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Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He specializes in visual cognition and developmental linguistics, and his experimental topics include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, regularity and irregularity in language, the neural basis of words and grammar, and childhood language development. Other experimental topics he works on are the psychology of cooperation and of communication, including emotional expression, euphemism, innuendo, and how people use "common knowledge", a term of art meaning the shared understanding in which two or more people know something, know that the other one knows, know the other one knows that they know, and so on.

Pinker has written two technical books that proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In particular, his work with Alan Prince published in 1989 critiqued the connectionist model of how children acquire the past tense of English verbs, positing that children use default rules, such as adding -ed to make regular forms, sometimes in error, but are obliged to learn irregular forms one by one.

Pinker is the author of nine books for general audiences. The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007) describe aspects of psycholinguistics and cognitive science, and include accounts of his own research, positing that language is an innate behavior shaped by natural selection and adapted to our communication needs. Pinker's The Sense of Style (2014) is a general language-oriented style guide. Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) posits that violence in human societies has generally declined over time, and identifies six major trends and five historical forces of this decline, the most important being the humanitarian revolution brought by the Enlightenment and its associated cultivation of reason. Enlightenment Now (2018) further argues that the human condition has generally improved over recent history because of reason, science, and humanism. The nature and importance of reason is also discussed in his next book Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (2021).

In 2004, Pinker was named in Times "The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today", and in the years 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2011 in Foreign Policys list of "Top 100 Global Thinkers". Pinker was also included in Prospect Magazine's top 10 "World Thinkers" in 2013. He has won awards from the American Psychological Association, the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Humanist Association. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 2013. He has served on the editorial boards of a variety of journals, and on the advisory boards of several institutions. Pinker was the chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary from 2008 to 2018.

Biography
Pinker was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1954, to a middle-class secular Jewish family in an English-speaking community. His grandparents immigrated to Canada from Poland and Romania in 1926, and owned a small necktie factory in Montreal. His father, Harry, worked in real estate and was a lawyer. His mother, Roslyn, was originally a homemaker, but later became a guidance counsellor and a high-school vice-principal. In an interview, Pinker described his mother as "very intellectual" and "an intense reader [who] knows everything". His brother, Robert, worked for the Canadian government for several decades as an administrator and a policy analyst, while his sister, Susan Pinker, is a psychologist and writer who authored The Sexual Paradox and The Village Effect. Susan is also a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

Pinker graduated from Dawson College in 1973. He graduated from McGill University in 1976 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology, then did doctoral studies in experimental psychology at Harvard University under Stephen Kosslyn, receiving a PhD in 1979. He did research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year, then became a professor at Harvard and later, Stanford University.

From 1982 until 2003 Pinker taught at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, was the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science (1985–1994), and eventually became the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience (1994–1999), taking a one-year sabbatical at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1995–96. Since 2003 he has been serving as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard and between 2008 and 2013 he also held the title of Harvard College Professor in recognition of his dedication to teaching. He currently gives lectures as a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, a private college in London.

Pinker married Nancy Etcoff in 1980 and they divorced in 1992; he married again in 1995 and again divorced. His third wife, whom he married in 2007, is the novelist and philosopher Rebecca Goldstein. He has two stepdaughters, the novelist Yael Goldstein Love and the poet Danielle Blau. Pinker adopted atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious "cultural Jew." Pinker is an avid cyclist.

Linguistic career
Pinker's research on visual cognition, begun in collaboration with his thesis adviser, Stephen Kosslyn, showed that mental images represent scenes and objects as they appear from a specific vantage point (rather than capturing their intrinsic three-dimensional structure), and thus correspond to the neuroscientist David Marr's theory of a "two-and-a-half-dimensional sketch." He also showed that this level of representation is used in visual attention, and in object recognition (at least for asymmetrical shapes), contrary to Marr's theory that recognition uses viewpoint-independent representations.

In psycholinguistics, Pinker became known early in his career for promoting computational learning theory as a way to understand language acquisition in children. He wrote a tutorial review of the field followed by two books that advanced his own theory of language acquisition, and a series of experiments on how children acquire the passive, dative, and locative constructions. These books were Language Learnability and Language Development (1984), in Pinker's words "outlin[ing] a theory of how children acquire the words and grammatical structures of their mother tongue", and Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989), in Pinker's words "focus[ing] on one aspect of this process, the ability to use different kinds of verbs in appropriate sentences, such as intransitive verbs, transitive verbs, and verbs taking different combinations of complements and indirect objects". He then focused on verbs of two kinds that illustrate what he considers to be the processes required for human language: retrieving whole words from memory, like the past form of the irregular verb "bring", namely "brought"; and using rules to combine (parts of) words, like the past form of the regular verb "walk", namely "walked".

In 1988 Pinker and Alan Prince published a critique of a connectionist model of the acquisition of the past tense (a textbook problem in language acquisition), followed by a series of studies of how people use and acquire the past tense. This included a monograph on children's regularization of irregular forms and his popular 1999 book, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. Pinker argued that language depends on two things: the associative remembering of sounds and their meanings in words, and the use of rules to manipulate symbols for grammar. He presented evidence against connectionism, where a child would have to learn all forms of all words and would simply retrieve each needed form from memory, in favour of the older alternative theory, the use of words and rules combined by generative phonology. He showed that mistakes made by children indicate the use of default rules to add suffixes such as "-ed": for instance 'breaked' and 'comed' for 'broke' and 'came'. He argued that this shows that irregular verb-forms in English have to be learnt and retrieved from memory individually, and that the children making these errors were predicting the regular "-ed" ending in an open-ended way by applying a mental rule. This rule for combining verb stems and the usual suffix can be expressed as Vpast → Vstem + d, where V is a verb and d is the regular ending. Pinker further argued that since the ten most frequently occurring English verbs (be, have, do, say, make ... ) are all irregular, while 98.2% of the thousand least common verbs are regular, there is a "massive correlation" of frequency and irregularity. He explains this by arguing that every irregular form, such as 'took', 'came' and 'got', has to be committed to memory by the children in each generation, or else lost, and that the common forms are the most easily memorized. Any irregular verb that falls in popularity past a certain point is lost, and all future generations will treat it as a regular verb instead.

In 1990 Pinker, with Paul Bloom, published a paper arguing that the human language faculty must have evolved through natural selection. The article provided arguments for a continuity-based view of language evolution, contrary to then-current discontinuity-based theories that see language as suddenly appearing with the advent of Homo sapiens as a kind of evolutionary accident. This discontinuity-based view was prominently argued by two main authorities, linguist Noam Chomsky and Stephen Jay Gould. The paper became widely cited and created renewed interest in the evolutionary prehistory of language, and has been credited with shifting the central question of the debate from "did language evolve?" to "how did language evolve?" The article also presaged Pinker's argument in The Language Instinct.

In 2006 Pinker provided to Alan Dershowitz, a personal friend of Pinker's who was Jeffrey Epstein's defense attorney, Pinker's own interpretation of the wording of a federal law pertaining to the enticement of minors into illegal sex acts via the internet. Dershowitz included Pinker's opinion in a letter to the court during proceedings that resulted in a plea deal in which all federal sex trafficking charges against Epstein were dropped. In 2019, Pinker stated that he was unaware of the nature of the charges against Epstein, and that he engaged in an unpaid favor for his Harvard colleague Dershowitz, as he had regularly done. He stated in an interview with BuzzFeed News that he regrets writing the letter. Pinker says he never received money from Epstein and met with him three times over more than a dozen years, and said he could never stand Epstein and tried to keep his distance.

Human cognition and natural language
Pinker's 1994 The Language Instinct was the first of several books to combine cognitive science with behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology. It introduces the science of language and popularizes Noam Chomsky's theory that language is an innate faculty of mind, with the controversial twist that the faculty for language evolved by natural selection as an adaptation for communication. Pinker criticizes several widely held ideas about language – that it needs to be taught, that people's grammar is poor and getting worse with new ways of speaking, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that language limits the kinds of thoughts a person can have, and that other great apes can learn languages. Pinker sees language as unique to humans, evolved to solve the specific problem of communication among social hunter-gatherers. He argues that it is as much an instinct as specialized adaptative behavior in other species, such as a spider's web-weaving or a beaver's dam-building.

Pinker states in his introduction that his ideas are "deeply influenced" by Chomsky; he also lists scientists whom Chomsky influenced to "open up whole new areas of language study, from child development and speech perception to neurology and genetics" – Eric Lenneberg, George Miller, Roger Brown, Morris Halle and Alvin Liberman. Brown mentored Pinker through his thesis; Pinker stated that Brown's "funny and instructive" book Words and Things (1958) was one of the inspirations for The Language Instinct.

