text:
Józef Maria Bocheński

Józef Maria Bocheński or Innocentius Bochenski (30 August 1902 – 8 February 1995) was a Polish Dominican, logician and philosopher.

Biography
Born on 30 August 1902 in Czuszów, then part of the Russian Empire, to a family with patriotic and pro-independence traditions. His predecessors had fought in the Napoleonic wars and various national uprisings. His father, Adolf Józef Bocheński (1870–1936), who greatly developed the family estate, was a landowning activist, volunteer in the 1919-21 war with the Soviet Union and a doctor of agricultural sciences; his interest in economic history influenced Józef’s own reflections on economic doctrine and his personal aversion to Marxism. Józef’s mother, Maria Małgorzata née Dunin-Borkowska (1882–1931), was interested in theology, the author of the biographies of St John of the Cross and St Teresa of Jesus and the founder of a parish in Ponikwa. In charge of raising the children, she was known for her rigorous methods of exerting parental control and autocratic character. Józef’s father had a more liberal disposition, being primarily interested in his sons becoming good athletes and cavalrymen (he himself having had considerable sports achievements as a horse rider). Józef had three siblings: Aleksander Adolf Maria Bocheński (1904–2001), journalist and political author, economic and political activist, member of the Legislative Parliament in 1947–1952, member of the PAX Association Board in 1962–1985 as well as an activist of the Patriotic Movement for National Rebirth; Adolf Maria Bocheński (1909––1944), journalist, political author and soldier of the Polish Armed Forces in the West; and Olga Antonina, married name Zawadzka (1905–2008), teacher and author of religious education curricula, awardee of the Righteous Among the Nations medal. Józef was initially taught at home. The tutors taught the boys patriotic songs, military drills and inculcated them with a romantic perception of patriotism. Yet at the same time, they were raised in French culture, with emphasis being placed on logicality and rationalism.

In 1907, the Bocheński family moved from Czuszów in the Kielce region to Ponikwa, a property inherited by Józef’s mother, near Brody in Eastern Galicia. Life in this vast estate had a significant impact on the siblings, who had been taught to cherish the tradition of eastern borderland (Kresy) peoples. The brothers had been politicised since early childhood, and now they argued among themselves the validity Roman Dmowski’s concepts. The topic was so hotly disputed that the parents felt obliged to ban such discussions at the dinner table, all the more so because Józef was quite favourably disposed to the national camp, whereas his father regarded National Democrats to be ‘a mentality rather than a political party’.

The First World War, with several evacuations and returns to Ponikwa on account of its proximity to the frontline, led to the family’s drastic impoverishment. They witnessed soldiers’ and workers’ revolts at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. Their numerous peregrinations also meant that Józef had to frequently change schools, from Tarnów to Warsaw (Konrad Górski School), and then to Lwów (Adam Mickiewicz Gymnasium).

As a sixteen-year-old, Józef Bocheński witnessed Polish-Ukrainian fighting in Lwów, but his parents did not allow him to participate. After graduating from high school in 1920, he volunteered to join the 8th Uhlan Regiment and saw action in the Battle of Komarów. These war experiences reaffirmed his conviction that defensive warfare was a justified means of conducting national politics. He studied law at the University of Lwów in 1920–1922, and then political economy at the University of Poznań in 1922–1926. However, he was not attracted to studying as much as to other aspects of student life. In the academic year 1924/1925, he was president of the university’s Brotherly Aid Association, and was also active in the Corona Academic Corporation as well as the Monarchist Organization, of which he was president in 1926. The views that Bocheński then espoused could be perceived as leaning towards the ideals of National Democracy – though he later reflected that in his youth for a time he considered himself to be an anarchist. In the student press, he actively condemned the May Coup and took part in anti-Piłsudski demonstrations (his brothers, by contrast, were fervent supporters of the Marshal).

In 1926, Józef came to the conclusion that he faced a completely wasted life. Feeling that he was no longer a Christian, a Catholic or even a person of faith, he broke his engagement with Maria Franciszka Bocheńska (his cousin) and entered a seminary. He did this to discipline his exuberant personality in an institution whose feudal, anti-democratic nature, by his own admission, he found attractive. According to Włodzimierz Sznarbachowski, a close acquaintance, that was also the intention of Józef’s autocratic mother, Maria Bocheńska, who understood well her oldest son’s character (just as she felt her youngest son should become a diplomat, and Alexander, a natural-born farmer, should be allowed to marry). Another major influence on Józef’s choice was Friar Jacek Woroniecki, who helped him to become interested in Thomism.

From 25 June 1926 to 3 July 1927, Józef was a seminarian at the Poznań Theological Seminary. There he experienced conversion and developed fascination with Christian philosophy. Joining a religious order was, in Józef’s mind, an essential consequence of his choice and after lengthy considerations of the qualities of the Jesuit, Franciscan, Dominican and Benedictine orders, he decided to join the Dominicans. He made his noviciate the Kraków Dominican monastery from October 1927 to October 1928. After making a temporary profession of vows on 4 October 1928, against his intention of becoming a missionary, he was told to take up studies in philosophy at Fribourg University, Switzerland, in 1928–1931. He was awarded a doctorate in philosophy on 31 June 1931 (for ‘an idiotic’, in his opinion, thesis on Maurycy Straszewski). In 1931–1933, he studied at the Pontifical University of St Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) in Rome to become, on 21 March 1934, a doctor of theology (for a thesis entitled Discovering the existence of God through causality and the Catholic faith). On 20 June 1932, he was ordained to the presbyterate. In 1934–1940, he gave lectures on logic at the Angelicum in Rome. He was awarded a habilitation in Christian Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University on 14 March 1938 on the basis of a thesis entitled From the history of the logic of modal sentences. Bocheński’s understanding of the supernatural and material spheres was greatly influenced by his attachment to the logical method of thinking, which, in his opinion, inevitably led to recognising the existence of God. The view that faith, being an act of will, was not contrary, but coherent with science and logic was apparent in all his works. In the 1930s, Józef also published articles in Bunt Młodych and Polityka, magazines where his brothers Aleksander and Adolf were leading columnists. Józef’s articles primarily concerned philosophical issues, providing in this form a basis for the ‘superpower’ ideology of the two periodicals.

The outbreak of war found him engaged the construction of a religious house in Służewo. On 6 September, he left Warsaw accompanied by National Democrat acquaintances and subsequently joined the 81st Infantry Regiment, where he served as a chaplain. Taken prisoner at Kock, he soon managed to escape and – via Kraków, Katowice and Vienna – eventually reached Italy. There he was involved in helping Polish professors imprisoned by the Germans, and next he got through to Great Britain, where he carried out pastoral work among the Polish exiles and served as a Polish Army education officer. In 1943–1944, he was a lecturer at the Military Academy in Edinburgh. On 16 February 1944, Bishop Józef Gawlina appointed him army chaplain, thanks to which he joined the Polish II Corps, where he met his brother Adolf and participated in the Battle of Monte Cassino (serving on the Italian front from 27 March to 16 July 1944). On 17 August 1944, he was appointed chaplain to Polish Army Headquarters in Rome and head of the army bishop’s press office. He held this position until 15 October 1945, in that time authoring many distinctly anti-communist articles as well as serving as editor of the soldiers’ religious press.

In the autumn of that year, he started giving lectures on the history of 20th-century philosophy at the University of Fribourg, and from 1951 also on early modern history. An associate professor from 1945, he became a full professor at the university in 1948. Bocheński continued working at Fribourg until 1973, as dean of the Faculty of Philosophy in 1950-1952, and university rector in 1964-1966. In 1957, he became the director of the Eastern Europe Institute at Fribourg, from 1956 he was also a board member of Kollegium Ost in Cologne, and its director in 1961. In 1960, he received Fribourg citizenship.

Bocheński was visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, the University of Kansas, the University of Cologne, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Salzburg and Boston College. He was a member of the Council of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies, the founder and secretary of the World Union of Catholic Philosophical Societies as well as the president of the International Federation of Logical and Methodological Societies. He established the Polish Catholic Home in Fribourg in 1952, and also co-founded the Polish Museum Foundation in Rapperswil.

He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Notre Dame, USA (1966), the University of Buenos Aires (1977), the University of Milan (1981), as well as the Jagiellonian University and Academy of Theology in Warsaw (1988).

He was the promoter of several dozen doctoral dissertations and author of numerous books on what could be broadly termed philosophy and theology. The most important of these include: Szkice etyczne (1953), Formale Logik (1956), A history of formal logic (1961), The logic of religion (1965), ''Sto zabobonów. Krótki filozoficzny słownik zabobonów (1987), Marksizm – leninizm. Nauka czy wiara? (1988),Współczesne metody myślenia (1992), Zarys historii filozofii (1993) and Lewicę, religię, sowietologię'' (1996).

