text:
Telegraph key

A telegraph key or Morse key is a specialized electrical switch used by a trained operator to transmit text messages in Morse code in a telegraphy system. Keys are used in all forms of electrical telegraph systems, including landline (also called wire) telegraphy and radio (also called wireless) telegraphy. An operator uses the telegraph key to send electrical pulses (or in the case of modern CW, unmodulated radio waves) of two different lengths: short pulses, called dots or dits, and longer pulses, called dashes or dahs. These pulses encode the letters and other characters that spell out the message.

Types
Since its original inception, the telegraph key's design has developed such that there are now multiple types of keys.

Straight keys
A straight key is the common telegraph key as seen in various movies. It is a simple bar with a knob on top and an electrical contact underneath. When the bar is pressed down against spring tension, it makes a closed electric circuit. Traditionally, American telegraph keys had flat topped knobs and narrow bars (frequently curved), while British telegraph keys had ball shaped knobs and thick bars. This appears to be purely a matter of culture and training, but the users of each are tremendously partisan.

Straight keys have been made in numerous variations for over 150 years and in numerous countries. They are the subject of an avid community of key collectors. The straight keys used in wire telegraphy also had a shorting bar that closed the electrical circuit when the operator was not actively sending messages. This was to complete the electrical path to the next station so that its sounder would operate, as in the operator receiving a message from the next town. Although occasionally included in later keys for reasons of tradition, the shorting bar is unnecessary for radio telegraphy, except as a convenience when tuning the transmitter.

The straight key is simple and reliable, but the rapid pumping action needed to send a string of dots (or dits as most operators call them) poses some significant drawbacks. Transmission speeds vary from 5 words (25 characters) per minute, by novice operators, up to about 30 words (150 characters) per minute by skilled operators. In the early days of telegraphy, a number of professional telegraphers developed a repetitive stress injury known as glass arm or telegrapher's paralysis. "Glass arm" or "telegrapher's paralysis" may be reduced or eliminated by increasing the side play of the straight key by loosening the adjustable trunnion screws. Such problems can be avoided by using a good technique.

Alternative designs
In addition to the basic up-and-down telegraph key, telegraphers have been experimenting with alternate key designs from the beginning of telegraphy. Many are made to move side-to-side instead of up-and-down. Some of the designs, such as sideswipers (or bushwhackers) and semi-automatic keys operate mechanically.

Beginning in the mid-20th century electronic devices called "keyers" have been developed, which are operated by special keys of various designs generally categorized as single-paddle keys (also called sideswipers), and double-paddle keys (or "iambic" or "squeeze" keys). The keyer may be either an independent device that attaches to the transmitter in place of a telegraph key, or circuitry incorporated in modern amateurs' radios.

Sideswipers
The first widely accepted alternative key was the sideswiper or sidewinder, sometimes called a cootie key or bushwhacker. This key uses a side-to-side action with contacts on both the left and right and the arm spring-loaded to return to center; the operator may make a dit or dah by swinging the lever in either direction. A series of dits can be sent by rocking the arm back and forth.

This first new style of key was introduced in part to increase speed of sending, but more importantly to reduce the repetitive strain injury affecting telegraphers, then popularly called "glass arm" or clinically "telegraphic paralysis". The side-to-side motion reduces strain, and uses different muscles than the up-and-down motion (called "pounding brass"). Nearly all advanced keys use some form of side-to-side action.

The alternating action produces a distinctive rhythm or swing which noticeably affects the operator's transmission rhythm (known as ‘fist’). Although the original sideswiper is now rarely seen or used, when the left and right contacts are electrically separated a sideswiper becomes a modern single-paddle key (see below); likewise, a modern single-lever key becomes an old-style sideswiper when its two contacts are wired together.

Semi-automatic key
A popular side-to-side key is the semi-automatic key or bug, sometimes known as a Vibroplex key, after the company that first manufactured them. The original bugs were fully mechanical, based on a kind of simple clockwork mechanism, and required no electronic keyer. A skilled operator can achieve sending speeds in excess of 40 words per minute with a ‘bug’.

The benefit of the clockwork mechanism is that it reduces the motion required from the telegrapher's hand, which provides greater speed of sending, and it produces uniformly timed dits (dots, or short pulses) and maintains constant rhythm; consistent timing and rhythm are crucial for decoding the signal on the other end of the telegraph line.

The single paddle is held between the knuckle and the thumb of the right hand. When the paddle is pressed to the right (with the thumb), it kicks a horizontal pendulum which then rocks against the contact point, sending a series of short pulses (dits or dots) at a speed which is controlled by the pendulum’s length. When the paddle is pressed toward the left (with the knuckle) it makes a continuous contact suitable for sending dahs (dashes); the telegrapher remains responsible for timing of the dahs.

Electronic keyers and paddle keys
Like semi-automatic keys, the telegrapher operates an electronic keyer by tapping a paddle key, swinging its lever(s) from side-to-side. When pressed to one side (usually left), the keyer electronics generate a series of dahs; when pressed to the other side (usually right), a series of dits. Keyers work with two different types of keys: Single paddle and double paddle keys.

Like semi-automatic keys, pressing the paddle on one side produces a dit and the other a dah. Single paddle keys are also called single lever keys or sideswipers, the same name as the older side-to-side key design they greatly resemble. Double paddle keys are also called "iambic" keys or "squeeze" keys. Also like the old semi-automatic keys, the conventional assignment of the paddle directions is that pressing a paddle with the thumb (for a right-handed telegrapher, pressing the single paddle rightward, or for a double-paddle key, pressing the left paddle rightwards to the center) creates a series of dits: The clockwork pendulum on old semi-automatic keys needed the extra kick that the stronger thumb press provided. Pressing a paddle with the knuckle (hence swinging a single paddle leftward, or the right paddle on a double-paddle key leftward to the center) creates a series of dahs. Left-handed telegraphers sometimes elect to reverse the electrical contacts, so their left-handed keying is a mirror image of standard right-handed keying.

Single paddle keys are essentially the same as the original sideswiper keys, with the left and right electrical contacts wired separately. Double-paddle keys have one arm for each of the two contacts, each arm held away from the common center by a spring; pressing either of the paddles towards the center makes contact, the same as pressing a single-lever key to one side. For double-paddle keys wired to an "iambic" keyer, squeezing both paddles together makes a double-contact, which causes the keyer to send alternating dits and dahs (or dahs and dits, depending on which lever makes first contact).

Most electronic keyers include dot and dash memory functions, so the operator does not need to use perfect spacing between dits and dahs or vice versa. With dit or dah memory, the operator's keying action can be about one dit ahead of the actual transmission. The electronics in the keyer adjusts the timing so that the output of each letter is machine-perfect. Electronic keyers allow very high speed transmission of code.

Using a keyer in what's called "iambic" mode requires a key with two paddles: One paddle produces dits and the other produces dahs. Pressing both at the same time (a "squeeze") produces an alternating dit-dah-dit-dah sequence, which starts with a dit if the dit side makes contact first, or a dah  if the dah side connects first.

An additional advantage of electronic keyers over semiautomatic keys is that code speed is easily changed with electronic keyers, just by turning a knob. With a semiautomatic key, the location of the pendulum weight and the pendulum spring tension and contact must all be repositioned and rebalanced to change the dit speed.

Double-lever paddles
Keys having two separate levers, one for dits and the other for dahs are called dual or dual-lever paddles. With a dual paddle both contacts may be closed simultaneously, enabling the "iambic" functions of an electronic keyer that is designed to support them: By pressing both paddles (squeezing the levers together) the operator can create a series of alternating dits and dahs, analogous to a sequence of iambs in poetry. For that reason, dual paddles are sometimes called squeeze keys or iambic keys. Typical dual-paddle keys' levers move horizontally, like the earlier single-paddle keys, as opposed to how the original "straight-keys'" arms move up-and-down.

Whether the sequence begins with a dit or a dah is determined by which lever makes contact first: If the dah lever is closed first, then the first element will be a dah, so the string of elements will be similar to a sequence of trochees in poetry, and the method could as logically be called "trochaic keying" ( ...). If the dit lever makes first contact, then the string begins with a dit ( ...).

Insofar as iambic keying is a function of the electronic keyer, it is not correct, technically, to refer to a dual paddle key itself as "iambic", although this is commonly done in marketing. A dual paddle key is required for iambic sending, which also requires an iambic keyer. But any single- or dual-paddle key can be used non-iambicly, without squeezing, and there were electronic keyers made which did not have iambic functions.

Iambic keying or squeeze keying reduces the key strokes or hand movements necessary to make some characters, e.g. the letter C, which can be sent by merely squeezing the two paddles together. With a single-paddle or non-iambic keyer, the hand motion would require alternating four times for (dah-dit-dah-dit ).

The efficiency of iambic keying has recently been discussed in terms of movements per character and timings for high speed CW, with the author concluding that the timing difficulties of correctly operating a keyer iambicly at high speed outweigh any small benefits.

Iambic keyers function in one of at least two major modes: Mode and mode. There is a third, rarely available mode.

Mode
Mode is the original iambic mode, in which alternate dots and dashes are produced as long as both paddles are depressed. Mode is essentially "what you hear is what you get": When the paddles are released, the keying stops with the last dot or dash that was being sent while the paddles were held.

Mode
Mode is the second mode, which devolved from a logic error in an early iambic keyer. Over the years iambic mode has become something of a standard and is the default setting in most keyers.

In mode, dots and dashes are produced as long as both paddles are depressed. When the paddles are released, the keying continues by sending one more element than has already been heard. I.e., if the paddles were released during a dah then the last element sent will be a following dit; if the paddles were released during a dit then the sequence will end with the following dah.

Users accustomed to one mode may find it difficult to adapt to the other, so most modern keyers allow selection of the desired mode.

Mode
A third electronic keyer mode useful with a dual paddle is the "Ultimatic" mode (mode ), so-called for the brand name of the electronic keyer that introduced it. In the Ultimatic keying mode, the keyer will switch to the opposite element if the second lever is pressed before the first is released (that is, squeezed).

