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Roland Barthes

Roland Gérard Barthes (12 November 1915 – 26 March 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism.

Barthes is perhaps best known for his 1957 essay collection Mythologies, which contained reflections on popular culture, and the 1967/1968 essay "The Death of the Author", which critiqued traditional approaches in literary criticism. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Collège de France.

Early life
Roland Barthes was born on 12 November 1915 in the town of Cherbourg in Normandy. His father, naval officer Louis Barthes, was killed in a battle during World War I in the North Sea before Barthes's first birthday. His mother, Henriette Barthes, and his aunt and grandmother raised him in the village of Urt and the city of Bayonne. In 1924, Barthes' family moved to Paris, though his attachment to his provincial roots would remain strong throughout his life.

Student years
Barthes showed great promise as a student and spent the period from 1935 to 1939 at the Sorbonne, where he earned a licence in classical literature. He was plagued by ill health throughout this period, suffering from tuberculosis, which often had to be treated in the isolation of sanatoria. His repeated physical breakdowns disrupted his academic career, affecting his studies and his ability to take qualifying examinations. They also exempted him from military service during World War II.

His life from 1939 to 1948 was largely spent obtaining a licence in grammar and philology, publishing his first papers, taking part in a medical study, and continuing to struggle with his health. He received a diplôme d'études supérieures (roughly equivalent to an MA by thesis) from the University of Paris in 1941 for his work in Greek tragedy.

Early academic career
In 1948, he returned to purely academic work, gaining numerous short-term positions at institutes in France, Romania, and Egypt. During this time, he contributed to the leftist Parisian paper Combat, out of which grew his first full-length work, Writing Degree Zero (1953).

In 1952, Barthes settled at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, where he studied lexicology and sociology. During his seven-year period there, he began to write a popular series of bi-monthly essays for the magazine Les Lettres Nouvelles, in which he dismantled myths of popular culture (gathered in the Mythologies collection that was published in 1957). Consisting of fifty-four short essays, mostly written between 1954 and 1956, Mythologies were acute reflections of French popular culture ranging from an analysis on soap detergents to a dissection of popular wrestling. Knowing little English, Barthes taught at Middlebury College in 1957 and befriended the future English translator of much of his work, Richard Howard, that summer in New York City.

Rise to prominence
Barthes spent the early 1960s exploring the fields of semiology and structuralism, chairing various faculty positions around France, and continuing to produce more full-length studies. Many of his works challenged traditional academic views of literary criticism and of renowned figures of literature. His unorthodox thinking led to a conflict with a well-known Sorbonne professor of literature, Raymond Picard, who attacked the French New Criticism (a label that he inaccurately applied to Barthes) for its obscurity and lack of respect towards France's literary roots. Barthes's rebuttal in Criticism and Truth (1966) accused the old, bourgeois criticism of a lack of concern with the finer points of language and of selective ignorance towards challenging theories, such as Marxism.

By the late 1960s, Barthes had established a reputation for himself. He traveled to the US and Japan, delivering a presentation at Johns Hopkins University. During this time, he wrote his best-known work, the 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," which, in light of the growing influence of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, would prove to be a transitional piece in its investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought.

Mature critical work
Barthes continued to contribute with Philippe Sollers to the avant-garde literary magazine Tel Quel, which was developing similar kinds of theoretical inquiry to that pursued in Barthes's writings. In 1970, Barthes produced what many consider to be his most prodigious work, the dense, critical reading of Balzac's Sarrasine entitled S/Z. Throughout the 1970s, Barthes continued to develop his literary criticism; he developed new ideals of textuality and novelistic neutrality. In 1971, he served as visiting professor at the University of Geneva. In those same years he became primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS).

In 1975 he wrote an autobiography titled Roland Barthes and in 1977 he was elected to the chair of Sémiologie Littéraire at the Collège de France. In the same year, his mother, Henriette Barthes, to whom he had been devoted, died, aged 85. They had lived together for 60 years. The loss of the woman who had raised and cared for him was a serious blow to Barthes. His last major work, Camera Lucida, is partly an essay about the nature of photography and partly a meditation on photographs of his mother. The book contains many reproductions of photographs, though none of them are of Henriette.

Death
On 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes was knocked down by the driver of a laundry van while walking home through the streets of Paris. One month later, on 26 March, he died from the chest injuries he had sustained in the crash.

Early thought
Barthes's earliest ideas reacted to the trend of existentialist philosophy that was prominent in France during the 1940s, specifically to the figurehead of existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's What Is Literature? (1947) expresses a disenchantment both with established forms of writing and more experimental, avant-garde forms, which he feels alienate readers. Barthes's response was to try to discover that which may be considered unique and original in writing. In Writing Degree Zero (1953), Barthes argues that conventions inform both language and style, rendering neither purely creative. Instead, form, or what Barthes calls "writing" (the specific way an individual chooses to manipulate conventions of style for a desired effect), is the unique and creative act. However, a writer's form is vulnerable to becoming a convention once it has been made available to the public. This means that creativity is an ongoing process of continual change and reaction.

In Michelet, a critical analysis of the French historian Jules Michelet, Barthes developed these notions, applying them to a broader range of fields. He argued that Michelet's views of history and society are obviously flawed. In studying his writings, he continued, one should not seek to learn from Michelet's claims; rather, one should maintain a critical distance and learn from his errors, since understanding how and why his thinking is flawed will show more about his period of history than his own observations. Similarly, Barthes felt that avant-garde writing should be praised for its maintenance of just such a distance between its audience and itself. In presenting an obvious artificiality rather than making claims to great subjective truths, Barthes argued, avant-garde writers ensure that their audiences maintain an objective perspective. In this sense, Barthes believed that art should be critical and should interrogate the world, rather than seek to explain it, as Michelet had done.

Semiotics and myth
Barthes's many monthly contributions, collected in his Mythologies (1957), frequently interrogated specific cultural materials in order to expose how bourgeois society asserted its values through them. For example, Barthes cited the portrayal of wine in French society. Its description as a robust and healthy habit is a bourgeois ideal that is contradicted by certain realities (i.e., that wine can be unhealthy and inebriating). He found semiotics, the study of signs, useful in these interrogations. He developed a theory of signs to demonstrate this perceived deception. He suggested that the construction of myths results in two levels of signification: the "language-object", a first order linguistic system; and the "metalanguage", the second-order system transmitting the myth. The former pertains to the literal or explicit meaning of things while the latter is composed of the language used to speak about the first order. Barthes explained that these bourgeois cultural myths were "second-order signs," or "connotations." A picture of a full, dark bottle is a signifier that relates to a specific "signified": a fermented, alcoholic beverage. However, the bourgeoisie relate it to a new signified: the idea of healthy, robust, relaxing experience. Motivations for such manipulations vary, from a desire to sell products to a simple desire to maintain the status quo. These insights brought Barthes in line with similar Marxist theory. Barthes used the term "myth" while analyzing the popular, consumer culture of post-war France in order to reveal that "objects were organized into meaningful relationships via narratives that expressed collective cultural values."

In The Fashion System Barthes showed how this adulteration of signs could easily be translated into words. In this work he explained how in the fashion world any word could be loaded with idealistic bourgeois emphasis. Thus, if popular fashion says that a 'blouse' is ideal for a certain situation or ensemble, this idea is immediately naturalized and accepted as truth, even though the actual sign could just as easily be interchangeable with 'skirt', 'vest' or any number of combinations. In the end Barthes's Mythologies became absorbed into bourgeois culture, as he found many third parties asking him to comment on a certain cultural phenomenon, being interested in his control over his readership. This turn of events caused him to question the overall utility of demystifying culture for the masses, thinking it might be a fruitless attempt, and drove him deeper in his search for individualistic meaning in art.

Structuralism and its limits
As Barthes's work with structuralism began to flourish around the time of his debates with Picard, his investigation of structure focused on revealing the importance of language in writing, which he felt was overlooked by old criticism. Barthes's "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative" is concerned with examining the correspondence between the structure of a sentence and that of a larger narrative, thus allowing narrative to be viewed along linguistic lines. Barthes split this work into three hierarchical levels: 'functions', 'actions' and 'narrative'. 'Functions' are the elementary pieces of a work, such as a single descriptive word that can be used to identify a character. That character would be an 'action', and consequently one of the elements that make up the narrative. Barthes was able to use these distinctions to evaluate how certain key 'functions' work in forming characters. For example, key words like 'dark', 'mysterious' and 'odd', when integrated together, formulate a specific kind of character or 'action'. By breaking down the work into such fundamental distinctions Barthes was able to judge the degree of realism given functions have in forming their actions and consequently with what authenticity a narrative can be said to reflect on reality. Thus, his structuralist theorizing became another exercise in his ongoing attempts to dissect and expose the misleading mechanisms of bourgeois culture.

