The document discusses several scientific concepts and famous individuals:
1. It mentions Philipp von Jolly advising Max Planck against pursuing physics.
2. It discusses hyperinflation in Germany following World War I, and how it contributed to the rise of the Nazi party.
3. It provides background on the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation by Penzias and Wilson in 1964 while investigating noise from radio signals.
4. It briefly summarizes the plot of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy involving the invention of the Total Perspective Vortex.
4. 2.
•The Munich physics professor Philipp von Jolly
advised X against going into physics, saying, “in this
field, almost everything is already discovered, and all
that remains is to fill a few holes.”
•His lesser known but equally important work can be
traced with the greats of Rayleigh, Jean , Wien and
relying heavily on Boltzmann.
6. 3.
• X (born November 2, 1929 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is
an American engineer entrepreneur who runs a successful
corporation based in Framingham, Massachusetts.
• In 2011, he donated a majority of the company in form of
non-voting shares to Massachusetts Institute of
Technology to sustain and advance MIT’s education and
research mission on the condition that the shares never be
sold.
• X makes Y that have been lauded for their
performance,[though they have been criticized as costing
"at least 50% too much for the … value of the experience ...
however, if you're a frequent flyer, these are a no brainer".
8. 4.
• X is widely believed to have contributed to the Nazi takeover
of Germany and Adolf Hitler's rise to power. Adolf Hitler
himself in his book, Mein Kampf, makes many references to
the German debt and the negative consequences that
brought about the inevitability of "national socialism".
• X also raised doubts about the competence of liberal
institutions, especially amongst a middle class who had held
cash savings and bonds. It also produced resentment of
bankers and speculators, whom the government and the
press blamed for the crisis.
• Some Germans called the X Weimar banknotes "Jew confetti"
14. 7.
• X is the name of various fractional units of currency used in the
Greek-speaking world from antiquity until today. The word means
"small" or "thin", and during classical and Hellenistic times a X was
always a small value coin, usually the smallest available
denomination of another currency.
• In modern Greece, X is the name of the 1/100 denomination of all
the official currencies of the Greek state:
• the phoenix (1827–1832),
• the drachma (1832–2001)
• the euro (2002–current) –
-the name is the Greek form of "euro cent." Its unofficial currency
sign is Λ (lambda).
Until the introduction of the euro, no Greek coin had been minted
with a denomination lower than 5 X since the late 1870s.
16. 8.
• The real Windows Mobile 7, that is, X as it once was called, is dead.
Windows Mobile 7 was supposed to be an evolution of Windows Mobile 5
and 6. It was supposed to be built on the paradigm that previous
generations of Windows Mobile had been created from: a Start-menu
centric application experience, two soft keys on bottom, and applications
that acted as they would on the desktop (often with a close button).
• Well X was scrapped, probably around 2008 when the Mobile division of
Microsoft saw a big reorganization. With that, Microsoft started from
scratch to build the next generation of Windows Mobile, or Windows
Phone as they began calling it in 2009. Also at that time, they decided to
extend the life of Windows Mobile 6 to buy some time, and a year later
we saw 6.5. And despite rampant criticism, 6.5 shipped on a lot of really
awesome devices like the HTC Touch Pro2 and HD2, Acer neoTouch, and
Samsung Omnia II.
• Source://pocketnow.com
19. 9.
• X occurs when the phonemes of 2 different speech stimuli are
combined into a new percept that is longer and linguistically more
complex than either of the 2 inputs. For example, when "pay" is
presented to one ear and "lay" to the other, the listener often
perceives "play.“
• A common form of X is found in the development of nasal vowels,
which frequently become phonemic when final nasal consonants
are lost from a language. This occurred in French and Portuguese.
Compare the French words un vin blanc [œ̃ vɛ̃ blɑ̃] "a white wine"
with their English cognates, one, vine, blank, which retain the n's.
• Cognates – same etymological origin
22. • X is a mountain in the Pennine Alps on the border between
Switzerland and Italy. Its summit is 4,478 meters (14,690 ft) high,
making it one of the highest peaks in the Alps.The mountain
overlooks the town of Zermatt in the canton of Valais to the
north-east and Breuil-Cervinia in the Aosta Valley to the south.
