title: Sister Wives

text: Mark A. Perigard of the "Boston Herald" criticized Kody Brown for opening himself and his family up to potential criminal prosecution by appearing in the series, describing him as "a lawbreaker who is risking himself and the family he claims is so precious just to star in his own TV show". Elizabeth Tenety of "The Washington Post" called the series "one part domestic drudgery, another part sensationalism" and claimed it relied on a "familiar reality TV recipe" shared by other TLC series such as "19 Kids and Counting" and "Kate Plus 8". "Religion Dispatches" writer Joanna Brooks shared Tenety's perspective, criticizing the show for presenting polygamy in a manner that "is about as interesting to me as Kate Gosselin's latest makeover." In this vein Brooks criticized the show for not engaging the theology of plural marriage and for letting Kody Brown's superficial comments about the dissimilarity of Fundamentalist and mainstream Mormonism pass onto the viewers without any critical scrutiny or added nuance. Shari Puterman, television columnist with the "Asbury Park Press", felt the sister wives had issues with jealousy and self-worth, and she compared Kody to a cult leader. Puterman added, "I can't speak for everyone, but I believe in the sanctity of marriage. It's sad to see that TLC's capitalizing on people who don't." Former prosecutor and television personality Nancy Grace criticized the show and said she believed Kody Brown should go to jail, but she expressed doubt he would, based on Utah's history of overlooking polygamy. Christine Seifert, an associate professor of communications at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, said the show could give viewers who are unfamiliar with the LDS church the incorrect assumption that polygamy is accepted by the mainstream church. Several commentators have taken notice of the fact that the family's religious convictions are downplayed in "Sister Wives".


title: Sister Wives

text: According to Nielsen Media Research, the September 26, 2010, one-hour premiere episode of "Sister Wives" drew 2.26 million viewers, a strong rating for the network. It marked the biggest series debut for TLC since "Cake Boss" launched in 2009 and was a stronger rating than any of the season premieres for HBO's "Big Love". The remaining episodes of the first season were each half an hour long, with two broadcasts together each Thursday. In the second week, the first episode drew 1.88 million viewers, while the second drew 2.13 million. The third week drew similar results, with 1.89 million viewers watching the first episode and 2.05 million watching the second. "Sister Wives" drew its strongest ratings during the fourth and final week of the first season, with 2.67 million viewers for the first episode and 2.74 million for the season finale. As a result of the 2.7 million average viewership for the two episodes, TLC ranked first among all ad-support cable channels in the 18–49 and 25–54 age groups. The series drew double- and triple-digit rating gains in all key demographics and ranked second in ad-supported cable network shows during its timeslot.


title: Sister Wives

text: Kody Brown, along with his wives, filed a legal case in the United States federal courts challenging the State of Utah's criminal polygamy law. The Browns prevailed in a 2013 federal district court ruling, but a unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ordered the case to be dismissed on standing grounds in 2016. The Tenth Circuit concluded that, because local Utah prosecutors had a policy of not pursuing most polygamy cases in the absence of additional associated crimes (e.g., welfare fraud or marriage of underage persons), the Browns had no credible fear of future prosecution and thus lacked standing.


title: MGMT

text: MGMT () is an American indie rock band formed in 2002 in Middletown, Connecticut. It was founded by multi-instrumentalists Andrew VanWyngarden and Ben Goldwasser. Alongside VanWyngarden and Goldwasser, MGMT's live lineup currently consists of drummer Will Berman, bassist Simon O'Connor, and guitarist and keyboard James Richardson.


title: MGMT

text: Originally signed to Cantora Records by the nascent label's co-founder, NYU undergrad Will Griggs, MGMT later signed with Columbia and RED Ink in 2006 and released their debut album "Oracular Spectacular" the next year. After the release of "Oracular Spectacular" Richardson, Berman and Matthew Asti joined the core band in the studio for "Congratulations," which was released on April 13, 2010. In January 2011 they began work on their eponymous third studio album. It was released on September 17, 2013, and was released as an early exclusive on Rdio on September 9, 2013. The group's fourth studio album, titled "Little Dark Age", was released in February 2018 and marked the end of their contract with Columbia. Beginning in 2019, the duo began producing music independent of a label for the first time since 2006. In late 2019, the two released a new song called "In the Afternoon" as their first fully self-produced single.


title: MGMT

text: On October 5, 2007, "Spin" named MGMT "Artist of the Day". In November "Rolling Stone" pegged MGMT as a top ten "Artist to Watch" in 2008 and went on to name "Oracular Spectacular" number 494 in their top 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. The band placed ninth in the BBC's "Sound of 2008 Top Ten Poll". They were also named as Last.fm's most played new artist of 2008 in their "Best of 2008" list. At the 51st Grammy Awards, the Justice remix of "Electric Feel" won the Grammy Award for Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical. The group was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best New Artist and "Kids" was nominated for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals at the 52nd Grammy Awards.


title: MGMT

text: Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden formed the band while attending Wesleyan University during their freshman year. "We weren't trying to start a band," remarked Goldwasser. "We were just hanging out and showing each other music that we liked." VanWyngarden named Talking Heads and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) as artists who are "definitely in [their] blood". They experimented with noise rock and electronica before settling on what Paco Alvarez of "Spin" calls "their current brand of shape-shifting psychedelic pop." In 2002, the duo attended the inaugural Bonnaroo together as fans. The band formed under the name The Management and released two demo albums, "We (Don't) Care" and "Climbing to New Lows", under that name; but since the name was already being used by another band, they later changed it to MGMT, a disemvowelment of the original band name. While at Wesleyan, they were schoolmates of Francis and the Lights, with whom they have since toured. VanWyngarden and Goldwasser graduated in 2005 and toured extensively in support of the "Time to Pretend EP" released in the same year, opening for indie pop band of Montreal.


title: MGMT

text: In the autumn of 2006 Maureen Kenny signed the band to Columbia Records. When the band received a call from the A&R department of Columbia Records saying they were interested in their music, they thought it was a joke. The duo recorded with Flaming Lips/Sleater-Kinney music producer Dave Fridmann in 2007 for their major label debut, "Oracular Spectacular". MGMT opened for Of Montreal on tour in autumn 2007 as a five-piece touring band including Matthew Asti (bass), James Richardson (drums), and Hank Sullivant (guitar). In November 2007, they performed for the first time in Europe, supporting the band Samantha and The Courteeners at Koko in London, England. After March 2008, Hank Sullivant left the band to pursue his own band, Kuroma. Will Berman joined as the new drummer, James Richardson switched from drums to guitar, and Matthew Asti remained on bass.


title: MGMT

text: In June 2008 the band supported Radiohead on the Manchester date of their world tour and went on a headline tour of the UK during November 2008, playing at venues such as Manchester Academy and Shepherd's Bush Empire. MGMT opened for M.I.A. on the Vassar College date of her 2008 tour, and also played several shows with Beck during his 2008 tour. They appeared at the 2008 and 2009 editions of the Bonnaroo Music Festival. Bruce Springsteen was in attendance during their 2009 Bonnaroo late-night set, which followed his headlining appearance on What Stage. They also toured Australia with a headlining spot on the Meredith Music Festival line-up. The group played a show at the Virgin Music Festival on the Toronto Islands on September 6, 2008, playing nine songs off their "Oracular Spectacular" album. They also played the 2008 Street Scene festival in San Diego, California. On February 27, 2009, MGMT performed alongside Spectrum at The Dome in Finsbury Park. MGMT also played another show in Australia at the 2009 Splendour in the Grass Festival. They headlined this music festival along with other well known bands such as Bloc Party, The Flaming Lips, Happy Mondays, and Jane's Addiction. MGMT opened for Paul McCartney, an admitted fan, at Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts, on August 5 and 6, 2009. On August 15, 2009, MGMT played in Hamburg, Germany, at the Dockville Festival and performed several songs from their upcoming album. MGMT was one of the headlining bands for the Treasure Island Music Festival on Treasure Island in San Francisco, California, on October 17, 2009.


title: MGMT

text: MGMT's "Congratulations" was released on April 13, 2010. The band, including Matthew Asti, James Richardson, and Will Berman from the live band, spent the summer of 2009 in Malibu, California, recording the album with Pete Kember (a.k.a. Sonic Boom), formerly of Spacemen 3 and Spectrum, serving as producer/guru, and long-time friend Billy Bennett (also an NCAA record-holding kicker for the University of Georgia), as engineer. MGMT originally suggested that they might not release any singles from the album. By July 2010, however, four single releases from the album had been confirmed. The album cover art for "Congratulations" was created for MGMT by Anthony Ausgang and the overall design of the packaging is by Josh Cheuse of Sony Entertainment. On March 9, 2010, MGMT released the song "Flash Delirium" for free download on their official website. On March 20, the band allowed users to stream their new album from their website.


title: MGMT

text: MGMT started their Congratulations Tour on April 12, 2010, in San Francisco, California, at The Fillmore. They performed on April 23 at Brown University's Spring Weekend; on April 27 at Yale University's Spring Fling; on April 30 at the University of New Hampshire's Spring Climax; and on May 1 at Fordham University's Spring Weekend. They performed on "Saturday Night Live" on April 24, 2010, and on the "Late Show with David Letterman" on May 12 to promote their new album, and on June 11, MGMT played their largest headlining show anywhere in the world with a sold-out, 9,500 capacity gig at the Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Morrison, Colorado. On June 25, MGMT performed on "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon", and on July 23, they were the musical guests on "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson".


title: MGMT

text: On August 25, MGMT released a music video for "Congratulations", the third video of their second album.