While Barthes found structuralism to be a useful tool and believed that discourse of literature could be formalized, he did not believe it could become a strict scientific endeavour. In the late 1960s, radical movements were taking place in literary criticism. The post-structuralist movement and the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida were testing the bounds of the structuralist theory that Barthes's work exemplified. Derrida identified the flaw of structuralism as its reliance on a transcendental signifier; a symbol of constant, universal meaning would be essential as an orienting point in such a closed off system. This is to say that without some regular standard of measurement, a system of criticism that references nothing outside of the actual work itself could never prove useful. But since there are no symbols of constant and universal significance, the entire premise of structuralism as a means of evaluating writing (or anything) is hollow.

Transition
Such thought led Barthes to consider the limitations not just of signs and symbols, but also of Western culture's dependency on beliefs of constancy and ultimate standards. He travelled to Japan in 1966 where he wrote Empire of Signs (published in 1970), a meditation on Japanese culture's contentment in the absence of a search for a transcendental signifier. He notes that in Japan there is no emphasis on a great focus point by which to judge all other standards, describing the centre of Tokyo, the Emperor's Palace, as not a great overbearing entity, but a silent and nondescript presence, avoided and unconsidered. As such, Barthes reflects on the ability of signs in Japan to exist for their own merit, retaining only the significance naturally imbued by their signifiers. Such a society contrasts greatly to the one he dissected in Mythologies, which was revealed to be always asserting a greater, more complex significance on top of the natural one.

In the wake of this trip Barthes wrote what is largely considered to be his best-known work, the essay "The Death of the Author" (1967). Barthes saw the notion of the author, or authorial authority, in the criticism of literary text as the forced projection of an ultimate meaning of the text. By imagining an ultimate intended meaning of a piece of literature one could infer an ultimate explanation for it. But Barthes points out that the great proliferation of meaning in language and the unknowable state of the author's mind makes any such ultimate realization impossible. As such, the whole notion of the 'knowable text' acts as little more than another delusion of Western bourgeois culture. Indeed, the idea of giving a book or poem an ultimate end coincides with the notion of making it consumable, something that can be used up and replaced in a capitalist market. "The Death of the Author" is considered to be a post-structuralist work, since it moves past the conventions of trying to quantify literature, but others see it as more of a transitional phase for Barthes in his continuing effort to find significance in culture outside of the bourgeois norms. Indeed, the notion of the author being irrelevant was already a factor of structuralist thinking.

Textuality and S/Z
Since Barthes contends that there can be no originating anchor of meaning in the possible intentions of the author, he considers what other sources of meaning or significance can be found in literature. He concludes that since meaning can't come from the author, it must be actively created by the reader through a process of textual analysis. In his S/Z (1970), Barthes applies this notion in an analysis of Sarrasine, a Balzac novella. The result was a reading that established five major codes for determining various kinds of significance, with numerous lexias throughout the text – a "lexia" here being defined as a unit of the text chosen arbitrarily (to remain methodologically unbiased as possible) for further analysis. The codes led him to define the story as having a capacity for plurality of meaning, limited by its dependence upon strictly sequential elements (such as a definite timeline that has to be followed by the reader and thus restricts their freedom of analysis). From this project Barthes concludes that an ideal text is one that is reversible, or open to the greatest variety of independent interpretations and not restrictive in meaning. A text can be reversible by avoiding the restrictive devices that Sarrasine suffered from such as strict timelines and exact definitions of events. He describes this as the difference between the writerly text, in which the reader is active in a creative process, and a readerly text in which they are restricted to just reading. The project helped Barthes identify what it was he sought in literature: an openness for interpretation.

Neutral and novelistic writing
In the late 1970s, Barthes was increasingly concerned with the conflict of two types of language: that of popular culture, which he saw as limiting and pigeonholing in its titles and descriptions, and neutral, which he saw as open and noncommittal. He called these two conflicting modes the Doxa (the official and unacknowledged systems of meaning through which culture is absorbed) ) and the Para-doxa. While Barthes had sympathized with Marxist thought in the past (or at least parallel criticisms), he felt that, despite its anti-ideological stance, Marxist theory was just as guilty of using violent language with assertive meanings, as was bourgeois literature. In this way they were both Doxa and both culturally assimilating. As a reaction to this, he wrote The Pleasure of the Text (1975), a study that focused on a subject matter he felt was equally outside the realm of both conservative society and militant leftist thinking: hedonism. By writing about a subject that was rejected by both social extremes of thought, Barthes felt he could avoid the dangers of the limiting language of the Doxa. The theory he developed out of this focus claimed that, while reading for pleasure is a kind of social act, through which the reader exposes him/herself to the ideas of the writer, the final cathartic climax of this pleasurable reading, which he termed the bliss in reading or jouissance, is a point in which one becomes lost within the text. This loss of self within the text or immersion in the text, signifies a final impact of reading that is experienced outside the social realm and free from the influence of culturally associative language and is thus neutral with regard to social progress.

Despite this newest theory of reading, Barthes remained concerned with the difficulty of achieving truly neutral writing, which required an avoidance of any labels that might carry an implied meaning or identity towards a given object. Even carefully crafted neutral writing could be taken in an assertive context through the incidental use of a word with a loaded social context. Barthes felt his past works, like Mythologies, had suffered from this. He became interested in finding the best method for creating neutral writing, and he decided to try to create a novelistic form of rhetoric that would not seek to impose its meaning on the reader. One product of this endeavor was A Lover's Discourse: Fragments in 1977, in which he presents the fictionalized reflections of a lover seeking to identify and be identified by an anonymous amorous other. The unrequited lover's search for signs by which to show and receive love makes evident illusory myths involved in such a pursuit. The lover's attempts to assert himself into a false, ideal reality is involved in a delusion that exposes the contradictory logic inherent in such a search. Yet at the same time the novelistic character is a sympathetic one, and is thus open not just to criticism but also understanding from the reader. The result is one that challenges the reader's views of social constructs of love, without trying to assert any definitive theory of meaning.

Mind and body
Barthes also attempted to reinterpret the mind–body dualism theory. Like Friedrich Nietzsche and Emmanuel Levinas, he also drew from Eastern philosophical traditions in his critique of European culture as "infected" by Western metaphysics. His body theory emphasized the formation of the self through bodily cultivation. The theory, which is also described as ethico-political entity, considers the idea of the body as one that functions as a "fashion word" that provides the illusion of a grounded discourse. This theory has influenced the work of other thinkers such as Jerome Bel.

Photography and Henriette Barthes
Throughout his career, Barthes had an interest in photography and its potential to communicate actual events. Many of his monthly myth articles in the 1950s had attempted to show how a photographic image could represent implied meanings and thus be used by bourgeois culture to infer 'naturalistic truths'. But he still considered the photograph to have a unique potential for presenting a completely real representation of the world. When his mother, Henriette Barthes, died in 1977 he began writing Camera Lucida as an attempt to explain the unique significance a picture of her as a child carried for him.

Reflecting on the relationship between the obvious symbolic meaning of a photograph (which he called the studium) and that which is purely personal and dependent on the individual, that which 'pierces the viewer' (which he called the punctum), Barthes was troubled by the fact that such distinctions collapse when personal significance is communicated to others and can have its symbolic logic rationalized. Barthes found the solution to this fine line of personal meaning in the form of his mother's picture. Barthes explained that a picture creates a falseness in the illusion of 'what is', where 'what was' would be a more accurate description. As had been made physical through Henriette Barthes's death, her childhood photograph is evidence of 'what has ceased to be'. Instead of making reality solid, it serves as a reminder of the world's ever changing nature. Because of this there is something uniquely personal contained in the photograph of Barthes's mother that cannot be removed from his subjective state: the recurrent feeling of loss experienced whenever he looks at it. As one of his final works before his death, Camera Lucida was both an ongoing reflection on the complicated relations between subjectivity, meaning and cultural society as well as a touching dedication to his mother and description of the depth of his grief.

