text:
Borken (district)

Borken is a Kreis (district) in the northwestern part of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany in the Münster region. Neighboring districts are Steinfurt, Coesfeld, Recklinghausen, Wesel, Cleves, Bentheim in the Lower Saxony and the Dutch provinces Gelderland and Overijssel. The two biggest cities are Bocholt and Gronau.

History
During the era of the Holy Roman Empire the area was subordinate to the Prince-Bishopric of Münster for centuries. In 1803 the bishops lost this territory, and the short-lived Principality of Salm was founded. After the Napoleonic Wars the region became a part of the Prussian province of Westphalia in 1815. At that time the district was created, together with the district Ahaus. In 1923 the city Bocholt left the district and became a district-free city. In 1975 the district got its current size by incorporating the district Ahaus, the city Bocholt and small parts of the districts Rees, Recklinghausen and Coesfeld.

Geography
The district is located in the western part of the Münsterland, a rather flat and rural area.

Coat of arms
The colors of the coat of arms were chosen to be the same as those of the Prince-Bishopric of Münster, the long-time owner of the region. The three white anchors in the middle derive from the coat of arms of the Herrschaft Anholt. It is depicted three times to show the three main parts the district was created from – the old district Borken, the district Ahaus and the city Bocholt.

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

title: Borken (district)


text:
Borken, North Rhine-Westphalia

Borken (, Westphalian: Buorken) is a town and the capital of the district of the same name, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

Geography
Borken is situated 10 km east of the Dutch border. Borken station is the northern terminus on the remaining section of the Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck–Winterswijk railway.

Neighbouring places

 * Raesfeld
 * Heiden
 * Südlohn
 * Rhede
 * Velen

Division of the town
Borken consists of 12 districts:

The 10 largest groups of foreign residents by 31 December 2018:

History
The name comes from the German word "Burg" or "Burk" and gradually changed to "Burke", then "Burken" and finally to "Borken". Around the year 800 the village was being used by Charles The Great (Charlemagne) as a stopover place on his travels. In 1226 City rights were granted by Bishop Dietrich II of Isenberg-Limburg. Fortification of the city with walls and towers was first noted in 1391.

In the last years of the Holy Roman Empire (1803–06) it was the capital of the short-lived principality of Salm. From 1810 to 1814 it was part of the French Empire. In 1815 Borken came under the jurisdiction of the Prussian Province of Westphalia. At the same time it became the seat of government for the newly formed district or county of Borken (Kreis Borken). Between 1880 and 1905 the area experienced the building of railroad connections: (1880 Wanne-Borken-Winterswijk line, 1901 Empel-Bocholt-Borken and Borken-Burgsteinfurt, 1905 Borken-Coesfeld-Münster).

Near the end of World War II the historic center of the city was heavily destroyed. After the war, community rearrangements followed in 1969, including annexation of Gemen and other towns in the vicinity. Between 1975 and 1978 came the cleaning up and rebuilding of the southern part of the old city. There, buildings which had outlasted the destruction of the Second World War were finally demolished. In 2001 Borken celebrated its 775th anniversary.

Twin towns – sister cities
Borken is twinned with:

 * Albertslund, Denmark
 * 🇵🇱 Bolków, Poland
 * 🇩🇪 Grabow, Germany
 * 🇸🇪 Mölndal, Sweden
 * 🇨🇿 Říčany, Czech Republic
 * 🏴 Whitstable, England, United Kingdom

Born in Borken

 * Marvin Grumann (born 1993), footballer
 * Cornelia "Coco" Maaßen (born 1999), handballer
 * Otto Leopold of Limburg Stirum (1684–1754), Lord of Gemen and Raesfeld, General of the Imperial Army
 * Jacques Palminger (born 1964), musician
 * Jochen Schmidt (1936–2010), journalist and dance critic
 * Ilse von Stach (1879–1941), writer

Connected with Borken

 * Marcus Ehning (born 1974), jumping rider, lives in Borken-Weseke
 * Herbert Lütkebohmert (1948–1993), footballer, lived in Borken and is buried here
 * Léonide Massine (1896–1979), dancer and choreographer, died in Borken

title: Borken, North Rhine-Westphalia


text:
Talk:2nd millennium

notable persons table
I deleted a lot of people from the significant persons list. Like most lists this one was very heavily weighted in the more recent past, and very heavily weighted in western civilizations. I think the purpose of this page is to give a reader a broad overall view of the millennium while pointing them toward more specific things. To that end, I created a table that will help both readers and editors create a more balanced view of the millennium. I recommend limiting additions to ten persons per century and three persons per continent, but those are just guidelines subject to continually adjustment. I would also remind editors that longer lists can be added to the century pages. I’m working on a similar organization for the list of inventions, but I'm having trouble whittling down the subject areas. Geography doesn't seem like the right way to organize it, but there are too many subtopics at present. -ErinHowarth (talk) 01:18, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I agree. Furthermore, many of the references are about one author's personal opinions on who was how influential. I think Wikipedia deserves better than that. IMO one should either delete all those references to Hart's questionable list, or create Wikipedia articles for alternative lists (some of them listed below), and add links from significant persons to those alternative lists, too. Otherwise the Wikipedia information on the 2nd millennium BC will reflect inappropriate bias towards one guy's personal opinions. Gimmemoretime (talk) 16:08, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

A top 10 list at http://www.faqs.org/shareranks/1338,Most-Influential-People-of-All-Time : 1 Manu (Shanker Mishra), 2 Einstein, 3 Socrates, 4 Aristotle, 5 Plato, 6 Newton, 7 Lao Tzu, 8 Moses, 9 Darwin, 10 Franklin.

A Japanese top 10 list http://www.japanprobe.com/2007/04/01/historys-100-most-influencial-people-hero-edition-video/ : 1 Sakamoto Ryoma, 2 Napoleon I, 3 Oda Nobunaga, 4 Saigo Takamori, 5 Miyamoto no Yoshitsune, 6 Jean of Arc, 7 Hideyoshi Toyotomi, 8 Albert Einstein, 9 Yutaka Ozaki, 10 Akechi Mitsuhide.

A top 7 list http://www.rateitall.com/t-1283-most-influential-people-in-world-history.aspx : 1 Jesus Christ, 2 Muhammad, 3 Adolf Hitler, 4 Ronald Reagan, 5 Albert Einstein, 6 Buddha, 7 Johann Gutenberg.

LIFE magazine's top 10 list http://www.smccd.edu/accounts/goth/MainPages/100_most_important_people.pdf : 1 Edison, 2 Columbus, 3 Luther, 4 Galileo, 5 Leonardo, 6 Newton, 7 Magellan, 8 Pasteur, 9 Darwin, 10 Jefferson.

Several lists are topped by Gutenberg, e.g.: http://www.falls.igs.net/~dphillips/biography3.htm

Another top 10 list http://tt.tennis-warehouse.com/showthread.php?t=173626 : 1 Mohammed, 2 Aristotle, 3 Tsai Lun, 4 Johann Gutenberg, 5 Jesus of Nazareth, 6 Paul of Tarsus, 7 Shih Huang Ti, 8 Louis Pasteur, 9 Plato, 10 Siddhartha Guatama.

Yet another list found on the web: 1 Mitochondria Eve, 2 Jesus, 3 Mohammed, 4 Columbus, 5 Confucius, 6 Darwin, 7 Sun Yat-sen, 8 Karl Marx, 9 Buddha, 10 Rousseau.

Some of the numerous additional lists of this kind:

http://www.the-top-tens.com/lists/most-influential-person-of-all-time.asp

http://www.worldtop.org/Culture/People/Most+influential+people+ever/

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_are_the_25_most_important_people_in_history

http://www.historum.com/showthread.php?t=2971

Gimmemoretime (talk) 16:08, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Is Queen Victoria not a significant person from the 19th century, a large chunk of it is called the Victorian age in quite a lot of places. 86.182.156.86 (talk) 23:34, 16 January 2010 (UTC)

I'm shocked that there's no mention of the most famous and influential person ever: Napoleon. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.230.113.131 (talk) 21:09, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Best millennium?
Which is the best millennium? I think most people would agree that it was the 2nd millennium. It had much more better things than the 3rd millennium which hardly has anything when you look at it, or the 1st millennium which was a good start but also sparse. I think the article makes this clear, but maybe should spell it out so people understand it? I would be happy to write some point about this if people want. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.145.255.177 (talk) 22:47, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Like its 1999
It is commonly believed that the Second Millennium ended in 1999. There were many celebrations at the end of 1999 to welcome in the New Millennium, but the Julian calendar does not work that way. The Second Millennium actually ended in 2000. I will try to explain why. The First Millennium started in the Year 1, in order to 1000 years long, It ended in the Year 1000 (not 999). Likewise, the Second Millennium started in the Year 1001. In order to be 1000 years long, it ends in the 2000, not 1999. -User:ErinHowarth|ErinHowarth (User talk:ErinHowarth|talk) 02:57, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
 * The people who were celebrating were wrong.--Jojhutton (talk) 20:04, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

The decimal system works on 0-9. No Year 1 has been recorded. 24 Hour clock starts at 0. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.198.255.3 (talk) 16:12, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
 * ¿Que? — Arthur Rubin (talk) 16:34, 1 April 2011 (UTC)