Bocheński had his own reflections and theories regarding the nation, based on the concepts of Fr Woroniecki, and not limited to only the issues of language, culture or ideology, but also to the whole sphere of emotions and axiology. His views in these matters corresponded with the traditions of Polish national thought, which placed emphasis on biological, economic and cultural development as a prerequisite in the struggle for independence, which only then could be followed by the building of the actual state. Patriotism, in his opinion, should not be withdrawn, but offensive in so far as the nation’s potential permitted. In this respect, he was both a militarist and a positivist, convinced, similarly to his brother Alexander, that the Poles had to face a long and arduous education in overcoming their much accumulated shortcomings.

Bocheński criticised Marxism from the philosophical point of view as a closed system of thought, misinterpreting interpersonal relations through a false belief in the existence of a ‘scientific worldview’, which was by definition anti-Christian and especially dangerous as an instrument of Soviet imperial politics and propaganda. Hence, he fought Marxism by all possible means, for instance, by taking part in the 1950s trial of the German Communist Party by the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, which led to its banning. He also criticised Marxism from an economic standpoint by creating his own philosophy of entrepreneurship as a phenomenon conditioned by various human factors, which could not be explained by a closed theory.

The Dominican was not only an outstanding scholar of Thomism, but also its ardent supporter, being particularly attached to Thomistic concepts of pluralism and its consequent concepts of personalism, especially in the interpretation of Jacques Maritain, as expressed in his text published in Znak, Polish People’s Republic [sic] (I. Bocheński, ‘ABC tomizmu’, Znak, 1950, No. 2, pp. 89–126). Bocheński’s personalism did not, however, mean the absolutization of the idea of being able to implement Christianity in every political system, or that every political system was compatible with Christianity. Therefore, he did not agree with the Poles who in the 1940s and 50s supported of Emmanuel Mounier’s view that personalism could deepen socialism and vulgarised it to the level of leftist integrationism, stating as, for instance, Konstanty Łubieński, that a Catholic not only can, but even ought to be socialist (K. Łubieński, ‘Open letter to Mr Juliusz Lada. (On the margin of the note in The Tablet)’, Dziś i Jutro, 1948, No. 49, pp. 1–2). The PAX Association ideology derived from this theses, because this is what we are talking about here, assumed that despite different worldview inspirations, Marxism and Catholicism shared the same social and economic goals. Of course, this issue could not be viewed in a strictly theological context. As a staunch anti-communist, Bocheński was particularly opposed to any efforts of combining Catholicism with communism, and that was exactly what the PAX Association was implying.

The philosopher was personally involved in putting on the index of the Congregation of the Holy Office Bolesław Piasecki’s Zagadnienia istotne (Real Issues) as well as PAX’s biweekly Dziś i Jutro (Today and Tomorrow) – where incidentally his brother occasionally published texts. The official reason for this was the fact that Piasecki placed the Act of Creation above the Act of Salvation, which would allow Catholics to engage in any political system that in his subjective appraisal would lead to positive changes in the world. Bocheński received the text of the book from Janina Kolendo with Piasecki’s approval because he hoped Alexander’s older brother would understand the thesis and even persuade the Vatican to look also favourably on it. Józef Bocheński, was outraged and wrote a critical memorandum to Bishop Józef Gawlina, who then passed it on to the Holy Office. Bocheński, speaking on Polish Radio Free Europe, also engaged in that station’s campaign against Piasecki’s activities.

Józef’s stance against PAX also made him critical of the path selected by Alexander. Admittedly, the two brothers had a good relationship and corresponded with each other whenever it was possible. Aleksander would visit Józef in France or Switzerland, where, as the former half-jokingly recalled, he would and vainly try to persuade Jozef to divide competencies in the family, leaving the Dominican the theological issues and all the political issues to himself. Jozef, however, had no illusions that his younger brother had taken a path that was wrong and damaging to the Church. Already in the interwar period, Józef described Aleksander’s style of reasoning as foggy, in contrast to the brilliant analyses of his youngest brother Adolf. In the post-war period, Jozef primarily disapproved of Aleksander’s support of Piasecki’s campaign against Primate Wyszyński, which included PAX accusing the cardinal of disruptive activities. Aleksander not only approved of the open letter of the PAX Association in this matter, but even tried to persuade bishops Bohdan Brejza and Henryk Grzondziel to support it. Józef did not hide his indignation in a letter to his brother, in which he condemned Aleksander’s actions as contrary to ‘binding’ principles, and stated that he had abstained from public criticism not because of family considerations but because of the apolitical stance he had to maintain as a scholar and university rector.

During one of their meetings, in 1961, Aleksander and Józef served as intermediaries between Piasecki and the Vatican. This was a classified, informal meeting in which the Holy See tried to improve relations between PAX and Primate Wyszyński in return for information Piasecki could provide about the Church in the East. The whole matter never went beyond the sphere of speculation, but it showed that for the sake of the Church, Józef Bocheński was willing to put all personal and political animosities to one side.

In September 1982, he took part in negotiations to release hostages held at the Polish Embassy in Bern. In 1987, he visited Poland for the first time after almost 50 years.

Bocheński, a fan of fast cars and aviation (obtaining a pilot’s licence at the age of 68 in 1970, and achieving a total flight experience of 765 hours and 40 minutes), was famous for his original views and unconventional manner. In his will, he dedicated his body to science. Józef Maria Bocheński died in Fribourg on 2 February 1995.

His distinctions and awards included the Monte Cassino Commemorative Cross and the Gold Cross of the Polish Army Field Bishop in 1945, the Order of Italy and the Copernicus Silver Medal in 1973, the Alfred Jurzykowski Prize in 1974 and the Polonia Restituta Commander’s Cross (awarded Polish President Kazimierz Sabbat) in 1987. By a resolution of the Senate of the Republic of Poland, 2020 was proclaimed the year of Fr Józef Bocheński.

Cracow Circle
Bocheński is perhaps the most famous exponent of the Cracow Circle Thomism, which has been called "the most significant expression of Catholic thought between the two World Wars." The Circle was founded by a group of philosophers and theologians that, in distinction from traditional neo-Thomism, embraced modern formal logic and applied it to traditional Thomist philosophy and theology. Inspired by the logical clarity of Aquinas, members of the Circle held both philosophy and theology to contain "propositions with truth-values…a structured body of propositions connected in meaning and subject matter, and linked by logical relations of compatibility and incompatibility, entailment etc." "The Cracow Circle set about investigating and where possible improving this logical structure with the most advanced logical tools available at the time, namely those of modern mathematical logic, then called ‘logistic’." Other members of the Circle included Jan Salamucha and Jan F. Drewnowski.

Précis de logique mathématique
Bochenski said "that once when he went to visit Lukasiewicz before the war [World War II], Lukasiewicz conveyed him inside excitedly, indicated a complex formula, beginning something like 'CCC...', and said, 'Look at this beautiful and self-evidently true formula.' Clearly the formula's truth was not immediately evident to the bemused Bochenski."

In Bocheński's Précis de logique mathématique, he uses this notation, in the style of Łukasiewicz:

The logical hexagon for the square of opposition
Robert Blanché quoted a passage of Bochenski’s Formale Logik in Structures intellectuelles (1966, 39): "Hindu logic knows of three logical propositions and not the four of western logic. For it Some S are P does not signify Some S at least are P but Some S are P but not all." This passage shows that Indian tradition explicitly speaks of the existence of partial quantity, the third quantity to be considered along with totality apprehended by A the universal affirmative of the square, and zero quantity apprehended by E the universal negative of the square. To the two universals A and E entertaining a relationship of contrariety, one should add the third contrary constituted by the double negation of the first two. As the subcontrary I contradicts E and the subcontrary O contradicts A, the logical proposition apprehending partial quantity can be represented by the conjunction of I and O : I & O. In Blanché’s logical hexagon this conjunction is symbolized by the letter Y. Many scholars think that the logical square of opposition, representing four values, should be replaced by the logical hexagon, which has the power to express more relations of opposition.