Posthumous publications
A posthumous collection of essays was published in 1987 by François Wahl, Incidents. It contains fragments from his journals: his Soirées de Paris (a 1979 extract from his erotic diary of life in Paris); an earlier diary he kept which explicitly detailed his paying for sex with men and boys in Morocco; and Light of the Sud Ouest (his childhood memories of rural French life). In November 2007, Yale University Press published a new translation into English (by Richard Howard) of Barthes's little known work What is Sport. This work bears a considerable resemblance to Mythologies and was originally commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as the text for a documentary film directed by Hubert Aquin.

In February 2009, Éditions du Seuil published Journal de deuil (Journal of Mourning), based on Barthes's files written from 26 November 1977 (the day following his mother's death) up to 15 September 1979, intimate notes on his terrible loss: "The (awesome but not painful) idea that she had not been everything to me. Otherwise I would never have written a work. Since my taking care of her for six months long, she actually had become everything for me, and I totally forgot of ever have written anything at all. I was nothing more than hopelessly hers. Before that she had made herself transparent so that I could write.... Mixing-up of roles. For months long I had been her mother. I felt like I had lost a daughter."

He grieved his mother's death for the rest of his life: "Do not say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not in mourning. I'm suffering." and "In the corner of my room where she had been bedridden, where she had died and where I now sleep, in the wall where her headboard had stood against I hung an icon—not out of faith. And I always put some flowers on a table. I do not wish to travel anymore so that I may stay here and prevent the flowers from withering away."

In 2012 the book Travels in China was published. It consists of his notes from a three-week trip to China he undertook with a group from the literary journal Tel Quel in 1974. The experience left him somewhat disappointed, as he found China "not at all exotic, not at all disorienting".

Influence
Roland Barthes's criticism contributed to the development of theoretical schools such as structuralism, semiotics, and post-structuralism. While his influence is mainly found in these theoretical fields with which his work brought him into contact, it is also felt in every field concerned with the representation of information and models of communication, including computers, photography, music, and literature. One consequence of Barthes's breadth of focus is that his legacy includes no following of thinkers dedicated to modeling themselves after him. The fact that Barthes's work was ever adapting and refuting notions of stability and constancy means there is no canon of thought within his theory to model one's thoughts upon, and thus no "Barthesism".

Key terms
Readerly and writerly are terms Barthes employs both to delineate one type of literature from another and to implicitly interrogate ways of reading, like positive or negative habits the modern reader brings into one's experience with the text itself. These terms are most explicitly fleshed out in S/Z, while the essay "From Work to Text", from Image—Music—Text (1977), provides an analogous parallel look at the active–passive and postmodern–modern ways of interacting with a text.

Readerly text
A text that makes no requirement of the reader to "write" or "produce" their own meanings. The reader may passively locate "ready-made" meaning. Barthes writes that these sorts of texts are "controlled by the principle of non-contradiction" (156), that is, they do not disturb the "common sense," or "Doxa," of the surrounding culture. The "readerly texts," moreover, "are products [that] make up the enormous mass of our literature" (5). Within this category, there is a spectrum of "replete literature," which comprises "any classic (readerly) texts" that work "like a cupboard where meanings are shelved, stacked, [and] safeguarded" (200).

Writerly text
A text that aspires to the proper goal of literature and criticism: "... to make the reader no longer a consumer but a producer of the text" (4). Writerly texts and ways of reading constitute, in short, an active rather than passive way of interacting with a culture and its texts. A culture and its texts, Barthes writes, should never be accepted in their given forms and traditions. As opposed to the "readerly texts" as "product," the "writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages" (5). Thus reading becomes for Barthes "not a parasitical act, the reactive complement of a writing", but rather a "form of work" (10).

The Author and the scriptor
Author and scriptor are terms Barthes uses to describe different ways of thinking about the creators of texts. "The author" is the traditional concept of the lone genius creating a work of literature or other piece of writing by the powers of his/her original imagination. For Barthes, such a figure is no longer viable. The insights offered by an array of modern thought, including the insights of Surrealism, have rendered the term obsolete. In place of the author, the modern world offers a figure Barthes calls the "scriptor," whose only power is to combine pre-existing texts in new ways. Barthes believes that all writing draws on previous texts, norms, and conventions, and that these are the things to which the reader must turn to understand a text. As a way of asserting the relative unimportance of the writer's biography compared to these textual and generic conventions, Barthes says that the scriptor has no past, but is born with the text. He also argues that, in the absence of the idea of an "author-God" to control the meaning of a work, interpretive horizons are opened up considerably for the active reader. As Barthes puts it, "the death of the author is the birth of the reader."

Criticism
In 1964, Barthes wrote "The Last Happy Writer" ("Le dernier des écrivains heureux" in Essais critiques), the title of which refers to Voltaire. In the essay he commented on the problems of the modern thinker after discovering the relativism in thought and philosophy, discrediting previous philosophers who avoided this difficulty. Disagreeing roundly with Barthes's description of Voltaire, Daniel Gordon, the translator and editor of Candide (The Bedford Series in History and Culture), wrote that "never has one brilliant writer so thoroughly misunderstood another."

The sinologist Simon Leys, in a review of Barthes's diary of a trip to China during the Cultural Revolution, disparages Barthes for his seeming indifference to the situation of the Chinese people, and says that Barthes "has contrived—amazingly—to bestow an entirely new dignity upon the age-old activity, so long unjustly disparaged, of saying nothing at great length."

In popular culture
Barthes's A Lover's Discourse: Fragments was the inspiration for the name of 1980s new wave duo The Lover Speaks.

Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot draws out excerpts from Barthes's A Lover's Discourse: Fragments as a way to depict the unique intricacies of love that one of the main characters, Madeleine Hanna, experiences throughout the novel.

In the film Birdman (2014) by Alejandro González Iñárritu, a journalist quotes to the protagonist Riggan Thompson an extract from Mythologies: "The cultural work done in the past by gods and epic sagas is now done by laundry-detergent commercials and comic-strip characters".

In the film The Truth About Cats & Dogs (1996) by Michael Lehmann, Brian is reading an extract from Camera Lucida over the phone to someone he thinks to be a beautiful woman but is actually her more intellectual and less physically desirable friend.

In the film Elegy, based on Philip Roth's novel The Dying Animal, the character of Consuela (played by Penélope Cruz) is first depicted in the film carrying a copy of Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text on the campus of the university where she is a student.

Laurent Binet's novel The 7th Function of Language is based on the premise that Barthes was not merely accidentally hit by a van driver but that he was instead murdered, as part of a conspiracy to acquire a document known as the "Seventh Function of Language".

Works

 * (1953) Le degré zéro de l'écriture
 * (1954) Michelet par lui-même
 * (1957) Mythologies, Seuil: Paris.
 * (1963) Sur Racine, Editions du Seuil: Paris
 * (1964) Éléments de sémiologie, Communications 4, Seuil: Paris.
 * (1970) L'Empire des signes, Skira: Geneve.
 * (1970) S/Z, Seuil: Paris.
 * (1971) Sade, Fourier, Loyola, Editions du Seuil: Paris.
 * (1972) Le Degré zéro de l'écriture suivi de Nouveaux essais critiques, Editions du Seuil: Paris.
 * (1973) Le plaisir du texte, Editions du Seuil: Paris.
 * (1975) Roland Barthes, Éditions du Seuil: Paris
 * (1977) Poétique du récit, Editions du Seuil: Paris.
 * (1977) Fragments d'un discours amoureux, Paris
 * (1978) Préface, La Parole Intermédiaire, F. Flahault, Seuil: Paris
 * (1980) Recherche de Proust, Editions du Seuil: Paris.
 * (1980) La chambre claire: note sur la photographie. [Paris]: Cahiers du cinéma: Gallimard: Le Seuil, 1980.
 * (1981) Essais critiques, Editions du Seuil: Paris.
 * (1982) Littérature et réalité, Editions du Seuil: Paris.
 * (1988) Michelet, Editions du Seuil: Paris.
 * (1993) Œuvres complètes, Editions du Seuil: Paris.
 * (2009) Carnets du voyage en Chine, Christian Bourgeois: Paris.
 * (2009) Journal de deuil, Editions du Seuil/IMEC: Paris.