I will repeat what I have been saying about all of the other millennium and century articles on wikipedia: Just because there was no year 0 according to the Gregorian Calendar doesn't make 1000 a part of the 1st millennium, nor 2000 a part of the 2nd millennium. Look at the numbers in front. We really need to change these century and millennium articles to reflect the fact that they do begin with a year 0. That is just fact, and I have talked to administrators of wikipedia who agree. Bjoh249 (talk) 12:56, 30 May 2011 (UTC)
 * Please name one of these administrators. However, even if you were correct, consensus at the relevant WikiProjects is clearly against you, and this being a change which would affect multiple articles, WikiProject consensus is more relevant than consensus at any individual article (which is also running against you).  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 18:39, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Not inventions
I've removed the following items from the inventions and discoveries table. Strikethrough text indicates items that have been worked into other sections. Society -ErinHowarth (talk) 05:43, 10 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Middle English Bible translations (1380) added 12/10/08
 * Timeline of Christian missions|Christian missions (to Americas, Africa, East Indies etc.)
 * Atlantic slave trade (16th, 17th,18th &19th centuries) added 12/09/08
 * Capitalism (1776) added 12/09/08
 * Socialism (1848) added 12/09/08
 * Universal suffrage (c. 1910)
 * History of Parliamentarism (1707)
 * European colonization of the Americas (1492) added 12/09/08
 * The title of the section is "Inventions, discoveries, introductions", i.e. the section is not only meant for inventions, but also for something new introduced.  Otolemur crassicaudatus  (talk) 19:14, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Granted. Maybe what I was trying to do is limit this section to more tangible items. Bibles are a tangible items, but the slave trade, suffrage and parliamentarism seemed to me more like events to me, but that's just me. -ErinHowarth (talk) 01:26, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Israel Kamakawiwo'ole
I love Israel. I really do. However, does he really deserve inclusion on this list? 68.80.37.35 (talk) 03:03, 5 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Maybe not. I created the table and structured it in order to even-out the scope of the list.  I divided the world into five regions (based on the Olympic flag).  This approach may be fundamentally flawed, but the previous list was sooo long as to render the reader (me) completely overwhelmed, and it was horrifically western-centric, with more than 90% of the names coming from Europe or America.  At the same time, I'm no expert on the Pacific Islands, and as far as I know, there may be more than a dozen peple more influencial than Israel from the area of Oceania.  Please feel free to make whatever edits you like.  I would prefer to see Israel pushed off the list rather than simply deleted from the list, that is, I would rather see his name replaced with the names of more influencial people rather than just have him removed with no additions made.  -ErinHowarth (talk) 18:10, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

>>That makes sense. He is of course one of the most important and/or influential people of the millennium. This is sarcasm. The list should not be culture or region centric, but it should also have valid entries (even if better entries are few). And the list needs to be filtered more for the 20th Century. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.169.71.58 (talk) 04:01, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

Just a quick note
I edited the first paragraph to fix several typos.

Bach
'1722 - Bach divided the scale into 12 equal semitones'.

Bach did not 'divide' the musical scale into 12 equal semitones, he wrote 24 pieces emphasising the benefits of this. It had been realised previously, with similar collections of pieces already published. Whilst Bach's was by far the most influential; it is erroneous to state that he divided the scale. 86.132.132.186 (talk) 19:25, 19 February 2010 (UTC)

1535 - Europeans discover tobacco
The article has the European discovery of tobacco occurring in 1535. This cited properly and taken from a Life Magazine article, which the article relies on for many of it's events (50+ links to this citation). This conflicts with the information in the History of tobacco article however, see especially this section and this one. I will try and look into this more closely this week, but for now I am gonna slap a dubious tag on it pointing here. Winston365 (talk) 07:47, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Dead link
During several automated bot runs the following external link was found to be unavailable. Please check if the link is in fact down and fix or remove it in that case!

 * http://www.worldtimelines.org.uk/world/africa/AD600-1500
 * In 1st millennium on 2011-05-25 06:54:43, Socket Error: 'A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond'
 * In 1st millennium on 2011-06-10 04:35:32, Socket Error: 'A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond'
 * In 2nd millennium on 2011-06-19 06:23:04, Socket Error: 'A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond'

--JeffGBot (talk) 06:24, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

Picture
Can someone fix it, please. GuzzyG (talk) 04:50, 17 March 2012 (UTC)

Civilizations Section
Wait, how come American society is not included on this list? I don't mind if it's not included, but there just doesn't seem to be any explanation for why each society is (or isn't) included on the list. Maybe someone could add that explanation? -- 66.92.0.62 (talk) 10:53, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

 * I'm thinking all of the USA, Mexico and Brazil should probably be on the list (as they have been the large empires in the region post-colonialism). I'll think about it some more but then I think I'm just going to go ahead and add them, unless someone disagrees. 83.233.111.34 (talk) 05:16, 3 August 2014 (UTC)

Ludwig van Beethoven was the most famous composer.
Those blockers don't know anything. Beethoven is really the #1 famous composer. By User: George B. Washington 8:17 (2013-5-2) Mozart is the 2nd most famous composer. Beethoven is more famous. That's why I undo your's. Those blockers doesn't understand because thet didn't read. —Preceding undated comment added 12:18, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

Marx?
No Karl Marx in the list of significant people for the 19th century? Whatever one might think of his ideas, surely his influence has been tremendous… Aridd (talk) 10:25, 17 July 2014 (UTC)

Significant people: Three events limit per category?
In the source it says that we should try to limit the number of events to three. Is there an etablished consensus on this? My personal opinion is that while this might be helpful in making sure the western world isn't over-represented, it would probably be better to have some kind of soft guideline.

The reason I'm asking is because I noticed that the Russian Revolution (1917) is in the Asia category, but according to the UN geoscheme that the article claims to follow, Russia is in Europe. I was going to change it, but saw the comment in the source. 83.233.111.34 (talk) 05:43, 3 August 2014 (UTC)
 * A number of people have been ignoring the limits in a number of categories. It is tempting to revert to the status a year ago when the limits were observed. — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 20:23, 1 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I see I missed a number of "people" categories which have 6 or more with "limit three" comments. Isn't anyone watching this article?  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 06:01, 7 March 2015 (UTC)
 * There seem to be a lot of people listed who do not seem to belong among the top few notable people in their continent over an entire century. But it will be very hard to reach consensus over a list of only three. We would need more specific guidelines. Gap9551 (talk) 16:21, 12 October 2015 (UTC)

This article is always changed. Vandals add they favourite persons whenever they want. Something needs to be done.--2.96.182.156 (talk) 16:48, 4 October 2015 (UTC)

Someone needs to trim the table back to the 3 names per region limit. --Khajidha (talk) 11:22, 13 October 2015 (UTC)

 * Several people have recently brought up this issue. In addition there is the first section on this page, that strives for objectivity by looking at lists of notable people published by presumed reliable sources. That would be step in the right direction (at least we could avoid people who don't appear on any of these lists). I think a strict limit (e.g., of three) is a good thing to keep thing in control, despite such a constraint being tougher on the higher populated regions. I propose a further constraint: having at most one person in each cell per broad category/profession (examples of categories could be: politician/king, scientist/inventor, explorer, religious figure, writer/artist, etc). Gap9551 (talk) 16:13, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

I don't see any consensus for the limit. There's no justification for it; just a comment that appears in the source. It seems to me that a short limit demands a definition or criteria for determining the most notable people; a lot can happen in a decade, and among many disciplines. -- Mikeblas (talk) 20:41, 25 October 2015 (UTC)

"significant people per millennium" was never a sustainable approach. This article should focus on summarizing grand historical trends rather than playing "pick three persons/events per continent". The proper approach to an article like this is radical WP:SS. --dab (𒁳) 11:02, 17 September 2018 (UTC)

Colour
That first image is all white men; I'd change that but I don't understand how it's put together. Can anyone help? Gob Lofa (talk) 22:20, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Anyone? Gob Lofa (talk) 13:52, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

I'll just get rid of it. Gob Lofa (talk) 13:30, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

Move discussion in progress
There is a move discussion in progress on Talk:1st millennium which affects this page. Please participate on that page and not in this talk page section. Thank you. —RMCD bot 23:30, 3 March 2016 (UTC)

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Mistake
Tenochtitlan founded in 1325, not 1315. It's even the year in the note that attached. Theshumai (talk) 21:28, 1 January 2018 (UTC)

Distracting parenthetical
Current version: Doubling time was at first seven centuries (reaching 600 million in 1700), and during the final three centuries population growth accelerated extremely, growth rate peaking at 1.8% p.a. in the second half of the 20th century.

As modified for my own notes: World population has grown without precedent over the millennium, from 310 million in AD 1000 to about 6,000 million in AD 2000.

Doubling time was at first seven centuries, with world population reaching 600 million in 1700.

During the final three centuries population growth accelerated extremely, growth rate peaking at 1.8% p.a. in the second half of the 20th century.

My notes tend to be sentence based (better for rapid review) rather than paragraph based (better for bulk intake).

FWIW. — MaxEnt 02:01, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Image
How appropriate is it to have 10 images to represent 10 centuries of history? Not to mention the fact that, these images are very Eurocentric (with at least 3 of the images being related to America). I propose to delete the image because it's impossible to objectively summarize 10 centuries in a few pictures as the importance of the events depicted in these images vary vastly between different cultures and countries. — Golden  call me maybe? 08:35, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

 * I've gone ahead and deleted the image as no one's voiced any objection. — Golden  call me maybe? 09:43, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
 * Hi, would you mind explaining why you the image? Cheers. —  Golden  call me maybe? 17:11, 6 February 2022 (UTC)

 * , hello, I reverted the image removal due to there not being a large consensus on removing it, and the image in question does a good enough job, I feel, of providing an interesting visual aid to readers of the article. Though seeing now your point about the image being too Euro/Western-centric, I wonder if others would be in favor of replacing or editing the image to have it include more major events from non-Western parts of the world during that millennium? If so, I wouldn't oppose removing or replacing it. District9123 (talk) 00:04, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

I agree that the montage should be altered to include more regions of the world over a larger span of time than is currently shown. Also, the links from the images and the description sentences below the montage need some fixes. Suggestions I will place here include:

-Replacing Napoleon's image with a different conqueror, preferably Genghis Khan (this will give Asia more representation, plus he created the largest contiguous land empire in history, more impressive than Napoleon territory-wise).

-Replace either the Islamic conquest of Constantinople and/or the lightbulb image with something on the Islamic Golden Age (again, gives Asia and/or Africa inclusion) or even Mansa Musa and the Malian Empire (inclusion for the latter). Also, one of those two images, or alternatively the Alexander Graham Bell with telephone image, can be replaced with Gandhi, to highlight decolonization and resistance to imperialism, plus give Asia inclusion again.

-Change the link from the Columbus image so it goes to the European colonization of the Americas page, and make sure the description sentence notes the significance of the European rediscovery of the Americas and subsequent events.

-The American Revolution image can be kept or replaced with a French Revolution image. In either case, the link should be to the Atlantic Revolutions page, and the sentence description for the image should be on the broader context of Enlightenment-inspired revolutions.

