the-french-artist/wikipedia_20220301.simple_sentence_split huggingface dataset:
Robert Bork's America is a land where women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.
Bork's nomination was rejected by the United States Senate with a vote of 58–42.
Reagan then nominated Douglas H. Ginsburg, but Ginsburg withdrew his name from consideration after it was revealed he used cannabis.
Reagan later nominated Anthony Kennedy to replace Powell, Jr. and was confirmed with a vote of 97–0.
In 1987, Reagan travelled to Berlin to give a speech at the Berlin Wall.
That is where he gave one of his greatest speeches of his presidency.
Referring to the Brandenburg Gate and the Berlin Wall he said,
We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace.
There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace.
General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate.
Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate.
Mr. Gorbachev...Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
In January 1987, U.S. Representative Tom Foley introduced the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 to Congress as a way to give reparation to Japanese-Americans who were interned by the United States during World War II.
It passed the House in September 1987 and was sent to the Senate were it was passed in April 1988.
Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act into law on August 10, 1988 granting USD $20,000 with payments beginning in 1990.
A total of 82,219 Japanese-Americans received checks.
End of the Cold War
During his term as president, Reagan saw the change in the direction of the Soviet leadership with Mikhail Gorbachev.
Months after his Berlin Wall speech, Gorbachev announced his plans to work with Reagan for a big arms agreements.
Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty which banned nuclear weapons being launched between the United States and the Soviet Union.
When Reagan visited Moscow for the fourth summit in 1988, he was seen as a celebrity by the Soviets.
A journalist asked the president if he still considered the Soviet Union the evil empire. "
No", he replied, "I was talking about another time, another era".
In November 1989, ten months after Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall was torn down, the Cold War was officially declared over at the Malta Summit on December 3, 1989, and two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.
End of the Reagan presidency
Reagan left office with high rankings on January 20, 1989 when his Vice President George H. W. Bush became president.
Reagan and his wife, Nancy, soon returned home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, California.
In the years after he left office, Reagan's time in office was seen as one of the best and is compared to that of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.
Post-presidency, 1989-2004
After leaving office, Reagan and his wife Nancy lived in Bel Air, Los Angeles.
They also visited their ranch, Rancho del Cielo.
Reagan gave a speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention giving his support for Bush's re-election campaign in the 1992 presidential election.
In June 1989, Reagan was honored with Honorary Knighthood and received the Order of the Bath presented by Queen Elizabeth II.
He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1993 by President George H. W. Bush.
He was the first former living president to receive the honor.
Soon afterwards the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation created the Ronald Reagan Freedom Award for people who made a big change for freedom.
In 1990, Reagan wrote an autobiography titled, An American Life.
Even after when he left office, Reagan had a close friendship with both Thatcher and Gorbachev.
They would often visit him at his home.
On April 13, 1992, Reagan was assaulted by an anti-nuclear protester during a speech while accepting an award from the National Association of Broadcasters in Las Vegas.
The protester was Richard Paul Springer.
He smashed a 2-foot-high (60 cm) 30-pound (13.5 kg) crystal statue of an eagle that the broadcasters had given to Reagan.
Pieces of glass hit Reagan, but he was not injured.
Springer was the founder of an anti-nuclear group called the 100th Monkey.
Following his arrest on assault charges, a Secret Service spokesman did not say how Springer got past the agents.
Later, Springer pled guilty to the federal charge of interfering with the Secret Service, but other felony charges of assault and fighting against officers were dropped.
Health issues
Early in his presidency, Reagan started wearing a hearing aid, first in his right ear and later in his left as well.
In 1985, he had colon cancer and skin cancer removed at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland.
In 1987, Reagan had surgery to remove polyp of the nose.
Also in that year, Reagan went into surgery for an enlarged prostate.
After announcing his disease, many people sent supporting letters to his California home.
There was also an opinion based on unfinished evidence that Reagan had showed symptoms of mental decline while still in office.
In 1995, the Ronald and Nancy Reagan Research Institute was dedicated in Chicago, Illinois.
It is an institution that can help people with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
Reagan fell at his Bel Air home on January 13, 2001.
He broke his hip.
The fracture was repaired the next day.
Reagan, 89 years old, returned home later that week, but he then had to do difficult physical therapy at home.
White House correspondent memoirs
But then, at the end, he regained his alertness.
As she described it,
Final years
As the years went on, the Alzheimer's disease slowly destroyed Reagan's mental capacity.
He was only able to recognize a few people, including his wife, Nancy.
He remained active during his last years.
He took walks through parks near his home and on beaches, played golf regularly, and until 1999 he often went to his office in nearby Century City.
Reagan's public appearances became much less frequent with the progression of the disease.
His family decided that he would live in quiet semi-isolation with his wife Nancy.
Nancy Reagan told CNN's Larry King in 2001 that very few visitors were allowed to see her husband because she felt that "Ronnie would want people to remember him as he was."
In that same year, Reagan's daughter, Maureen Reagan, died from melanoma at the age of 60.
The USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76) was finished in 2001.
A ceremony was held in March 2001.
Reagan's wife, Nancy lead the ceremony.
She christened the ship.
Reagan could not go because he was very sick.
Following her husband's diagnosis and death, Nancy became a stem-cell research advocate.
She urged Congress and President George W. Bush to support federal funding for embryonic stem cell research.
President Bush opposed the idea.
In 2009, she praised President Barack Obama for lifting restrictions on such research.
Mrs. Reagan believed that it could lead to a cure for Alzheimer's.
Nancy died on March 6, 2016 at the age of 94.
Death and funeral
On June 5, 2004, Reagan died at the age of 93 of pneumonia, caused by Alzheimer's disease, in his home in Bel Air, Los Angeles, California.
A short time after his death, Nancy Reagan released a statement saying, "My family and I would like the world to know that President Ronald Reagan has died after 10 years of Alzheimer's disease at 93 years of age.
We appreciate everyone's prayers."
Reagan was granted a state funeral.
Reagan's state funeral was the first in the United States since Lyndon B. Johnson in 1973.
It was held at the Washington National Cathedral on June 11 and presided by former Missouri United States senator John Danforth.
President George W. Bush and former presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton went to the funeral.
First Lady Laura Bush and former first ladies Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter, and Barbara Bush also went.
Former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson did not go to the funeral because of poor health.
Reverend Billy Graham, who was Reagan's first choice to lead the funeral, could not go because he was recovering from surgery.
Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O'Connor also went to the funeral and delivered a passage from the Bible.
The funeral was led by Reagan's close friend and pastor Michael Wenning.
Foreign leaders also went to Reagan's funeral, Mikhail Gorbachev, Prime Minister of United Kingdom Tony Blair, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and interim presidents Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and Ghazi al-Yawer of Iraq.
Former Prime Minister of United Kingdom Margaret Thatcher, former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and both former President George H. W. Bush and President George W. Bush gave eulogies.
Reagan was buried later that day in an underground vault at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
His tomb reads,
I know in my heart that man is good.
That what is right will always eventually triumph.
And that there is purpose and worth to each and every life.
Reagan met Jane Wyman while filming Brother Rat in 1938.
He asked Wyman to marry him at the Chicago Theatre.
They were married on January 20, 1940 in Glendale, California.
They had two children: Michael (adopted) and Maureen Reagan.
They had a third child, Christine Reagan, but she was stillborn.
With Reagan's growing political career and the death of their child, Wyman filled for divorce in 1948.
The divorce was final in 1949.
In 1949, months after divorcing Wyman, Reagan met Nancy Davis.
Davis was an actress who was accidentally listed as a communist and asked Reagan to help.
After Reagan helped Davis, the two began dating.
Three years later, Reagan asked Davis to marry him in Beverly Hills, California.
They were married on March 4, 1952 in Hollywood, California.
Together, they had two children: Ron and Patti Reagan.
Wyman died of natural causes on September 10, 2010.
She was aged 90.
Nancy outlived her husband by eleven years.
She died on March 6, 2016 of heart failure.
She was aged 94.
Honors
In June 2007, Reagan received the Order of the White Eagle from Poland's president, Lech Kaczyński, for Reagan's work to end communism in Poland.
Nancy Reagan travelled to Warsaw to accept the award for her husband.
On June 3, 2009,  a statue of Reagan was added in the United States Capitol rotunda.
The statue represents the state of California in the National Statuary Hall Collection.
Following Reagan's death, both major American political parties agreed to place a statue of Reagan instead of that of Thomas Starr King.
Also in June 2009, President Obama signed the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission Act into law.
It created a commission to plan activities to mark the upcoming centenary of Reagan's 100 birthday.
On July 4, 2011, a statue of Reagan was presented in London.
It is outside of the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
The ceremony was supposed to be attended by Reagan's wife Nancy, but she did not attend.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice took her place and read a statement from her.
British Prime Minister during Reagan's presidency, Baroness Thatcher, was also unable to attend due to poor health.
A statue of Reagan was presented in November 2011 in Warsaw, Poland.
President of Poland Lech Wałęsa was there.
In 2016, Ronald and Nancy Reagan were honored in the Presidential $1 Coin Program in August 2016.
He was the last president honored in the program.
Culture portrayal
In the 1991 crime/thriller movie Point Break, a face-mask of Reagan is worn by the leader (Patrick Swayze) of the "Ex-Presidents", gang of robbers who wear face-masks of former Presidents during bank robberies.
In the 2000 psychological horror movie American Psycho, Reagan was discussed towards the end of the movie as to whether he is a psychopath or an innocent old man in regards to the Iran-Contra affair.
In 2001, Richard Crenna played Reagan in the Oliver Stone television movie The Day Reagan Was Shot.
In 2007, the edited version of his diary was published entitled The Reagan Diaries.
It became the New York Times Best Seller.
Voice actor Hank Azaria voiced Reagan three times (1993, 1994, and 2012) in The Simpsons.