There has been debate about the explanatory adequacy of the theory. By 2015, the nativist views of Pinker and Chomsky had a number of challenges on the grounds that they had incorrect core assumptions and were inconsistent with research evidence from psycholinguistics and child language acquisition. *, quote p. 1030: "Some critiques directly challenge the logic of arguments made by Chomsky, Pinker, and like-minded theorists, questioning such core assumptions as the universality of generative grammar, the autonomy of syntax in language processing, and the fundamental unlearnability of language (e.g., Bates & Goodman, 1999; Braine, 1994; Pullum & Scholz, 2002; Tomasello, 1995). Other critiques focus on empirical evidence inconsistent with particular nativist assertions. For example, the claim that negative evidence is not available when children make grammatical errors, an assumption central to the "poverty of the stimulus" argument at the heart of Chomsky’s theory, is not supported by a recent analysis of parents’ reformulations in speech to children (Chouinard & Clark, 2003). These diverse challenges, both philosophical and data-driven, have fueled debate over four decades about the explanatory adequacy of nativist theories of language learning." *, quote pp. 58–60: "GG is generally seen as a declining paradigm and its proponents now tend to stay away from conferences like AAAL (the American Association of Applied Linguistics) and University of Boston Child Language Development conferences, as a cursory count of papers on the basis of abstracts shows [...] In the psycholinguistic community, the idea of innateness and a Language Acquisition Device (LAD) were seen as problematic [...] Now that generation of GG linguists is retiring and there is a tendency in many universities not to replace them with younger scholars of that school, but rather appoint UB oriented linguists. There is almost a euphoria that the grip of the nativists on what constitutes linguistics is gone and that other approaches and more social orientations are seen as meaningful alternatives. Others try to explain the reasons for the decline of GG [...] Some informants are quite outspoken about the role of GG in AL. William Grabe states: "Fundamentally Chomsky is wrong and we wasted a lot of time. In 1964 Chomsky’s Aspects was published. Now, in 2014, we are 50 years later. What impact has all of that had in real world language use? This is an overstated theoretical direction." Jan Hulstijn summarizes: "Generative linguistics has had no noticeable (or durable) impact."" The reality of Pinker's proposed language instinct, and the related claim that grammar is innate and genetically based, has been contested by linguists such as Geoffrey Sampson in his 1997 book, Educating Eve: The 'Language Instinct' Debate. Sampson argues that "while it may seem attractive to argue the nature side of the 'nature versus nurture' debate, the nurture side may better support the creativity and nobility of the human mind." Sampson denies there is a language instinct, and argues that children can learn language because people can learn anything. Others have sought a middle ground between Pinker's nativism and Sampson's culturalism.

The assumptions underlying the nativist view have also been questioned in Jeffrey Elman's Rethinking Innateness: A Connectionist Perspective on Development, which defends the connectionist approach that Pinker attacked. In his 1996 book Impossible Minds, the machine intelligence researcher Igor Aleksander calls The Language Instinct excellent, and argues that Pinker presents a relatively soft claim for innatism, accompanied by a strong dislike of the 'Standard Social Sciences Model' or SSSM (Pinker's term), which supposes that development is purely dependent on culture. Further, Aleksander writes that while Pinker criticises some attempts to explain language processing with neural nets, Pinker later makes use of a neural net to create past tense verb forms correctly. Aleksander concludes that while he doesn't support the SSSM, "a cultural repository of language just seems the easy trick for an efficient evolutionary system armed with an iconic state machine to play." Two other books, How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate (2002), broadly surveyed the mind and defended the idea of a complex human nature with many mental faculties that are genetically adaptive (Pinker is an ally of Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins in many disputes surrounding adaptationism). Another major theme in Pinker's theories is that human cognition works, in part, by combinatorial symbol-manipulation, not just associations among sensory features, as in many connectionist models. On the debate around The Blank Slate, Pinker called Thomas Sowell's book A Conflict of Visions "wonderful", and explained that "The Tragic Vision" and the "Utopian Vision" are the views of human nature behind right- and left-wing ideologies.

In Words and Rules: the Ingredients of Language (1999), Pinker argues from his own research that regular and irregular phenomena are products of computation and memory lookup, respectively, and that language can be understood as an interaction between the two. "Words and Rules" is also the title of an essay by Pinker outlining many of the topics discussed in the book. Critiqueing the book from the perspective of generative linguistics Charles Yang, in the London Review of Books, writes that "this book never runs low on hubris or hyperbole". The book's topic, the English past tense, is in Yang's view unglamorous, and Pinker's attempts at compromise risk being in no man's land between rival theories. Giving the example of German, Yang argues that irregular nouns in that language at least all belong to classes, governed by rules, and that things get even worse in languages that attach prefixes and suffixes to make up long 'words': they can't be learnt individually, as there are untold numbers of combinations. "All Pinker (and the connectionists) are doing is turning over the rocks at the base of the intellectual landslide caused by the Chomskian revolution."

In The Stuff of Thought (2007), Pinker looks at a wide range of issues around the way words related to thoughts on the one hand, and to the world outside ourselves on the other. Given his evolutionary perspective, a central question is how an intelligent mind capable of abstract thought evolved: how a mind adapted to Stone Age life could work in the modern world. Many quirks of language are the result.

Pinker is critical of theories about the evolutionary origins of language that argue that linguistic cognition might have evolved from earlier musical cognition. He sees language as being tied primarily to the capacity for logical reasoning, and speculates that human proclivity for music may be a spandrel – a feature not adaptive in its own right, but that has persisted through other traits that are more broadly practical, and thus selected for. In How the Mind Works, Pinker reiterates Immanuel Kant's view that music is not in itself an important cognitive phenomenon, but that it happens to stimulate important auditory and spatio-motor cognitive functions. Pinker compares music to "auditory cheesecake", stating that "As far as biological cause and effect is concerned, music is useless". This argument has been rejected by Daniel Levitin and Joseph Carroll, experts in music cognition, who argue that music has had an important role in the evolution of human cognition. In his book This Is Your Brain On Music, Levitin argues that music could provide adaptive advantage through sexual selection, social bonding, and cognitive development; he questions the assumption that music is the antecedent to language, as opposed to its progenitor, noting that many species display music-like habits that could be seen as precursors to human music.

Pinker has also been critical of "whole language" reading instruction techniques, stating in How the Mind Works, "...the dominant technique, called 'whole language,' the insight that [spoken] language is a naturally developing human instinct has been garbled into the evolutionarily improbable claim that reading is a naturally developing human instinct." In the appendix to the 2007 reprinted edition of The Language Instinct, Pinker cited Why Our Children Can't Read by cognitive psychologist Diane McGuinness as his favorite book on the subject and noted:

One raging public debate involving language went unmentioned in The Language Instinct: the "reading wars," or dispute over whether children should be explicitly taught to read by decoding the sounds of words from their spelling (loosely known as "phonics") or whether they can develop it instinctively by being immersed in a text-rich environment (often called "whole language"). I tipped my hand in the paragraph in [the sixth chapter of the book] which said that language is an instinct but reading is not. Like most psycholinguists (but apparently unlike many school boards), I think it's essential for children to be taught to become aware of speech sounds and how they are coded in strings of letters.

The Better Angels of Our Nature
In The Better Angels of Our Nature, published in 2011, Pinker argues that violence, including tribal warfare, homicide, cruel punishments, child abuse, animal cruelty, domestic violence, lynching, pogroms, and international and civil wars, has decreased over multiple scales of time and magnitude. Pinker considers it unlikely that human nature has changed. In his view, it is more likely that human nature comprises inclinations toward violence and those that counteract them, the "better angels of our nature". He outlines several "major historical declines of violence" that all have their own social/cultural/economic causes.

Response to the book was divided. Many critics found its arguments convincing and its synthesis of a large volume of historical evidence compelling. This and other aspects drew criticism, including the use of deaths per capita as a metric, Pinker's liberal humanism, the focus on Europe, the interpretation of historical data, and its image of indigenous people. Archaeologist David Wengrow summarized Pinker's approach to archaeological science as "a modern psychologist making it up as he goes along".

English writing style in the 21st century
In his seventh popular book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (2014), Pinker attempts to provide a writing style guide that is informed by modern science and psychology, given that William Strunk wrote The Elements of Style in 1918, nearly a full century prior to Pinker’s publication.

Views

Pinker identifies as a liberal, who is critical of some aspects of the far-left. He supports same-sex marriage, a universal basic income, the legalization of drugs, the taxation of carbon, and the abolition of capital punishment. Pinker is a strong supporter of the Democratic Party. However, Pinker has argued that the far-left has created an atmosphere of intellectual intolerance on college campuses and elsewhere, and helped form the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard to combat what he described as an epidemic of censorship at universities. He was a signatory of the Letter on Justice and Open Debate which argued that discussion of political issues was being silenced by a widespread "intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and a tendency to dissolve complex issues into a binding moral certainty."

Pinker has sharply criticized social conservatives, such as former Chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics Leon Kass, for opposing stem cell research, arguing that their moral views were mere expressions of disgust that were obstructing treatments that could save millions of lives.

Pinker is a frequent participant in public debates surrounding the contributions of science to contemporary society. Social commentators such as Ed West, author of The Diversity Illusion, consider Pinker important and daring in his willingness to confront taboos, as in The Blank Slate. According to West, the doctrine of tabula rasa remained accepted "as fact, rather than fantasy" a decade after the book's publication. West describes Pinker as "no polemicist, and he leaves readers to draw their own conclusions".

In January 2005 Pinker defended comments by then-President of Harvard University Lawrence Summers. Summers had speculated that in addition to differing societal demands and discrimination, "different availability of aptitude at the high end" may contribute to gender gaps in mathematics and science. In a debate between Pinker and Elizabeth Spelke on gender and science, Pinker argued in favor of the proposition that the gender difference in representation in elite universities was "explainable by some combination of biological differences in average temperaments and talents interacting with socialization and bias".

In January 2009 Pinker wrote an article about the Personal Genome Project and its possible impact on the understanding of human nature in The New York Times. He discussed the new developments in epigenetics and gene-environment interactions in the afterword to the 2016 edition of his book The Blank Slate. Pinker has been criticised for using the data of scientific racists (on subjects unrelated to race), such as the blogger Steven Sailer, with journalist Angela Saini stating that "for many people, Pinker's willingness to entertain the work of individuals who are on the far right and white supremacists has gone beyond the pale". Pinker has stated that he condemns racism.

In a November 2009 article for The New York Times, Pinker wrote a mixed review of Malcolm Gladwell's essays, criticizing his analytical methods. Gladwell replied, disputing Pinker's comments about the importance of IQ on teaching performance and by analogy the effect, if any, of draft order on quarterback performance in the National Football League. Advanced NFL Stats addressed the issue statistically, siding with Pinker and showing that differences in methodology could explain the two men's differing opinions.

