In the 1320s Giotto painted two large altarpieces. The first was the Stefaneschi Triptych, which is now in the Vatican Museum. (A triptych is a painting on three panels. Some triptychs are very small and can be folded up and carried around, but this triptych is a large altarpiece.) The second altarpiece is called the Baroncelli Polyptych. (A polyptych has lots of parts, big and small. They are usually made as great big altarpieces for important churches, and have big, carved gold frames.)
Giotto travelled around and did paintings in Rome, Naples and Bologna. He always took a group of students with him. Nowadays, many of the frescos that he painted in these cities have been destroyed by damp, by earthquakes, by war and by people demolishing the church to build a new one. Because Giotto was very famous, people always liked to believe that he painted the fresco in their church. Many frescos are probably by Giotto's students.
In 1334 Giotto was in Florence where the magnificent new Florence Cathedral was being built. Giotto was made the chief architect and was given the job of designing a huge tower to hold the cathedral bells. It is called Giotto's Bell Tower and was designed and begun by him on July 18 1334, but it was not completed to his design.
As he grew old, Giotto became friends with two writers, Giovanni Boccaccio and Sacchetti, who both thought that he was such an entertaining and famous person that they wrote about him in their stories. The most famous writer of that time, Dante, also wrote about him in his book "The Divine Comedy". Dante said that Giotto was the greatest painter in the world, even greater than his famous master, Cimabue.
Giotto died in January of 1337. Vasari wrote that Giotto was buried in Santa Maria del Fiore, the Cathedral of Florence, on the left of the entrance and with the spot marked by a white marble plaque.
In the 1970s, some bones were discovered underneath the paving near at a spot described by Vasari. In 2000 the bones were examined by experts.
The bones were those of a very short man, just over four feet tall. In a fresco in the Church of Santa Croce, there is a figure of a man who is a dwarf (a person who is very short). People at that church have always said that the dwarf was Giotto himself. The bones that were found at the cathedral support this story. Also, the bones had lots of unusual chemicals in them, such as arsenic and lead, which were found in the artist's paints. After the bones had been examined, they were buried with great honour, because many people believed that they were the remains of the great artist. Not everybody believes this.
Pliny the Younger
Gaius or Caius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, born Gaius or Caius Plinius Caecilius (61/63 in Como - ca. 113), better known as Pliny the Younger, was a lawyer, a remarkable writer, an author, and natural philosopher of Ancient Rome. Pliny's uncle, Pliny the Elder, helped raise and educate him and they were both witnesses to the eruption of Vesuvius on August 24th, 79 AD.
Moura Photovoltaic Power Station
The Moura Photovoltaic Power Station is in the municipality of Moura, in the interior region of Alentejo, Portugal. It will have an installed capacity of 62 MWp. The first stage of construction should be finished in 2008 and the second and final stage is scheduled for 2010. Together with the construction of the power station, a solar panel factory is currently being built and there are plans for a research lab dedicated to solar energy.
The brainchild of Prof Mario Baptista Coelho, the founding partner of Renatura and a Professor of Geostrategy of Natural Resources at the Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon, Moura was the first step in proving the feasibility of Very-Large Scale Photovoltaic Plants.
Originally conceptualized in 1999, Moura is a stepping stone in addressing the CO2 issue by way of Solar Energy.
Now fully operational and grid-connected, Moura is currently operated by Acciona, which purchased the project in 2007.
Coped with Moura is the Sunflower Sustainability Project, as in integrated package of the paradigm of sustainability and Zero-Carbon Communities (www.sunflower-project.net).
Jérémie
Jérémie (Kréyòl: "Jeremi") is a city in southwest Haiti. It is the capital city of the Grand'Anse "Département".
Jérémie is also called the "City of Poets" because of the many writers, poets, and historians that were born or live there, such as Etzer Vilaire and Émile Roumer. The father of the French writer Alexandre Dumas, père, General Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was born at Madère, near Jérémie.
The town was founded in 1756 when the country was the French colony of "Saint-Domingue". It was built where there was a small fishing town called "Trou-Jérémie".
The city is on the north coast of the Southern Peninsula, on a small bay. It is among low mountains (Bordes, Rochasse and Caracol) and almost isolated from the rest of the country, about 280 km south of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince. To the southeast of the city is the River Grande-Anse.
It is also the chief town of an "arrondissement" (a part of a department) with the same name. The "arrondissement" has five "communes" (a "commune" is like a municipality): Jérémie, Abricots, Bonbon, Chambellan and Moron.
Jeremie is an important Haitian port; bananas are send to other countries from this port.
There are several interesting places to visit and see in Jérémie and near the city. Some of them are:
Three Mile Island accident
The Three Mile Island accident occurred on March 28th, 1979 at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania. It was "the single most important event in the fifty-year history of nuclear power regulation in the United States". Many people have seen the event as a turning point for the nuclear power industry in the United States.
The Three Mile Island power station is near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The accident resulted in a partial core meltdown in Unit 2 of the nuclear power plant. Unit 2's pressurized water reactor was of 900 MWe capacity.
The chain of events that led to the crisis at the TMI plant included several minor equipment failures that operator errors drastically compounded, resulting in a major accident. The Three Mile Island accident is largely seen as a failure of crisis management. According to one reviewer of the book:
Reactor operators were not trained to deal with accident conditions, and the NRC had not established effective communication with utilities. Moreover, once the accident occurred, the lines of authority proved to be ill defined. The public received conflicting reports that caused needless panic and evacuations. It was these systemic weaknesses in the regulatory system that allowed gifted people to make the mistakes they did.
Large portions of the TMI-2 reactor core melted, though the fact that a partial meltdown had occurred did not become clear until 1985. The greatest source of concern during the TMI crisis was a hydrogen bubble that formed in the top of the pressure vessel which held the core:
Although opinions differed, some reactor experts feared that over time the hydrogen bubble might become flammable or, less likely, explosive by combining with free oxygen in the vessel. If the bubble burned or exploded, it could rupture the pressure vessel and force the damaged reactor core into the containment building. The loss of the vessel would not make a breach of containment inevitable, but it would increase the risk of a disastrous release of radiation.
In the end, the Three Mile Island accident, though it "caused a grave crisis, did not produce a public health disaster". In the face of a core meltdown, the pressure vessel held and there was no breach of the plant's containment structure. Only "tiny amounts of the most dangerous forms of volatile radiation escaped to the atmosphere". The TMI-2 cleanup took 11 years and cost about US$1 billion.