Harry Shearer said that Simpsons character Mr. Burns is inspired by Reagan.
Seth MacFarlane voiced Reagan in American Dad!
and on Family Guy for special episodes.
During the history of Saturday Night Live, Reagan has been played by Phil Hartman, Randy Quaid and Robin Williams.
In a 2010 short comedy video, Presidential Reunion, actor Jim Carrey played the spirit of Reagan trying to speak to Barack Obama about bank companies and the media.
In 2014, Reagan was played by British actor Alan Rickman in Lee Daniels' The Butler.
In 2015, Bill O'Reilly published Killing Reagan, the fifth book of his Killing series.
It covers the assassination attempt on Reagan in March 1981.
A year later, National Geographic Society announced they were making a television movie based on the book.
Killing Reagan was premiered on National Geographic on October 16, 2016, with actor Tim Matheson playing Reagan.
In late 2015, actor Bruce Campbell played Reagan in the second season of Fox's criminal suspense drama series Fargo.
In March 2018, it was confirmed that actor Dennis Quaid would play Reagan in an upcoming movie, titled Reagan, which will be based on Reagan's life.
David Henrie will play a younger Reagan in the movie.
Old footage of Reagan and his likeness was used for the 2020 first-person shooter video game Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War.
Reagan, by public opinion, is one of the most popular American presidents.
His legacy is strongly admired among many conservatives and Republicans.
Those who do admire Reagan are sometimes called Reagan coalitionists.
According to USA Today, "Reagan transformed the American presidency in ways that only a few have been able to."
His role in the Cold War made his image more popular as a different kind of leader as both Reagan and Gorbachev wanted to end nuclear tensions and the war.
Reagan ranked third of post–World War II presidents in a 2007 Rasmussen Reports poll, fifth in an ABC 2000 poll, ninth in another 2007 Rasmussen poll, and eighth in a late 2008 poll by British newspaper The Times.
In 2011, British historians released a survey to rate American presidents.
This poll of British experts in American history and politics said that Reagan is the eighth greatest American president.
Reagan is even admired by people of the opposite party, the Democratic Party.
Democrats who support Reagan are called Reagan Democrats.
His presidency is sometimes called the Reagan Era because of the changes it brought during Reagan's time as president.
In his home state of California, Reagan is seen as a hero.
Reagan is known for his witty charm and his warm optimism.
The legacy of his economic policies is still divided between people who believe that the government should be smaller and those who believe the government should take a more active role in regulating the economy.
While some of his foreign policies were controversial, many thank Reagan for peacefully ending the Cold War.
Holden, Kenneth.
Making of the Great Communicator: Ronald Reagan's Transformation From Actor To Governor (2013)
Putnam, Jackson K. "Governor Reagan: A Reappraisal."
California History (2006): 24-45.
in JSTOR
Books by Reagan
Reagan's White House biography
Reagan foundation page
Find a Grave page
IMDb page
NNDB page
Rotten Tomatoes page
Honorary Knights Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath
Congressional Gold Medal recipients
Recipients of the Order of the White Eagle (Poland)
National Radio Hall of Fame inductees
1968 United States presidential candidates
1976 United States presidential candidates
1980 United States presidential candidates
1984 United States presidential candidates
Actors from Illinois
American radio actors
American labor leaders
American television presenters
American crime victims
American autobiographers
Major League Baseball broadcasters
People with Alzheimer's disease
Governors of California
Infectious disease deaths in Los Angeles
Reagan family
American military personnel of World War II
Military people from Illinois
Politicians from Illinois
Writers from Illinois
Skin cancer survivors
Presidents of the Screen Actors Guild
1911 births
2004 deaths
The United Nations (UN) is an organization between countries established on 24 October 1945 to promote international cooperation.
It was founded to replace the League of Nations following World War II and to prevent another conflict.
When it was founded, the UN had 51 members, but there are now 193.
Most nations are members of the UN and send diplomats to the headquarters to hold meetings and make decisions about global issues.
To keep world peace.
To help countries get along.
To alleviate poverty amongst it's members
To improve living conditions for people all over the world.
And to make the world a better place.
After World War I, the nations of the world formed the League of Nations.
The organization was a place where nations could talk through their differences calmly.
However, some countries like Germany, Italy, and Japan ignored the League and tried to solve their problems through war.
Members of the League of Nations did not want to go to war to protect other members and so it failed.
World War II soon started.
The Allies of World War II often called themselves "the United Nations" since they were united against the Axis Powers.
After the war, the winners formed a new organization for world peace.
On 25 April 1945 in San Francisco, they decided on the name '"United Nations".
In June, they signed the United Nations Charter and decided how the organization would work.
The UN was created on 24 October 1945, and its first meeting was held in January 1946.
Since 1947 24 October has been called “United Nations Day”.
The only country whose flag is modelled after the United Nations is Somalia.
All of the organs of the United Nations are based in New York City, United States, except for the International Court of Justice, which is in The Hague, Netherlands.
