantryman, guardsman, artilleryman, paratrooper, grenadier, ranger, sniper, engineer, sapper, craftsman, signaller, medic, rifleman, or gunner, among other terms. Some of these designations or their etymological origins have existed in the English language for centuries, while others are relatively recent, reflecting changes in technology, increased division of labor, or other factors. In the United States Army, a soldier's military job is designated as a Military Occupational Specialty (MOS), which includes a very wide array of MOS Branches and sub-specialties. One example of a nickname for a soldier in a specific occupation is the term "red caps" to refer to military policemen personnel in the British Army because of the colour of their headgear.

Infantry are sometimes called "grunts" in the United States Army (as the well as in the U.S. Marine Corps) or "squaddies" (in the British Army). U.S. Army artillery crews, or "gunners," are sometimes referred to as "redlegs", from the service branch colour for artillery. U.S. soldiers are often called "G.I.s" (short for the term "Government Issue"). Such terms may be associated with particular wars or historical eras. "G.I." came into common use during World War II and after, but prior to and during World War I especially, American soldiers were called "Doughboys," while British infantry troops were often referred to as "Tommies" (short for the archetypal soldier "Tommy Atkins") and French infantry were called "Poilus" ("hairy ones").

Some formal or informal designations may reflect the status or changes in status of soldiers for reasons of gender, race, or other social factors. With certain exceptions, service as a soldier, especially in the infantry, had generally been restricted to males throughout world history. By World War II, women were actively deployed in Allied forces in different ways. Some notable female soldiers in the Soviet Union were honored as "Heroes of the Soviet Union" for their actions in the army or as partisan fighters. In the United Kingdom, women served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) and later in the Women's Royal Army Corps (WRAC). Soon after its entry into the war, the U.S. formed the Women's Army Corps, whose female soldiers were often referred to as "WACs." These sex-segregated branches were disbanded in the last decades of the twentieth century and women soldiers were integrated into the standing branches of the military, although their ability to serve in armed combat was often restricted.

Race has historically been an issue restricting the ability of some people to serve in the U.S. Army. Until the American Civil War, Black soldiers fought in integrated and sometimes separate units, but at other times were not allowed to serve, largely due to fears about the possible effects of such service on the institution of legal slavery. Some Black soldiers, both freemen and men who had escaped from slavery, served in Union forces, until 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation opened the door for the formation of Black units. After the war, Black soldiers continued to serve, but in segregated units, often subjected to physical and verbal racist abuse. The term "Buffalo Soldiers" was applied to some units fighting in the 19th century Indian Wars in the American West. Eventually, the phrase was applied more generally to segregated Black units, who often distinguished themselves in armed conflict and other service. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman issued an executive order for the end of segregation in the United States Armed Forces.

Conscription

Throughout history, individuals have often been compelled by force or law to serve in armies and other armed forces in times of war or other times. Modern forms of such compulsion are generally referred to as "conscription" or a "draft". Currently, many countries require registration for some form of mandatory service, although that requirement may be selectively enforced or exist only in law and not in practice. Usually the requirement applies to younger male citizens, though it may extend to women and non-citizen residents as well. In times of war, the requirements, such as age, may be broadened when additional troops are thought to be needed.

At different times and places, some individuals have been able to avoid conscription by having another person take their place. Modern draft laws may provide temporary or permanent exemptions from service or allow some other non-combatant service, as in the case of conscientious objectors.

In the United States, males aged 18-25 are required to register with the Selective Service System, which has responsibility for overseeing the draft. However, no draft has occurred since 1973, and the U.S. military has been able to maintain staffing through voluntary enlistment.