-The description sentence for the airplane needs to be reworded. "aeroplanes become the most-used way of transport through the skies" is dumb wording, because traveling through the skies was not practical before the airplane (hot air balloons hardly count). It would be better to note the first flight and the proliferation of aircraft since then.

The above is not exhaustive regarding possible changes, though I think the moon landing, Gutenberg Bible, and the Black Death should be kept. It would take time for me to figure out how to execute some of the changes with the montage, though if no one else attempts it I will try eventually. The description sentences and links might be easier to fix. AMBtheMarylander2102 (talk) 20:59, 28 May 2022 (UTC)

Salmankhan
Salmankhan 2405:205:120A:17F3:30F9:92BF:773F:CDDE (talk) 12:07, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Collages
It appears an RFC on collages on Wikiproject years will be interpreted to also ban collages in millenia articles. Users here may wish to participate. Koopinator (talk) 08:05, 24 December 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:2nd millennium


text:
Nuclear isomer

A nuclear isomer is a metastable state of an atomic nucleus, in which one or more nucleons (protons or neutrons) occupy excited state (higher energy) levels. "Metastable" describes nuclei whose excited states have half-lives 100 to 1000 times longer than the half-lives of the excited nuclear states that decay with a "prompt" half life (ordinarily on the order of 10−12 seconds). The term "metastable" is usually restricted to isomers with half-lives of 10−9 seconds or longer. Some references recommend 5 × 10−9 seconds to distinguish the metastable half life from the normal "prompt" gamma-emission half-life. Occasionally the half-lives are far longer than this and can last minutes, hours, or years. For example, the Isotopes of tantalum nuclear isomer survives so long (at least 1015 years) that it has never been observed to decay spontaneously. The half-life of a nuclear isomer can even exceed that of the ground state of the same nuclide, as shown by as well as isotopes of rhenium, isotopes of iridium, isotopes of bismuth, isotopes of polonium, isotopes of americium and multiple holmium isomers.

Sometimes, the gamma decay from a metastable state is referred to as isomeric transition, but this process typically resembles shorter-lived gamma decays in all external aspects with the exception of the long-lived nature of the meta-stable parent nuclear isomer. The longer lives of nuclear isomers' metastable states are often due to the larger degree of nuclear spin change which must be involved in their gamma emission to reach the ground state. This high spin change causes these decays to be forbidden transitions and delayed. Delays in emission are caused by low or high available decay energy.

The first nuclear isomer and decay-daughter system (uranium X2/uranium Z, now known as /protactinium-234) was discovered by Otto Hahn in 1921.

Nuclei of nuclear isomers
The nucleus of a nuclear isomer occupies a higher energy state than the non-excited nucleus existing in the ground state. In an excited state, one or more of the protons or neutrons in a nucleus occupy a nuclear orbital of higher energy than an available nuclear orbital. These states are analogous to excited states of electrons in atoms.

When excited atomic states decay, energy is released by fluorescence. In electronic transitions, this process usually involves emission of light near the visible range. The amount of energy released is related to bond-dissociation energy or ionization energy and is usually in the range of a few to few tens of eV per bond. However, a much stronger type of binding energy, the nuclear binding energy, is involved in nuclear processes. Due to this, most nuclear excited states decay by gamma ray emission. For example, a well-known nuclear isomer used in various medical procedures is technetium-99m, which decays with a half-life of about 6 hours by emitting a gamma ray of 140 keV of energy; this is close to the energy of medical diagnostic X-rays.

Nuclear isomers have long half-lives because their gamma decay is "forbidden" from the large change in nuclear spin needed to emit a gamma ray. For example, has a spin of 9 and must gamma-decay to  with a spin of 1. Similarly, has a spin of 1/2 and must gamma-decay to  with a spin of 9/2.

While most metastable isomers decay through gamma-ray emission, they can also decay through internal conversion. During internal conversion, energy of nuclear de-excitation is not emitted as a gamma ray, but is instead used to accelerate one of the inner electrons of the atom. These excited electrons then leave at a high speed. This occurs because inner atomic electrons penetrate the nucleus where they are subject to the intense electric fields created when the protons of the nucleus re-arrange in a different way.

In nuclei that are far from stability in energy, even more decay modes are known.

After fission, several of the fission fragments that may be produced have a metastable isomeric state. These fragments are usually produced in a highly excited state, in terms of energy and angular momentum, and go through a prompt de-excitation. At the end of this process, the nuclei can populate both the ground and the isomeric states. If the half-life of the isomers is long enough, it is possible to measure their production rate and compare it to that of the ground state, calculating the so-called isomeric yield ratio.

Metastable isomers
Metastable isomers can be produced through nuclear fusion or other nuclear reactions. A nucleus produced this way generally starts its existence in an excited state that relaxes through the emission of one or more gamma rays or conversion electrons. Sometimes the de-excitation does not completely proceed rapidly to the nuclear ground state. This usually occurs as a spin isomer when the formation of an intermediate excited state has a spin far different from that of the ground state. Gamma-ray emission is hindered if the spin of the post-emission state differs greatly from that of the emitting state, especially if the excitation energy is low. The excited state in this situation is a good candidate to be metastable if there are no other states of intermediate spin with excitation energies less than that of the metastable state.

Metastable isomers of a particular isotope are usually designated with an "m". This designation is placed after the mass number of the atom; for example, cobalt-58m1 is abbreviated, where 27 is the atomic number of cobalt. For isotopes with more than one metastable isomer, "indices" are placed after the designation, and the labeling becomes m1, m2, m3, and so on. Increasing indices, m1, m2, etc., correlate with increasing levels of excitation energy stored in each of the isomeric states (e.g., hafnium-178m2, or ).

A different kind of metastable nuclear state (isomer) is the fission isomer or shape isomer. Most actinide nuclei in their ground states are not spherical, but rather prolate spheroidal, with an axis of symmetry longer than the other axes, similar to an American football or rugby ball. This geometry can result in quantum-mechanical states where the distribution of protons and neutrons is so much further from spherical geometry that de-excitation to the nuclear ground state is strongly hindered. In general, these states either de-excite to the ground state far more slowly than a "usual" excited state, or they undergo spontaneous fission with half-lives of the order of nanoseconds or microseconds—a very short time, but many orders of magnitude longer than the half-life of a more usual nuclear excited state. Fission isomers may be denoted with a postscript or superscript "f" rather than "m", so that a fission isomer, e.g. of plutonium-240, can be denoted as plutonium-240f or.

Nearly stable isomers
Most nuclear excited states are very unstable and "immediately" radiate away the extra energy after existing on the order of 10−12 seconds. As a result, the characterization "nuclear isomer" is usually applied only to configurations with half-lives of 10−9 seconds or longer. Quantum mechanics predicts that certain atomic species should possess isomers with unusually long lifetimes even by this stricter standard and have interesting properties. Some nuclear isomers are so long-lived that they are relatively stable and can be produced and observed in quantity.

The most stable nuclear isomer occurring in nature is tantalum-180m, which is present in all tantalum samples at about 1 part in 8,300. Its half-life is at least 1015 years, markedly longer than the age of the universe. The low excitation energy of the isomeric state causes both gamma de-excitation to the 180Ta ground state (which itself is radioactive by beta decay, with a half-life of only 8 hours) and direct electron capture to hafnium or beta decay to tungsten to be suppressed due to spin mismatches. The origin of this isomer is mysterious, though it is believed to have been formed in supernovae (as are most other heavy elements). Were it to relax to its ground state, it would release a photon with a photon energy of 75 keV.

It was first reported in 1988 by C. B. Collins that theoretically 180Ta can be forced to release its energy by weaker X-rays, although at that time this de-excitation mechanism had never been observed. However, the de-excitation of 180Ta by resonant photo-excitation of intermediate high levels of this nucleus (E ≈ 1 MeV) was observed in 1999 by Belic and co-workers in the Stuttgart nuclear physics group.

hafnium-178 is another reasonably stable nuclear isomer. It possesses a half-life of 31 years and the highest excitation energy of any comparably long-lived isomer. One gram of pure 178Hf contains approximately 1.33 gigajoules of energy, the equivalent of exploding about 315 kg of TNT. In the natural decay of 178Hf, the energy is released as gamma rays with a total energy of 2.45 MeV. As with 180Ta, there are disputed reports that 178Hf can be stimulated into releasing its energy. Due to this, the substance is being studied as a possible source for gamma-ray lasers. These reports indicate that the energy is released very quickly, so that 178Hf can produce extremely high powers (on the order of exawatts). Other isomers have also been investigated as possible media for gamma-ray stimulated emission.

Holmium's nuclear isomer holmium-166 has a half-life of 1,200 years, which is nearly the longest half-life of any holmium radionuclide. Only 163Holmium, with a half-life of 4,570 years, is more stable.

thorium-229 has a remarkably low-lying metastable isomer only $8.356 eV$ above the ground state. The isomer's low energy produces "gamma rays" at a wavelength of $148.382 nm$, in the far ultraviolet, which allows for direct nuclear laser spectroscopy. Such ultra-precise spectroscopy, however, cannot begin without a sufficiently precise initial estimate of the wavelength, something that was only achieved in 2024 after two decades of effort. Combined with its convenient half-life of $1,740 s$, this allows the development of a nuclear clock of unprecedented accuracy.

High-spin suppression of decay
The most common mechanism for suppression of gamma decay of excited nuclei, and thus the existence of a metastable isomer, is lack of a decay route for the excited state that will change nuclear angular momentum along any given direction by the most common amount of 1 quantum unit ħ in the spin angular momentum. This change is necessary to emit a gamma photon, which has a spin of 1 unit in this system. Integral changes of 2 and more units in angular momentum are possible, but the emitted photons carry off the additional angular momentum. Changes of more than 1 unit are known as forbidden transitions. Each additional unit of spin change larger than 1 that the emitted gamma ray must carry inhibits decay rate by about 5 orders of magnitude. The highest known spin change of 8 units occurs in the decay of 180mTa, which suppresses its decay by a factor of 1035 from that associated with 1 unit. Instead of a natural gamma-decay half-life of 10−12 seconds, it has a half-life of more than 1023 seconds, or at least 3 × 1015 years, and thus has yet to be observed to decay.

Gamma emission is impossible when the nucleus begins in a zero-spin state, as such an emission would not conserve angular momentum.