The UN's main buildings in New York City, but the UN also has offices in Geneva, Switzerland,Kenya, and Austria).
The UN tries to be peaceful, but was also involve in armed conflicts.
In the 1950s during the Soviet boycott of United Nations Security Council, UN supported South Korea in a war against North Korea, and in the 1990s, the UN helped to force Iraqi soldiers out of Kuwait.
At other times, the UN has built peacekeeping forces in which UN travel to conflicted places in the world and to keep peace.
Today there are UN peacekeepers working in Afghanistan, Cyprus, Haiti, Liberia, and several other countries.
Through a series of goals, resolutions and declarations adopted by member nations of the United Nations, the world has a set of commitments, actions, and goals to stop and reverse the spread of HIV and scale up towards universal access to HIV prevention, treatment, care.
and support services.
Principal organs of the United Nations
There are also so-called special agencies of the United Nations, Some of them are older than the United Nations.
Here are a few of them:
The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)
The World Health Organization (WHO)
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
The International Labour Organization (ILO)
The International Monetary Fund (IMF)
The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)
UN website
UN Foundation website
1945 establishments
Global is a prefix which means that it applies to the entire world rather than any special place or people.
It is used to mean "universal".
da:Global
de:Global
en:Global
sv:Global
Ancient historians
Herodotus, (485—c.420 BC), Halicarnassian "Father of History"
Thucydides, (c.460–400 BC), Peloponnesian War
Xenophon, (431—c.360 BC), an Athenian knight and student of Socrates
Julius Caesar, (c.100–44 BC), Gallic and civil wars
Flavius Josephus, (37–100), Jewish history
Sima Qian, (c.140 BC), Chinese history
Plutarch, (c. 46–120 AD)
Gaius Cornelius Tacitus, (c. 56—c. 120), early Roman Empire
Suetonius, (75–160)
Medieval historians/chroniclers
Jordanes, (6th century), Goths
Procopius, (d. c. 565), Byzantines
Bede, (c. 632–735), Anglo-Saxons
Geoffrey of Monmouth, churchman/historian
ibn Khaldun, (1332–1406)
Christine de Pizan, (c.1365—c.1430), historian, poet, philosopher
Snorri Sturluson, author of Younger Edda and Heimskringla; d. in  1241
Historians from the time period 1600--1900
Sharaf Khan Bidlisi, died in 1603
Voltaire, (1694–1778), French Enlightenment philosopher, historian, and novelist, author of Candide.
Edward Gibbon, (1737–1794), Roman Empire
Leopold von Ranke, (1795–1886), German
William H. Prescott, (1796–1859), US historian of Spain, Mexico, Peru
Mary Sheldon Barnes, (1850-1898), American
Henri Pirenne - "one of the most eminent scholars of the Middle Ages and of Belgian national development", says Encyclopædia Britannica; the Belgian died in 1935
Historians after 1900
Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), history of ideas
Winston Churchill (1874–1965), U.K. prime minister; World Wars I and II, English-speaking peoples
Robert Conquest (1917–2015), Russia, Soviet Union
John Davies (1938–2015), Welsh historian
Michel Foucault (1926–1984), French historian of ideas / philosopher
Francis Fukuyama, (b. 1955)
Martin Gilbert (1936–2015)
Christopher Hill, (1912–2003), 17th century England
Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012), British historian, labour history
Paul Kennedy (born 1945), British historian, author of influential The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
Thomas Kuhn, (1922–1996), history of science, author of The Copernican Revolution, Black-Body Theory and the Quantum Discontinuity, and the influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Hans Mommsen (1930–2015), German social history
Richard Pipes (1923–2018), conservative Polish-born American historian, Russian and Soviet history
Janko Prunk (born 1942), Slovenian historian of modern history
Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), American president and historian, War of 1812, frontier
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (d. 2008), Russian historian and novelist
David Starkey (born 1945), Tudor history
Conrad Totman (born 1934), American historian, wrote A History of Japan
Eric Williams, (1911–1981), Guyanese historian, Caribbean history, anti-imperialist themes
Robert M. Young (academic) (d. 2019), American historian, history of medicine and human sciences
Howard Zinn (1922–2010), American historian, popular U.S. history, the Left in the U.S.
List of historians by country
Anything related to Japan
Japanese people
Marco Polo was born in 1254 and died on January 8,1324.
He was an Italian trader and explorer.
He was one of the first Europeans to explore Central Asia and East Asia.
Many other explorers, including Christopher Columbus, looked up to him.
He could speak four languages.
Marco Polo was known for the book, Travels of Marco Polo, where he talked about Asia.
Marco Polo  was born in Venice, one of the most successful trading cities.
Polo's mother died when he was very young and he was raised by his aunt and uncle.
His father and uncle returned from their Silk Road travels when Marco was about 15 years old.
Two years later, the three of them started their journey to Cathay (China).
His family were well-known merchants, not explorers.
He learned about writing, reading, and arithmetic, and how to do business.