title: MGMT

text: In January 2012, MGMT confirmed in an interview with "Intercourse Magazine" that they had started work on their third album, with VanWyngarden stating that he had written five songs. On February 27, 2012, MGMT began recording the album with Dave Fridmann at his Tarbox Road Studios. In March 2012, VanWyngarden said that MGMT will perform new songs on their upcoming shows in Latin America. On March 30, 2012, the band premiered a new song, entitled "Alien Days", at a show in Bogotá, Colombia. The band performed on August 3, 2012 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada at Osheaga, and on August 5, 2012 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania at Musikfest. In January 2013, "NME" and "Rolling Stone" published an interview in which the band announced that the album was tentatively scheduled for a June 2013 release. As of March 2013, the process of recording the album at Tarbox Road Studios with Fridmann was near completion.


title: MGMT

text: On April 20, 2013, the band released the studio version of "Alien Days". The band then embarked on a spring tour, followed by fall/autumn and winter tour dates for North America. Following VanWyngarden's shoulder surgery in mid-2013, former touring member Hank Sullivant rejoined the band to play live guitar for the remainder of 2013. Sullivant played with VanWyngarden when they were in high school and is in the band Kuroma, whose next album is produced by Goldwasser. The self-titled album was released September 17, 2013. An exclusive early release of the album, along with a full-length music video called "Optimizer", was available from the Rdio music service on September 9, 2013. In June 2013, the band performed at the FireFly Music Festival in Dover, Delaware. They performed at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April 2014 before embarking on a European tour later in June 2014 and performing at the Glastonbury Festival in England. In July 2014, they were nominated for a VMA in the category "Best Editing" for their music video "Your Life is a Lie". After wrapping up touring behind their self-titled album, Goldwasser relocated to LA. In an interview at Falls Festival Marion Bay in 2014, the band announced that they would take a short break and come back stronger with a new sound.


title: MGMT

text: Will Berman stated in an interview with HitFix in April 2015 that "We've been taking a little break I guess. We've been at it for years at this point. There's more to come." He didn't want to speak for either Ben or Andrew on when there would be a new album from the group. On December 26, 2015, the band tweeted announcing that they would return in 2016. The band began working on an untitled new album in October 2016. On May 8, 2017, the band released a teaser video on Instagram alongside the title of the forthcoming album as "Little Dark Age", following a series of cryptic tweets the week prior. On June 21, the band revealed that their next album had been mastered. On October 17, the band released "Little Dark Age", the title track from their new album and their first single in four years. "When You Die" was released as the second single on December 12, 2017. The third single from the record, "Hand It Over", was released on January 5, 2018.


title: MGMT

text: "Rolling Stone" magazine published on January 25, 2018 an interview with MGMT regarding their fourth album "Little Dark Age". MGMT admitted that their two previous albums were so poorly received that they thought they could never have reached peak popularity as they had with the release of their first album. Since their separation, the two core members began working long distances on the album via e-mail. "Little Dark Age" was in part shaped by this unique, distanced relationship between the two musicians, who later decided to meet and jointly work together again.


title: MGMT

text: The band has explained that "Little Dark Age" is both an expression of surprise and dismay to the current political and social climate—particularly the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States—with an occasional reference to their personal lives. Of the election, VanWyngarden stated, "We were like, 'Wow, is it actually possible for the most impossible thing to happen?' [...] Apparently, we were more inspired to write pop music after evil took over the world." Touring guitarist James Richardson also provided inspiration, which resulted in the song 'James' being dedicated to celebrating the band's friendship. The album was released on February 9, 2018, and followed with a North American tour, part of the "Little Dark Age" Tour.


title: MGMT

text: On November 22, 2019, the band performed a new song titled "In the Afternoon" in Las Vegas, Nevada. On December 10, a teaser for the studio version of the song was posted on the band's Instagram page. On December 11, "In the Afternoon" was officially released as a single alongside a music video created by the band. The release marks their first after departing from Columbia Records and the first on their independent label, MGMT Records. On March 20, 2020, the band released another new song, titled "As You Move Through the World".


title: MGMT

text: In June 2021, the band released a statement on Twitter and Instagram hinting that they were working on new music.


title: MGMT

text: On November 11, 2022, the band released their 2011 performance at the Guggenheim Museum as a live album titled "11•11•11" exactly 11 years after being performed.


title: MGMT

text: MGMT's musical style has been characterized as a range of pop and rock genres, including indie pop, synth-pop, psychedelic pop, indie rock, psychedelic rock, neo-psychedelia, and electronic rock. Paco Alvarez of "Spin" described their sound as a "brand of shape-shifting psychedelic pop" and Gavin Haynes of "the Guardian" describes MGMT as being "between pop and experimental".


title: MGMT

text: In January 2009, MGMT demanded compensation from the French Union for a Popular Movement (UMP) Party. The UMP, headed by Nicolas Sarkozy, the former President of France, had used the song "Kids" without permission at a party conference and in two online videos in 2008. In an official statement, MGMT remarked that "the fact that the UMP used our song without permission while simultaneously pushing anti-piracy legislation seemed a little wack." The UMP initially offered a symbolic compensation of €1 to MGMT, but the band refused that offer. Finally, in April 2009, the parties settled out of court, and the UMP agreed to pay MGMT around €2,500 for legal fees and €30,000 (US $39,050) for copyright infringement. MGMT donated this money to artists' rights organizations.


title: MGMT

text: They have collaborated with rapper Kid Cudi, and are featured on the single "Pursuit of Happiness" from his album "". For the 2010 MTV VMA's Kid Cudi was nominated for Best Hip-Hop video for "Pursuit of Happiness". They also collaborated on the track "Worm Mountain" on The Flaming Lips' "Embryonic".


title: MGMT

text: On September 4, 2009, Beck announced his second Record Club covers album, "Songs of Leonard Cohen". MGMT contributed, alongside Devendra Banhart, Andrew Stockdale of Wolfmother and Binki Shapiro of Little Joy.


title: MGMT

text: During the production of "Congratulations" in 2009, VanWyngarden and Goldwasser met with Lou Reed, the former lead singer and guitarist of The Velvet Underground, about contributing vocals to "Lady Dada's Nightmare". VanWyngarden recalls, "he pretty much said it didn't need it. And then he also talked about how we didn't need managers."


title: MGMT

text: In 2010, they provided guest vocals on "Call from the Bank" on rapper Nipsey Hussle's mixtape "The Marathon", which would be their last collaborative effort for ten years until 2020, when they contributed vocals to "The Divine Chord" and "Solitary Ceremonies" alongside guitar work by Johnny Marr on electronic group The Avalanches' third studio album "We Will Always Love You".


title: MGMT

text: In 2012, the group covered "Future Games" by Fleetwood Mac on the tribute album "", produced by Randall Poster.


title: James Horner

text: James Roy Horner (August 14, 1953 – June 22, 2015) was an American composer. He was known for the integration of choral and electronic elements, and for his frequent use of motifs associated with Celtic music.


title: James Horner

text: Horner's first film score was in 1979 for "The Lady in Red", but he did not establish himself as an eminent film composer until his work on the 1982 film "". His for James Cameron's "Titanic" is the best-selling orchestral film soundtrack of all time. He also wrote the score for the highest-grossing film of all time, Cameron's "Avatar". Horner also scored other notable films including "" (1984), "The Name of the Rose" (1986), "Aliens" (1986), Willow (1988), "Field of Dreams" (1989), "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" (1989), "The Rocketeer" (1991), "Braveheart" (1995), "The Mask of Zorro" (1998), "Deep Impact" (1998), "A Beautiful Mind" (2001) and "The Amazing Spider-Man" (2012).


title: James Horner

text: Horner collaborated on multiple projects with directors including Don Bluth, James Cameron, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Joe Johnston, Walter Hill, Ron Howard, Phil Nibbelink and Simon Wells; producers including George Lucas, David Kirschner, Jon Landau, Brian Grazer and Steven Spielberg; and songwriters including Will Jennings, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil. He won two Academy Awards, six Grammy Awards, two Golden Globes, three Satellite Awards, three Saturn Awards, and was nominated for three BAFTA Awards.


title: James Horner

text: Horner, who was an avid pilot, died at the age of 61 in a single-fatality crash while flying his Short Tucano turboprop aircraft.


title: James Horner

text: His father, Harry Horner, was born in Holice, Bohemia, then a part of Austria-Hungary. He emigrated to the United States in 1935 and worked as a set designer and art director. His mother, Joan Ruth (née Frankel), was born to a Canadian family. His brother Christopher is a writer and documentary filmmaker.


title: James Horner

text: Horner started playing piano at the age of five. He also played violin. He spent his early years in London, where he attended the Royal College of Music, where he studied with György Ligeti. He returned to America, where he attended Verde Valley School in Sedona, Arizona, and later received his bachelor's degree in music from the University of Southern California. After earning a master's degree, he started work on his doctorate at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he studied with Paul Reale, among others. After several scoring assignments with the American Film Institute in the 1970s, he finished teaching a course in music theory at UCLA, then turned to film scoring. Horner was also an avid pilot and owned several small airplanes.


title: James Horner

text: Horner's first credits as a feature-film composer were for B-movie director and producer Roger Corman. 1979's "The Lady in Red", was followed by 1980's "Humanoids from the Deep" and "Battle Beyond the Stars". As his work gained notice in Hollywood, Horner was invited to take on larger projects.


title: James Horner

text: Horner's big break came in 1982 when he was asked to score "". It established him as an A-list Hollywood composer. Director Nicholas Meyer quipped that Horner was hired because the studio could no longer afford the first "Trek" movie's composer, Jerry Goldsmith; but that by the time Meyer returned to the franchise with "", the studio could not afford Horner either.


title: James Horner

text: Horner continued writing high-profile film scores in the 1980s, including "48 Hrs." (1982), "Krull" (1983), "" (1984), "Commando" (1985), "Cocoon" (1985), "Aliens" (1986), "Captain EO" (1986), "*batteries not included" (1987), "Willow" (1988), "Glory" and "Field of Dreams" (both 1989). "Cocoon" was the first of his many collaborations with director Ron Howard.