Works

 * Elementa logicae graecae (1937), Rome: Anonima Libraria Catolica Italiana.
 * Manuale di filosofia bolscevica (1946)
 * La logique de Théophraste (1947), 1987 reprint, New York, Garland Publishing.
 * Europäische Philosophie der Gegenwart (1947), Bern: A. Francke.
 * Précis de logique mathématique (1949), Bussum, North Holland: F. G. Kroonder.
 * ABC tomizmu (1950), London: Veritas.
 * Der sowjetrussische Dialektische Materialismus (1950)
 * Ancient formal logic (1951)
 * Szkice etyczne: Zebrał i ułożył Adam Bocheński (1953), London:  Veritas.
 * Die zeitgenössischen Denkmethoden (1954)
 * Die kommunistische Ideologie und die Würde, Freiheit und Gleichheit der Menschen im Sinne des Grundgesetzes für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland vom 23.5.1949 (1956), [Bonn]: Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst.
 * Bibliographie der Sowietischen Philosophie (1959), Fribourg: Ost-Europa Institut.
 * Formale Logik (1956) translated into English as A history of formal logic (1961)
 * Der sowjetrussische dialektische Materialismus (Diamat) (1962)
 * (co-edited with Gerhart Niemayer) Handbook on Communism(1962), New York: Praeger.
 * The Logic of Religion (1965)
 * Wege zum philosophischen Denken (1967)
 * Guide to Marxist philosophy: an introductory bibliography (1972), Chicago:  Swallow Press.
 * Philosophy, an introduction (1972), New York: Harper & Row.
 * Marxismus-Leninismus. Wissenschaft oder Glaube? (1973), München: Olzog.
 * Was ist Autorität?: Einf. in d. Logik d. Autorität (1974), Fribourg:  Herder.
 * Logic and Ontology (1974)
 * Sto zabobonów. Krótki filozoficzny słownik zabobonów ("One Hundred Superstitions. A Short Philosophical Dictionary of Superstitions", 1987).
 * Logika i filozofia (1993)
 * Miedzy logika a wiara (1994)
 * Szkice o nacjonalizmie i katolicyzmie polskim (1994), Komorów: Wydawn. Antyk, Marcin Dybowski.
 * Wspomnienia (1994), Kraków: Philed.
 * Lewica, religia, sowietologia (1996), Warsaw: Zakon Ojców Dominikanów.
 * The Road to Understanding. More than Dreamt of in Your Philosophy (1996), ISBN 1-886670-06-4

title: Józef Maria Bocheński


text:
User talk:Sonicnoodles

Thanks for experimenting with Wikipedia. Your test worked, and has been reverted or removed. Please use the sandbox for any other tests you want to do. Take a look at the welcome page if you would like to learn more about contributing to our encyclopedia. Thanks.

Darrien 12:51, 2004 Sep 30 (UTC)

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

title: User talk:Sonicnoodles


text:
URC

URC may stand for:

Church

 * United Reformed Church, a Christian denomination in Great Britain
 * United Reformed Churches in North America

Companies

 * Uganda Railways Corporation, operating railways in Uganda
 * United Refining Company, an oil company in Pennsylvania, United States
 * Urban Regeneration Company, a type of company in the United Kingdom
 * Universal Robina Corporation, a Filipino food and beverage company

Rugby

 * Undeb Rygbi Cymru, the Welsh-language name for the Welsh Rugby Union
 * Under-19s Rugby Championship, an Australian tournament for junior men's teams
 * United Rugby Championship, for rugby union clubs in Ireland, Italy, Scotland, South Africa, and Wales
 * Unión de Rugby de Cuyo, governing body of rugby union in Mendoza, Argentina

Science and technology

 * Universal remote or "universal remote control"
 * Universal Remote Console, defined by ISO/IEC 24752
 * Uniform Resource Characteristics, a computing term
 * Universal rotation curve, a unified description of galactic rotation curves
 * University Rover Challenge, an annual competition for college students, by the Mars Society
 * Unsolicited Result Code in Hayes AT Command

Other

 * Union Revolutionary Council, the supreme governing body of Burma from 1962 to 1974
 * Ürümqi Diwopu International Airport, China (IATA code)
 * Utility regulatory commission
 * Universal Races Congress, an international meeting on racial understanding in 1911 in London

title: URC


text: File:The Monster at the End of This Book Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover.jpg


text:
User talk:Codywilson

''with the terrorist thing at burnie high school, it wasn't in the examiner. thats where wikipedia comes in, covering the stuff that print media doesn't. and btw ask the police, they have it on record, its called hushing it up for the public safety. and stop spreading dirty rumours''
 * No, its not wikipedia's role to report stuff that isn't reported anywhere else, its an encyclopedia. If you want to post something controversial and don't want it deleted, you need a source.  If the police have it on record, then its up to you to get a copy of the report to prove it.  Even if it was true, "someone faked an email message" would not be enough to make the school noteworthy.
 * It's a shame, due to all the crap you and your mates have posted on Thomas Hatcher, Neville Windsor, Burnie High School, people want to delete Hellyer College now, which could have been a good article. If you really want to write articles (not ones that just get deleted) then why don't you get some more detail about the college and its history and make it into a full article?  Reece High School is another good one that you could write about, when it burnt down and was rebuilt with all modern stuff in it, that was big news at the time and would be worth keeping. -- Chuq12:59, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I reverted your edit because it was an unsubstantiated, dubious and factually inaccurate claim. It's hard to write that out of a short paragraph. 203.22.224.100 02:16, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Factual inaccuracy: there are senior high schools in most mainland states as well. Why would graduates of Hellyer Senior High School be more sought after by mainland unis then? 203.22.224.100 02:28, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)

don't post nonsense
refrain from creating nonencyclopedic articles like Thomas Hatcher Controversy. RickK 06:26, Oct 1, 2004 (UTC)

It's patent nonsense, and it will be deleted every time you recreate it. RickK 06:29, Oct 1, 2004 (UTC)

Save the Game!
Help us track down verifiable sources to bring The Game back! Go to SaveTheGame.org! Bkkbrad 20:11, 25 March 2006 (UTC)

title: User talk:Codywilson


text:
Ik people

The Ik people are an ethnic group or tribe native to northeastern Uganda, near the Kenyan border. Primarily subsistence farmers, most Ik live in small clan villages, or odoks, in the area surrounding Mount Morungole in the Kaabong district. Their population is estimated between 10,000 and 15,000.

The word Ik means "head of migration"; they are traditionally believed by locals to have been some of the region's earliest settlers from Kenya. In 1972, they were the subject of anthropologist Colin Turnbull's highly contested book The Mountain People, which described them as traditionally nomadic hunter-gatherers. Turnbull surmised that the Ik had transitioned to farming in the mid-20th century due to extensive raiding from neighboring groups, as well as the creation of nature preserves on their historical range. In 1985, linguist Bernd Heine disputed Turnbull's claims. His analysis of the Ik language and their traditional holidays found numerous references to agriculture, suggesting that they are historical farmers who hunted and foraged supplementarily. This hypothesis was backed up by accounts from elders, who denied any known history of a nomadic lifestyle.

The Ik language is a member of the Kuliak sub-group of Nilo-Saharan languages. Notable traditions include itówé-és ("blessing the seeds"), a three-day festival that marks the beginning of the agricultural year, and ipéyé-és, a coming-of-age ritual in which young men must cleanly slaughter a male goat with a spear. The Ik are predominantly Christian.

The Ik, along with various other Ugandan tribes, have been subject to forced eviction from their ancestral lands without compensation. They continue to face numerous challenges due to their small population and isolation. The road system in rural Kaabong is poor, and access to education and health services is scarce: in 2016, only one Ik student completed their O-level examinations. In 2016, Hillary Lokwang became the first member of the tribe to be elected to parliament; however, they continue to be politically marginalized. Due to their reliance on agriculture, they are vulnerable to drought and famine. The tribe is considered endangered by some.

Communities and culture
The Ik are divided into patrilineal clans, of which Heine in 1985 noted twelve. Clans are led by the J’akama Awae, an inherited position. Marriages between members of different clans occur; in these cases, according to Heine, women retain their original clan identity, while their children are born members of the father's clan. Clans live in small, walled villages known as odoks or asaks. Ik villages may be visited by tourists.

Rituals
There are known rituals in Ik culture, the most significant of which are ipéyé-és and tasapet. Both are considered rights of passage and are practiced by only men: ipéyé-és marks the beginning of manhood, and tasapet the initiation to elderhood. In ipéyé-és, young men must slaughter a male goat instantaneously, using a spear that may not penetrate the other side of the goat's body. Tasapet may not be completed by a man until all of his older brothers have gone through it. Once this has occurred, his hair will be shaved and he will be taken to live in the bush for a month, as well as slaughtering a bull. Men who have completed tasapet are considered the highest members of the Ik: no decisions can be made without their consent, and they are entitled to respect from those younger. As of 1985, this tradition may be endangered due to the expense of purchasing cattle from neighboring groups.

