title: IAU designated constellations

text: Each IAU constellation has an official 3-letter abbreviation based on the genitive form of the constellation name. The majority of the abbreviations are just the first three letters of the constellation name, with the first character capitalised: "Ori" for "Orion", "Ara" for "Ara/Arae", "Com" for "Coma Berenices". In some cases, the abbreviation is from the genitive form without appearing in the base name (as in "Hyi" for "Hydrus/Hydri", to avoid confusion with "Hydra", abbreviated "Hya"; and "Sge" for "Sagitta/Sagittae", to avoid confusion with "Sagittarius", abbreviated "Sgr"). In other cases, to unambiguously identify the constellation, such as where the name and its genitive differ in the first three letters, other letters beyond the initial three are used: "Aps" for "Apus/Apodis", "CrA" for "Corona Australis", "CrB" for "Corona Borealis", "Crv" for "Corvus". ("Crater" is abbreviated "Crt" to prevent confusion with "CrA".) When letters are taken from the second word of a two-word name, the first letter from the second word is capitalised: "CMa" for "Canis Major", "CMi" for "Canis Minor". Two cases are ambiguous: "Leo" for the constellation "Leo" could be mistaken for "Leo Minor" (abbreviated "LMi"), and "Tri" for "Triangulum" could be mistaken for "Triangulum Australe" (abbreviated "TrA").


title: IAU designated constellations

text: For help with the literary English pronunciations, see the . There is considerable diversity in how Latinate names are pronounced in English. For traditions closer to the original, see Latin spelling and pronunciation.


title: IAU designated constellations

text: Various other unofficial patterns exist alongside the constellations. These are known as "asterisms". Examples include the Big Dipper/Plough and the Northern Cross.


title: IAU designated constellations

text: Some ancient asterisms, for example Coma Berenices, Serpens, and portions of Argo Navis, are now officially constellations.


title: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

text: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is a 2009 American romantic comedy film directed by Mark Waters. The script was written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, based on Charles Dickens' 1843 novella "A Christmas Carol". Filming spanned February 19, 2008 to July 2008 in Rhode Island with stars Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner, Lacey Chabert, Emma Stone, and Michael Douglas. The film was released on May 1, 2009.


title: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

text: "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" features a wedding day and the day before, rather than the familiar Christmas and Christmas Eve from "A Christmas Carol". The three ghosts share similar appearances with the original descriptions, and the film shares the traditional plot points from the book.


title: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

text: Connor Mead is a famous photographer and womanizer. He attends the wedding of his brother Paul to Sandra, where he becomes reacquainted with Jenny Perotti, the only girl who captured his heart. After delivering a drunken speech at the rehearsal dinner, Connor sees the ghost of his playboy uncle Wayne. Wayne tells him not to be like him in life and says that he will be visited by three ghosts who will lead him through his romantic past, present, and future.


title: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

text: The first is the "Ghost of Girlfriends Past" in the form of Allison, his first lover. They revisit scenes from his past, focusing on his relationship with Jenny. Connor and she were very close at school; she gave him his first instant camera which he used to take her picture, promising to keep it forever. By middle school, they were on the verge of romance, but Connor's hesitation at a dance caused Jenny to dance with and kiss another boy.


title: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

text: Wayne told Connor that he must avoid romance at all costs in order not to feel such pain again. When he next saw Jenny, he ignored her and chose Allison. Several years later, Connor and Jenny meet again and rekindle their romance. She tries to stop his womanizing. He falls in love but panics, running away to avoid being hurt. Jenny wakes up broken-hearted.


title: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

text: Back in the present, Connor accidentally destroys the wedding cake and fails to reconcile with Jenny. He is confronted by the "Ghost of Girlfriends Present" in the form of his assistant Melanie. He sees that the others make fun of his shallow lifestyle. Paul expresses hope that he will someday improve. Connor is upset that Jenny is being comforted by Brad. Melanie and his former lovers discuss his lack of empathy.


title: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

text: Connor accidentally tells Sandra that Paul slept with one of her bridesmaids early in their relationship, and she is furious with Paul. Connor attempts to mend the situation, but Paul tells him to leave. Confronted by the "Ghost of Girlfriends Future", who takes him forward in time to see that Jenny marries Brad while Paul remains alone. Further in the future, Paul is the only mourner at Connor's funeral. Wayne appears and tells Connor that this is his future if he continues on the same path, pushing him into the grave to be buried by his many ex-girlfriends.


title: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

text: Waking up the next day, Connor finds out that Sandra has cancelled the wedding. Connor took the car in order to find her, convincing her to forgive Paul, saying that the pain of heartbreak is outweighed by the regret of never risking one's heart in the first place. Connor photographs the wedding, and he reconciles with Jenny by showing her the picture he still carries of her. They kiss and dance in the snow to the same song Connor once hesitated to ask her to dance to.


title: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

text: Wayne strikes out with the Ghost of Girlfriends Future. Wayne tries to hit on Melanie but she dances with Brad. Wayne is finally rejected by Allison, the Ghost of Girlfriends Past, who still appears 16.


title: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

text: "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" was originally set up in 2004 at Touchstone Pictures with Ben Affleck attached to play the lead character and Kevin Smith to direct, but both opted out and Disney cancelled the project. Betty Thomas was also attached to direct at one point, and Affleck's LivePlanet was also on board to produce.


title: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

text: It was primarily filmed at Crane Castle in Ipswich, Massachusetts. The church scene with Garner marrying another man was filmed at the Martha-Mary Chapel in Sudbury, MA. It was built by Henry Ford in honor of his mother and mother in law. It is on the same property as the historic Wayside Inn, dating from 1716. It is the oldest operating inn in the country. The film also reunited Michael Douglas and Anne Archer for the first time since the 1987 hit thriller "Fatal Attraction", but they shared no scenes together. Christa B. Allen played the younger version of Garner's character, as she did in "13 Going on 30" in 2004.


title: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

text: The film received negative reviews and holds rating on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on reviews, with an average rating of . The website's critics consensus reads, "A retread of "A Christmas Carol", featuring Matthew McConaughey in a retread of his "Dazed and Confused" role, "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past" lacks originality, humor, and any semblance of charm." Metacritic lists it with a 34 out of 100, which indicates "generally unfavorable reviews", based on 29 reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past

text: On the film's opening weekend, it debuted at #2 with a gross of $15.4 million (3,175 theaters, $4,854 average), far behind ""s $85.1 million gross. The film made $55.3 million in the United States and Canada along with $47.1 million from foreign territories for a worldwide total of $102.4 million.


title: Yves Tumor

text: Sean Bowie, best known by the recording alias Yves Tumor, is an American musician and producer of experimental music, born in Miami, Florida and currently based in Turin, Italy.


title: Yves Tumor

text: To date, they have released four studio albums: "When Man Fails You" (2015), "Serpent Music" (2016), "Safe in the Hands of Love" (2018) and "Heaven to a Tortured Mind" (2020).


title: Yves Tumor

text: Raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, Tumor started making music at age 16 as an outlet away from "dull, conservative surroundings." They taught themself to play drums, bass, guitar, and keyboards. Describing their experience growing up in Tennessee as unpleasant, Yves moved at age 20 to San Diego, and then after college, to Los Angeles. They met Mykki Blanco in 2012, later touring for two and a half years throughout Europe and Asia.


title: Yves Tumor

text: In the early 2010s, Tumor recorded as Teams, and made music which AllMusic described as "post-chillwave". The artist debuted the Yves Tumor project in 2015 with an EP for Berlin's experimental club label Janus, and another one for Blanco's label, Dogfood MG. That same year, the artist released the first album, "When Man Fails You" (which would later be re-released by Apothecary Compositions on April 29, 2016).


title: Yves Tumor

text: In September 2016, Tumor signed with PAN Records and released their label debut, "Serpent Music". Yves had worked on the album for three years after moving to Leipzig, Germany. The album was recorded between Miami, Leipzig, Los Angeles and Berlin. In "Pitchfork"s review of the album, critic Andy Beta compared Tumor's musical style to James Ferraro and Dean Blunt, and noted their use of "unsettling percussive loops and field recordings to create a mood as if lost in a strange urban landscape."


title: Yves Tumor

text: In September 2017, Tumor released a compilation album titled "Experiencing the Deposit of Faith" for free. Later that week, it was revealed through a tour announcement that Tumor had signed to Warp Records. Following the announcement, the artist embarked on a tour with a new audiovisual show.


title: Yves Tumor

text: In September 2018, Tumor released their Warp debut, "Safe in the Hands of Love", with no prior announcement. It was preceded by the singles "Noid" on July 24, "Licking an Orchid" featuring James K on August 29, and "Lifetime" on September 3. The album received universal acclaim from music critics. "Pitchfork"s Jayson Greene stated in the review that the album "dwarfs everything the artist has released by several orders of magnitude. The leap is so audacious it's disorienting."


title: Yves Tumor

text: Tumor's fourth album, "Heaven to a Tortured Mind", was released on April 3, 2020, preceded on March 3 by the single "Kerosene" featuring Diana Gordon. Alexis Petridis, reviewing the album for "The Guardian", awarded it Album of the Week, describing it as "extraordinary: experimental, capable of any genre, with an internal logic powering its shifts in mood.[…] There’s real skill involved in coming up with something that sounds coherent while shifting through so many styles.”


title: Yves Tumor

text: In October 2020, Tumor said in an interview with Michèle Lamy " I have another EP and a whole album basically not finished, but ready to start finishing. I’ve been very busy during the quarantine." In December 2020, Tumor released the single "let all the poisons that lurk in the mud seep out" in collaboration with Kelsey Lu, featuring Kelly Moran and Moses Boyd. In July 2021, they released the EP "The Asymptotical World", recorded in collaboration with their bandmates, Chris Greatti and Yves Rothman.


title: Yves Tumor

text: Tumor's earlier work was compared to that of Dean Blunt and James Ferraro, the latter of whom they have collaborated with; however, their more recent music, such as "Heaven to a Tortured Mind," has been likened to Prince and David Bowie.


title: Yves Tumor

text: Tumor has cited Throbbing Gristle as an influence, saying: "Sonically, Throbbing Gristle (were very inspirational). There’s something about their music, like the hypnotic trance vibes, that really influenced me. When I moved to Los Angeles after college, a good friend of mine would always play Chris & Cosey records when we were hanging out. I slowly became obsessed with them and started reading about Genesis P-Orridge and that whole movement."


title: Yves Tumor

text: In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Tumor designed furniture and furthered their interest in upholstery: "I just got really into my other hobbies, which include architecture and interior architecture, and urban architecture, but I’m not that good at math, so I wanted to scale everything down. I just decided to just start constructing chairs and couches and stools, but I think I’m going to begin welding as opposed to actual construction."