Applications
Hafnium isomers (mainly 178m2Hf) have been considered as weapons that could be used to circumvent the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, since it is claimed that they can be induced to emit very strong gamma radiation. This claim is generally discounted. DARPA had a program to investigate this use of both nuclear isomers. The potential to trigger an abrupt release of energy from nuclear isotopes, a prerequisite to their use in such weapons, is disputed. Nonetheless a 12-member Hafnium Isomer Production Panel (HIPP) was created in 2003 to assess means of mass-producing the isotope.

Technetium isomers Tc-99m (with a half-life of 6.01 hours) and (with a half-life of 61 days) are used in medical and industrial applications.

Nuclear batteries
Nuclear batteries use small amounts (milligrams and microcuries) of radioisotopes with high energy densities. In one betavoltaic device design, radioactive material sits atop a device with adjacent layers of P-type and N-type silicon. Ionizing radiation directly penetrates the junction and creates electron–hole pairs. Nuclear isomers could replace other isotopes, and with further development, it may be possible to turn them on and off by triggering decay as needed. Current candidates for such use include 108Ag, 166Ho, 177Lu, and 242Am. As of 2004, the only successfully triggered isomer was 180mTa, which required more photon energy to trigger than was released.

An isotope such as 177Lu releases gamma rays by decay through a series of internal energy levels within the nucleus, and it is thought that by learning the triggering cross sections with sufficient accuracy, it may be possible to create energy stores that are 106 times more concentrated than high explosive or other traditional chemical energy storage.

Decay processes
An isomeric transition or internal transition (IT) is the decay of a nuclear isomer to a lower-energy nuclear state. The actual process has two types (modes): Isomers may decay into other elements, though the rate of decay may differ between isomers. For example, 177mLu can beta-decay to 177Hf with a half-life of 160.4 d, or it can undergo isomeric transition to 177Lu with a half-life of 160.4 d, which then beta-decays to 177Hf with a half-life of 6.68 d.
 * γ (gamma ray) emission (emission of a high-energy photon),
 * internal conversion (the energy is used to eject one of the atom's electrons).

The emission of a gamma ray from an excited nuclear state allows the nucleus to lose energy and reach a lower-energy state, sometimes its ground state. In certain cases, the excited nuclear state following a nuclear reaction or other type of radioactive decay can become a metastable nuclear excited state. Some nuclei are able to stay in this metastable excited state for minutes, hours, days, or occasionally far longer.

The process of isomeric transition is similar to gamma emission from any excited nuclear state, but differs by involving excited metastable states of nuclei with longer half-lives. As with other excited states, the nucleus can be left in an isomeric state following the emission of an alpha particle, beta particle, or some other type of particle.

The gamma ray may transfer its energy directly to one of the most tightly bound electrons, causing that electron to be ejected from the atom, a process termed the photoelectric effect. This should not be confused with the internal conversion process, in which no gamma-ray photon is produced as an intermediate particle.

title: Nuclear isomer


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Jeremias Gotthelf

Albert Bitzius (4 October 1797 – 22 October 1854) was a Swiss novelist, best known by his pen name of Jeremias Gotthelf.

Biography
Bitzius was born at Murten, where his father was pastor. The Bitzius family had once belonged to the Bernese patriciate, but was known for its craftsmen and pastors since the 17th century. In 1804, the family home was moved to Utzenstorf, a village in the Bernese Emmental. Here young Bitzius grew up, receiving his early education and consorting with the boys of the village, as well as helping his father to cultivate his glebe. In 1812 he went to complete his education at Bern. He was a founding member of the Student Society Zofingia, the second-oldest fraternity in Switzerland (founded in 1819).

In 1820 he was received as a pastor. In 1821 he enrolled for a year at the University of Göttingen, but returned home in 1822 to act as his father's assistant. On his father's death (1824) he went in the same capacity to Herzogenbuchsee, and later to Bern (1829). Early in 1831 he went as assistant to the aged pastor of the village of Lützelflüh, in the Lower Emmental (between Langnau and Burgdorf), being soon elected his successor (1832) and marrying one of his granddaughters, Henriette Zeender (1833).

He spent the rest of his life in Lützelflüh, where he died, leaving three children (the son was a pastor, the two daughters married pastors). During the 1840s, he steadfastly opposed radicalism and secularism and placed a conservative emphasis on piety and ecclesiastical authority. There are lives of Bitzius by C. Manuel, in the Berlin edition of Bitzius's works (Berlin, 1861), and by J. Ammann in vol. i. (Bern, 1884) of the Sammlung Bernischer Biographien.

Writings
Bitzius started writing late in life. His first work, the Der Bauernspiegel, oder die Lebensgeschichte des Jeremias Gotthelf, appeared in 1837. It purported to be the life of Jeremias Gotthelf, narrated by himself, and this name was later adopted by the author as his pen name. It sketches the development of a poor country orphan boy, but is not an autobiography. It is a living picture of Bernese (or, strictly speaking, Emmental) village life, true to nature, and not attempting to gloss over its defects and failings. It is written (like the rest of his works) in German, but contains expressions from the Bernese dialect of the Emmental, though Bitzius was not (like Auerbach) a peasant by birth, but belonged to the educated classes, so that he reproduces what he had seen and learnt, and not what he had himself personally experienced. The book was a great success, as it was a picture of real life, and not of fancifully beribboned eighteenth-century villagers. Henceforth Bitzius was a prolific writer, and in the last 18 years of his life became one of the important novelists not only of Switzerland but of the German language in general.

His best known work is without doubt the short novel The Black Spider (Die schwarze Spinne), a semi-allegorical tale of the plague in form of the titular monster that devastates a Swiss valley community; first as a result of a pact with the devil born out of need and a second time due to the moral decay that releases the monster from its prison again.

Among his later tales are the Leiden und Freuden eines Schulmeisters (1838–1839), Uli der Knecht (The story of a poor peasant laborer who develops into the owner of a prosperous farm; 1841), with its continuation, Uli der Pächter (1849), Anne-Bäbi Jowäger (1843–1844), Käthi, die Großmutter (1846), Die Käserei in der Vehfreude (1850), and the Erlebnisse eines Schuldenbauers (1853). He also published several volumes of shorter tales.

His works were issued in 24 volumes at Berlin, between 1856 and 1861, while 10 volumes, giving the original text of each story, were issued at Bern between 1898 and 1900.

Literature
In The Tongue Set Free, the first part of the autobiography of Elias Canetti, the author mentions being haunted by Gotthelf's short story 'The Black Spider' in his early teens.

In the novel 2666 by Roberto Bolaño Gotthelf is mentioned as the subject of the novel Bitzius:

(...) and in Bitzius, a novel less than one hundred pages long, similar in some ways to Mitzi's Treasure, (...) and that told the story of the life of Albert Bitzius, pastor of Lützelflüh, in the canton of Bern, an author of sermons as well as a writer under the pseudonym Jeremias Gotthelf.

Film adaptations
All six films were directed by the Swiss film director Franz Schnyder.
 * Uli the Farmhand (1954)
 * Uli the Tenant (1955)
 * The Cheese Factory in the Hamlet (1958)
 * Anne Bäbi Jowäger – I. Teil: Wie Jakobli zu einer Frau kommt (1960)
 * Anne Bäbi Jowäger – II. Teil: Jakobli und Meyeli (1962)
 * Geld und Geist (1964)

title: Jeremias Gotthelf


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User:MarcS~enwiki

I am from Germany. The idea of the Wikipedia as a joint space of gathered human knowledge fascinates me, specifically because of its open and non-proprietary nature.

title: User:MarcS~enwiki


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Dating creation

Dating creation is the attempt to provide an estimate of the age of Earth or the age of the universe as understood through the creation myths of various religious traditions. Various traditional beliefs hold that the Earth, or the entire universe, was brought into being in a grand creation event by one or more deities. After these cultures develop calendars, a question arises: Precisely how long ago did this creation event happen?

Sumerian and Babylonian
One of the Old Babylonian versions of the ancient Sumerian King List (WB 444) lists various mythical antediluvian kings and gives them reigns of several tens of thousands of years. The first Sumerian king Alulim, at Eridu, is described as reigning for 28,800 years, followed by several later kings of similar periods. In total these antediluvian kings ruled for 241,200 years from the time when "the kingship was lowered from heaven" to the time when "the flood" swept over the land. However, most modern scholars do not believe the ancient Sumerians or Babylonians believed in a chronology of their own this old. Instead they believed that these figures were either fabrications, or were based on not literal solar years (365.2425 days) but instead lunar months (29.53059 days).

Cicero, reacting to the chronologies of such authors as Berossos (who composed a Greek-language history of Babylonia, known as the Babyloniaca, during the 3rd century BC), strongly criticised the claim that the Babylonians had kings going back hundreds of thousands of years:

"...Let us scorn the Babylonians...the men whose records, as they themselves assert, cover a period of four hundred and seventy thousand years."

Diodorus Siculus also wrote something similar about how he believed the Babylonians fabricated their chronology:

"...A man can scarcely believe them (Babylonians) for they reckon that, down to Alexander's crossing over into Asia, it has been four hundred and seventy-three thousand years, since they began in early times to make their observations of the stars."

Despite these criticisms, some ancient Greeks, including most notably Alexander Polyhistor and Proclus, believed the Babylonian kings were hundreds of thousands of years old, and that the Babylonians dated their creation 400,000–200,000 years before their own time.

Egyptian
The ancient Turin King List lists a mythical predynastic "reign of the gods" which first occurred 36,620 years before Menes (3050 BC), therefore dating the creation to around 39,670 BC.

Fragments from Manetho (Eusebius, George Syncellus and preserved in Felix Jacoby's FGrH), however, list different dates. Eusebius, regarding Aegyptiaca, in his Chronicle recorded that:

"...These were the first to hold sway in Egypt. Thereafter, the kingship passed from one to another in unbroken succession ... through 13,900 years — ... After the Gods, Demigods reigned for 1,255 years; and again another line of kings held sway for 1,817 years; then came thirty more kings, reigning for 1,790 years; and then again ten kings ruling for 350 years. There followed the rule of the Spirits of the Dead ... for 5,813 years ..."