The Theodul Pass, located at the eastern base of the peak, is the
lowest passage between its north and south side.
• X was one of the last great Alpine peaks to be climbed and its
first ascent marked the end of the golden age of alpinism. It was
made in 1865 by a party led by Edward Whymper and ended
disastrously when four of its members fell to their deaths on the
descent. The north face was not climbed until 1931, and is
amongst the six great north faces of the Alps. X is one of the
deadliest peaks in the Alps: from 1865 – when it was first climbed
– to 1995, 500 alpinists died on it.
• X has become an iconic emblem of the Swiss Alps and the Alps in
general. Since the end of the 19th century, when railways were
built, it attracted more and more visitors and climbers. Each
summer a large number of mountaineers try to climb X via the
northeast Hörnli ridge, the most popular route to the summit.
24. 11.
• It's practically standing still now they've dropped ropes out of the nose of the
ship; and (uh) they've been taken ahold of down on the field by a number of
men. It's starting to rain again; it's... the rain had (uh) slacked up a little bit.
The back motors of the ship are just holding it (uh) just enough to keep it
from...It's burst into flames! It's burst into flames and it's falling it's crashing!
Watch it; watch it! Get out of the way; Get out of the way! Get this, Charlie; get
this, Charlie! It's fire... and it's crashing! It's crashing terrible! Oh, my! Get out
of the way, please! It's burning and bursting into flames and the... and it's
falling on the mooring mast. And all the folks agree that this is terrible; this is
the one of the worst catastrophes in the world. [indecipherable] its flames...
Crashing, oh! Four- or five-hundred feet into the sky and it... it's a terrific crash,
ladies and gentlemen. It's smoke, and it's in flames now; and the frame is
crashing to the ground, not quite to the mooring mast. Oh, the humanity! And
all the passengers screaming around here. I told you; it—I can't even talk to
people, their friends are on there! Ah! It's... it... it's a... ah! I... I can't talk, ladies
and gentlemen. Honest: it's just laying there, mass of smoking wreckage. Ah!
And everybody can hardly breathe and talk and the screaming. I... I... I'm sorry.
Honest: I... I can hardly breathe. I... I'm going to step inside, where I cannot
see it. Charlie, that's terrible. Ah, ah... I can't. Listen, folks; I... I'm gonna have
to stop for a minute because [indecipherable] I've lost my voice. This is the
worst thing I've ever witnessed.
26. 12.
• The concept of X originated with the Italian scholar Petrarch
(Francesco Petrarca) in the 1330s, and was originally intended as
a sweeping criticism of the character of Late Latin literature.
• Later historians expanded the term to refer to the transitional
period between Roman times and the High Middle Ages (c. 11th–
13th century), including not only the lack of Latin literature, but
also a lack of contemporary written history, general
demographic decline, limited building activity and material
cultural achievements in general. Later historians and writers
picked up the concept, and popular culture has further
expanded on it as a vehicle to depict X as a time of
backwardness, extending its pejorative use and expanding its
scope.
32. 15.
• The X National Book Awards (prior British Book Awards) are a
series of British literary awards focused on the best UK writers
and their works, as selected by an academy of members from
the British book publishing industry. The awards are organized
and governed by Agile Marketing.
• The shortlists are created by around 50 individuals from the X
National Book Awards Academy, who are drawn from retailer
chain buyers, independent booksellers, wholesalers and trade
press columnists. Winners are then chosen by the entire 750-
strong X National Book Awards Academy by way of vote. Each
member gets one vote per category and the most votes wins.
The criteria for a winning book is primarily the appeal, profile
and sales impact of the title concerned.
• It was also known as the Nibbies because of the golden nib-
shaped trophy given to winners.
35. • The Stockholm Visitor's Board (former Stockholm Information
Service) was a sponsor of the project in the beginning, like several
museums, theaters, parks and scientific institutions.
• The Ericsson Globe (originally known as the Stockholm Globe Arena,
or in Swedish nicknamed Globen, ’The Globe’) is the national indoor
arena of Sweden, located in the Johanneshov district of Stockholm
(Stockholm Globe City).