Single-lever paddle keys
A single-lever paddle key has separate contacts for dits and dahs, but there is no ability to make both contacts simultaneously by squeezing the paddles together for iambic mode.

When a single-paddle key is used with an electronic keyer, continuous dits are created by holding the dit-side paddle (...); likewise, continuous dahs are created by holding the dah paddle (...).

A single-paddle key can non-iambicly operate any electronic keyer, whether or not it even offers iambic functions, and regardless of whether the keyer iambically operates in mode, , or.

Non-telegraphic keys
Simple telegraph-like keys were long used to control the flow of electricity in laboratory tests of electrical circuits. Often, these were simple "strap" keys, in which a bend in the key lever provided the key's spring action.

Telegraph-like keys were once used in the study of operant conditioning with pigeons. Starting in the 1940s, initiated by B. F. Skinner at Harvard University, the keys were mounted vertically behind a small circular hole about the height of a pigeon's beak in the front wall of an operant conditioning chamber. Electromechanical recording equipment detected the closing of the switch whenever the pigeon pecked the key. Depending on the psychological questions being investigated, keypecks might have resulted in the presentation of food or other stimuli.

Modern pigeon response keys are specially made switches but are still called "keys" due to their origins as telegraph keys.

Operators' "fist"
With straight keys, side-swipers, and, to an extent, bugs, each and every telegrapher has their own unique style or rhythm pattern when transmitting a message. An operator's style is known as their "fist".

Since every fist is unique, other telegraphers can usually identify the individual telegrapher transmitting a particular message. This had a huge significance during the first and second World Wars, since the on-board telegrapher's "fist" could be used to track individual ships and submarines, and for traffic analysis.

However, with electronic keyers (either single- or double-paddle) this is no longer the case: Keyers produce uniformly "perfect" code at a set speed, which is altered at the request of the receiver, usually not the sender. Only inter-character and inter-word spacing remain unique to the operator, and can produce a less clear semblance of a "fist".

title: Telegraph key


text:
I Woke Up

I Woke Up is the 26th album by Jandek and his only release of 1997. Released as Corwood Industries #0764, it introduced (for the first and last time) a new male vocalist who sings most of the tracks.

Reviews
More existential twang, strum, holler, and moan. Of course, a shylock like Will Oldham gets laid a lot when he pulls this trick, so it's patently unfair that Texas recluse Jandek doesn't get those same dumpy groupies. -- Fred Mills Magnet #31

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

title: I Woke Up


text:
BA

BA or variants may refer to:

 * Bachelor of Arts, an academic degree

Businesses and organizations

 * Bibliotheca Alexandrina, a library and cultural center in Egypt
 * Booksellers Association of the UK and Ireland
 * British Airways, a British airline
 * British Association for the Advancement of Science, now British Science Association
 * Bundesagentur für Arbeit, Federal Employment Agency of Germany
 * Selskap med begrenset ansvar, a type of Norwegian company with limited liability

Languages

 * Aka-Bo language, an Indian language, also known as Ba
 * Bashkir language, ISO 639-1 language code ba
 * Ba (cuneiform), a sign in cuneiform texts
 * Ba (Indic), in Indic abugidas
 * Ba (Javanese) (ꦧ), in the Javanese script
 * Ba (Mongolic), in alphabets used to write Mongolic and Tungusic languages
 * Arabic letter ب, named باء bāʾ

People

 * Ba (given name), in Myanmar and ancient China
 * Ba (surname), a West African surname
 * Ba (pharaoh), an early Egyptian or ancient Egyptian king

The Americas

 * Buenos Aires, Argentina
 * The Bahamas, WMO country code

Asia

 * Ba (state), an ancient state in eastern Sichuan, China
 * Ba River (China)
 * Ba River (Vietnam)
 * Bandra railway station, Indian Railways code BA
 * Ba'a, Rote, Indonesia
 * Bahrain, obsolete NATO, FIPS and LOC MARC country code
 * Banan District, Chongqing, China, formerly Ba County
 * Bazhou, Hebei, China, formerly Ba County

Europe

 * BA postcode area, Bath, England
 * Ba (Ljig), Serbia
 * Ba Congress, 1944
 * Bosnia and Herzegovina, ISO-3166 country code BA
 * .ba, the top-level domain for Bosnia and Herzegovina

Oceania

 * Ba Province, Fiji
 * Ba (town)
 * Ba District, Fiji
 * Ba River (Fiji)
 * Ba (Open Constituency, Fiji)

Science and technology

 * Ba (genus), land snails
 * ba space, in mathematics
 * Barium, chemical symbol Ba
 * Barye, a measurement unit of pressure
 * 6-Benzylaminopurine, plant hormone
 * BA, sublineages of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant
 * British Association screw threads, a set of small screw threads

Sport

 * Ba F.C., a Fijian football club
 * Ba game, a version of medieval football played in Scotland
 * Basketball Australia, promoting basketball in Australia
 * Batting average, a statistic in cricket and baseball
 * Bowls Australia, a governing body
 * Kirkwall Ba Game, or The Ba', annual event in Orkney, Scotland

Transportation

 * Ford Falcon (BA), an Australian car
 * NZR BA class, a New Zealand steam locomotive classification

Other uses

 * BA, dominical letter for a leap year starting on Saturday
 * Ba (soul), an Ancient Egyptian concept of the soul or spirit
 * Ba. (band), a Lithuanian rock band
 * "B.A." Baracus, a fictional character in TV series The A-Team
 * Beerenauslese, or BA, a German late-harvest wine
 * Business agent (labor), a position in some local trade unions
 * Business analyst, one who processes, interprets and documents business processes

title: BA


text:
New Town (Jandek album)

New Town is the 27th studio album by the folk band Jandek. It was released in 1998 on Corwood Industries. The album consists of Jandek's vocals and mostly guitar instrumentation.

title: New Town (Jandek album)


text:
Smile

A smile is a facial expression formed primarily by flexing the muscles at the sides of the mouth. Some smiles include a contraction of the muscles at the corner of the eyes, an action known as a Duchenne smile. Among humans, a smile expresses delight, sociability, happiness, joy, or amusement. It is distinct from a similar but usually involuntary expression of anxiety known as a grimace. Although cross-cultural studies have shown that smiling is a means of communication throughout the world, there are large differences among different cultures, religions, and societies, with some using smiles to convey confusion, embarrassment or awkwardness.

Evolutionary background
Primatologist Signe Preuschoft traces the smile back over 30 million years of evolution to a "fear grin" stemming from monkeys and apes, who often used barely clenched teeth to portray to predators that they were harmless or to signal submission to more dominant group members. The smile may have evolved differently among species, especially among humans.

Social effects
Smiling seems to have a favorable influence upon others and makes one likable and more approachable. In the social context, smiling and laughter have different functions in the order of sequence in social situations:
 * Smiling is sometimes a pre-laughing device and is a common pattern for paving the way to laughter;
 * Smiling can be used as a response to laughter.

Smiling is a signaling system that evolved from a need to communicate information in many different forms. One of these is an advertisement of sexual interest. Female smiles are appealing to heterosexual males, increasing physical attractiveness and enhancing sex appeal. However, recent research indicates a man's smile may or may not be most effective in attracting heterosexual women, and that facial expressions such as pride or even shame might be more effective. The researchers did not explicitly study the role of smiles in other sexual preferences.

As reinforcement and manipulation
The influence of smiling on others is not necessarily benign. It may take the form of positive reinforcement, possibly for an underhand manipulative and abusive purpose.

Cultural differences
While smiling is perceived as a positive emotion most of the time, there are many cultures that perceive smiling as a negative expression and consider it unwelcoming. Too much smiling can be viewed as a sign of shallowness or dishonesty. In some parts of Asia, people may smile when they are embarrassed or in emotional pain. Some people may smile at others to indicate a friendly greeting. A smile may be reserved for close friends and family members. Many people in the former Soviet Union area consider smiling at strangers in public to be unusual and even suspicious behavior, or even a sign of stupidity.

Systematic large cross-cultural study on social perception of smiling individuals documented that in some cultures a smiling individual may be perceived as less intelligent than the same non-smiling individual (and that cultural uncertainty avoidance may explain these differences). Furthermore, the same study showed that corruption at the societal level may undermine the prosocial perception of smiling—in societies with high corruption indicators, trust toward smiling individuals is reduced.

There can also be gender differences. In the United States and Canada, women report men telling them to smile. For example, Greg Rickford, a member of the Canadian Parliament told a female journalist to smile rather than answer the question she had asked. Biological anthropologist Helen Fisher states that, while this could be either caring or controlling behavior, such behavior is unlikely to be welcome.

Dimples
Cheek dimples are formed secondary to a bifid zygomaticus major muscle, whose fascial strands insert into the dermis and cause a dermal tethering effect. Dimples are genetically inherited and are a dominant trait. Having bilateral dimples (dimples in both cheeks) is the most common form of cheek dimples. A rarer form is the single dimple, which occurs on one side of the face only.

This bifid variation of the muscle originates as a single structure from the zygomatic bone. As it travels anteriorly, it then divides with a superior bundle that inserts in the typical position above the corner of the mouth. An inferior bundle inserts below the corner of the mouth. Dimples are analogous and how they form in cheeks varies from person to person. The shape of a person's face can affect the look and form as well: leptoprosopic (long and narrow) faces have long and narrow dimples, and eryprosopic (short and broad) faces have short, circular dimples. People with a mesoprosopic face are more likely to have dimples in their cheeks than any other face shape.

Duchenne smile
While conducting research on the physiology of facial expressions in the mid-19th century, French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne identified two distinct types of smiles. A Duchenne smile involves contraction of both the zygomatic major muscle (which raises the corners of the mouth) and the orbicularis oculi muscle (which raises the cheeks and forms crow's feet around the eyes). The Duchenne smile has been described as "smizing", as in "smiling with the eyes". An exaggerated Duchenne smile is sometimes associated with lying.