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The World Wide Web ("WWW", "W3" or, simply, "the Web") is a global information medium which users can access via computers connected to the Internet. The term is often mistakenly used as a synonym for the Internet, but the Web is a service that operates over the Internet, just as email and Usenet do. The history of the Internet and the history of hypertext date back significantly farther than that of the World Wide Web.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN in 1989, applying the concept of hyperlinking that had by then existed for some decades. He developed the first web server, the first web browser, and a document formatting protocol, called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). After publishing the markup language in 1991, and releasing the browser source code for public use in 1993, many other web browsers were soon developed, with Marc Andreessen's Mosaic (later Netscape Navigator), being particularly easy to use and install, and often credited with sparking the Internet boom of the 1990s. It was a graphical browser which ran on several popular office and home computers, bringing multimedia content to non-technical users by including images and text on the same page.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Websites for use by the general public began to emerge in 1994. This spurred competition in server and browser software, highlighted in the Browser wars which was initially dominated by Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. Following the complete removal of commercial restrictions on Internet use by 1995, commercialization of the Web amidst macroeconomic factors led to the dot-com boom and bust in the late 1990s and early 2000s.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The features of HTML evolved over time, leading to HTML version 2 in 1995, HTML3 and HTML4 in 1997, and HTML5 in 2014. The language was extended with advanced formatting in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and with programming capability by JavaScript. AJAX programming delivered dynamic content to users, which sparked a new era in Web design, styled Web 2.0. The use of social media, becoming common-place in the 2010s, allowed users to compose multimedia content without programming skills, making the Web ubiquitous in every-day life.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The underlying concept of hypertext as a user interface paradigm originated in projects in the 1960s, from research such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) by Andries van Dam at Brown University, IBM Generalized Markup Language, Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based "memex", which was described in the 1945 essay "As We May Think". Other precursors were FRESS and Intermedia. Paul Otlet's project Mundaneum has also been named as an early 20th-century precursor of the Web.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: In 1980, Tim Berners-Lee, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, built ENQUIRE, as a personal database of people and software models, but also as a way to experiment with hypertext; each new page of information in ENQUIRE had to be linked to another page.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: During the 1980s, many packet-switched data networks emerged based on various communication protocols (see Protocol Wars). One of these standards was the Internet protocol suite, which is often referred to as TCP/IP. As the Internet grew through the 1980s, many people realized the increasing need to be able to find and organize files and use information. By 1985, the Domain Name System (upon which the Uniform Resource Locator is built) came into being. Many small, self-contained hypertext systems were created, such as Apple Computer's HyperCard (1987).


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Berners-Lee's contract in 1980 was from June to December, but in 1984 he returned to CERN in a permanent role, and considered its problems of information management: physicists from around the world needed to share data, yet they lacked common machines and any shared presentation software. Shortly after Berners-Lee's return to CERN, TCP/IP protocols were installed on Unix machines at the institution, turning it into the largest Internet site in Europe. In 1988, the first direct IP connection between Europe and North America was established and Berners-Lee began to openly discuss the possibility of a web-like system at CERN.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: While working at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee became frustrated with the inefficiencies and difficulties posed by finding information stored on different computers. On 12 March 1989, he submitted a memorandum, titled "Information Management: A Proposal", to the management at CERN. The proposal used the term "web" and was based on "a large hypertext database with typed links". It described a system called "Mesh" that referenced ENQUIRE, the database and software project he had built in 1980, with a more elaborate information management system based on links embedded as text: "Imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document, you could skip to them with a click of the mouse." Such a system, he explained, could be referred to using one of the existing meanings of the word "hypertext", a term that he says was coined in the 1950s. Berners-Lee notes the possibility of multimedia documents that include graphics, speech and video, which he terms "hypermedia".


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Although the proposal attracted little interest, Berners-Lee was encouraged by his manager, Mike Sendall, to begin implementing his system on a newly acquired NeXT workstation. He considered several names, including "Information Mesh", "The Information Mine" or "Mine of Information", but settled on "World Wide Web". Berners-Lee found an enthusiastic supporter in his colleague and fellow hypertext enthusiast Robert Cailliau. Berners-Lee and Cailliau pitched Berners-Lee's ideas to the European Conference on Hypertext Technology in September 1990, but found no vendors who could appreciate his vision.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Berners-Lee's breakthrough was to marry hypertext to the Internet. In his book "", he explains that he had repeatedly suggested to members of both technical communities that a marriage between the two technologies was possible. But, when no one took up his invitation, he finally assumed the project himself. In the process, he developed three essential technologies:


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: With help from Cailliau, he published a more formal proposal on 12 November 1990 to build a "hypertext project" called "World Wide Web" (abbreviated "W3") as a "web" of "hypertext documents" to be viewed by "browsers" using a client–server architecture. The proposal was modelled after the Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) reader Dynatext by Electronic Book Technology, a spin-off from the Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship at Brown University. The Dynatext system, licensed by CERN, was considered too expensive and had an inappropriate licensing policy for use in the general high energy physics community, namely a fee for each document and each document alteration.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: At this point HTML and HTTP had already been in development for about two months and the first web server was about a month from completing its first successful test. Berners-Lee's proposal estimated that a read-only Web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve "the creation of new links and new material by readers, [so that] authorship becomes universal" as well as "the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available".