Enlistment
Soldiers in war may have various motivations for voluntarily enlisting and remaining in an army or other armed forces branch. In a study of 18th century soldiers' written records about their time in service, historian Ilya Berkovich suggests "three primary 'levers' of motivation ... 'coercive', 'remunerative', and 'normative' incentives." Berkovich argues that historians' assumptions that fear of coercive force kept unwilling conscripts in check and controlled rates of desertion have been overstated and that any pay or other remuneration for service as provided then would have been an insufficient incentive. Instead, "old-regime common soldiers should be viewed primarily as willing participants who saw themselves as engaged in a distinct and honourable activity." In modern times, soldiers have volunteered for armed service, especially in time of war, out of a sense of patriotic duty to their homeland or to advance a social, political, or ideological cause, while improved levels of remuneration or training might be more of an incentive in times of economic hardship. Soldiers might also enlist for personal reasons, such as following family or social expectations, or for the order and discipline provided by military training, as well as for the friendship and connection with their fellow soldiers afforded by close contact in a common enterprise.

In 2018, the RAND Corporation published the results of a study of contemporary American soldiers in Life as a Private: A Study of the Motivations and Experiences of Junior Enlisted Personnel in the U.S. Army. The study found that "soldiers join the Army for family, institutional, and occupational reasons, and many value the opportunity to become a military professional. They value their relationships with other soldiers, enjoy their social lives, and are satisfied with Army life." However, the authors cautioned that the survey sample consisted of only 81 soldiers and that "the findings of this study cannot be generalized to the U.S. Army as a whole or to any rank."

Length of service
The length of time that an individual is required to serve as a soldier has varied with country and historical period, whether that individual has been drafted or has voluntarily enlisted. Such service, depending on the army's need for staffing or the individual's fitness and eligibility, may involve fulfillment of a contractual obligation. That obligation might extend for the duration of an armed conflict or may be limited to a set number of years in active duty and/or inactive duty.

As of 2023, service in the U.S. Army is for a Military Service Obligation of 2 to 6 years of active duty with a remaining term in the Individual Ready Reserve. Individuals may also enlist for part-time duty in the Army Reserve or National Guard. Depending on need or fitness to serve, soldiers usually may reenlist for another term, possibly receiving monetary or other incentives.

In the U.S. Army, career soldiers who have served for at least 20 years are eligible to draw on a retirement pension. The size of the pension as a percentage of the soldier's salary usually increases with the length of time served on active duty.

In media and popular culture

Since the earliest recorded history, soldiers and warfare have been depicted in countless works, including songs, folk tales, stories, memoirs, biographies, novels and other narrative fiction, drama, films, and more recently television and video, comic books, graphic novels, and games. Often these portrayals have emphasized the heroic qualities of soldiers in war, but at times have emphasized war's inherent dangers, confusions, and trauma and their effect on individual soldiers and others.

title: Soldier


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Paul Lansky

Paul Lansky (born June 18, 1944, in New York City) is an American composer.

Biography
Paul Lansky (born 1944) is an American composer. He was educated at Manhattan's High School of Music and Art, Queens College and Princeton University, studying with George Perle and Milton Babbitt, among others. He received his Ph.D. in music from Princeton in 1973. His doctoral dissertation consisted of an essay titled "Affine music" and a composition of string quartet. Originally intending to pursue a career in performance, during 1965–66 he played the French horn with the Dorian Wind Quintet. He left the group to attend graduate school. From 1969 until his retirement in 2014 he was on the faculty at Princeton University where he retired as the William Shubael Conant Professor of Music. He chaired the Department from 1991–2000. In 2000 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States. In 2009–10 he was the inaugural composer in residence with the Alabama Symphony. In 2016 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has received grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fromm Foundation and the Koussevitsky Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and Chamber Music America, among others.

Computer music
Beginning in the mid 1960s Lansky was among the first to experiment with the computer for sound synthesis. Until 2004 this was his predominant focus. Since then he has alternated between instrumental composition and electronic music.