Non-Duchenne smile
A non-Duchenne smile involves only the zygomatic major muscle. According to Messenger ''et. al.'' "Research with adults initially indicated that joy was indexed by generic smiling, any smiling involving the raising of the lip corners by the zygomatic major .... More recent research suggests that smiling in which the muscle around the eye contracts, raising the cheeks high (Duchenne smiling), is uniquely associated with positive emotion."

The "Pan Am smile", also known as the "Botox smile", is the name given to a fake smile, in which only the zygomatic major muscle is voluntarily contracted to show politeness. It is named after the now-defunct airline Pan American World Airways, whose flight attendants would always flash every passenger the same perfunctory smile. Botox was introduced for cosmetic use in 2002. Chronic use of Botox injections to deal with eye wrinkle can result in the paralysis of the small muscles around the eyes, preventing the appearance of a Duchenne smile.

Other animals
In other animals, the baring of teeth is often used as a threat or warning display—known as a snarl—or a sign of submission. For chimpanzees, it can also be a sign of fear. However, not all animal displays of teeth convey negative acts or emotions. For example, Barbary macaques demonstrate an open mouth display as a sign of playfulness, which likely has similar roots and purposes as the human smile.

title: Smile


text:
Erik Axelsson Tott

Erik Axelsson (Tott) (c. 1419–1481) was a Dano-Swedish statesman who served as the regent of Sweden under the Kalmar Union, jointly with Jöns Bengtsson Oxenstierna in 1457 and alone from 1466 to 1467.

Biography
He was born in Scania during the reign of King Eric of Pomerania, as the son of Axel Pedersen Thott, lord of Herlev and Lilloe, and his second wife Ingeborg Ivarsdotter. He entered the service of his mother's first cousin, King Charles VIII of Sweden (c. 1408–1470), at an early age, when Charles was Lord High Constable and Castellan. Erik Axelsson was the "Swedish anchor" of his family, of whom most regarded themselves as Danish subjects. His father's first wife was from Scania, a region then integral to the (Danish) kingdom. In two generations during the latter half of the 15th century, the nine Tott brothers (Axelssöner), held high and mighty positions just when Denmark and Sweden were struggling to shape the Kalmar Union, however trying to preserve their own family's position and often act in concert. A few of them changed sides in certain occasions, but mostly each of them aligned according to their most important personal landholdings. For longer periods Eric held for the Swedish crown the key Finnish castles and fiefdoms of Viborg, Tavastehus (and built Olofsborg), and was always on the Swedish side, accepting the Danish monarch when Swedish nobility wanted that, and supported separate state/monarchy when the Swedes wanted that. His brother, Iver Axelsen Tott, established a veritable principality for himself by taking the island of Gotland, and sometimes surrounding regions.

Eric opposed his older kinsman the king in 1457, when he as king had gathered much dissatisfaction among Swedish high nobility. In 1467, Eric yet again supported King Charles VIII in his third election. He acquired the former Swedish estates of the Livonian Brothers of the Sword in 1467, including Årsta Castle. As overlord of Finland (Österland), he initiated the construction of the border fortress Olavinlinna in Savonlinna and the Vyborg town wall, both in the 1470s.

Eric Axelsson was married to Bengta Mattsdotter Lillie and Elin Gustavsdotter Sture  but died childless. His brothers Ivar Tott and Laurens Axelsson Tott  survived him, inheriting most of his properties, together with his various nephews and nieces.

Tott's Russian wars
Tott's Russian wars refers to two conflicts between Russia and Sweden spanning from the years of 1475–1476, and then 1479–1482. They were both fought over the construction of fortifications at Nyslott.

Tott's first Russian war
After the appointment of Erik Axelsson Tott as commander of Viborg in 1457, tensions began to rise with Novgorod. Despite a peace treaty being signed in 1468, the Russians engaged in raids along the border the same year. The situation was worsened by the fact that a truce signed in 1458 would expire in 1473.

In 1475, Tott began the construction of a fortification in Finland called Nyslott or Olofsborg, situated on an islet in the strait between Saimed and Haukivesi though it is unclear whether it was in Swedish or Russian territory. Under these circumstances, the construction led to increased Russian activity in the area. The Swedes had begun requiring a tax for the defense of the east and began equipping troops for this purpose. The commander of these troops was likely the knight Erik Karlsson Vase.

The fighting between the Swedes and Russians was however likely to have only been in smaller patrols, and a peace was eventually signed in 1476.

Tott's second Russian war
The construction of Nyslott continued despite the renewed peace between Russia and Sweden in 1476 and became an issue for the Russians. Erik Axelsson Tott, the commander of Viborg and also responsible for Nyslott, prepares and awaits himself for a large attack by the Russians. Nyslott was at that point extended from having only dirt and wood defenses to stone.

In 1479, the awaited attack occurred, and the Russians launched a raid in the area of Nyslott; however, specific details of the event are not known. In 1480, as revenge for this attack, Tott committed to a revenge attack against the Russians. He had earlier received reinforcements from Sweden and advanced 120 km into Russian territory. According to Olaus Petris, the incursion was extremely brutal, quoting that the Swedes "killed both people and animals, men and women, young and old, to several thousands".

In 1481, Tott died and was succeeded by his brother Lars Axelsson, who continued the conflict until 1482, when he signed a truce which would remain until 1495.

title: Erik Axelsson Tott


text:
Brian Wilson Presents Smile

Brian Wilson Presents Smile (also referred to as Smile or the abbreviation BWPS) is the fifth studio album by American musician Brian Wilson, released on September 28, 2004 on Nonesuch. It features all-new recordings of music that he had originally created for Smile, an unfinished album by the Beach Boys that he abandoned in 1967. Revisiting Smile was an intense emotional undertaking for Wilson, as he had been deeply traumatized by the circumstances that had originally surrounded the project.

Wilson initially agreed to revisit Smile in the form of a live concert performance as a follow-up to his 2000–2002 tour for the Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds. From October to November 2003, he worked with keyboardist Darian Sahanaja and original lyricist Van Dyke Parks in assembling a three-movement structure for BWPS while embellishing the material with newly written lyrics and melodies. Wilson and his band premiered it at the Royal Festival Hall in London on February 20, 2004. Motivated by the positive reception, he then adapted the performance as a studio-recorded solo album. None of the other Beach Boys were involved with BWPS, nor with the documentary that covered its making, Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of Smile.

BWPS was universally acclaimed by critics and peaked at number 13 in the US and number 7 in the UK. It earned Wilson his first Grammy Award, winning in the category of Best Rock Instrumental Performance for "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow". In 2011, the album's sequencing served as a blueprint for The Smile Sessions, a compilation dedicated to the original Beach Boys recordings. In 2020, BWPS was ranked number 399 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time".

Background

In 1967, due to numerous difficulties surrounding the project, Brian Wilson abandoned Smile, an unfinished album that he had recorded with his band the Beach Boys, lyricist Van Dyke Parks, and numerous session musicians. The band substituted its release with Smiley Smile, a downscaled version, and a legend subsequently grew around the original Smile recordings. In the 1980s, unreleased material from its recording sessions began circulating widely on bootlegs, which inspired many fans to compile a hypothetical version of the completed album. Among these fans were Los Angeles-based musicians Darian Sahanaja, Probyn Gregory, and Nick Walusko, all of whom later formed the band Wondermints.

In 1995, Wilson reteamed with Parks for the collaborative album Orange Crate Art, which provoked speculation regarding a future release of Smile. Instead, Wilson indicated that he was more interested in completing a forthcoming collaboration with musician Andy Paley. That year, Paley invited Wilson to a concert at the Morgan-Wixon Theater in Los Angeles, a show which featured the Wondermints performing a rendition of "Surf's Up". After the concert, Wilson remarked to Paley, "If I'd had these guys back in '67, I could've taken Smile on the road."

In late 1998, the Wondermints accepted an offer from Wilson's wife Melinda Ledbetter to join Wilson's live band, a group that included guitarist Jeffrey Foskett, multi-instrumentalist Scott Bennett, reed player Paul Mertens, bassist Bob Lizik, and backing vocalist Taylor Mills. Their first tour was successful, and from 2000 to 2002, Wilson followed up with another, this time playing the Pet Sounds album in its entirety.

Announcement
Wilson had been psychologically scarred by the making of Smile and regarded the album as his life's greatest failure. Sahanaja recalled, "When I first met Brian, you couldn't even mention the words 'Heroes and Villains'; he'd turn around and walk away or he'd say, 'I don't want to talk about it.'" In December 2000, while at a Christmas party at Bennett's house, Wilson was playing songs on piano when the wife of biographer David Leaf called out a request for "Heroes and Villains". To the astonishment of everyone present, Wilson began playing and singing the song. He then agreed to perform the song with his band at a forthcoming tribute show held in his honor at the Radio City Music Hall in New York. At the concert, various artists performed renditions of Wilson's songs, including "Our Prayer" and "Surf's Up", with Wilson's band providing accompaniment. A performance of "Cabinessence" was considered, but dropped due to its complexity.

Following the concert, Ledbetter and Sahanaja successfully petitioned Wilson to add "Our Prayer" and "Surf's Up" into his regular setlists. "Heroes and Villains" and a medley of "Wonderful" and "Cabinessence" were also added. Within a few months, Wilson performed "Prayer" and "Heroes" during his appearance on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. According to Sahanaja, "It was like little baby steps all the way." While rehearsing for the Pet Sounds concerts in January 2002, Sahanaja attended a lunch meeting with Wilson, Ledbetter, and Pet Sounds show promoter Glenn Maxx. At one point, someone joked, "The only thing that could ever top this is to do music from Smile". Unusual for Wilson, he did not voice an objection to the idea.

In 2003, during the recording of his forthcoming album Gettin' in over My Head, Wilson permitted his managers to schedule shows that would include the live debut of Smile. On May 22, while he was in London to accept an Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement, it was announced that Wilson and his band would perform a live interpretation of Smile in February 2004 at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Parks, who had attended the Radio City Music Hall concert, was not originally involved, nor was he contacted about the project beforehand, and only learned about it through the press.