title: James Horner

text: In 1987, Horner's original score for "Aliens" brought him his first Academy Award nomination. "Somewhere Out There," which he co-composed and co-wrote with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil for "An American Tail", was also nominated that year for Best Original Song.


title: James Horner

text: Throughout the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, Horner wrote orchestral scores for family films (particularly those produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment), with credits for "An American Tail" (1986); "The Land Before Time" (1988); "The Rocketeer", "Once Around" and "" (1991); "Once Upon a Forest" and "We're Back! A Dinosaur's Story" (1993); "The Pagemaster" (1994); "Casper", "Jumanji" and "Balto" (1995); "Mighty Joe Young" (1998); and "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" (2000).


title: James Horner

text: Horner scored six films in 1995, including his commercially successful and critically acclaimed works for "Braveheart" and "Apollo 13", both of which received Academy Award nominations.


title: James Horner

text: Horner's biggest critical and financial success came in 1997 with his score for James Cameron's "Titanic". At the 70th Academy Awards, Horner received the Oscar for Best Original Dramatic Score, and shared the Oscar for Best Original Song with co-writer Will Jennings for "My Heart Will Go On". The film's score and song also won three Grammy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. (Ten years earlier, Horner had vowed never to work with Cameron again, referring to the highly stressful scoring sessions for "Aliens" as "a nightmare.")


title: James Horner

text: After "Titanic", Horner continued to compose for major productions, including "The Perfect Storm", "A Beautiful Mind",


title: James Horner

text: "Enemy at the Gates", "The Mask of Zorro", "The Legend of Zorro", "House of Sand and Fog" and "Bicentennial Man". He also worked on smaller projects such as "Iris", "Radio" and "". He received his eighth and ninth Academy Award nominations for "A Beautiful Mind" (2001) and "House of Sand and Fog" (2003), but lost on both occasions to composer Howard Shore.


title: James Horner

text: Horner composed the 2006–2011 theme for the "CBS Evening News", which was introduced during the debut of anchor Katie Couric on September 5, 2006. He wrote various treatments of the theme, explaining, "One night the show might begin with the Iranians obtaining a nuclear device, and another it might be something about a flower show... The tone needs to match the news."


title: James Horner

text: Horner collaborated again with James Cameron on his 2009 film "Avatar", which became the highest-grossing film of all time, surpassing Cameron's own "Titanic". Horner worked exclusively on "Avatar" for over two years. He said, ""Avatar" has been the most difficult film I have worked on, and the biggest job I have undertaken... I work from four in the morning to about ten at night, and that's been my way of life since March. That's the world I'm in now, and it makes you feel estranged from everything. I'll have to recover from that and get my head out of [it]."


title: James Horner

text: "Avatar" brought Horner his tenth Academy Award nomination, as well as nominations for the Golden Globe Award, British Academy Film Award and Grammy Award, all of which he lost to Michael Giacchino for "Up".


title: James Horner

text: After "Avatar", Horner wrote the score for the 2010 version of "The Karate Kid", replacing Atli Örvarsson. In 2011, he scored "Cristiada" (also known as "For Greater Glory"), which was released a year later; and "Black Gold". In 2012 he scored "The Amazing Spider-Man", starring Andrew Garfield. In an interview on his website, Horner revealed that he didn't return to compose the score for the sequel because he didn't like how the movie resulted in comparison to the first movie, calling it "dreadful." He was replaced by Hans Zimmer. James Horner's theme for "The Amazing Spider-Man" would later be incorporated into the film "", composed by Michael Giacchino.


title: James Horner

text: In early 2015, after a three-year hiatus, Horner wrote the music for the adventure film "Wolf Totem", his fourth collaboration with director Jean-Jacques Annaud.


title: James Horner

text: In July 2015, a month after his death, it was discovered Horner had also written the score for the 2016 remake of "The Magnificent Seven", planning it as a surprise.


title: James Horner

text: Horner's scores are also heard in trailers for other films. The climax of "Bishop's Countdown", from his score for "Aliens", ranks as the 5th most commonly used soundtrack cue in trailers.


title: James Horner

text: Horner also wrote the theme music for the Horsemen P-51 Aerobatic Team, and appears in "The Horsemen Cometh", a documentary about the team and the P-51 Mustang fighter plane. The theme is heard at the team's airshow performances.


title: James Horner

text: "Pas de Deux", a double concerto for violin, cello and Orchestra with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, was premiered on November 12, 2014 by Mari and Håkon Samuelsen, with the orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko. Horner also composed "Collage", a concerto for four horns, premiered on March 27, 2015 at London's Royal Festival Hall by the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jaime Martín, with soloists David Pyatt, John Ryan, James Thatcher and Richard Watkins. Two early works, "Spectral Shimmers" (1978) and "A Forest Passage" (2000), are to be performed and recorded for the first time in 2021.


title: James Horner

text: Horner was criticized more than once for reusing passages from his earlier compositions, and for featuring brief excerpts and reworked themes from classical composers. For example, his scores from "" and "" include excerpts from Prokofiev's "Alexander Nevsky" and "Romeo and Juliet"; the action ostinato from "Aliens" is originally from "Wolfen" and the film's main title is almost identical to Aram Khachaturian's Gayane Ballet Suite (Adagio) (already used in an outer space context in "") - Horner was to use it again within the score of "Patriot Games"; the heroic theme from "Willow" is based on that of Robert Schumann's Rhenish Symphony; "Field of Dreams" includes cues from the "Saturday Night Waltz" portion of Aaron Copland's ballet "Rodeo" and Copland's score from "Our Town"; Horner blended part of an early theme from the third movement of Shostakovich's Symphony no. 5 into an action scene in "Patriot Games", and the climactic battle scene in "Glory" includes excerpts from Wagner and Orff. Some critics felt these propensities made Horner's compositions inauthentic or unoriginal. In a 1997 issue of "Film Score Monthly," an editorial review of "Titanic" said Horner was "skilled in the adaptation of existing music into films with just enough variation to avoid legal troubles".


title: James Horner

text: Several critics have noted stark similarities between Braveheart's "Main Theme" and an earlier theme song, Kaoru Wada's "Pai Longing" from the 1991 Japanese anime series "3×3 Eyes".


title: James Horner

text: On at least one occasion, Horner's musical "borrowing" almost led to litigation. Horner's main title for "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" (1989) incorporates cues from the score by Nino Rota from Federico Fellini's film "Amarcord" (1973) and Raymond Scott's piece "Powerhouse B" (1937), the latter often referenced in Carl Stalling's Warner Bros. cartoon scores. Scott's piece was used without payment or credit, leading his estate to threaten legal action against Disney. Disney paid an undisclosed sum in an out-of-court settlement and changed the film's cue sheets to credit Scott.


title: James Horner

text: Horner died on June 22, 2015, when his turboprop aircraft, a Short Tucano with registration number N206PZ, crashed into the Los Padres National Forest near Ventucopa, California. Horner was the only occupant of the aircraft when it took off after fueling at Camarillo Airport. Three days later, on June 25, the Ventura County Medical Examiner's Office ruled the crash an accident. He was survived by his wife, Sara Elizabeth Horner (née Nelson), and two daughters.


title: James Horner

text: Post-accident investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) revealed that the leading cause of the accident was Horner's inability to maintain clearance from terrain during low-level airwork. During the flight, Horner contacted the Southern California Air Route Traffic Control Center, from whom he received advisories while flying over the Chumash Wilderness area. The NTSB interviewed two witnesses of the flight, who were in their homes when Horner flew over them; one said that the plane was flying at between . FAA radar data showed that the plane had made multiple low-altitude turns and performed rapid altitude change maneuvers, flying low through Quatal Canyon and skimming mountain ridgelines by less than .


title: James Horner

text: In addition to Horner's failing to maintain clearance, the NTSB determined there were other key factors that led to the accident. Foremost among these was Horner's use of prescription medications for pain relief and headaches. Toxicology testing found butalbital, codeine, and ethanol in Horner's body (although the ethanol may have been produced by microbial activity after his death).


title: James Horner

text: Contemporaries and collaborators around the world paid their respects to Horner, including composers Hans Zimmer, John Williams, Paul Williams and Alan Menken, and directors Ron Howard and James Cameron. Horner was reported to have been committed to the "Avatar" franchise; Cameron said he and Horner "were looking forward to our next gig." Horner's assistant, Sylvia Patrycja, wrote on her Facebook page, "We have lost an amazing person with a huge heart and unbelievable talent [who] died doing what he loved." Many celebrities, including Russell Crowe, Diane Warren and Celine Dion, also gave their condolences. Dion, who sang "My Heart Will Go On", one of Horner's most popular compositions, which is considered Dion's signature song, wrote on her website that she and husband René Angélil were "shaken by the tragic death" of their friend and "will always remember his kindness and great talent that changed [her] career." Leona Lewis, who recorded Horner's "I See You" for "Avatar", said working with him "was one of the biggest moments of my life." The final films which he composed the score too "Southpaw", "The 33" and "The Magnificent Seven" were all dedicated to his memory as was the film "Hacksaw Ridge". "" which Horner was set to work on before he died was also dedicated to his memory as well as actor Bill Paxton who died in 2017 and previously worked with Horner and Cameron on "Aliens" and "Titanic".


title: James Horner

text: Horner won two Academy Awards, for Best Original Dramatic Score ("Titanic") and Best Original Song ("My Heart Will Go On") in 1998, and was nominated for an additional eight Oscars. He also won two Golden Globe Awards, three Satellite Awards, three Saturn Awards, six Grammys, and was nominated for three British Academy Film Awards.


title: James Horner

text: In October 2013, Horner received the Max Steiner Award at the Hollywood in Vienna Gala, an award given for extraordinary achievement in the field of film music.