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: By December 1990, Berners-Lee and his work team had built all the tools necessary for a working Web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), the first web browser (named WorldWideWeb, which was also a web editor), the first web server (later known as CERN httpd) and the first web site (http://info.cern.ch) containing the first web pages that described the project itself was published on 20 December 1990. The browser could access Usenet newsgroups and FTP files as well. A NeXT Computer was used by Berners-Lee as the web server and also to write the web browser.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Working with Berners-Lee at CERN, Nicola Pellow wrote a simple text browser that could run on almost any computer, the Line Mode Browser, which worked with a command-line interface.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: In January 1991, the first web servers outside CERN were switched on. On 6 August 1991, Berners-Lee published a short summary of the World Wide Web project on the newsgroup "alt.hypertext", inviting collaborators.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Paul Kunz from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) visited CERN in September 1991, and was captivated by the Web. He brought the NeXT software back to SLAC, where librarian Louise Addis adapted it for the VM/CMS operating system on the IBM mainframe as a way to host the SPIRES-HEP database and display SLAC's catalog of online documents. This was the first web server outside of Europe and the first in North America.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The World Wide Web had several differences from other hypertext systems available at the time. The Web required only unidirectional links rather than bidirectional ones, making it possible for someone to link to another resource without action by the owner of that resource. It also significantly reduced the difficulty of implementing web servers and browsers (in comparison to earlier systems), but in turn, presented the chronic problem of link rot.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The WorldWideWeb browser only ran on NeXTSTEP operating system. This shortcoming was discussed in January 1992, and alleviated in April 1992 by the release of Erwise, an application developed at the Helsinki University of Technology, and in May by ViolaWWW, created by Pei-Yuan Wei, which included advanced features such as embedded graphics, scripting, and animation. ViolaWWW was originally an application for HyperCard. Both programs ran on the X Window System for Unix. In 1992, the first tests between browsers on different platforms were concluded successfully between buildings 513 and 31 in CERN, between browsers on the NexT station and the X11-ported Mosaic browser. ViolaWWW became the recommended browser at CERN. To encourage use within CERN, Bernd Pollermann put the CERN telephone directory on the web—previously users had to log onto the mainframe in order to look up phone numbers. The Web was successful at CERN and spread to other scientific and academic institutions.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Students at the University of Kansas adapted an existing text-only hypertext browser, Lynx, to access the web in 1992. Lynx was available on Unix and DOS, and some web designers, unimpressed with glossy graphical websites, held that a website not accessible through Lynx was not worth visiting.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: In the early 1990s, Internet-based projects such as Archie, Gopher, Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS), and the FTP Archive list attempted to create ways to organize distributed data. Gopher was a document browsing system for the Internet, released in 1991 by the University of Minnesota. Invented by Mark P. McCahill, it became the first commonly used hypertext interface to the Internet. While Gopher menu items were examples of hypertext, they were not commonly perceived in that way. In less than a year, there were hundreds of Gopher servers. It offered a viable alternative to the World Wide Web in the early 1990s and the consensus was that Gopher would be the primary way that people would interact with the Internet. However, in 1993, the University of Minnesota declared that Gopher was proprietary and would have to be licensed.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: In response, on 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone, with no fees due, and released their code into the public domain. This made it possible to develop servers and clients independently and to add extensions without licensing restrictions. Coming two months after the announcement that the server implementation of the Gopher protocol was no longer free to use, this spurred the development of various browsers which precipitated a rapid shift away from Gopher. By releasing Berners-Lee's invention for public use, CERN encouraged and enabled its widespread use.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Early websites intermingled links for both the HTTP web protocol and the Gopher protocol, which provided access to content through hypertext menus presented as a file system rather than through HTML files. Early Web users would navigate either by bookmarking popular directory pages or by consulting updated lists such as the NCSA "What's New" page. Some sites were also indexed by WAIS, enabling users to submit full-text searches similar to the capability later provided by search engines.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: After 1993 the World Wide Web saw many advances to indexing and ease of access through search engines, which often neglected Gopher and Gopherspace. As its popularity increased through ease of use, incentives for commercial investment in the Web also grew. By the middle of 1994, the Web was outcompeting Gopher and the other browsing systems for the Internet.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (UIUC) established a website in November 1992. After Marc Andreessen, a student at UIUC, was shown ViolaWWW in late 1992, he began work on Mosaic with another UIUC student Eric Bina, using funding from the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative, a US-federal research and development program initiated by US Senator Al Gore. Andreessen and Bina released a Unix version of the browser in February 1993; Mac and Windows versions followed in August 1993. The browser gained popularity due to its strong support of integrated multimedia, and the authors' rapid response to user bug reports and recommendations for new features. Historians generally agree that the 1993 introduction of the Mosaic web browser was a turning point for the World Wide Web.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Before the release of Mosaic in 1993, graphics were not commonly mixed with text in web pages, and the Web was less popular than older protocols such as Gopher and WAIS. Mosaic could display inline images and submit forms for Windows, Macintosh and X-Windows. NCSA also developed HTTPd, a Unix web server that used the Common Gateway Interface to process forms and Server Side Includes for dynamic content. Both the client and server were free to use with no restrictions. Mosaic was an immediate hit; its graphical user interface allowed the Web to become by far the most popular protocol on the Internet. Within a year, web traffic surpassed Gopher's. "Wired" declared that Mosaic made non-Internet online services obsolete, and the Web became the preferred interface for accessing the Internet.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The World Wide Web enabled the spread of information over the Internet through an easy-to-use and flexible format. It thus played an important role in popularising use of the Internet. Although the two terms are sometimes conflated in popular use, "World Wide Web" is not synonymous with "Internet". The Web is an information space containing hyperlinked documents and other resources, identified by their URIs. It is implemented as both client and server software using Internet protocols such as TCP/IP and HTTP.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: In keeping with its origins at CERN, early adopters of the Web were primarily university-based scientific departments or physics laboratories such as SLAC and Fermilab. By January 1993 there were fifty web servers across the world. By October 1993 there were over five hundred servers online, including some notable websites.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Practical media distribution and streaming media over the Web was made possible by advances in data compression, due to the impractically high bandwidth requirements of uncompressed media. Following the introduction of the Web, several media formats based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) were introduced for practical media distribution and streaming over the Web, including the MPEG video format in 1991 and the JPEG image format in 1992. The high level of image compression made JPEG a good format for compensating slow Internet access speeds, typical in the age of dial-up Internet access. JPEG became the most widely used image format for the World Wide Web. A DCT variation, the modified discrete cosine transform (MDCT) algorithm, led to the development of MP3, which was introduced in 1991 and became the first popular audio format on the Web.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: In 1992 the Computing and Networking Department of CERN, headed by David Williams, withdrew support of Berners-Lee's work. A two-page email sent by Williams stated that the work of Berners-Lee, with the goal of creating a facility to exchange information such as results and comments from CERN experiments to the scientific community, was not the core activity of CERN and was a misallocation of CERN's IT resources. Following this decision, Tim Berners-Lee left CERN for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he continued to develop HTTP.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The first Microsoft Windows browser was Cello, written by Thomas R. Bruce for the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School to provide legal information, since access to Windows was more widespread amongst lawyers than access to Unix. Cello was released in June 1993.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The rate of web site deployment increased sharply around the world, and fostered development of international standards for protocols and content formatting. Berners-Lee continued to stay involved in guiding web standards, such as the markup languages to compose web pages, and he advocated his vision of a Semantic Web (sometimes known as Web 3.0) based around machine-readability and interoperability standards.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: In May 1994, the first International WWW Conference, organized by Robert Cailliau, was held at CERN; the conference has been held every year since.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in September/October 1994 in order to create open standards for the Web. It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Computer Science (MIT/LCS) with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which had pioneered the Internet. A year later, a second site was founded at INRIA (a French national computer research lab) with support from the European Commission; and in 1996, a third continental site was created in Japan at Keio University.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: W3C comprised various companies that were willing to create standards and recommendations to improve the quality of the Web. Berners-Lee made the Web available freely, with no patent and no royalties due. The W3C decided that its standards must be based on royalty-free technology, so they can be easily adopted by anyone. Netscape and Microsoft, in the middle of a browser war, ignored the W3C and added elements to HTML ad hoc (e.g., blink and marquee). Finally, in 1995, Netscape and Microsoft came to their senses and agreed to abide by the W3C's standard.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The W3C published the standard for HTML 4 in 1997, which included Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), giving designers more control over the appearance of web pages without the need for additional HTML tags. The W3C couldn't enforce compliance so none of the browsers were fully compliant. This frustrated web designers who formed the Web Standards Project (WaSP) in 1998 with the goal of cajoling compliance with standards. A List Apart and CSS Zen Garden were influential websites that promoted good design and adherence to standards. Nevertheless, AOL halted development of Netscape and Microsoft was slow to update IE. Mozilla and Apple both released browsers that aimed to be more standards compliant (Firefox and Safari), but were unable to dislodge IE as the dominant browser.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: As the Web grew in the mid-1990s, web directories and primitive search engines were created to index pages and allow people to find things. Commercial use restrictions on the Internet were lifted in 1995 when NSFNET was shut down.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: In the US, the online service America Online (AOL) offered their users a connection to the Internet via their own internal browser, using a dial-up Internet connection. In January 1994, Yahoo! was founded by Jerry Yang and David Filo, then students at Stanford University. Yahoo! Directory became the first popular web directory. Yahoo! Search, launched the same year, was the first popular search engine on the World Wide Web. Yahoo! became the quintessential example of a first mover on the Web.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Online shopping began to emerge with the launch of Amazon's shopping site by Jeff Bezos in 1995 and eBay by Pierre Omidyar the same year.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: By 1994, Marc Andreessen's Netscape Navigator superseded Mosaic in popularity, holding the position for some time. Bill Gates outlined Microsoft's strategy to dominate the Internet in his Tidal Wave memo in 1995. With the release of Windows 95 and the popular Internet Explorer browser, many publicly companies began to develop a Web presence. At first, people mainly anticipated the possibilities of free publishing and instant worldwide information. By the late 1990s, the directory model had given way to search engines, corresponding with the rise of Google Search, which developed new approaches to relevancy ranking. Directory features, while still commonly available, became after-thoughts to search engines.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Netscape had a very successful IPO valuing the company at $2.9 billion despite the lack of profits and triggering the dot-com bubble. Increasing familiarity with the Web led to the growth of direct Web-based commerce (e-commerce) and instantaneous group communications worldwide. Many dot-com companies, displaying products on hypertext webpages, were added into the Web. Over the next 5 years, over a trillion dollars was raised to fund thousands of startups consisting of little more than a website.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: During the dot-com boom, many companies vied to create a dominant web portal in the belief that such a website would best be able to attract a large audience that in turn would attract online advertising revenue. While most of these portals offered a search engine, they were not interested in encouraging users to find other websites and leave the portal and instead concentrated on "sticky" content. In contrast, Google was a stripped-down search engine that delivered superior results. It was a hit with users who switched from portals to Google. Furthermore, with AdWords, Google had an effective business model.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: AOL bought Netscape in 1998. In spite of their early success, Netscape was unable to fend off Microsoft. Internet Explorer and a variety of other browsers almost completely replaced it.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Faster broadband internet connections replaced many dial-up connections from the beginning of the 2000s.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: With the bursting of the dot-com bubble, many web portals either scaled back operations, floundered, or shut down entirely. AOL disbanded Netscape in 2003.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Web server software was developed to allow computers to act as web servers. The first web servers supported only static files, such as HTML (and images), but now they commonly allow embedding of server side applications. Web framework software enabled building and deploying web applications. Content management systems (CMS) were developed to organize and facilitate collaborative content creation. Many of them were built on top of separate content management frameworks.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: After Robert McCool joined Netscape, development on the NCSA HTTPd server languished. In 1995, Brian Behlendorf and Cliff Skolnick created a mailing list to coordinate efforts to fix bugs and make improvements to HTTPd. They called their version of HTTPd, Apache. Apache quickly became the dominant server on the Web. After adding support for modules, Apache was able to allow developers to handle web requests with a variety of languages including Perl, PHP and Python. Together with Linux and MySQL, it became known as the LAMP platform.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Following the success of Apache, the Apache Software Foundation was founded in 1999 and produced many open source web software projects in the same collaborative spirit.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: After graduating from UIUC, Andreessen and Jim Clark, former CEO of Silicon Graphics, met and formed Mosaic Communications Corporation in April 1994 to develop the Mosaic Netscape browser commercially. The company later changed its name to Netscape, and the browser was developed further as Netscape Navigator, which soon became the dominant web client. They also released the Netsite Commerce web server which could handle SSL requests, thus enabling e-commerce on the Web. SSL became the standard method to encrypt web traffic. Navigator 1.0 also introduced cookies, but Netscape did not publicize this feature. Netscape followed up with Navigator 2 in 1995 introducing frames, Java applets and JavaScript. In 1998, Netscape made Navigator open source and launched Mozilla.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Microsoft licensed Mosaic from Spyglass and released Internet Explorer 1.0 that year and IE2 later the same year. IE2 added features pioneered at Netscape such as cookies, SSL, and JavaScript. The browser wars became a competition for dominance when Explorer was bundled with Windows. This led to the "United States v. Microsoft Corporation" antitrust lawsuit.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: IE3, released in 1996, added support for Java applets, ActiveX, and CSS. At this point, Microsoft began bundling IE with Windows. IE3 managed to increase Microsoft's share of the browser market from under 10% to over 20%. IE4, released the following year, introduced Dynamic HTML setting the stage for the Web 2.0 revolution. By 1998, IE was able to capture the majority of the desktop browser market. It would be the dominant browser for the next fourteen years.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Google released their Chrome browser in 2008 with the first JIT JavaScript engine, V8. Chrome overtook IE to become the dominant desktop browser in four years, and overtook Safari to become the dominant mobile browser in two. At the same time, Google open sourced Chrome's codebase as Chromium.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Ryan Dahl used Chromium's V8 engine in 2009 to power an event driven runtime system, Node.js, which allowed JavaScript code to be used on servers as well as browsers. This led to the development of new software stacks such as MEAN. Thanks to frameworks such as Electron, developers can bundle up node applications as standalone desktop applications such as Slack.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Acer and Samsung began selling Chromebooks, cheap laptops running ChromeOS capable of running web apps, in 2011. Over the next decade, more companies offered Chromebooks. Chromebooks outsold MacOS devices in 2020 to become the second most popular OS in the world.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Other notable web browsers emerged including Mozilla's Firefox, Opera's Opera browser and Apple's Safari.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Web pages were initially conceived as structured documents based upon HTML. They could include images, video, and other content, although the use of media was initially relatively limited and the content was mainly static. By the mid-2000s, new approaches to sharing and exchanging content, such as blogs and RSS, rapidly gained acceptance on the Web. The video-sharing website YouTube launched the concept of user-generated content. As new technologies made it easier to create websites that behaved dynamically, the Web attained greater ease of use and gained a sense of interactivity which ushered in a period of rapid popularization. This new era also brought into existence social networking websites, such as Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, and photo- and video-sharing websites such as Flickr and, later, Instagram which gained users rapidly and became a central part of youth culture. Wikipedia's user-edited content quickly displaced the professionally-written Microsoft Encarta. The popularity of these sites, combined with developments in the technology that enabled them, and the increasing availability and affordability of high-speed connections made video content far more common on all kinds of websites. This new media-rich model for information exchange, featuring user-generated and user-edited websites, was dubbed Web 2.0, a term coined in 1999 and popularized in 2004 at the Web 2.0 Conference. The Web 2.0 boom drew investment from companies worldwide and saw many new service-oriented startups catering to a newly "democratized" Web.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: JavaScript made the development of interactive web applications possible. Web pages could run JavaScript and respond to user input, but they could not interact with the network. Browsers could submit data to servers via forms and receive new pages, but this was slow compared to traditional desktop applications. Developers that wanted to offer sophisticated applications over the Web used Java or nonstandard solutions such as Adobe Flash or Microsoft's ActiveX.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Microsoft added a little noticed feature in 1999 called XMLHttpRequest to MSIE. Developers at Oddpost used this feature in 2002 to create the first Ajax application, a webmail client that performed as well as a desktop application. Ajax apps were revolutionary. Web pages evolved beyond static documents to full-blown applications. Websites began offering APIs in addition to webpages. Developers created a plethora of Ajax apps including widgets, mashups and new types of social apps. Analysts called it Web 2.0.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Browser vendors improved the performance of their JavaScript engines and dropped support for Flash and Java. Traditional client server applications were replaced by cloud apps. Amazon reinvented itself as a cloud service provider.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The use of social media on the Web has become ubiquitous in everyday life. The 2010s also saw the rise of streaming services, such as Netflix.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: In spite of the success of Web 2.0 applications, the W3C forged ahead with their plan to replace HTML with XHTML and represent all data in XML. In 2004, representatives from Mozilla, Opera, and Apple formed an opposing group, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), dedicated to improving HTML while maintaining backward compatibility. For the next several years, websites did not transition their content to XHTML; browser vendors did not adopt XHTML2; and developers eschewed XML in favor of JSON. By 2007, the W3C conceded and announced they were restarting work on HTML and in 2009, they officially abandoned XHTML. In 2019, the W3C ceded control of the HTML specification, now called the HTML Living Standard, to WHATWG.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Microsoft rewrote their Edge browser in 2021 to use Chromium as its code base in order to be more compatible with Chrome.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The increasing use of encrypted connections (HTTPS) enabled e-commerce and online banking. Nonetheless, the 2010s saw the emergence of various controversial trends, such as internet censorship and the growth of cybercrime, including web-based cyberattacks and ransomware.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Early attempts to allow wireless devices to access the Web used simplified formats such as i-mode and WAP. Apple introduced the first smartphone in 2007 with a full-featured browser. Other companies followed suit and in 2011, smartphone sales overtook PCs. Since 2016, most visitors access websites with mobile devices which led to the adoption of responsive web design.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Apple, Mozilla, and Google have taken different approaches to integrating smartphones with modern web apps. Apple initially promoted web apps for the iPhone, but then encouraged developers to make native apps. Mozilla announced Web APIs in 2011 to allow webapps to access hardware features such as audio, camera or GPS. Frameworks such as Cordova and Ionic allow developers to build hybrid apps. Mozilla released a mobile OS designed to run web apps in 2012, but discontinued it in 2015.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Google announced specifications for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), and progressive web applications (PWA) in 2015. AMPs use a combination of HTML, JavaScript, and Web Components to optimize web pages for mobile devices; and PWAs are web pages that, with a combination of web workers and manifest files, can be saved to a mobile device and opened like a native app.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: The extension of the Web to facilitate data exchange was explored as an approach to create a Semantic Web (sometimes called Web 3.0). This involved using machine-readable information and interoperability standards to enable context-understanding programs to intelligently select information for users. Continued extension of the Web has focused on connecting devices to the Internet, coined Intelligent Device Management. As Internet connectivity becomes ubiquitous, manufacturers have started to leverage the expanded computing power of their devices to enhance their usability and capability. Through Internet connectivity, manufacturers are now able to interact with the devices they have sold and shipped to their customers, and customers are able to interact with the manufacturer (and other providers) to access a lot of new content.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Web3 (sometimes also referred to as Web 3.0) is an idea for a decentralized Web based on public blockchains, smart contracts, digital tokens and digital wallets.