The news elicited some mixed reactions from fans of Wilson who felt that his attempt to complete Smile would destroy the legendary quality associated with the project. Sahanaja remembered that, during their meetings over the summer, Wilson did not appear interested in the project. He said, "I knew there were a lot of people who were very familiar with this stuff, and for most of them even touching Smile was sacrilege. I was of that same mindset, but then Brian gradually started getting into it."

Planning and collaboration

The project was not approached as an attempt to complete Smile. Initially, the band's goal was only to assemble a cohesive live set of Smile material that had been released to that point. To assist with the assembly, Sahanaja was assigned the role of "musical secretary" for Wilson, and in early autumn 2003, was sent to the Beach Boys' tape vaults to download select recordings to his laptop. Sahanaja consulted bootlegs that he had amassed since the early 1980s, as well as an archive of literature belonging to David Leaf, which included photocopies of handwritten lyric sheets that were originally given to illustrator Frank Holmes in 1966.

With Pro Tools session files loaded onto his Apple G3 iBook, Sahanaja joined Wilson at his home on numerous occasions to listen to the recordings and determine how they were originally supposed to function together. To relieve Wilson from the burden of deconstructing and reconstructing his own music, Sahanaja handled the task for him by transcribing the recordings as much as he possibly could, then presenting the resultant work back to him for necessary adjustments. At first, Sahanaja presented only the recurring motifs and chord patterns of the songs before moving onto any lyrics. Wilson had resisted listening to the original recordings, but eventually went through with the task. He later said that listening to the recordings "reawakened the bad feelings of the drugs, not the music. The music was good vibes. The drugs were bad vibes. I had a bad flashback, but we got over it right away."

In Sahanaja's recollection, "He'd be saying, 'Oh yeah, that's supposed to be a part of this song,' or 'Use that bit to connect these two songs here,' and it was really neat." However, on another occasion, Sahanaja said that Wilson did not assert his original ideas for the album: "Brian Wilson is not going to tell you in October/November of 2003, 'No, this was supposed to be like this.' If anything, he was terrified at first, but as he became more comfortable, we just went with his gut. And nine times out of ten, his gut is Smile."

Early in these sessions, the pair were working on the song "Do You Like Worms?" when they ran into issues reading the handwriting of its lyric sheet. Wilson swiftly phoned Parks, who he had not spoken to in years, and immediately asked what word came after "cheering". Parks asked Wilson to fax him the lyric sheet, and within minutes, Parks called back and clarified that the word was "Indians". After Wilson and Sahanaja finished their work for that day, Wilson called Parks again and had a lengthier conversation, during which Parks accepted the invitation to join the project.

Parks returned to his original role as the project's lyricist. He was not involved with the sequencing of the tracks, preferring to leave those decisions to Wilson. In the interest of preserving the "integrity" of their work, Sahanaja took on a less active role, contributing to the discussions only when the songwriters were struggling with "how to pull something off live". Wilson later stated that he could recall very little of Smile until Parks entered the project. Parks himself had not listened to any of the Smile music in decades. According to Sahanaja,

"Brian would sing a melody, and I wouldn't know if it was new or something that had always been there. Van Dyke would listen, look up, and then point up in the air and nod his head, like confirmation of some thread he'd left behind. [...] For them to come up with ideas now, whether they were there all along or if they were new, it was seamless to me. They created their own universe."

Wilson, Parks, and Sahanaja configured the presentation into three movements. The third effectively constituted songs that were leftover from the other two movements, and in Sahanaja's description, "the stuff that was the riskiest" from Wilson's point of view. Sahanaja said: "At that point, he [Brian] and Van Dyke were talking as if they were finishing Smile."

Original Smile differences
According to Wilson, BWPS reimagined the original Smile concept "from scratch". Asked for a comparison, he responded that the new version was "different, much different. Much more progressive, much happier, much more uplifting." Parks provided lyrics that had been written in the 1960s but not previously documented, and some that were newly written for the project. He believed that a hypothetical 1967 version of Smile would not have been significantly different from their 2004 version.

Sahanaja believed that there were two exceptions in which Wilson clearly recalled ideas that he had originally conceived for the Smile album. One was the verse melody of "Do You Like Worms?"; the other was the pairing of "Wonderful" and "Look". Regarding the latter, Sahanaja said that "Brian just butted those two together and said, 'Yeah, that's it! That's how it goes!'" When he asked Parks if an idea was part of the original concept, Parks would only respond with, "It was inevitable."

A number of short, orchestral segues between songs were newly written for the project by Wilson, Parks, Sahanaja, and Paul Mertens. They also wrote a string arrangement for the second part of "Surf's Up", an idea that Wilson said he originally intended for the piece. Some of the titles of the original tracks were changed, including "Do You Like Worms?", which was renamed "Roll Plymouth Rock". Wilson explained that this was because "we wanted something a little more appropriate". When Wilson was presented "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow", he began humming the melody from "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter", which was then incorporated into the piece.

In Wilson's words, "We [first] thought of it as 2-movement rock opera. Then we added a third [and] we called it a 3-movement rock opera." The subtitles for these movements ("Americana", "Cycle of Life", and "Spiritual Rebirth—Elements") were the invention of music writer Peter Reum. In a 2011 interview, Sahanaja stated that Wilson never mentioned an "elemental" concept during these sessions: "whenever I did bring up the concept he didn't seem to react to it with any enthusiasm. I brought it up again while Van Dyke was around and didn't get a clear reaction from him either." According to biographer Steven Gaines, Wilson had declared an intention to complete Smile in three movements in 1980.

Besides the tracks that made it into the final presentation, nothing else from the original Smile sessions was worked on, although some recordings were presented to Wilson for consideration. Among the rejected ideas that Sahanaja played for Wilson was "He Gives Speeches", "With Me Tonight", "She's Goin' Bald", and the alternate "rock with me, Henry" version of "Wonderful".

Rehearsals
Rehearsals began in January 2004, at which point Leaf had arrived with a film crew set on documenting the project. Wilson was still intensely troubled by his memories of Smile and the prospects of performing it live. He began struggling with a resurgence of auditory hallucinations. Sahanaja recalled that, after the holiday break, when he returned to Wilson's house to prepare for the forthcoming vocal rehearsals, "I remember him shaking and he sat down and he started crying and yelling 'I'm fucked! I'm fucked!'" They attempted to work on a few songs before Wilson threw the lyric sheet across the room and began shouting from the other room, "Darian! Darian! They are trying to kill me! They are trying to kill me!"

On the first day of rehearsals, Wilson had a panic attack and drove himself to the emergency room at a nearby hospital, but calmed down within hours. His attendance for the rest of the rehearsal dates remained inconsistent, as he would leave prematurely on some days, and on others, skip them entirely. Sahanaja told biographer Mark Dillon, "There's always the question of whether you're forcing Brian to do something he doesn't want to do. But in the end, do you want a Brian Wilson who just sits at home, watching TV, or should you try to put a spark under him and get him going to the point where it is a productive, positive thing for him?"

Premiere

Brian Wilson Presents Smile premiered at the Royal Festival Hall on February 20, 2004. It was bookended by two setlists consisting of regular Beach Boys hits such as "Sloop John B" and "God Only Knows", lesser-known songs such as "You're Welcome" and "Time to Get Alone", and songs from Gettin' in Over My Head. The first set was played acoustically in the style of Beach Boys' Party!; Wilson sat on a stool surrounded by his supporting band, who provided additional vocals, two guitars, bongos, and an occasional flute or harmonica part.

When Smile completed its debut, Wilson received a ten-minute standing ovation before he was able to invite Parks, who was in tears, onstage. According to Sahanaja, "the standing ovation was indescribable. I had never seen anything like it as an audience member or a performer. [...]They wouldn't let him speak or say anything. [...] I stepped up to him and said, 'Uh, Brian... I think they like SMiLE.'" For the encore, Parks performed shaker on "Do It Again". Sahanaja reported that, after the show, Wilson rocked back and forth backstage—out of relief that he had finally conquered his fear of Smile—exclaiming "Darian! Darian! We did it! We did it!"

The concerts were repeated at the same venue for every night until February 26, with each playing recorded by engineer Mark Linett for posterity on film and a 48-track Genex hard disk recorder. All the dates were sold-out, with attendees including Paul McCartney, George Martin, and Jason Pierce of Spiritualized. A brief tour followed in England and Europe.

Reviews
Critical reaction was highly favorable. The Guardian declared that it was "one of the greatest of American symphonies." John Mulvey wrote in NME; "It's rare that you can honestly say you were present at a moment of genuine historic significance. And it's rarer still that the reality of these occasions measures up to the hype." In March, GQ ranked BWPS among the "Top Five Gigs of All Time". Parks attended several more of Wilson's shows, commenting, "It's absolutely thrilling. I did two shows in London, two in New York and two in LA, and you can't help but be engaged in seeing the performance. The audience was very much a part of what the performance was all about."

Conversely, The Times' Stephen Dalton was skeptical of the album's myth and felt that most of the performance "sounded like whimsical juvenilia. It was clearly adventurous for its era but, with the best will in the world, it is not difficult to see why Wilson's [...] fellow Beach Boys balked at releasing it." Mojo's Jim Irvin was similarly underwhelmed; although he enjoyed the songs, he wrote, "To claim that this show was transcendent is to disregard the figure at its heart, a bewildered-looking man of 61 who barely plays the piano he's perched behind. [...] its hard to feel uplifted, as such." Critic Barney Hoskyns wrote that it was "a pretty magnificent evening", although Wilson's apathetic demeanor resembled that of an autistic person's. Hoskyns mused, "As bizarrely not-there as Brian seemed through all of this, he seemed to be enjoying himself as much as he is able to. Occasionally he flapped his arms about, and he made a big point of introducing 'Marcella' as a real 'rock'n'roll' song – as though that were what we secretly craved."