Translations to English

 * The Fashion System (1967), University of California Press: Berkeley.
 * Writing Degree Zero (1968), Hill and Wang: New York. ISBN 0-374-52139-5
 * Elements of Semiology (1968), Hill and Wang: New York.
 * Mythologies (1972), Hill and Wang: New York.
 * The Pleasure of the Text (1975), Hill and Wang: New York.
 * S/Z: An Essay (1975), Hill and Wang: New York. ISBN 0-374-52167-0
 * Sade, Fourier, Loyola (1976), Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.
 * Image—Music—Text (1977), Hill and Wang: New York.
 * Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1977) (In this so-called autobiography, Barthes interrogates himself as a text.)
 * The Eiffel Tower and other Mythologies (1979), University of California Press: Berkeley.
 * Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (1981), Hill and Wang: New York.
 * Critical Essays (1972), Northwestern University Press
 * A Barthes Reader (1982), Hill and Wang: New York.
 * Empire of Signs (1983), Hill and Wang: New York.
 * The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980 (1985), Jonathan Cape: London.
 * The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation (1985), Basil Blackwell: Oxford.
 * The Rustle of Language (1986), B. Blackwell: Oxford.
 * Criticism and Truth (1987), The Athlone Pr.: London.
 * Michelet (1987), B.Blackwell: Oxford.
 * Writer Sollers (1987), University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis.
 * Roland Barthes (1988), Macmillan Pr.: London.
 * A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1990), Penguin Books: London.
 * New Critical Essays (1990), University of California Press: Berkeley.
 * Incidents (1992), University of California Press: Berkeley.
 * On Racine (1992), University of California Press: Berkeley
 * The Semiotic Challenge (1994), University of California Press: Berkeley.
 * The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978) (2005), Columbia University Press: New York.
 * The Language of Fashion (2006), Power Publications: Sydney.
 * What Is Sport? (2007), Yale University Press: London and New Haven. ISBN 978-0-300-11604-5
 * Mourning Diary (2010), Hill and Wang: New York. ISBN 978-0-8090-6233-1
 * The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978–1979 and 1979–1980) (2011), Columbia University Press: New York.
 * How to Live Together: Notes for a Lecture Course and Seminar at the Collège de France (1976–1977) (2013), Columbia University Press: New York.

Reviews

 * Smith, Stan (1983), review of Double Exposure: Barthes on Photography, in Hearn, Sheila G. (ed.), Cencrastus No. 11, New Year 1983, pp. 47 – 48,

title: Roland Barthes


text:
Armand J. Piron

'''Armand John "A.J." Piron''' (August 16, 1888 – February 17, 1943) was an American jazz violinist who led dance bands during the 1910s thru the 1930s.

Early life
A.J. Piron was born August 16, 1888, to Octave Louis Piron and Marie Jeanne Zeringue (Jennie). While this is the date according to his draft registration card, his birth record states he was born August 26, 1889. The former date is more widely accepted. At home his family spoke English and French patois, although Piron spoke mostly English.

Piron grew up with his five siblings in the 7th Ward at 1523-24 Columbus Street, steps from Claiborne Avenue, which at that time was a bustling, tree-lined center of commerce and community life. Octave Piron was a shoemaker and a musician himself. He was both a music teacher and played in the Philharmonic Orchestra alongside many well known musicians of the time like Manuel Perez, Charlie Elgar, Ida Rose, and Alphonse Picou, among others. Octave Piron taught his sons Milford, Albert, and Armand Piron how to play.

At the age of seven Piron had an accident that damaged one of his legs. For the next five years while Piron recovered, he devoted himself to practicing the violin. This could be the reason A.J. Piron didn't join the numerous marching bands popular in New Orleans at that time but instead became a dance and concert band musician. At age twelve Piron made his musical debut when he joined a band his father led that included some of his students and Piron's brothers.

Career
In 1903 Piron began playing in the Bloom Philharmonic. In 1908 he played for the Peerless Orchestra. Then in 1913 he played in the large, legendary orchestra organized by John P. Robichaux for the Carnival ball of the Elves of Oberon. That same year Piron was playing at the Rose Bud Theater on Dryades Street, sometimes with Papa Celestin's Tuxedo band. He also played in the Olympia Band with Sydney Bechet, Kid Ory, Louis Keppard, and Clarence Williams, among others.

After touring briefly with W.C. Handy in 1917, Piron started an orchestra which included Lorenzo Tio, Steve Lewis, John Lindsay, and Peter Bocage. The theme song of the orchestra was "The Purple Rose of Cairo", written by Piron and Steve Lewis. In 1923, Piron took his band to New York City.

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

title: Armand J. Piron


text:
GRP

GRP may refer to:

Biochemistry

 * Gastrin-releasing peptide
 * Grp78, Grp94, Grp170, glucose-regulated proteins
 * Grape reaction product

Mathematics

 * Grp, the Category of groups

Technology and materials

 * Glass-reinforced-polymer, also known as Fiberglass, or Fibreglass.
 * Gentoo Reference Platform

Transport

 * Grove Park railway station, London, National Rail station code

Other uses

 * Government resource planning
 * US Grasslands Reserve Program
 * Gross rating point
 * Gross regional product
 * GRP Records, an American jazz label
 * Gurupi Airport, in Brazil

title: GRP


text:
Fiberglass

Fiberglass (American English) or fibreglass (Commonwealth English) is a common type of fiber-reinforced plastic using glass fiber. The fibers may be randomly arranged, flattened into a sheet called a chopped strand mat, or woven into glass cloth. The plastic matrix may be a thermoset polymer matrix—most often based on thermosetting polymers such as epoxy, polyester resin, or vinyl ester resin—or a thermoplastic.

Cheaper and more flexible than carbon fiber, it is stronger than many metals by weight, non-magnetic, non-conductive, transparent to electromagnetic radiation, can be molded into complex shapes, and is chemically inert under many circumstances. Applications include aircraft, boats, automobiles, bath tubs and enclosures, swimming pools, hot tubs, septic tanks, water tanks, roofing, pipes, cladding, orthopedic casts, surfboards, and external door skins.

Other common names for fiberglass are glass-reinforced plastic (GRP), glass-fiber reinforced plastic (GFRP) or GFK (from Glasfaserverstärkter Kunststoff). Because glass fiber itself is sometimes referred to as "fiberglass", the composite is also called fiberglass-reinforced plastic (FRP). This article will adopt the convention that "fiberglass" refers to the complete fiber-reinforced composite material, rather than only to the glass fiber within it.

Carbon-fiber-reinforced polymers are a similar composite material in which the reinforcement are carbon fibers.

History
Glass fibers have been produced for centuries, but the earliest patent was awarded to the Prussian inventor Hermann Hammesfahr (1845–1914) in the U.S. in 1880.

Mass production of glass strands was accidentally discovered in 1932 when Games Slayter, a researcher at Owens-Illinois, directed a jet of compressed air at a stream of molten glass and produced fibers. A patent for this method of producing glass wool was first applied for in 1933. Owens joined with the Corning company in 1935 and the method was adapted by Owens Corning to produce its patented "Fiberglas" (spelled with one "s") in 1936. Originally, Fiberglas was a glass wool with fibers entrapping a great deal of gas, making it useful as an insulator, especially at high temperatures.

A suitable resin for combining the fiberglass with a plastic to produce a composite material was developed in 1936 by DuPont. The first ancestor of modern polyester resins is Cyanamid's resin of 1942. Peroxide curing systems were used by then. With the combination of fiberglass and resin the gas content of the material was replaced by plastic. This reduced the insulation properties to values typical of the plastic, but now for the first time, the composite showed great strength and promise as a structural and building material. Many glass fiber composites continued to be called "fiberglass" (as a generic name) and the name was also used for the low-density glass wool product containing gas instead of plastic.

Ray Greene of Owens Corning is credited with producing the first composite boat in 1937 but did not proceed further at the time due to the brittle nature of the plastic used. In 1939 Russia was reported to have constructed a passenger boat of plastic materials, and the United States a fuselage and wings of an aircraft. The first car to have a fiberglass body was a 1946 prototype of the Stout Scarab, but the model did not enter production.

Fiber
Unlike glass fibers used for insulation, for the final structure to be strong, the fiber's surfaces must be almost entirely free of defects, as this permits the fibers to reach gigapascal tensile strengths. If a bulk piece of glass were defect-free, it would be as strong as glass fibers; however, it is generally impractical to produce and maintain bulk material in a defect-free state outside of laboratory conditions.

Production
The process of manufacturing fiberglass is called pultrusion. The manufacturing process for glass fibers suitable for reinforcement uses large furnaces to gradually melt the silica sand, limestone, kaolin clay, fluorspar, colemanite, dolomite and other minerals until a liquid forms. It is then extruded through bushings (spinneret), which are bundles of very small orifices (typically 5–25 micrometres in diameter for E-Glass, 9 micrometres for S-Glass).