In an appearance for BBC World Service's Exchanges At The Frontier programme, an audience member questioned whether the virtuous developments in culture and human nature (documented in The Better Angels of Our Nature) could have expressed in our biology either through genetic or epigenetic expression. Pinker responded that it was unlikely since "some of the declines have occurred far too rapidly for them to be explicable by biological evolution, which has a speed limit measured in generations, but crime can plummet in a span of 15 years and some of these humanitarian reforms like eliminating slavery and torture occurred in, say, 50 years". Helga Vierich and Cathryn Townsend wrote a critical review of Pinker's sweeping "civilizational" explanations for patterns of human violence and warfare in response to a lecture he gave at Cambridge University in September 2015.

In his 2018 book Enlightenment Now, Pinker posited that Enlightenment rationality should be defended against attacks from both the political left and political right. In a debate with Pinker, post-colonial theorist Homi Bhabha said that Enlightenment philosophy had immoral consequences such as inequality, slavery, imperialism, world wars, and genocide, and that Pinker downplayed them. Pinker argued that Bhabha had perceived the causal relationship between Enlightenment thinking and these sources of suffering "backwards", responding in part that "The natural state of humanity, at least since the dawn of civilization, is poverty, disease, ignorance, exploitation, and violence (including slavery and imperial conquest). It is knowledge, mobilised to improve human welfare, that allows anyone to rise above this state." In a 2019 story in Current Affairs, proprietor Nathan Robinson criticised Pinker, saying that he misrepresents his critics' arguments against his work.

In 2020, an open letter to the Linguistic Society of America requesting the removal of Pinker from its list of LSA Fellows and its list of media experts was signed by hundreds of academics. The letter accused Pinker of a "pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence, in particular in the immediate aftermath of violent acts and/or protests against the systems that created them", citing as examples six of Pinker's tweets. Pinker said in reply that through this letter, he, and more importantly, younger academics with less protection, were being threatened by "a regime of intimidation that constricts the theatre of ideas." Several academics criticized the letter and expressed support for Pinker. The executive committee of the Linguistic Society of America declined to strike Pinker from its lists and issued a response letter stating that "It is not the mission of the Society to control the opinions of its members, nor their expression."

Awards and distinctions
Pinker was named one of Times 100 most influential people in the world in 2004 and one of Prospect and Foreign Policys 100 top public intellectuals in both years the poll was carried out, 2005 and 2008; in 2010 and 2011 he was named by Foreign Policy to its list of top global thinkers. In 2016, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

His research in cognitive psychology has won the Early Career Award (1984) and Boyd McCandless Award (1986) from the American Psychological Association, the Troland Research Award (1993) from the National Academy of Sciences, the Henry Dale Prize (2004) from the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and the George Miller Prize (2010) from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. He has also received honorary doctorates from the universities of Newcastle, Surrey, Tel Aviv, McGill, Simon Fraser University and the University of Tromsø. He was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, in 1998 and in 2003. Pinker received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1999. On May 13, 2006, he received the American Humanist Association's Humanist of the Year award for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution. For 2022 he was awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the category of "Humanities and Social Sciences".

From 2008 to 2018, Pinker chaired the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He wrote the essay on usage for the fifth edition of the Dictionary, published in 2011. In February 2001, Pinker, "whose hair has long been the object of admiration, and envy, and intense study", was nominated by acclamation as the first member of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) organized by the Annals of Improbable Research.

Books

 * Language Learnability and Language Development (1984)
 * Visual Cognition (1985)
 * Connections and Symbols (1988)
 * Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (1989)
 * Lexical and Conceptual Semantics (1992)
 * The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language (1994)
 * How the Mind Works (1997)
 * Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language (1999)
 * The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002)
 * The Best American Science and Nature Writing (editor and introduction author, 2004)
 * Hotheads (an extract from How the Mind Works, 2005) ISBN 978-0-14-102238-3
 * The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (2007)
 * The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television (2008)
 * The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011)
 * Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles (2013)
 * The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (September 30, 2014)
 * Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (February 13, 2018)
 * Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (September 28, 2021)

Interviews

 * 7th Avenue interview on "Better Angels", 2014
 * Steven Pinker on The Hour
 * Steven Pinker Multimedia audio and video files
 * Mosaic Science (Wellcome) interview

Filmed talks

 * The Better Angels of our Nature, Royal Institution, November 2011
 * Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century: With Steven Pinker, Royal Institution, October 2015
 * Q&A – Linguistics, style and writing with Steven Pinker, Royal Institution, October 2015
 * Steven Pinker & Michael Shermer, Pangburn, September 2018
 * Steven Pinker & Michael Shermer, Pangburn, September 2018

Debates

 * The Two Steves Debate with neurobiologist Steven Rose
 * The Science of Gender and Science Debate with cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Spelke (Video of the debate on YouTube)
 * The Decline of Violence Debate with economist Judith Marquand, BHA chief executive Andrew Copson and BBC broadcaster Roger Bolton

title: Steven Pinker


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Henry Bessemer

Sir Henry Bessemer (19 January 1813 – 15 March 1898) was an English inventor, whose steel-making process would become the most important technique for making steel in the nineteenth century for almost one hundred years. He also played a significant role in establishing the town of Sheffield, nicknamed ‘Steel City’, as a major industrial centre.

Bessemer had been trying to reduce the cost of steel-making for military ordnance, and developed his system for blowing air through molten pig iron to remove the impurities. This made steel easier, quicker and cheaper to manufacture, and revolutionised structural engineering. One of the most significant inventors of the Second Industrial Revolution, Bessemer also made over 100 other inventions in the fields of iron, steel and glass. Unlike many inventors, he managed to bring his own projects to fruition and profited financially from their success. He was knighted for his contribution to science in 1879, and in the same year was made a fellow of the Royal Society.

Father: Anthony Bessemer
Bessemer's father, Anthony, was born in London into a Huguenot family, but moved to Paris when he was about 21 years old. He was an inventor who, while engaged by the Paris Mint, made a machine for making medallions that could produce steel dies from a larger model. He became a member of the French Academy of Science, for his improvements to the optical microscope when he was 26. He was forced to leave Paris by the French Revolution, and returned to Britain. There he invented a process for making gold chains, which was successful, and enabled him to buy a small estate in the village of Charlton, near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, where Henry was born. According to Bessemer he was given his name by his godfather Henry Caslon, who employed his father as a punchcutter.

Early inventions
The invention from which Bessemer made his first fortune was a series of six steam-powered machines for making bronze powder, used in the manufacture of gold paint. As he relates in his autobiography, he examined the bronze powder made in Nuremberg which was the only place where it was made at the time. He then copied and improved the product and made it capable of being made on a simple production line. It was an early example of reverse engineering where a product is analysed, and then reproduced.

The process was kept secret, with only members of his immediate family having access to the factory. The Nuremberg powder, which was made by hand, retailed in London for £5 12s per pound and he eventually reduced the price to half a crown £ – 2 / 6, or about 1/40th. The profits from sale of the paint allowed him to pursue his other inventions.

Bessemer patented a method for making a continuous ribbon of plate glass in 1848, but it was not commercially successful (see his autobiography, chapter 8). He gained experience in designing furnaces, which was to be of great use for his new steel-making process.

Bessemer process
Henry Bessemer worked on the problem of manufacturing cheap steel for ordnance production from 1850 to 1855 when he patented his method. However, William Kelly, an American inventor in Kentucky, received a priority patent in 1857, effectively nullifying Bessemer's 1855 US patent.

On 24 August 1856 Bessemer first described the process to a meeting of the British Association in Cheltenham which he titled "The Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel." It was published in full in The Times. The Bessemer process involved using oxygen in air blown through molten pig iron to burn off the impurities and thus create steel. James Nasmyth had been working on a similar idea for some time prior to this. A reluctant patentor, and in this instance still working through some problems in his method, Nasmyth abandoned the project after hearing Bessemer at the meeting. Bessemer acknowledged the efforts of Nasmyth by offering him a one-third share of the value of his patent. Nasmyth turned it down as he was about to retire.

Many industries were constrained by the lack of steel, being reliant on cast iron and wrought iron alone. Examples include railway structures such as bridges and tracks, where the treacherous nature of cast iron was keenly felt by many engineers and designers. There had been many accidents when cast iron beams collapsed suddenly, such as the Dee Bridge disaster of May 1847, the Wootton bridge collapse and the Bull bridge accident of 1860. The problem recurred at the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879, and failures continued until all cast iron under-bridges were replaced by steel structures. Wrought iron structures were much more reliable with very few failures.

Though this process is no longer commercially used, at the time of its invention it was of enormous industrial importance because it lowered the cost of production steel, leading to steel being widely substituted for cast iron and wrought iron. Bessemer's attention was drawn to the problem of steel manufacture in the course of an attempt to improve the construction of guns.

Implementation
Bessemer licensed the patent for his process to five ironmasters, but from the outset, the companies had great difficulty producing good-quality steel. Mr Göran Fredrik Göransson, a Swedish ironmaster, using the purer charcoal pig iron of that country, was the first to make good steel by the process, but only after many attempts. His results prompted Bessemer to try a purer iron obtained from Cumberland hematite, but even with this he had only limited success because the quantity of carbon was difficult to control. Robert Forester Mushet had carried out thousands of experiments at Darkhill Ironworks, in the Forest of Dean, and had shown that the quantity of carbon could be controlled by removing almost all of it from the iron and then adding an exact amount of carbon and manganese, in the form of spiegeleisen. This improved the quality of the finished product and increased its malleability.