Using these times, 13,900 + 1,255 + 1,817 + 1,790 + 350 + 5,813 = 24,950 years, which counting back from Menes (3050 BC) fixes the creation at 28,000 BC. George Syncellus preserved yet another set of figures for the predynastic "reign of the gods", 11,984 years for Gods and 2,646 for demigods producing 14,630 years, thus dating the creation to 17,680 BC.

The Book of Sothis, considered as Pseudo-Manetho by many scholars, provides different figures. One fragment from Pseudo-Manetho dates the reign of the first Egyptian God (Ptah) 36,525 years before Menes (FGrH, #610 F2) and so dates the creation to about 39,575 BC.

The ancient Greeks reported similar figures on ancient Egyptian chronology. Diogenes Laërtius recorded that the ancient Egyptians dated their creation to their first god Hephaestus, who by interpretatio graeca was Ptah. According to Laertius, Hephaestus (Ptah) lived 48,863 years before Alexander the Great (b. 356 BC), dating the creation to 49,219 BC. Herodotus wrote that the ancient Egyptians had gods who ruled over them before the first dynasty of Egypt, but did not attempt to precisely date their creation by using their chronology:

"...Thus far went the record given by the Egyptians and their priests; and they showed me that the time from the first king to that priest of Hephaestus, who was the last, covered three hundred and forty-one generations, and that in this time this also had been the number of their kings, and of their high priests. Now three hundred generations are ten thousand years, three generations being equal to a hundred. And over and above the three hundred, the remaining forty-one cover thirteen hundred and forty years. Thus the whole period is eleven thousand three hundred and forty years; in all of which time (they said) they had had no king who was a god in human form, nor had there been any such either before or after those years among the rest of the kings of Egypt...Among the Greeks, Heracles, Dionysus, and Pan are held to be the youngest of the gods. But in Egypt, Pan is the most ancient of these and is one of the eight gods who are said to be the earliest of all; Heracles belongs to the second dynasty (that of the so-called twelve gods); and Dionysus to the third, which came after the twelve. How many years there were between Heracles and the reign of Amasis, I have already shown; Pan is said to be earlier still; the years between Dionysus and Amasis are the fewest, and they are reckoned by the Egyptians at fifteen thousand. The Egyptians claim to be sure of all this, since they have reckoned the years and chronicled them in writing."

According to Herodotus the ancient Egyptian demigods began 11,340 years before the reign of Seti I (1290 BC), so 11,340 + 1290 = 12,630 BC, while he listed earlier figures, 15,000 and 17,000, for the reign of the gods.

The ancient Greek writer Diodorus Siculus wrote that the ancient Egyptians dated their creation (or start of their reign of Gods) "a little less than eighteen thousand years" from Ptolemy XII Auletes (117–51 BC).

Apollonius, an Egyptian pagan priest in the 2nd century AD, calculated the cosmos to be 153,075 years old as reported by Theophilus of Antioch.

Martianus Capella, a pagan writer, wrote in his De nuptiis in the 5th century AD that the ancient Egyptians had archives of astronomy which started 40,000 years before his own era.

Herodotus' figures were discussed by Isaac Newton in his The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728) but were dismissed by Newton because they did not fit Christian cosmology.

The mathematician and esotericist R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz, in his work Sacred Science, reconstructed Herodotus' dates to conclude that the ancient Egyptians dated their creation to an astronomical (stellar) event some 30,000 years before Herodotus' own time.

Hinduism
The Rig Veda questions the origin of the cosmos in the Nasadiya Sukta (the 129th hymn of Rigveda 10th mandala): "Neither being (sat) nor non-being was as yet. What was concealed? And where? And in whose protection?…Who really knows? Who can declare it? Whence was it born, and whence came this creation? The devas were born later than this world's creation, so who knows from where it came into existence? None can know from where creation has arisen, and whether he has or has not produced it. He who surveys it in the highest heavens, he alone knows-or perhaps does not know." (Rig Veda 10. 129)"

Dick Teresi in his book Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science, reviewing Vedas writes that: "Twenty-four centuries before Isaac Newton, the Hindu Rig-Veda asserted that gravitation held the universe together. The Sanskrit speaking Aryans subscribed to the idea of a spherical earth in an era when the Greeks believed in a flat one. The Indians before the fifth century BCE calculated the age of the earth as 4.3 billion years; scientists in 19th century England were convinced it was 100 million years."

Carl Sagan and Fritjof Capra have pointed out similarities between the latest scientific understanding of the age of the universe and the Hindu concept of a "day and night of Brahma", which is much closer to the current known age of the universe than other creation views. The days and nights of Brahma posit a view of the universe that is divinely created, and is not strictly evolutionary, but an ongoing cycle of birth, death, and rebirth of the universe. According to Sagan: "The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang."

Also, as per Hinduism, Kaliyuga, the last part of the current cycle (yuga cycle) of time traditionally starts in 3102 BC.

Greek and Roman
Most ancient Greek and Roman chroniclers, poets, grammarians, and scholars (Eratosthenes, Varro, Apollodorus of Athens, Ovid, Censorinus, Catullus, and Castor of Rhodes) believed in a threefold division of history: ádelon (obscure), mythikón (mythical) and historikón (historical) periods. According to the Roman grammarian Censorinus, the first period of ádelon (obscure), was calculated by Varro as follows:

"The first [period] stretches from the beginning of mankind [the creation] to the first cataclysm [i.e. the flood of Ogyges]."

The primordial ádelon (obscure) period ended with the flood of Ogyges and what followed was the beginning of the mythikón (mythical) period. Varro dated this flood to 2137 BC but Censorinus wrote in his De Die Natali ch. xxi that the Ogyges’ diluvium occurred 1600 years before the first Olympiad (776 BC) meaning 2376 BC. Castor of Rhodes also provided another date for the start of the mythikón (mythical) period, 2123 BC. Censorinus recorded that the second period, the mythikón, stretched from the flood of Ogyges to the first Olympiad:

"The second stretches from the first cataclysm to the first Olympiad; because many myths are recorded in it, it is called “mythical”."

Censorinus quoted Varro in saying the second period (mythikón) lasted from 2137 to 776 BC, or if Censorinus' own dates are used: 2376 BC to 776 BC, or finally if Castor's: 2123 BC to 776 BC. Ovid, however, dated the start of the mythikón period to the reign of Inachus, whom he dated 400 or so years after the flood of Ogyges, meaning around 1900–1700 BC, but agreed with Varro that the mythikón ended during the first Olympiad (776 BC). See Ages of Man for more details about Ovid's chronology. Another ancient date for the start of the mythikón (mythical) period is found preserved in Augustine's City of God xviii.3, which dates it to 2050 BC. The final period according to Censorinus and Varro, the historikón (historical) era, began from 776 BC (the first Olympiad) to their own time:

"The third stretches from the first Olympiad to us. Because the events in it are contained in true histories, he calls it “historical.”"

Eratosthenes and Apollodorus of Athens, however, pushed back the start of the historical period to the Trojan War, which they fixed at 1184 BC.

Very few ancient Greeks or Romans attempted to date the creation, or beginning of the ádelon (obscure) period. While all ancient sources (excluding Ovid) dated the end of this period and start of the mythical (mythikón) period to 2376–2050 BC, most did not claim to know when the creation (ádelon period) exactly began. As Censorinus admitted:

"If the origin of the world had been known to man, I would have begun there."

Varro and Castor of Rhodes also wrote something very similar; however, some ancient Greeks and Romans attempted to calculate the date for the creation by using ancient sources or records of mythological figures. Since Inachus was dated 400 years after the flood of Ogyges and that Ogyges himself was considered a Titan or a primordial Autochthon "from earliest ages", some ancient Greeks or Romans dated the creation (beginning with Chaos or Gaia) only a few hundred years before Ogyges (2376–2050 BC). Most ancient Greeks, however, did not subscribe to such a literalist view of using mythology to attempt to date the creation; Hecataeus of Miletus was an early ancient Greek logographer who strongly criticised this method, while Ptolemy wrote of such an "immense period" of time before the historical period (776 BC), and thus believed in a much greater age for the creation.

Among the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers there were different opinions and traditions pertaining to the date of the creation. Some philosophers believed the Universe was eternal, and actually had no date of creation.

Zoroastrianism
Zoroastrianism involves a 12,000-year cosmogony and chronology, often divided into four ages as outlined in the Bundahishn. The first age lasted for 3,000 years and included the spiritual creation by Ahura Mazda, followed by the physical creation of 3,000 years when evil entered the world (see Angra Mainyu). During the 6,000th year, Zoroaster's Fravashi was created, followed by the prophet Zoroaster himself at the end of the 9th millennium. The 9,000th year marked the start of the fourth and last age. Modern Zoroastrians believe they are living currently in the final age. Since evil first entered the physical creation after the spiritual creation was complete, Zoroastrians maintain that for 9,000 years the world continues to be a battlefield between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu, which will end during the 12,000th year, when the Saoshyants brings about the final renovation of the world to defeat evil.

Dating precisely the beginning of the start of the 12,000th year cosmogony rests solely on the date Zoroaster is estimated to have been born. Since Zoroaster was born himself at the end of the 9th millennium (just before the 9,000th year), the date of creation can be calculated by counting back 8,900–9,000 years. The Persian Zoroastrian tradition places Zoroaster around the 7th or 6th century BC, since the Bundahishn (34. 1-9) and the Book of Arda Viraf dates Zoroaster 258 years before the era of Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) which dates Zoroaster from 614-581 BC. The 11th century Persian Muslim scholar Abū Rayḥān al-Bīrūnī also dated Zoroaster 258 years before the era of Alexander (The Remaining Signs of Past Centuries, p. 17, l. 10, transl. Sachau). This date is also found in the historical account The Meadows of Gold (iv.107) written by the 9th-century Arab historian Al-Masudi. Other Arabic, Persian and Muslim sources place Zoroaster around the same date (600 BC). Therefore, if 8,900-9,000 years are added to about 600 BC the date of creation comes to 9600 - 9500 BC. A 12,000 year chronology places the end date at around 2400-2500 AD, which is why modern Zoroastrians believe they are living in the end few hundred years of the final era. Other dates for Zoroaster, however, differ and dates proposed for Zoroaster's birth range from 1750 to 500 BC.

Chinese
The ancient Chinese historian Xu Zheng in his Three Five Historic Records dated the creation of the world by Pangu 36,000 years (2 x 18,000) before the reign of the legendary Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors. The date of the Three sovereigns is fixed at 3000–2700 BC and therefore dates the creation about 39,000 BC.