These filaments are then sized (coated) with a chemical solution. The individual filaments are now bundled in large numbers to provide a roving. The diameter of the filaments, and the number of filaments in the roving, determine its weight, typically expressed in one of two measurement systems:
 * yield, or yards per pound (the number of yards of fiber in one pound of material; thus a smaller number means a heavier roving). Examples of standard yields are 225yield, 450yield, 675yield.
 * tex, or grams per km (how many grams 1 km of roving weighs, inverted from yield; thus a smaller number means a lighter roving). Examples of standard tex are 750tex, 1100tex, 2200tex.

These rovings are then either used directly in a composite application such as pultrusion, filament winding (pipe), gun roving (where an automated gun chops the glass into short lengths and drops it into a jet of resin, projected onto the surface of a mold), or in an intermediary step, to manufacture fabrics such as chopped strand mat (CSM) (made of randomly oriented small cut lengths of fiber all bonded together), woven fabrics, knit fabrics or unidirectional fabrics.

Chopped strand mat
Chopped strand mat or CSM is a form of reinforcement used in fiberglass. It consists of glass fibers laid randomly across each other and held together by a binder.

It is typically processed using the hand lay-up technique, where sheets of material are placed on a mold and brushed with resin. Because the binder dissolves in resin, the material easily conforms to different shapes when wetted out. After the resin cures, the hardened product can be taken from the mold and finished.

Using chopped strand mat gives the fiberglass isotropic in-plane material properties.

Sizing
A coating or primer is applied to the roving to:
 * help protect the glass filaments for processing and manipulation.
 * ensure proper bonding to the resin matrix, thus allowing for the transfer of shear loads from the glass fibers to the thermoset plastic. Without this bonding, the fibers can 'slip' in the matrix causing localized failure.

Properties
An individual structural glass fiber is both stiff and strong in tension and compression—that is, along its axis. Although it might be assumed that the fiber is weak in compression, it is actually only the long aspect ratio of the fiber which makes it seem so; i.e., because a typical fiber is long and narrow, it buckles easily. On the other hand, the glass fiber is weak in shear—that is, across its axis. Therefore, if a collection of fibers can be arranged permanently in a preferred direction within a material, and if they can be prevented from buckling in compression, the material will be preferentially strong in that direction.

Furthermore, by laying multiple layers of fiber on top of one another, with each layer oriented in various preferred directions, the material's overall stiffness and strength can be efficiently controlled. In fiberglass, it is the plastic matrix which permanently constrains the structural glass fibers to directions chosen by the designer. With chopped strand mat, this directionality is essentially an entire two-dimensional plane; with woven fabrics or unidirectional layers, directionality of stiffness and strength can be more precisely controlled within the plane.

A fiberglass component is typically of a thin "shell" construction, sometimes filled on the inside with structural foam, as in the case of surfboards. The component may be of nearly arbitrary shape, limited only by the complexity and tolerances of the mold used for manufacturing the shell.

The mechanical functionality of materials is heavily reliant on the combined performances of both the resin (AKA matrix) and fibers. For example, in severe temperature conditions (over 180 °C), the resin component of the composite may lose its functionality, partially due to bond deterioration of resin and fiber. However, GFRPs can still show significant residual strength after experiencing high temperatures (200 °C).

Types of glass fiber used
The most common types of glass fiber used in fiberglass is E-glass, which is alumino-borosilicate glass with less than 1% w/w alkali oxides, mainly used for glass-reinforced plastics. Other types of glass used are A-glass (Alkali-lime glass with little or no boron oxide), E-CR-glass (Electrical/Chemical Resistance; alumino-lime silicate with less than 1% w/w alkali oxides, with high acid resistance), C-glass (alkali-lime glass with high boron oxide content, used for glass staple fibers and insulation), D-glass (borosilicate glass, named for its low Dielectric constant), R-glass (alumino silicate glass without MgO and CaO with high mechanical requirements as Reinforcement), and S-glass (alumino silicate glass without CaO but with high MgO content with high tensile strength).

Pure silica (silicon dioxide), when cooled as fused quartz into a glass with no true melting point, can be used as a glass fiber for fiberglass but has the drawback that it must be worked at very high temperatures. In order to lower the necessary work temperature, other materials are introduced as "fluxing agents" (i.e., components to lower the melting point). Ordinary A-glass ("A" for "alkali-lime") or soda lime glass, crushed and ready to be remelted, as so-called cullet glass, was the first type of glass used for fiberglass. E-glass ("E" because of initial Electrical application), is alkali-free and was the first glass formulation used for continuous filament formation. It now makes up most of the fiberglass production in the world, and also is the single largest consumer of boron minerals globally. It is susceptible to chloride ion attack and is a poor choice for marine applications. S-glass ("S" for "stiff") is used when tensile strength (high modulus) is important and is thus an important building and aircraft epoxy composite (it is called R-glass, "R" for "reinforcement" in Europe). C-glass ("C" for "chemical resistance") and T-glass ("T" is for "thermal insulator"—a North American variant of C-glass) are resistant to chemical attack; both are often found in insulation-grades of blown fiberglass.

Applications
Fiberglass is an immensely versatile material due to its lightweight, inherent strength, weather-resistant finish and variety of surface textures.

The development of fiber-reinforced plastic for commercial use was extensively researched in the 1930s. It was of particular interest to the aviation industry. A means of mass production of glass strands was accidentally discovered in 1932 when a researcher at Owens-Illinois directed a jet of compressed air at a stream of molten glass and produced fibers. After Owens merged with the Corning company in 1935, Owens Corning adapted the method to produce its patented "Fiberglas" (one "s"). A suitable resin for combining the "Fiberglas" with a plastic was developed in 1936 by DuPont. The first ancestor of modern polyester resins is Cyanamid's of 1942. Peroxide curing systems were used by then.

During World War II, fiberglass was developed as a replacement for the molded plywood used in aircraft radomes (fiberglass being transparent to microwaves). Its first main civilian application was for the building of boats and sports car bodies, where it gained acceptance in the 1950s. Its use has broadened to the automotive and sport equipment sectors. In the production of some products, such as aircraft, carbon fiber is now used instead of fiberglass, which is stronger by volume and weight.

Advanced manufacturing techniques such as pre-pregs and fiber rovings extend fiberglass's applications and the tensile strength possible with fiber-reinforced plastics.

Fiberglass is also used in the telecommunications industry for shrouding antennas, due to its RF permeability and low signal attenuation properties. It may also be used to conceal other equipment where no signal permeability is required, such as equipment cabinets and steel support structures, due to the ease with which it can be molded and painted to blend with existing structures and surfaces. Other uses include sheet-form electrical insulators and structural components commonly found in power-industry products. Because of fiberglass's lightweight and durability, it is often used in protective equipment such as helmets. Many sports use fiberglass protective gear, such as goaltenders' and catchers' masks.

Storage tanks
Storage tanks can be made of fiberglass with capacities up to about 300 tonnes. Smaller tanks can be made with chopped strand mat cast over a thermoplastic inner tank which acts as a preform during construction. Much more reliable tanks are made using woven mat or filament wound fiber, with the fiber orientation at right angles to the hoop stress imposed in the sidewall by the contents. Such tanks tend to be used for chemical storage because the plastic liner (often polypropylene) is resistant to a wide range of corrosive chemicals. Fiberglass is also used for septic tanks.

House building
Glass-reinforced plastics are also used to produce house building components such as roofing laminate, door surrounds, over-door canopies, window canopies and dormers, chimneys, coping systems, and heads with keystones and sills. The material's reduced weight and easier handling, compared to wood or metal, allows faster installation. Mass-produced fiberglass brick-effect panels can be used in the construction of composite housing, and can include insulation to reduce heat loss.

Oil and gas artificial lift systems
In rod pumping applications, fiberglass rods are often used for their high tensile strength to weight ratio. Fiberglass rods provide an advantage over steel rods because they stretch more elastically (lower Young's modulus) than steel for a given weight, meaning more oil can be lifted from the hydrocarbon reservoir to the surface with each stroke, all while reducing the load on the pumping unit.

Fiberglass rods must be kept in tension, however, as they frequently part if placed in even a small amount of compression. The buoyancy of the rods within a fluid amplifies this tendency.