title: James Horner

text: In 2005, the American Film Institute unveiled their list of the top twenty-five American film scores. Five of Horner's scores were among 250 nominees, making him the most nominated composer to "not" make the top twenty-five.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: The Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), also known by its original name Rijndael (), is a specification for the encryption of electronic data established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: AES is a variant of the Rijndael block cipher developed by two Belgian cryptographers, Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen, who submitted a proposal to NIST during the AES selection process. Rijndael is a family of ciphers with different key and block sizes. For AES, NIST selected three members of the Rijndael family, each with a block size of 128 bits, but three different key lengths: 128, 192 and 256 bits.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: AES has been adopted by the U.S. government. It supersedes the Data Encryption Standard (DES), which was published in 1977. The algorithm described by AES is a symmetric-key algorithm, meaning the same key is used for both encrypting and decrypting the data.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: In the United States, AES was announced by the NIST as U.S. FIPS PUB 197 (FIPS 197) on November 26, 2001. This announcement followed a five-year standardization process in which fifteen competing designs were presented and evaluated, before the Rijndael cipher was selected as the most suitable.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: AES is included in the ISO/IEC 18033-3 standard. AES became effective as a U.S. federal government standard on May 26, 2002, after approval by the U.S. Secretary of Commerce. AES is available in many different encryption packages, and is the first (and only) publicly accessible cipher approved by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) for top secret information when used in an NSA approved cryptographic module.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: AES is based on a design principle known as a substitution–permutation network, and is efficient in both software and hardware. Unlike its predecessor DES, AES does not use a Feistel network. AES is a variant of Rijndael, with a fixed block size of 128 bits, and a key size of 128, 192, or 256 bits. By contrast, Rijndael "per se" is specified with block and key sizes that may be any multiple of 32 bits, with a minimum of 128 and a maximum of 256 bits. Most AES calculations are done in a particular finite field.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: The key size used for an AES cipher specifies the number of transformation rounds that convert the input, called the plaintext, into the final output, called the ciphertext. The number of rounds are as follows:


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: Each round consists of several processing steps, including one that depends on the encryption key itself. A set of reverse rounds are applied to transform ciphertext back into the original plaintext using the same encryption key.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: In the step, each byte formula_3 in the "state" array is replaced with a formula_4 using an 8-bit substitution box. Note that before round 0, the "state" array is simply the plaintext/input. This operation provides the non-linearity in the cipher. The S-box used is derived from the multiplicative inverse over , known to have good non-linearity properties. To avoid attacks based on simple algebraic properties, the S-box is constructed by combining the inverse function with an invertible affine transformation. The S-box is also chosen to avoid any fixed points (and so is a derangement), i.e., formula_5, and also any opposite fixed points, i.e., formula_6.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: While performing the decryption, the step (the inverse of ) is used, which requires first taking the inverse of the affine transformation and then finding the multiplicative inverse.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: The step operates on the rows of the state; it cyclically shifts the bytes in each row by a certain offset. For AES, the first row is left unchanged. Each byte of the second row is shifted one to the left. Similarly, the third and fourth rows are shifted by offsets of two and three respectively. In this way, each column of the output state of the step is composed of bytes from each column of the input state. The importance of this step is to avoid the columns being encrypted independently, in which case AES would degenerate into four independent block ciphers.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: In the step, the four bytes of each column of the state are combined using an invertible linear transformation. The function takes four bytes as input and outputs four bytes, where each input byte affects all four output bytes. Together with , provides diffusion in the cipher.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: During this operation, each column is transformed using a fixed matrix (matrix left-multiplied by column gives new value of column in the state):


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: Matrix multiplication is composed of multiplication and addition of the entries. Entries are bytes treated as coefficients of polynomial of order formula_8. Addition is simply XOR. Multiplication is modulo irreducible polynomial formula_9. If processed bit by bit, then, after shifting, a conditional XOR with 1B should be performed if the shifted value is larger than FF (overflow must be corrected by subtraction of generating polynomial). These are special cases of the usual multiplication in formula_10.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: In more general sense, each column is treated as a polynomial over formula_10 and is then multiplied modulo formula_12 with a fixed polynomial formula_13. The coefficients are displayed in their hexadecimal equivalent of the binary representation of bit polynomials from formula_14. The step can also be viewed as a multiplication by the shown particular MDS matrix in the finite field formula_10. This process is described further in the article Rijndael MixColumns.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: In the step, the subkey is combined with the state. For each round, a subkey is derived from the main key using Rijndael's key schedule; each subkey is the same size as the state. The subkey is added by combining each byte of the state with the corresponding byte of the subkey using bitwise XOR.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: On systems with 32-bit or larger words, it is possible to speed up execution of this cipher by combining the and steps with the step by transforming them into a sequence of table lookups. This requires four 256-entry 32-bit tables (together occupying 4096 bytes). A round can then be performed with 16 table lookup operations and 12 32-bit exclusive-or operations, followed by four 32-bit exclusive-or operations in the step. Alternatively, the table lookup operation can be performed with a single 256-entry 32-bit table (occupying 1024 bytes) followed by circular rotation operations.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: Using a byte-oriented approach, it is possible to combine the , , and steps into a single round operation.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: The National Security Agency (NSA) reviewed all the AES finalists, including Rijndael, and stated that all of them were secure enough for U.S. Government non-classified data. In June 2003, the U.S. Government announced that AES could be used to protect classified information:


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: The design and strength of all key lengths of the AES algorithm (i.e., 128, 192 and 256) are sufficient to protect classified information up to the SECRET level. TOP SECRET information will require use of either the 192 or 256 key lengths. The implementation of AES in products intended to protect national security systems and/or information must be reviewed and certified by NSA prior to their acquisition and use.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: By 2006, the best known attacks were on 7 rounds for 128-bit keys, 8 rounds for 192-bit keys, and 9 rounds for 256-bit keys.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: For cryptographers, a cryptographic "break" is anything faster than a brute-force attack – i.e., performing one trial decryption for each possible key in sequence. A break can thus include results that are infeasible with current technology. Despite being impractical, theoretical breaks can sometimes provide insight into vulnerability patterns. The largest successful publicly known brute-force attack against a widely implemented block-cipher encryption algorithm was against a 64-bit RC5 key by distributed.net in 2006.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: The key space increases by a factor of 2 for each additional bit of key length, and if every possible value of the key is equiprobable, this translates into a doubling of the average brute-force key search time. This implies that the effort of a brute-force search increases exponentially with key length. Key length in itself does not imply security against attacks, since there are ciphers with very long keys that have been found to be vulnerable.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: AES has a fairly simple algebraic framework. In 2002, a theoretical attack, named the "XSL attack", was announced by Nicolas Courtois and Josef Pieprzyk, purporting to show a weakness in the AES algorithm, partially due to the low complexity of its nonlinear components. Since then, other papers have shown that the attack, as originally presented, is unworkable; see XSL attack on block ciphers.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: During the AES selection process, developers of competing algorithms wrote of Rijndael's algorithm "we are concerned about [its] use ... in security-critical applications." In October 2000, however, at the end of the AES selection process, Bruce Schneier, a developer of the competing algorithm Twofish, wrote that while he thought successful academic attacks on Rijndael would be developed someday, he "did not believe that anyone will ever discover an attack that will allow someone to read Rijndael traffic."


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: Until May 2009, the only successful published attacks against the full AES were side-channel attacks on some specific implementations. In 2009, a new related-key attack was discovered that exploits the simplicity of AES's key schedule and has a complexity of 2. In December 2009 it was improved to 2. This is a follow-up to an attack discovered earlier in 2009 by Alex Biryukov, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Ivica Nikolić, with a complexity of 2 for one out of every 2 keys. However, related-key attacks are not of concern in any properly designed cryptographic protocol, as a properly designed protocol (i.e., implementational software) will take care not to allow related keys, essentially by constraining an attacker's means of selecting keys for relatedness.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: on August 3, 2009. This new attack, by Alex Biryukov, Orr Dunkelman, Nathan Keller, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Adi Shamir, is against AES-256 that uses only two related keys and 2 time to recover the complete 256-bit key of a 9-round version, or 2 time for a 10-round version with a stronger type of related subkey attack, or 2 time for an 11-round version. 256-bit AES uses 14 rounds, so these attacks are not effective against full AES.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: The practicality of these attacks with stronger related keys has been criticized, for instance, by the paper on chosen-key-relations-in-the-middle attacks on AES-128 authored by Vincent Rijmen in 2010.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: In November 2009, the first known-key distinguishing attack against a reduced 8-round version of AES-128 was released as a preprint.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: This known-key distinguishing attack is an improvement of the rebound, or the start-from-the-middle attack, against AES-like permutations, which view two consecutive rounds of permutation as the application of a so-called Super-S-box. It works on the 8-round version of AES-128, with a time complexity of 2, and a memory complexity of 2. 128-bit AES uses 10 rounds, so this attack is not effective against full AES-128.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: The first key-recovery attacks on full AES were by Andrey Bogdanov, Dmitry Khovratovich, and Christian Rechberger, and were published in 2011. The attack is a biclique attack and is faster than brute force by a factor of about four. It requires 2 operations to recover an AES-128 key. For AES-192 and AES-256, 2 and 2 operations are needed, respectively. This result has been further improved to 2 for AES-128, 2 for AES-192 and 2 for AES-256, which are the current best results in key recovery attack against AES.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: This is a very small gain, as a 126-bit key (instead of 128-bits) would still take billions of years to brute force on current and foreseeable hardware. Also, the authors calculate the best attack using their technique on AES with a 128-bit key requires storing 2 bits of data. That works out to about 38 trillion terabytes of data, which is more than all the data stored on all the computers on the planet in 2016. As such, there are no practical implications on AES security. The space complexity has later been improved to 2 bits, which is 9007 terabytes (while still keeping a time complexity of 2).