Marriage
Marriage is generally arranged between families, and engagements may be decided when the bride is as young as seven to ten years old. The groom's family is expected to pay a bride price; the groom is obligated to work for the bride's family for a period. The first marriage ceremony is called tsan-es, in which the engaged are rubbed with oil. The groom then throws a spear at a tree, in order to test his abilities as a hunter. Following this, the bride is expected to cook and perform domestic duties for the groom's clan, while they assess her ability to integrate among them. In the second ceremony, the groom's family visits the bride bearing livestock and grain. They are welcomed with beer and any remaining problems between the two families are discussed. After a few days of celebration, the bride returns with the groom's family. In subsequent ceremonies, the groom is expected to provide food or beer to various other members of the clan, in order to help integrate the newlyweds into society.

Holidays
Three major holidays were noted by Heine in his report, the most important of which is itówé-és, or “blessing of the seeds.” The holiday is celebrated over three days, generally in January, and marks the beginning of the agricultural season. On the first day of the holiday, a sacred tree is planted and people bring their seeds to be blessed under it, which includes dancing around the tree. Beer is brewed, and the following morning elder members taste it, after which it is drunk. No individual may drink until all older members of the tribe have done so first. Dzíber-ika mεs, or “beer of the axes”, is the second most important Ik holiday. Beer is brewed by individual families and brought to the di, the meeting place of the elders, along with all their agricultural tools. The beer is drunk and then sprinkled over the tools to bless them. It is usually celebrated in November or December. Inúmúm-έs, or “opening the harvest”,  is celebrated around August. Harvested grains are cooked communally and eaten by the men at the di.

Generosity
Turnbull's 1972 ethnography described the Ik as "unfriendly, uncharitable, inhospitable and generally mean as any people can be." This perception of the Ik was reflected in other publications, including The New York Times, who described the Ik as a "haunting flower of evil." A twenty-first century report by Catherine Townsend of Baylor University, however, fully repudiated these claims. Using the Dictator Game, a common anthropological test, the Ik demonstrated generosity on par with most other cultures. The Ik believe in nature spirits called kíʝáwika, which reward generosity. According to Townsend, Turnbull's perception of the Ik may have been partly due to the famine the group was experiencing at the time.

A habitually peaceful people, the Ik are frequently raided by neighboring tribes. They have a ritual dance in which they practice responding to an attack, in which the men defend the village and women help lead children to hidden positions, as well as caring for wounded.

Livelihood
The Ik are primarily subsistence farmers. Their staple crops include sorghum, millet, corn and tobacco. Their diets are supplemented with hunting as well as gathering of certain foods, including honey, various fruits and white ants, known as danj. They may trade with neighboring groups for products such as cattle. The Ik are known to brew beer, and the drink plays an important role in some of their traditions.

The Mountain People
In 1972, anthropologist Colin Turnbull published an ethnography about the Ik, The Mountain People. The research provides an examination of Ik culture/practices based on information he gathered during a 1965–66 study. He depicts the Ik as a people forced into individualism to survive. Although Ik consider non-productive individuals such as the elderly and infirm to be burdens on the society, a few remaining elderly Ik are used as sources for his descriptions of the former Ik society (including hunter-gatherer practices, marriage, childbirth, death rituals/taboos, religious/spiritual beliefs, and other aspects). Although quickly outdated by their rapidly-evolving culture, much of the research focused on the then-current condition of the Ik people during a severe famine during a drought.

On the Ik language: "Archie Tucker, the English linguist, accepted an invitation to determine the source(s) of this extraordinary language, but realized it is not Sudanic or Bantu. Archie established the nearest language is classical Middle-Kingdom Egyptian. – The Mountain People, Ch. 2, p. 35."

Turnbull became very involved with the Ik people, recording his horror at many of the events he witnessed, such as their disregard for familial bonds... leading to the death of children and the elderly by starvation. He writes warmly about certain Ik, and describes his "misguided" efforts to give food and water to those too weak to farm/forage, standing guard over them to prevent others from stealing the food. Turnbull shares these experiences to raise questions concerning basic human nature, and constantly references Western concepts of "goodness" and "virtue" abandoned during any period individuals possess nothing more than a need to survive (establishing parallels to the individualism of Western society). His time with the Ik exasperated Turnbull and aggravated his innate melancholy, yet he dedicated his work "to the Ik, whom I learned not to hate".

Criticism
Turnbull's research is controversial among other researchers, who question the accuracy of many 'vivid' claims by his study subjects. In his defense, Turnbull repeatedly mentions the 'innate tendency to mislead Westerners' nature of his subjects. Bernd Heine gives these 1983 examples to support his claims that Turnbull's 1966 methods and conclusions are flawed:
 * Evidence indicates Turnbull possessed limited knowledge of the rapidly-evolving Ik language and tradition and virtually no knowledge of the flora and fauna of the region. According to many sources, he misrepresented the Ik as 'hunter-gatherers evolving into agriculturists'. However, linguistic and cultural evidence suggest that the Ik had been farmers long before they were displaced from their hunting/foraging property after the formation of Kidepo National Park... the singular event the Ik claim forced them to become farmers.
 * Lending credibility to his allegations of their inability to distinguish reality from fantasy, some of Turnbull's informants are Diding'a people claiming to be Ik. Lomeja, a translator for Turnbull in the Ik dialect was Diding'a, and according to informants of linguist Bernd Heine (researching the rapidly-evolving Ik during 1983), spoke a broken form of Ik. Moreover, half of the six villages Turnbull studied were headed by non-Ik.
 * Turnbull's claim that Ik steal cattle and then "double-deal" by selling elaborate falsehoods concerning the thieves to the victims is not corroborated by the ["admittedly 'highly-optimistic'"] Dodoth County Chief's reports, as well as the 1963-69 records of the Administrator in Moroto. According to many scholars, the files and reports suggest the largest number of cattle raids occurred in parts of Dodoth County, but no mention of Ik raiding livestock is in any of these documents, leading experts to conclude any African methods of record-keeping tend toward stylized fictions rather than any resemblance to Western methods of factual accounting.
 * The 1965 Turnbull claim that 'frequent and enthusiastic non-monogamist sexual activities are common among the Ik' is contrary to claims by informants interviewed by Westerner Bernd Heine in 1983. Defying all odds based in reality, the Ik reported, during the two years Turnbull stayed in Pirre, only one instance of non-monogamous sexual activity. Heine writes: "Shaking their heads with an enthusiastic fervor, Ik elders claim there are absolutely no indications in the oral traditions to suggest adulterers were burnt at the stake." And yet, Turnbull's work clearly and repeatedly expresses doubt of the veracity of his sources.
 * Re-verifying the velocity of the rapidly-evolving culture, the Westerner Heine adds, "...Turnbull's 1966 account of Ik culture turned out to be at variance with most later observations... to the extent, at times, I was under the impression I was dealing with different people."

Heine endorsed the conclusion of T.O. Beidelman. "This book cannot be discussed in any proper sociological terms for we are provided with only snatches of data. Rather than a study of the Ik, this is an autobiographical portrait of the author using the Ik as counters for expressing his feelings and experiences in the field."

In his opinion, Turnbull stated that as Ik society self-destructed, their saviors were tribal individuals. Consequently, during the mid-1960s, Turnbull advocated to the Ugandan government a relocation scheme of random tribal members "with no more than ten people in any re-located group" to alleviate the Ik tendency of alienating their neighbors.

Cultural references
Turnbull's book provided material for a 1975 play called The Ik by Colin Higgins and Dennis Cannan. Directed by Peter Brook, the play premiered in Paris in 1975, and was produced in London in 1976 by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The group toured the United States in 1976 as a bi-centennial gift from French tax-payers.

The physician and poet Lewis Thomas wrote an essay, "The Ik", which Cevin Soling read as a child and sparked a documentary, Ikland (2011). It was produced in the mid-2000s by Spectacle Films and was directed by Soling and David Hilbert. The film depicts the Ik people in a positive light by showing how easily befriended they are, how they survive and live as families, their music and dancing, and their ability to step into acting roles. The documentary concludes with members of the tribe mimicking a staged performance of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens as a Western metaphor for 'redemption'.

title: Ik people


text:
The Monster at the End of This Book: Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover

The Monster at the End of This Book: Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover (or simply The Monster at the End of This Book) is a children's picture book based on the television series Sesame Street and starring Grover. It was written by series writer and producer Jon Stone and illustrated by Michael Smollin, and originally published by Little Golden Books in 1971. It has since become the all-time bestselling Sesame Street book title and has been cited as a modern classic of children's literature.

Plot
Having read the book's title, Grover is horrified to learn that there is a monster at the end of the book. He immediately begs the reader not to finish the book so as to avoid encountering the monster. As the book continues, Grover constructs a series of obstacles in hopes of preventing the reader from reading further, but none of them work (mostly because they are merely illustrations, not actual obstacles).