Sounds originating from "real-world" sources are the predominant focus of Lansky's computer music: traffic, kids in the kitchen, musical instruments, and most of all speech. Electronic synthesis is frequently used but the main sonic resources are transformations of recorded natural sounds. One of his first large pieces, Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion (1979) set the stage. It is based on a reading by his wife Hannah MacKay of a famous poem. The piece is not so much a setting of the poem as it is a study of the contours of a live reading of the poem. The work uses a technique known as linear predictive coding, LPC, which was developed in the 1960s by scientists as a data-reduction technique meant to economize on the amount of data needed for digital voice transmission and is used today in some cell phone communication. It allows for the separation of pitch and speed and the pitch contours of the speech can be altered independently of the speed. Each of the six movements explores a different aspect of speech. This led to a series of "chatter" pieces, Idle Chatter, etc. that fragment the speech into a percussive rap-like texture. Other projects included folksong settings (Folk Images), a portrait of a woman (Things She Carried), a contemplation of letters and numbers (Alphabet Book), sounds of the highway (Night Traffic, Ride), blues harmonica, electric guitar, piano improvisation and casual conversation. The bulk of his approximately 70 electronic compositions are contained on ten solo CDs (see Discography). While there are a few pieces for electronics and live instruments the bulk of Lansky's pieces are recorded "tape" pieces.

Lansky's works have attracted interest in various realms. They have been used by dance companies (Bill T. Jones, Eliot Feld Ballet, New York City Ballet). His works frequently have a rhythmic "groove" that is attractive to dancers. In 2000 he was the co-subject (along with Francis Dhomont) of a documentary film made for the European Arte network by Uli Aumüller, My Cinema for the Ears that deals with the use of natural sounds. A four-chord sequence from Lansky's first large computer piece Mild und leise (1972) was sampled by the English rock band Radiohead for the track "Idioteque" on their 2000 Kid A album.

Software
Lansky used any available computing hardware: IBM mainframes at first (1966–84), then mini and micro computers by DEC, (1984–89), and finally personal computers by NeXT, Silicon Graphics and Apple Computer. During the mainframe era computer time was scarce and expensive, and this prompted Lansky to write his own software package called Mix, in Fortran. This made it easier to assemble a composition voice-by-voice, section-by-section, even note-by-note, avoiding large expensive runs to create an entire piece at once. Mix had no scheduler (meaning that it could create notes in any order) and thus was not suitable for real-time synthesis. Mix used additive writes to the output device, analogous to overdubbing on tape. When the move was made to minis and micros, Lansky ported Mix to the C programming language and called it CMix. During the late 1990s a group led by Brad Garton at Columbia University created a version with a scheduler, RtCmix, that was capable of real time synthesis. Starting in the mid 1990s Lansky used a well-known software package called SuperCollider. Programs like Cmix and SuperCollider are script-based rather than driven by a graphical interface. (Input data is frequently in the form of a program rather than a note list.) This facilitated the creation of complex textures in works such as Idle Chatter, which contain thousands of short notes, frequently selected using random methods. This is sometimes called algorithmic composition.

Instrumental music
During the mid 1990s Lansky began to be approached by performers who were attracted to the performative-like aspects of his computer music. Percussionists in particular were attracted by pieces such as Table’s Clear, which resembles a gamelan made of pots and pans, and the "chatter" series. One of his first large percussion pieces was Threads, 2005, written for the Sō Percussion quartet. Since then there are about a dozen pieces for percussion instruments, alone and in various ensembles. Another focus has been classical guitar, alone and in combination: Semi-Suite, With the Grain (concerto), Partita (guitar and percussion.) A residency with the Alabama Symphony led to several orchestral pieces (Shapeshifters, Imaginary Islands). Significant commissions came from the Library of Congress and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for the wind quintet The Long and Short of It, and Chamber Music America for a trio for the Janus Trio, Book of Memory, and for Sō Percussion, Springs. The 2004 trio for horn, violin and piano, Etudes and Parodies won the 2005 International Horn Society prize. Lansky's instrumental music is published by Carl Fischer. The bulk of his computer music as well as much instrumental music is available on Bridge Records.

Harmony
Most of Lansky's works are basically tonal. In general terms this means the apparent background source for his pitch language is the diatonic scale rather than the chromatic or microtonal scale. He frequently uses traditional tonal syntax. During 1969–72 he collaborated with George Perle on an expansion of Perle's 12-tone tonality, which led to Perle's book of the same name. This approach basically establishes another metric for measuring and relating harmonies that has to do with symmetry. It is related to some music by Bartok. Some of Lansky's work such as Notes to Self, for piano, and It All Adds Up, for two pianos, use this approach. Lansky's instrumental music generally eschews extended instrumental techniques. He writes that he scratched that itch with computer music.

