Florence Nightingale - The Real Nurse Biography

Florence Nightingale, OM (May 12, 1820 – August 13, 1910), who came to be known as The Lady with the Lamp, was the pioneer of modern nursing. Each year, the International Nurses Day is celebrated on her birth anniversary.

Early Life
Born into a wealthy and well-connected British family at the ‘Villa Colombaia’ in Florence, Italy, she was named after the city of her birth, as was her older sister (named Parthenope for the old city that is now Naples). A brilliant and strong-willed woman, Florence rebelled against the expected role for a woman of her status, which was to become an obedient wife.
Inspired by what she understood to be a divine calling (first experienced in 1837 at the age of 17 at Embley Park and later throughout her life), Nightingale made a commitment to nursing, a career with a poor reputation and filled mostly by poorer women. Traditionally, the role of nurse was handled by female “hangers-on” who followed the armies; they were equally likely to function as cooks or prostitutes. Nightingale was particularly concerned with the appalling conditions of medical care for the legions of the poor and indigent. She announced her decision to her family in 1845, evoking intense anger and distress from her family, particularly her mother.
In December 1844, in response to a pauper’s death in a workhouse infirmary in London that became a public scandal, Nightingale became the leading advocate for improved medical care in the infirmaries and immediately engaged the support of Charles Villiers, then president of the Poor Law Board. This led to her active role in the reform of the Poor Laws, extending far beyond the provision of medical care.
In 1846 she visited Kaiserwerth, a pioneering hospital established and managed by an order of Catholic sisters in Germany, and was greatly impressed by the quality of medical care and by the commitment and practises of the sisters.

Rejection of marriage proposal
In 1851 she rejected the marriage proposal of politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton, against her mother’s wishes. Convinced that marriage would interfere with her ability to follow her calling to nursing, Nightingale continued to reject his proposal.
When in Rome in 1847, recovering from a mental breakdown precipitated by a continuing crisis of her relationship with Milnes, Nightingale met Sidney Herbert, a brilliant politician who had been Secretary at War (1845 – 46), a position he would hold again (1852 – 1854) during the Crimean War. Herbert was already married but he and Nightingale were immediately attracted to each other and they became life-long close friends. Herbert was instrumental in facilitating Nightingale’s pioneering work in Crimea and in the field of nursing, and Nightingale became a key advisor to Herbert in his political career.


Her career began at Kaiserwerth
Florence Nightingale’s career in nursing began in earnest in 1851 when she received four months’ training in Germany as a deaconess of Kaiserwerth. She undertook the training over strenuous family objections concerning the risks and social implications of such activity, and the Catholic foundations of the hospital. While at Kaiserwerth, Florence reported having her most important intense and compelling experience of her divine calling.


On August 12, 1853, Nightingale took a post of superintendent at the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in Upper Harley Street, London, a position she held until October 1854. Her father had given her an annual income of £500 (roughly $50,000 in present terms) that allowed her to live comfortably and to pursue her career.
Her most famous contribution was during the Crimean War, which became her central focus when reports began to filter back to Britain about the horrific conditions for the wounded. On October 21, 1854, Nightingale and a staff of 38 women volunteer nurses, trained by Nightingale and including her aunt Mai Smith, were sent to the Crimea, with the authorisation of Sidney Herbert.

The hospital in Scutari
She arrived early in November 1854. In Scutari (modern-day Uskudar in Istanbul, Turkey) Nightingale and her nurses found wounded soldiers being badly cared for by overworked medical staff in the face of official indifference. Medicines were in short supply, hygiene was being neglected, and mass infections were common, many of them fatal. There was no equipment to process food for the patients.
Nightingale and her compatriots began by thoroughly cleaning the hospital and equipment, and reorganizing patient care. Although she met resistance from the doctors and officers, her changes vastly improved conditions for the wounded and by April dropped mortality rates by 40 per cent to just two per cent.
She sent many letters to Herbert, to facilitate better medical care.
When she first arrived in the Crimea, she travelled on horseback making the inspections, she then transferred to a mule cart, and was reported to have escaped serious injury when it was toppled in an accident. Following this episode she used a solid Russian-built carriage, with waterproof hood and curtains. The carriage was returned to England after the war and subsequently given to the Nightingale training school for nurses, which she founded at St Thomas’s hospital. The carriage was damaged when the hospital was bombed in the Blitz. It was restored and transferred to the Army Museum in Aldershot.
Reportedly she treated 2,000 patients herself. She also contracted Crimean Fever. She is remembered today because of the compassion, care and administrative skills that she introduced to the profession of nursing, to patient care and to the maintenance of medical records.
Nightingale’s work inspired massive public support throughout England, where she was celebrated and admired as “The Lady with the Lamp” after the Grecian lamp she always carried in her tireless evening and night-time visits to injured soldiers. Nightingale’s lamp also allowed her to work late every night, maintaining meticulous medical records for the hospital, and writing personal letters to the family of every soldier who died in the hospital. The depth of her commitment to the care of her patients in Crimea earned her the everlasting respect and affection of the common soldier.

Heroic return home
Nightingale returned to Britain a heroine on August 7, 1857, and, according to the BBC, was arguably the most famous Victorian after Queen Victoria herself .
Florence moved from her family home in Middle Claydon, Buckinghamshire to the Burlington Hotel in Piccadilly. However, she was stricken by a fever of possible psychosomatic origin, in part a delayed response to the stress of her work in the Crimean War and her bout with Crimean fever. She barred her mother and sister from her room and rarely left it. It has been suggested that she may have suffered from bipolar disorder or myalgic encephalitis . See CBC story: ‘Florence Nightingale suffered from bipolar disorder’
In response to an invitation from Queen Victoria, and despite the limitations of confinement to her room, Florence Nightingale played the central role in the establishment of the Royal Commission on the Health of the Army, of which Sidney Herbert became chairman. As a woman, Nightingale could not be appointed to the Royal Commission, but she wrote the Commission’s 1,000-plus page detailed report that included detailed statistical reports and was instrumental in the implementation of its recommendations.

Army Medical School
The report of the Royal Commission led to a major overhaul of army military care, and to the establishment of an Army Medical School and of a comprehensive system of army medical records.
On November 29, 1855, a public meeting to give recognition to Florence for her work in the Crimea led to the establishment of the Nightingale Fund, to raise funds for training of nurses and there was an outpouring of generous donations. Sidney Herbert served as the honorary secretary of the fund, and the Duke of Cambridge was chairman.
By 1859, Florence had £45,000 at her disposal from the Nightingale Fund to set up the Nightingale Training School (now called the Nightingale School of Nursing) at St Thomas’ Hospital on July 9, 1860. The first trained Nightingale nurses began work on May 16 at the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary. She also campaigned and raised funds for the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital in Aylesbury, near her family home.
Florence Nightingale wrote Notes on Nursing which was published in 1860, a slim 136-page book that served as the cornerstone of the curriculum at the Nightingale School and other nursing schools established. Notes on Nursing also sold well to the general reading public and is considered as a classic introduction to nursing.
Nightingale spent the rest of her life promoting the establishment and development of the nursing profession and organizing it into its modern form.


Nightingale Fund nurses
By 1882 Nightingale nurses had a growing influential presence in the embryonic nursing profession, and some had become matrons at several leading hospitals, including, in London, St Mary’s Hospital, Westminster Hospital, St Marylebone Workhouse Infirmary and the Royal Hospital for Incurables at Putney; and throughout Britain, e.g. Royal Victoria Hospital, Netley; Edinburgh Royal Infirmary; Cumberland Infirmary; Liverpool Royal Infirmary as well as at Sydney Hospital, in New South Wales, Australia.
After the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, Nightingale’s work served as an inspiration for nurses in the war, and Union government approached her for advice to organise field medicine. Although her ideas met official resistance they inspired the volunteer body of United States Sanitary Commission and US volunteers like Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton and Cornelia Hancock.
In 1869 she returned to England and, with Elizabeth Blackwell, opened the Women’s Medical College.