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: According to the Snowden documents, the NSA is doing research on whether a cryptographic attack based on tau statistic may help to break AES.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: At present, there is no known practical attack that would allow someone without knowledge of the key to read data encrypted by AES when correctly implemented.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: Side-channel attacks do not attack the cipher as a black box, and thus are not related to cipher security as defined in the classical context, but are important in practice. They attack implementations of the cipher on hardware or software systems that inadvertently leak data. There are several such known attacks on various implementations of AES.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: In April 2005, D. J. Bernstein announced a cache-timing attack that he used to break a custom server that used OpenSSL's AES encryption. The attack required over 200 million chosen plaintexts. The custom server was designed to give out as much timing information as possible (the server reports back the number of machine cycles taken by the encryption operation). However, as Bernstein pointed out, "reducing the precision of the server's timestamps, or eliminating them from the server's responses, does not stop the attack: the client simply uses round-trip timings based on its local clock, and compensates for the increased noise by averaging over a larger number of samples".


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: In October 2005, Dag Arne Osvik, Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer presented a paper demonstrating several cache-timing attacks against the implementations in AES found in OpenSSL and Linux's codice_1 partition encryption function. One attack was able to obtain an entire AES key after only 800 operations triggering encryptions, in a total of 65 milliseconds. This attack requires the attacker to be able to run programs on the same system or platform that is performing AES.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: In December 2009 an attack on some hardware implementations was published that used differential fault analysis and allows recovery of a key with a complexity of 2.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: In November 2010 Endre Bangerter, David Gullasch and Stephan Krenn published a paper which described a practical approach to a "near real time" recovery of secret keys from AES-128 without the need for either cipher text or plaintext. The approach also works on AES-128 implementations that use compression tables, such as OpenSSL. Like some earlier attacks, this one requires the ability to run unprivileged code on the system performing the AES encryption, which may be achieved by malware infection far more easily than commandeering the root account.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: In March 2016, Ashokkumar C., Ravi Prakash Giri and Bernard Menezes presented a side-channel attack on AES implementations that can recover the complete 128-bit AES key in just 6–7 blocks of plaintext/ciphertext, which is a substantial improvement over previous works that require between 100 and a million encryptions. The proposed attack requires standard user privilege and key-retrieval algorithms run under a minute.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: Many modern CPUs have built-in hardware instructions for AES, which protect against timing-related side-channel attacks.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: The Cryptographic Module Validation Program (CMVP) is operated jointly by the United States Government's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Computer Security Division and the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) of the Government of Canada. The use of cryptographic modules validated to NIST FIPS 140-2 is required by the United States Government for encryption of all data that has a classification of Sensitive but Unclassified (SBU) or above. From NSTISSP #11, National Policy Governing the Acquisition of Information Assurance: “Encryption products for protecting classified information will be certified by NSA, and encryption products intended for protecting sensitive information will be certified in accordance with NIST FIPS 140-2.”


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: The Government of Canada also recommends the use of FIPS 140 validated cryptographic modules in unclassified applications of its departments.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: Although NIST publication 197 (“FIPS 197”) is the unique document that covers the AES algorithm, vendors typically approach the CMVP under FIPS 140 and ask to have several algorithms (such as Triple DES or SHA1) validated at the same time. Therefore, it is rare to find cryptographic modules that are uniquely FIPS 197 validated and NIST itself does not generally take the time to list FIPS 197 validated modules separately on its public web site. Instead, FIPS 197 validation is typically just listed as an "FIPS approved: AES" notation (with a specific FIPS 197 certificate number) in the current list of FIPS 140 validated cryptographic modules.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: The Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program (CAVP) allows for independent validation of the correct implementation of the AES algorithm. Successful validation results in being listed on the NIST validations page. This testing is a pre-requisite for the FIPS 140-2 module validation. However, successful CAVP validation in no way implies that the cryptographic module implementing the algorithm is secure. A cryptographic module lacking FIPS 140-2 validation or specific approval by the NSA is not deemed secure by the US Government and cannot be used to protect government data.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: FIPS 140-2 validation is challenging to achieve both technically and fiscally. There is a standardized battery of tests as well as an element of source code review that must be passed over a period of a few weeks. The cost to perform these tests through an approved laboratory can be significant (e.g., well over $30,000 US) and does not include the time it takes to write, test, document and prepare a module for validation. After validation, modules must be re-submitted and re-evaluated if they are changed in any way. This can vary from simple paperwork updates if the security functionality did not change to a more substantial set of re-testing if the security functionality was impacted by the change.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: Test vectors are a set of known ciphers for a given input and key. NIST distributes the reference of AES test vectors as AES Known Answer Test (KAT) Vectors.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: High speed and low RAM requirements were some of the criteria of the AES selection process. As the chosen algorithm, AES performed well on a wide variety of hardware, from 8-bit smart cards to high-performance computers.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: On a Pentium Pro, AES encryption requires 18 clock cycles per byte, equivalent to a throughput of about 11 MiB/s for a 200 MHz processor.


title: Advanced Encryption Standard

text: On Intel Core and AMD Ryzen CPUs supporting AES-NI instruction set extensions, throughput can be multiple GiB/s (even over 15 GiB/s on an i7-12700k).


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Gulliver's Travels, or Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships is a 1726 prose satire by the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan Swift, satirising both human nature and the "travellers' tales" literary subgenre. It is Swift's best known full-length work, and a classic of English literature. Swift claimed that he wrote "Gulliver's Travels" "to vex the world rather than divert it".


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: The book was an immediate success. The English dramatist John Gay remarked: "It is universally read, from the cabinet council to the nursery." In 2015, Robert McCrum released his selection list of 100 best novels of all time in which "Gulliver's Travels" is listed in third place as "a satirical masterpiece".


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: The travel begins with a short preamble in which Lemuel Gulliver gives a brief outline of his life and history before his voyages.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: During his first voyage, Gulliver is washed ashore after a shipwreck and finds himself a prisoner of a race of tiny people, less than tall, who are inhabitants of the island country of Lilliput. After giving assurances of his good behaviour, he is given a residence in Lilliput and becomes a favourite of the Lilliput Royal Court. He is also given permission by the King of Lilliput to go around the city on condition that he must not hurt their subjects.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: At first, the Lilliputians are hospitable to Gulliver, but they are also wary of the threat that his size poses to them. The Lilliputians reveal themselves to be a people who put great emphasis on trivial matters. For example, which end of an egg a person cracks becomes the basis of a deep political rift within that nation. They are a people who revel in displays of authority and performances of power. Gulliver assists the Lilliputians to subdue their neighbours the Blefuscudians by stealing their fleet. However, he refuses to reduce the island nation of Blefuscu to a province of Lilliput, displeasing the King and the royal court.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Gulliver is charged with treason for, among other crimes, urinating in the capital though he was putting out a fire. He is convicted and sentenced to be blinded. With the assistance of a kind friend, "a considerable person at court", he escapes to Blefuscu. Here, he spots and retrieves an abandoned boat and sails out to be rescued by a passing ship, which safely takes him back home with some Lilliputian animals he carries with him.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Gulliver soon sets out again. When the sailing ship "Adventure" is blown off course by storms and forced to sail for land in search of fresh water, Gulliver is abandoned by his companions and left on a peninsula on the western coast of the North American continent.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: The grass of Brobdingnag is as tall as a tree. He is then found by a farmer who is about 72 ft (22 m) tall, judging from Gulliver estimating the man's step being . The giant farmer brings Gulliver home, and his daughter Glumdalclitch cares for Gulliver. The farmer treats him as a curiosity and exhibits him for money. After a while the constant display makes Gulliver sick, and the farmer sells him to the queen of the realm. Glumdalclitch (who accompanied her father while exhibiting Gulliver) is taken into the queen's service to take care of the tiny man. Since Gulliver is too small to use their huge chairs, beds, knives and forks, the queen commissions a small house to be built for him so that he can be carried around in it; this is referred to as his "travelling box".