Studio recording
Motivated by the positive reception, Wilson agreed to record a studio version of Smile after two weeks of consideration. Recording began on April 13, 2004 with his ten-piece touring band, augmented by a ten-piece string section and an acoustic bassist. The basic tracks were recorded at Sunset Sound Recorders in four days, with overdubbing and mixing continuing until July with some stops at engineer Mark Linett's Your Place or Mine studio.

When played live, digital keyboards were used to replicate the sound of various instruments such as harpsichord and tack piano, and electric drums were used in place of timpanis. These digital keyboards were kept for the album's recording, though a real upright piano and timpani was used. Some alterations were also made to tracks' specific arrangements, since they had been arranged with an audience in mind, along with the logistics of only having ten performers on stage. Linett explained: "For the studio version of Smile, Brian and the band eliminated some of the flourishes that were designed just for live performance and substantially reworked the instrumental arrangements." Most engineering for the album followed practices that were common during the 1960s, and tracks were recorded and sequenced in discrete sections the same as they would have been on the original Smile. The vocals were recorded using a Universal Audio tube mixing console identical to the one used by the Beach Boys at United Western Recorders in the 1960s.

The album was recorded onto a custom Pro Tools HD rig. Mixing was completed in late July, just as the band were to begin their tour of Europe. Wilson mostly avoided the mixing sessions. Linett said, "Brian would come in, make comments, take stuff home, then make more comments. The third time he came in, I gave him a CD and I said: 'Hey, there it is. Smile, ready to play on your CD player.' I swear you could see something change in him. And he's been different ever since." According to Sahanaja, Wilson held the CD to his chest and said, "'I'm going to hold this dear to my heart.' He was trembling."

Release
In an interview from October 2004, Wilson was asked what completing Smile had meant to him, and he responded:

"It means reaching people in a market that's so dead, so out of it. Breathing some new life into an old market is what this music is about. And I think it's going to inspire the industry to make better music. I really do. A Phil Spector type of movement might happen again, too. [...] I think we're at the lowest point we've been in the history of the business. The quality of music, the lack of melodic originality, the lack of discernible lyrics, like in rap music. It all adds up to one big minus."

On September 28, 2004, BWPS was issued on Nonesuch Records. It debuted at number 13 on the Billboard 200, the highest chart position of any album by the Beach Boys or Brian Wilson since 1976's 15 Big Ones, and it was the best-selling album on Amazon for two weeks. On September 28, Wilson appeared on The Tonight Show performing "Heroes and Villains". On October 5, Leaf's documentary Beautiful Dreamer: Brian Wilson and the Story of Smile premiered on the Showtime network. The film included interviews with Wilson and dozens of his associates, albeit none of his surviving bandmates from the Beach Boys, who declined to appear in the film. It was later included on the DVD of a Smile concert performed in Los Angeles. By February 2005, Nielson Soundscan had reported that the album had sold over 300,000 copies. It was certified platinum in combination with its international sales.

From autumn 2004 to summer 2005, Wilson supported the album with a world tour that included stops in the US, Europe, and Japan. In March 2005, Wilson, Parks, and Leaf held a panel at the annual South by Southwest convention in Austin, Texas to discuss Smile. Asked if he would permit the release of the original Beach Boys recordings, Wilson responded: "Never. Those are gone forever. I don't want those made public because they bring up bad memories. I don't think about the old days anymore. I never do." Sahanaja told Australian Musician, "In six years of touring this is the happiest we've ever seen Brian, I mean consistently happy and it's got to be because of the music. [...] Who would have thought … of all things…Smile."

Contemporary critical reception
BWPS received widespread acclaim from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from critics, Smile received an average score of 97 based on 29 reviews, making it the third-highest rated album in the website's history.

Rolling Stone's Robert Christgau, who was skeptical of Smile back in the 1960s, praised Parks' lyrics and wrote, "what elevates them into something approaching a utopian vision is Wilson's orchestrations: brief bridge melodies, youthful harmonies [...] and an enthralling profusion of instrumental colors." Dominique Leone of Pitchfork declared, "As the mythical follow-up to Pet Sounds, it delivers, and despite his age, Wilson's voice even sounds fantastic, still carrying the weight of these angelic melodies." The Village Voice's Tom Smucker felt that it might go on to be considered "album of the year" and described it as "the first successfully conceptualized Beach Boys release since Kokomo, the most moving since Pet Sounds, and the funniest since Smiley Smile".

In Britain, The Guardian's Alexis Petridis wrote that news of the album's release caused "an outbreak of mild hysteria" and provoked a journalist from the newspaper to solicit an opinion from the British government, who then supplied a comment from defense secretary Geoff Hoon. Petridis concluded, "Despite the hype, it is hard not to be impressed with the new Smile. [...] the songs Wilson wrote for Smile still sound like nothing else rock music has ever produced. Its release may not warrant a quote from the defence secretary, but only the hardest heart would not be gladdened by its contents."

NME's reviewer compared BWPS favorably to Sergei Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé ("its interweaved and repeated melodic strands"), Miles Davis' Kind of Blue ("its sheer contemplative beauty"), and the work of George Gershwin and Aaron Copland ("its appropriation of American folk"). In his review for Mojo, Mark Paytress rated BWPS higher than the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, as well as any "latter-day art-rock classic, say, Radiohead's OK Computer". Acknowledging the "issues of authenticity that arise out of this 'reconstruction'", he added, "as someone with a small collection of Smile(s) — and thus with one eyebrow sharply raised — I'm amazed how easy it is to believe that this is, perhaps, the genuine Smile."

Less favorably, music critic Paul Morley felt that BWPS represented "a breathtaking example of ultimately banal thinkers attempting self-consciously to make art, a square version of freaking out, musically sophisticated, aesthetically conservative [...] I needed a quick shower of Ramones, Dre and Hendrix afterwards, just to rinse away the clingy bits of fake myth." John Bush of AllMusic believed BWPS was "a remarkably unified, irresistible piece of pop music", yet decreed that it was "no musical watershed on par with Sgt. Pepper's [...] or Wilson's masterpiece, Pet Sounds". Writing in his 2005 book about Smile, Domenic Priore opined, "The recording sessions for the album at Sunset Sound came and went very quickly, and the mix suffers because of this; the emphasis on bass is not what it should be, and the tracks should breathe more. Some felt that there was too much singing, compared with the instrumental texture of the original tapes."

BWPS received three nominations for the 2005 Grammy Awards, including Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical (for Mark Linett). It won one Grammy, in the category of Best Rock Instrumental Performance for "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow". Smile also finished in second place in the Pazz & Jop, an annual critics poll run by The Village Voice. Pitchfork named it fifth best album of 2004 and the 25th best album released between 2000 and 2004.

Beach Boys' response and lawsuit

Mike Love gave his thoughts on the album in a November 2004 interview: "I guess it's a good thing for Brian to do. A friend sent me a copy, but I haven't had time to hear it yet because we've been on tour." In an earlier interview, he had said he would have no interest in listening to the album and, citing the legal concept of "corporate opportunity", mentioned that it had possibly infringed on the Beach Boys' intellectual property rights. Love argued that, because the group had collectively paid for the 1960s recording sessions and all contributed work on the original tracks, "I would have thought it would have been more honorable to put it together as the Beach Boys."

In many interviews he gave around the album's release, Wilson disparaged the Beach Boys, calling them inferior to his current band. In a 2007 interview, Love expressed that he was disappointed to hear about Wilson's remarks. "I'm glad that he's happy with the people he's performing with, but, you know, I think it's sad that he thinks that. My personal feeling is that the original group recordings on Smile have got to be better." Bruce Johnston took offense as well, writing in an email to biographer Peter Ames Carlin: "I spent years showing full support for Brian, but now that's all changed because of his current point of view." Johnston said of the album in a 2008 interview, "I think as an exercise in keeping [Wilson] occupied, it's interesting. [...] I talk to him every once in a while. But I'm never going to tell him that I'll take Pet Sounds over what he's doing now."

One of the promotions for the album was a free CD issued through the Mail on Sunday in September 2004. The 10-track compilation included Beach Boys songs Wilson had recently rerecorded, five of which he coauthored with Love. The Mail on Sunday distributed 2.6 million copies of the compilation. In November 2005, Love filed a lawsuit in which he claimed the promotion hurt the sales of the original recordings. Love's suit was dismissed in 2007 when a judge determined that there were "no triable issues of material fact".

Al Jardine said in 2013 that he "didn't give it a whole lot of thought; I didn't want to go there at that time. They were good enough to send me a copy. So I dropped the needle, as they used to say, and listened to a few cuts, and it was very nice. But there's nothin' like the [vintage recordings]."

Retrospective assessments and legacy

Although critics widely referred to Wilson's 2004 version as the Smile album completed, many fans disputed the notion. Bootleggers continued to compile their own versions of the Beach Boys' album. In 2011, The Smile Sessions was released containing an approximation of what the band's finished album might have sounded like, using BWPS as a blueprint. Linett co-produced the compilation with Wilson. According to Sahanaja, Wilson "lobbied hard" for the album's sequence to be based on BWPS. In a 2015 interview, Wilson stated that he ultimately preferred his solo version.

Reviewing BWPS on the tenth anniversary of its release, Chris Shields of the St. Cloud Times wrote that "the sequencing raised a question mark or two, and there were mixing quibbles (I would have loved to hear more bass), but [...] [t]he lyrical beauty, the majesty of the music, the shifting (yet somehow fixed) meanings that intertwine throughout it all, still elate me, still fill me with hope and joy." PopMatters contributor Sean Murphy opined that the album was "crucial", but rendered "less significant" with the availability of The Smile Sessions. Writing for NewMusicBox, Frank Oteri called BWPS "a wonderful album, but it is also not quite right. It is not and can never be a substitute for SMiLE". Music historian Clinton Heylin, who felt that the original Smile recordings failed to live up to the myth, characterized BWPS as "a pale shadow full of digital tweaks, and precious little sweet inspiration; showing if anything that there never was a realised record".