Mathematician & statistician
Nightingale had exhibited a gift for mathematics from an early age, and excelled in the subject under the tutorship of her father. She had a special interest in statistics, a field in which her father was an expert, and was a pioneer in the nascent field of epidemiology. Florence made extensive use of statistical analysis in the compilation, analysis and presentation of statistics on medical care and public health.
In her later life, she made a comprehensive statistical study of sanitation in Indian rural life and was the leading figure in the introduction of improved medical care and public health service in India. See Florence Nightingale, the passionate statistician and Biography of Nightingale at MacTutor History of Mathematics.
She invented a diagram she called the coxcomb or polar area chart-similar to today’s pie chart-to depict changing patient outcomes in the military field hospital she managed. She made extensive use of the coxcomb to present reports on the nature and magnitude of the conditions of medical care in the Crimean War to Members of Parliament and civil servants who would have been unlikely to read or understand traditional statistical reports. As such, she was a pioneer in the visual presentation of information, now pioneered by Edward Tufte, and has earned high respect in the field of information ecology. See Polar area chart, or coxcomb, diagram.
In 1858, Florence Nightingale was elected the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society and she later became an honorary member of the American Statistical Association.

Royal recognition
In 1883 Queen Victoria awarded Florence Nightingale with the Royal Red Cross and in 1907 she became the first woman to be awarded the Order of Merit. In 1908 she was given the Honorary Freedom of the City of London. She could not leave her bed after 1896 and died on August 13, 1910. The offer of burial in Westminster Abbey was declined by her relatives, and she is buried in the graveyard at St. Margaret Church in East Wellow, England.
Florence Nightingale’s lasting contribution has been her role in founding the nursing profession, and in the shining example she set for nurses throughout the profession of commitment to patient care and hospital administration. There is a Florence Nightingale Museum in London.
There are countless examples of Florence Nightingale’s continuing legacy in the nursing profession that she founded, from the continuing work of the Nightingale School of Nursing and throughout the entire field of nursing education and medical records.
Today, there are three hospitals in Istanbul named after her: F. N. Hastanesi in Sisli, (the biggest private hospital in Turkey), Metropolitan F.N. Hastanesi in Gayrettepe and Avrupa F.N. Hastanesi in Mecidiyekoy, all belonging to the Turkish Cardiology Foundation.
During the Vietnam War, Florence Nightingale served as an inspiration for many US Army nurses and sparked a continuing renewal of interest in her life and work, that, inter alia, caught the attention of Country Joe of Country Joe and the Fish who has assembled an extensive web site in her honor.
The Agostino Gemelli Medical Centre in Rome, the first University-based hospital in Italy and one of its most respected medical centers, is the research and teaching hospital of Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart). It honored Florence Nightingale’s contribution to the nursing profession by giving the name Bedside Florence to a wireless ward system they have developed that equips nurses with Compaq iPAQ hand-held computers connected to a Windows 2000 wireless network.

Madame Cama - Biography

Madame Cama was the fiery patriot who first unfurled India’s flag at an international assembly. She turned away from a life of luxury and lived an exile – to serve her country. And the mighty British Government grew afraid of her.

Madame Cama, Veer Savarkar and some other patriots met and designed that tricolor flag in 1905. It was flown first in 1905 in Berlin and next in 1907 in Bengal.
The tricolor flag contained green, saffron and red stripes. In the green stripe at the top there were eight blooming lotuses. India was then divided into eight provinces and the flowers represented these provinces. The words ‘Vande Mataram’ in Devanagari script across the central saffron strip of the flag were a salutation to Mother India. In the red stripe at thebottom there was a half-moon on the right and the rising sun on the left. Red represents strength, saffron represents victory; and boldness and enthusiasm are represented by green. “This flag was designed by a distinguished selfless young Indian patriot” said Madame Cama. She was referring to Veer Savarkar.
In August 1907, she learnt that the International Socialist Conference would be held in Stuttgart ‘in Germany. Madame Cama got a golden opportunity to expose to world view the conditions in enslaved India. A thousand representatives from several countries of the world attended the Conference. When
India’s turn came, Madame Cama ascended the rostrum. She was wearing a colorful saree. She had an attractive personality. Dignity shone in the face. The representative’s thought: ‘She is an Indian princess.’
Madame Cama spoke about the sorrows and the poverty of lakes of Indians who were suffering silently.
‘One-fifth of mankind lives in India. All lovers of freedom should cooperate to free these people from subjection.’ This was the gist of the resolution, she boldly placed before the conference. She condemned the British Government which was looting from India thirty-five million pounds every year. She explained how the Indian economy was growing weaker day by day because of the lawless imperialists sucking the blood of India. At the end of her speech she unfurled the Indian flag and said:
“This flag is of Indian Independence. Behold it is born! It has been made sacred by the blood of young Indians who sacrificed their lives.I call upon you, gentle men, to rise and salute this flag of Indian Independence. In the name of this flag I appeal to lovers of freedom all over the world to cooperate with this flag.”


As if held by magic, the whole assembly stood up and honored the flag. Madame Cama was the lady who first unfurled the Indian flag, in a foreign land, in the presence of representatives of many countries! “It is my practice to speak under the flag of my country” – she would say and unfurl the flag before she spoke at any function.
After the conference in Germany concluded she came to America. To gain the support of the people there for the sacred cause in which she was engaged she had to start a campaign. In New York she explained her objects to press reporters who met her and they were full of praise for her. She told the reporters that lakes and lakes of people in India,although illiterate and suffering from hunger, loved their country. There was confidence and hope in the voice of Madame Cama when she said that Indians would attain independence within a few years and live in liberty, equality and brotherhood.
It was 28th October 1907. The Minerva Club had organized a meeting at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. The speaker was Madame Cama. In her speech she said that Indians should be given the political right to vote.
“People here may know of Russia. But they may not know much about conditions in India. The British Government is adopting the practice of destroying people who are educated and can think, or of sending them to jail. They are torturing the people and driving them to hospitals in jails. We desire a peaceful atmosphere and not bloody revolution. By proceeding in a non-violent manner as far as possible we have to overthrow despotic rule” said Madame Cama. Also Madame Cama spoke at several places. She may be called Mother India’s representative to the United States of America.
In 1914, when the First World War began, Madame Cama’s activities to gain the country’s freedom became intense. The leading articles in the press condemning the autocratic rule of the British grew sharper.
To the Indian soldiers fighting for the British, she gave a warning in the following words:
“Children of Mother India, you are being deceived. Do not take part in this war. You are going to fight and die, not for India, but for the British.The British have put shackles on Mother India’s hands; think how they can be removed. If you help the British, you will tighten the shackles.”
She herself would visit army camps in Marseilles. There she would meet Indian soldiers and ask them to keep away from the war. Questioned she: “Are you going to fight for those who have imprisoned your mother?” Return the arms, she would preach.
The French were allies of the British. Therefore the French Government must have been dissatisfied with the propa- ganda carried on by Madame Cama. The French Government warned Madame Cama that she was carrying on false propaganda against the British.
Madame Cama passed away on 13th August 1936. She had fought for India’s freedom. That freedom dawned eleven years after her death.
In a sense Madame Cama’s life abroad where she fought for India’s freedom was like living in obscurity. She sacrificed her life for the motherland. Even during the last moments of her life she urged repeatedly: “To gain freedom from subjection stand up against all difficulties.” “He who loses freedom will lose virtue. Opposition of tyranny is obedience to God’s command” said Madame Cama; she practiced what she preached.