Piping
GRP and GRE pipe can be used in a variety of above- and below-ground systems, including those for:
 * desalination
 * water treatment
 * water distribution networks
 * chemical process plants
 * water used for firefighting
 * hot and cold water
 * drinking water
 * wastewater/sewage, Municipal waste
 * liquified petroleum gas

Boating
Fiberglass composite boats have been made since the early 1940s, and many sailing vessels made after 1950 were built using the fiberglass lay-up process. As of 2022, boats continue to be made with fiberglass, though more advanced techniques such as vacuum bag moulding are used in the construction process.

Armour
Though most bullet-resistant armours are made using different textiles, fiberglass composites have been shown to be effective as ballistic armor.

Filament winding
Filament winding is a fabrication technique mainly used for manufacturing open (cylinders) or closed-end structures (pressure vessels or tanks). The process involves winding filaments under tension over a male mandrel. The mandrel rotates while a wind eye on a carriage moves horizontally, laying down fibers in the desired pattern. The most common filaments are carbon or glass fiber and are coated with synthetic resin as they are wound. Once the mandrel is completely covered to the desired thickness, the resin is cured; often the mandrel is placed in an oven to achieve this, though sometimes radiant heaters are used with the mandrel still turning in the machine. Once the resin has cured, the mandrel is removed, leaving the hollow final product. For some products such as gas bottles, the 'mandrel' is a permanent part of the finished product forming a liner to prevent gas leakage or as a barrier to protect the composite from the fluid to be stored.

Filament winding is well suited to automation, and there are many applications, such as pipe and small pressure vessels that are wound and cured without any human intervention. The controlled variables for winding are fiber type, resin content, wind angle, tow or bandwidth and thickness of the fiber bundle. The angle at which the fiber has an effect on the properties of the final product. A high angle "hoop" will provide circumferential or "burst" strength, while lower angle patterns (polar or helical) will provide greater longitudinal tensile strength.

Products currently being produced using this technique range from pipes, golf clubs, Reverse Osmosis Membrane Housings, oars, bicycle forks, bicycle rims, power and transmission poles, pressure vessels to missile casings, aircraft fuselages and lamp posts and yacht masts.

Fiberglass hand lay-up operation
A release agent, usually in either wax or liquid form, is applied to the chosen mold to allow the finished product to be cleanly removed from the mold. Resin—typically a 2-part thermoset polyester, vinyl, or epoxy—is mixed with its hardener and applied to the surface. Sheets of fiberglass matting are laid into the mold, then more resin mixture is added using a brush or roller. The material must conform to the mold, and air must not be trapped between the fiberglass and the mold. Additional resin is applied and possibly additional sheets of fiberglass. Hand pressure, vacuum or rollers are used to be sure the resin saturates and fully wets all layers, and that any air pockets are removed. The work must be done quickly before the resin starts to cure unless high-temperature resins are used which will not cure until the part is warmed in an oven. In some cases, the work is covered with plastic sheets and vacuum is drawn on the work to remove air bubbles and press the fiberglass to the shape of the mold.

Fiberglass spray lay-up operation
The fiberglass spray lay-up process is similar to the hand lay-up process but differs in the application of the fiber and resin to the mold. Spray-up is an open-molding composites fabrication process where resin and reinforcements are sprayed onto a mold. The resin and glass may be applied separately or simultaneously "chopped" in a combined stream from a chopper gun. Workers roll out the spray-up to compact the laminate. Wood, foam or other core material may then be added, and a secondary spray-up layer imbeds the core between the laminates. The part is then cured, cooled, and removed from the reusable mold.

Pultrusion operation
Pultrusion is a manufacturing method used to make strong, lightweight composite materials. In pultrusion, material is pulled through forming machinery using either a hand-over-hand method or a continuous-roller method (as opposed to extrusion, where the material is pushed through dies). In fiberglass pultrusion, fibers (the glass material) are pulled from spools through a device that coats them with a resin. They are then typically heat-treated and cut to length. Fiberglass produced this way can be made in a variety of shapes and cross-sections, such as W or S cross-sections.

Warping
One notable feature of fiberglass is that the resins used are subject to contraction during the curing process. For polyester this contraction is often 5–6%; for epoxy, about 2%. Because the fibers do not contract, this differential can create changes in the shape of the part during curing. Distortions can appear hours, days, or weeks after the resin has set.

While this distortion can be minimized by symmetric use of the fibers in the design, a certain amount of internal stress is created; and if it becomes too great, cracks form.

Health hazards
In June 2011, the US National Toxicology Program (NTP) removed from its Report on Carcinogens all biosoluble glass wool used in home and building insulation and for non-insulation products. However, NTP considers fibrous glass dust to be "reasonably anticipated [as] a human carcinogen (Certain Glass Wool Fibers (Inhalable))". Similarly, California's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment ("OEHHA") published a November, 2011 modification to its Proposition 65 listing to include only "Glass wool fibers (inhalable and biopersistent)." The actions of U.S. NTP and California's OEHHA mean that a cancer warning label for biosoluble fiber glass home and building insulation is no longer required under federal or California law. All fiberglass wools commonly used for thermal and acoustical insulation were reclassified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in October 2001 as Not Classifiable as to carcinogenicity to humans (Group 3).

People can be exposed to fiberglass in the workplace by breathing it in, skin contact, or eye contact. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has set the legal limit (permissible exposure limit) for fiberglass exposure in the workplace as 15 mg/m3 total and 5 mg/m3 in respiratory exposure over an 8-hour workday. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) has set a recommended exposure limit (REL) of 3 fibers/cm3 (less than 3.5 micrometers in diameter and greater than 10 micrometers in length) as a time-weighted average over an 8-hour workday, and a 5 mg/m3 total limit.

The European Union and Germany classify synthetic vitreous fibers as possibly or probably carcinogenic, but fibers can be exempt from this classification if they pass specific tests. Evidence for these classifications is primarily from studies on experimental animals and mechanisms of carcinogenesis. The glass wool epidemiology studies have been reviewed by a panel of international experts convened by the IARC. These experts concluded: "Epidemiologic studies published during the 15 years since the previous IARC monographs review of these fibers in 1988 provide no evidence of increased risks of lung cancer or mesothelioma (cancer of the lining of the body cavities) from occupational exposures during the manufacture of these materials, and inadequate evidence overall of any cancer risk." A 2012 health hazard review for the European Commission stated that inhalation of fiberglass at concentrations of 3, 16 and 30 mg/m3 "did not induce fibrosis nor tumours except transient lung inflammation that disappeared after a post-exposure recovery period." Similar reviews of the epidemiology studies have been conducted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry ("ATSDR"), the National Toxicology Program, the National Academy of Sciences and Harvard's Medical and Public Health Schools which reached the same conclusion as IARC that there is no evidence of increased risk from occupational exposure to glass wool fibers.

Fiberglass will irritate the eyes, skin, and the respiratory system. Potential symptoms include irritation of eyes, skin, nose, throat, dyspnea (breathing difficulty); sore throat, hoarseness and cough. Scientific evidence demonstrates that fiberglass is safe to manufacture, install and use when recommended work practices are followed to reduce temporary mechanical irritation. These work practices are not always followed, and fiberglass is often left exposed in basements that later become occupied. Fiberglass insulation should never be left exposed in an occupied area, according to the American Lung Association.

While the resins are cured, styrene vapors are released. These are irritating to mucous membranes and respiratory tract. Therefore, the Hazardous Substances Ordinance in Germany dictates a maximum occupational exposure limit of 86 mg/m3. In certain concentrations, a potentially explosive mixture may occur. Further manufacture of GRP components (grinding, cutting, sawing) creates fine dust and chips containing glass filaments, as well as tacky dust, in quantities high enough to affect health and the functionality of machines and equipment. The installation of effective extraction and filtration equipment is required to ensure safety and efficiency.

title: Fiberglass


text:
Talk:SQL Slammer

Under the Impace section, it says, "Yonhap news agency in South Korea reported on the Internet services had been shut down for hours on Saturday, January 25, 2003 nationwide." Should this be "reported that the internet services had been shut down" or "reported on the internet that services had been shut down"? Banaticus 09:10, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

Frankly, SQL Slammer ruined Mr. Weaver's theory because the worm didn't use permutation scans, partitioned permutation scans or hitlist scans to propagate in 10 minutes. Keep it simple! Gritzko

Is there any reason this article is located at SQL slammer (computer worm) instead of just SQL slammer? Parentheses are for disambiguation, and I don't think there's any ambiguity here. — Jonathan Kovaciny (talk|contribs) 19:48, 11 April 2007 (UTC)

Size of the worm
The beginning of == Technical details == reads: "The size of the Worm isn't 376 bytes. The worm sends 376 bytes to UDP port 1434, the SQL Server Resolution Service Port."
 * "The worm is a small (376 bytes) piece of code that does little other than generate random IP addresses and send itself out to those addresses."
 * And the end of the section (which has been mistaken for the discussion page):

I deleted the last sentences and the alleged size in the first sentence. Apokrif 16:31, 20 July 2007 (UTC)

As to who and when it was first publically detected you might want to look here http://www.dslreports.com/forum/remark,5771929 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.51.228.164 (talk) 20:23, 28 April 2011 (UTC)

Many patching delays and missteps
It is simplistic to the point of misleading to state "a patch had been released six months earlier in MS02-039". Do we want to tell more of the patch history?