title: History of the World Wide Web

text: Historiography of the Web poses specific challenges including, disposable data, missing links, lost content and archived websites, which have consequences for web historians. Sites such as the Internet Archive aim to preserve content.


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: "The Black Cat" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in the August 19, 1843, edition of "The Saturday Evening Post". In the story, an unnamed narrator has a strong affection for pets until he perversely turns to abusing them. His favorite, a pet black cat, bites him one night and the narrator punishes it by cutting its eye out and then hanging it from a tree. The home burns down but one remaining wall shows a burned outline of a cat hanging from a noose. He soon finds another black cat, similar to the first except for a white mark on its chest, but he soon develops a hatred for it as well. He attempts to kill the cat with an axe but his wife stops him; instead, the narrator murders his wife. He conceals the body behind a brick wall in his basement. The police soon come and, after the narrator's tapping on the wall is met with a shrieking sound, they find not only the wife's corpse but also the black cat that had been accidentally walled in with the body and alerted them with its cry.


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: The story is a study of the psychology of guilt, often paired in analysis with Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart". In both, a murderer carefully conceals his crime and believes himself unassailable, but eventually breaks down and reveals himself, impelled by a nagging reminder of his guilt. "The Black Cat", which also features questions of sanity versus insanity, is Poe's strongest warning against the dangers of alcoholism.


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: The story is presented as a first-person narrative using an unnamed unreliable narrator. He is a condemned man at the outset of the story. The narrator tells us that from an early age he has loved animals; he and his wife have many pets, including a large, beautiful black cat (as described by the narrator) named Pluto. This cat is especially fond of the narrator and vice versa. Their mutual friendship lasts for several years until the narrator becomes an alcoholic. One night, after coming home completely intoxicated, he believes the cat to be avoiding him. When he tries to seize it, the panicked cat bites the narrator, and in a fit of drunken rage he seizes the animal, pulls a pen-knife from his pocket, and deliberately gouges out the cat's eye.


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: From that moment on, the cat flees in terror at his master's approach. At first, the narrator is remorseful and regrets his cruelty. "But this feeling soon gave place to irritation. And then came, as if to my final and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of perverseness." In another fit of drunken fury, the narrator takes the cat out in the garden one morning and ties a noose around its neck, hanging it from a tree where it dies. That very night his house mysteriously catches fire, forcing the narrator, his wife and their servant to flee the premises.


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: The next day, the narrator returns to the ruins of his home to find, imprinted on the single wall that survived the fire, the apparition of a gigantic cat with a rope around the animal's neck.