Aung San Suu Kyi - Freedom Fighter

Aung San Suu Kyi is one of the world’s most renown freedom fighters and advocates of nonviolence, having served as the figurehead for Burma’s struggle for democracy since 1988.
Born on June 19th, 1945 to Burma’s independence hero, Aung san, Aung San Suu Kyi was educated in Burma, India, and the United Kingdom. Her father was assassinated when she was only two years old.
In 1988, while living in London, she returned to Burma to nurse her dying mother,and was plunged into the country’s nationwide uprising that had just begun. Joining the newly-forming National League for Democracy political party, Suu Kyi gave numerous speeches calling for freedom and democracy.
The military regime responede to the uprising with brute force, shooting and otherwise killing up to 10,000 demonstrators student, women, children, and others-in a mater of months. Unable to maintain its grip on power, the regime was forced to call for a general election in 1990.
As Suu Kyi began to campaign for the NLD, she and many others were detained by the regime. Despite being held under house arrest, the NLD went on to win a staggering 82% of the seats in parliament. The regime never recognized the results.


Suu Kyi has been in and out of arrest ever since. She was held from 1989-1995, and again from 2000-2002. She was again arrested and placed behind bars in May 2003 after the Depayin massacre, during which up to 100 of her supporters were beaten to death by the regime’s cronies. She has moved from prison back into house arrest in late 2003 and has been held there ever since.
She has won numerous international awards, including the Nobel Peace Prize, Sakharov Prize from the European Parliament, United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Jawaharlal Nehru Award from India.





She has called on people around the world to join the struggle for freedom in Burma, saying “Please use your liberty to promote ours.”

Biography of Raj Chandra Bose

Only a few days were left for his B.A. examination. Raj Chandra Bose was lost in his books. But his sister came with a problem. There was hardly any food left in the house. It was an urgent problem but nothing new. In the past three years he had faced one crisis after another. First, his mother had died in an epidemic and two years later his father had died.

At the age of 19 the entire burden of bringing up his brother and two sisters, all younger than him, had fallen on his shoulders. He had to take tuitions to earn for the family and he had won scholarships so that he could continue his studies. But finding money now was a problem. He had suspended tuitions to prepare for his examinations.

Then he remembered that there were still some medicines, including a bottle of quinine, in his father’s medicine chest. It was soon after World War I and medicines were scarce and costly in India. A bottle of quinine fetched him a handsome amount. The crisis was overcome. Raj Chandra took his B.A. examination and passed it successfully.

Raj Chandra Bose was born on June 19, 1901, at Hosangabad in Madhya Pradesh and grew up at Rohtak, where his father was doctor. Being the first child, his father had pinned high hopes on him. He always expected the boy to top his class. Once when he stood only second in geography in an eighth class test, his father forced him to learn his 200-page geography book by heart.

Pure mathematics had fascinated Bose from childhood. In 1925 no course in pure mathematics was available at Hindu College, in Delhi, where he had done his M.A. in applied mathematics. So, with the help of Seth Kedarnath Goenka, whose younger brother he had taught, he went to Calcutta. There he happened to meet Shyamadas Mukherjee, a mathematician, who not only gave him a room and allowed him the use of his library, but helped him in “learning the spirit of mathematics.”

In 1927 he took his M.A. in pure mathematics, but he could not get a job. He was rejected everywhere for being “overqualified”. He and his family had to live on the money he earned by teaching students. It was difficult, but he continued his research in geometry.

In 1932 came the turning point. His research in geometry came to the notice of P. C. Mahalanobis, who wanted a geometry scholar for the Indian Statistical Institute. Bose was reluctant to join the institute because he knew hardly anything about statistics. But Mahalanobis assured him that he would guide him.
By reading books and research papers and teaching students Bose mastered the fundamentals of statistics. He made many valuable contributions to the subject when he was at the institute.

In 1949 he migrated to the USA and joined the University of North Carolina as a Professor of Statistics. It was not money that tempted him to leave his homeland. It was only because he was offered a job which enabled him to devote all his time to mathematics. Later he became Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Colorado University.

Two of Bose’s discoveries won him much fame. Working with one of his students, he proved that a famous mathematical conjecture of the eighteenth century Swiss mathematician, Leonard Euler, was incorrect. Then, in collaboration with another student, he discovered new codes for telecommunication. Everyone knows the Morse Code. It is a code composed of dots and dashes used for sending messages over long distances via wireless telegraphy. However, because of what scientists call “noise”, errors often creep in to the messages. The Bose-Ray Chaudhuri codes could rectify the errors at the receiving end.
In 1976 America’s highest honour to a scientist came to Bose. He was elected Fellow of the US Academy of Sciences.

Ruy Lopez de Segura - Biography

Ruy Lopez de Segura (born 1530 in Zafra near Badajoz, died 1580) was a Spanish priest whose book Libro de la invención liberal y arte del juego del Axedrez was one of the first fundamental chess books in Europe. He studied and lived in Salamanca. Considered by many to be the first unofficial world chess champion.

Biography of Tipu Sultan - The Great Emperor

Tipu Sultan was born on 20 November 1750, Devanahalli & died on 4 May 1799, Srirangapattana, also known as the Tiger of Mysore, was the de facto ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore. He was the son of a prominent Muslim named Hyder Ali, by his second wife, Fatima or Fakhr-un-nissa. His full name was Sultan Fateh Ali Khan Shahab or Tipu Saheb Tipu Sultan. In addition to his role as ruler, he was a scholar, soldier, and poet. He was a devout Muslim but the majority of his subjects were Hindus.
At the request of the French, he built a church, the first in Mysore. In alliance with the French in their struggle with the British both Tipu Sultan and Hyder Ali did not hesitate to use their French trained army against the Marathas, Sira, Malabar, Coorg and Bednur. He was proficient in many languages. He helped his father Hyder Ali defeat the British in the Second Mysore War, and negotiated the Treaty of Mangalore with them. However, he was defeated in the Third Anglo-Mysore War and in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War by the combined forces of the British East India Company, the Nizam of Hyderabad and to a lesser extent, Travancore and the Marathas. Tipu Sultan died defending his capital Srirangapattana, on 4 May 1799.
Tipu Sultan was born at Devanahalli, in present-day Bangalore District, some 33 km (21 mi) North of Bangalore city. The exact date of his birth is not known; various sources claim different dates between 1749 and 1753. According to one widely accepted dating, he was born on 10 November 1750 (Friday, 10th Dhu al-Hijjah, 1163 AH). His father, Hyder Ali, was a military officer in service to the Kingdom of Mysore; he rapidly rose in power, and became the de facto ruler of Mysore in 1761. His mother Fatima or Fakhr-un-nissa was the daughter of Shahal Tariq, governor of the fort of Kadapa. He went in daily to say his prayer and paid special attention to mosques in the area. While leading a predominantly Hindu country, Tipu remained strong in his faith.
During his rule, Tipu Sultan laid the foundation for a dam where the famous Krishna Raja Sagara Dam across the river Cauvery was later built. He also completed the project of Lal Bagh started by his father Hyder Ali, and built roads, public buildings, and ports along the Kerala shoreline. His dominion extended throughout North Bangalore including the Nandi Hills, Kanivenarayanapura, and Chickballapur.
His trade extended to countries which included Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, France, Turkey, and Iran. Under his leadership, the Mysore army proved to be a school of military science to Indian princes. The serious blows that Tipu Sultan inflicted on the British in the First and Second Mysore Wars affected their reputation as an invincible power. Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, the former President of India, in his Tipu Sultan Shaheed Memorial Lecture in Bangalore (30 November 1991), called Tipu Sultan the innovator of the world’s first war rocket. Two of these rockets, captured by the British at Srirangapatna, are displayed in the Royal Artillery Museum in London. Most of Tipu Sultan’s campaigns resulted in successes.
He managed to subdue all the petty kingdoms in the south. He defeated the Marathas and the Nizams and was also one of the few Indian rulers to have defeated British armies. He is said to have started a coinage system, banking system, a new calendar, and a new system of weights and measures.[citation needed] He was well versed in Urdu, Kannada, Persian, and Arabic. Tipu was supposed to become a Sufi, but his father Hyder Ali insisted he become a capable soldier and a great leader.
There were over 26,000 soldiers of the British East India Company comprising about 4000 Europeans and the rest Indians. A column was supplied by the Nizam of Hyderabad consisting of ten battalions and over 16,000 cavalry, and many soldiers were sent by the Marathas. Thus the soldiers in the British force numbered over 50,000 soldiers whereas Tipu Sultan had only about 30,000 soldiers. The British broke through the city walls, and Tipu Sultan died defending his capital on May 4. When the fallen Tipu was identified, Wellesley felt his pulse and confirmed that he was dead. Next to him, underneath his palankeen, was one of his most confidential servants, Rajah Cawn. Rajah was able to identify Tipu for the soldiers.
Tipu Sultan was killed at the Hoally (Diddy) Gateway, which was located 300 yards from the N.E. Angle of the Srirangapattana Fort. The Fort Gateway had been built only 5 years prior to Tipu’s death. Tipu was buried the next afternoon, near the remains of his father. In the midst of his burial, a great storm struck, with massive winds and rains. As Lieutenant Richard Bayly of the British 12th regiment wrote, “I have experienced hurricanes, typhoons, and gales of wind at sea, but never in the whole course of my existence had I seen anything comparable to this desolating visitation”.

