He earned a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1951. In this period, Ryūsaku Tsunoda became his mentor.
Starting in 1955, Keene was a professor at Columbia University for over fifty years. He retired from Columbia after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami. He became a Japanese citizen under the name "Kīn Donarudo".
His first visit to Japan was during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.
Keene died on February 24, 2019 in Tokyo from heart failure, aged 96.
In an overview of writings by and about Keene, OCLC/WorldCat lists roughly 600+ works in 1,400+ publications in 16 languages and 39,000+ library holdings.
Katherine LaNasa
Katherine LaNasa (born December 1, 1966 in New Orleans, Louisiana) is an American movie and TV actress and dancer. She has acted in many television programs and movies. LaNasa was married to actors Dennis Hopper, French Stewart and Grant Show.
Ryūsaku Tsunoda
Tsunoda was responsible for the early growth of the Japanese language and literature collection at Columbia's library.
Tsunoda's best known students was Donald Keene. Keene's opinion of Tsunoda was explaind in a lecture given at Waseda University in 1994:
According to Sir George Sansom, Tsunoda was the "father of Japanese studies in America".
In an overview of writings by and about Tsunoda, OCLC/WorldCat lists roughly 50 works in 100+2 publications in 4 languages and 2,000+ library holdings.
Breton Party
The Breton Party (, ) is a social-democratic and social-liberal nationalist party which aspires to the creation of an independent Brittany, within the European Union.
Minkowski spacetime
In special relativity, the Minkowski spacetime is a four-dimensional manifold, created by Hermann Minkowski. It has four dimensions: three dimensions of space (x, y, z) and one dimension of time. Minkowski spacetime has a metric signature of (-+++), and describes a flat surface when no mass is present. The convention in this article is to call Minkowski spacetime simply spacetime.
However, Minkowski spacetime only applies in special relativity. General relativity used the notion of curved spacetime to describe the effects of gravity and accelerated motion.
Spacetime can be thought of as a four-dimensional coordinate system in which the axes are given by
formula_1
They can also be denoted by
formula_2
Where formula_3 represents formula_4. The reason for measuring time in units of the speed of light times the time coordinate is so that the units for time are the same as the units for space. Spacetime has the differential for arc length given by
formula_5
This implies that spacetime has a metric tensor given by
formula_6
As before stated, spacetime is flat everywhere; to some extent, it can be thought of as a plane.
Spacetime can be thought of as the "arena" in which all of the events in the universe take place. All that one needs to specify a point in spacetime is a certain time and a typical spatial orientation. It is hard (virtually impossible) to visualize four dimensions, but some analogy can be made, using the method below.
Hermann Minkowski introduced a certain method for graphing coordinate systems in Minkowski spacetime. As seen to the right, different coordinate systems will disagree on an object's spatial orientation and/or position in time. As you can see from the diagram, there is only one spatial axis (the x-axis) and one time axis (the ct-axis). If need be, one can introduce an extra spatial dimension, (the y-axis); unfortunately, this is the limit to the number of dimensions: graphing in four dimensions is impossible. The rule for graphing in Minkowski spacetime goes as follows:
1) The angle between the x-axis and the x'-axis is given by formula_7 where v is the velocity of the object
2) The speed of light through spacetime "always" makes an angle of 45 degrees with either axis.
In the general theory of relativity, Einstein used the equation
formula_8
To allow for spacetime to actually curve; the resulting effects are those of gravity.
Diane Pretty
Diane Pretty (15 November 1958 - 11 May 2002) was a British woman who became known for a debate on laws of euthanasia. She had attempted to change British law so she could end her own life because of the pains and problems of the terminal illness motor neurone disease.
Over time, the disease worsened and made it impossible for her to move or communicate easily even though her mental faculties remained normal. The illness resulted in her having to be looked after continuously by her husband and nurses. Pretty took her case to court using the Human Rights Act to argue not to prosecute anybody involved in helping her to die. British courts did not accept Pretty's arguments, with the House of Lords eventually turning her case down. The European Court of Human Rights refused to acknowledge that the European Convention on Human Rights provided a right to die, and her appeal to that court also failed. She died aged 43, as a result of her condition.
Megaevolution
Megaevolution is a term which describes the most dramatic events in evolution. By that is not meant a different kind of evolution; rather, it means evolution which produces a tremendous effect. It is not suggested that the evolutionary processes involved are special although, in some cases they might be. Since the word 'macroevolution' can apply to relatively modest changes at the species and genus level, 'megaevolution' may be used for really huge changes.
The adaptive radiation of birds in the Lower Cretaceous, teleosts in the Cretaceous, flowering plants in the Upper Cretaceous, mammals in the Eocene, moths in the Cretaceous are striking examples of macroevolution. However, there are even more important events in the history of life. An interesting list was prepared by Maynard Smith and Szathmáry, which they called the major transitions in evolution. They did the list twice.
Some of these topics have been discussed before.
Numbers one to six on the list are about events which are of huge importance, but about which we know relatively little. All occurred before (and mostly very much before) the fossil record started, or at least before the Phanerozoic eon.
Numbers seven and eight on the list are of a different kind from the first six, and are generally not considered by the other authors. Number four is of a type which is not covered by traditional evolutionary theory, The origin of eukaryotic cells is probably due to symbiosis between prokaryotes. This is a kind of evolution which must be a rare event.
The Cambrian explosion or Cambrian radiation was the relatively rapid appearance of most major animal phyla around 530 million years ago (mya) in the fossil record. It is the classic example of megaevolution. "The fossil record documents two mutually exclusive macroevolutionary modes separated by the transitional Ediacaran period".
Before about 580 mya it seems that most organisms were simple. They were made of individual cells occasionally organized into colonies. Over the following 70 or 80 million years the rate of evolution accelerated by an order of magnitude. Normally rates of evolution are measured by the extinction and origination rate of species, but here we can say that by the end of the Cambrian every phylum, or almost every phylum, existed.
The diversity of life began to resemble that of today.
The Cambrian explosion has caused much scientific debate. The seemingly rapid appearance of fossils in the 'primordial strata' was noted as early as the mid 19th century, and Charles Darwin saw it as one of the main objections that could be made against his theory of evolution by natural selection.
Deep Impact (space mission)
Deep Impact was a NASA space mission to study comets. It was sent out to meet Comet Tempel 1, and to crash a smaller space rocket deep into the comet's surface.