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Between small adventures such as fighting giant wasps and being carried to the roof by a monkey, he discusses the state of Europe with the King of Brobdingnag. The king is not happy with Gulliver's accounts of Europe, especially upon learning of the use of guns and cannon. On a trip to the seaside, his traveling box is seized by a giant eagle which drops Gulliver and his box into the sea where he is picked up by sailors who return him to England.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Setting out again, Gulliver's ship is attacked by pirates, and he is marooned close to a desolate rocky island near India. He is rescued by the flying island of Laputa, a kingdom devoted to the arts of music, mathematics, and astronomy but unable to use them for practical ends. Rather than using armies, Laputa has a custom of throwing rocks down at rebellious cities on the ground.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Gulliver tours Balnibarbi, the kingdom ruled from Laputa, as the guest of a low-ranking courtier and sees the ruin brought about by the blind pursuit of science without practical results, in a satire on bureaucracy and on the Royal Society and its experiments. At the Grand Academy of Lagado in Balnibarbi, great resources and manpower are employed on researching preposterous schemes such as extracting sunbeams from cucumbers, softening marble for use in pillows, learning how to mix paint by smell, and uncovering political conspiracies by examining the excrement of suspicious persons (see muckraking). Gulliver is then taken to Maldonada, the main port of Balnibarbi, to await a trader who can take him on to Japan.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: While waiting for a passage, Gulliver takes a short side-trip to the island of Glubbdubdrib which is southwest of Balnibarbi. On Glubbdubdrib, he visits a magician's dwelling and discusses history with the ghosts of historical figures, the most obvious restatement of the "ancients versus moderns" theme in the book. The ghosts include Julius Caesar, Brutus, Homer, Aristotle, René Descartes, and Pierre Gassendi.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: On the island of Luggnagg, he encounters the "struldbrugs", people who are immortal. They do not have the gift of eternal youth, but suffer the infirmities of old age and are considered legally dead at the age of eighty.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: After reaching Japan, Gulliver asks the Emperor "to excuse my performing the ceremony imposed upon my countrymen of trampling upon the crucifix", which the Emperor does. Gulliver returns home, determined to stay there for the rest of his days.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Despite his earlier intention of remaining at home, Gulliver returns to sea as the captain of a merchantman, as he is bored with his employment as a surgeon. On this voyage, he is forced to find new additions to his crew who, he believes, have turned against him. His crew then commits mutiny. After keeping him contained for some time, they resolve to leave him on the first piece of land they come across, and continue as pirates. He is abandoned in a landing boat and comes upon a race of deformed savage humanoid creatures to which he conceives a violent antipathy. Shortly afterwards, he meets the Houyhnhnms, a race of talking horses. They are the rulers while the deformed creatures that resemble human beings are called Yahoos.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Some scholars have identified the relationship between the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos as a master/ slave dynamic.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Gulliver becomes a member of a horse's household and comes to both admire and emulate the Houyhnhnms and their way of life, rejecting his fellow humans as merely Yahoos endowed with some semblance of reason which they only use to exacerbate and add to the vices Nature gave them. However, an Assembly of the Houyhnhnms rules that Gulliver, a Yahoo with some semblance of reason, is a danger to their civilization and commands him to swim back to the land that he came from. Gulliver's "Master," the Houyhnhnm who took him into his household, buys him time to create a canoe to make his departure easier. After another disastrous voyage, he is rescued against his will by a Portuguese ship. He is disgusted to see that Captain Pedro de Mendez, whom he considers a Yahoo, is a wise, courteous, and generous person.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: He returns to his home in England, but is unable to reconcile himself to living among "Yahoos" and becomes a recluse, remaining in his house, avoiding his family and his wife, and spending several hours a day speaking with the horses in his stables.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: It is uncertain exactly when Swift started writing "Gulliver's Travels". (Much of the writing was done at Loughry Manor in Cookstown, County Tyrone, whilst Swift stayed there.) Some sources suggest as early as 1713 when Swift, Gay, Pope, Arbuthnot and others formed the Scriblerus Club with the aim of satirising popular literary genres. According to these accounts, Swift was charged with writing the memoirs of the club's imaginary author, Martinus Scriblerus, and also with satirising the "travellers' tales" literary subgenre. It is known from Swift's correspondence that the composition proper began in 1720 with the mirror-themed Parts I and II written first, Part IV next in 1723 and Part III written in 1724; but amendments were made even while Swift was writing "Drapier's Letters". By August 1725 the book was complete; and as "Gulliver's Travels" was a transparently anti-Whig satire, it is likely that Swift had the manuscript copied so that his handwriting could not be used as evidence if a prosecution should arise, as had happened in the case of some of his Irish pamphlets (the "Drapier's Letters"). In March 1726 Swift travelled to London to have his work published; the manuscript was secretly delivered to the publisher Benjamin Motte, who used five printing houses to speed production and avoid piracy. Motte, recognising a best-seller but fearing prosecution, cut or altered the worst offending passages (such as the descriptions of the court contests in Lilliput and the rebellion of Lindalino), added some material in defence of Queen Anne to Part II, and published it. The first edition was released in two volumes on 28 October 1726, priced at 8"s". "6"d."


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Motte published "Gulliver's Travels" anonymously, and as was often the way with fashionable works, several follow-ups ("Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput"), parodies ("Two Lilliputian Odes, The first on the Famous Engine With Which Captain Gulliver extinguish'd the Palace Fire...") and "keys" ("Gulliver Decipher'd" and "Lemuel Gulliver's Travels into Several Remote Regions of the World Compendiously Methodiz'd", the second by Edmund Curll who had similarly written a "key" to Swift's "Tale of a Tub" in 1705) were swiftly produced. These were mostly printed anonymously (or occasionally pseudonymously) and were quickly forgotten. Swift had nothing to do with them and disavowed them in Faulkner's edition of 1735. Swift's friend Alexander Pope wrote a set of five "Verses on Gulliver's Travels", which Swift liked so much that he added them to the second edition of the book, though they are rarely included.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: In 1735 an Irish publisher, George Faulkner, printed a set of Swift's works, Volume III of which was "Gulliver's Travels". As revealed in Faulkner's "Advertisement to the Reader", Faulkner had access to an annotated copy of Motte's work by "a friend of the author" (generally believed to be Swift's friend Charles Ford) which reproduced most of the manuscript without Motte's amendments, the original manuscript having been destroyed. It is also believed that Swift at least reviewed proofs of Faulkner's edition before printing, but this cannot be proved. Generally, this is regarded as the "Editio Princeps" of "Gulliver's Travels" with one small exception. This edition had an added piece by Swift, "A letter from Capt. Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson", which complained of Motte's alterations to the original text, saying he had so much altered it that "I do hardly know mine own work" and repudiating all of Motte's changes as well as all the keys, libels, parodies, second parts and continuations that had appeared in the intervening years. This letter now forms part of many standard texts.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: The five-paragraph episode in Part III, telling of the rebellion of the surface city of Lindalino against the flying island of Laputa, was an allegory of the affair of "Drapier's Letters" of which Swift was proud. Lindalino represented Dublin and the impositions of Laputa represented the British imposition of William Wood's poor-quality copper currency. Faulkner had omitted this passage, either because of political sensitivities raised by an Irish publisher printing an anti-British satire, or possibly because the text he worked from did not include the passage. In 1899 the passage was included in a new edition of the "Collected Works". Modern editions derive from the Faulkner edition with the inclusion of this 1899 addendum.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Isaac Asimov notes in "The Annotated Gulliver" that Lindalino is generally taken to be Dublin, being composed of double lins; hence, Dublin.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: "Gulliver's Travels" has been described as a Menippean satire, a children's story, proto-science fiction and a forerunner of the modern novel.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Published seven years after Daniel Defoe's successful "Robinson Crusoe", "Gulliver's Travels" may be read as a systematic rebuttal of Defoe's optimistic account of human capability. In "The Unthinkable Swift: The Spontaneous Philosophy of a Church of England Man", Warren Montag argues that Swift was concerned to refute the notion that the individual precedes society, as Defoe's work seems to suggest. Swift regarded such thought as a dangerous endorsement of Thomas Hobbes' radical political philosophy and for this reason Gulliver repeatedly encounters established societies rather than desolate islands. The captain who invites Gulliver to serve as a surgeon aboard his ship on the disastrous third voyage is named Robinson.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Allan Bloom asserts that Swift's lampooning of the experiments of Laputa is the first questioning by a modern liberal democrat of the effects and cost on a society which embraces and celebrates policies pursuing scientific progress. Swift wrote:


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: A possible reason for the book's classic status is that it can be seen as many things to many people. Broadly, the book has three themes:


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Of equal interest is the character of Gulliver himself—he progresses from a cheery optimist at the start of the first part to the pompous misanthrope of the book's conclusion and we may well have to filter our understanding of the work if we are to believe the final misanthrope wrote the whole work. In this sense, "Gulliver's Travels" is a very modern and complex work. There are subtle shifts throughout the book, such as when Gulliver begins to see all humans, not just those in Houyhnhnm-land, as Yahoos.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Throughout, Gulliver is presented as being gullible. He generally accepts what he is told at face value; he rarely perceives deeper meanings; and he is an honest man who expects others to be honest. This makes for fun and irony: what Gulliver says can be trusted to be accurate, and he does not always understand the meaning of what he perceives.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Also, although Gulliver is presented as a commonplace "everyman" with only a basic education, he possesses a remarkable natural gift for language. He quickly becomes fluent in the native tongues of the strange lands in which he finds himself, a literary device that adds verisimilitude and humour to Swift's work.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Despite the depth and subtlety of the book, as well as frequent off-colour and black humour, it is often classified as a children's story because of the popularity of the Lilliput section (frequently bowdlerised) as a book for children. Indeed, many adaptations of the story are squarely aimed at a young audience, and one can still buy books entitled "Gulliver's Travels" which contain only parts of the Lilliput voyage, and occasionally the Brobdingnag section.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Although Swift is often accused of misogyny in this work, many scholars believe Gulliver's blatant misogyny to be intentional, and that Swift uses satire to openly mock misogyny throughout the book. One of the most cited examples of this comes from Gulliver's description of a Brobdingnagian woman:


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: This open critique towards aspects of the female body is something that Swift often brings up in other works of his, particularly in poems such as "The Lady's Dressing Room" and "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going To Bed".