When Bessemer tried to induce makers to take up his improved system, he met with general rebuffs and was eventually driven to undertake the exploitation of the process himself. He erected steelworks in Sheffield in a business partnership with others, such as W & J Galloway & Sons, and began to manufacture steel. At first the output was insignificant, but gradually the magnitude of the operations was enlarged until the competition became effective, and steel traders generally became aware that the firm of Henry Bessemer & Co. was underselling them to the extent of UK£10–£15 a ton. This argument to the pocket quickly had its effect, and licences were applied for in such numbers that, in royalties for the use of his process, Bessemer received a sum in all considerably exceeding a million pounds sterling.

However Mushet received nothing and by 1866 was destitute and in ill health. In that year his 16-year-old daughter, Mary, travelled to London alone, to confront Bessemer at his offices, arguing that his success was based on the results of her father's work. Bessemer decided to pay Mushet an annual pension of £300, a very considerable sum, which he paid for over 20 years, possibly with a view to keeping the Mushets from legal action. Bessemer also had works in Greenwich, London, adjacent to the River Thames, from about 1865.

W. M. Lord has said with regard to this success that "Sir Henry Bessemer was somewhat exceptional. He had developed his process from an idea to a practical reality in his own lifetime and he was sufficiently of a businessman to have profited by it. In so many cases, inventions were not developed quickly and the plums went to other persons than the inventors."

Other inventions

Bessemer was a prolific inventor and held at least 129 patents, spanning from 1838 to 1883. These included military ordnance, movable dies for embossed postage stamps, a screw extruder to extract sugar from sugar cane, and others in the fields of iron, steel and glass. These are described in some detail in his autobiography.

After suffering from seasickness in 1868, he designed the SS Bessemer (also called the "Bessemer Saloon"), a passenger steamship with a cabin on gimbals designed to stay level, however rough the sea, to save her passengers from seasickness. The mechanism – hydraulics controlled by a steersman watching a spirit level – worked in model form and in a trial version built in his garden in Denmark Hill, London. However, it never received a proper seagoing test as, when the ship demolished part of the Calais pier on her maiden voyage, investor confidence was lost and the ship was scrapped.

Continuous casting
Bessemer also obtained a patent in 1857 for the casting of metal between contrarotating rollers – a forerunner of today's continuous casting processes and remarkably, Bessemer's original idea has been implemented in the direct continuous casting of steel strip.

Death
Bessemer died in March 1898 at Denmark Hill, London. He is buried in West Norwood cemetery, London SE27. Other influential Victorians such as Sir Henry Tate, Sir Henry Doulton and Baron de Reuters are buried in the same cemetery.

Honours and legacy
Bessemer was knighted by Queen Victoria for his contribution to science on 26 June 1879, and in the same year was made a fellow of the Royal Society. An honorary membership was conferred on Bessemer by the Institution of Engineers and Shipbuilders in Scotland in 1891. He was elected an International Member of the American Philosophical Society in 1894. In 1895, he was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Sheffield's Kelham Island Industrial Heritage Museum maintains an early example of a Bessemer converter for public viewing.

A school was named after him in the town of Hitchin, and when the school was demolished in the 1980s the new road built in its place was named Bessemer Close in 1995. Bessemer Way in Rotherham is also named in his honour. In 2009, the public house "The Fountain" in Sheffield city centre was renamed "The Bessemer" in homage to Henry Bessemer, who had a huge impact on the Steel City's development. In Workington, Cumbria, the local Wetherspoons pub is now named after him.

In 2002 the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3) was established from mergers encompassing historical organisations including the Iron and Steel Institute, of which Bessemer was president from 1871 to 1873; the latter organisation instituted the Bessemer Gold Medal under his tenure. IOM3 still recognises Bessemer's legacy with an annual award of the medal for outstanding services to the steel industry; recent recipients include Indira Samarasekera.

That a man who did so much for industrial development did not receive higher recognition from his own government was a source of deep regret for English engineers, who alluded to the fact that in the United States, where the Bessemer process found much use, eight cities or towns bore his name.

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

title: Henry Bessemer


text:
User:Neurofun

New Wikipedian (March 14th 2002), still mostly exploring.

Please add any comments below:

March 14th 2002,

Welcome to the Wikipedia! And thanks for the Boyle catch and the copy-edit on Draco Malfoy.

User:Ed Poor

Try getting a proper job, Neurofun. You are also rubbish at drawing grasshoppers, btw.

kiss kiss

user:Knapspank

title: User:Neurofun


text:
Clover

Clover, also called trefoil, are plants of the genus Trifolium (from Latin tres 'three' + folium 'leaf'), consisting of about 300 species of flowering plants in the legume family Fabaceae originating in Europe. The genus has a cosmopolitan distribution with highest diversity in the temperate Northern Hemisphere, but many species also occur in South America and Africa, including at high altitudes on mountains in the tropics. They are small annual, biennial, or short-lived perennial herbaceous plants, typically growing up to 30 cm tall. The leaves are trifoliate (rarely, they have four or more leaflets; the more leaflets the leaf has, the rarer it is; see four-leaf clover), with stipules adnate to the leaf-stalk, and heads or dense spikes of small red, purple, white, or yellow flowers; the small, few-seeded pods are enclosed in the calyx. Other closely related genera often called clovers include Melilotus (sweet clover) and Medicago (alfalfa or Calvary clover).

Cultivation
Several species of clover are extensively cultivated as fodder plants. The most widely cultivated clovers are white clover, Trifolium repens, and red clover, Trifolium pratense. Clover, either sown alone or in mixture with ryegrass, has for a long time formed a staple crop for silaging, for several reasons: it grows freely, shooting up again after repeated mowings; it produces an abundant crop; it is palatable to and nutritious for livestock; it fixes nitrogen, reducing the need for synthetic fertilizers; it grows in a great range of soils and climates; and it is appropriate for either pasturage or green composting.

In many areas, particularly on acidic soil, clover is short-lived because of a combination of insect pests, diseases and nutrient balance; this is known as "clover sickness". When crop rotations are managed so that clover does not recur at intervals shorter than eight years, it grows with much of its pristine vigor.

Clovers are most efficiently pollinated by bumblebees, which have declined as a result of agricultural intensification. Honeybees can also pollinate clover, and beekeepers are often in heavy demand from farmers with clover pastures. Farmers reap the benefits of increased reseeding that occurs with increased bee activity, which means that future clover yields remain abundant. Beekeepers benefit from the clover bloom, as clover is one of the main nectar sources for honeybees.

Trifolium repens, white or Dutch clover, is a perennial abundant in meadows and good pastures. The flowers are white or pinkish, becoming brown and deflexed as the corolla fades. Trifolium hybridum, alsike or Swedish clover, is a perennial which was introduced early in the 19th century and has now become naturalized in Britain. The flowers are white or rosy, and resemble those of Trifolium repens. Trifolium medium, meadow or zigzag clover, a perennial with straggling flexuous stems and rose-purple flowers, has potential for interbreeding with T. pratense to produce perennial crop plants.

Other species are: Trifolium arvense, hare's-foot trefoil; found in fields and dry pastures, a soft hairy plant with minute white or pale pink flowers and feathery sepals; Trifolium fragiferum, strawberry clover, with globose, rose-purple heads and swollen calyxes; Trifolium campestre, hop trefoil, on dry pastures and roadsides, the heads of pale yellow flowers suggesting miniature hops; and the somewhat similar Trifolium dubium, common in pastures and roadsides, with smaller heads and small yellow flowers turning dark brown.

Uses
Clover is foraged for by wildlife such as bears, game animals, and birds. Clover is edible by humans, although red clover should be avoided by pregnant women. The plant is a traditional Native American food, which is eaten both raw and after drying and smoking the roots. The seeds from the blossoms are used to make bread. It is also possible to make tea from the blossoms.

Symbolism
Shamrock, the traditional Irish symbol, which according to legend was coined by Saint Patrick for the Holy Trinity, is commonly associated with clover, although alternatively sometimes with the various species within the genus Oxalis, which are also trifoliate.

Clovers occasionally have four leaflets, instead of the usual three. These four-leaf clovers, like other rarities, are considered lucky. Clovers can also have five, six, or more leaflets, but these are rarer still. The clover's outer leaf structure varies in physical orientation. The record for most leaflets is 56, set on May 10, 2009. This beat the "21-leaf clover", a record set in June 2008 by the same discoverer, who had also held the prior Guinness World Record of 18.

 * A common idiom is "to be (or to live) in clover", meaning to live a carefree life of ease, comfort, or prosperity.

 * A common saying in surgery [regarding the appearance of wound after hemorrhoidectomy] is "If it looks like clover, the trouble is over; if it looks like dahlia, it’s surely a failure."

 * A cloverleaf interchange is named for the resemblance to the leaflets of a (four-leaf) clover when viewed from the air.

Phylogeny
The first extensive classification of Trifolium had been done by Michael Zohary and David Heller, and it was subsequently released in 1984. They divided the genus into eight sections: Lotoidea, Paramesus, Mistyllus, Vesicamridula, Chronosemium, Trifolium, Trichoecephalum, and Involucrarium, with Lotoidea placed most basally. Within this classification system, Trifolium repens falls within section Lotoidea, the largest and least heterogeneous section. Lotoidea contains species from America, Africa, and Eurasia, considered a clade because of their inflorescence shape, floral structure, and legume that protrudes from the calyx. However, these traits are not unique to the section, and are shared with many other species in other sections. Zohary and Heller argued that the presence of these traits in other sections proved the basal position of Lotoidea, because they were ancestral. Aside from considering this section basal, they did not propose relationships between other sections. Since then, molecular data has both questioned and confirmed the proposed phylogeny from Zohary and Heller. A genus-wide molecular study has since proposed a new classification system, made up of two subgenera, Chronosemium and Trifolium. This recent reclassification further divides subgenus Trifolium into eight sections. The molecular data supports the monophyletic nature of three sections proposed by Zohary and Heller (Tripholium, Paramesus, and Trichoecepalum), but not of Lotoidea (members of this section have since been reclassified into five other sections). Other molecular studies, although smaller, support the need to reorganize Lotoidea.