Near the end of the book, Grover makes one last frantic plea not to turn the final page, only to discover on that page, in a surprise self-referential plot twist, that the monster is himself. He laughs and claims that he knew it all along, but the reader can see that he is quite embarrassed by the whole ordeal.

Publication
Jon Stone was involved in the creation and early development of the show Sesame Street. He reportedly wrote The Monster at the End of This Book around the end of 1970 or early the following year while on a flight across the United States to California. At the time, Sesame Street was airing its second season. Michael Smollin, a former advertising executive, illustrated the book. The Monster at the End of This Book was first published in 1971 by Little Golden Books. Copies first sold for 39 cents. The musician Christopher Cerf, who wrote songs for Sesame Street later told The Washington Post that upon reading the manuscript he said "Oh my god, this is wonderful".

Reception
The book was a quick success.

Originally written to introduce young children to the concept of reading a book from beginning to end, The Monster at the End of This Book is the bestselling Sesame Street book title of all time.

Based on a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association listed the book as one of its "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children". In 2012, it was ranked number ten among the "Top 100 Picture Books" in a survey published by School Library Journal.

As of January 2021 the book had sold almost 13 million copies, making it one of the ten bestselling Little Golden Books. The author Danny Freedman wrote a column that month in The Washington Post describing the book as "an unlikely constant, at a rarefied height" and felt that "the book’s long tail of influence is out of proportion with its 24 pages and its cardboard cover devoid of medallions."

An expert on children's literature Leonard S. Marcus described the book as an important point in children's fiction as it led to further innovation in the field, inspiring other self-aware works of literature like The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. According to Philip Nel, a professor of children's literature, the book's publication method and connection to television might be the reason it has attracted relatively little scholarly attention.

Sequels and adaptations
Two direct sequels were produced, also written by Stone and Illustrated by Smollin. Would You Like To Play Hide and Seek with Lovable, Furry Old Grover? (ISBN 978-0394832920), was published in 1976, while Another Monster at the End of This Book: Starring Lovable, Furry Old Grover, and Equally Lovable, Furry Little Elmo (ISBN 0-375-80562-1), was published in 1996. The latter features Grover now coping with Elmo actually encouraging the reader to turn the pages out of sheer curiosity.

On January 30, 2013, the Sesame Street Twitter account adapted the story to the popular social media network, again starring Grover with some impromptu assistance from Wil Wheaton.

The book was adapted into an animated special, The Monster at the End of This Story, which was released on HBO Max on October 22, 2020.

In other media

 * A season four episode of Supernatural is called "The Monster at the End of This Book". In it, lead characters Dean and Sam discover a prophet has made a book series about their lives, including events to come.


text:
Nicolae Bălcescu

Nicolae Bălcescu (29 June 1819 – 29 November 1852) was a Romanian Wallachian soldier, historian, journalist, and leader of the 1848 Wallachian Revolution.

Early life
Born in Bucharest to a family of low-ranking nobility, he used his mother's maiden name, in place of his father's name, Petrescu (his mother was originally from Bălcești, Vâlcea County now, then Argeș County). His siblings were Costache, Barbu, Sevasta and Marghioala, and his father died in 1824.

As a boy, Bălcescu studied at the Saint Sava College (from 1832), and was a passionate student of history. At the age of 17, he joined the Wallachian Army, and, in 1840, took part, alongside Eftimie Murgu and Cezar Bolliac, in Mitică Filipescu's conspiracy against Prince Alexandru II Ghica. The plot was uncovered, and Bălcescu was imprisoned in Mărgineni Monastery, where he remained for the following two years. The rough imprisonment conditions led to Bălcescu contracting tuberculosis, which left irreversible marks on health and led to his death.

Upon his release (after being granted a pardon by the new prince, Gheorghe Bibescu), he took part in forming a secret society drawn up from the Freemasonry and named Frăția ("The Brotherhood"), which he led together with Ion Ghica and Christian Tell (joined soon after by Gheorghe Magheru) in resistance against Prince Bibescu.

Magazin istoric pentru Dacia and other early works
In order to further his history studies, Bălcescu went to France and Italy, and was, together with August Treboniu Laurian, the editor of a magazine entitled Magazin istoric pentru Dacia, which was first published in 1844; that year also marked the publishing (in a different magazine) of his historical essay Puterea armată și arta militară de la întemeierea Prințipatului Valahiei și până acum ("The Military Strength and Art of Warfare from the Creation of the Wallachian Principality to This Day", which argued for a strong military as a guarantee of self-determination).

While in Paris (1846), he became leader of the Romantic nationalists and liberal-radical group Societatea studenților români (the Society of Romanian Students), which reunited Wallachians and Moldavians – it also included Ion Brătianu, Alexandru C. Golescu, Ion Ionescu de la Brad, C. A. Rosetti, and Mihail Kogălniceanu.

Magazin istoric went on to publish the very first collection of internal sources on the history of Wallachia and Moldavia – medieval chronicles which were afterwards published as a single volume. One of his contributions to the magazine singles him out as a radical liberal: Despre starea socială a muncitorilor plugari în Principatele Române în deosebite timpuri ("On the Social Status of the Ploughmen of the Romanian Principalities at Various Times") argues for a land reform, aimed at dispossessing the boyars of large plots of land (that would in turn be awarded to landless peasants); it was used as reference by Karl Marx in his succinct analysis of the events, a fact which was to earn Bălcescu credentials in Communist Romania.

Wallachian Revolution
In 1848, after taking part in the uprising in France, Bălcescu returned to Bucharest in order to take part in the 11 June revolution. He was, for just two days, both Minister and Secretary of State of the provisional government put in place by the revolutionaries. His advocacy of universal suffrage and land reform was not shared by many revolutionaries, and his group came into conflict with the traditional figures of authority – the Orthodox Metropolitan Neofit II, although head of the revolutionary government, opposed the reforms and ultimately conspired against the Revolution itself.

Bălcescu was arrested on 13 September that year by the authorities of the Ottoman Empire who had put an end to the Revolution; his relationship with the Ottomans was complicated by the fact that the radicals' strict opposition to Imperial Russia had made them reliable for the Porte – the Ottomans later allowed all participants in the events to take refuge in Istanbul, and thus avoid contact with the Russian troops sent over to assist the Ottoman presence. Bălcescu initially made his way to Transylvania, but was expelled by Habsburg authorities, who considered him a threat and an agitator of Romanian sentiment in that region.

In Istanbul and Transylvania
In early 1849, Bălcescu was in Istanbul when the Hungarian revolutionary armies under Józef Bem mounted a successful offensive against Habsburg forces and their Transylvanian Romanian allies. The Hungarian government of Lajos Kossuth then entered a debilitating war with Avram Iancu's Romanian guerrilla force, and the former members of the Wallachian government were approached by the Polish revolutionaries in exile, such as Henryk Dembiński, to mediate a peace between the two sides (in the hope that this was to ensure a stronger resistance to Russia, and counting on the Wallachian resentment towards the Saint Petersburg government).

Bălcescu left for Debrecen in May, and met with Kossuth to register the latter's offer to Iancu. Marxist-inspired historiography has celebrated this as an agreement; in fact, Bălcescu's papers reveal that he viewed the peace offering as unsatisfactory for Romanians, and that Avram Iancu rejected it altogether (while agreeing to a temporary armistice). The final offer from the Budapest leadership to Bălcescu and Iancu called for the Romanians to withdraw from Transylvania, as the region was turning into a battleground between Russia and the Hungarians. When this latter conflict drew to a close, the Romanians in Transylvania, although never particularly welcoming of the Russian presence, surrendered their weapons to the reinstated Habsburgs (Iancu's loyalty to the dynasty had been the subject of a parallel dispute between him and the Wallachians).

Final years
Bălcescu's most important work is Românii supt Mihai-Voievod Viteazul ("Romanians under the Rule of Michael the Brave"), which he wrote in exile in 1849 – first published posthumously by Alexandru Odobescu in 1860. The volume is a history of Michael's campaigns, as the first moment when Wallachia, Transylvania, and Moldavia, came under a single, albeit brief rule. They show Bălcescu's commitment to both radicalism and nationalism, his view oscillating between praise of Michael's gestures and criticism of his stance as a supporter of serfdom and privilege.

His final years saw an intense publishing activity, including his study, written in French, Question économique des Principautés Danubiennes, as well as a collaboration with Adam Mickiewicz on La Tribune des Peuples. Stricken by tuberculosis, impoverished, and constantly moving between various locations in France and the Italian Peninsula, he died in Palermo (in the Two Sicilies) at 33 years of age. Bălcescu never married, though he and his lover Alexandra Florescu had a son, Bonifaciu Florescu (1848–1899), who became a professor of French language and literature.