Britney Spears - The Beautiful Singer

 Britney Spears was born on 2 December 1981, Kentwood, Louisiana, USA. One of the last teenage superstars of the millennium, Spears enjoyed her breakthrough success at the end of 1998. She appeared in local dance revues and church choirs as a young girl, and at the age of eight auditioned for The Mickey Mouse Club. Although she was too young to join the series, a producer on the show gave her an introduction to a New York agent. She subsequently spent three summers at the Professional Performing Arts School Center. She appeared in a number of off-Broadway productions as a child actor, including Ruthless (1991).
She returned to the [ Walt ] Disney Channel for a spot on The Mickey Mouse Club, where she was featured for two years between the ages of 11 and 13. She began to audition for pop bands in the New York area, her demo tapes eventually landing on the desk of Jive Records’ Jeff Fenster. ”Her vocal ability and commercial appeal caught me right away,” he recalls. She was expensively groomed by Jive, who put her in the studio with Eric Foster White (producer and writer for Boyzone, Whitney Houston and others). They employed top R&B writer Max Martin (of Backstreet Boys fame) to produce her debut single, ”… Baby, One More Time”, and an album of the same title. They also set up a promotional free phone number where fans could listen to Spears’ music and interviews throughout the summer of 1998. She toured American venues for a series of concerts sponsored by US teen magazines, eventually joining ‘N Sync on tour.
The careful planning paid off when her debut album and single went on to top the American charts at the start of 1999. The album and single enjoyed similar success in the UK and Europe. The ballad ”Sometimes” and the funky ”(You Drive Me) Crazy” were also substantial transatlantic hits. ”Born To Make You Happy” topped the UK charts in January 2000. The demand for new Spears material was satisfied when her sophomore set, Oops! … I Did It Again, was released in May. The album contained the expected quota of well-produced, expertly crafted pop songs alongside a risible cover version of (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.

William Shakespeare - The Poet

Shakespeare’s literary achievement is not confined to his mastery of the poetic and dramatic form; his ability to capture and convey the most profound aspects of human nature is considered by many scholars to be unequalled, due to his understanding of the range and depth of human emotions. A colossal figure in world literature, Shakespeare’s legacy and influence continues to be felt in all parts of the globe. He has been translated into every major living language, and his plays are continually performed all around the world. Shakespeare was among the very few playwrights who have excelled in both tragedy and comedy.
Shakespeare wrote his works between 1588 and 1616, although the exact dates and chronology of the plays attributed to him are often uncertain. His prolific output is especially impressive in light of the fact that he lived only 52 years.
Shakespeare’s influence on the English-speaking world shows in the widespread use of quotations from Shakespearean plays the titles of works based on Shakespearean phrases, and the many adaptations of his.
Biography
Most historians agree that William Shakespeare1—actor, playwright and poet—was one individual whose life can be clearly mapped out through the study of considerable historical evidence.
Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, in April 1564, the son of John Shakespeare, a glove-maker, and of Mary Arden, a gentry daughter. His baptismal record dates to April 26 of that year. Because baptisms were performed within a few days of birth, tradition has settled on April 23 as his birthday. It provides a convenient symmetry: he died on that day in 1616, and, perhaps appropriately for a playwright commonly considered to be England’s greatest, it is also the Feast Day of Saint George, patron saint of England.
The house in Stratford known as ‘Shakespeare’s Birthplace’ (although this status is uncertain). It is claimed that the poet was born in the room with the checked windows.
Shakespeare’s father, prosperous at the time of William’s birth, was prosecuted for participating in the black market in wool, and later lost his position as an alderman. Some evidence exists that both sides of the family had Roman Catholic sympathies.
As the son of a prominent town official, William Shakespeare probably attended the Stratford grammar school, which may have provided an intensive education in Latin grammar and literature. The quality of Elizabethian era grammar schools was uneven. It is presumed that the young Shakespeare attended this school, since he was entitled to, although this cannot be confirmed because the school’s records have not survived. There is no evidence that his formal education extended beyond grammar school.
Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, on November 28, 1582 at Temple Grafton, near Stratford. Two neighbors of Anne, Fulk Sandalls and John Richardson, posted bond that there were no impediments to the marriage. There appears to have been some haste in arranging the ceremony: Anne was three months pregnant. After his marriage, William Shakespeare left few traces in the historical record until he appeared on the London literary scene.
On May 26, 1583 Shakespeare’s first child, Susanna, was baptised at Stratford. A son, Hamnet, and a daughter, Judith, were baptized soon after on February 2, 1585.
By 1592 Shakespeare had enough of a reputation for Robert Greene to denounce him as “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Johannes factotum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.” (The italicised line parodies the phrase, “Oh, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide” which Shakespeare used in Henry VI, part 3.)
In 1596 Hamnet died; he was buried on August 11, 1596. Because of the similarities of their names, some suspect that his death was part of the inspiration behind The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (c.1601), a reworking of an older, lost play.
By 1598 Shakespeare had moved to the parish of St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate, and appeared at the top of a list of actors in Every man in his Humour written by Ben Jonson.
Shakespeare’s signature, from his will
Shakespeare became an actor, writer and finally part-owner of a playing company, known as The Lord Chamberlain’s Men — the company took its name, like others of the period, from its aristocratic sponsor, the Lord Chamberlain. The group became popular enough that after the death of Elizabeth I and the coronation of James I (1603), the new monarch adopted the company and it became known as the King’s Men.
In 1604, Shakespeare acted as a matchmaker for his landlord’s daughter. Legal documents from 1612, when the case was brought to trial, show that in 1604, Shakespeare was a tenant of Christopher Mountjoy, a Huguenot tire-maker (a maker of ornamental headdresses) in the northwest of London. Mountjoy’s apprentice Stephen Belott wanted to marry Mountjoy’s daughter. Shakespeare was enlisted as a go-between, to help negotiate the details of the dowry. On Shakespeare’s assurances, the couple married. Eight years later, Belott sued his father-in-law for delivering only part of the dowry. Shakespeare was called to testify, but remembered little of the circumstances.
New Place, Stratford-on-Avon, built on the site of Shakespeare’s home
Various documents recording legal affairs and commercial transactions show that Shakespeare grew rich enough during his stay in London years to buy a property in Blackfriars, London and own the second-largest house in Stratford,