Species
291 species of Trifolium are accepted:

 * Trifolium absconditum Molinari
 * Trifolium acaule Steud. ex A.Rich.
 * Trifolium affine C.Presl
 * Trifolium acutiflorum Murb.
 * Trifolium × adulterinum Beyer
 * Trifolium affine C.Presl
 * Trifolium africanum Ser.
 * Trifolium aintabense Boiss. & Hausskn.
 * Trifolium albopurpureum Torr. & A. Gray – rancheria clover
 * Trifolium alexandrinum L. – Egyptian clover, berseem clover
 * Trifolium alpestre L.
 * Trifolium alpinum L. – alpine clover
 * Trifolium alsadami Post
 * Trifolium amabile Kunth
 * Trifolium ambiguum M. Bieb.
 * Trifolium amoenum Greene – showy Indian clover
 * Trifolium amphianthum Torr. & A.Gray
 * Trifolium andersonii A. Gray – Anderson's clover or fiveleaf clover
 * Trifolium andinum Nutt. – Intermountain clover
 * Trifolium andricum Lassen
 * Trifolium angulatum Waldst. & Kit.
 * Trifolium angustifolium L.
 * Trifolium ankaratrense Bosser
 * Trifolium apertum Bobrov
 * Trifolium appendiculatum Lojac.
 * Trifolium argutum Banks & Sol.
 * Trifolium arvense L. – hare's-foot clover
 * Trifolium attenuatum Greene
 * Trifolium aureum Pollich – large hop trefoil
 * Trifolium baccarinii Chiov.
 * Trifolium badium Schreb.
 * Trifolium barbigerum Torr. – bearded clover
 * Trifolium barbulatum (Freyn & Sint.) Zohary
 * Trifolium barnebyi (Isely) Dorn & Lichvar
 * Trifolium batmanicum Katzn.
 * Trifolium beckwithii W.H.Brewer ex S.Watson – Beckwith's clover
 * Trifolium bejariense Moric.
 * Trifolium × bertrandii Rouy
 * Trifolium berytheum Boiss. & C.I.Blanche
 * Trifolium biebersteinii Khalilov
 * Trifolium bifidum A.Gray – notchleaf clover
 * Trifolium bilineatum Fresen.
 * Trifolium billardierei Spreng.
 * Trifolium bithynicum Boiss.
 * Trifolium bivonae Guss.
 * Trifolium blancheanum Boiss.
 * Trifolium bobrovii Khalilov
 * Trifolium bocconei Savi
 * Trifolium boissieri Guss.
 * Trifolium bolanderi A.Gray
 * Trifolium bordsilovskyi Grossh.
 * Trifolium brandegeei S.Watson
 * Trifolium breweri S. Watson – forest clover
 * Trifolium brutium Ten.
 * Trifolium buckwestiorum Isely – Santa Cruz clover
 * Trifolium bullatum Boiss. & Hausskn.
 * Trifolium burchellianum Ser.
 * Trifolium calcaricum J.L.Collins & Wieboldt
 * Trifolium calocephalum Fresen.
 * Trifolium campestre Schreb. – hop trefoil
 * Trifolium canescens Willd.
 * Trifolium carolinianum Michx.
 * Trifolium caudatum Boiss.
 * Trifolium cernuum Brot.
 * Trifolium cheranganiense J.B.Gillett
 * Trifolium cherleri L.
 * Trifolium chilaloense Thulin
 * Trifolium chilense Hook. & Arn.
 * Trifolium chlorotrichum Boiss. & Balansa
 * Trifolium ciliolatum Benth. – foothill clover
 * Trifolium circumdatum Kunze
 * Trifolium clusii Godr.
 * Trifolium clypeatum L.
 * Trifolium congestum Guss.
 * Trifolium constantinopolitanum Ser.
 * Trifolium cryptopodium Steud. ex A. Rich.
 * Trifolium cyathiferum Lindl. – cup clover
 * Trifolium dalmaticum Vis.
 * Trifolium dasyphyllum Torr. & A.Gray
 * Trifolium dasyurum C.Presl
 * Trifolium davisii E.Hossain
 * Trifolium decorum Chiov.
 * Trifolium dedeckerae J.M.Gillett
 * Trifolium depauperatum Desv. – cowbag clover, balloon sack clover, or poverty clover
 * Trifolium dichotomum Hook. & Arn.
 * Trifolium dichroanthoides Rech.f.
 * Trifolium dichroanthum Boiss.
 * Trifolium diffusum Ehrh.
 * Trifolium dolopium Heldr. & Hochst. ex Gibelli & Belli
 * Trifolium douglasii House
 * Trifolium dubium Sibth. – lesser hop trefoil
 * Trifolium echinatum M.Bieb.
 * Trifolium egrissicum Mikheev & Magulaev
 * Trifolium elgonense J.B.Gillett
 * Trifolium elizabethiae Grossh.
 * Trifolium eriocephalum Nutt. – woollyhead clover
 * Trifolium eriosphaerum Boiss.
 * Trifolium erubescens Fenzl
 * Trifolium euxinum Zohary
 * Trifolium eximium Stephan ex Ser.
 * Trifolium farayense Mouterde
 * Trifolium fergan-karaeri M.Keskin
 * Trifolium fontanum Bobrov
 * Trifolium fragiferum L. – strawberry clover
 * Trifolium friscanum (S.L.Welsh) S.L.Welsh
 * Trifolium fucatum Lindl. – bull clover or sour clover
 * Trifolium gemellum Pourr. ex Willd.
 * Trifolium gillettianum Jacq.-Fél.
 * Trifolium glanduliferum Boiss.
 * Trifolium globosum L.
 * Trifolium glomeratum L. – clustered clover or bush clover
 * Trifolium gordeievii (Kom.) Z.Wei
 * Trifolium gracilentum Torr. & A.Gray – pinpoint clover
 * Trifolium grandiflorum Schreb.
 * Trifolium gymnocarpon Nutt. – hollyleaf clover
 * Trifolium hatschbachii Vincent & Butterworth
 * Trifolium haussknechtii Boiss.
 * Trifolium haydenii Porter
 * Trifolium heldreichianum (Gibelli & Belli) Hausskn.
 * Trifolium hickeyi T.K.Ahlq. & Vincent
 * Trifolium hirtum All. – rose clover
 * Trifolium howellii S.Watson – canyon clover or Howell's clover
 * Trifolium humile Ball
 * Trifolium hybridum L. – Alsike clover
 * Trifolium hydrophilum Greene
 * Trifolium incarnatum L. – crimson clover
 * Trifolium infamia-ponertii Greuter
 * Trifolium israeliticum Zohary & Katzn.
 * Trifolium isthmocarpum Brot.
 * Trifolium jokerstii Vincent & Rand.Morgan
 * Trifolium juliani Batt.
 * Trifolium kentuckiense Chapel & Vincent
 * Trifolium kingii S.Watson
 * Trifolium lanceolatum (J.B.Gillett) J.B.Gillett
 * Trifolium lappaceum L.
 * Trifolium latifolium (Hook.) Greene
 * Trifolium latinum Sebast.
 * Trifolium leibergii A.Nelson & J.F.Macbr. – Leiberg's clover
 * Trifolium lemmonii S.Watson – Lemmon's clover
 * Trifolium leucanthum M.Bieb.
 * Trifolium ligusticum Balb. ex Loisel.
 * Trifolium longidentatum Nábelek
 * Trifolium longipes Nutt. – longstalk clover
 * Trifolium lucanicum Gasp.
 * Trifolium lugardii Bullock
 * Trifolium lupinaster L.
 * Trifolium macilentum Greene
 * Trifolium macraei Hook. & Arn. – Chilean clover, double-head clover, or MacRae's clover
 * Trifolium macrocephalum (Pursh) Poir. – largehead clover
 * Trifolium masaiense J.B.Gillett
 * Trifolium mattirolianum Chiov.
 * Trifolium mazanderanicum Rech.f.
 * Trifolium medium L. – zigzag clover
 * Trifolium meduseum C.I.Blanche ex Boiss.
 * Trifolium meironense Zohary & Lerner
 * Trifolium mesogitanum Boiss.
 * Trifolium michaelis Greuter
 * Trifolium michelianum Savi
 * Trifolium micranthum Viv.
 * Trifolium microcephalum Pursh – smallhead clover
 * Trifolium microdon Hook. & Arn. – thimble clover
 * Trifolium miegeanum Maire
 * Trifolium minutissimum D.Heller & Zohary
 * Trifolium modestum Boiss.
 * Trifolium monanthum A.Gray – mountain carpet clover
 * Trifolium montanum L.
 * Trifolium multinerve A. Rich.
 * Trifolium multistriatum W.D.J.Koch
 * Trifolium mutabile Port.
 * Trifolium nanum Torr.
 * Trifolium nerimaniae M.Keskin
 * Trifolium × neyrautii Rouy
 * Trifolium nigrescens Viv.
 * Trifolium noricum Wulfen
 * Trifolium obscurum Savi
 * Trifolium obtusiflorum Hook. – clammy clover
 * Trifolium occidentale Coombe
 * Trifolium ochroleucon Huds. - sulphur clover
 * Trifolium oliganthum Steud. – fewflower clover
 * Trifolium olivaceum Greene
 * Trifolium orbelicum Velen.
 * Trifolium ornithopodioides L.
 * Trifolium owyheense Gilkey
 * Trifolium pachycalyx Zohary
 * Trifolium palaestinum Boiss.
 * Trifolium pallescens Schreb.
 * Trifolium pallidum Waldst. & Kit.
 * Trifolium palmeri S.Watson
 * Trifolium pamphylicum Boiss. & Heldr.
 * Trifolium pannonicum Jacq. – Hungarian clover
 * Trifolium parnassi Boiss. & Spruner
 * Trifolium parryi A.Gray
 * Trifolium patens Schreb.
 * Trifolium patulum Tausch
 * Trifolium pauciflorum d'Urv.
 * Trifolium × permixtum Neuman
 * Trifolium peruvianum Vogel
 * Trifolium philistaeum Zohary
 * Trifolium phitosianum N.Böhling, Greuter & Raus
 * Trifolium phleoides Pourr. ex Willd.
 * Trifolium physanthum Hook. & Arn.
 * Trifolium physodes Steven ex M. Bieb.
 * Trifolium pichisermollii J.B.Gillett
 * Trifolium pignantii Fauché. & Chaub.
 * Trifolium pilczii Adamović
 * Trifolium pilulare Boiss.
 * Trifolium piorkowskii Rand.Morgan & A.L.Barber
 * Trifolium plebeium Boiss.
 * Trifolium plumosum Douglas ex Hook.
 * Trifolium polymorphum Poir.
 * Trifolium polyodon Greene
 * Trifolium polyphyllum C.A.Mey.
 * Trifolium polystachyum Fresen.
 * Trifolium praetermissum Greuter, Pleger & Raus.
 * Trifolium pratense L. – red clover
 * Trifolium productum Greene
 * Trifolium prophetarum M. Hossain
 * Trifolium pseudomedium Hausskn.
 * Trifolium pseudostriatum Baker f.
 * Trifolium pulchellum Schischk.
 * Trifolium purpureum Loisel.
 * Trifolium purseglovei J. B. Gillett
 * Trifolium quartinianum A. Rich.
 * Trifolium radicosum Boiss. & Hohen.
 * Trifolium rechingeri Rothm.
 * Trifolium reflexum L. – buffalo clover
 * Trifolium repens L. – shamrock (white clover)
 * Trifolium resupinatum L. – Persian clover, shaftal
 * Trifolium retusum L.
 * Trifolium × retyezaticum Nyár.
 * Trifolium rhizomatosum O.Schwarz
 * Trifolium rhombeum S.Schauer
 * Trifolium riograndense Burkart
 * Trifolium rollinsii J.M.Gillett
 * Trifolium roussaeanum Boiss.
 * Trifolium rubens L.
 * Trifolium rueppellianum Fresen.
 * Trifolium salmoneum Mouterde
 * Trifolium sannineum Mouterde
 * Trifolium sarosiense Hazsl.
 * Trifolium saxatile All.
 * Trifolium scabrum L.
 * Trifolium schimperi (Hochst.) A.Rich.
 * Trifolium schneideri Standl.
 * Trifolium × schwarzii Wein
 * Trifolium scutatum Boiss.
 * Trifolium sebastiani Savi
 * Trifolium semipilosum Fresen.
 * Trifolium setiferum Boiss.
 * Trifolium simense Fresen.
 * Trifolium sintenisii Freyn
 * Trifolium siskiyouense J.M.Gillett
 * Trifolium somalense Taub. ex Harms
 * Trifolium sonorense T.K.Ahlq. & Vincent
 * Trifolium spadiceum L.
 * Trifolium spananthum Thulin
 * Trifolium spumosum L.
 * Trifolium squamosum (or maritimum) L. – sea clover
 * Trifolium squarrosum L.
 * Trifolium stellatum L.
 * Trifolium steudneri Schweinf.
 * Trifolium stipulaceum Thunb.
 * Trifolium stoloniferum Muhl. ex A. Eaton – running buffalo clover
 * Trifolium stolzii Harms
 * Trifolium striatum L. – knotted clover
 * Trifolium strictum L.
 * Trifolium subterraneum L. – subterranean clover
 * Trifolium suffocatum L.
 * Trifolium sylvaticum Gérard
 * Trifolium tembense Fresen.
 * Trifolium tenuifolium Ten.
 * Trifolium thalii Vill.
 * Trifolium thompsonii C.V.Morton – Thompson's clover
 * Trifolium tomentosum L.
 * Trifolium × traplii Domin
 * Trifolium triaristatum Bertero ex Colla
 * Trifolium trichocalyx A.Heller – Monterey clover
 * Trifolium trichocephalum M. Bieb.
 * Trifolium trichopterum Pančić
 * Trifolium tumens Steven ex M.Bieb.
 * Trifolium ukingense Harms
 * Trifolium uniflorum L.
 * Trifolium usambarense Taub.
 * Trifolium variegatum Nutt. – whitetip clover
 * Trifolium vavilovii Eig
 * Trifolium velebiticum Degen
 * Trifolium velenovskyi Vandas
 * Trifolium vernum Phil.
 * Trifolium vesiculosum Savi
 * Trifolium vestitum D.Heller & Zohary
 * Trifolium virginicum Small
 * Trifolium wentzelianum Harms
 * Trifolium wettsteinii Dörfl. & Hayek
 * Trifolium wigginsii J. M. Gillett
 * Trifolium willdenovii Spreng. − tomcat clover
 * Trifolium wormskioldii Lehm. – cow clover
 * Trifolium xanthinum Freyn