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: A criticism of Swift's use of misogyny by Felicity A. Nussbaum proposes the idea that "Gulliver himself is a gendered object of satire, and his antifeminist sentiments may be among those mocked". Gulliver’s own masculinity is often mocked, seen in how he is made to be a coward among the Brobdingnag people, repressed by the people of Lilliput, and viewed as an inferior Yahoo among the Houyhnhnms.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Nussbaum goes on to say in her analysis of the misogyny of the stories that in the adventures, particularly in the first story, the satire isn't singularly focused on satirizing women, but to satirize Gulliver himself as a politically naive and inept giant whose masculine authority comically seems to be in jeopardy.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Another criticism of Swift's use of misogyny delves into Gulliver's repeated use of the word 'nauseous', and the way that Gulliver is fighting his emasculation by commenting on how he thinks the women of Brobdingnag are disgusting.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: This commentary of Deborah Needleman Armintor relies upon the way that the giant women do with Gulliver as they please, in much the same way as one might play with a toy, and get it to do everything one can think of. Armintor's comparison focuses on the pocket microscopes that were popular in Swift's time. She talks about how this instrument of science was transitioned to something toy-like and accessible, so it shifted into something that women favored, and thus men lost interest. This is similar to the progression of Gulliver's time in Brobdingnag, from man of science to women's plaything.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Misanthropy is a theme that scholars have identified in "Gulliver's Travels". Arthur Case, R.S. Crane, and Edward Stone discuss Gulliver's development of misanthropy and come to the consensus that this theme ought to be viewed as comical rather than cynical.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: In terms of Gulliver's development of misanthropy, these three scholars point to the fourth voyage. According to Case, Gulliver is at first averse to identifying with the Yahoos, but, after he deems the Houyhnhnms superior, he comes to believe that humans (including his fellow Europeans) are Yahoos due to their shortcomings. Perceiving the Houyhnhnms as perfect, Gulliver thus begins to perceive himself and the rest of humanity as imperfect. According to Crane, when Gulliver develops his misanthropic mindset, he becomes ashamed of humans and views them more in line with animals. This new perception of Gulliver's, Stone claims, comes about because the Houyhnhnms' judgement pushes Gulliver to identify with the Yahoos. Along similar lines, Crane holds that Gulliver's misanthropy is developed in part when he talks to the Houyhnhnms about mankind because the discussions lead him to reflect on his previously held notion of humanity. Specifically, Gulliver’s master, who is a Houyhnhnm, provides questions and commentary that contribute to Gulliver’s reflectiveness and subsequent development of misanthropy. However, Case points out that Gulliver's dwindling opinion of humans may be blown out of proportion due to the fact that he is no longer able to see the good qualities that humans are capable of possessing. Gulliver’s new view of humanity, then, creates his repulsive attitude towards his fellow humans after leaving Houyhnhnmland. But in Stone's view, Gulliver’s actions and attitude upon his return can be interpreted as misanthropy that is exaggerated for comic effect rather than for a cynical effect. Stone further suggests that Gulliver goes mentally mad and believes that this is what leads Gulliver to exaggerate the shortcomings of humankind.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Another aspect that Crane attributes to Gulliver’s development of misanthropy is that when in Houyhnhnmland, it is the animal-like beings (the Houyhnhnms) who exhibit reason and the human-like beings (the Yahoos) who seem devoid of reason; Crane argues that it is this switch from Gulliver’s perceived norm that leads the way for him to question his view of humanity. As a result, Gulliver begins to identify humans as a type of Yahoo. To this point, Crane brings up the fact that a traditional definition of man—"Homo est animal rationale" (Humans are rational animals)—was prominent in academia around Swift's time. Furthermore, Crane argues that Swift had to study this type of logic (see Porphyrian Tree) in college, so it is highly likely that he intentionally inverted this logic by placing the typically given example of irrational beings—horses—in the place of humans and vice versa.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Stone points out that "Gulliver's Travels" takes a cue from the genre of the travel book, which was popular during Swift's time period. From reading travel books, Swift’s contemporaries were accustomed to beast-like figures of foreign places; thus, Stone holds that the creation of the Yahoos was not out of the ordinary for the time period. From this playing off of familiar genre expectations, Stone deduces that the parallels that Swift draws between the Yahoos and humans is meant to be humorous rather than cynical. Even though Gulliver sees Yahoos and humans as if they are one and the same, Stone argues that Swift did not intend for readers to take on Gulliver’s view; Stone states that the Yahoos' behaviors and characteristics that set them apart from humans further supports the notion that Gulliver's identification with Yahoos is not meant to be taken to heart. Thus, Stone sees Gulliver’s perceived superiority of the Houyhnhnms and subsequent misanthropy as features that Swift used to employ the satirical and humorous elements characteristic of the Beast Fables of travel books that were popular with his contemporaries; as Swift did, these Beast Fables placed animals above humans in terms of morals and reason, but they were not meant to be taken literally.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Pedro de Mendez is the name of the Portuguese captain who rescues Gulliver in Book IV. When Gulliver is forced to leave the Island of the Houyhnhnms, his plan is "to discover some small Island uninhabited" where he can live in solitude. Instead, he is picked up by Don Pedro's crew. Despite Gulliver's appearance—he is dressed in skins and speaks like a horse—Don Pedro treats him compassionately and returns him to Lisbon.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Though Don Pedro appears only briefly, he has become an important figure in the debate between so-called soft school and hard school readers of "Gulliver's Travels". Some critics contend that Gulliver is a target of Swift's satire and that Don Pedro represents an ideal of human kindness and generosity. Gulliver believes humans are similar to Yahoos in the sense that they make "no other use of reason, than to improve and multiply ... vices". Captain Pedro provides a contrast to Gulliver's reasoning, proving humans are able to reason, be kind, and most of all: civilized. Gulliver sees the bleak fallenness at the center of human nature, and Don Pedro is merely a minor character who, in Gulliver's words, is "an Animal which had some little Portion of Reason".


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: While we cannot make assumptions about Swift’s intentions, part of what makes his writing so engaging throughout time is speculating the various political allusions within it. These allusions tend to go in and out of style, but here are some of the common (or merely interesting) allusions asserted by Swiftian scholars. Part I is probably responsible for the greatest number of political allusions, ranging from consistent allegory to minute comparisons. One of the most commonly noted parallels is that the wars between Lilliput and Blefuscu resemble those between England and France. The enmity between the low heels and the high heels is often interpreted as a parody of the Whigs and Tories, and the character referred to as Flimnap is often interpreted as an allusion to Sir Robert Walpole, a British statesman and Whig politician who Swift had a personally turbulent relationship with.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: In Part III, the grand Academy of Lagado in Balnibarbi resembles and satirizes the Royal Society, which Swift was openly critical of. Furthermore, "A. E. Case, acting on a tipoff offered by the word 'projectors,' found [the Academy] to be the hiding place of many of those speculators implicated in the South Sea Bubble." According to Treadwell, however, these implications extend beyond the speculators of the South Sea Bubble to include the many projectors of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century England, including Swift himself. Not only is Swift satirizing the role of the projector in contemporary English politics, which he dabbled in during his younger years, but the role of the satirist, whose goals align with that of a projector: "The less obvious corollary of that word [projector] is that it must include the poor deluded satirist himself, since satire is, in its very essence, the wildest of all projects - a scheme to reform the world."


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Ann Kelly describes Part IV of "The Travels" and the Yahoo-Houyhnhnm relationship as an allusion to that of the Irish and the British: "The term that Swift uses to describe the oppression in both Ireland and Houyhnhnmland is 'slavery'; this is not an accidental word choice, for Swift was well aware of the complicated moral and philosophical questions raised by the emotional designation 'slavery.' The misery of the Irish in the early eighteenth century shocked Swift and all others who witnessed it; the hopeless passivity of the people in this desolate land made it seem as if both the minds and bodies of the Irish were enslaved." Kelly goes on to write: "Throughout the Irish tracts and poems, Swift continually vacillates as to whether the Irish are servile because of some defect within their character or whether their sordid condition is the result of a calculated policy from without to reduce them to brutishness. Although no one has done so, similar questions could be asked about the Yahoos, who are slaves to the Houyhnhnms." However, Kelly does not suggest a wholesale equivalence between Irish and Yahoos, which would be reductive and omit the various other layers of satire at work in this section.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: In his annotated edition of the book published in 1980, Isaac Asimov claims that "making sense out of the words and phrases introduced by Swift...is a waste of time," and these words were invented nonsense. However, Irving Rothman, a professor at University of Houston, points out that the language may have been derived from Hebrew, which Swift had studied at Trinity College Dublin.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: The book was very popular upon release and was commonly discussed within social circles. Public reception widely varied, with the book receiving an initially enthusiastic reaction with readers praising its satire, and some reporting that the satire's cleverness sounded like a realistic account of a man's travels. James Beattie commended Swift’s work for its "truth" regarding the narration and claims that "the statesman, the philosopher, and the critick, will admire his keenness of satire, energy of description, and vivacity of language", noting that even children can enjoy the novel. As popularity increased, critics came to appreciate the deeper aspects of "Gulliver’s Travels." It became known for its insightful take on morality, expanding its reputation beyond just humorous satire.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Despite its initial positive reception, the book faced backlash. Viscount Bolingbroke, a friend of Swift and one of the first critics of the book, criticised the author for his overt use of misanthropy. Other negative responses to the book also looked towards its portrayal of humanity, which was considered inaccurate. Swifts’s peers rejected the book on claims that its themes of misanthropy were harmful and offensive. They criticized its satire for exceeding what was deemed acceptable and appropriate, including the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos’s similarities to humans. There was also controversy surrounding the political allegories. Readers enjoyed the political references, finding them humorous. However, members of the Whig party were offended, believing that Swift mocked their politics.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: British novelist and journalist William Makepeace Thackeray described Swift's work as "blasphemous", saying its critical view of mankind was ludicrous and overly harsh. He concluded that he could not understand the origins of Swift’s critiques on humanity.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: The term "Lilliputian" has entered many languages as an adjective meaning "small and delicate". There is a brand of small cigar called Lilliput, and a series of collectable model houses known as "Lilliput Lane". The smallest light bulb fitting (5 mm diameter) in the Edison screw series is called the "Lilliput Edison screw". In Dutch and Czech, the words "Lilliputter" and "lilipután", respectively, are used for adults shorter than 1.30 meters. Conversely, "Brobdingnagian" appears in the "Oxford English Dictionary" as a synonym for "very large" or "gigantic".


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: In like vein, the term "yahoo" is often encountered as a synonym for "ruffian" or "thug". In the "Oxford English Dictionary" it is defined as "a rude, noisy, or violent person" and its origins attributed to Swift's "Gulliver's Travels".