New Place

.
In 1609 his sonnets were published, love poems variously addressed: most to a youth (or ‘fair lord’); the remainder to a ‘dark lady’. Some regard the former set as being homoerotic, but that characterization remains in debate.
Shakespeare retired in about 1611. His retirement was not entirely without controversy. He was drawn into a legal quarrel regarding the enclosure of common lands. (Enclosure enabled land to be converted to pasture for sheep, but removed it as a resource for the poor.) Shakespeare had a financial interest in the land, and to the chagrin of some, he took a neutral position, making sure only that his own income from the land was protected.
In the last few weeks of Shakespeare’s life, the man who was to marry his younger daughter Judith – a tavern-keeper named Thomas Quiney – was charged in the local church court with “fornication.” A woman named Margaret Wheeler had given birth to a child and claimed it was Quiney’s; she and the child both died soon after. Quiney was disgraced, and Shakespeare revised his will to ensure that Judith’s interest in his estate was protected from possible malfeasance on Quiney’s part.
Shakespeare died in 1616, on April 23. He remained married to Anne until his death and was survived by his two daughters Susannah and Judith. Susannah married Dr John Hall, and later became the subject of a court case.
Shakespeare is buried in the chancel of Holy in Stratford-upon-Avon. He was granted the honor of burial in the chancel not on account of his fame as a playwright, but for purchasing a share of the tithe of the church for £440 (a considerable sum of money at the time). A bust of him placed by his family on the wall nearest his grave shows him posed as writing. Each year on his claimed birthday, a new quill pen is placed in the writing hand of the bust. It was common in his time for graves in the chancel of the church to later be emptied with the contents removed to a nearby charnel house as room in the chancel was required. As a result, his grave carries a well-known epitaph:
Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear, Trinity Church
To dig the dust enclosed here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones,
But cursed be he that moves my bones.
Popular legend claims that unpublished works by Shakespeare may lie inside his tomb, but no-one has ever verified these claims, perhaps for fear of the curse included in the quoted epitaph.

Works
Canonical works
The plays and their categories
Shakespeare’s plays first appeared in print as a series of folios and quartos, and scholars, actors and directors continue to study and perform them extensively. They form an established part of the Western canon of literature.
The plays are traditionally divided into tragedies, comedies and histories, following the logic of the original publications; however, modern criticism has labelled some of them “problem plays” as they elude easy categorization, or perhaps purposefully break generic conventions. In addition, Shakespeare’s later comedies are commonly known as “romances”.
The following list gives the plays in the order and categorization of the 1623 First Folio (the first collected edition of the plays). A single asterisk indicates a play commonly classified as a ‘romance’ today; two asterisks indicates those generally accepted as ‘problem plays’ – though other comedies still occasion critical dispute. To see the plays in the order in which they were written, see Chronology of Shakespeare plays.
Comedies
The Tempest *
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Measure for Measure **
The Comedy of Errors
Much Ado About Nothing
Love’s Labour’s Lost
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The Merchant of Venice **
As You Like It
Taming of the Shrew
All’s Well That Ends Well
Twelfth Night or What You Will
The Winter’s Tale *
Pericles, Prince of Tyre * (not included in the First Folio)
The Two Noble Kinsmen * (not included in the First Folio)
Histories
King John
Richard II
Henry IV, part 1
Henry IV, part 2
Henry V
Henry VI, part 1
Henry VI, part 2
Henry VI, part 3
Richard III
Henry VIII
Tragedies
Troilus and Cressida **
Coriolanus
Titus Andronicus
Romeo and Juliet
Timon of Athens
Julius Caesar
Macbeth
Hamlet
King Lear
Othello
Antony and Cleopatra
Cymbeline * (normally classed as a comedy today)

Dramatic collaborations
Like most playwrights of his period, Shakespeare did not always write alone and a number of his plays were collaborative, although the exact number is open to debate. Some of the following attributions, such as for The Two Noble Kinsmen, have well-attested contemporary documentation; others, such as for Titus Andronicus, remain more controversial, and are dependant on linguistic analysis by modern scholars.
Cardenio, a lost play; contemporary reports say that Shakespeare collaborated on it with John Fletcher.
Henry VI, part 1, possibly the work of a team of playwrights, whose identities we can only guess at. Some scholars argue that Shakespeare wrote less than 20% of the text.
Henry VIII, generally considered a collaboration between Shakespeare and John Fletcher.
Macbeth: Thomas Middleton may have revised this tragedy in 1615 to incorporate extra musical sequences.
Measure for Measure may have undergone a light revision by Thomas Middleton at some point after its original composition.
Pericles Prince of Tyre may include the work of George Wilkins, either as collaborator, reviser, or revisee.
Timon of Athens may result from collaboration between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton; this might explain its incoherent plot and unusually cynical tone.
Titus Andronicus may be a collaboration with, or revision of, George Peele.
The Two Noble Kinsmen, published in quarto in 1654 and attributed to John Fletcher and William Shakespeare; each playwright appears to have written about half of the text.

Lost plays by Shakespeare
Love’s Labour’s Won A late sixteenth-century writer, Francis Meres, and a scrap of paper (apparently from a bookseller), both list this title among Shakespeare’s recent works, but no play of this title has survived. It may have become lost, or it may represent an alternate title of one of the plays listed above, such as Much Ado About Nothing or All’s Well That Ends Well.
Cardenio, a late play by Shakespeare and Fletcher, referred to in several documents, has not survived. It re-worked a tale in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In 1727, Lewis Theobald produced a play he called Double Falshood, which he claimed to have adapted from three manuscripts of a lost play by Shakespeare that he did not name. Double Falshood does re-work the Cardenio story, and modern scholarship generally agrees that Double Falshood represents all we have of the lost play.

Poems
Shakespeare’s other literary works include:
Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
Longer poems:
Venus and Adonis
The Rape of Lucrece
The Passionate Pilgrim
The Phoenix and the Turtle

Galileo Galilei - The Austronomer Biography

Galileo Galilei (Pisa, February 15, 1564 – Arcetri, January 8, 1642), was a Tuscan astronomer, philosopher, and physicist who is closely associated with the scientific revolution. His achievements include improving the telescope, a variety of astronomical observations, the first law of motion, and supporting Copernicanism effectively. He has been referred to as the “father of modern astronomy,” as the “father of modern physics,” and as “father of science.” His experimental work is widely considered complementary to the writings of Francis Bacon in establishing the modern scientific method. Galileo’s career coincided with that of Johannes Kepler. The work of Galileo is considered to be a significant break from that of Aristotle. In addition, his conflict with the Roman Catholic Church is taken as a major early example of the conflict of authority and freedom of thought, particularly with science, in Western society.