title: Clover


text:
Damnatio memoriae

Damnatio memoriae is a modern Latin phrase meaning "condemnation of memory", indicating that a person is to be excluded from official accounts. Depending on the extent, it can be a case of historical negationism. There are and have been many routes to damnatio memoriae, including the destruction of depictions, the removal of names from inscriptions and documents, and even large-scale rewritings of history. The term can be applied to other instances of official scrubbing. The practice has been seen as early as the Egyptian New Kingdom period, where the Pharaohs Hatshepsut and Akhenaten were subject to it.

After Herostratus set fire to the Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of antiquity, the people of Ephesus banned the mention of his name. His name has since become an eponym for people who commit crimes for the purpose of gaining notoriety.

Etymology
Although the term damnatio memoriae is Latin, the phrase was not used by the ancient Romans, and first appeared in a thesis written in Germany in 1689.

Ancient world
Today's best known examples of damnatio memoriae from antiquity concern chiselling stone inscriptions or deliberately omitting certain information from them.

Ancient Mesopotamia
According to Stefan Zawadzki, the oldest known examples of such practices come from around 3000-2000 BC. He cites the example of Lagash (an ancient city-state founded by the Sumerians in southern Mesopotamia), where preserved inscriptions concerning a conflict with another city-state, Umma, do not mention the ruler of Umma, but describe him as "the man of Umma", which Zawadzki sees as an example of deliberate degradation of the ruler of Umma to the role of an unworthy person whose name and position in history the rulers of Lagash did not want to record for posterity.

Ancient Egypt

Egyptians also practiced this, as seen in relics from pharaoh Akhenaten's tomb and elsewhere. Akhenaten's sole worship of the god Aten, instead of the traditional pantheon, was considered heretical. During his reign, Akhenaten endeavoured to have all references to the god Amun chipped away and removed. After his reign, temples to Aten were dismantled and the stones reused to create other temples. Images of Akhenaten had their faces chipped away, and images and references to Amun reappeared. The people blamed their misfortunes on Akhenaten's shift of worship to Atenism, away from the gods they served before him. Other Egyptian victims of this practice include the pharaohs that immediately succeeded Akhenaten, including Smenkhkare, Neferneferuaten, and Ay. The campaign of damnatio memoriae against Akhenaten and his successors was initiated by the latter's successor, Horemheb, who decided to erase from history all pharaohs associated with the unpopular Amarna Period; this process was continued by Horemheb's successors. Tutankhamun was also erased from history in this way even though he had restored Egypt to the Amun god because he was simply one the kings who succeeded Akhenaten and he was possibly Akhenaten's own son.

Ancient Hittites

One case of damnatio memoriae is known for the ancient Hittite empire. Mursili III was a king of the Hittites for about seven years in 1282–1275 BC who was then overthrown by his uncle Hattusili III, who assumed the throne.

There is a well known relief of Mursili's father Muwatalli II near the village of Sirkeli Höyük in Turkey,, as well as a second, very similar relief that is believed to be that of his son Mursili. It was largely destroyed in antiquity, most likely by his spiteful uncle. The relief of the father was left untouched.

Ancient Greece

The practice was known in Ancient Greece. The Athenians frequently destroyed inscriptions which referred to individuals or events that they no longer wished to commemorate. After Timotheus was convicted of treason and removed from his post as general in 373 BC, all references to him as a general were deleted from the previous year's naval catalogue. The most complete example is their systematic removal of all references to the Antigonids from inscriptions in their city, in 200 BC when they were besieged by the Antigonid king Philip V of Macedon during the Second Macedonian War. One decree praising Demetrius Poliorcetes (Philip V's great-grandfather) was smashed and thrown down a well.

At Delphi, an honorific inscription erected between 337 and 327 BC for Aristotle and his nephew Callisthenes, two philosophers who were closely associated with the Macedonians, were smashed and thrown in a well after the death of Alexander of Macedon in 323 BC.

Ancient Rome
In ancient Rome, the practice of damnatio memoriae was the condemnation of emperors after their deaths. If the Senate or a later emperor did not like the acts of an emperor, they could have his property seized, his name erased and his statues reworked (normally defaced). Because there was an economic incentive to seize property and rework statues, historians and archaeologists have had difficulty determining when official damnatio memoriae actually took place, although it seems to have been quite rare.

