Old North Church (officially, Christ Church in the City of Boston) is a church in Boston, Massachusetts at 193 Salem Street. It was built in 1723. Its design was inspired by the works of Christopher Wren. The church is a parish of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. It is the oldest standing church building in Boston. Inside the church is a bust of George Washington that the Marquis de Lafayette thought the best likeness of Washington he had ever seen.
The church is known to most Americans because it was here that a lantern signal was sent by sexton Robert Newman from the church steeple on the evening of April 18, 1775 to warn American patriots that British soldiers were approaching Lexington and Concord by sea and not by land. "Paul Revere's Ride", a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, remembers this event.
The church steeple was damaged by storms in 1804 and 1954. It was rebuilt. It is now 175 feet (53 m) tall. The original weathervane is on top. There are 1100 bodies buried in the basement. Many of these are patriots who were killed at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Old North Church is a National Historic Landmark. Queen Elizabeth II visited the church in 1976 and was given a silver chalice (a cup) modelled on one made by Paul Revere.
Pitjantjatjara language
Pitjantjatjara ( or ) is one of the Western Desert languages of Australia. It is often considered a dialect. It is spoken by the Pitjantjatjara people of central Australia. It is mutually intelligible with other languages of the Western Desert and is very closely related to the Yankunytjatjara language.
The name of the people comes from their word for coming/going: "".
Aṉangu
Anangu, Aṉaŋu or Arnangu (pronounced with the stress on the first syllable: ), is a word used to refer to Aboriginal people in Australia. It is found in some dialects of the Western Desert Language (WDL) of western and central Australia.
Before European people arrived in central Australia, the word probably meant 'human being', or 'person'. But now it is used to mean 'Aboriginal person' only. Because other Aboriginal languages have their own words for '(Aboriginal) person' the word "anangu" is mostly used in English to refer to the WDL-speaking people. Used in this way, it is not used to refer to any traditional grouping (or tribe), but to the WDL people as a whole. The correct term for "black person" in Pitjantjatjara is "", literally "dark/black person".
Other Western Desert Language dialects have different words with a similar meaning and many uses. In the far west of the WDL (i.e. amongst Manyjilyjarra, Kartujarra, Putijarra and Warnman) the word "martu" is used, and in the central Western Desert (i.e. amongst the western Pintupi) the word "purntu", although this seems to be rarely used now.
There are a number of other names from Australian Aboriginal languages commonly used to identify groups based on geography:
House of the Seven Gables
The House of the Seven Gables is a historic house in Salem, Massachusetts. It was built for Captain John Turner. It remained in the Turner family for three generations. The earliest section of the house was built in 1668. It faced south towards Salem Harbor. It was a two-room, 2 1⁄2-story house. It had cross-gables and a huge central chimney. This portion now forms the middle of the house. The house was remodelled over the years. It was eventually acquired by the Ingersoll family. Nathaniel Hawthorne often visited his cousin Susannah at the house. He wrote a novel called "The House of the Seven Gables". The book uses the house as background. The house was restored between 1908 and 1910. A "cent-shop" and a secret staircase were added. This was done to please visitors who expected the house to resemble the one in Hawthorne's book. The House of the Seven Gables is the oldest "surviving" mansion house in continental North America. It has 17 rooms and over 8,000 square feet. The house is now a non-profit museum.
Colossus computer
Colossus was the world's first programmable electronic digital computer. British code breakers used Colossus for cryptanalysis during World War II.
These messages were sent between the German High Command, and army field commanders. Reading these messages helped the Allies to win the war.
Codebreaker Max Newman worked at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. His problem was how to get a machine that would help turn German coded radio teleprinter messages into ordinary language. A group of Post Office telephone engineers led by Tommy Flowers worked out how to do this. Their design, which was called "Colossus" used many vacuum tubes (valves). The first machine, Mark 1, worked in December 1943 and solved its first problem in February 1944. Colossus Mark 2 was even better. It first worked on 1 June 1944, just before the Normandy Landings on D-Day. Ten Colossus computers were in use at the end of the war.
British codebreakers called the teleprinter messages "Fish". The messages had been coded by an unknown German machine. They called the machine and its coded messages "Tunny". Colossus imitated the machine and read the coded message from a punched tape. It tried various possibilities of how two of the wheels had been set up. When Colossus found likely settings for two wheels, the codebreaker designed further programs for Colossus until likely settings of other wheels were found. Colossus did not perform all of the decoding process. It just found likely settings of the machine. The output from Colossus was then worked on by people who had a very good knowledge of the German language.
After the war the British codebreakers found out that the code machine was the Lorenz SZ42. All the secret Colossus computers were taken to pieces, so that no one would find out about them. The designs were destroyed. For thirty years no one knew who made them. Between the early 1990s and 2007, a working copy of a Colossus computer was built. This can be seen at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park in England.
Regular radio transmissions of "Tunny" messages started in June 1941. The British codebreakers saw that it used a five-unit code like a teleprinter system. Their research also showed that the coding was being done by a rotor cipher machine with 12 wheels (rotors). For each new message sent, the wheels had first to be turned to new positions. The start position for the message was chosen by the operator who was sending the message. He told the operator who was receiving the message what the start positions were with 12 letters that were not coded. The total number of possible start positions of the 12 wheels was very large indeed.
The coding machine added together the "plaintext" (the un-coded version of the message) and a stream of characters (letters, numbers, punctuation) called the "keystream" (a stream of seemingly random characters) that it generated to make the "ciphertext" (the coded version of the message). The ciphertext, which made no sense, was transmitted by radio. At the receiving end an identical machine removed the keystream to produce the plaintext of the message.
If the German operators always worked correctly, no two messages would have the same start position of the wheels. However, mistakes were made. They helped the British codebreakers. On 30 August 1941 two versions of the same message, which was nearly 4,000 characters long, were sent with the same wheel start positions. This mistake was very useful to the research codebreakers. A codebreaker called John Tiltman was able to get the keystream from these messages.