• The Ericsson Globe is currently the largest hemispherical building in
the world and took two and a half years to build. Shaped like a large
white ball, it has a diameter of 110 metres (361 feet) and an inner
height of 85 metres (279 feet).
37. 17.
• In 1960, Bell Labs built a 20-foot horn-shaped antenna in Holmdel,
NJ to be used with an early satellite system called Echo. The
intention was to collect and amplify radio signals to send them
across long distances, but within a few years, another satellite was
launched and Echo became obsolete.
With the antenna no longer tied to commercial applications, it was
now free for research. Penzias and Wilson jumped at the chance to
use it to analyze radio signals from the spaces between galaxies.
But when they began to employ it, they encountered a persistent
"noise“. If they were to conduct experiments with the antenna,
they would have to find a way to remove the static.
• Then they found droppings of pigeons nesting in the antenna. They
cleaned out the mess and tried removing the birds and discouraging
them from roosting, but they kept flying back. "To get rid of them,
we finally found the most humane thing was to get a shot
gun…and at very close range [we] just killed them instantly. It’s not
something I’m happy about, but that seemed like the only way out
of our dilemma," said Penzias."And so the pigeons left with a
smaller bang, but the noise remained, coming from every
direction."
39. 18.
• The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the
principle of extrapolated matter analyses.
To explain — since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way
affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory
possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet,
their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from,
say, one small piece of fairy cake.
The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to
annoy his wife. Trin Tragula — for that was his name — was a dreamer, a
thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as his wife would have it, an idiot.
And she would nag him incessantly about the utterly inordinate amount of
time he spent staring out into space, or mulling over the mechanics of safety
pins, or doing spectrographic analyses of pieces of fairy cake.
"Have some sense of proportion!" she would say, sometimes as often as thirty-
eight times in a single day.
And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex — just to show her.
And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece
of fairy cake, and into the other end he plugged his wife: so that when he
turned it on she saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation and herself in
relation to it.
To Trin Tragula's horror, the shock completely annihilated her brain; but to his
satisfaction he realized that he had proved conclusively that if life is going to
exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a
sense of proportion.
• X opened the door of the box and stepped in. Inside the box he waited. After
five seconds there was a click, and the entire Universe was there in the box
with him.
40.
41. 19.
•X of 1963 was one of the coldest winters on record in
the United Kingdom. Temperatures plummeted and
lakes and rivers began to freeze over. In the Central
England Temperature (CET) record, extending back
to 1659, only the winter (defined as the months of
December, January and February) of 1683–84 has
been significantly colder, with 1739–40 being slightly
colder than 1962–63. However, the winter did not
rank so highly in Scotland for its severity as it did in
England and Wales.
43. 20.
• X currents are a source of danger for people in ocean and lake surf.
They can be extremely dangerous, dragging swimmers away from
the beach. Death by drowning comes following exhaustion while
fighting the river or ocean current.
• Although a rare event, X currents can be deadly for non-swimmers
as well: a person standing waist deep in water can be dragged into
deeper waters, where they can drown if they are unable to swim
and are not wearing a flotation device. Varying topography makes
some beaches more likely to have X currents; a few are notorious.
• X currents cause more than 100 deaths annually in the United
States. X currents cause 80% of rescues needed by beach lifeguards.
47. 21.
• Hot, dry skin is a typical sign of X . The skin may become red and hot
as blood vessels dilate in an attempt to decrease X, sometimes
leading to swollen lips.
• Other signs and symptoms vary depending on the cause. The
dehydration associated with heat stroke can produce nausea,
vomiting, headaches, and low blood pressure. This can lead to
fainting or dizziness, especially if the person stands suddenly.
• The person may become confused or hostile, and may seem
intoxicated. Heart rate and respiration rate will increase
(tachycardia and tachypnea) as blood pressure drops and the heart
attempts to supply enough oxygen to the body. The decrease in
blood pressure can then cause blood vessels to contract, resulting
in a pale or bluish skin color in advanced cases of X. Some people,
especially young children, may have seizures. Eventually, as body
organs begin to fail, unconsciousness and death will result.