Compounding this difficulty is the fact that a completely successful damnatio memoriae results—by definition—in the full and total erasure of the subject from the historical record. In the case of figures such as emperors or consuls it is unlikely that complete success was possible, as even comprehensive obliteration of the person's existence and actions in records and the like would continue to be historically visible without extensive reworking. The impracticality of such a cover-up could be vast—in the case of Emperor Geta, for example, coins bearing his effigy proved difficult to entirely remove from circulation for several years, even though the mere mention of his name was punishable by death.

Difficulties in implementation also arose if there was not full and enduring agreement with the punishment, such as when the Senate's condemnation of Nero was implemented—leading to attacks on many of his statues —but subsequently evaded with the enormous funeral he was given by Vitellius. Similarly, it was often difficult to prevent later historians from "resurrecting" the memory of the sanctioned person.

The impossibility of actually erasing memory of an emperor have led scholars to conclude that this was not actually the goal of damnatio. Instead, they understand damnatio: "not so much as an attempt to obliterate memory entirely as to transform honorific commemoration into a form of visible denigration. That is: the power of an act of damnatio relies, at least in part, on the viewer of a monument being able to supplement the gaps in an inscription with their own knowledge of what those gaps had once contained, and the reasons why the text had been removed"These emperors are known to have been erased from monuments:

Middle Ages
In the Middle Ages, heresiarchs could have their memory condemned. The Council of Constance decreed the damnatio memoriae of John Wycliffe.

The practice of replacing pagan beliefs and motifs with Christian, and purposefully not recording the pagan history, has been compared to damnatio memoriae as well.

In her book Medici Women - Portraits of Power, Love and Betrayal, Gabrielle Langdon also presents compelling evidence concerning a probable damnatio memoriae issued against Isabella de' Medici, a prominent female figure of the 16th century Renaissance Medici court.

Ancient Maya
Several apparent damnatio mamoriae incidents occurred within the Maya civilization during the Classic period (250–900 CE) as a result of political conflicts between leaders of the local kingdoms.

One notable incident occurred in the kingdom of Paʼ Chan (modern-day Yaxchilan, Mexico) in the middle of the 8th century. In June 742, the k'uhul ajaw (Holy Lord, i.e. king) of Pa' Chan, Itzamnaaj Bahlam III, died after a 60-year-long rule, during which he turned his kingdom into one of great riches after a large number of military campaigns which were recorded and illustrated on multiple high-quality stelae, lintels and hieroglyphic steps of temples which he dedicated to his military success (e.g. Temple 44) and his family (e.g. Temple 23). Though he had a son who eventually ascended to the throne after his death, there was a mysterious decade-long interregnum period in which Pa' Chan did not record the existence of any king. Itzamnaaj Bahlam's son, Yaxun Bʼalam IV, also known as Bird Jaguar IV, ascended to the throne in April 752, nearly ten years after his father's death.

This interregnum period may be explained by a text from the nearby northern kingdom of Yokib (modern-day Piedras Negras, Guatemala). Panel 3 of this city, largely regarded as one of the most beautiful pieces of Mayan art, was carved approximately in 782 and illustrates an episode of the reign of Itzam Kʼan Ahk II (also known as Pawaaj Kʼan Ahk II), in which he celebrated his first kʼatun (period of 7200 days) as king, on July 27, 749. Panel 3 claims that the celebration "was witnessed by Sak Jukub Yopaat Bahlam, Holy Lord of Paʼ Chan." Also known as Yopaat Bahlam II, this mysterious ruler does not appear anywhere else in the historical record, not even in his supposed homeland. Moreoever, his respectful presence at a celebration in Yokib, Paʼ Chan's centuries-old and bitter rival (which had, in fact, scored a victory in battle against Itzamnaaj Bahlam III in 726), as well as the depiction of Itzam Kʼan Ahk apparently addressing a speech (now hardly readable, but probably involving an event of Paʼ Chan's past) toward a party from Paʼ Chan—which included his son and "heir to the throne" of Paʼ Chan (chʼok paʼchan ajaw), Sihyaj Ahkteʼ—, possibly indicate that he ruled as a vassal of Itzam Kʼan Ahk, or that he used the celebration as an opportunity to ask for Itzam Kʼan Ahk's support against Yaxun Bʼalam IV, his political rival. This has led to the conclusion that if this man truly ruled Paʼ Chan, any records of his existence were destroyed during the reign of Yaxun Bʼalam IV, who notoriously led a massive propaganda campaign throughout his rule to claim legitimacy over the throne, which involved the rewriting of his kingdom's dynastic history and restoration of several historical records of previous kings. The immense texts writing Yaxun Bʼalam's own version of his kingdom's dynastic history may have been carved over existing records which would have been intentionally erased with plaster, possibly destroying the records of the king (or kings) of the interregnum.

It is possible Yopaat Bahlam and his son lived the rest of their lives in exile at Yokib, and that the "heir to the throne" never rose to power. Yopaat Bahlam may have been buried in Burial 13 of the city, judging from a text carved on four Spondylus limbatus shells found within it which bears his name and mentions that he had previously visited the city in January 747, also within the interregnum.

New Spain

Notorious incidents of damnatio memoriae occurred during the existence of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the Spanish colony that emerged after the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521. Various viceroys ordered the destruction of monuments and documents depicting certain episodes of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican history and rebels to Spanish rule over the Americas.

For instance, Moctezuma I (not to be confused with his more famous great-grandson Moctezuma II), 15th-century huei tlahtoani (Great Speaker, i.e. emperor) of the Excan Tlahtoloyan (lit. Triple Capital), known by historians as the Mexica or Aztec Empire (also known as the Aztec Triple Alliance, whose inhabitants referred to themselves as Culhua-Mexica), ordered the creation of a portrait of himself and of his military and political advisor Tlacaelel at Chapultepec, a historically and naturally important site which nowadays is within Mexico City. This became a tradition among subsequent Mexica rulers, and portraits of Axayacatl and Ahuizotl, two of Moctezuma's successors, were also made throughout the rest of the century (Tizoc's absence may be explained by his sudden death from poisoning). Moctezuma II would create the last portrait of this kind in 1519 (which believes might be "the last Aztec monument"), at the eve of the Spanish conquest.

Antonio de León y Gama, a distinguished Mexican intellectual, wrote in the late 18th century that these portraits were well preserved up until that century. León y Gama claimed that the only portrait he got to see himself was Moctezuma II's, before its destruction was ordered by the authorities in 1753 or 1754. He mentioned that Axayacatl's portrait still existed earlier in that century before it was "broken up and removed." Indeed, the remains of Moctezuma's portrait, approximately 2 meters (over 6 feet) high, reveal that its damage was not accidental or natural. It was carved on pink-to-gray andesite, which is "slightly harder than marble," according to Hajovsky. The markings in the damaged parts show that apparently its destruction was executed with the dropping of a boulder, and that deep holes were drilled "perhaps in order to pry the stone apart or blow it up."

In another notorious instance, Spanish bishop Juan de Zumárraga ordered the destruction of a portrait depicting Nezahualcoyotl, king of Texcoco, on July 7, 1539, along with various other sculptures at the Hill of Texcotzingo "in a manner such that they would no longer be remembered," a clear example of damnatio memoriae.

During the Mexican War of Independence, which started in 1810, one of the earliest revolutionary leaders, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, nowadays remembered as a national Hero, was executed by the Spanish authorities in 1811. After his execution, according to contemporary accounts, the authorities declared a damnatio memoriae. According to one of Hidalgo's soldiers, Pedro García (1790–1873), "the fierce war against Hidalgo's memory and his ideas" was done through strict censorship. "It became illegal to speak about Hidalgo anywhere, it became a great crime that was severely punished. This is the reason why no portrait which resembles him at all is found anywhere in the country, since the prohibition lasted nearly ten years. Nobody felt safe speaking inside their homes."

The Spanish efforts to erase his memory, however, were in vain. The War of Independence continued, and the leaders who continued to revolution after Hidalgo's death made great efforts to commemorate his legacy. José María Morelos, for example, declared in 1813 that September 16, the anniversary of the beginning of the war, would be celebrated every year "remembering always the merit of the great Hero Don Miguel Hidalgo and his partner Don Ignacio Allende."

Similar practices in modern times
While complete damnatio memoriae has not been attempted in modern times—naming or writing about a person fallen from favour has never been made subject to formal punishment—less total instances of damnatio memoriae in modern times include numerous examples from the Soviet Union, retouching photos to remove individuals such as Leon Trotsky, Nikolay Yezhov, and even Stalin. After Stalin ordered the murder of Grigory Kulik's wife Kira Kulik-Simonich, all photographic records of her were destroyed; although she was described as very pretty, no photographs or other images of her survive. Following their fall from favour, Lavrentiy Beria and others were removed from articles in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Following the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, many communist statues, particularly of Lenin and Stalin, were removed from former Soviet satellite states. Following a 2015 decision, a process of decommunization in Ukraine successfully dismantled all 1,320 statues of Lenin after its independence, as well as renaming roads and structures named under Soviet authority.

The graphic designer David King had a strong interest in Soviet art and design, and amassed a collection of over 250,000 images. His most striking examples of before-and-after alterations were published as The Commissar Vanishes.

Poland
19th century Polish writers often omitted mentioning two kings from the list of Polish monarchs, Bezprym and Wenceslaus III of Bohemia, which has resulted in their being omitted from many later works as well.

China
The treatment of Chinese politician Zhao Ziyang following his fall from grace inside the Chinese Communist Party is regarded as another modern case of damnatio memoriae.

Germany
The destruction of all copies of The Victory of Faith in order to erase Ernst Röhm is considered an act of Nazi damnatio memoriae. In the end, two copies survived: one preserved in London and one preserved by the Communist government of East Germany.