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: In the discipline of computer architecture, the terms "big-endian" and "little-endian" are used to describe two possible ways of laying out bytes of data in computer memory. The terms derive from one of the satirical conflicts in the book, in which two religious sects of Lilliputians are divided between those who crack open their soft-boiled eggs from the little end, the "Little-endians", and those who use the big end, the "Big-endians". The nomenclature was chosen as an irony, since the choice of which byte-order method to use is technically trivial (both are equally good), but actually still important: systems which do it one way are thus incompatible with those that do it the other way, and so it "shouldn't" be left to each individual designer's choice, resulting in a "holy war" over a triviality.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: It has been pointed out that the long and vicious war which started after a disagreement about which was the best end to break an egg is an example of the narcissism of small differences, a term Sigmund Freud coined in the early 1900s.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: Many sequels followed the initial publishing of the "Travels". The earliest of these was the anonymously authored "Memoirs of the Court of Lilliput", published 1727, which expands the account of Gulliver's stays in Lilliput and Blefuscu by adding several gossipy anecdotes about scandalous episodes at the Lilliputian court. Abbé Pierre Desfontaines, the first French translator of Swift's story, wrote a sequel, "Le Nouveau Gulliver ou Voyages de Jean Gulliver, fils du capitaine Lemuel Gulliver" (The New Gulliver, or the travels of John Gulliver, son of Captain Lemuel Gulliver), published in 1730. Gulliver's son has various fantastic, satirical adventures.


title: Gulliver's Travels

text: The standard edition of Jonathan Swift's prose works is the "Prose Writings" in 16 volumes, edited by Herbert Davis et al.


title: Number of the beast

text: The number of the beast (, ) is associated with the Beast of Revelation in chapter 13, verse 18 of the Book of Revelation. In most manuscripts of the New Testament and in English translations of the Bible, the number of the beast is six hundred sixty-six or (in Greek numerals, represents 600, represents 60 and represents 6). Papyrus 115 (which is the oldest preserved manuscript of the "Revelation" ), as well as other ancient sources like "Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus", give the number of the beast as χιϛ or χιϲ, transliterable in Arabic numerals as 616 (), not 666; critical editions of the Greek text, such as the "Novum Testamentum Graece", note χιϛ as a variant.


title: Number of the beast

text: The number of the beast is described in Revelation 13:15–18. Several translations have been interpreted for the meaning of the phrase "Here is Wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast..." where the peculiar Greek word ("psephisato") is used. Possible translations include "to count", "to reckon" and also "to vote" or "to decide".


title: Number of the beast

text: In the "Textus Receptus", derived from Byzantine text-type manuscripts, the number six hundred sixty-six is represented by the Greek numerals , with the Greek letter stigma () representing the number 6:


title: Number of the beast

text: "And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666."


title: Number of the beast

text: In several editions of the Greek Bible, the number is represented by the final three words, , "hexakósioi hexēkonta héx", meaning "six hundred [and] sixty-six":


title: Number of the beast

text: "And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred and sixty-six."


title: Number of the beast

text: Revelation 13:18 states that if one is wise and has an understanding to count the number of the beast, which is also the number of a man, the number comes to 666.


title: Number of the beast

text: Although Irenaeus (2nd century AD) affirmed the number to be 666 and reported several scribal errors of the number, theologians have doubts about the traditional reading because of the appearance of the figure 616 in the "Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus" (C; Paris—one of the four great uncial codices), as well as in the Latin version of Tyconius ("DCXVI", ed. Souter in the Journal of Theology, SE, April 1913), and in an ancient Armenian version (ed. Conybeare, 1907). Irenaeus knew about the 616 reading, but did not adopt it (Haer. V, 30). In the 380s, correcting the existing Latin-language version of the New Testament (commonly referred to as the "Vetus Latina"), Jerome retained "666".


title: Number of the beast

text: Around 2005, a fragment from Papyrus 115, taken from the Oxyrhynchus site, was discovered at the University of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. It gave the beast's number as ('). This fragment is the oldest manuscript (about 1,700 years old) of Revelation 13 found . "Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus", known before the "Papyrus 115" finding but dating to after it, has 616 written in full: ', "hexakosioi deka hex" ( "six hundred and sixteen").


title: Number of the beast

text: "Papyrus 115" and "Ephraemi Rescriptus" have led some scholars to regard 616 as the original number of the beast. According to Paul Louis, "The number 666 has been substituted for 616 either by analogy with 888, the [Greek] number of Jesus (Gustav Adolf Deissmann), or because it is a triangular number, the sum of the first 36 numbers (1+2+3+4+5+6+...+36 = 666)".


title: Number of the beast

text: The beast's identity and the beast's number are usually interpreted by applying one of three methods:


title: Number of the beast

text: In Greek isopsephy and Hebrew gematria, every letter has a corresponding numeric value. Summing these numbers gives a numeric value to a word or name. The use of isopsephy to calculate "the number of the beast" is used in many of the below interpretations.


title: Number of the beast

text: Preterist theologians typically support the interpretation that 666 is the numerical equivalent of the name and title Nero Caesar (Roman Emperor 54–68 AD). Written in Aramaic, this can be valued at 666 using the Hebrew numerology of gematria, and was used to secretly speak against the emperor. Additionally, "Nero Caesar" in the Hebrew alphabet is "NRON QSR", which when interpreted numerically represents the numbers 50 200 6 50 100 60 200, which add up to 666.


title: Number of the beast

text: The Greek term (charagma, "mark" in Revelation 13:16) was most commonly used for imprints on documents or coins. Charagma is well attested to have been an imperial seal of the Roman Empire used on official documents during the 1st and 2nd centuries. In the reign of Emperor Decius (249–251 AD), those who did not possess the certificate of sacrifice () to Caesar could not pursue trades, a prohibition that conceivably goes back to Nero, reminding one of Revelation 13:17.


title: Number of the beast

text: Preterists argue that Revelation was written before the destruction of the Temple, with Nero exiling John to Patmos. Most scholars, however, argue it was written after Nero committed suicide in AD 68. "Our Sunday Visitor's Catholic Encyclopedia" has noted that Revelation was "written during the latter part of the reign of the Roman Emperor Domitian, probably in A.D. 95 or 96".Additional Protestant scholars are in agreement.


title: Number of the beast

text: Because some people believe Revelation 13 speaks of a future prophetic event, "All who dwell on the earth worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." (Revelation 13:8 NKJV), some have argued that the interpretation of Nero meeting the fulfillment is an impossibility if Revelation was written around 30 years the death of Nero. However, rumors circulated that Nero had not really died and would return to power.


title: Number of the beast

text: It has also been suggested that the numerical reference to Nero was a code to imply but not directly identify emperor Domitian, whose style of rulership resembled that of Nero, who heavily taxed the people of Asia (Lydia), to whom the Book of Revelation was primarily addressed. The popular Nero Redivivus legend stating that Nero would return to life can also be noted; "After Nero's suicide in AD 68, there was a widespread belief, especially in the eastern provinces, that he was not dead and somehow would return. Suetonius (XL) relates how court astrologers had predicted Nero's fall but that he would have power in the east. And, indeed, at least three false claimants did present themselves as Nero "redivivus" (resurrected).


title: Number of the beast

text: An Aramaic scroll from Wadi Murabba'at, dated to "the second year of Emperor Nero", refers to him by his name and title. In Hebrew it is "Nron Qsr" (pronounced "Nerōn Kaisar"). In Latin it is "Nro Qsr" (pronounced "Nerō Kaisar").


title: Number of the beast

text: The Greek version of the name and title transliterates into Hebrew as , and yields a numerical value of 666, as shown:


title: Number of the beast

text: The Latin version of the name drops the second Nun (), so that it appears as "Nro" and transliterates into Hebrew as , yielding 616:


title: Number of the beast

text: Gematria has also been used with the word "Maometis" (); which scholars have described as a dubiously obscure Latinisation of a Greek transliteration of the Arabic name محمد (Muhammad).


title: Number of the beast

text: A leading proponent of the Maometis interpretation was Walmesley, the Roman Catholic bishop of Rama. Other proponents include 16–17th century Catholic theologians Gilbert Genebrard, François Feuardent, and René Massuet. Maometis in Greek numerals totals 666:


title: Number of the beast

text: Setton (1992) is critical of the idea: Muhammad was frequently defamed and made a subject of "legends", taught by preachers as "fact". For example, in order to show that Muhammad was the anti-Christ, it was asserted that Muhammad died not in the year 632 but in the year 666. In another variation on the theme the number "666" was also used to represent the period of time Muslims would hold sway of the land. In "Quia maior", the encyclical calling for the Fifth Crusade, Euthymius Zygabenus and Zonaras wrote the name as "Maometh" and Cedrenus wrote the name "Mouchoumet" none of which is the "Maometis" in question.


title: Number of the beast

text: Fr. Sloet of Holland proposed the title of Antichrist as king of Israel. He wrote that, "The Jews have ever looked forward to the Messiah as a great leader to restore the kingdom of Israel. They rejected Jesus because He did not fulfill this expectation... He will be king of a restored Israel, not only king, but the king par excellence. In Hebrew this idea could be expressed by the words (hammelek l'Yisrael), which have the requisite numerical value of 666; but in order to obtain this number kaph medial (כ) must be used in melek (king) instead of kaph final (ך)."


title: Number of the beast

text: The Classical Greek word (), translated as "mark" (of the beast) in Revelation 13:16 can also mean "any mark engraved", "imprinted", or "branded"; "stamped money", "document", or "coin".


title: Number of the beast

text: The mark of the beast is interpreted differently across the four main views of Christian eschatology.


title: Number of the beast

text: A common preterist view of the Mark of the beast (focusing on the past) is the stamped image of the emperor's head on every coin of the Roman Empire: the stamp on the hand or in the mind of all, without which no one could buy or sell. New Testament scholar C.C. Hill notes, "It is far more probable that the mark symbolizes the all-embracing economic power of Rome, whose very coinage bore the emperor's image and conveyed his claims to divinity (e.g., by including the sun's rays in the ruler's portrait). It had become increasingly difficult for Christians to function in a world in which public life, including the economic life of the trade guilds, required participation in idolatry."


title: Number of the beast

text: Adela Yarbro Collins further denotes that the refusal to use Roman coins resulted in the condition where "no man might buy or sell". A similar view is offered by Craig R. Koester. "As sales were made, people used coins that bore the images of Rome's gods and emperors. Thus each transaction that used such coins was a reminder that people were advancing themselves economically by relying on political powers that did not recognize the true God."


title: Number of the beast

text: In 66 AD, when Nero was emperor—about the time some scholars say Revelation was written—the Jews revolted against Rome and coined their own money.