A long-term interest of Lansky's is music "about" music. Earlier examples of this are his computer pieces Guy's Harp, about blues harmonica, and Not So Heavy Metal, about rock and roll guitar. More recent examples are Book of Memory, which comments on music from Machaut to Scriabin, Ancient Echoes, based on late-16th-century dance music, and Ricercare Plus, inspired by 17th-century counterpoint.

Discography

 * Smalltalk, 1990 (New Albion Records 030)
 * Homebrew, 1992 (Bridge Records 9035)
 * More Than Idle Chatter, 1994 (Bridge 9050)
 * Fantasies And Tableaux, 1994 (Composers Recordings, Inc. 683)
 * Folk Images, 1995 (Bridge 9060)
 * Things She Carried, 1997 (Bridge 9076)
 * Conversation Pieces, 1998 (Bridge 9083)
 * Ride, 2001 (Bridge 9103)
 * Alphabet Book, 2002 (Bridge 9126)
 * Music Box, 2006 (Bridge 9210)
 * Etudes and Parodies, 2007 (Bridge 9222)
 * Threads, 2011 (Cantaloupe Music 21064)
 * Imaginary Islands, 2012 (Bridge 9366)
 * Comix Trips, 2012 (Meyer Media)
 * Notes to Self, 2013 (Bridge 9405)
 * Textures and Threads, 2014 (Bridge 9435)
 * Contemplating Weather,2015 (Bridge 9447)
 * Book of Memory, 2016 (New Focus Recordings fcr 176)
 * Idle Fancies, 2015 (Bridge 9454)

title: Paul Lansky


text:
Republican

Republican can refer to:

Political ideology

 * An advocate of a republic, a type of government that is not a monarchy or dictatorship, and is usually associated with the rule of law.
 * Republicanism, the ideology in support of republics or against monarchy; the opposite of monarchism
 * Republicanism in Australia
 * Republicanism in Barbados
 * Republicanism in Canada
 * Republicanism in Ireland
 * Republicanism in Morocco
 * Republicanism in the Netherlands
 * Republicanism in New Zealand
 * Republicanism in Spain
 * Republicanism in Sweden
 * Republicanism in the United Kingdom
 * Republicanism in the United States
 * Classical republicanism, republicanism as formulated in the Renaissance
 * A member of a Republican Party:
 * Republican Party (disambiguation)
 * Republican Party (United States), one of the two main parties in the U.S.
 * Fianna Fáil, a conservative political party in Ireland
 * The Republicans (France), the main centre-right political party in France
 * Republicans (Brazil), a conservative political party in Brazil
 * Republican People's Party (disambiguation)
 * particular governments that called themselves republics, including:
 * List of republics
 * Roman Republic, as well as supporters of the Republic during the Roman Empire
 * Second Spanish Republic, during the Spanish Civil War, as well as its supporters
 * Republican faction (Spanish Civil War)
 * Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, which governed Afghanistan from 2004 to 2021
 * Republican insurgency in Afghanistan
 * Various French Republics, most notably the First Republic established during the French Revolution and the Second Republic, the first post-Revolution republic in France

People

 * Upper Republican, a distinct culture of Native Americans along the upper Republican River

Publications

 * The Republican, a British newspaper established as Sherwin's Political Register by Richard Carlile in 1817 and renamed in 1819
 * The Republican (Springfield, Massachusetts), a newspaper published in Springfield, Massachusetts
 * Lawrence Republican, a defunct newspaper published before the American Civil War in Lawrence, Kansas
 * Missouri Republican, newspaper based in St. Louis, Missouri (1808–1919)
 * Woodville Republican, a weekly newspaper published in Woodville, Mississippi

Places in the United States

 * Republican City, Nebraska, a village in the state of Nebraska
 * Republican River, a river that flows through Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas
 * Republican Township, Jefferson County, Indiana
 * Republican Township, Clay County, Kansas
 * Republican, North Carolina

title: Republican