A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, Op. 21 is an orchestral work by Felix Mendelssohn. He wrote the work when he was 17 in 1827. Many years later, he wrote more music for Shakespeare's play. These additions include the famous "Wedding March". The fairies of the play are represented with light, skipping music, the lovers by romantic themes, and the workmen by clownish music. Bottom is represented by a drone bass that sounds like the bray (call) of a donkey.
Punched tape
Punched tape is a medium for data storage. It is made of a long strip with holes in it. The holes are used to represent information. The principle is the same as that of a punched card, except that the length is variable. Punched tape was widely used in the 1950s and 1960s, but was later replaced by other media. Punched tape was first used to program looms, in the 18th century. Similar looms are still used for weaving Tartans, but the punched tape is made of metal platelets today. Another use of punched tape is in barrel organs.
20th century teleprinters also use punched tape. Herman Hollerith used punched tape for a census, in 1890. Gilbert Vernam, a telecommunication engineer developed the Vernam cipher in 1917. This cipher could be used with punched tape. Vernam combined a character of the punched tape, with one of a key, to give the encoded character. Combining the ecoded character with the key again gives the plain text. This is in fact an exclusive disjunction, even though Vernam used a different name. It was an automated one-time pad. The NSA has called this patent "perhaps one of the most important in the history of cryptography."
There are different formats for punching tapes. Today, two formats are left, which are mechanically compatible. One is used in Telex and early computing applications. The strip is wide, and has five positions, plus a row that serves for feeding, and is always punched. The feeding row is between positions three and four. Data positions use a quadratic raster of a width of . The other format is mainly used in computing. The strip is wide, and has eight positions. Like the other format, the feeding row is between holes three and four. Both formats save ten rows of data (or characters) on a length of . If the 5 position strip is put on top of the 8 position one, the first five holes (and the feeding row) have the same position. Thi means that a reader which is capable of reading 8-position tape can also read 5-position tape. There are devices which can output both formats.
It is possible to encode 256 different characters on an 8 hole tape, the five hole tape can hold 32 different characters. The Baudot code which is used for encoding has two special characters that allow to switch between two halves of a code. This means that the five position punchtape can encode 59 different characters.
Punched tape has some advantages:
Punched tape had gone out of use by the end of the 20th century, replaced by new technology for these reasons:
Missouri State University
The Missouri State University is a public university which is in Springfield, Missouri. The school started on March 17, 1905. In Autumn 2012, almost twenty-two thousand students were enrolled in this university.
Pope Francis
Pope Francis (Jorge Mario Bergoglio) (, , ; born on 17 December 1936) is the 266th and current pope of the Roman Catholic Church. He was elected on 13 March 2013. He chose the name Francis to honor St. Francis of Assisi.
Francis is the first Jesuit pope. He is also the first pope in more than a millennium who is not European. He is the first pope ever to come from the Americas, and the first from the Southern Hemisphere.
From 1998 until he was elected as the pope, Francis was the Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Throughout his life, both as an individual and a religious leader, he has been known for his humility, his concern for the poor, and his commitment to dialogue as a way to build bridges between people of all backgrounds, beliefs, and faiths. He has expressed concern about the effects of global warming (climate change). In his 2015 encyclical "Laudato si'" , he wrote about these issues, and others.
Since his election to the papacy, he has shown a simpler and less formal approach to the office, choosing to live in the Vatican guesthouse and not the papal residence.
Pope Francis was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He was one of the children of Mario Bergoglio, an Italian railway accountant, and Regina Maria Bergoglio (née Sívori), a housewife.
He received a master's degree in philosophy and theology from the University of Buenos Aires. After that, he studied at the seminary in Villa Devoto. He entered the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) on 11 March 1958.
Bergoglio became a member of the Society of Jesus in 1958. He was made a priest in 1969. In 1973, he was named "provincial" or head of the Jesuits in Argentina. In the mid-1980s, he began working on a doctoral degree at Sankt Georgen Graduate School of Philosophy and Theology in Frankfurt, Germany.
Pope John Paul II appointed Bergoglio the Archbishop of Buenos Aires in 1998. During the 2001 Consistory, Pope named Bergoglio as a Cardinal.
Pope Francis and Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani met on 6 March 2021 for at most 40 minutes, part of the time alone except for interpreters, in the Shiite cleric’s modest home in the city of Najaf. Every detail was scrutinized ahead of time in painstaking, behind-the-scenes preparations that touched on everything from shoes to seating arrangements. Pope Francis said in a statement that there should be "unity" between followers of different religions.
Cardinal Bergoglio was elected on 13 March 2013. He chose the name "Francis" to honor St. Francis of Assisi. Just after he was elected, Francis told a newspaper how he chose the new name:
""Let me tell you a story," he said. He then [explained] how during the conclave he had sat next to Cardinal Cláudio Hummes of Brazil, whom he called "a great friend." After the voting, Cardinal Hummes "hugged me, he kissed me and he said, 'Don't forget the poor!' And that word entered here," the pope said, pointing to his heart. "I thought of wars, while the voting continued, though all the votes," he said ... "And Francis is the man of peace. And that way the name came about, came into my heart: Francis of Assisi.""
Despite both his parents being Italians, Francis is the first non-European pope since Pope Gregory III in the 8th century.
Pope Francis is the first pope to speak to a session of the United States Congress. He spoke there during his visit to the United States on 24 September 2015.
Personally, Pope Francis likes to read books by authors such as Friedrich Hölderlin, Jorge Luis Borges or Fyodor Dostoevsky. He likes to watch movies of Italian neorealism, and likes to go to the opera.
He is also interested in football. He is an active member of San Lorenzo de Almagro, which is one of the teams in the "Primera División" league.
In 2015, Pope Francis released a progressive rock album titled "Wake Up!".
When Bergoglio was a Cardinal, his views about the celibacy of priests were recorded in the book "On Heaven and Earth." The book is a record of conversations he had with a Buenos Aires rabbi. In this book, he said that celibacy "is a matter of discipline, not of faith. It can change." However, he added: "For the moment, I am in favor of maintaining celibacy, with all its [positive and negative parts], because we have ten centuries of good experiences rather than failures [...] Tradition has weight and validity."