Polo went on a 24-year trip to China with his father and uncle during the Mongol Dynasty.
He left Venice at the age of 17 on a boat that went through the Mediterranean Sea, Ayas, Tabriz and Kerman.
Then he travelled across Asia getting as far as Beijing.
On the way there he had to go over mountains and through terrible deserts, across hot burning lands and places where the cold was horrible.
He served in Kublai Khan's court for 17 years.
He left the Far East and returned to Venice by sea.
There was sickness on board and 600 passengers and crew died and some say pirates attacked.
Nevertheless, Marco Polo survived it all.
Some scholars believe that while Marco Polo did go to China, he did not go to all of the other places described in his book.
He brought noodles back from China and the Italians invented different sizes and shapes and called it pasta.
Polo returned to Venice with treasures like ivory, jade, jewels, porcelain and silk.
His father had borrowed money and bought a ship.
He became wealthy because of his trading in the East.
His nickname was Marco Il Milione, due to an ancestor of his called Emilione.
"Travels of Marco Polo"
Soon after Polo returned from his journeys he fought in a war against Genoa, got captured and put in prison.
When he was in prison, he became friendly with a fellow prisoner, Rusticello, who was a writer of romances and novels.
He told the writer about all his adventures, which became a book called The Travels of Marco Polo.
The published version was written by Rustichello da Pisa, based on what Polo had told him.
It became famous throughout Europe.
In the book he said that Kublai Khan's wealthy new empire had a postal system.
He also talked about the Chinese people.
China used paper money that was made from mulberry bark.
1254 births
1324 deaths
Italian explorers
European geographers
People from Venice
Herpes zoster (also known as shingles or zona) is a disease in humans.
The same virus that causes chickenpox also causes shingles.
The symptoms are pain and a rash with blisters.
The shingles vaccine reduces the risk of shingles.
Antivirus medicine can reduce the seriousness and duration of shingles if started within 3 days of the rash.
Shingles is a viral disease produced by the varicella zoster virus (VZV), the same virus that causes chicken pox.
Its symptoms include pain and a blistering rash that occurs along the nerves that contain dormant virus.
You can not catch shingles.
However, you can catch chicken pox through direct contact with someone who has shingles, by touching the area of the rash.
Most people who get shingles are old.
It sometimes infects younger people, or people with a weakened immune system.
Stress may trigger shingles.
The disease starts with tingling, itchiness, or pain on an infected person's skin.
After a few days, the disease causes a blistering rash.
This rash may be on the trunk or face.
The rash  grows into small blisters filled with fluid.
These blisters dry out and crust over for several days.
The rash causes anything from mild itching to extreme pain.
The rash stays in one region of the body.
The shingles virus is contagious from person to person only by direct contact.
For this reason, persons with shingles are advised to limit contact with those who are not immune to chicken pox, those with increased risk are young children and pregnant women.
Contracting chickenpox when one is pregnant can be dangerous to the unborn child.
If people have had chickenpox, they cannot get chickenpox from someone else again.
However, it is thought that contact with a shingles patient may trigger a person's own dormant chickenpox virus to become shingles.
Doctors recommend antiviral drugs, steroids, antidepressants, anticonvulsants, and topical agents to treat shingles.
The antiviral drugs acyclovir, valacyclovir, and famcyclovir can reduce the severity of shingles.
Shingles can be very painful and itchy.
It is not very dangerous to healthy people, and it usually ends without major problems.
The rash and pain last 3 to 5 weeks.
Sometimes, serious problems like temporary, partial facial paralysis, ear damage, or
encephalitis may occur.
Persons with shingles on the upper half of the face need immediate medical attention: the virus may cause serious damage to the eyes.
Most people who have shingles have only one attack of the disease in their lifetime.
However, people with AIDS, cancer or weak immune systems may have multiple attacks.
NIH Facts About Shingles
NINDS Shingles Information Page
A Brief History of Time (1988) is a book written by the scientist and mathematician Stephen Hawking.
The subject of the book is cosmology, the story of the universe.
There are two other versions of this book: The Illustrated A Brief History of Time and A Briefer History of Time.
The Illustrated A Brief History of Time has pictures to help explain its ideas.
It was also updated because new information was found.
A Briefer History of Time is shorter than the first version and was also updated.
This book is very popular and well-known.
This book was on the London Sunday Times bestseller list for over 4 years.
In this book, Hawking talks about many theories in physics.
Some of the things that he talks about are the history of physics, gravity, how light moves in the universe, space-time, elementary particles (very small objects that make up things in the universe), black holes, the Big Bang (the theory that the universe started from one point), and time travel (the idea that travel can be done to the past and to the future.)
In the first part of the book, Hawking talks about the history of physics.
He talks about the ideas of philosophers such as Aristotle and Ptolemy.
Aristotle, unlike many other people of his time, thought that the Earth was round.
He also thought that the sun and stars went around the Earth.
Ptolemy also thought about how the sun and stars were located in the universe.