Early career
Galileo was born in Pisa, Italy, as the son of Vincenzo Galilei, a mathematician and musician.
He attended the University of Pisa, but was forced to “drop out” for financial reasons. However, he was offered a position on its faculty in 1589 and taught mathematics. Soon after, he moved to the University of Padua, and served on its faculty teaching geometry, mechanics, and astronomy until 1610. During this time he explored science and made many landmark discoveries.
Experimental science
In the pantheon of the scientific revolution, Galileo takes a high position because of his pioneering use of quantitative experiments with results analyzed mathematically. There was no tradition of such methods in European thought at that time; the great experimentalist who immediately preceded Galileo, William Gilbert, did not use a quantitative approach. However, Galileo’s father, Vincenzo Galilei, had performed experiments in which he discovered what may be the oldest known non-linear relation in physics, between the tension and the pitch of a stretched string. Galileo also contributed to the rejection of blind allegiance to authority (like the Church) or other thinkers (such as Aristotle) in matters of science and to the separation of science from philosophy or religion. These are the primary justifications for his description as “father of science.”
In the 20th century some authorities challenged the reality of Galileo’s experiments, in particular the distinguished French historian of science Alexandre Koyre. The experiments reported in Two New Sciences to determine the law of acceleration of falling bodies, for instance, required accurate measurements of time, which appeared to be impossible with the technology of the 1600s. According to Koyre, the law was arrived at deductively, and the experiments were merely illustrative thought experiments.
Later research, however, has validated the experiments. The experiments on falling bodies (actually rolling balls) were replicated using the methods described by Galileo (Settle, 1961), and the precision of the results was consistent with Galileo’s report. Later research into Galileo’s unpublished working papers from as early as 1604 clearly showed the reality of the experiments and even indicated the particular results that led to the time-squared law (Drake, 1973).
Astronomy
Although the popular idea of Galileo inventing the telescope is inaccurate, he was one of the first people to use the telescope to observe the sky. Based on sketchy descriptions of telescopes invented in the Netherlands in 1608, Galileo made one with about 8x magnification, and then made improved models up to about 20x. On August 25, 1609, he demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers. His work on the device also made for a profitable sideline with merchants who found it useful for their shipping businesses. He published his initial telescopic astronomical observations in March 1610 in a short treatise entitled Sidereus Nuncius (Sidereal Messenger).
On January 7, 1610 Galileo discovered three of Jupiter’s four largest satellites (moons): Io, Europa, and Callisto. Ganymede he discovered four nights later. He determined that these moons were orbiting the planet since they would occasionally disappear; something he attributed to their movement behind Jupiter. He made additional observations of them in 1620. Later astronomers overruled Galileo’s naming of these objects, changing his Medicean stars to Galilean satellites. The demonstration that a planet had smaller planets orbiting it was problematic for the orderly, comprehensive picture of the geocentric model of the universe, in which everything circled around the Earth.
Galileo noted that Venus exhibited a full set of phases like the Moon. The heliocentric model of the solar system developed by Copernicus predicted that all phases would be visible since the orbit of Venus around the Sun would cause its illuminated hemisphere to face the Earth when it was on the opposite side of the Sun and to face away from the Earth when it was on the Earth-side of the Sun.
rast, the geocentric model of Ptolemy predicted that only crescent and new phases would be seen, since Venus was thought to remain between the Sun and Earth during its orbit around the Earth. Galileo’s observation of the phases of Venus proved that Venus orbited the Sun and lent support to (but did not prove) the heliocentric model.
Galileo was one of the first Europeans to observe sunspots, although there is evidence that Chinese astronomers had done so before. The very existence of sunspots showed another difficulty with the perfection of the heavens as assumed in the older philosophy. And the annual variations in their motions, first noticed by Francesco Sizzi, presented great difficulties for either the geocentric system or that of Tycho Brahe. A dispute over priority in the discovery of sunspots led to a long and bitter feud with Christoph Scheiner; in fact, there can be little doubt that both of them were beaten by David Fabricius and his son Johannes.
He was the first to report lunar mountains and craters, whose existence he deduced from the patterns of light and shadow on the Moon’s surface. He even estimated the mountains’ heights from these observations. This led him to the conclusion that the Moon was “rough and uneven, and just like the surface of the Earth itself”, and not a perfect sphere as Aristotle had claimed.
Galileo observed the Milky Way, previously believed to be nebulous, and found it to be a multitude of stars, packed so densely that they appeared to be clouds from Earth. He also located many other stars too distant to be visible with the naked eye.
Galileo observed the planet Neptune in 1611, but took no particular notice of it; it appears in his notebooks as one of many unremarkable dim stars.
Physics
Galileo’s theoretical and experimental work on the motions of bodies, along with the largely independent work of Kepler and Rene Descartes, was a precursor of the Classical mechanics developed by Sir Isaac Newton. He was a pioneer, at least in the European tradition, in performing rigorous experiments and insisting on a mathematical description of the laws of nature.
One of the most famous stories about Galileo is that he dropped balls of different masses from the Leaning Tower of Pisa to demonstrate that their velocity of descent was independent of their mass (excluding the limited effect of air resistance). This was contrary to what Aristotle had taught: that heavy objects fall faster than lighter ones, in direct proportion to weight. Though the story of the tower first appeared in a biography by Galileo’s pupil Vincenzo Viviani, it is not now generally accepted as true. However, Galileo did perform experiments involving rolling balls down inclined planes, which proved the same thing: falling or rolling objects (rolling is a slower version of falling) are accelerated independently of their mass.
He determined the correct mathematical law for acceleration: the total distance covered, starting from rest, is proportional to the square of the time (This law is regarded as a predecessor to the many later scientific laws expressed in mathematical form.). He also concluded that objects retain their velocity unless a force —often friction— acts upon them, refuting the accepted Aristotelian hypothesis that objects “naturally” slow down and stop unless a force acts upon them. This principle was incorporated into Newton’s laws of motion (1st law).
Galileo also noted that a pendulum’s swings always take the same amount of time, independently of the amplitude. While Galileo believed this equality of period to be exact, it is only an approximation appropriate to small amplitudes. It is good enough to regulate a clock, however, as Galileo may have been the first to realize. (See Technology below)
In the early 1600s, Galileo and an assistant tried to measure the speed of light.
Good on different hilltops, each holding a shuttered lantern. Galileo would open his shutter, and, as soon as his assistant saw the flash, he would open his shutter. At a distance of less than a mile, Galileo could detect no delay in the round-trip time greater than when he and the assistant were only a few yards apart. While he could reach no conclusion on whether light propagated instantaneously, he recognized that the distance between the hilltops was perhaps too small for a good measurement.
Galileo is lesser known for, yet still credited with being one of the first to understand sound frequency. After scraping a chisel at different speeds, he linked the pitch of sound to the spacing of the chisel’s skips (frequency).
In his 1632 Dialogue Galileo presented a physical theory to account for tides, based on the motion of the Earth. If correct, this would have been a strong argument for the reality of the Earth’s motion. (The original title for the book, in fact, described it as a dialogue on the tides; the reference to tides was removed by order of the Inquisition.) His theory gave the first insight into the importance of the shapes of ocean basins in the size and timing of tides; he correctly accounted, for instance, for the negligible tides halfway along the Adriatic Sea compared to those at the ends. As a general account of the cause of tides, however, his theory was a failure.
Mathematics
While Galileo’s application of mathematics to experimental physics was innovative, his mathematical methods were the standard ones of the day. The analyses and proofs relied heavily on the Eudoxian theory of proportion, as set forth in the fifth book of Euclid’s Elements. This theory had become available only a century before, thanks to accurate translations by Tartaglia and others; but by the end of Galileo’s life it was being superseded by the algebraic methods of Descartes, which a modern finds incomparably easier to follow.
Galileo produced one piece of original and even prophetic work in mathematics: Galileo’s paradox, which shows that there are as many perfect squares as there are whole numbers, even though most numbers are not perfect squares. Such seeming contradictions were brought under control 250 years later in the work of Georg Cantor.