The first patch to fix the Slammer vulnerability was issued on 24 July 2002. Additional Security Bulletins came in August and October, when it was discovered that another package of patches to the same database programs made them worse. A patch to fix the new problem came on 9 October, but fully installing it would reopen the vulnerability to Slammer -- an old, vulnerable module had been included in the fix. 16 October brought a patch that actually patched Slammer, but now the other problem was forgotten. The sixth shot was the charm: a preliminary pack of patches issued in December 2002 got both problems right, along with 188 other bugs in the 7th version of SQL Server. Systems Administrators were told, "Microsoft DOES NOT support the use of this build in your production environments. It is being provided for testing purposes, such that you have the opportunity to uncover issues/concerns . . ." Doubtless some waited until that pack stabilized on 4 January 2003, or until the first easy-to-install patch addressing just these two vulnerabilities was issued. That was 26 January, just after Slammer struck.

Decide for yourself whether the patch was released 6 months before the attack or the day after. David Litchfield, an independent researcher, discovered Microsoft's Slammer vulnerability and contacted the company on 16 May 2002 (see http://www.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/NT-Bugtraq/2002-06/0014.html), so throw in the 2+ months it took Microsoft to make any public move when you add up the nation's total response delay.

Microsoft expressed doubts about Mr. Litchfield's claims and made no response to the danger until Mr. Litchfield presented his findings publicly at the Blackhat Security Briefings in July 2002.

Jerry-va (talk) 14:01, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

title: Talk:SQL Slammer


text:
Oh! What a Lovely War

'Oh! What a Lovely War' is a 1969 British epic comedy historical musical war film directed by Richard Attenborough (in his directorial debut), with an ensemble cast, including Maggie Smith, Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud, John Mills, Kenneth More, Laurence Olivier, Jack Hawkins, Corin Redgrave, Michael Redgrave, Vanessa Redgrave, Ralph Richardson, Ian Holm, Paul Shelley, Malcolm McFee, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Nanette Newman, Edward Fox, Susannah York, John Clements, Phyllis Calvert and Maurice Roëves.

The film is based on the stage musical Oh, What a Lovely War!, originated by Charles Chilton as the radio play The Long Long Trail in December 1961, and transferred to stage by Gerry Raffles in partnership with Joan Littlewood and her Theatre Workshop in 1963.

The title is derived from the music hall song "Oh! It's a Lovely War", which is one of the major numbers in the film.

Synopsis
''Oh! What a Lovely War'' summarises and takes a satirical view on the events of World War I using popular songs of the time, many of which were parodies of older popular songs, and using allegorical settings such as Brighton's West Pier to criticise the manner in which the eventual victory was won.

The diplomatic maneuvering and events involving those in authority are set in a fantasy location inside the pierhead pavilion, far from the trenches. In the opening scene, various foreign ministers, generals and heads of state walk over a huge map of Europe, reciting actual words spoken by these figures at the time. An unnamed photographer takes a picture of Europe's rulers – after handing two red poppies to the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg, he takes their picture, "assassinating" them as the flash goes off. Many of the heads of state enjoy good personal relations and are reluctant to go to war: a tearful Emperor Franz Josef declares war on Serbia after being deceived by his Foreign Minister, and Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II are shown as unable to overrule their countries' military mobilisation schedules. The German invasion of Belgium leaves Sir Edward Grey little choice but to get involved. Italy reneges on its alliance with the Central Powers (it joined the Allies in 1915) but Turkey joins them instead.

The start of the war in 1914 is shown as a parade of optimism. The protagonists are an archetypal British family of the time, the Smiths, who are shown entering Brighton's West Pier, with General Haig selling tickets – the film later follows the young Smith men through their experiences in the trenches. A military band rouses holidaymakers from the beach to rally round and follow – some even literally boarding a bandwagon. The first Battle of Mons is similarly cheerfully depicted yet more realistic in portrayal. Both scenes are flooded in pleasant sunshine.

When the casualties start to mount, a theatre audience is rallied by singing "Are We Downhearted? No!" A chorus line dressed in frilled yellow dresses, recruits a volunteer army with "We don't want to lose you, but we think you ought to go". A music hall star (Maggie Smith) then enters a lone spotlight, and lures the still doubtful young men in the audience into "taking the King's Shilling" by singing about how every day she "walks out" with different men in uniform, and that "On Saturday I'm willing, if you'll only take the shilling, to make a man of any one of you." The young men take to the stage and are quickly moved offstage and into military life, and the initially alluring music hall singer is depicted on close-up as a coarse, over-made-up harridan.

The red poppy crops up again as a symbol of impending death, often being handed to a soldier about to be sent to die. These scenes are juxtaposed with the pavilion, now housing the top military brass. There is a scoreboard (a dominant motif in the original theatre production) showing the loss of life and "yards gained".

Outside, Sylvia Pankhurst (Vanessa Redgrave) is shown addressing a hostile crowd on the futility of war, upbraiding them for believing everything they read in the newspapers. She is met with catcalls and jeered from her podium.

1915 is depicted as darkly contrasting in tone. Many shots of a parade of wounded men illustrate an endless stream of grim, hopeless faces. Black humour among these soldiers has now replaced the enthusiasm of the early days. "There's a Long, Long Trail a-Winding" captures the new mood of despair, depicting soldiers filing along in torrential rain in miserable conditions. Red poppies provide the only bright colour in these scenes. In a scene of British soldiers drinking in an estaminet, a Soubrette (Pia Colombo) leads them in a jolly chorus of "The Moon Shines Bright on Charlie Chaplin", a reworking of an American song then shifts the mood back to darker tone by singing a soft and sombre version of "Adieu la vie". At the end of the year, amidst more manoeuvres in the pavilion, General (later Field Marshal) Douglas Haig replaces Field Marshal Sir John French as Commander-in-Chief of the British Forces. Haig is then mocked by Australian troops who see him inspecting British soldiers; they sing "They were only playing Leapfrog" to the tune of "John Brown's Body".

An interfaith religious service is held in a ruined abbey. A priest tells the gathered soldiers that each religion has endorsed the war by way of allowing soldiers to eat pork if Jewish, meat on Fridays if Catholic, and work through the sabbath if in service of the war for all religions. He also says the Dalai Lama has blessed the war effort.

1916 passes and the film's tone darkens again. The songs contain contrasting tones of wistfulness, stoicism and resignation, including "The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling", "If the Sergeant Steals Your Rum, Never Mind" and "Hanging on the Old Barbed Wire". The wounded are laid out in ranks at the field station, a stark contrast to the healthy rows of young men who entered the war. The camera often lingers on Harry Smith's silently suffering face.

The Americans arrive, but are shown only in the "disconnected reality" of the pavilion, interrupting the deliberations of the British generals by singing "Over There" with the changed final line: "And we won't come back – we'll be buried over there!" The resolute-looking American captain seizes the map from an astonished Haig.

Jack notices with disgust that after three years of fighting, he is literally back where he started, at Mons. As the Armistice is sounding, Jack is the last one to die. There is a splash of red which at first glance appears to be blood, but which turns out to be yet another poppy out of focus in the foreground. Jack's spirit wanders through the battlefield, and he eventually finds himself in the room where the elder statesmen of Europe are drafting the coming peace – but they are oblivious to his presence. Jack finally finds himself on a tranquil hillside, where he joins his brothers for a lie down on the grass, where their figures morph into crosses. The film closes with a long slow pan out that ends in a dizzying aerial view of countless soldiers' graves, as the voices of the dead sing "We'll Never Tell Them" (a parody of the Jerome Kern song "They Didn't Believe Me").