He made a planetary model that described Aristotle's thinking.
Today, it is known that the opposite is true; the earth goes around the sun.
The Aristotle/Ptolemy ideas about the position of the stars and sun was disproved in 1609.
The person who first thought of the idea about the Earth going around the sun was Nicholas Copernicus.
Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, two other scientists, helped to prove that Copernicus's idea was right.
They looked at how the moons of some planets moved in the sky, and they used this to prove Copernicus right.
Isaac Newton also wrote a book about gravity, which helped to prove Copernicus's idea right.
Hawking describes the motion of planets moving around the sun and how gravity works between the planets and the sun.
He also talks about the ideas of absolute rest and absolute position.
These ideas are about the thought that events stay in place over a period of time.
This was found not to be true by Newton's laws of gravity.
The idea of absolute rest did not work when objects move very fast (at the speed of light, or light speed).
The speed of light was first measured in 1676 by the Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Roemer.
The speed of light was found to be very fast, but at a finite speed.
However, scientists found a problem when they tried to say that light always travelled at the same speed.
The scientists created a new idea, called the ether, which tried to explain light's speed.
Albert Einstein said the idea of the ether was not needed if another idea, the idea of absolute time (or time that is always the same) was dropped.
Einstein's idea was also the same as Henry Poincare's idea.
Einstein's idea is called the theory of relativity.
Hawking also talks about light.
He says that events can be described by light cones.
The top of the light cone tells where the light from the event will travel.
The bottom tells where the light was in the past.
The center of the light cone is the event.
Besides light cones, Hawking also talks about how light can bend.
When light goes past a big mass, like a star, the light changes direction slightly towards the mass.
After talking about light, Hawking talks about time in Einstein's theory of relativity.
One prediction that Einstein's theory makes is that time will go by slower when something is near huge masses.
However, when something is farther away from the mass, time will go by faster.
Hawking used the idea of two twins living at different places to describe his idea.
If one of the twins went to live on a mountain, and another twin went to live near the sea, the twin who went to live on the mountain would be a little bit older than the twin who went to live at the sea.
Hawking talks about the expanding universe.
The universe is getting bigger over time.
One of the things he uses to explain his idea is the Doppler shift.
The Doppler shift happens when something moves toward or away from another object.
There are two types of things that happen in Doppler shift - red shifting and blue shifting.
Red shifting happens when something is moving away from us.
This is caused by the wavelength of the visible light reaching us increasing, and the frequency decreasing, which shifts the visible light towards the red/infra-red end of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Red-shift is linked to the belief that the universe is expanding as the wavelength of the light is increasing, almost as if stretched as planets and galaxies move away from us, which shares similarities to that of the Doppler effect, involving sound waves.
Blue shifting happens when something is moving toward us, the opposite process of red-shift, in which the wavelength decreases and frequency increases, shifting the light towards the blue end of the spectrum.
A scientist named Edwin Hubble found that many stars are red shifted and are moving away from us.
Hawking uses the Doppler shift to explain that the universe is getting bigger.
The beginning of the universe is thought to have happened through something called the Big Bang.
The Big Bang was a very big explosion that created the universe.
The uncertainty principle says that the speed and the position of a particle cannot be found at the same time.
To find where a particle is, scientists shine light at the particle.
If a high frequency light is used, the light can find the position more accurately but the particle's speed will be unknown (because the light will change the speed of the particle).
If a lower frequency light is used, the light can find the speed more accurately but the particle's position will be unknown.
The uncertainty principle disproved the idea of a theory that was deterministic, or something that would predict everything in the future.
How light behaves is also talked more about in this chapter.
Some theories say that light acts like particles even though it really is made of waves; one theory that says this is Planck's quantum hypothesis.
A different theory also says that light waves also act like particles; a theory that says this is Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
Light waves have crests and troughs.
The highest point of a wave is the crest, and the lowest part of the wave is a trough.
Sometimes more than one of these waves can interfere with each other - the crests and the troughs line up.
This is called light interference.
When light waves interfere with each other, this can make many colors.
An example of this is the colors in soap bubbles.
Elementary Particles and Forces of Nature
Quarks are very small things that make up everything we see (matter).
There are six different "flavors" of quarks: the up quark, down quark, strange quark, charmed quark, bottom quark, and top quark.
Quarks also have three "colors": red, green, and blue.
There are also anti-quarks, which are the opposite of the regular quarks.
In total, there are 18 different types of regular quarks, and 18 different types of anti quarks.
Quarks are known as the "building blocks of matter" because they are the smallest thing that make up all the matter in the universe.
All elementary particles (for example, the quarks) have something called spin.
The spin of a particle shows us what a particle looks like from different directions.
For example, a particle of spin 0 looks the same from every direction.
A particle of spin 1 looks different in every direction, unless the particle is spun completely around (360 degrees).
Hawking's example of a particle of spin 1 is an arrow.
A particle of spin two needs to be turned around halfway (or 180 degrees) to look the same.