Maya
The Mesoamerican Long Count calendar dates the creation of the world of human beings to 11 August 3114 BC (in the most commonly accepted correlation) according to the proleptic Gregorian calendar, or Monday, 6 September 3114 BC according to the proleptic Julian calendar. There was also a previous creation that did not have a beginning date, but a date on Stela F from Quiriguá refers to a date possibly 24 trillion years in the past.

Genesis creation narrative
Within the biblical framework and chronology, various dates have been proposed for the date of creation since ancient times, to more recent periods. The Bible begins with the Book of Genesis, in which God creates the Earth, the rest of the Universe, and the Earth's plants and animals, including the first humans, in six days. A second narrative begins with the first human pair, Adam and Eve, and goes on to list many of their descendants, in many cases giving the ages at which they had children and died. If these events and ages are interpreted literally throughout and the genealogies are considered closed, it is possible to build up a chronology in which many of the events of the Old Testament are dated to an estimated number of years after creation. Some biblical scholars have gone further, attempting to harmonise this biblical chronology with that of recorded history, thus establishing a date for creation in a modern calendar. Since the biblical story lacks chronology for some periods, the duration of events has been subject to interpretation in many different ways, resulting in a variety of estimates of the date of creation.

Numerous efforts have been made to determine the biblical date of creation, yielding varying results. Besides differences in interpretation, the use of different versions of the Bible can also affect the result. Two dominant dates for creation using such models exist, about 5500 BC and about 4000 BC. These were calculated from the genealogies in two versions of the Bible, with most of the difference arising from two versions of Genesis. The older dates stem from the Greek Septuagint. The later dates are based on the Hebrew Masoretic Text. The patriarchs from Adam to Terah, the father of Abraham, were often 100 years older when they begat their named son in the Septuagint than they were in the Hebrew or the Vulgate (Genesis 5, 11). The net difference between the two genealogies of Genesis amounts to 1466 years (ignoring the "second year after the flood" ambiguity), which accounts for virtually all of the 1500-year difference between 5500 BC and 4000 BC. For example, the period from the creation to the Flood derives from the genealogical table of the ten patriarchs listed in, and , called the generations of Adam. According to the Masoretic Text, this period consists of 1,656 years, and Western Christian Bibles deriving from the Latin Vulgate also follow this dating. However, the Samaritan texts give an equivalent period of 1,307 years, and according to the Septuagint (Codex Alexandrinus, Elizabeth Bible) it is 2,262 years. James Ussher agrees with the dating until the birth of Abraham, which he argues took place when Terah was 130, and not 70 as is the direct reading of, thus adding 60 years to his chronology for events postdating Abraham.

Early Jewish estimations
The earliest post-exilic Jewish chronicle preserved in the Hebrew language, the Seder Olam Rabbah, compiled by Jose ben Halafta in 160 AD, dates the creation of the world to 3761 BC while the later Seder Olam Zutta to 4339 BC. The Hebrew calendar has traditionally, since the 4th century AD by Hillel II, dated the creation to 3761 BC.

Septuagint
Many of the earliest Christians who used the Septuagint version of the Bible calculated creation as having occurred about 5500 BC, and Christians up to the Middle Ages continued to use this rough estimate: Clement of Alexandria (5592 BC), Theophilus of Antioch (5529 BC), Sextus Julius Africanus (5501 BC), Hippolytus of Rome (5500 BC), Panodorus of Alexandria (5493 BC), Maximus the Confessor (5493 BC), George Syncellus (5492 BC), Sulpicius Severus (5469 BC), Isidore of Seville (5336 BC) and Gregory of Tours (5200 BC). The Byzantine calendar has traditionally dated the creation of the world to September 1, 5509 BC.

The Chronicon of Eusebius (early 4th century) dated creation to 5228 BC while Jerome (c. 380, Constantinople) dated creation to 5199 BC. In the Roman Martyrology, the Proclamation of the Birth of Christ formerly used this date, as did the Irish Annals of the Four Masters.

Bede was one of the first to break away from the standard Septuagint date for the creation and in his work De Temporibus ("On Time") (completed in 703 AD) dated the creation to 18 March 3952 BC but was accused of heresy at the table of Bishop Wilfrid, because his chronology was contrary to accepted calculations of around 5500 BC.

Masoretic
After the Masoretic Text was published, however, dating creation around 4000 BC became common, and was received with wide support. Proposed calculations of the date of creation using the Masoretic from the 10th century to the 18th century include: Marianus Scotus (4192 BC), Henry Fynes Clinton (4138 BC), Henri Spondanus (4051 BC), Benedict Pereira (4021 BC), Louis Cappel (4005 BC), James Ussher (4004 BC), Augustin Calmet (4002 BC), Isaac Newton (3998 BC), Petavius (3984 BC), Theodore Bibliander (3980 BC), Johannes Kepler (April 27, 3977 BC) [based on his book Mysterium Cosmographicum], Heinrich Bünting (3967 BC), Christen Sørensen Longomontanus (3966 BC), Melanchthon (3964 BC), Martin Luther (3961 BC), Cornelius Cornelii a Lapide (3961 BC), John Lightfoot (3960 BC), Joseph Justus Scaliger (3949 BC), Christoph Helvig (3947 BC), Gerardus Mercator (3928 BC), Matthieu Brouard (3927 BC), Benito Arias Montano (3849 BC), Andreas Helwig (3836 BC).

Among the Masoretic creation estimates or calculations for the date of creation only the Archbishop Ussher chronology dates the creation to 4004 BC and became the most accepted and popular, mainly because this specific date was attached to the King James Bible.

Polish Christmas carol Wśród nocnej ciszy contains text Cztery tysiące lat wyglądany (Looked out for four thousand years) related to Jesus, which also corresponds to date of creation based on Masoretic Text.

Alfonsine tables
Alfonso X of Castile commissioned the Alfonsine tables, composed of astronomical data based on observation, from which the date of the creation has been calculated to be either 6984 BC or 6484 BC.

Other biblical estimations
In 1738, Alphonse Des Vignoles said he had collected over 200 different estimates, ranging from 3483 BC to 6984 BC. John Clark Ridpath attributes these values respectively to Yom-Tov Lipmann-Muhlhausen and Regiomontanus.

 * Christian Charles Josias Bunsen in the 19th century dated the creation to 20,000 BC.
 * Tarleton Perry Crawford dated the creation to 12,500 BC.
 * Harold Camping dated the creation to 11,013 BC.

title: Dating creation


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Coesfeld (district)

Coesfeld is a Kreis (district) in the northwestern part of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, west of the city of Münster. Neighboring districts are Steinfurt, district-free Münster, Warendorf, district-free Hamm, Unna, Recklinghausen, Borken.

History
In medieval times the region was subordinate to the bishopric of Münster. When the area became part of the Prussian province Westphalia in 1816 the new administration created two districts, Coesfeld and Lüdinghausen. Except minor changes they stayed until the major reorganization in 1975 when both were merged to form the current district. A few municipalities from the district Münster were also added, while others formerly belonging to the district were moved to neighboring districts.

Geography
The district is located in the Münsterland, a mostly rural area. The Lippe River forms part of the border of the district in the south.

Coat of arms
The coat of arms depicts a bishop, a goose and a bell. The bishop is Saint Liudger, the first bishop of Münster. The goose was according to a popular legend thrown into a dry well by Liudger, in order to find water during a drought. The bells of Lüdinghausen allegedly chimed by themselves, whenever Liudger entered the town. The left side derives from the former coat of arms of the district Lüdinghausen, while the right side comes from the old district Coesfeld. The coat of arms were granted in 1979.

title: Coesfeld (district)


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John Sculley

John Sculley III (born April 6, 1939) is an American businessman, entrepreneur and investor in high-tech startups. Sculley was vice-president (1970–1977) and president of PepsiCo (1977–1983), until he became chief executive officer (CEO) of Apple Inc. on April 8, 1983, a position he held until leaving in 1993. In May 1987, Sculley was named Silicon Valley's top-paid executive, with an annual salary of US$10.2 million.

While Sculley was at Apple, Apple's sales increased tenfold from $800 million to $8 billion. However, many attribute his success to the fact that he joined the company just when Steve Jobs' visions and Steve Wozniak's creations had become highly lucrative. His stint at Apple remains controversial due to his departure from co-founder Steve Jobs's sales structure, particularly regarding Sculley's decision to compete with IBM in selling computers to the same types of customers. Others say that the "two clashed over management styles and priorities, Jobs focusing on future innovation and Sculley more on current product lines and profitability". But Sculley ultimately was forced to step down as Apple CEO because he was opposed to licensing Macintosh software and was talking to Goldman Sachs about splitting Apple into two companies. When Sculley left in May 1993, Apple had $2 billion in cash and $200 million in debt.

Sculley is recognized as an expert in marketing, in part because of his early successes at PepsiCo, notably his introduction of the Pepsi Challenge, which allowed the company to gain market share from primary rival Coca-Cola. He used similar marketing strategies throughout the 1980s and 1990s at Apple to mass-market Macintosh personal computers, and today he continues to speak and write about disruptive marketing strategies.

Sculley is currently invested in and involved with a number of high-tech start-up companies, including 3CInteractive, Zeta Global, Inflexion Point, Mobeam, OpenPeak, x10 Credit, Pivot Acquisition Corp., nextSource and WorldMate. He is currently Chairman of the PeopleTicker and SkillsVillage.

Sculley was portrayed by Allan Royal in the 1999 TNT television film Pirates of Silicon Valley, by Matthew Modine in the 2013 film Jobs and by Jeff Daniels in the 2015 film Steve Jobs.

Early life
Sculley was born in New York City, the son of Margaret Blackburn (Smith), a horticulturist, and John Sculley, Jr., a Wall Street lawyer. Sculley and his brothers spent much of their childhood in Bermuda before moving back to New York. He attended high school at St. Mark's School in Southborough, Massachusetts.

Sculley received a bachelor's degree in Architectural Design from Brown University and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Career
Sculley began work at Marschalk Co. in New York City in 1963.