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: Though initially disturbed, the narrator gradually determines a logical explanation for it; someone outside had cut the cat from the tree and thrown its corpse into the bedroom to awaken him during the fire. The narrator begins to miss Pluto and hate himself for his actions, feeling guilty. Some time later, he finds a similar cat in a tavern, being the same size and color as the original and even missing an eye, with the only difference is a large white patch on the cat's chest. The narrator takes it home, but soon begins to fear and loathe the cat, as it amplifies his guilty conscience. After some time, the white patch of fur begins to take shape and, much to the narrator's horror, forms the shape of the gallows. This terrifies and angers him more, and he avoids the cat whenever possible.


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: Then, one day when the narrator and his wife are visiting the cellar in their new home, the cat gets under its master's feet and nearly trips him down the stairs. The infuriated narrator attempts to kill the cat with an axe but is stopped by his wife. Failing to take out his drunken fury on the cat, he angrily kills his wife with the axe instead. He seals his wife's corpse in a wall in the cellar. A few days later, when the police arrive to investigate the wife's disappearance, they find nothing and the narrator goes free. The cat, which he intended to kill as well, has also gone missing. This grants him the freedom to sleep, even with the burden of murder.


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: On the last day of the investigation, the narrator accompanies the still-clueless police into the cellar. Completely confident in his own safety, the narrator comments on the sturdiness of the building and taps upon the wall he had built around his wife's body. A loud, inhuman screaming sound fills the room. The alarmed police tear down the wall and find the wife's corpse. Sitting on the corpse's rotting head, to the utter horror of the narrator, is the screeching black cat. The terrified narrator is immediately shattered completely by this reminder of his crime—which he had believed to be safe from discovery—and the appearance of the cat. As he words it: "I had walled the monster up within the tomb!"


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: "The Black Cat" was first published in the August 19, 1843, issue of "The Saturday Evening Post". At the time, the publication was using the temporary title "United States Saturday Post". The story was reprinted in "The Baltimore Sun" and "The Pensacola Gazette" that same year. Readers immediately responded favorably to the story, spawning parodies including Thomas Dunn English's "The Ghost of the Grey Tadpole".


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: Like the narrator in Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", the narrator of "The Black Cat" is of questionable sanity. In the beginning of the tale, the narrator says that he would be "mad indeed" should he expect a reader to believe the story, implying that he has already been accused of madness.


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: The extent to which the narrator claims to have loved his animals suggests mental instability in the form of having “too much of a good thing”. His partiality for animals substitutes “the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man”. Since the narrator's wife shares his love of animals, he likely thinks of her as another pet, seeing as he distrusts and dislikes humans. Additionally, his failure to understand his excessive love of animals foreshadows his inability to explain his motives for his actions.


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: One of Poe's darkest tales, "The Black Cat" includes his strongest denunciation of alcohol. The narrator's perverse actions are brought on by his alcoholism, a "disease" and "fiend" which also destroys his personality. The use of the black cat evokes various superstitions, including the idea voiced by the narrator's wife that they are all witches in disguise. Poe owned a black cat. In his "Instinct vs Reason – A Black Cat" he stated: "The writer of this article is the owner of one of the most remarkable black cats in the world – and this is saying much; for it will be remembered that black cats are all of them witches." In Scottish and Irish mythology, the Cat-sìth is described as being a black cat with a white spot on its chest, not unlike the cat the narrator finds in the tavern. The eponymous cat is named Pluto after the Roman god of the Underworld.


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: Although Pluto is a neutral character at the beginning of the story, he becomes antagonistic in the narrator's eyes once the narrator becomes an alcoholic. The alcohol pushes the narrator into fits of intemperance and violence, to the point at which everything angers him – Pluto in particular, who is always by his side, becomes the malevolent witch who haunts him even while avoiding his presence. When the narrator cuts Pluto's eye from its socket, this can be seen as symbolic of self-inflicted partial blindness to his own vision of moral goodness.


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: The fire that destroys the narrator's house symbolizes the narrator's "almost complete moral disintegration". The only remainder is the impression of Pluto upon the wall, which represents his unforgivable and incorrigible sin.


title: The Black Cat (short story)

text: From a rhetorician's standpoint, an effective scheme of omission that Poe employs is diazeugma, or using many verbs for one subject; it omits pronouns. Diazeugma emphasizes actions and makes the narrative swift and brief.


title: History of the potato

text: The potato was the first domesticated vegetable in the region of modern-day southern Peru and extreme northwestern Bolivia between 8000 and 5000 BCE. Cultivation of potatoes in South America may go back 10,000 years, but tubers do not preserve well in the archaeological record, making identification difficult. The earliest archaeologically verified potato tuber remains have been found at the coastal site of Ancón (central Peru), dating to 2500 BC. Aside from actual remains, the potato is also found in the Peruvian archaeological record as a design influence of ceramic pottery, often in the shape of vessels. The potato has since spread around the world and has become a staple crop in most countries.


title: History of the potato

text: It arrived in Europe sometime before the end of the 16th century by two different ports of entry: the first in Spain around 1570, and the second via the British Isles between 1588 and 1593. The first written mention of the potato is a receipt for delivery dated 28 November 1567 between Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and Antwerp. In France, at the end of the 16th century, the potato had been introduced to the Franche-Comté, the Vosges of Lorraine and Alsace. By the end of the 18th century, it was written in the 1785 edition of "Bon Jardinier": "There is no vegetable about which so much has been written and so much enthusiasm has been shown ... The poor should be quite content with this foodstuff." It had widely replaced the turnip and rutabaga by the 19th century. Throughout Europe, the most important new food in the 19th century was the potato, which had three major advantages over other foods for the consumer: its lower rate of spoilage, its bulk (which easily satisfied hunger) and its cheapness. The crop slowly spread across Europe, becoming a major staple by mid-century, especially in Ireland.


title: History of the potato

text: The earliest archaeologically verified potato tuber remains were found at the coastal site of Ancón (central Peru), dating to 2500 BC. There is also recent evidence from stone tools of potatoes suggesting evidence of potatoes existing as far back as 3400 BC. However, it is difficult to be certain as potatoes do not preserve well compared to other crops. Potatoes dating to about 2000 BC were also found at Huaynuma, in the Casma Valley of Peru, and early potatoes dating to 800-500 BC were also uncovered at the Altiplano site of Chiripa on the east side of Lake Titicaca.


title: History of the potato

text: Archeological evidence also shows that throughout the formative period from 1500 BC to 500 BC and Tiwanaku period in the Andes, potatoes and tubers became increasingly popular as a crop and food. Boiled and steamed potatoes and tubers replaced soups throughout the formative period. From isotopic analysis of human skeletons and archeological reference materials, tubers and potatoes were an integral part of the Andean diet throughout the formative and Tiwanaku periods, alongside the grain quinoa and animals such as llamas. In the Incan period, potato and legume consumption decreased (although still commonly consumed) in favor of crops like maize.


title: History of the potato

text: Aside from these remains, in the Peruvian archaeological record, the potato was uncovered as a design influence of ceramic pottery in the Altiplanos, often in the shape of vessels. These vessels represented potatoes in three ways: as clear depictions of the vegetable, as embodying a human form (either mutilated or not) or as transition between the two. The fact that the Altiplanos chose to represent the potato in their vessels shows they had great social significance to the people there. Moreover, in Moche culture, potatoes did not have much religious or cultural significance compared to more prominent crops like maize. The protuberant and malformed nature of the potato fascinated the Moche and commonly appeared in their art as malformed animals and humans provoking an emotion known as "mundo hororroso." The potato-symbolized art touched on themes such as physical deformities and hallucinations.


title: History of the potato

text: In the Altiplano, potatoes provided the principal energy source for the Inca Empire, its predecessors, and its Spanish successor. Andean people prepared their potatoes in a variety of ways, such as mashed, baked, boiled, and stewed in ways similar to modern methods. The Andean people also prepared a dish called papas secas, which was a process that involved boiling, peeling, and chopping. These potatoes were then fermented in order to create toqosh: and ground to a pulp, soaked, and filtered into a starch referred to as almidón de papa. However, the cash crop of the Andean people was chuño: created by letting potatoes freeze overnight allowing them to thaw in the morning which they repeated to soften the potatoes. Then, Farmers extracted the potatoes' water leaving them much lighter and smaller. This new creation was later prepared into a stew (usually an addition). Among its many benefits, Chuño's primary benefit was that it could be stored for years without refrigeration, which came into use especially during years of famine or bad harvests. Moreover, this long shelf life allowed it to be the staple food for the Inca Armies due to how well it maintained its flavor and longevity. The Spanish fed chuño to the silver miners who produced vast wealth in the 16th century for the Spanish government.


title: History of the potato

text: Potato was the staple food of most PreColumbian Mapuches, "specially in the southern and coastal Mapuche territories where maize did not reach maturity".


title: History of the potato

text: Potato was cultivated by the Chono tribe in Guaitecas Archipelago in Patagonia being this the southern limit of Pre-Hispanic agriculture as noted by the mention of the cultivation of Chiloé potatoes by a Spanish expedition in 1557.


title: History of the potato

text: Sailors returning from the Andes to Spain with silver presumably brought maize and potatoes for their own food on the trip. Historians speculate that leftover tubers (and maize) were carried ashore and planted: "We think that the potato arrived some years before the end of the 16th century, by two different ports of entry: the first, logically, in Spain around 1570, and the second via the British Isles between 1588 and 1593 ... we find traces of the transport of potatoes travelling from the Canaries to Antwerp in 1567 ... we can say that the potato was introduced there [the Canary islands] from South America around 1562 ... the first written mention of the potato [is] ... a receipt for delivery dated 28 November 1567 between Las Palmas in the Grand Canaries and Antwerp."