The example given in the book is of a double-headed arrow.
There are two groups of particles in the universe: particles with a spin of 1/2, and particles with a spin of 0, 1, or 2.
All of these particles follow Pauli's exclusion principle.
Pauli's exclusion principle says that particles cannot be in the same place or have the same speed.
If Pauli's exclusion principle did not exist, then everything in the universe would look the same, like a roughly uniform and dense "soup".
Particles with a spin of 0, 1, or 2 move force from one particle to another.
Some examples of these particles are virtual gravitons and virtual photons.
Virtual gravitons have a spin of 2 and they represent the force of gravity.
This means that when gravity affects two things, gravitons move to and from the two things.
Virtual photons have a spin of 1 and represent electromagnetic forces (or the force that holds atoms together).
Besides the force of gravity and the electromagnetic forces, there are weak and strong nuclear forces.
Weak nuclear forces are the forces that cause radioactivity, or when matter emits energy.
Weak nuclear force works on particles with a spin of 1/2.
Strong nuclear forces are the forces that keep the quarks in a neutron and a proton together, and keeps the protons and neutrons together in an atom.
The particle that carries the strong nuclear force is thought to be a gluon.
The gluon is a particle with a spin of 1.
The gluon holds together quarks to form protons and neutrons.
However, the gluon only holds together quarks that are three different colors.
This makes the end product have no color.
This is called confinement.
Some scientists have tried to make a theory that combines the electromagnetic force, the weak nuclear force, and the strong nuclear force.
This theory is called a grand unified theory (or a GUT).
This theory tries to explain these forces in one big unified way or theory.
Black holes are stars that have collapsed into one very small point.
This small point is called a singularity.
This singularity is a point of space-time which rotates at a high speed.
That is the reason that black holes have no  time.
Black holes suck things into their center because its gravity is very strong.
Only very large stars, called super-giants, are big enough to become a black hole.
The star must be one and a half times the mass of the sun or larger to turn into a black hole.
This number is called the Chandrasekhar limit.
If the mass of a star is less than the Chandrasekhar limit, it will not turn into a black hole; instead, it will turn into a different, smaller type of star.
The boundary of the black hole is called the event horizon.
If something is in the event horizon, it will never get out of the black hole.
Black holes can be shaped differently.
Some black holes are perfectly spherical - like a ball.
Other black holes bulge in the middle.
Black holes will be spherical if they do not rotate.
Black holes will bulge in the middle if they rotate.
Black holes are difficult to find because they do not let out any light.
They can be found when black holes suck in other stars.
When black holes suck in other stars, the black hole lets out X-rays, which can be seen by telescopes.
Hawking talks about his bet with another scientist, Kip Thorne.
Hawking bet that black holes did not exist, because he did not want his work on black holes to be wasted.
Hawking realized that the event horizon of a black hole could only get bigger, not smaller.
The area of the event horizon of a black hole gets bigger whenever something falls into the black hole.
He also realized that when two black holes combine, the size of the new event horizon is greater than or equal to the sum of the event horizons of the two other black holes.
This means that a black hole's event horizon can never get smaller.
Disorder, also known as entropy, is related to black holes.
There is a scientific law that has to do with entropy.
This law is called the second law of thermodynamics, and it says that entropy (or disorder) will always increase in an isolated system (for example, the universe).
The relation between the amount of entropy in a black hole and the size of the black hole's event horizon was first thought of by a research student (Jacob Bekenstein) and proven by Hawking, whose calculations said that black holes emit radiation.
This was strange, because it was already said that nothing can escape from a black hole's event horizon.
This problem was solved when the idea of pairs of "virtual particles" was thought of.
One of the pair of particles would fall into the black hole, and the other would escape.
This would look like the black hole was emitting particles.
This idea seemed strange at first, but many people accepted it after a while.
The Origin and Fate of the Universe
Most scientists believe that the universe started in an explosion called the Big Bang.
The model for this is called the "hot big bang model".
When the universe starts getting bigger, the things inside of it also begin to get cooler.
When the universe was first beginning, it was infinitely hot.
The temperature of the universe cooled and the things inside the universe began to clump together.
Hawking also talks about how the universe could have been.
For example, if the universe formed and then collapsed quickly, there would not be enough time for life to form.
Another example would be a universe that expanded too quickly.
The idea of many universes is called the many-worlds interpretation.
Each particle has many histories.
This idea is known as Feynman's theory of sum over histories.
A theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity should have Feynman's theory in it.
To find the chance that a particle will pass through a point, the waves of each particle needs to be added up.
These waves happen in imaginary time.
Imaginary numbers, when multiplied by themselves, make a negative number.
For example, 2i X 2i = -4.
Other editions
1988 — The first edition is published.
This edition had an introduction by Carl Sagan.
1990 - Similar to the 1996 but with an introduction by Carl Sagan, uncolored pictures, and it was printed in paperback
1996 — An illustrated, updated and expanded edition is published, called The Illustrated A Brief History of Time.