Smith family

 * Wendy Allnutt as Flo Smith
 * Colin Farrell as Harry Smith
 * Malcolm McFee as Freddie Smith
 * John Rae as Grandpa Smith
 * Corin Redgrave as Bertie Smith
 * Maurice Roëves as George Smith
 * Paul Shelley as Jack Smith
 * Kim Smith as Dickie Smith
 * Angela Thorne as Betty Smith
 * Mary Wimbush as Mary Smith

At the time, the Beatles were interested in making an anti-war film. At Bertrand Russell’s suggestion, Paul McCartney met with the producer Len Deighton to discuss the opportunity of the band portraying the Smith family, although in the end it was not possible to arrange their appearance.

Also starring

 * Vincent Ball as Australian Soldier
 * Pia Colombo as Estaminet Singer
 * Paul Daneman as Tsar Nicholas II
 * Isabel Dean as Sir John French's Lady
 * Christian Doermer as Fritz
 * Robert Flemyng as Staff Officer in Gassed Trench
 * Meriel Forbes as Lady Grey
 * Frank Forsyth as Woodrow Wilson
 * Ian Holm as President Poincaré
 * David Lodge as Recruiting Sergeant
 * Joe Melia as the Photographer
 * Guy Middleton as Sir William Robertson
 * Juliet Mills as Nurse
 * Nanette Newman as Nurse
 * Cecil Parker as Sir John
 * Natasha Parry as Sir William Robertson's Lady
 * Gerald Sim as Chaplain
 * Thorley Walters as Staff Officer in Ballroom
 * Anthony Ainley as Third Aide
 * Michael Bates as Drunk Lance Corporal
 * Fanny Carby as Mill Girl
 * Cecilia Darby as Sir Henry Wilson's Lady
 * Geoffrey Davies as Aide
 * Edward Fox as Aide
 * George Ghent as Heckler
 * Zeph Gladstone as Chauffeur (uncredited)
 * Peter Gilmore as Private Burgess
 * Ben Howard as Private Garbett
 * Norman Jones as Scottish Soldier
 * Paddy Joyce as Irish Soldier
 * Angus Lennie as Scottish Soldier
 * Harry Locke as Heckler
 * Clifford Mollison as Heckler
 * Derek Newark as Shooting Gallery Proprietor
 * John Owens as Seamus Moore
 * Ron Pember as Corporal at Station
 * Dorothy Reynolds as Heckler
 * Norman Shelley as Staff Officer in Ballroom
 * Marianne Stone as Mill Girl
 * John Trigger as Officer at Station
 * Kathleen Wileman as Emma Smith at Age 4
 * Penelope Allen as Solo Chorus Girl
 * Maurice Arthur as Soldier Singer
 * Freddie Ascott as 'Whizzbang' Soldier
 * Dinny Jones as Chorus Girl
 * Carole Gray as Chorus Girl
 * Bernard Jarvis as the whistling blowing soldier in the trench
 * Jane Seymour as Chorus Girl (uncredited and film debut)

Guest stars

 * Dirk Bogarde as Stephen
 * Phyllis Calvert as Lady Haig
 * Jean-Pierre Cassel as French Colonel
 * John Clements as General von Moltke
 * John Gielgud as Count Leopold Berchtold
 * Jack Hawkins as Emperor Franz Josef I
 * Kenneth More as Kaiser Wilhelm II
 * Laurence Olivier as Field Marshal Sir John French
 * Michael Redgrave as Sir Henry Wilson
 * Vanessa Redgrave as Sylvia Pankhurst
 * Ralph Richardson as Sir Edward Grey
 * Maggie Smith as Music Hall Star
 * Susannah York as Eleanor
 * John Mills as General (later Field Marshal) Sir Douglas Haig

Production
The producers were the novelist Len Deighton, photographer Brian Duffy and Richard Attenborough, who was making his directorial debut. The Deighton Duffy production company had produced the film adaptation of Deighton’s Only When I Larf starring Richard Attenborough. Deighton wrote the screenplay for ''Oh! What a Lovely War'' and the opening title sequence was created by Len Deighton's lifelong friend Raymond Hawkey, the designer responsible for many of Deighton's book covers in the 1960s. In an attempt to shame other people who he thought were claiming credit for things they hadn't actually done, Deighton decided not to be listed in the film credits, a gesture he later described as "stupid and infantile".

The 1969 film transferred the mise-en-scène completely into the cinematic domain, with elaborate sequences shot at West Pier in Brighton, elsewhere in Brighton and on the South Downs, interspersed with motifs from the stage production. These included the 'cricket' scoreboards showing the number of dead, but Deighton did not use the pierrot costumes. However, as many critics, including Pauline Kael, noted, the treatment diminished the effect of the numbers of deaths, which appear only fleetingly. Nonetheless, Deighton’s final sequence, ending in a helicopter shot of thousands of war graves is regarded as one of the most memorable moments of the film. According to Attenborough, 16,000 white crosses had to be hammered into individually dug holes due to the hardness of the soil. Although this is effective in symbolising the scale of death, the number of crosses was in fact fewer than the number of deaths in a single battle: depicting the actual number killed in the entire war would have required the scale to have been replicated more than 1000 times.

The film was shot in the summer of 1968 in Sussex, mostly in the Brighton area. Many of the extras were local people, but a great many were students from the University of Sussex, Falmer, on the outskirts of the town. The film's locations included the West Pier (now gutted by fire and wrecked), Ditchling Beacon, Sheepcote Valley (the trench sequences), Old Bayham Abbey, near Frant (the church parade), Brighton station and Ovingdean (where thousands of crosses were erected for the classic finale).

The song
The song was written by J. P. Long and Maurice Scott in 1917 and was part of the repertoire of music hall star and male impersonator Ella Shields. The first verse and the chorus follow:

Two pre-musical renditions, one from 1918, can be found at Firstworldwar.com. Almost all of the songs featured in the film also appear on the CD41 album series ''Oh! It's a Lovely War'' (four volumes).

Release
The film had its premiere at the Paramount Theatre on Piccadilly Circus in London on 10 April 1969 before opening to the public the following day.

Reception
Vincent Canby of The New York Times called it "a big, elaborate, sometimes realistic film whose elephantine physical proportions and often brilliant all-star cast simply overwhelm the material with a surfeit of good intentions." Variety called the film "dedicated, exhilarating, shrewd, mocking, funny, emotional, witty, poignant and technically brilliant." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times gave the film 4 stars out of 4, writing that it was not a movie but "an elaborately staged tableau, a dazzling use of the camera to achieve essentially theatrical effects. And judged on that basis, Richard Attenborough has given us a breathtaking evening." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune also gave the film a perfect grade of 4 stars and wrote it "deserves an Academy Award nomination for the best picture of the year ... You can sit back and enjoy this film on any one of many levels. The songs are good, the lyrics are biting; the staging and costuming blend with the story rather than overshadow it. The acting seems effortless." Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "What noted British actor Richard Attenborough, in a dazzling directorial debut, and his principal writers Len Deighton and Brian Duffy have done is to transform the highly political and one-dimensional Joan Littlewood theatre piece into timeless—and painfully timely—tragic allegory." Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote: "The conception is intriguing, but the film turns into an infernal, precision machine. As one big production number succeeded the other and one perfectly measured and symmetrical tableau faded into the next, I began to feel stupefied rather than touched. The physical production was rolling over the songs, the characters and the vignettes." David Wilson of The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote that "one is simply left admiring a worthy mosaic of bits and pieces, full of good ideas but nowhere near to being a self-contained dramatic entity."

The film presently has a score of 75% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 16 reviews, with an average grade of 8.2 out of 10.

The Toronto Star received complaints from veteran organizations about the advertisement for the film that featured cemetery crosses and later ran the adverts without the image.

Box office
It ranked the 16th film at the UK box office in 1969.

References in popular culture

 * English rock band Colonel Bagshot released an anti-war album of the same name in 1971, their first and only LP.
 * BBC Radio 4's 15 Minute Musical portrayed Tony Blair's premiership in the style of Oh! What a Lovely War in a September 2006 episode entitled "Oh! What a Lovely Blair".
 * At a Google Talks event, James Rado, one of the original writers and creators of Hair, stated that Oh! What a Lovely War was what made him want to work on a musical dealing with war. Archived at Ghostarchive and the Wayback Machine:
 * The song "The Bells of Hell Go Ting-a-ling-a-ling" was used as the play-out music for Ned Sherrin's 1964 BBC-TV show Not So Much a Programme, More a Way of Life.
 * Babyshambles named their live album Oh! What a Lovely Tour after this film.

title: Oh! What a Lovely War