In 2009, BWPS was named the 88th best album of the decade by Rolling Stone. In 2010, it was included in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. In 2020, it was ranked number 399 on Rolling Stone's list of "The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time". The editors wrote, "Close your eyes and you can imagine how it might've changed the world in 1968 [sic], but with Wilson's influence still all over scads of indie bands in 2004, it sounds and feels majestically modern." In 2022, it was ranked number 102 on Uncuts list of the greatest albums released since 1997, as well as number 21 on Rolling Stones list of the greatest concept albums in history.

Set list

The songs performed at the Royal Festival Hall shows in February 2004.

First set (acoustic)
 * 1) "And Your Dream Comes True"
 * 2) "Surfer Girl"
 * 3) "In My Room"
 * 4) "Hawaii"
 * 5) "Keep An Eye On Summer"
 * 6) "Please Let Me Wonder"
 * 7) "Good Timin'"
 * 8) "You're Welcome"

First set (full instrumentation) "Time to Get Alone" "Sloop John B" "Row Your Boat" "God Only Knows" "Soul Searchin'" "California Girls" "Catch a Wave" "Dance, Dance, Dance" <li>"City Blues"</li> <li>"Sail On, Sailor"</li> </ol>

Smile – same running order as album track list

Encore <li>"Do It Again"</li> <li>"I Get Around"</li> <li>"Help Me Rhonda"</li> <li> "Barbara Ann"</li> <li> "Surfin' U.S.A."</li> <li> "Fun, Fun, Fun"</li> <li> "Love and Mercy"</li> </ol>

Personnel
Per the album's liner notes.

The Brian Wilson Band

 * Brian Wilson – vocals, keyboards
 * Scott Bennett – vocals, keyboards, mallets, guitar
 * Nelson Bragg – vocals, percussion, whistles, celery
 * Jeffrey Foskett – vocals, guitar, hammer
 * Probyn Gregory – vocals, guitar, brass, Tannerin, whistles
 * Jim Hines – drums, mallets, saw, sound effects
 * Bob Lizik – bass guitar, guitar, beret
 * Paul Mertens – woodwinds, saxophone, harmonica, semi-conductor
 * Taylor Mills – vocals, power drill, leg-slap
 * Darian Sahanaja – vocals, keyboards, mallets, drill
 * Nick Walusko – vocals, guitar

Stockholm Strings 'n' Horns

 * Staffan Findin – bass trombone
 * Andreas Forsman – violin
 * Erik Holm – viola
 * Anna Landberg – cello
 * Malin-My Nilsson – violin
 * Björn Samuelsson – trombone
 * Victor Sand – saxophone, flute, clarinet
 * Markus Sandlund – cello

Production and technical staff

 * Kevin Deane – assistant engineer
 * Mark Linett – engineer, mixing
 * Mark London – package design and art
 * Dennis Loren – graphic layouts
 * Bob Ludwig – mastering
 * Pete Magdaleno – assistant engineer
 * Daniel S. McCoy – assistant engineer
 * Brian Wilson – arranger, producer

title: Brian Wilson Presents Smile


text:
The Beginning (Jandek album)

The Beginning is the 28th album by Jandek. It was released in 1999, and was given Corwood Industries release number 0766. It is considered the final album of Jandek's "second acoustic phase".

title: The Beginning (Jandek album)


text:
Talk:Topological group

Continuous group
Is it OK to say that 'Continuous group' is the same than 'Topological group' ??
 * looxix 23:30 Feb 23, 2003 (UTC)

Continuous group is an older term that possibly could also mean Lie group, so I would be careful. AxelBoldt 21:16 Mar 2, 2003 (UTC)

Left uniformity
Although it is true that the left uniformity turns left multiplications into uniformly continuous maps, this is not a characterization of the left uniformity. In fact, the right uniformity also turns left multiplications into uniformly continuous maps. The important characteristic of the left uniformity is that it is invariant with respect to left translations. This is not mentioned on the page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.95.217.43 (talk • contribs) 14:22, 16 April 2006

objects in analysis
"Almost all objects investigated in analysis are topological groups (usually with some additional structure)."

The above statement, which appears at the beginning of the article, is ambiguous. For example, continuous functions, open sets, and Lebesgue measure are not topological groups in any reasonable sense. Can someone rephrase the sentence? --Acepectif 03:45, 19 June 2007 (UTC)

H-spaces
After the remark that the fundamental group of a topological group is abelian, this is deduced from the corresponding property for H-spaces. This is silly: the proof for topological groups works the same way and is simpler, so H-spaces introduce needless generality. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 137.82.36.10 (talk • contribs) 21:08, 27 August 2007

I do not fully agree with the logic of this remark. If you have a general theorem it seems to me perfectly reasonable to cite the theorem in justification of a particular case of it, whether or not the particular case can be proved more simply. Apart from anything else this helps to show relationships among different parts of the subject. Nevertheless I have reworded this statement in an attempt to answer this criticism. JamesBWatson (talk) 12:59, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

Closure of compact sets
"Topology Expert" has asked me to prove that, in a topological group, the closure of a compact set is compact. But this is a well-known property of regular spaces, and topological groups are regular (as already stated in the article). --Zundark (talk) 11:52, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

What you say above is meaningless to the context. You wrote that the Hausdorff condition is not required for the theorem in question to hold since the closure of a compact set in a topological group is compact. But for this to hold, you require a stronger condition than the Hausdorff axiom. So you can't conclude this from the fact that topological groups are regular.

Topology Expert (talk) 04:35, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

 * You have claimed on my talk page that you are a topologist. If this is true, then you must be well aware that "regular space" is used in two senses, only one of which is stronger than the Hausdorff condition. I even linked the phrase "regular spaces" so that you could go and read the definition if you were uncertain what I meant. Please do that now. All topological groups are uniformizable, and therefore completely regular. They need not be Hausdorff. --Zundark (talk) 10:57, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

 * I am well aware of this. But if you assume that one-point sets are closed in the topological group you can get complete regularity and the Hausdorff condition from there. Furthermore, in many branches of mathematics, topological groups are required to be T1 (for instance Lie group theory where a stronger assumption exists).

However, I accept that what you said earlier was pertinent to the discussion so that's fine. I'll respond to your next message as soon as I can because I have some comments.

Topology Expert (talk) 11:28, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

There is, in fact, a formula for the closure of a compact set in a topological group: if K is compact, then $$\overline{K}=\overline{\{1\}}K$$ (which is clearly compact, as it's a continuous image of the compact product space $$\overline{\{1\}}\times K$$). Some Googling finds an on-line proof of this formula: Introduction to Topological Groups by Karl Heinrich Hofmann (it's part (iv) of Corollary 1.16, on page 9). Maybe it's worth mentioning this formula in the article (though it's obviously only of interest for non-Hausdorff topological groups). --Zundark (talk) 11:52, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Why is the closure of {1} compact (I don't have time to verify this myself (not that I can't) so could you please prove it? Until then, I will revert your edits)?

Topology Expert (talk) 09:15, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

 * Why is your ignorance justification for reverting my edits? How would you like it if I went around reverting your edits on the grounds that I haven't got time to check that they're correct?

 * The closure of {1} is compact because its topology is trivial. This is obvious, but see part (ii) of that same Corollary 1.16 if you can't work it out yourself. --Zundark (talk) 09:39, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

 * Wrong again. According to your argument (you say that {1} inherits the trivial topology), the closure of a one-point set in a topological space is always compact (since one-point sets always inherit the trivial topology in case you did not know). What about an infinite set in the particular point topology? The closure of the particular point is not compact (not even metacompact!), yet the topology it inherits is trivial. I recommend that you 'relearn' topology (I doubt that you have learnt it in the first place), if you are going to place personal attacks (why did you link trivial topology?) just to hide your misunderstanding.
 * Topology Expert (talk) 03:47, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I have not made any mistake here. You appear to have completely misunderstood what I said. I said that the closure of {1} has the trivial topology. This is true, and I pointed you to a proof. I never claimed that the closure of a singleton in an arbitrary topological space is compact, so your example with the particular point topology is irrelevant. --Zundark (talk) 09:21, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

 * Claim: In a topological group, the closure of each singleton has the indiscrete topology and is thus compact.
 * Proof: Define an equivalence relation on the group: $$x\sim y$$ iff $$\forall{U}.x\in U\rightarrow y\in U$$ (where quantification is over the open sets). Doing a little work you can see that this is an equivalence relation. Now, it turns out that the equivalence classes are $$[g]=\overline{\{g\}}$$. Moreover one can see that every open set (indeed every borel set... indeed every set generated from the open sets by boolean set operations) are $$\sim$$-invariant. Thus for an open set and the closure of a singleton, $$U\cap \overline{\{g\}}=\overline{\{g\}}$$ or $$\emptyset$$ (which one depends on whether or not $$g\in U$$). Thus the subspace topology of $$\overline{\{g\}}$$ is, as Zundark said, trivial. Hence it is compact. $$\square$$
 * drusus null 00:45, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

To resolve this dispute once an for all, see my recent edit. Now, removing the Hausdorff condition will definitely make the statement false (not that I accept that the Hausdorff condition can be ommitted from the previous statement (nor do I accept your above arguments) but at least in this case there will be no dispute).