1967–82: Pepsi-Cola
Sculley joined the Pepsi-Cola division of PepsiCo in 1967 as a trainee, where he participated in a six-month training program at a bottling plant in Pittsburgh. In 1970, at the age of 30, Sculley became the company's youngest marketing vice-president.

Sculley initiated one of the company's first consumer-research studies, an extended in-home product test in which 350 families participated. As a result of the research, Pepsi decided to launch new, larger, and more varied packages of their soft drinks, including the two-liter bottle Sculley worked with DuPont to develop. In 1970, Pepsi set out to dethrone Coca-Cola as the market leader of the industry, in what eventually became known as the Cola Wars. Pepsi began spending more on marketing and advertising, typically paying between US$200,000 and $300,000 for each television spot, while most companies spent between $15,000 and $75,000. With the Pepsi Generation campaign, Pepsi aimed to overturn Coca-Cola's classic marketing.

In 1974, Sculley became president of PepsiCo's International Food Operations division, shortly after he visited a failing potato-chip factory in Paris. PepsiCo's food division was their only money-losing division, with revenues of US$83 million and losses of $156.5 million. To make the food division profitable, Sculley improved product quality, enhanced accounts, and established financial controls. Within three years, the food division was making US$300 million in revenues and $40 million in profit.

Sculley was best known at Pepsi for the Pepsi Challenge, an advertising campaign he started in 1975 to compete against Coca-Cola to gain market share, using heavily advertised taste tests. It claimed based on Sculley's own research that Pepsi-Cola tasted better than Coca-Cola. The Pepsi Challenge included a series of television advertisements that first aired in the early 1970s, featuring lifelong Coca-Cola drinkers participating in blind taste tests. Pepsi's soft drink was always chosen as the preferred product by the participant; however, these results have been criticized as being caused by Pepsi's sweetness, rather than its superior taste.

The Pepsi Challenge was mostly targeted at the Texas market, where Pepsi had a significantly lower market share at the time. The campaign was successful, significantly increasing Pepsi's market share in that state. At the time the Pepsi Challenge was started, Sculley was senior vice-president of United States sales and marketing operations at Pepsi. Sculley himself took the taste test and picked Coke instead of Pepsi.

In 1977, Sculley was named Pepsi's youngest-ever president. Although commonly called the CEO of Pepsi, this was never the case. At the time of his departure, Don Kendall was CEO of Pepsi.

1983–93: Apple Computer, Inc.
"I think of you just like Woz and Markkula. You're like one of the founders of the company. They founded the company, but you and I are founding the future." Apple lured Sculley away from Pepsi in order to apply his marketing skills to the personal computer market. Steve Jobs successfully sealed the deal after he made his pitch to Sculley: "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?" Apple's president, Mike Markkula, wanted to retire and believed that Jobs, who wished to be the company's president, lacked the discipline and temperament needed to run Apple on a daily basis. Sculley, with his solid business background and recent success, would give Apple an image of greater reliability and stability. In an interview with Authority Magazine, Sculley said that Jobs came to him and said "How did you do that? You had no money to speak of at Pepsi. “How did you pass Coca Cola?” And I responded, “Well, we call it experience marketing.” The focus was on selling the experience, not the product.

When Sculley started at Apple, he got a $1 million signing bonus, $1 million in annual pay and options on 350,000 Apple shares. From the time Jobs and Sculley first met in 1982 until 1985, they had what they both acknowledged as an amazing partnership. Sculley used his marketing experience to help keep the aging Apple II generating much-needed cash and helped Jobs launch the Mac with the most admired consumer marketing campaign of its time. Once Jobs took over the Macintosh project from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and early Apple employee Jef Raskin, he became the executive product manager and made all the product decisions.

The Lisa computer, an innovative model designed by a team initially led by Jobs, became available in January 1983, and had disastrous sales. When Jobs's Macintosh, the first of a new series of models with a pioneering black-and-white graphical user interface, was shipped to stores in January 1984, Sculley raised the initial price to $2,495 from the originally planned $1,995, allocating the additional money to hypothetically higher profit margins and to expensive advertising campaigns. Macintosh sold well, and received excellent reviews, but it did not eliminate the IBM PC.

At the peak of the Macintosh success, Apple made an attempt to move unsold inventory of Lisa computers by renaming it to "Macintosh XL" and positioning it as a top-of-the-line pro Macintosh model. At this point, a power struggle between Jobs and Sculley was becoming obvious. Jobs became "non-linear": he kept meetings running past midnight, sent out lengthy faxes, then called new meetings at 7:00 am. Sculley had little control over the Macintosh division where Jobs was the general manager.

The Apple board of directors instructed Sculley to "contain" Jobs and limit his ability to launch expensive forays into untested products. Rather than submit to Sculley's direction, Jobs attempted to oust him from his leadership role at Apple. Sculley found out about Jobs's plans and called a board meeting at which Apple's board of directors sided with Sculley and removed Jobs from his managerial duties. Jobs resigned from Apple and founded NeXT Inc. the same year. Sculley said in 2015 that Jobs never forgave him and their friendship was never repaired.

After Jobs left, Sculley was named president and the company experienced a turnaround in 1986; one journalist wrote "since Sculley joined the company … many things have changed", and that his "strategy has worked". Wozniak credited the Macintosh's initial success to Sculley, saying that he "worked to build a Macintosh market when the Apple II went away". Under the direction of Sculley, who had learned several painful lessons after introducing the bulky Macintosh Portable in 1989, Apple introduced the PowerBook in 1991.

In 1991, Apple introduced System 7, a major upgrade to the operating system, which added color to the interface and introduced new networking capabilities. It remained the architectural basis for Mac OS until 2001, when the classic Mac OS was replaced by Mac OS X. The success of the PowerBook and other products brought increasing revenue. For some time, it appeared that Apple could do no wrong, introducing fresh new products and generating increasing profits in the process. The magazine MacAddict named the period between 1989 and 1991 as the "first golden age" of the Macintosh. Under the leadership of Sculley, Apple's sales multiplied from $982 million in 1983 to $7.9 billion in 1993.

Microsoft threatened to discontinue Microsoft Office for the Macintosh if Apple did not license parts of the Macintosh graphical user interface to use in the Windows operating system. Under pressure, Sculley agreed, a decision which later affected the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit. About that time, Sculley coined the term personal digital assistant (PDA) referring to the Apple Newton, one of the world's first PDAs, a product that Sculley oversaw and launched in 1993.

In 1987, Sculley made several predictions in a Playboy interview: He predicted that the Soviet Union would land a man on Mars within the next 20 years and he claimed that optical storage media such as the CD-ROM would revolutionize the use of personal computers. Some of his ideas for the Knowledge Navigator were eventually fulfilled by the Internet and the World Wide Web during the 1990s and others by Apple itself with the introduction of Siri.

On December 5, 1992, Sculley, as Chairman, CEO, and CTO of Apple Computer, Inc., gave a seminal speech regarding the future of the Internet, titled "The Dawn of a $3.5 Trillion Communications Mega-Industry: Information Access, Processing and Distribution in a Digital World." This was the keynote address to a packed house at the Harvard Business School's Burden Auditorium, as part of the inaugural student-run Harvard/MIT Communications 2000 Symposium, now known as the Harvard Business School Tech Club's annual Cyberposium.

In the early 1990s, Sculley led Apple to port its operating system to run on a new microprocessor, the PowerPC. Sculley later acknowledged such an act was his greatest mistake, indicating that he should instead have targeted the dominant Intel architecture. After a bad first quarter in 1993, amid a personal-computer price war and internal tension over the company's direction, Apple's board forced Sculley out. He resigned on October 15, 1993 and was replaced by German-born Michael Spindler, who had been Chief Operating Officer. Spindler was ousted three years later and replaced with Gil Amelio. In 1997, amidst poor financial performance Apple would acquire Steve Jobs's NeXT Software; Jobs would oust Amelio and reinstate himself as chief executive.

1993–present: tech investment
After leaving Apple on October 23, 1993, Sculley became chairman and chief executive officer at Spectrum Information Technologies, a New York-based company that held key computer patents for wireless data transmission. Only four months later he resigned from the company and filed a lawsuit against Spectrum president Peter Caserta, seeking more than $10 million in damages. Sculley alleged that he was misled when he was hired at Spectrum by not being told of SEC inquiries and "aggressive revenue recognition accounting" for license fees.

Sculley has been a founding investor in MetroPCS (formerly General Wireless) and helped guide the company's brand marketing; MetroPCS became a multibillion-dollar public company on the New York Stock Exchange until its acquisition by T-Mobile in 2013. He built NFO Research from $25 million to $550 million in revenue, and sold it to IPG for $850 million. He helped launch and advised Hotwire.com, Intralinks (which was co-founded by his brother Arthur), and InPhonic, Buy.com, and PeoplePC.

In 1997, Sculley became the chairman of Live Picture, a California-based company, to oversee its push into high-quality, low-bandwidth imaging over the Internet. US$22M in venture capital was provided for the company. Sculley later left the company, but remained an investor. In 1999, Live Picture filed for federal bankruptcy protection as part of a plan to be acquired by MGI Software.

In 1997, Sculley co-founded PopTech with Bob Metcalfe and several other dignitaries from the technology industry. In 1998, he joined the board of directors of BuyComp LLC (now Buy.com), an Internet-only computer store. Two years later, he partnered with Dennis M. Lynch to launch Signature21, providing marketing services to small to medium-sized businesses. In 2001, Sculley and Lynch transitioned the company into a learning program for rising entrepreneurs. Months later, Lynch left the company, while Sculley continued to consult and work with small businesses, including InPhonic, whose board of directors he later joined. InPhonic was an online retailer of cell phones and wireless plans. Sculley's early leadership helped steer InPhonic towards its successful IPO in 2004. Sculley served as the vice chairman of the InPhonic board of directors. InPhonic filed for bankruptcy in 2007.

In 2002, Sculley endorsed and invested in the Wine Clip, a wine accessory product, which claims to accelerate the aeration of wine by exposure to magnets. A year later he helped in the founding of Verified Person Inc., an online pre-employment screening company. As of 2012, he serves on the board of directors. In 2004, Sculley joined the board of directors at OpenPeak, a maker of software for wireless consumer electronics, digital media, computers, and home systems. In the same year, Sculley became a venture partner at Rho Ventures. In March 2006, Sculley was named Chairman of IdenTrust (formerly Digital Signature Trust Company) a San Francisco-based firm focusing on verifying identity and boosting financial security.