Nationalization of his properties
In the present his properties remain nationalized by the Romanian Government 2011, after 1945, as Bălcesti Giltofani Land in Bălcești which in the present is Nicolae Bălcescu Museum, taken from Bălcescu's family member Radu Mandrea and Aristide Razu, in 1948 by a "donation act" towards the Communist Government, in Romania, in Vâlcea County.

Also his earthly remains, remain in Palermo, Italy, although the Communist Party of Romania tried to bring them back to Romania in 1970, to use them for communist propaganda. The Capuchin Monks in Palermo at the Capuchin Monastery, also known as Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, denied to the Romanian Communist Delegation of Historians access to the grave.

title: Nicolae Bălcescu


text:
Jefferson, Maryland

Jefferson is an unincorporated community and census-designated place (CDP) in Frederick County, Maryland, United States. As of the 2020 census the town had a population of 2,235 (which includes the widespread area of the town's zip code, not Jefferson proper). Jefferson was established in 1774 and incorporated as a town in 1831. However, a year later, in 1832, the citizens of the town decided that municipal government was unnecessary, and dis-incorporated the town, which has been unincorporated since then.

History
According to archaeologist Mary F. Barse, Jefferson was initially laid out in 1774 on a 96 acre tract owned by Mrs. Eleanor Medley, which was ultimately called "New Town". It contained 40 rectangular lots – 20 aligned on each side of what is now MD 180 – stretching between what are now Lander Road and Old Middletown Road. In 1795, 22 additional lots were platted by Elias Delashmutt on the western end of the original section, and called "New Freedom". In 1831 both sections were incorporated as "Jefferson" by the Maryland Legislature.

Jefferson's growth in the 19th century was due largely to its location on the main road between Frederick and Harpers Ferry, which is today's Maryland Route 180. Along this thoroughfare, wagon traffic and livestock drives were frequent. Concomitantly, commercial development intensified to serve the surrounding farms as well as travelers. As a center of agricultural mercantilism, throughout most of the late 18th and 19th century, Jefferson was also home to a sizable population of slaves.

The Hagerstown and Frederick Railway linked Jefferson to Frederick and Hagerstown in 1907. However, Jefferson Pike remained the only link to the closest steam powered rail station in Brunswick.

Examined historic maps (Griffith 1795; Bond 1858; Martenet 1865, 1885; Lake 1873; USGS1910) depict Jefferson on what is now MD 180 as early as 1795. It was designated "Trap Town" at the close of the 18th century by Griffith (1795). Local history suggests that the name derives from the large number of taverns operating at the time, which were purportedly, on either ends of town. Consequently, a traveler could be "trapped" on their way in or out of town.

The Lewis Mill Complex and the George Willard House are National Register of Historic Places properties near Jefferson.

Geography
Jefferson is located in southwestern Frederick County at the western base of Catoctin Mountain. Maryland Route 180 passes through the town, and U.S. Route 340 bypasses it to the south, forming the southern edge of the CDP. US 340 leads northeast 9 mi to Frederick, the county seat, and southwest 13 mi to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the Jefferson CDP has an area of 5.4 sqkm, all land.

Mar-Lu-Ridge Summer Camp and Education and Conference Center, located on the crest of Catoctin Mountain, 4 mi south of Jefferson, has been a main retreat and outdoor ministry site for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America since 1959.

title: Jefferson, Maryland


text:
Megastructure

A megastructure is a very large artificial object, although the limits of precisely how large vary considerably. Some apply the term to any especially large or tall building. Some sources define a megastructure as an enormous self-supporting artificial construct. The products of megascale engineering or astroengineering are megastructures.

Most megastructure designs could not be constructed with today's level of industrial technology. This makes their design examples of speculative (or exploratory) engineering. Those that could be constructed easily qualify as megaprojects.

Megastructures are also an architectural concept popularized in the 1960s where a city could be encased in a single building, or a relatively small number of buildings interconnected. Such arcology concepts are popular in science fiction. Megastructures often play a part in the plot or setting of science fiction movies and books, such as Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke.

In 1968, Ralph Wilcoxen defined a megastructure as any structural framework into which rooms, houses, or other small buildings can later be installed, uninstalled, and replaced; and which is capable of "unlimited" extension. This type of framework allows the structure to adapt to the individual wishes of its residents, even as those wishes change with time.

Other sources define a megastructure as "any development in which residential densities are able to support services and facilities essential for the development to become a self-contained community".

Many architects have designed such megastructures. Some of the more notable such architects and architectural groups include the Metabolist Movement, Archigram, Cedric Price, Frei Otto, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Yona Friedman, and Buckminster Fuller.

Existing
There are structures that may be considered megastructures, such as
 * The Great Wall of China is a human-built megastructure, a few meters wide and 3947 mi in length, about 4975318 yd2.
 * The Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras, a 10360 km2 sprawling agricultural landscape carved in the mountains by free tribesmen of Ifugao some 6,000 to 2,000 years ago.
 * Skyscrapers represent the current state-of-the-art in large structure engineering. (See the List of tallest buildings and structures in the world and list of largest buildings in the world.)
 * The Large Hadron Collider consists of, among other structures, a ring 27 kilometers in circumference.

Networks of roads or railways, and collections of buildings (cities and associated suburbs), are usually not considered megastructures, despite frequently qualifying based on size. However, an ecumenopolis might qualify.

Proposed

 * Atlantropa, a hydroelectric dam to be built across the Strait of Gibraltar, lowering the surface of the Mediterranean Sea by as much as 200 meters.
 * Trans-Global Highway, highway systems that would link all six of the inhabited continents on Earth. The highway would network new and existing bridges and tunnels, not only improving ground transportation but also potentially offering a conduit for utility pipelines.
 * Cloud nine is Buckminster Fuller's proposal for a tensegrity sphere a mile in radius which would be large enough so that it would float in the sky if heated by only one degree above ambient temperature, creating habitats for mini cities of thousands of people in each "Cloud Nine". Fuller also proposed a marine analog consisting of a hollow terraced floating tetrahedron of reinforced concrete measuring one mile from vertex to vertex supporting a population of one million living in air-deployed residential modules on the exterior with the requisite infrastructure providing utilities (water, power, sewerage, etc.) inside. The modules would have standardized utility ports so as to be completely livable within minutes of arrival, and could be subsequently detached and moved to other such cities.
 * The Line, a 170-kilometer-long linear settlement in Saudi Arabia, a smart city currently in the early stages of construction.

Theoretical
A number of theoretical structures have been proposed which may be considered megastructures.

Stellar scale
Most stellar scale megastructure proposals are designs to make use of the energy from a sun-like star while possibly still providing gravity or other attributes that would make it attractive for an advanced civilization.
 * The Alderson disk is a theoretical structure in the shape of a disk, whose outer radius is equivalent to the orbit of Mars or Jupiter and whose thickness is several thousand kilometers. A civilization could live on either side, held by the gravity of the disk and still receive sunlight from a star bobbing up and down in the middle of the disk.
 * A Dyson sphere (also known as a Dyson shell) refers to a structure or mass of orbiting objects that completely surrounds a star to make full use of its solar energy.
 * A Matrioshka brain is a collection of multiple concentric Dyson spheres which make use of star's energy for computing.
 * A Stellar engine either uses the temperature difference between a star and interstellar space to extract energy or serves as a Shkadov thruster.
 * A Shkadov thruster accelerates an entire star through space by selectively reflecting or absorbing light on one side of it.
 * Topopolis (also known as Cosmic Spaghetti) is a large tube that rotates to provide artificial gravity.
 * A Ringworld (or Niven Ring) is an artificial ring encircling a star, rotating faster than orbital velocity to create artificial gravity on its inner surface. A non-rotating variant is a transparent ring of breathable gas, creating a continuous microgravity environment around the star, as in the eponymous Smoke Ring.

Related structures which might not be classified as individual stellar megastructures, but occur on a similar scale:

 * A Dyson swarm is a Dyson sphere made up of separately orbiting elements (including large habitats) rather than a single continuous shell.
 * A Dyson bubble is a Dyson sphere in which the individual elements are statites, non-orbital objects held aloft by the pressure of sunlight.