Topology Expert (talk) 04:30, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

 * I've provided two different proofs of the part you were stuck on. Your rejection of the second one was based on a misreading of what I wrote, and you haven't yet given a reason for rejecting the first one. If you could be more specific about what is not clear to you, I can provide further explanation or references. --Zundark (talk) 15:42, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Proposed rewrite
On 17 September 2008 Topology Expert tagged this page as possibly requiring a complete rewrite. I have read the page and cannot see why this should be. I have also looked at the talk page to see whether Topology Expert gives any explanation there: he doesn't. Topology Expert has disputed a few facts concerning closures of compact sets with Zundark, but a dispute on one point scarcely justifies a complete rewrite. Can anyone justify keeping the tag there? JamesBWatson (talk) 13:01, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

 * I've removed the tag. The article could obviously be improved, but it's no worse than many others, and the tag doesn't really seem justified. The discussion between me and "Topology Expert" above is not relevant, as "Topology Expert" eventually admitted that I was right anyway. --Zundark (talk) 14:02, 2 December 2008 (UTC)

 * I am putting the tag back with the following justification:

 * There are many important results that could be included about topological groups such as its applications to harmonic analysis and Lie group theory

 * The article is not structured well; different facts are places in a haphazard manner

Topology Expert (talk) 09:33, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Under those conditions, wouldn't most articles qualify for this tag? We need some sort of threshold to fall below before we apply the tag, and I think any reasonable threshold would exclude this article. Topology expert, why not make use of the comments page, which is included in the rating template above? This way your ideas are still noted until taken care of, and we aren't in the situation of applying rewrite tags to articles whenever they're not close to good articles. Ben (talk) 23:40, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

I am certainly glad that I raised this question, as Topology Expert has now given some indication what he thinks needs to be done to improve the article. However, it does not seem to me that what he has said justifies the tag. If someone thinks that some topics could be included that are not yet included it seems to me there are two things to consider doing: (1) put them in or (2) suggest on the talk page that someone else do so. The fact that a couple of topics are missing does not justify a complete rewrite. As for the poor structuring, certainly the "Properties" section is an unstructured list, and could be improved by some structuring. However, I have always thought that the complete rewrite tag is for cases where the whole article is really rubbishy, not for any article that could be improved in a few respects. Does anyone else have any opinion on this? JamesBWatson (talk) 17:28, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes but to tell the truth the artile should be like this since its probably as important (if not more important) than vector space.

Topology Expert (talk) 17:45, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Yes, thank you: providing an example to show how you think the article should be structured was helpful. However, I still see the complete rewrite tag as being for cases where the whole article is really rubbishy. JamesBWatson (talk) 18:02, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

 * This article does not need a rewrite. Sure it's missing content, but articles needing rewrites are ones that are seriously deficient in many respects, and often have no structure at all. If you look at "vector space" before the flourish of activity that made it what it is now, it wasn't really any better than this article is now, and no rewrite was required to turn it into what it is now. This article has structure (but needs more) and content (but needs) more, that's all. And no, topological groups are not more important than vector spaces. RobHar (talk) 18:05, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

'And no, topological groups are not more important than vector spaces'. That depends on a person's opinion; I can name an important field in the theory of topological groups for every field in vector space theory you mention. In particular, I think many mathematicians will agree that Lie groups are probably the start of modern mathematics.

Topology Expert (talk) 18:57, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

 * Not that I really care to get in a discussion with you about this statement, but pretty much every field in math (and science) uses vector spaces. Many subjects in math use groups that are topological groups, but that doesn't mean that topological groups are that important. The amount of math that requires the notion of topological group in its full generality is extremely small compared the amount of math that uses even finite-dimensional vector spaces on a regular basis. I mean, many things in sight are topoi (including topological groups), that doesn't make them as important. Yeah, Lie groups are extremely important, and pretty cool (and I've never thought of what the "start of modern mathematics" is), but that doesn't make topological groups important. RobHar (talk) 19:10, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

 * Well vector spaces are completely classified in the sense that any two vector spaces over the same field, having the same dimension are isomorphic. This is not the same (there is not an analagous property) for topological groups in general.

Topology Expert (talk) 19:16, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

If you don't want the tag, remove it (as I have done). I am not in the mood to argue after the recent conflicts.

Topology Expert (talk) 19:18, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

 * I was simply responding to JamesBWatson's question about whether anyone else had an opinion. I gave my opinion. You didn't have to remove the tag because of that. You only argued about whether topological groups were more important than vector spaces, which has nothing to do with the tag (or really with what this talk page should be about). If you find topological groups really important then that's great for this article and you can put the energy you have into improving the article. Perhaps I shouldn't have included that last sentence in my original comment because it clearly upset you and brought the discussion even more off target, but I simply found your comment about the importance of topological groups wrong (and unnecessary). I didn't mean to upset you. Regards. RobHar (talk) 19:39, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Template
Is Template:Basic notions in group theory intended for this article? It is referred to. Quotient group (talk) 19:27, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Silence means consent. Quotient group (talk) 19:37, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

 * I'd say it usually means "apathy". Sometimes it means "consent", but often it means "you must be joking" or "I wasn't paying attention". --Zundark (talk) 20:40, 18 October 2009 (UTC)

 * Very often it means that the people who might have an opinion haven't seen the message. It is certainly unrealistic to assume it means consent. Since you ask I have no idea whether the template was intended for this article, nor do I care.I don't find it particularly helpful, but perhaps it does no harm. JamesBWatson (talk) 10:07, 26 October 2009 (UTC)

Non-examples?
Many examples are given of topological groups; for contrast, I would like to see non-examples. That is, are there groups that are not topological groups (aside from the discrete topology, which I guess you have for any set)? That is, is the emphasis of the definition "topological group" that there are groups without a topology, or that there is always at least one topology for a group, but that some topologies are more interesting than others? Basically, I think there is something fundamental that I don't quite grok :-) —Ben FrantzDale (talk) 14:19, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
 * As the article's lead says, "A topological group G is a topological space and group". A group which is not a topological space is just a group, and not a topological group. If you mean "is every group capable of having a non-trivial topology imposed on it?" then the answer is "no", as can be seen by considering a few groups of small finite order. JamesBWatson (talk) 16:13, 9 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Let's break the question apart. Forgive my ignorance about groups of finite order; I'm used to thinking about continuous matrix groups.
 * Can a finite group have a topology other than the discrete topology? (As I understand it, you can have a non-trivial topology on a finite set, as defined by a graph. If that's correct, this is the same as asking if group structure on a finite set implies only a trivial topology, which I don't think is the case (as with a Rubik's cube, which is a finite group with a clear sense of what points (states) are "near" each other).)
 * Can you give an example of one of these "few groups of small finite order"?
 * Are there any continuous groups that don't have a non-trivial topology?
 * I find that an important part of understanding mathematical terms (for me) is understanding the distinction that the term is trying to make. With that in mind, it is important to understand the edge of the definition—what comes close to fitting the definition, but fails. Thanks. —Ben FrantzDale (talk) 14:19, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
 * In the Rubik's cube clearly there is a clear sense of what points (states) are "near" each other in the same sense as that in the integers 3 and 4 are nearer to each other than 3 and 1000000, but I am not aware of any non-trivial topologisation of the Rubik cube group: can you clarify? I don't understand the relevance of the remark about graphs. Firstly, how does a graph define a topology on a finite set? Secondly, how does such a topology establish a topological group?
 * An example of one of these "few groups of small finite order" is a cyclic group of order three. I regard both the discrete topology and the topology which makes all sets open as trivial topologies; no other topology is consistent with the group structure.
 * I don't fully understand "Are there any continuous groups that don't have a non-trivial topology?" The only sense I can make of it is "are there any continuous groups that do have a trivial topology", in which case any group can clearly be made into a topological group by giving it the topology in which all sets are open. JamesBWatson (talk) 15:31, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Ad 1: topologies on a finite group G that make it a topological group are in 1-to-1 correspondence with normal subgroups of G. On the one hand, if H is a normal subgroup of G, it defines a topological group on G whose open sets are unions of cosets of H. On the other hand, every topological group on G is of this form (H is the smallest neighbourhood of 1). In general, topologies on a finite set correspond to preorders, but in the case of topological groups, the preorder is always an equivalence relation (in fact, a congruence relation on the group). — Emil J. 17:14, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I guess one way to look at this is to consider the question does every group admit a topology compatible with the group structure? - the answer is trivially yes because of the discrete topology. Then the question becomes not one of "finding non-examples" but one of enumerating and characterising the possible topological group structures having the same underlying group. EmilJ gives an example of such a characterisation (in terms of normal subgroups) for the case of finite groups. Miguel (talk) 22:59, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

title: Talk:Topological group


text:
Put My Dream on This Planet

Put My Dream on This Planet is the 29th album by Jandek. It was his only new release of 2000 (note that there were numerous reissues of the oldest material). The first of three consecutive a capella albums, it is Corwood Industries #0767.

Initially thought by fans to have been recorded on a voice-activated microcassette recorder, Jandek clarified in his 2014 cover interview for The Wire that he recorded this album, as well as the two a capella followups, This Narrow Road and Worthless Recluse, on a standard consumer-grade cassette recorder, and that the pauses in the recording were removed per his request with a noise reduction gate during the mastering stage.

Critical reception
Exclaim! wrote that "Jandek sounds old, with a deep, grainy, Johnny Cash-like voice that appears to be recorded by a portable microphone, as opposed to a crisp studio recording." The Globe and Mail thought that the album "would try the patience of the saints of any faith."

title: Put My Dream on This Planet


text:
This Narrow Road

This Narrow Road is the 30th album by Jandek, and the first of two new discs (there were several reissues) released in 2001. It is also the second of three (so far) spoken word releases and is Corwood #0768.

title: This Narrow Road


text:
Pyrotechnics

Pyrotechnics is the science and craft of creating such things as fireworks, safety matches, oxygen candles, explosive bolts and other fasteners, parts of automotive airbags, as well as gas-pressure blasting in mining, quarrying, and demolition. This trade relies upon self-contained and self-sustained exothermic chemical reactions to make heat, light, gas, smoke and/or sound. The name comes from the Greek words pyr ("fire") and tekhnikos ("made by art").

Improper use of pyrotechnics could lead to pyrotechnic accidents. People responsible for the safe storage, handling, and functioning of pyrotechnic devices are known as pyrotechnicians.

Proximate pyrotechnics
Explosions, flashes, smoke, flames, fireworks and other pyrotechnic-driven effects used in the entertainment industry are referred to as proximate pyrotechnics. Proximate refers to the pyrotechnic device's location relative to an audience. In the majority of jurisdictions, special training and licensing must be obtained from local authorities to legally prepare and use proximate pyrotechnics.