Before speaking at the Silicon Valley 4.0 conference, Sculley was interviewed by CNET in October 2003, where he explained the mistakes he made at Apple concerning the Apple Newton and HyperCard. Sculley had canceled Apple's first hand-held mobile tablet PenMac led by Paul Mercer with applications by Samir Arora and instead signed an agreement to work with Sharp Electronics on the Newton technology. Also in 2003, Sculley was interviewed by the BBC for the television documentary The World's Most Powerful episode Steve Jobs vs. Bill Gates, discussing his time at Apple during the 1980s as CEO. In 2010, he was interviewed for Cult of Mac on the topics of Steve Jobs and design.

In 2007, Sculley co-founded the data company Zeta Global with business partner David A. Steinberg, and in January 2014 the data analytics firm XL Marketing, rebranded and incorporated its resources into Zeta Interactive, re-launching it as a Big Data-Driven Marketing firm. On January 30, 2014, Sculley was a panelist at a forum organized by Zeta, which featured ad executives, marketers and NFL executive to discuss the changes in the way companies market and reach consumers since Sculley's time at Apple in 1984 when the computer company featured what became one of the first iconic Super Bowl ads—the 1984 commercial. In October 2016, Zeta Interactive was again rebranded as Zeta Global.

In 2014, Sculley co-founded Obi Mobiles, a smartphone brand aimed at the emerging markets. The company was renamed Obi Worldphone. In September 2017, Sculley distanced himself from Obi Worldphone and told that his name was used for PR only. He has also been working in the health care industry, focusing on RxAdvance, a cloud-based platform that helps pharmaceutical companies, hospitals and insurers manage chronically ill patients living at home.

Other
Sculley went political in the early 1990s on behalf of Republican Tom Campbell, who in 1992 was running in the California Republican primary to be the party candidate for a United States Senate seat. Sculley hosted a fundraiser for Campbell at his ranch in Woodside. Sculley had become acquainted with Hillary Clinton, serving with her on a national education council. When Bill Clinton ran for president, Sculley supported him. Sculley sat next to Hillary Clinton during the President's first State of the Union address in January 1993.

Personal life
Sculley married Ruth, stepdaughter of PepsiCo president Donald Kendall in 1960, with whom he had two children. The couple divorced in 1965. In 1978, he married Carol Lee Adams, ex-wife of a former PepsiCo vice president, ultimately divorcing in 2011.

In 2013, Sculley married Diane Gibbs Poli, vice president and design coordinator for Wittman Building Corporation, and they live in Palm Beach, Florida.

In 2016, while visiting Japan, Sculley saw Steve Jobs’ autograph in a sushi restaurant, and broke down in tears. The owner said "“He told me that since they were retired from the frontlines of business, they could have enjoyed sushi at Steve’s favorite restaurant and had a good time together, but he has passed away and now he’s in heaven.”"

title: John Sculley


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James Pradier

James Pradier (born Jean-Jacques Pradier, ; 23 May 1790 – 4 June 1852) was a Genevan-born French sculptor best known for his work in the neoclassical style.

Life and work
Born in Geneva (then the Republic of Geneva), Pradier was the son of a Protestant family from Toulouse. He left for Paris in 1807 to work with his elder brother, Charles-Simon Pradier, an engraver, and also attended the École des Beaux-Arts beginning in 1808. He won a Prix de Rome that enabled him to study in Rome from 1814 to 1818 at the Villa Medici. Pradier made his debut at the Salon in 1819 and quickly acquired a reputation as a competent artist. He studied under Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres in Paris. In 1827 he became a member of the Académie des beaux-arts and a professor at the École des Beaux-Arts

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Pradier oversaw the finishing of his sculptures himself. He was a friend of the Romantic poets Alfred de Musset, Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and the young Gustave Flaubert. His workshop was a meeting place for artists, presided over by his mistress, Juliette Drouet, who became Victor Hugo's mistress in 1833. After the liaison with Drouet ended, Pradier married Louise d'Arcet (1814-1885), daughter of the French chemist Jean-Pierre-Joseph d'Arcet, in 1833. They separated in 1845, after Pradier had become aware of her infidelities. They had three children: Charlotte (born 27 July 1834), John (b. 21 May 1836), and Thérèse (b. 3 July 1839). Due to her numerous lovers and her complicated financial lfe, Louise Pradier was among the inspirations for Flaubert when he wrote Madame Bovary.

The cool neoclassical surface finish of Pradier's sculptures is charged with an eroticism that their mythological themes can barely disguise. At the Salon of 1834, Pradier's Satyr and Bacchante created a scandalous sensation. Some claimed to recognize the features of the sculptor and his mistress, Juliette Drouet. When the prudish government of Louis-Philippe refused to purchase it, Count (later Prince) Anatoly Nikolaievich Demidov bought it and took it to his palazzo in Florence – though many years later it would finally be on display in France, part of the Louvre's collection.

Other famous sculptures by Pradier are the figures of Fame in the spandrels of the Arc de Triomphe, decorative figures at the Madeleine, and his twelve Victories inside the dome of the Invalides, all in Paris. For his native Geneva he completed the statue of the Genevan Jean-Jacques Rousseau erected in 1838 on the tiny Île Rousseau, where Lac Léman empties to form the Rhône. Aside from large-scale sculptures, Pradier collaborated with François-Désiré Froment-Meurice, designing jewelry in a 'Renaissance-Romantic' style.

James Pradier is buried in the Père-Lachaise cemetery. Much of the contents of his studio were bought after his death by the city museum of Geneva.

Influence
Pradier's importance as an artist in his day is demonstrated by the fact that his portrait is included in François Joseph Heim's painting Charles X Distributing Prizes to Artists at the Salon of 1824, now in the Louvre Museum, Paris.

Pradier has been largely forgotten in modern times. In 1846 Gustave Flaubert said of him, however:
 * This is a great artist, a true Greek, the most antique of all the moderns; a man who is distracted by nothing, not by politics, nor socialism, and who, like a true workman, sleeves rolled up, is there to do his task from morning until night with the will to do well and the love of his art.

An exhibition, Statues de chair: sculptures de James Pradier (1790–1852) at Geneva's Musée d'Art et d'Histoire (October 1985 – February 1986) and Paris, Musée du Luxembourg (February – May 1986), roused some interest in Pradier's career and aesthetic. Pradier's students included:

 * Marie-Noémi Cadiot, 1828–1888
 * Henri Chapu, 1833–1891
 * Gustave Crauck, 1827–1905
 * Antoine Étex, 1808–1888
 * Eugène Guillaume, 1822–1905
 * Henri Lehmann, 1814–1882
 * Eugène-Louis Lequesne, 1815–1887
 * Henri Le Secq, 1818–1882
 * Jacques-Léonard Maillet, 1823–1894
 * Pierre-Charles Simart, 1806–1857

title: James Pradier


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Exploratory engineering

Exploratory engineering is a term coined by K. Eric Drexler to describe the process of designing and analyzing detailed hypothetical models of systems that are not feasible with current technologies or methods, but do seem to be clearly within the bounds of what science considers to be possible within the narrowly defined scope of operation of the hypothetical system model. It usually results in paper or video prototypes, or (more likely nowadays) computer simulations that are as convincing as possible to those that know the relevant science, given the lack of experimental confirmation. By analogy with protoscience, it might be considered a form of protoengineering.

Usage
Due to the difficulty and necessity of anticipating results in such areas as genetic modification, climate change, molecular engineering, and megascale engineering, parallel fields such as bioethics, climate engineering and hypothetical molecular nanotechnology sometimes emerge to develop and examine hypotheses, define limits, and express potential solutions to the anticipated technological problems. Proponents of exploratory engineering contend that it is an appropriate initial approach to such problems.

Engineering is concerned with the design of a solution to a practical problem. A scientist may ask "why?" and proceed to research the answer to the question. By contrast, engineers want to know how to solve a problem, and how to implement that solution. Exploratory engineering often posits that a highly detailed solution exists, and explores the putative characteristics of such a solution, while holding in abeyance the question of how to implement that solution. If a point can be reached where the attempted implementation of the solution is addressed using the principles of engineering physics, the activity transitions from protoengineering to actual engineering, and results in success or failure to implement the design.

Requirements
Unlike the scientific method which relies on peer reviewed experiments which attempt to prove or disprove a falsifiable hypothesis, exploratory engineering relies on peer review, simulation and other methods employed by scientists, but applies them to some hypothetical artifact, a specific and detailed hypothesized design or process, rather than to an abstract model or theory. Because of the inherent lack of experimental falsifiability in exploratory engineering, its practitioners must take particular care to avoid falling into practices analogous to cargo cult science, pseudoscience, and pathological science.

Criticism
Exploratory engineering has its critics, who dismiss the activity as mere armchair speculation, albeit with computer assist. A boundary which would take exploratory engineering out of the realm of mere speculation and define it as a realistic design activity is often indiscernible to such critics, and at the same time is often inexpressible by the proponents of exploratory engineering. While both critics and proponents often agree that much of the highly detailed simulation effort in the field may never result in a physical device, the dichotomy between the two groups is exemplified by the situation in which proponents of molecular nanotechnology contend that many complicated molecular machinery designs will be realizable after an unspecified "assembler breakthrough" envisioned by K. Eric Drexler, while critics contend that this attitude embodies wishful thinking equivalent to that in the famous Sidney Harris cartoon (ISBN 0-913232-39-4) "And then a miracle occurs" published in the American Scientist magazine. In summary the critics contend that a hypothetical model which is both self-consistent and consistent with the laws of science concerning its operation, in the absence of a path to build the device modeled, provides no evidence that the desired device can be built. Proponents contend that there are so many potential ways to build the desired device that surely at least one of those ways will not display a critical flaw preventing the device from being built.

Science fiction
Both proponents and critics often point to science fiction stories as the origin of exploratory engineering. On the positive side of the science fiction ledger, the ocean-going submarine, the telecommunications satellite, and other inventions were anticipated in such stories before they could be built. On the negative side of the same ledger, other science fiction devices such as the space elevator may be forever impossible because of basic strength of materials issues or due to other difficulties, either anticipated or unanticipated.

title: Exploratory engineering