Technology
Galileo made a few contributions to what we now call technology as distinct from pure physics, and suggested others. This is not the same distinction as made by Aristotle, who would have considered all Galileo’s physics as techne or useful knowledge, as opposed to episteme, or philosophical investigation into the causes of things.
In 1595-1598, Galileo devised and improved a “Geometric and Military Compass” suitable for use by gunners and surveyors. This expanded on earlier instruments designed by Niccolo Tartaglia and Guidobaldo del Monte. For gunners, it offered, in addition to a new and safer way of elevating cannons accurately, a way of quickly computing the charge of gunpowder for cannonballs of different sizes and materials. As a geometric instrument, it enabled the construction of any regular polygon, computation of the area of any polygon or circular sector, and a variety of other calculations.
About 1606-1607 (or possibly earlier), Galileo made a thermometer, using the expansion and contraction of air in a bulb to move water in an attached tube.
In 1609, Galileo was among the first to use a refracting telescope as an instrument to observe stars, planets or moons.
In 1610, he used a telescope as a compound microscope, and he made improved microscopes in 1623 and after.
This appears to be the first clearly documented use of the compound microscope.
In 1612, having determined the orbital periods of Jupiter’s satellites, Galileo proposed that with sufficiently accurate knowledge of their orbits one could use their positions as a universal clock, and this would make possible the determination of longitude. He worked on this problem from time to time during the remainder of his life; but the practical problems were severe. The method was first successfully applied by Giovanni Domenico Cassini in 1681 and was later used extensively for land surveys; for navigation, the first practical method was the chronometer of John Harrison.
In his last year, when totally blind, he designed an escapement mechanism for a pendulum clock. The first fully operational pendulum clock was made by Christiaan Huygens in the 1650s.
He created sketches of various inventions, such as a candle and mirror combination to reflect light throughout a building, an automatic tomato picker, a pocket comb that doubled as an eating utensil, and what appears to be a ballpoint pen.
Church controversy
Galileo was a practicing Catholic, yet his writings on Copernican heliocentrism disturbed some in the Catholic Church who believed in a geocentric model of the solar system. They argued that heliocentrism was in direct contradiction of the Bible, at least as interpreted by the church fathers, and the highly revered ancient writings of Aristotle and Plato (especially among the Dominican order, facilitators of the Inquisition).
The geocentric model was generally accepted at the time for several reasons. By the time of the controversy, the Catholic Church had largely abandoned the Ptolemaic model for the Tychonian model in which the Earth was at the center of the Universe, the Sun revolved around the Earth and the other planets revolved around the Sun. This model is geometrically equivalent to the Copernican model and had the extra advantage that it predicted no parallax of the stars, an effect that was impossible to detect with the instruments of the time. In the view of Tycho and many others, this model explained the observable data of the time better than the geocentric model did. (That inference is valid, however, only on the assumption that no very small effect had been missed: that the instruments of the time were absolutely perfect, or that the Universe could not be much larger than was generally believed at the time. As to the latter, belief in the large, possibly infinite, size of the Universe was part of the heretical beliefs for which Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake in 1600.)
An understanding of the controversies, if it is even possible, requires attention not only to the politics of religious organizations but to those of academic philosophy. Before Galileo had trouble with the Jesuits and before the Dominican friar Caccini denounced him from the pulpit, his employer heard him accused of contradicting Scripture by a professor of philosophy, Cosimo Boscaglia, who was neither a theologian nor a priest. The first to defend Galileo was a Benedictine abbot, Benedetto Castelli, who was also a professor of mathematics and a former student of Galileo’s. It was this exchange that led Galileo to write the Letter to Grand Duchess Christina. (Castelli remained Galileo’s friend, visiting him at Arcetri near the end of Galileo’s life, after months of effort to get permission from the Inquisition to do so.)
However, real power lay with the Church, and Galileo’s arguments were most fiercely fought on the religious level. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century historian Andrew Dickson White wrote from an anti-clerical perspective:
The war became more and more bitter. The Dominican Father Caccini preached a sermon from the text, “Ye men of Galilee, why stand ye gazing up into heaven?” and this wretched pun upon the great astronomer’s name ushered in sharper weapons; for, before Caccini ended, he insisted that “geometry is of the devil,” and that “mathematicians should be banished as the authors of all heresies.” The Church authorities gave Caccini promotion.
Father Lorini proved that Galileo’s doctrine was not only heretical but “atheistic,” and besought the Inquisition to intervene.
hop of Fiesole screamed in rage against the Copernican system, publicly insulted Galileo, and denounced him to the Grand-Duke. The Archbishop of Pisa secretly sought to entrap Galileo and deliver him to the Inquisition at Rome. The Archbishop of Florence solemnly condemned the new doctrines as unscriptural; and Paul V, while petting Galileo, and inviting him as the greatest astronomer of the world to visit Rome, was secretly moving the Archbishop of Pisa to pick up evidence against the astronomer.
But by far the most terrible champion who now appeared was Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, one of the greatest theologians the world has known. He was earnest, sincere, and learned, but insisted on making science conform to Scripture. The weapons which men of Bellarmin’s stamp used were purely theological. They held up before the world the dreadful consequences which must result to Christian theology were the heavenly bodies proved to revolve about the Sun and not about the Earth.
Their most tremendous dogmatic engine was the statement that “his pretended discovery vitiates the whole Christian plan of salvation.” Father Lecazre declared “it casts suspicion on the doctrine of the incarnation.” Others declared, “It upsets the whole basis of theology. If the Earth is a planet, and only one among several planets, it can not be that any such great things have been done specially for it as the Christian doctrine teaches. If there are other planets, since God makes nothing in vain, they must be inhabited; but how can their inhabitants be descended from Adam? How can they trace back their origin to Noah’s ark? How can they have been redeemed by the Saviour?” Nor was this argument confined to the theologians of the Roman Church; Melanchthon, Protestant as he was, had already used it in his attacks on Copernicus and his school. (White, 1898; online text)
In 1616, the Inquisition warned Galileo not to hold or defend the hypothesis asserted in Copernicus’s On the Revolutions, though it has been debated whether he was admonished not to “teach in any way” the heliocentric theory. When Galileo was tried in 1633, the Inquisition was proceeding on the premise that he had been ordered not to teach it at all, based on a paper in the records from 1616; but Galileo produced a letter from Cardinal Bellarmine that showed only the “hold or defend” order.

Alexander the Great - Biography

Alexander the Great, who would become the Conqueror of the Ancient World, was born at Pella, Macedonia in 356 B.C. His father was King Phillip II and his mother was Olympias, a deeply spiritual woman who taught her son that he was a descendant of Achilles and Hercules. From the earliest age, then, Alexander was conditioned for conquest and kingly glory. He, thus, bec ame focused on being a great ruler.
When he was 13, Alexander became student to the great Greek philosopher Aristotle. Under Aristotle’s tutorship he gained an interest in philosophy, medicine and science. However, Aristotle’s concept of small citystate government would not have gone down well with the young prince who was bent on world domination. Aristotle did, however, cultivate Alexander’s interest in reading and learning.
At age 16 Alexander was called to Macedonia to put down a Thracian rebellion while his father was away. Distinguishing himself immediately, Alexander quelled the rebellion, stormed the rebel’s stronghold and renamed it Alexandroupolis, after himself.

In 336 B.C. Phillip was assassinated and 20 years he had embarked on his campaign of conquest. His army of 30,000 foot soldiers and 5,000 cavalrymen was small but efficient. Along with the army he took engineers, surveyors, architects, scientists and even historians.
During his conquest Alexander crossed the Indus River and entered the region bordering the Persian province of Taxila. Here he met the feared Indian Monarch Porus who, with 25,000 men and 200 elephants nearly did what the entire Persian Kingdom could not. After fierce fighting, however, Alexander was once more victorious. Porus surrendered and became an ally.
After an eight year campaign Alexander was now ruler of a massiv e empire. He was keen to push further west but his men were weary and intent on returning to their families. Reluctantly he complied with their wishes.
Alexander was a caring military leader. He would visit his men after the battle, examining their wounds and praising them for their valiant efforts. He would also arrange extravagant funerals for the fallen. He would arrange games and contests for his men. The affection for their leader was what galvanized his troops.
Returning to Babylon Alexander assumed the role he had coveted for so long- The Great Conqeuror. In June, 332 B. C. Alexander fell victim to malarial fever. He never recovered. The man who no man could defeat died on 13 June 323 B.C. He was just 32 years and 8 months old.

Dr. Condoleezza Rice - Biography

Condoleezza Rice was born on November 14, 1954 Birmingham, Alabama, is an American professor, politician, diplomat and author. She served as the 66th United States Secretary of State, and was the second person to hold that office in the administration of President George W. Bush. Rice was the first African-American woman secretary of state, as well as the second African American (after Colin Powell), and the second woman (after Madeleine Albright). Rice was President Bush’s National Security Advisor during his first term.