North Korea
In December 2013, Jang Song-thaek was abruptly accused of being a counter-revolutionary and was stripped of all his posts, expelled from the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK), arrested and executed. His photos were removed from official media and his image digitally removed from photos with other North Korean leaders.

Analysis
The term is used in modern scholarship to cover a wide array of official and unofficial sanctions through which the physical remnants and memories of a deceased individual are destroyed.

Looking at cases of damnatio memoriae in modern Irish history, Guy Beiner has argued that iconoclastic vandalism only makes martyrs of the "dishonored", thus ensuring that they will be remembered for all time. Nonetheless, Beiner goes on to argue that the purpose of damnatio memoriae—rather than being to erase people from history—was to guarantee only negative memories of those who were so dishonored. Pointing out that damnatio memoriae did not erase people from history but in effect kept their memory alive, Beiner concluded that those who partake in the destruction of a monument should be considered agents of memory.

Author Charles Hedrick proposes that a distinction be made between damnatio memoriae (the condemnation of a deceased person) and abolitio memoriae (the actual erasure of another from historical texts).

In case of removal of Soviet monuments in Eastern Europe, the primary reason was that they were established as a symbol of occupation, domination or cult of personality, rather than simple historic mark. It has been pointed out that all Nazi-established monuments and street names have been removed after World War II which has been perceived as natural reaction after liberation at that time.

title: Damnatio memoriae


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Shallot

The shallot is a cultivar group of the onion. Until 2010, the (French red) shallot was classified as a separate species, Allium ascalonicum. The taxon was synonymized with Allium cepa (the common onion) in 2010, as the difference was too small to justify a separate species.

As part of the onion genus Allium, its close relatives include garlic, scallions, leeks, chives, and the Chinese onion.

Etymology and names
The names scallion and shallot are derived from the Old French eschalotte, by way of eschaloigne, from the Latin Ascalōnia caepa or Ascalonian onion, a Ascalōnia caepa or Ascalonian onion, a namesake of the ancient city of Ascalon.

The term shallot is usually applied to the French red shallot (Allium cepa var. aggregatum, or the A. cepa Aggregatum Group). It is also used for the Persian shallot or musir (A. stipitatum) from the Zagros Mountains in Iran and Iraq, and the French gray shallot (Allium oschaninii) which is also known as griselle or "true shallot"; it grows wild from Central to Southwest Asia. The name shallot is also used for a scallion in New South Wales, Australia and among English-speaking people in Quebec while the term French shallot refers to the plant referred to on this page. In most English-speaking nations, the name is pronounced with the emphasis on the last syllable in common with the French pronunciation, sha-lot, while the emphasis is commonly made on the first syllable, shall-ət, in the United States.

The term eschalot, derived from the French word échalote, can also be used to refer to the shallot.

Description and cultivation
Like garlic, shallots are formed in clusters of offsets with a head composed of multiple cloves. The skin colour of shallots can vary from golden brown to gray to rose red, and their off-white flesh is usually tinged with green or magenta.

Shallots are extensively cultivated for culinary uses, propagated by offsets. In some regions ("long-season areas"), the offsets are usually planted in autumn (September or October in the Northern Hemisphere). In some other regions, the suggested planting time for the principal crop is early spring (typically in February or the beginning of March in the Northern Hemisphere).

In planting, the tops of the bulbs should be kept a little above ground, and the soil surrounding the bulbs is often drawn away when the roots have taken hold. They come to maturity in summer, although fresh shallots can now be found year-round in supermarkets. Shallots should not be planted on ground recently manured. Shallots suffer damage from leek moth larvae, which mine into the leaves or bulbs of the plant.

Nutrition
A raw shallot is 80% water, 17% carbohydrates, 2.5% protein and contains negligible fat (table). In a reference amount of 100 g, raw shallot supplies 72 calories and is a rich source of vitamin B6 (27% of the Daily Value, DV), while providing moderate amounts of manganese (14% DV) and vitamin C (10% DV) (table). No other micronutrients are in significant content.

Culinary
Shallots are used in cooking. They may be pickled. Finely-sliced deep-fried shallots are used as a condiment in Asian cuisine, often served with porridge. Shallots taste similar to other cultivars of the common onion, but have a milder flavor. Like onions, when sliced, raw shallots release substances that irritate the human eye, resulting in production of tears.

Fresh shallots can be stored in a cool, dry area (0 to 4 °C, 32 to 40 °F, 60 to 70% RH) for six months or longer. Chopped, dried shallots are available.

Europe
In Europe, the Pikant, Atlas, and Ed's Red types of shallots are the most common.

Asia
Shallots are the traditional choice for many dishes in Sri Lankan cuisine, including pol sambola, lunu miris and many meat, fish and vegetable dishes.

In most Indian cuisines, the distinction between onions and shallots is weak; larger varieties of shallot are sometimes confused with small red onions and used interchangeably. Indeed, most parts of India use the regional name for onion interchangeably with shallot (Maharashtra, for instance, where both are called kanda). The southern regions of India distinguish shallots from onions in recipes more often, especially the much loved tiny varieties (about the width of a finger); these are widely used in curries and different types of sambar, a lentil-based dish. Shallots pickled in red vinegar are common in many Indian restaurants, served along with sauces and papad on the condiments tray. They are also used as a home remedy for sore throats, mixed with jaggery or sugar. In Nepal, shallots are used as one of the ingredients for making momo.

In Kashmir shallots are widely used in preparation of Wazwan Kashmiri cuisine, as they add distinct flavor and prevent curry from becoming black, which is common with onions.

In Iran shallots are used in various ways, the most common being grated shallot mixed into dense yogurt, a combination served in almost every restaurant when one orders grills or kebabs. Shallots are also used to make different types of torshi (ترشی), a sour Iranian side dish consisting of a variety of vegetables under vinegar, eaten with main dishes in small quantities. Shallot is also pickled—called shour (شور) in Persian—along with other vegetables to be served as torshi.

In Southeast Asian cuisines, such as those of Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Brunei, both shallots and garlic are often used as elementary spices. Raw shallots can also accompany cucumbers when pickled in mild vinegar solution. They are also often chopped finely, then fried until golden brown, resulting in tiny crispy shallot chips called bawang goreng (fried shallots) in Indonesian, which can be bought ready-made from groceries and supermarkets. Shallots enhance the flavor of many Southeast Asian dishes, such as fried rice variants. They are also often present in noodle and slaw dishes. Crispy shallot chips are also used in southern Chinese cuisine. In Indonesia, shallots are sometimes pickled and added to several traditional foods; the pickles' sourness is thought to increase the appetite. In the southern Philippines, shallot bulbs and leaves are used to make the popular spicy Maranao condiment called palapa, which is used in the dish Piaparan.

The tubular green leaves of the plant can also be eaten and are very similar to the leaves of spring onions and chives.

title: Shallot


text:
The Phantom Edit

Star Wars Episode I.I: The Phantom Edit is a fan edit of the film Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, removing many elements of the original film. The purpose of the edit, according to creator Mike J. Nichols, was to make a much stronger version of The Phantom Menace based on the previous execution and philosophies of film storytelling and editing of George Lucas. The Phantom Edit was the first unauthorized re-edit of The Phantom Menace to receive major publicity and acclaim and is also considered the first fan-edit of a feature film ever to be shared by an online audience.

History
The Phantom Edit was originally circulated in Hollywood studios in 2000 and 2001, and was followed by media attention. Salon.com, NPR, PBS, and the BBC all covered the edit to various degrees.

Rumor initially attributed The Phantom Edit to Kevin Smith, who admitted to having seen the re-edit but denied that he was the editor. The editor was revealed to be Mike J. Nichols of Santa Clarita, California, in the September 7, 2001, edition of The Washington Post.

Available on VHS, DVD and later via BitTorrent, the DVD contains two deleted scenes and a commentary track by the editor as well as a few Easter eggs. The DVD version has also been relabeled as Episode I.II, has a slightly different podrace from the VHS version, and contains more extensive editing to individual images and sounds that have not been entirely cut.

Lucasfilm, the production company of series creator George Lucas, condoned the edit and did not pursue legal action against its distributors.

Changes
Changes made from the original film in The Phantom Edit There were a total of 18 minutes cut from the original film, reducing the run time from 136 minutes to 119 minutes.
 * Opening crawl replaced with a new one explaining why the edit was made
 * Re-editing of nearly all scenes featuring Jar Jar Binks and removing some of what Nichols dubs 'Jar Jar Antics'
 * Removal or re-editing of most of the battle droid dialogue
 * Limiting of exposition throughout the film
 * Trimming scenes involving politics
 * Re-arrangement of shots and scenes to match the original Star Wars trilogy's presentation style
 * Removal of "yippee" and "oops" from Anakin's dialogue
 * Removal of dialogue that specifies the nature of midi-chlorians as a biological basis for Force sensitivity
 * Reinstatement of deleted scenes in order to fill in plot holes

Reviews
Critics and filmmakers have commented on the original Phantom Edit, in most cases providing the approval and recognition which furthered the fan edit movement.

 * "Smart editing to say the least" — Kevin Smith, film director
 * "...Materialized from out of nowhere was a good film that had been hidden inside the disappointing original one." — Daniel Kraus, Salon
 * "[Done by]; someone with a gift (and equipment) for editing" — Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune film critic

The 2010 documentary film The People vs. George Lucas cites The Phantom Edit as a key example of the remix culture created by the Star Wars franchise.

Sequel: Attack of the Phantom
Nichols followed up his edits of Episode I with an edit of Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones.

Called Star Wars Episode II.I: Attack of the Phantom, the DVD contains a re-edited version (38 minutes cut, new runtime of 104 minutes) of Episode II in surround sound, with a commentary track. At points during the commentary, the viewer has the option to pause the film to view in more detail some of the things that the editor is discussing.

title: The Phantom Edit