This hardcover edition contains full color illustrations and photographs to help explain the text.
It also has topics not in the original book, including a new chapter on wormholes and time travel.
1998 — The Tenth Anniversary Edition is published.
It has the same text as the one published in 1996, but was also released in paperback and has less diagrams.
2005 — The release of A Briefer History of Time (written with Leonard Mlodinow), which is a shorter version of the original book.
It was updated again to include new scientific developments..
1988 books
Science books
Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 - August 2, 1922) was a Scottish-born British-Canadian-American teacher, scientist, and inventor.
He was the founder of the Bell Telephone Company.
In 1876, Bell was the first inventor to patent the telephone, and he helped start the Bell Telephone Company with others in July 1877.
In 1879, this company joined with the New England Telephone Company to form the National Bell Telephone Company.
In 1880, they formed the American Bell Telephone Company, and in 1885, American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T), still a large company today.
Along with Thomas Edison, Bell formed the Oriental Telephone Company on January 25, 1881.
Alexander Graham Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.
His family was known for teaching people how to speak English clearly (elocution).
Both his grandfather, Alexander Bell, and his father, Alexander Melville Bell, taught elocution.
His father wrote often about this and is most known for his invention and writings of Visible Speech.
In his writings he explained ways of teaching people who were deaf and unable to speak.
It also showed how these people could learn to speak words by watching their lips and reading what other people were saying.
Alexander Graham Bell went to the Royal High School of Edinburgh.
He graduated at the age of fifteen.
At the age of sixteen, he got a job as a student and teacher of elocution and music in Weston House Academy, at Elgin in Morayshire.
He spent the next year at the University of Edinburgh.
While still in Scotland, he became more interested in the science of sound (acoustics).
He hoped to help his deaf mother.
From 1866 to 1867, he was a teacher at Somersetshire College in Bath, Somerset.
In 1870 when he was 23 years old, he moved with his family to Canada where they settled at Brantford, Ontario.
Bell began to study communication machines.
He made a piano that could be heard far away by using electricity.
In 1871 he went with his father to Montreal, Quebec in Canada, where he took a job teaching about "visible speech".
His father was asked to teach about it at a large school for deaf mutes in Boston, Massachusetts, but instead he gave the job to his son.
The younger Bell began teaching there in 1872.
Alexander Graham Bell soon became famous in the United States for this important work.
He published many writings about it in Washington, D.C.. Because of this work, thousands of deaf mutes in the United States of America are now able to speak, even though they cannot hear.
Bell's genius is seen in part by the eighteen patents granted in his name alone and the twelve that he shared with others.
These included fifteen for the telephone and telegraph, four for the photophone, one for the phonograph, five for aeronautics, four for hydrofoils, and two for a selenium cell.
In 1888, he was one of the original members of the National Geographic Society and became its second president.
The French government gave him the decoration of the Legion of Honor.
The Royal Society of Arts in London awarded him the Albert medal in 1902.
The University of Würzburg, Bavaria, granted him the Degree of PhD
His past experience made him ready to work more with sound and electricity.
He began his studies in 1874 with a musical telegraph, in which he used an electric circuit and a magnet to make an iron reed or tongue vibrate.
One day, it was found that a reed failed to respond to the current.
Mr. Bell desired his assistant, who was at the other end of the line, to pluck the reed, thinking it had stuck to the magnet.
His assistant, Thomas Watson complied, and to his surprise, Bell heard the corresponding reed at his end of the line vibrate and sound the same - without any electric current to power it.
A few experiments soon showed that his reed had been set in vibration by the changes in the magnetic field that the moving reed produced in the line.
This discovery led him to stop using the electric battery current.
His idea was that, since the circuit was never broken, all the complex vibrations of speech might be converted into currents, which in turn would reproduce the speech at a distance.
Bell, with his assistant, devised a receiver, consisting of a stretched film or drum with a bit of magnetised iron attached to its middle, and free to vibrate in front of the pole of an electromagnet in circuit with the line.
This apparatus was completed on June 2, 1875.
On July 7, he instructed his assistant to make a second receiver which could be used with the first, and a few days later they were tried together, at each end of the line, which ran from a room in the inventor's house at Boston to the cellar underneath.
Bell, in the room, held one instrument in his hands, while Watson in the cellar listened at the other.
The inventor spoke into his instrument, "Do you understand what I say?"
and Mr. Watson rushed back into the upstairs and answered "Yes."
The first successful two-way telephone call was not made until March 10, 1876 when Bell spoke into his device, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you."
and Watson answered back and came into the room to see Bell.
The first long distance telephone call was made on August 10, 1876 by Bell from the family home in Brantford, Ontario to his assistant in Paris, Ontario, some 16 km (10 mi.)
On March 7, 1876, the U.S. Patent Office gave him patent #174465 for the telephone.
Bell is also credited with the invention of an improved metal detector in 1881 that made sounds when it was near metal.
The device was quickly put together in an attempt to find the bullet in the body of U.S. President James Garfield.