title: History of the potato

text: Europeans in South America were aware of the potato by the mid-16th century but refused to eat the plant. For the Spaniards the potato was regarded as a food for the natives: the Spanish conquerors speak most favourably of the potato, but they recommend it especially for the natives who have to do the heaviest jobs. A similar pattern occurred in England where the potato became the food of the working class. In 1553, in the book "Crónica del Peru", Pedro Cieza de León mentions he saw it in Quito, Popayán and Pasto in 1538. Basque fishermen from Spain used potatoes as ships' stores for their voyages across the Atlantic in the 16th century and introduced the tuber to western Ireland, where they landed to dry their cod. The English privateer Sir Francis Drake, returning from his circumnavigation, or Sir Walter Raleigh's employee Thomas Harriot, are commonly credited with introducing potatoes into England. In 1588, botanist Carolus Clusius made a painting of what he called "Papas Peruanorum" from a specimen in the Low Countries; in 1601 he reported that potatoes were in common use in northern Italy for animal fodder and for human consumption.


title: History of the potato

text: The potato first spread in Europe for non-food purposes. It was regarded with suspicion and fear due to it being a member of the nightshade family. Europeans assumed its resemblance to nightshade meant that it was the creation of witches or devils. At first it was mostly used as fodder for livestock or to feed the starving. In Northern Europe it was grown as an exotic novelty in botanical gardens. It was first eaten on the continent at a Seville hospital in 1573. After Philip II received potatoes from Peru, he sent harvested tubers to the pope, who sent them to the papal ambassador to the Netherlands because he was ill. Clusius indirectly received his tubers from the ambassador; he planted them in Vienna, Frankfurt, and Leyden, and is the person who widely introduced the plant to Europe. It was grown for flowers by Rudolph Jakob Camerarius (1588) and others; John Gerard added the first printed picture of the potato to "Herball" (1597), although he thought that the plant was native to Virginia.


title: History of the potato

text: The Spanish had an empire across Europe and brought potatoes for their armies. Peasants along the way adopted the crop, which was less often pillaged by marauding armies than above-ground stores of grain. Across most of Northern Europe, where open fields prevailed, potatoes were strictly confined to small garden plots because field agriculture was strictly governed by custom that prescribed seasonal rhythms for plowing, sowing, harvesting and grazing animals on fallow and stubble. This meant that potatoes were barred from large-scale cultivation because the rules allowed only grain to be planted in the open fields. People feared that it was poisonous like other plants the potato was often grown with in herb gardens, and distrusted a plant, nicknamed "the devil's apples", that grew underground. In France and Germany, government officials and noble landowners promoted the rapid conversion of fallow land into potato fields after 1750. The potato thus became an important staple crop in northern Europe. Famines in the early 1770s contributed to its acceptance, as did government policies in several European countries and climate change during the Little Ice Age, when traditional crops in this region did not produce as reliably as before. At times and places when and where most other crops failed, potatoes could still typically be relied upon to contribute adequately to food supplies during colder years.


title: History of the potato

text: In France, at the end of the 16th century, the potato had been introduced to the Franche-Comté, the Vosges of Lorraine and Alsace. By the end of the 18th century, it was written in the 1785 edition of "Bon Jardinier": "There is no vegetable about which so much has been written and so much enthusiasm has been shown ... The poor should be quite content with this foodstuff." The people also began to overcome their disgust of the potato when Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette began wearing potato blossoms in their everyday attire. It had widely replaced the turnip and rutabaga by the 19th century.


title: History of the potato

text: The potato had a large effect on European demographics and society, due to the fact that it yielded about three times the calories per acre of grain while also being more nutritive and growing in a wider variety of soils and climates, significantly improving agricultural production in the early modern era. Despite this it took a while to catch on. Probably the first area of Europe to cultivate it on a wide scale was Ireland in the early 17th century, so that by the 18th century the Irish population exploded, and its people subsisted almost entirely on the crop. It spread to England soon after it reached Ireland (being widely cultivated in Lancashire and around London, on top of imports from Ireland), also becoming a staple by the 18th century. By the late 18th century, Sir Frederick Eden wrote that the potato had become "a constant standing dish, at every meal, breakfast excepted, at the tables of the Rich, as well as the Poor." By 1715 the potato was widespread in the Low Countries, the Rhineland, Southwestern Germany, and Eastern France, and by the mid-18th century had also been firmly established in the Kingdom of Prussia in northern and eastern Germany, due to the efforts of Frederick II's government from 1744. Northern and western France took longer than eastern France, but there too it became common by the late 18th century. On the other hand, maize (which also yielded far more calories per acre than wheat) proved more popular than the potato in the hotter climates of Portugal, Spain, Italy, and southern France, first being grown in Spain around 1525 and becoming a common part of the peasant diet by the 17th century.


title: History of the potato

text: It is generally believed that potatoes entered Africa with colonists, who consumed them as a vegetable rather than as a staple starch. Shipping records from 1567 show that the first place outside of Central and South America where potatoes were grown were the Canary Islands. As in other continents, despite its advantages as an anti-famine, high-elevation alternative to grain, potatoes were first resisted by local farmers who believed they were poisonous. As colonialists promoted them as a low-cost food, they were also a symbol of domination. In former European colonies of Africa, potatoes were initially consumed only occasionally, but increased production made them a staple in certain areas. Potatoes tended to become more popular in wartime due to their being able to be stored in the ground. It was well established as a crop by the mid-20th century and in present-day Africa they have become a vegetable or co-staple crop.


title: History of the potato

text: In higher regions of Rwanda, potatoes have become a new staple food crop. Prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, consumption was as high as 153 to 200 kg per year – higher than in any Western European country. Recently farmers have developed the potato as a cash crop after introducing several new varieties brought back by migrant laborers from Uganda and other varieties from Kenya.


title: History of the potato

text: The potato diffused widely after 1600, becoming a major food resource in Europe and East Asia. Following its introduction into China toward the end of the Ming dynasty, the potato immediately became a delicacy of the imperial family. After the middle period of the Qianlong era (1735–96) in the Qing dynasty, population increases and a subsequent need to increase grain yields coupled with greater peasant geographic mobility led to the rapid spread of potato cultivation throughout China, and it was acclimated to local natural conditions.


title: History of the potato

text: Peter Boomgaard looks at the adoption of various root and tuber crops in Indonesia throughout the colonial period and examines the chronology and reasons for progressive adoption of foreign crops: sweet potato (widespread by the 1670s), ("Irish") potato and bengkuang (yam beans) (both locally abundant by the 1780s), and cassava (from the 1860s).


title: History of the potato

text: In India, Edward Terry mentioned the potato in his travel accounts of the banquet at Ajmer by Asaph Khan to Sir Thomas Roe, the British Ambassador in 1675. The vegetables gardens of Surat and Karnataka had potatoes as mentioned in Fyer's travel record of 1675. The Portuguese introduced potatoes, which they called 'Batata', to India in the early seventeenth century when they cultivated it along the western coast. British traders introduced potatoes to Bengal as a root crop, 'Alu'. By the end of the 18th century, it was cultivated across northern hill areas of India. Potatoes were introduced to Tibet by the 19th century through the trade route from India.


title: History of the potato

text: Early colonists in Virginia and the Carolinas may have grown potatoes from seeds or tubers from Spanish ships, but the earliest certain potato crop in North America was brought to New Hampshire in 1719 from Derry. The plants were from Ireland, so the crop became known as the "Irish potato". Thomas Jefferson says of the potato, "you say the potatoe is a native of the US. I presume you speak of the Irish potatoe. I have enquired much into this question, & think I can assure you that plant is not a native of N. America. it came from Ireland". It was not until after 1750 - as with Europe - that they were widely planted in eastern North America, however. In 1812 the Russian-American Company's Fort Ross planted a crop, the first in western North America and possibly a second, independent introduction into the continent. Potatoes were planted in Idaho as early as 1838; by 1900 the state's production exceeded a million bushels (about 27,000 tonnes). Before 1910, the crops were stored in barns or root cellars, but, by the 1920s, potato cellars or barns came into use. U.S. potato production has increased steadily; two-thirds of the crop comes from Idaho, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Maine, and potato growers have strengthened their position in both domestic and foreign markets.


title: History of the potato

text: French physician Antoine Parmentier studied the potato intensely and in "Examen chymique des pommes de terres" ("Chemical examination of potatoes") (Paris, 1774) showed their enormous nutritional value. King Louis XVI and his court eagerly promoted the new crop, with Queen Marie Antoinette even wearing a headdress of potato flowers at a fancy dress ball. The annual potato crop of France soared to 21 million hectoliters in 1815 and 117 million in 1840, allowing a concomitant growth in population while avoiding the Malthusian trap.


title: History of the potato

text: Although potatoes had become widely familiar in Russia by 1800, they were confined to garden plots until the grain failure in 1838–39 persuaded peasants and landlords in central and northern Russia to devote their fallow fields to raising potatoes. Potatoes yielded from two to four times more calories per acre than grain did, and eventually came to dominate the food supply in Eastern Europe. Boiled or baked potatoes were cheaper than rye bread, just as nutritious, and did not require a gristmill for grinding. On the other hand, cash-oriented landlords realised that grain was much easier to ship, store and sell, so both grain and potatoes coexisted.


title: History of the potato

text: In the German lands, Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, strove successfully to overcome farmers' skepticism about the potato, and in 1756 he issued an official proclamation mandating its cultivation. This "Kartoffelbefehl" (potato order) termed the unfamiliar tuber "a very nutritious food supplement." Frederick was sometimes known as the "Kartoffelkönig" ("potato king").