Planetary scale

 * A Bishop Ring, Halo or Orbital is a space habitat similar to but much smaller than a Niven Ring. Instead of being centered on a star, it is in orbit around the star and its diameter is typically on the order of magnitude of a planet. By tilting the ring relative to its orbit, the inner surface would experience a nearly conventional day and night cycle. Due to its enormous scale, the habitat would not need to be fully enclosed like the Stanford torus, instead its atmosphere would be retained solely by centripetal gravity and side walls, allowing an open sky.
 * Globus Cassus is a hypothetical proposed project for the transformation of Planet Earth into a much bigger, hollow, artificial world with the ecosphere on its inner surface. This model serves as a tool to understand the World's real functioning processes.
 * Shellworlds or paraterraforming are inflated shells holding high pressure air around an otherwise airless world to create a breathable atmosphere. The pressure of the contained air supports the weight of the shell.
 * Completely hollow shell worlds can also be created on a planetary or larger scale by contained gas alone, also called gravitational balloons, as long as the outward pressure from the contained gas balances the gravitational contraction of the entire structure, resulting in no net force on the shell. The scale is limited only by the mass of gas enclosed, the shell can be made of any mundane material. The shell can have an additional atmosphere on the outside.
 * It can also refer to terraformed or artificial planets with multiple concentric layers.

Orbital structures

 * An orbital ring is a dynamically elevated ring placed around the Earth that rotates at an angular rate that is faster than orbital velocity at that altitude, stationary platforms can be supported by the excess centripetal acceleration of the super-orbiting ring (similar in principle to a Launch loop), and ground-tethers can be supported from stationary platforms.
 * The Bernal sphere is a proposal for a spherical space colony with a maximum diameter of 16 kilometers. It would have gravity at the equator, and gradually turn to zero G at the poles.
 * Rotating wheel space stations, such as the Stanford torus, are wheel-like space station which produce artificial gravity by rotation. Typical designs include transport spokes to a central hub used for docking and/or micro-gravity research.
 * The related concepts, O'Neill and McKendree cylinders, are both pairs of counter-rotating cylinders containing habitable areas inside and creating 1g on their inner surfaces via centripetal acceleration. The scale of each concept came from estimating the largest 1g cylinder that could be built from steel (O'Neill) or carbon fiber (McKendree).
 * Hollowed asteroids (or Bubble worlds or Terraria) are spun on their axis for simulated gravity and filled with air, allowing them to be inhabited on the inside. In some concepts, the asteroid is heated to molten rock and inflated into its final form.
 * A stellaser is a star-powered laser or maser.

Trans-orbital structures

 * A skyhook is a very long tether that hangs down from orbit.
 * A space elevator is a tether that is fixed to the ground, extending beyond geostationary orbital altitude, such that centripetal force exceeds gravitational force, leaving the structure under slight outward tension.
 * A space fountain is a dynamically supported structure held up by the momentum of masses which are shot up to the top at high speeds from the ground.
 * A launch loop (or Lofstrom loop) is a dynamically supported 2000 km long iron loop that projects up in an arc to 80 km that is ridden by maglev cars while achieving orbital velocity.
 * StarTram Generation 2 is a maglev launch track extending from the ground to above 96% of the atmosphere's mass, supported by magnetic levitation.
 * A rotovator is a rotating tether where the lower tip is moving in the opposite direction to the tether's orbital velocity, reducing the difference in velocity relative to the ground, and hence reducing the velocity of rendezvous; the upper tip is likewise moving at greater than orbital velocity, allowing propellantless transfer between orbits. Around an airless world, such as the moon, the lower tip can actually touch the ground with zero horizontal velocity. As with any momentum exchange tether, orbital energy is gained or lost in the transfer.

Fictional
A number of structures have appeared in fiction which may be considered megastructures.

Stellar scale

 * The Dyson sphere has appeared in many works of fiction, including the Star Trek universe.
 * Larry Niven's series of novels beginning with Ringworld centered on, and originated the concept of a ringworld, or Niven ring. A ringworld is an artificial ring with a radius roughly equal to the radius of the Earth's orbit (1 AU). A star is present in the center and the ring spins to create g-forces, with inner walls to hold in the atmosphere. The structure is unstable, and required the author to include workarounds in subsequent novels set on it.
 * In the manga Blame! the megastructure is a vast and chaotic complex of metal, concrete, stone, etc., that covers the Earth and assimilates the Moon, and eventually expands to encompass a volume greater than the orbit of Jupiter.
 * In White Light by William Barton and Michael Capobianco, a Topopolis is presented as taking over the entire universe.
 * In the Heechee Saga series by Frederik Pohl, a race of pure energy beings called The Foe have constructed the Kugelblitz, a black hole made of energy and not matter.
 * In the Xeelee series of books by Stephen Baxter, the eponymous alien race constructed the Ring, a megastructure made of cosmic strings, spanning over 10 million light years.
 * In Freelancer, The Dom'Kavosh's Dyson shell that is inhabited by a drone race created by the Dom'Kavosh, Nomads. This is reached via a hyper gate, created by the same creators as the Dyson sphere.
 * The Saga of Cuckoo series novel Wall Around a Star mentions a proposal to build a super dyson sphere, completely enclosing the Galactic Center.
 * The title of the novel Helix by Eric Brown directly references a stellar-scale helical megastructure. Different types of environments and habitats are interspersed along the structure, while their varying distance from the central star affects the climate.
 * The player's central quest in computer game Dyson Sphere Program is to construct a Dyson sphere. Gameplay focuses on constructing planetary scale factories as a means towards this end.
 * The Quarg in the game Endless Sky are shown building a massive ring around one of their stars, which is most likely around one astronomical unit in diameter. A completed version of this can also be found in another location.
 * In computer games Space Empires IV and Space Empires V, the player can construct sphereworlds and ringworlds around stars.
 * Dennis E. Taylor's 2020 novel Heaven's River features a Topopolis built around an alien system. Different segments of the structure are built with artificial climate and weather.

Planetary and orbital scale

 * Several structures from the fictional Halo universe:
 * The original twelve Halos, seen in Halo: Cryptum, were 30,000 kilometers in diameter; a separate array of six Halos are 10,000 kilometers in diameter, with one of the original twelve later being reduced to this size in Halo: Primordium.
 * The Lesser Ark is a 127,530 km diameter structure from which the Halo Array can be activated and capable of building 10,000 km Halos. The "greater" Ark, seen in Cryptum and Primordium, is capable of producing 30,000 km Halos.
 * Onyx is an artificial planet made entirely out of Forerunner Sentinels (advanced replicating robots). At its core is a "shield world", contained within slipstream space, that is approximately one astronomical unit in diameter. The much smaller Shield World 0459, (approximately 1,400 km in diameter), is the setting for the latter half of Halo Wars. A third shield world, Requiem, is the primary setting for Halo 4. Requiem is an artificial hollow planet encased in a kind of Dyson Sphere. Halo 5: Guardians introduces a fourth shield world, Genesis.
 * High Charity, the Covenant's mobile planetoid station.
 * In the Doctor Who episodes The Stolen Earth and Journey’s End, a planet-sized space station known as The Crucible is built by the Daleks, a genocidal alien race, and facilitates the reality bomb, a weapon meant to erase the entire multiverse from existence. The Crucible also held enough Daleks to slaughter the universe they were in even without the bomb, according to The Doctor.
 * In Sonic Adventure 2 and Shadow The Hedgehog, the Eclipse Cannon is a planet-destroying WMD built inside of the Space Colony Ark.
 * Buster Machine III from Gunbuster.
 * The Culture Orbital from The Culture.
 * In the 2013 CGI anime film, Space Pirate Captain Harlock, the Jovian Accelerator is an ancient, Death Star-like Weapon of mass destruction that uses energy from Jupiter's atmosphere to create a large beam of intense light strong enough to destroy an entire planet.
 * Sidonia, the main ship and home of millions of humans, 1000 years in the future in the Knights of Sidonia manga and anime series, created after the destruction of the earth along with other unnamed seed ships.
 * Trantor, the capital of an interstellar empire in Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, is an ecumenopolis, a planet entirely covered in one huge metal-clad building, with only one small green space: the Emperor's palace grounds.
 * The Ori Supergate seen in a number of episodes of Stargate SG1 could be classed as a megastructure.
 * In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, Earth, as well as other planets, were artificial megastructures. Earth was intended to function as a gigantic computer and was built by a race of beings who made their living by manufacturing other planets.
 * Mata-Nui in the BIONICLE franchise is classifiable as a megastructure. In the story, he is a massive robot as tall as a planet, and inside his body, every inhabitant of the BIONICLE Universe (Matoran, Toa, etc.) all live, unaware that they live inside a massive, space-traveling entity.
 * In the Robotech Sentinels novels, Haydon IV is an artificially constructed cyber-planet with android citizens.
 * In the Invader Zim episode "Planet Jackers", two aliens surround the Earth with a fake sky in order to throw it into their sun.
 * In the 2017 video game Destiny 2, the fleet of Dominus Ghaul, the ruler of the Cabal Empire, features a massive super-weapon named the Almighty, whose wingspan is said to be as wide as the planet Mercury. Almighty links itself to a solar system's star on the quantum level via an energy beam and breaks it down into usable fuel, warping to another system before the star collapses into a supernova.
 * Nightmare's fortress from Kirby: Right Back at Ya! can be classified as a megastructure because it is the size of a small planet.
 * In several works, Arthur C. Clarke writes about a colossal hollow tube, first described in Rendezvous with Rama (1973), and inhabited by different races.
 * The Citadel in the Mass Effect universe is an enormous space station constructed by an ancient race of machines called the Reapers millions of years before the games in the series. At the time of Mass Effect 2, its population is 13.2 million.
 * In the game Airforce Delta Strike a large Space Elevator called the Chiron Lift is used to send supplies out into outer space.
 * In the Warhammer 40,000 series, the Imperial Palace (site of the Golden Throne wherein the Emperor of Mankind is kept alive indefinitely) could be considered a megastructure. The palace is a complex of continent-wide structures with the Golden Throne being located in an area stretching across the whole of the Himalayan mountains.
 * In the film Elysium, a luxury space station (a Bishop Ring) called Elysium houses the wealthy population of the human species.
 * Large rotating space-stations are a staple of science fiction, including Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, the battle school from Ender's Game, and the eponymous Babylon 5.
 * Hollowed asteroids feature in various fiction, such as Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312, Larry Niven's Known Space, and Golden Age SF writers like Clarke and Asimov.
 * In the 2022 film Moonfall, Earth's moon is knocked from its orbit and begins to circle closer to Earth. A conspiracy theorist believes the Moon is a Dyson sphere megastructure and turns out to be correct.

