Dari ("Fārsī-ye Darī") is a dialect of the Persian language. It is the Persian language as spoken in Afghanistan. It is the second official language of Afghanistan, and is widely used by the government and most media agencies. It is mainly spoken by the Tajiks and other minority groups. A small minority also exists in parts of Pakistan closest to these named regions. It is sometimes called Farsi. People in Afghanistan and Iran who speak Persian can understand each other. The name Dari was given to the Persian language at a very early date.
Historically, Dari was the court language of the Sassanids.
Halo (series)
Halo is a science fiction shooter video game series. The games are published by Microsoft were made by Bungie Studios from 2001 to 2010 and are now made by 343 Industries.
Counterpoint
Counterpoint is the art of composing music by combining different parts (voices) in a way that sounds nice. Music composed like this is called contrapuntal.
If the tune of "Twinkle, twinkle little star" is played on the piano and then some chords are added, this is harmony, not counterpoint. Instead, if the tune of "Twinkle, twinkle little star" was played while another melody was played, this would be considered counterpoint.
A different way of playing it would be to start the tune with the right hand. Then, in the second bar (measure), as the fifth note is played, the left hand starts to play the tune an octave lower. This works well for a time, but in the fifth bar (on the word “Up” in the right hand part) it starts to get dissonant (sounding unpleasant), so changes need to made to the left hand to make it sound nicer. This way of writing with a particular number of parts (in this case: two) is called "contrapuntal music".
In that example the left hand imitated the right hand at first. This is called imitation.
If the second part had continued to imitate all the way through the piece it would have been a canon. But “Twinkle, twinkle” does not work well as a canon. One famous canon is by Thomas Tallis. A canon that can be repeated is called a round. This is all contrapuntal music.
Counterpoint does not have to have imitation, although it often does. The important thing is that each part (i.e. each voice) is equally important. It is not one part singing the tune and the rest just accompanying.
Counterpoint does not have to be one note against one note. There can be two or more notes in one part against one in the other e.g. crotchets (quarter notes) in one part and quavers (eighth notes) in another. There is a whole system for this called “species”.
Counterpoint can be varied by inverting it, i.e. putting the top part at the bottom. When music is written so that the parts can be swapped round it is called "invertible counterpoint".
The word “counterpoint” comes from the Latin “punctus contra punctum” meaning “point against point”. The word “point” meant “note”. Several hundred years ago composers found how to write contrapuntal music. They often took a main tune (called a “Cantus Firmus”) and then added one or two or more parts to it. The more parts there were the harder it was to compose because it all had to fit so that it sounded good. Music for several voices written in this way is called polyphonic music. Polyphony was used in all church music in the Renaissance. The greatest composer of polyphony was Giovanni da Palestrina (1525-1594). Students learning the art of composition today still learn counterpoint by taking Palestrina’s music as their model.
Guided by Voices
Guided by Voices (often called GBV) is an American indie band. Guided by Voices is very famous for making many albums. They were active between 1986 and 2004. The band reunited in 2010 but broke up again in 2014. In 2016 they reunited for a second time.
The band had many members who only stayed for a while. Robert Pollard is the most important member. Before becoming a full-time musical artist, he was a teacher at an elementary school. While he was teaching, he created lots of music for the band. Robert is a solo artist today. He is a great fan of rock music. His music, and the music of Guided by Voices, is inspired by the famous British band The Beatles and different music styles like post-British Invasion garage rock, psychedelic, prog-rock, as well as punk and post-punk.
In 2004, during the band's last concert tour before breaking up, many cities around the United States picked a day to be "Guided by Voices Day" in that city. Some of them are:
Eugenics
Eugenics is a social and political philosophy. It tries to influence the way people choose to mate and raise children, with the aim of improving the human species.
Eugenics rests on some basic ideas. The first is that, in genetics, what is true of animals is also true of man. The characteristics of animals are passed on from one generation to the next in heredity, including mental characteristics. For example, the behaviour and mental characteristics of different breeds of dog differ, and all modern breeds are greatly changed from wolves. The breeding and genetics of farm animals show that if the parents of the next generation are chosen, then that affects what offspring are born.
"Negative eugenics" aims to cut out traits that lead to suffering, by limiting people with the traits from reproducing. "Positive eugenics" aims to produce more healthy and intelligent humans, by persuading people with those traits to have more children. In the past, many ways were proposed for doing this, and even today eugenics means different things to different people. The idea of eugenics is controversial, because in the past it was sometimes used to justify discrimination and injustice against people who were thought to be genetically unhealthy or inferior.
Modern eugenics was first invented in 1865 by Sir Francis Galton, a British scientist who was the cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton believed that intelligence and talent were hereditary and were passed from parent to their children. Based on this, he thought that people could be bred to be smarter, just like animals were bred to be larger or smaller. Galton thought the best way to do this was to learn more about heredity, and also to tell people that they should only marry people who were smart and strong. Galton chose the name "Eugenics" because it was very similar to the Greek for "well born".
Galton developed the idea of eugenics throughout his life. He understood the two types of eugenics, positive and negative eugenics. One problem, which critics brought up, is the difficulty of agreeing on who is a healthy person, genetically speaking, and who is an inferior person. Obviously, opinions differ.
The rediscovery of the scientific work of Gregor Mendel in 1900 led to modern genetics, and an understanding of how heredity worked. Mendel himself experimented on peas, and found that many characteristics of the pea plants, such as their colour or their height, could be turned on and off through heredity like a switch. For example, his peas could be either yellow or green, one or the other.
When applied to humans, people thought this meant that human characteristics, like being smart or not, could be influenced by heredity.