title: History of the potato

text: Throughout Europe, the most important new food in the 19th century was the potato, which had three major advantages over other foods for the consumer: its lower rate of spoilage, its bulk (which easily satisfied hunger) and its cheapness. The crop slowly spread across Europe, such that, for example, by 1845 it occupied one-third of Irish arable land. Potatoes comprised about 10% of the caloric intake of Europeans. Along with several other foods that either originated in the Americas or were successfully grown or harvested there, potatoes sustained European populations.


title: History of the potato

text: In Britain, the potato promoted economic development by underpinning the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. It served as a cheap source of calories and nutrients that was easy for urban workers to cultivate on small backyard plots. Potatoes became popular in the north of England, where coal was readily available, so a potato-driven population boom provided ample workers for the new factories. Marxist Friedrich Engels even declared that the potato was the equal of iron for its "historically revolutionary role". The Dutch potato-starch industry grew rapidly in the 19th century, especially under the leadership of entrepreneur Willem Albert Scholten (1819–92).


title: History of the potato

text: In Ireland, the expansion of potato cultivation was due entirely to the landless labourers, renting tiny plots from landowners who were interested only in raising cattle or in producing grain for market. A single acre of potatoes and the milk of a single cow was enough to feed a whole Irish family a monotonous but nutritionally adequate diet for a healthy, vigorous (and desperately poor) rural population. Often even poor families grew enough extra potatoes to feed a pig that they could sell for cash.


title: History of the potato

text: A lack of genetic diversity from the low number of varieties left the crop vulnerable to disease. In the early 1800s, a strain of potato blight ("Phytophthora infestans") known as HERB-1 began to spread in the Americas, especially Central and North America destroying many crops. The blight spread to Europe in the 1840s where, because of an extreme lack of genetic diversity, the potato crops were even more susceptible. In Northern Europe there were major crop losses lasting throughout the rest of the 19th century. Ireland in particular, because of the extreme dependence of the poor, especially western Ireland, on this single staple crop, was devastated by the blight's arrival in 1845.


title: History of the potato

text: The Lumper potato, widely cultivated in western and southern Ireland before and during the Great Famine, was bland, wet and poorly resistant to the potato blight, but yielded large crops and usually provided adequate calories for peasants and labourers. Heavy dependence on this potato led to disaster when the blight quickly turned harvest-ready and newly harvested potatoes into a putrid mush. The Irish Famine in the western and southern parts of Ireland between 1845 and 1849 was a catastrophic failure in the food supply that led to approximately a million deaths from famine and (especially) diseases that attacked weakened bodies, and to massive emigration to Britain, the U.S., Canada and elsewhere. During the famine years roughly one million Irish emigrated; this tide was not turned until the 20th century, when Ireland's population stood at less than half of the pre-famine level of 8 million.


title: History of the potato

text: By the 1960s, the Canadian Potato Research Centre in Fredericton, New Brunswick, was one of the top six potato research institutes in the world. Established in 1912 as a Dominion Experimental Station, the station began in the 1930s to concentrate on breeding new varieties of disease-resistant potatoes. In the 1950s–1960s, the growth of the French fry industry in New Brunswick led to a focus on developing varieties for the industry. By the 1970s, the station's potato research was broader than ever before, but the station and its research programs had changed, as emphasis was placed on serving industry rather than potato farmers in general. Scientists at the station even began describing their work using engineering language rather than scientific prose. Potatoes are Canada's most important vegetable crop; they are grown commercially in all its provinces, led by Prince Edward Island.


title: History of the potato

text: Beginning in the 1960s Chilean agronomist Andrés Contreras begun to collect neglected local varieties of potatoes in Chiloé Archipelago and San Juan de la Costa. These varieties were mostly grown in small gardens by elderly women, and passed down generation by generation. In 1990 he led a potato-hunting expedition to Guaitecas Archipelago, the southern limit of Pre-Hispanic agriculture. The collection of Contreras became the groundwork for the gene bank of Chilean potatoes at the Austral University of Chile in Valdivia. Contreras reciprocated local communities by genetically improving varieties aimed for small scale agriculture.


title: History of the potato

text: In modern times potatoes have grown in popularity due to their versatility and ability to be used for many different dishes of food.


title: Patricia Hodge

text: Patricia Ann Hodge, OBE (born 29 September 1946) is an English actor. She is known on-screen for playing Phyllida Erskine-Brown in "Rumpole of the Bailey" (1978–1992), Jemima Shore in "Jemima Shore Investigates" (1983), Penny in "Miranda" (2009–2015) and Mrs Pumphrey in "All Creatures Great and Small" (2021–present).


title: Patricia Hodge

text: Hodge made her West End debut in 1972 and the next year starred in the West End production of "Pippin" directed by Bob Fosse. Hodge has received two nominations for the Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical, and in 2000, she won the Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the play "Money".


title: Patricia Hodge

text: Her other screen credits include the 1983 film "Betrayal", the 1986 TV adaptation of "The Life and Loves of a She-Devil", and the TV film "Hotel du Lac" (1986). For her role in "Hotel du Lac", Hodge received a nomination for the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress.


title: Patricia Hodge

text: Hodge was born in Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire. The daughter of Eric and his wife Marion (née Phillips), the manager and manageress of the Royal Hotel in Grimsby, Hodge attended Wintringham Girls' Grammar School in Weelsby Avenue in Grimsby and then St Helen's School, Northwood, Middlesex, before attending Maria Grey College in Twickenham (later becoming part of Brunel University London), to train as a teacher. She taught English and drama at in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, while also applying to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. She started at LAMDA when she was 22, and was awarded the Eveline Evans Award for Best Actress on graduation.


title: Patricia Hodge

text: Hodge made her professional stage debut in the Howard Barker play "No-One Was Saved" at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh in 1971. She made her West End debut in "Rookery Nook" in 1972, and worked with Bob Fosse in 1973 on "Pippin". However, when applying for television work she found she had become classed as a theatre actress. Having made the breakthrough in the role of Phyllida (Trant) Erskine-Brown in "Rumpole of the Bailey", she found when trying to make the occasional return to theatre work that she had been classed as a television actress.


title: Patricia Hodge

text: She has appeared in roles as diverse as in "The Naked Civil Servant" opposite John Hurt, shortly after she featured in the BBC's 1975 Christmas production "Great Big Groovy Horse", a rock opera based on the story of the Trojan Horse shown on BBC2 starring Julie Covington, Bernard Cribbins and Paul Jones. It was later repeated on BBC1 in 1977. She featured as Myra Arundel in the 1984 BBC version of Noël Coward's "Hay Fever", as Margaret Thatcher in "The Falklands Play," and in 2007 as Betty, the wife of tycoon Robert Maxwell, in the BBC TV drama "Maxwell" opposite David Suchet. She took the female lead in the 1983 film, "Betrayal" (based on Harold Pinter's play "Betrayal"), a roman à clef derived from the playwright's affair with broadcaster Joan Bakewell.


title: Patricia Hodge

text: She was nominated for a BAFTA for her role in a television adaptation of Anita Brookner's "Hotel du Lac" in 1987, and was awarded the Laurence Olivier Theatre Award in 2000 for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the production of "Money" at the National Theatre.


title: Patricia Hodge

text: She bought the rights of the book "Portrait of a Marriage" and is credited with developing a TV series of the same name in association with the BBC in 1990 adapted by writer Penelope Mortimer.


title: Patricia Hodge

text: She co-starred with Dame Judi Dench in the 1995 London revival of Stephen Sondheim's "A Little Night Music", at the National Theatre, as Countess Charlotte Malcom. In 2003, Hodge featured in "His Dark Materials", one of Nicholas Hytner's early productions as its Artistic Director, her third role on the Olivier Theatre stage.


title: Patricia Hodge

text: Hodge is an Honorary Graduate (DLitt) of Brunel University and one of the founder members of the Brunel Club. From 2009 to 2015, she played a comedy role in the BBC sitcom "Miranda", as the mother of the eponymous main character. Hodge reprised the role alongside the rest of the cast for the 2017 Royal Variety Performance. In 2012 she toured in Christopher Luscombe's revival of "Dandy Dick", starring alongside Nicholas Le Provost. She is Joint President of Grimsby's Caxton Theatre and a Trustee of LAMDA, her alma mater.


title: Patricia Hodge

text: In 2008, she guest starred in an episode of "Hustle" within the 4th series, playing the character of Veronica Powell. After the BBC commissioned the show for a 5th series in February 2008, it was planned Hodge would make an additional appearance, however due to on-set filming issues the episode her character would have appeared in was never finished, and subsequently never aired. The release of the 5th series was delayed as a result.


title: Patricia Hodge

text: In 2018, Hodge played Ursula, the mother of Liberal MP and party leader Jeremy Thorpe (played by Hugh Grant) in BBC Television's "A Very English Scandal".


title: Patricia Hodge

text: In April 2021, it was announced that Hodge would play the role of Mrs. Pumphrey in the television series "All Creatures Great and Small" taking over from Diana Rigg who had died the previous year.


title: Patricia Hodge

text: Delayed for a year from autumn 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Hodge was invited by Nigel Havers to star opposite him in Noël Coward's "Private Lives", the inaugural production of the Nigel Havers Theatre Company, directed by one of her previous collaborators Christopher Luscombe.


title: Patricia Hodge

text: Hodge married music publisher Peter Douglas Owen on 31 July 1976 in Tonbridge. The couple had two sons. Douglas died in May 2016, according to Hodge, from heart complications.