Many musical groups use pyrotechnics to enhance their live shows. Pink Floyd were innovators of pyrotechnic use in concerts. For instance, at the climax of their song "Careful with That Axe, Eugene", a blast of smoke was set off at the back of the stage. Bands such as the Who, KISS and Queen soon followed with use of pyrotechnics in their shows. Michael Jackson attempted using pyrotechnics in a 1984 Pepsi advertisement, where a stray spark caused a small fire in his hair. German industrial metal band Rammstein are renowned for their incorporation of a large variety of pyrotechnics into performances, which range from flaming costumes to face-mounted flamethrowers. Nightwish, Lordi, Sabaton and Parkway Drive are also known for their vivid pyrotechnics in concert. Many professional wrestlers have also used pyrotechnics as part of their entrances to the ring.

Modern pyrotechnics are, in general, divided into categories based upon the type of effect produced or manufacturing method. The most common categories are:

Various ingredients may be added to pyrotechnic devices to provide colour, smoke, noise or sparks. Special additives and construction methods are used to modify the character of the effect produced, either to enhance or subdue the effect; for example, sandwiching layers of pyrotechnic compounds containing potassium perchlorate, sodium salicylate or sodium benzoate with layers that do not creates a fountain of sparks with an undulating whistle.
 * Airburst – Hanging charges designed to burst into spheres of sparks. Primarily used to provide an effect similar to an aerial shell without producing fallout. May also be designed to launch pieces of confetti or streamers. A plurality of airbursts is usually achieved with a harness.
 * Binary powders – Kits divided into separate oxidizer and fuel, intended to be mixed on site before being loaded into hardware.
 * Comet (meteor) – Brightly colored burning pellets resembling shooting stars. These are no larger than 50mm for proximate use. Crossette comets carry a small cavity filled with a small amount of burst charge in the middle which causes the stars to split into four pieces. Crossette comets are usually no larger than 45mm for proximate use.
 * Flame Mortars – These articles use a smokeless powder-based composition to produce a rising column or a rolling ball of fire in various colors. Duration is typically 5 seconds or less for proximate pyrotechnics, and the diameter is usually 1 to 4 inches.
 * Flare – Cylindrical tubes containing a pressed pyrotechnic composition intended to produce a bright flame of various colors. Proximate flares are usually 2 to 6 inches in length and 0.5-1 inches in diameter, and may last 60 seconds or longer.
 * Flash Paper/Flash String/Flash Cotton – Stored and transported when wet with either water or alcohol, these are different forms of nitrocellulose which burn with very little smoke or ash, and are popularly used as hand flashes for magicians, amongst other uses.
 * Flash Trays – A preloaded tube 6 to 18 inches in length with a slit cut between the two end plugs. Used to produce a fan pattern flash and spray of sparks.
 * Flash Pots – Preloaded cylindrical tubes 2 to 4 inches long and 0.5 to 1 inches in diameter used to emit bright flashes of light, often with a bang or spray of sparks.
 * Gerbs – Pyrotechnic fountains used to produce a controlled plume of sparks, and may be classified as fast gerbs or duration gerbs depending on the burn duration. Special waterfall gerbs are often used to produce an effect similar to a waterfall, using several hung upside down in a line.
 * Line Rockets – A device attached to a line specifically to produce thrust. Usually has a duration of 5 seconds or less. May also produce a whistle effect.
 * Ice Fountains – A gerb-type device with no choke specifically used to provide a low-smoke alternative to gerbs, at the cost of lower height.
 * Mines – Devices containing multiple stars, propelled into the air using a lift charge. Special mine-comet effects feature both mines and comets in the same article.
 * Mortar Hits – Produces a bright flash and a puff of smoke, and may be designed to produce noise in addition to the effect. Concussion mortars are special mortars exclusively used to produce loud bangs, and may be used to accentuate other effects.
 * Multi-Shot Devices – Articles used to chain multiple effects together, may be timed or instantaneous.
 * Smoke Cartridges – Used to produce a plume of smoke, duration and size vary greatly depending on the device used.
 * Smoke Cookies – Compressed discs of pyrotechnic composition used to produce a smoke effect.
 * Spark Hits – Used to simulate short circuits in an electrical panel.
 * Saxons – Articles that produce revolving showers of sparks, consisting of two gerb-type devices pinned at the center.
 * Shock Tubing – A special thermoplastic tube used to simulate lightning strikes and the resulting thunder, using special igniters.
 * Strobe Pots – Used to produce multiple flashes of light.

In general, such pyrotechnic devices are initiated by a remotely controlled electrical signal that causes an electric match, or e-match, to produce ignition. The remote control may be manual, via a switch console, or computer controlled according to a pre-programmed sequence and/or a sequence that tracks the live performance via stage cues.

Display pyrotechnics
Display pyrotechnics, also known as commercial fireworks, are pyrotechnic devices intended for use outdoors, where the audience can be further away, and smoke and fallout is less of a concern. Generally the effects, though often similar to proximate pyrotechnics, are of a larger size and more vigorous in nature. It will typically take an entire day to set up a professional fireworks display. This work is normally undertaken on temporarily secured locations by specialist companies employing teams of experienced pyrotechnicians.

In modern times a familiar feature of larger fireworks displays are aerial shells, which commonly appear as large spherical bursts of stars in the sky. The exterior of these shells are commonly made of a hard paper-adhesive layered composite which holds the interior stars arranged around a burst charge, or other pyrotechnic effects. Aerial shells are fired out of mortars from the ground and have internal timing fuses that accurately and reliably position their bursts. A continuous sequence of shells are launched, often with effects artistically choreographed to music and themes, accompanied by various types of ground effects. Modern fireworks displays are commonly executed to a designed program using electrical wiring and ignition linked to an electronic firing system.

The size of these fireworks can range from 50 mm (2") to over 600 mm (24") diameter depending on the type of effect and available distance from the audience. In most jurisdictions, special fireworks training and licensing must be obtained from local authorities to legally prepare and use display pyrotechnics.

Consumer pyrotechnics
Consumer pyrotechnics are devices readily available for purchase to the general public with little or no special licensing or training. These items are considered relatively low hazard devices but, like all pyrotechnics, can still be hazardous and should be stored, handled and used appropriately. Some of the most common examples of consumer pyrotechnics encountered include recreational fireworks (including whistling and sparking types), model rocket motors, highway and marine distress flares, sparklers and caps for toy guns. Pyrotechnics are also indirectly involved in other consumer products such as powder actuated nail guns, ammunition for firearms, and modern fireplaces. Some types, including bird scarers, shell crackers, whistle crackers and flares, may be designed to be fired from a 12-gauge pistol or rifle.

Safety
Pyrotechnics are dangerous and must be handled and used properly. Recently, several high-profile incidents involving pyrotechnics have re-enforced the need to respect these explosives at all times. Proximate pyrotechnics is an area of expertise that requires additional training beyond that of other professional pyrotechnics areas and the use of devices specifically manufactured for indoor, close proximity use. Despite this, accidents can still happen due to the use of low-quality product, or due to an unexpected event, or even due to an error on the part of the operator.

Homemade devices
A common low-budget pyrotechnic flash pot is built using modified screw-in electric fuses in a common light fixture. The fuses are intentionally blown, acting as ignitors for a pyrotechnic material.

Homemade devices may fail to include safety features and can provide numerous hazards, including:

 * A firing circuit using high-power, non-isolated AC line voltage can be a shock hazard to the operator and bystanders.
 * The use of high-current fuses as ignitors can cause main circuit breakers and fuses to trip, due to the sudden inrush of hundreds of amperes through a dead-shorted circuit. Switches used to control ignition may be damaged from the high-current surges.
 * There may not be indicators or interlocks preventing premature ignition of the pyrotechnic material. Screwing a powder-loaded fuse into an unknowingly powered socket will result in immediate ignition, injuring the operator.

Commercial flash pots include safety features such as warning pilot lamps, preignition grounding, and safing circuits. They also use isolated and low-voltage power sources, and have keyed power connections to help prevent accidental ignition.

title: Pyrotechnics


text:
Serving channel

A serving channel (sometimes called a depot channel) is a slang term for a file sharing channel found on an IRC network. Here, users can share and download files including photos, videos, audio files, books, programs, etc. Users that are actively sharing their files are generally referred to as 'servers', whereas users that download without sharing their own files are generally referred to as 'leeches'. While serving normally implies pirated or questionable material, some channels are used for fully legitimate reasons. There are two styles of servers, Fserves, and serving scripts like OmenServe.

Fserve type channels
Using an Fserve script, a server is set up like an FTP. Using CTCP commands and server triggers, a user can initiate a connection with the server. Once connected, the user will be given access to a server's file archive.
 * ex.: " "

Searching and requesting with Fserves
Once a leech has gained access to a server's Fserve, they can navigate through folders using commands similar to DOS. Once inside a folder, the user is able to retrieve a listing of what files are found there.
 * ex.: " " & " " (to display files)

To request a file, the user enters a filename from the folder display listing, along with the " " command.
 * ex.: " "

Serving script type channels
Using a serving script, servers have the ability to send files directly to another user using remote commands. The serving script compiles a listing of available files, and also listens for a leech to request a file. Serving scripts also allow for a user to search all of the servers in a channel at the same time with a single command.

Searching and requesting with serving scripts
A user initiates a search by typing a 'search command' followed by a 'search string' within the channel window. Various search commands exist, including '@find', '@search', and '@seek', depending on what serving script is being used. Wildcard characters such as * can also be used in the search string to simplify a search. The search command will then return a list of files to the user's query window if any servers have a file that matches the search string.
 * ex.: " "

If there are any matches for the user's search string, the next step is to request those files from the server. The user can copy and paste the returned match, along with a short trigger command, from the query window directly into the channel window. The request is then placed in a file queue within the serving script, and downloaded on a first-come, first-served basis.
 * ex.: " "

Users also have the ability to download the complete archive of a server's available files, commonly called a "list" due to the .txt format that the script's output code creates. To request a server's list, there is a separate 'list trigger' used.
 * ex.: " "

title: Serving channel