Before joining the Bush administration, she was a professor of political science at Stanford University where she served as Provost from 1993 to 1999. Rice served as the Soviet and East European Affairs Advisor to President George H.W. Bush during the dissolution of the Soviet Union and German reunification.
Rice was born as the only child of Angelena Ray Rice, a high school science, music and oratory teacher, and John Wesley Rice, Jr., a high school guidance counselor and Presbyterian minister. Her name, Condoleezza, derives from the music-related term, con dolcezza, which in Italian means, “with sweetness”. The family had roots in the American South going back to the pre-Civil War era, and worked as sharecroppers for a time after Emancipation. Rice grew up in the Titusville neighborhood at a time when the South was racially segregated.
Rice began to learn French, music, figure skating and ballet at the age of three. At the age of fifteen, she began piano classes with the goal of becoming a concert pianist. While Rice ultimately did not become a professional pianist, she still practices often and plays with a chamber music group. She accompanied cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing Brahms’s Violin Sonata in D Minor at Constitution Hall in April 2002 for the National Medal of Arts Awards.
In 1967, the family moved to Denver, Colorado. She attended St. Mary’s Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school in Cherry Hills Village, Colorado, graduating in 1971. After studying piano at the Aspen Music Festival and School, Rice enrolled at the University of Denver, where her father was then serving as an assistant dean.
Rice was a Democrat until 1982 when she changed her political affiliation to Republican in part because she disagreed with the foreign policy of Democratic President Jimmy Carter, and because of the influence of her father, who was Republican. As she told the 2000 Republican National Convention, “My father joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did.”
Rice was hired by Stanford University as an assistant professor of political science (1981–1987). She was promoted to associate professor in 1987, a post she held until 1993. She was a specialist on the Soviet Union and gave lectures on the subject for the Berkeley-Stanford joint program led by UC Berkeley Professor George Breslauer in the mid-1980s.
Rice is an accomplished pianist and has performed in public since she was a young girl. At the age of 15, she played Mozart with the Denver Symphony, and to this day she plays regularly with a chamber music group in Washington. She does not play professionally, but has performed at diplomatic events at embassies, including a performance for Queen Elizabeth II, and she has performed in public with cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
On December 17, 2000, Rice was named as National Security Advisor and stepped down from her position at Stanford. She was the first woman to occupy the post. Rice earned the nickname of “Warrior Princess,” reflecting strong nerve and delicate manners.
Her mother, Angelena Rice, died of breast cancer in August 1985, aged 61. In July 1989, Condoleezza’s father, John Wesley Rice, married Clara Bailey, to whom he remained married until his death, in December 2000, aged 77. He was a football and basketball coach throughout his life.
Rice has never married, and has no children.

Albert Einstein - Biography

William Lilly (April 30, 1602-1681), was a very well-known English astrologer and occultist during his time. Lilly was particularly adept at interpreting the astrological charts drawn up and used in horary astrology, as this was his specialty. He caused much controversy in 1666 for alledgedly predicting the Great Fire of London some 14 years before it happened.

Because of this many people thought that he in fact may have started it, but there is no evidence to support these claims. He was born in 1602 at Diseworth in Leicestershire, where his family were long-established yeomen. He received a basic classical education at the school of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, but makes a point of saying that his master never taught logic. At the age of seventeen, his father having fallen into poverty, he went to London and was employed in attendance on an elderly couple. His master, at his death in 1627, left him an annuity of $20; and, Lilly having soon afterwards married the widow, she, dying in 1633, left him property to the value of about $1000.
He now began to dabble in astrology, reading all the books on the subject he could fall in with, and occasionally trying his hand at unravelling mysteries by means of his art. The years 1642 and 1643 were devoted to a careful revision of all his previous reading, and in particular, having lighted on Valentine Naibod ‘s Commentary on Alcabitius , he “seriously studied him and found him to be the profoundest author he ever met with.” About the same time he tells us that he ?did carefully take notice of every grandaction betwixt king and parliament, and did first then incline to believe that as all sublunary affairs depend on superior causes, so there, was: a possibility of discovering them by the configurations of the superior bodies.” And, having thereupon “made some essays,” he “found encouragement to proceed further, and ultimately framed to himself that method which he ever afterwards followed.”
Lilly’s most comprehensive book was published in 1647 and was entitled Christian Astrology. It was so large that it came in three separate volumes, and it remains popular even today and has never gone totally out-of-print. It is considered one of the classic texts for the study of traditional astrology from the Middle Ages.
He then began to issue his prophetical almanacs and other works, which met with serious attention from some of the most prominent members of the Long Parliament. If we may believe his statements, Lilly was on intimate terms with Bulstrode Whitlock , William Lenthall the speaker, Sir Philip Stapleton , Elias Ashmole and others. Even John Selden seems to have acknowledged him, and probably the chief difference between him and the mass of the community at the time was that, while others believed in the general truth of astrology, he ventured to specify the future events to which he referred.
Even from his own account, however, it is evident that he did not trust implicitly to the indications given by the aspects of the heavens, but kept his eyes and ears open for any information which might make his predictions safe. It appears that he had correspondents both at home and in foreign parts to keep him conversant with the probable current of affairs. Not a few of his exploits indicate rather the quality of a clever police detective than of a profound astrologer.
After the Restoration he very quickly fell into disrepute. His sympathy with the parliament, which his predictions had generally shown, was not calculated to bring him into royal favour. He came under the lash of Butler, who, making allowance for some satiric exaggeration, has given in the character of Sidrophel a probably not very incorrect picture of the man; and, having by this time amassed a tolerable fortune, he bought a small estate at Hersham in Surrey, to which he retired, and where he diverted the exercise of his peculiar talents to the practice of medicine. He died in 1681.
Lilly’s life of himself, published after his death, is still worth looking into as a remarkable record of credulity. So lately as 1852 a prominent London publisher put forth a new edition of Lilly’s Christian Astrology, “with numerous emendations adapted to the improved state of the science.”

The World Richest Man - Mukesh Ambani

Mukesh Ambani is the chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries Limited, India’s largest private sector company. His wealth is estimated at US$ 19 billion as of November 2006, making him one of World’s richest persons. Mukesh and younger brother Anil are sons of the founder of Reliance Industries, Dhirubhai Ambani .
Mukesh Ambani was born on April 19, 1957 in Mumbai. His father Dhirubhai Ambani was then a small businessman who later on rose to become one of the legends of Indian industry. Mukesh Ambani did his Bachelors in Chemical Engineering from University of Bombay and Masters in Business Administration from Stanford University, USA.
Mukesh Ambani joined Reliance in 1981 and was the brain behind Reliance’s backward integration from textiles into polyester fibres and further into petrochemicals. During the process of backward integration, Mukesh Ambani led the creation of 51 new, world-class manufacturing facilities involving diverse technologies that raised Reliance’s manufacturing capacities manifold.
World’s largest grassroots petroleum refinery at Jamnagar is the brainchild of Mukesh Ambani. He was also the incharge of Dhirubhai’s dream project Reliance Infocomm. But after the split in the Reliance Empire, Reliance Infocomm went to his brother Anil Ambani. Mukesh Ambani is now planning to enter retail sector in a big way. He has plans to establish big retail stores all over the country. Recently, he also entered into an agreement with Haryana Government to establish a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) with an investment running into thousands of crores.
Mukesh Ambani has many achievements and honours to his name. Mukesh Ambani was chosen as the ET Business leader of the Year 2006. He was ranked 42nd among the World’s Most Respected Business Leaders and second among the four Indian CEOs featured in a survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers and published in Financial Times, London, November 2004. He was conferred the World Communication Award for the Most Influential Person in Telecommunications in 2004 by Total Telecom, October, 2004. Mukesh Ambani was also conferred the Asia Society Leadership Award by the Asia Society, Washington D.C., USA,