title: Patricia Hodge

text: Hodge was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2017 Birthday Honours for services to drama.


title: Niv Sultan

text: Niv Sultan (; born 16 September 1992) is an Israeli actress. She is known for starring in the Apple TV+ Israeli series "Tehran".


title: Niv Sultan

text: Sultan was born in Jerusalem, Israel, to a Moroccan Jewish family. Her parents immigrated from Morocco. After serving as a soldier in the Israel Defense Force, she attended acting classes for three years in Tel Aviv, Israel.


title: Niv Sultan

text: Sultan was chosen as the lead role in the Apple TV+ Israeli espionage television series "Tehran" (), where she stars as Tamar Rabinyan, a Mossad agent working a ground operation in Tehran, Iran.


title: Niv Sultan

text: During an interview with "The Natural Aristocrat", Niv Sultan commented on why she loves portraying Tamar Rabinyan on Apple TV+ Israeli series "Tehran":


title: Niv Sultan

text: Sultan married fellow actor Maor Schwitzer in March of 2022. They met on the set of the show "" ("She Has It") in 2018, where they played an engaged couple.


title: Mandarin duck

text: The mandarin duck (Aix galericulata) is a perching duck species native to the East Palearctic. It is medium-sized, at long with a wingspan. It is closely related to the North American wood duck, the only other member of the genus "Aix". is an Ancient Greek word which was used by Aristotle to refer to an unknown diving bird, and is the Latin for a wig, derived from , a cap or bonnet. Outside of its native range, the mandarin duck has a large introduced population in the British Isles and Western Europe, with additional smaller introductions in North America.


title: Mandarin duck

text: The adult male has a red bill, large white crescent above the eye and reddish face and "whiskers". The male's breast is purple with two vertical white bars, the flanks ruddy, and he has two orange feathers at the back (large feathers that stick up similar to boat sails). The female is similar to the female wood duck, with a white eye-ring and stripe running back from the eye, but is paler below, has a small white flank stripe, and a pale tip to its bill.


title: Mandarin duck

text: Like many other species of ducks, the male undergoes a moult after the mating season into eclipse plumage. When in eclipse plumage, the male looks similar to the female, but can be told apart by its bright yellow-orange or red beak, lack of any crest, and a less-pronounced eye-stripe.


title: Mandarin duck

text: Mandarin ducklings are almost identical in appearance to wood ducklings, and very similar to mallard ducklings. The ducklings can be distinguished from mallard ducklings because the eye-stripe of mandarin ducklings (and wood ducklings) stops at the eye, while in mallard ducklings it reaches all the way to the bill.


title: Mandarin duck

text: Various mutations of the mandarin duck are found in captivity. The most common is the white mandarin duck. Although the origin of this mutation is unknown, the constant pairing of related birds and selective breeding is presumed to have led to recessive gene combinations, leading in turn to genetic conditions including leucism.


title: Mandarin duck

text: The species was once widespread in East Asia, but large-scale exports and the destruction of its forest habitat have reduced populations in eastern Russia and in China to below 1,000 pairs in each country; Japan, however, is thought to still hold some 5,000 pairs. The Asian populations are migratory, overwintering in lowland eastern China and southern Japan.


title: Mandarin duck

text: Specimens frequently escape from collections, and in the 20th century, a large, feral population was established in Great Britain; more recently, small numbers have bred in Ireland, concentrated in the parks of Dublin. Now, about 7,000 are in Britain with other populations on the European continent, the largest of which is in the region of Berlin. Isolated populations exist in the United States. The town of Black Mountain, North Carolina, has a limited population, and a free-flying feral population of several hundred mandarins exist in Sonoma County, California. This population is the result of several ducks escaping from captivity, then reproducing in the wild. In 2018, a single bird, dubbed Mandarin Patinkin, was seen in New York City's Central Park.


title: Mandarin duck

text: The habitats it prefers in its breeding range are the dense, shrubby forested edges of rivers and lakes. It mostly occurs in low-lying areas, but it may breed in valleys at altitudes of up to . In winter, it additionally occurs in marshes, flooded fields, and open rivers. While it prefers fresh water, it may also be seen wintering in coastal lagoons and estuaries. In its introduced European range, it lives in more open habitat than in its native range, around the edges of lakes, water meadows, and cultivated areas with woods nearby.


title: Mandarin duck

text: Compared to other ducks, mandarins are shy birds, preferring to seek cover under trees such as overhanging willows, and form smaller flocks, but may become bolder as a result of becoming tame from frequent interaction with humans.


title: Mandarin duck

text: In the wild, mandarin ducks breed in densely wooded areas near shallow lakes, marshes or ponds. They nest in cavities in trees close to water and during the spring. A single clutch of nine to twelve eggs is laid in April or May. Although the male may defend the brooding female and his eggs during incubation, he himself does not incubate the eggs and leaves before they hatch. Shortly after the ducklings hatch, their mother flies to the ground and coaxes the ducklings to leap from the nest. After all of the ducklings are out of the tree, they will follow their mother to a nearby body of water.


title: Mandarin duck

text: Mandarins feed by dabbling or walking on land. They mainly eat plants and seeds, especially beech mast. The species will also add snails, insects and small fish to its diet. The diet of mandarin ducks changes seasonally; in the fall and winter, they mostly eat acorns and grains. In the spring, they mostly eat insects, snails, fish and aquatic plants. In the summer, they eat dew worms, small fish, frogs, mollusks, and small snakes. They feed mainly near dawn or dusk, perching in trees or on the ground during the day.


title: Mandarin duck

text: Predation of the mandarin duck varies between different parts of its range. Mink, raccoon dogs, otters, polecats, Eurasian eagle-owls, and grass snakes are all predators of the mandarin duck. The greatest threat to the mandarin duck is habitat loss due to loggers. Hunters are also a threat to the mandarin duck, because often they are unable to recognize the mandarin in flight and as a result, many are shot by accident. Mandarin ducks are not hunted for food, but are still poached because their extreme beauty is prized.


title: Mandarin duck

text: The Chinese refer to Mandarin ducks as (), where () and () respectively stand for male and female mandarin ducks. In traditional Chinese culture, mandarin ducks are believed to be lifelong couples, unlike other species of ducks. Hence they are regarded as a symbol of conjugal affection and fidelity, and are frequently featured in Chinese art.


title: Mandarin duck

text: A Chinese proverb for loving couples uses the mandarin duck as a metaphor: "Two mandarin ducks playing in water" (). A mandarin duck symbol is also used in Chinese weddings because in traditional Chinese lore, they symbolize wedded bliss and fidelity. Because the male and female plumages of the mandarin duck are so unalike, is frequently used colloquially in Cantonese to mean an "odd couple" or "unlikely pair" – a mixture of two different types of same category. For example, the drink and fried rice. Mandarin ducks featured on the flag of Weihaiwei during British rule.


title: Mandarin duck

text: For Koreans, mandarin ducks represent peace, fidelity, and plentiful offspring. Similar to the Chinese, they believe that these ducks mate for life. For these reasons, pairs of wooden-carved mandarin ducks called wedding ducks are often given as wedding gifts and play a significant role in Korean marriage.


title: 2067 (film)

text: 2067 is a 2020 Australian science fiction film directed and written by Seth Larney from a treatment by Gavin Scott Davis (itself from Larney's own idea), and starring Kodi Smit-McPhee and Ryan Kwanten.


title: 2067 (film)

text: In the year 2067, Earth has been devastated by climate change and an ongoing nuclear war. Only one city in the ruins of Australia has been able to hold out against these catastrophic changes, thanks to synthetic oxygen; this oxygen is tainted and gradually causes a deadly affliction known as "The Sickness".


title: 2067 (film)

text: Ethan Whyte cares for his wife Xanthe, who is afflicted with the Sickness. One day, Ethan is called before Regina Jackson, the Chronicorp CTO, who explains that the Sickness will eventually wipe out humanity. During a test of the "Chronical", a prototype time machine that quantum physicist Richard Whyte (Ethan's late father) had worked on before his death twenty years earlier, the scientists received a radio signal from 400 years in the future with a message to specifically send Ethan to them. In hopes of preventing the extinction of humankind, Ethan is asked to be sent into the future. He refuses, as he resents his father for abandoning him and his mother, but Xanthe and Ethan's guardian and work colleague Jude manage to change his mind.


title: 2067 (film)

text: After surviving the traumatic time displacement, Ethan finds himself in a lush rainforest, with a hand computer named Archie and a wrist device given to him as a child by Richard as his only surviving pieces of equipment. He finds the entrance to a bunker-like structure, and a skeleton wearing his jumpsuit, a decaying Archie and the wrist device, and with a bullet hole in its skull. Shocked by the discovery of his apparent death in the near future, and sick from eating poisonous berries, Ethan is rescued by Jude, who followed him through time after his life readings, transmitted through the Chronical, were failing. After sharing their findings, they follow Archie's directions to another, still-functional door, which leads to the Chronical lab. Ethan's wrist device is revealed to be a DNA analyser specifically made to grant him access to the Chronical, which sets itself for automatic reactivation in four hours.


title: 2067 (film)

text: From a holographic recording left by Richard, the duo learns that the Chronical project originally entailed the reactivation of an atmospheric monitoring station which would ascertain the Earth atmosphere's breathability in the future and then transmit the data back to the past. When first activating the machine, Richard was surprised to receive a message to send his own son to the future, so despite his misgivings, he prepared Ethan's wrist analyser. However, an immediate follow-up mission was rendered impossible because safely sending living matter through time required an operational link from both sides and the data showed a power failure in 2474.