Star Wars (1977 – present, American sci-fi franchise)

 * The Death Star from Star Wars is 160 km in diameter, followed by a second Death Star 200km in diameter.
 * Starkiller Base was constructed from the dwarf planet Ilum, depending on the source it's diameter 660 to 830 km.
 * The Centerpoint Station was a 350 km spherical space station at the Lagrangian point between the planets Talus and Tralus in the Corellia system. It was a gigantic and ancient hyperspace tractor beam with which an ancient race, known as Celestials, created the Corellia star system. With the help of the tractor beam, whole planets could be moved through hyperspace and arranged into their actual orbits around the central star. On the other hand, the same technology could be used as a weapon to destroy even stars. On the inside of the main sphere, a huge living space called Hollowtown was home to many people in a similar fashion as on the inside of a Dyson sphere.
 * A second, smaller megastructure of near-identical design, called Sinkhole Station, was also built shortly after the construction of Centerpoint Station. Its purpose was to maintain the stability of The Maw, a black hole cluster constructed using Centerpoint Station.
 * Coruscant is an ecumenopolis, the planet is entirely covered by and essentially a city. It serves as the capital of first the Republic and then later the First Galactic Empire.
 * The Galaxy Gun, a large space station designed to destroy entire planets from across the galaxy could be considered a megastructure because its size is more than seven kilometres long.
 * The Star Forge from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.
 * Glavis Ringworld is a ring shaped space station around a star in The Book of Boba Fett.
 * The Core World Kuat was circled by an orbital ring used primarily as a shipyard.
 * There are multiple instances of hollowed asteroids, such as Hammer Station and the Eye of Palpatine.

Stellaris (2016 video game)

 * Stellar-Scale Megastructures
 * A Dyson Sphere is a megastructure added in the Utopia expansion, capable of producing massive amounts of energy at the cost of rendering the solar system uninhabitable, except for Habitats.
 * A Ring World is a megastructure added in the Utopia expansion, offering a solar-system sized habitat equivalent to four massive habitable planets.
 * A Matter Decompressor is a megastructure added in the Megacorp expansion to the game and allows the owner to harvest massive amounts of minerals from the cores of Black Holes.
 * A Mega-Shipyard is a massive shipyard in orbit of a star, capable of producing ships much faster than average shipyards.
 * The Aetherophasic Engine is a megastructure built by crisis aspirants, capable of destroying the entire galaxy as a side-product of allowing the race which constructed it to ascend to the "Shroud", an alternate dimension in the game composed of nearly pure energy
 * A Quantum Catapult is a large megastructure built around a pulsar or neutron star that is capable of sending fleets instantly across the galaxy. It however is not completely accurate and thus can send fleets away from their intended destinations.
 * Orbital/Planetary Scale Megastructures
 * A Science Nexus is a massive orbital science laboratory which expands the empire's science production massively.
 * A Sentry Array is a massive orbital station that gives you sight over the entire in-game galaxy.
 * Habitats are orbital structures which serve the purpose of a small planet.
 * A Mega Art Installation is a megastructure that improves your overall amenities and happiness in your empire.
 * A Strategic Coordination Center is a megastructure that Increases your naval capacity, and ship speed, as well as adds several other bonuses.
 * An Interstellar Assembly acts as a hub for the game's Galactic Community, increases your diplomatic weight, adds more envoys, and another empire's opinion of you.
 * Gateways allow for near-instantaneous travel across the galaxy. In addition, there is a unique form of Gateway called "L-Gates" which link up to an extragalactic cluster of stars.
 * Orbital Rings are massive ring structures built around planets that afford extra protection and increase the output of the planet.
 * Hyper Relays are large structures that allow ships to jump to identical Hyper Relays in adjacent systems instead of using the existing hyperlane connections, thereby avoiding having to traverse systems at sublight speeds.
 * In addition, many megastructures can also generate in "ruined" versions, which the player can later repair.

title: Megastructure


text:
Talk:Nicolae Bălcescu

Untitled
This article, a fairly direct translation of the version from the Romanian Wikipedia, is not particularly well-written, and lacks important explanatory information in a few areas. I'm full aware of this. I hope that someone who is more qualified to contribute would come along and improve it. --SeekingOne 13:12, Sep 30, 2004 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Nicolae Bălcescu. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20060909041033/http://www.ohiou.edu/%7eChastain/ac/balcescu.htm to http://www.ohiou.edu/~Chastain/ac/balcescu.htm

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 22:49, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

title: Talk:Nicolae Bălcescu


text:
Ie

Ie, ie, IE or I/E may refer to:

Arts and entertainment

 * Iced Earth, a band from Florida, US
 * Improv Everywhere, a comedy group
 * Into Eternity (band), a band from Canada
 * Individual events (speech), events centred around public speaking

Businesses and organizations

 * Iarnród Éireann, or Irish Rail
 * Identity Evropa, a white supremacist group in the United States
 * Ie (trading houses), a Japanese cottage industry
 * IE Business School, formerly Instituto de Empresa, a business school in Spain
 * Institut Eksekutif, an educational institution in Malaysia
 * Institute for Energy, of the European Union
 * Instituto Escuela (disambiguation), various entities
 * Solomon Airlines (IATA airline designator)

Language

 * id est (i.e.), Latin for "that is" or "in other words"
 * ie (digraph)
 * Indian English, the form of English spoken in the Republic of India
 * International English, a global English language
 * -ie, an English diminutive suffix
 * Ye (Cyrillic), also spelled Ie, a Cyrillic letter that looks exactly like the Latin E
 * Ukrainian Ye, also spelled Ie, the Cyrillic letter Є
 * Interlingue, originally the Occidental language (ISO 639-1 code IE)
 * Indo-European language family

Places

 * Republic of Ireland, by ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code
 * Inland Empire, California, US
 * Ie, Okinawa, Japan
 * Old Irish name for the Scottish island of Iona (or Ì Chaluim Chille)
 * Ie, Noardeast-Fryslân, Netherlands

Computing

 * Internet Explorer, a web browser by Microsoft
 * .ie, Internet top-level domain for Ireland
 * Industrial Ethernet, a version of Ethernet
 * Infinity Engine, a video game engine
 * Information extraction, a type of information retrieval
 * IntelliMouse Explorer, a brand of mouse by Microsoft

Other uses in science and technology

 * Inclusion/exclusion criteria, in clinical trials
 * Industrial ecology, the study of sustainable industrial systems
 * Industrial engineering, an engineering discipline
 * Information engineering, an engineering discipline
 * Infective endocarditis, a form of endocarditis caused by infectious agents
 * Information Element, a basic building block of wireless messages in a cellular network
 * Ionization energy, the energy required to strip an atom or molecule of an electron

Other uses

 * Ie, the classical Japanese family system
 * Ie, a shirt in traditional Romanian dress

title: Ie