Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

In August 1945, during the final stage of the Second World War, United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two bombings, which killed at least 129,000 people, remain the only use of nuclear weapons for warfare in human history.At the time of its bombing, 

Hiroshima was a city of both industrial and military significance. A number of military units were located   nearby, the most important of which was the headquarters of Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's Second General Army, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan,^[102] and was located in Hiroshima Castle.


 The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest seaports in southern Japan, and was of great wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials. The four largest companies in the city were Mitsubishi Shipyards, Electrical Shipyards, Arms Plant, and Steel and Arms Works, which employed about 90% of the city's labor force, and accounted for 90% of the city's industry.^[166]Although an important industrial city, Nagasaki had been spared from firebombing because its geography made it difficult to locate at night with AN/APQ-13 radar

.After World War II, most of Hiroshima would be rebuilt, though one destroyed section was set aside as a reminder of the effects of the atomic bomb. Each August 6, thousands of people gather at Peace Memorial Park to join in interfaith religious services commemorating the anniversary of the bombing.
The city was unbelievably devastated. Of its 90,000 buildings, over 60,000 were demolished. Another bomb was assembled at Tinian Island on August 6. On August 8, Field Order No.17 issued from the 20th Air Force Headquarters on Guam called for its use the following day on either Kokura, the primary target, or Nagasaki, the secondary target. Three days after Hiroshima, the B-29 bomber, "Bockscar" piloted by Sweeney, reached the sky over Kokura on the morning of August 9 but abandoned the primary target because of smoke cover and changed course for Nagasaki.

Hitler

Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in the small Austrian town of Braunau to Alois Hitler who later became a senior customs official and his wife Klara, who was from a poor peasant family.

At primary school, Hitler showed great intellectual potential and was extremely popular with fellow pupils as well as being admired for his leadership qualities. However, competition at secondary school was tougher and Hitler stopped trying as a result.

At the age of 18, he moved to Vienna with money inherited after his father's death in 1903, in order to pursue a career in art, as this was his best subject at school. However his applications for both the Vienna Academy of Art and the School of Architecture were rejected.

During the First World War he volunteered to fight for the German Army and gained the rank of corporal, earning accolades as a dispatch-runner. He won several awards for bravery, including the Iron Cross First Class.

In October 1918, he was blinded in a mustard gas attack. Germany surrendered while Hitler was in hospital and he went into a state of great depression, spending lots of time in tears. After the war ended, Hitler's future seemed uncertain.

By early 1945, Hitler realized that Germany was going to lose the war. The Soviets had driven the German army back into Western Europe, and the Allies were advancing into Germany. On April 29, 1945, Hitler married his girlfriend, Eva Braun, in a small civil ceremony in his Berlin bunker. Around this time, Hitler was informed of the assassination of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Afraid of falling into the hands of enemy troops, Hitler and Braun committed suicide the day after their wedding, on April 30, 1945. Their bodies were carried to the bombed-out garden behind the Reich Chancellery, where they were burned. Berlin fell on May 2, 1945.

Hitler's political program had brought about a world war, leaving behind a devastated and impoverished Eastern and Central Europe, including Germany. His policies inflicted human suffering on an unprecedented scale and resulted in the death of an estimated 40 million people, including about 27 million in the Soviet Union. Hitler's defeat marked the end of a phase of European history dominated by Germany, and the defeat of fascism. A new ideological global conflict, the Cold War, emerged in the aftermath of World War II.

Quotes :

"The great mass of people...will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one."

"What luck for rulers that men don't think."

"Strength lies not in defence, but in attack." 

The Forbidden City

Ringed by a 52m-wide moat at the very heart of Běijīng, the Forbidden City is China’s largest and best-preserved collection of ancient buildings, and the largest palace complex in the world. So called because it was off limits for 500 years, when it was steeped in stultifying ritual and Byzantine regal protocol, the otherworldly palace was the reclusive home to two dynasties of imperial rule until the Republic overthrew the last Qing emperor.

Features

• It is the world's biggest ancient palace.
• It is considered to be among the world's top 5 most important palaces.
• China's most popular single site tourist attraction.
• The structure is almost 600 years old.
• Home of dynastic clans for 500 years.
• A million articles are considered national heritage.
• 1987 UNESCO World Heritage List
• The largest collection of ancient wooden structures in the world.
• A stunning array of ancient treasures and buildings: with ancient porcelain and jade, gardens, plazas, historic sites, and 9,999 rooms

History

• 1406 Construction began on the Ming Dynasty palace in Beijing
• 1420The palace complex was completed.
• 1644 The Ming Dynasty lost control of the palace and the Manchus took possession.
• 1860 and 1900 Western forces briefly took control of the palace on two occasions.
• 1912 The last emperor of the Qing Empire abdicated.
• 1947 An important part of the palace's antiques and treasures were taken to Taiwan.
• 1987 The complex was named a UNESCO World Heritage.

• Original Purpose: A palace compound to protect and serve the Ming Dynasty clan.
• Significance: The palace complex was the center of two empires and is considered the symbol of China. Now it's Beijing's most popular tourist attraction.

Architecture

Surrounding wall of Forbidden City

• Rooms: 9,999 including anterooms
• Buildings: 980
• Total surface area: 720,000 square meters (7,747,200 square feet / 180 acres). For comparison, the Vatican measures 440,000 square meters, and the Kremlin measures 275,000 square meters.
• Surrounding wall: 7.9 meters (26 ft) high and 8.62 m (28.3 ft) wide at the base.
• Moat outside the walls: 6 meters (20 ft) deep and 52 meters (171 ft) wide
• Largest structure: The Hall of Supreme Harmony is 30 meters (98 ft) tall.
• Distance between east gate and west gate: 750 m
• Distance between north and south gate: 960 m

PEARL HARBOR

Pearl Harbor was originally an extensive deep embayment called Wai Nomi (meaning, “pearl water”) or Puʻuloa (meaning, “long hill”) by the Hawaiians. Puʻuloa was regarded as the home of the dolphin god, Kaʻahupahau, and his brother (or father), Kahiʻuka, in Hawaiian legends. According to tradition, Keaunui, the head of the powerful Ewu chiefs, is credited with cutting a navigable channel near the present Puʻuloa saltworks, by which he made the estuary, known as "Pearl Lake," accessible to navigation. Making due allowance for legendary amplification, the estuary already had an outlet for its waters where the present gap is; but Keaunui is typically given the credit for widening and deepening it.^[4]

Just before 8 a.m. on December 7, 1941, hundreds of Japanese fighter planes attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor near Honolulu, Hawaii. The barrage lasted just two hours, but it was devastating: The Japanese managed to destroy nearly 20 American naval vessels, including eight enormous battleships, and almost 200 airplanes. More than 2,000 Americans soldiers and sailors died in the attack, and another 1,000 were wounded. The day after the assault, President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war on Japan; Congress approved his declaration with just one dissenting vote. Three days later, Japanese allies Germany and Italy also declared war on the United States, and again Congress reciprocated. More than two years into the conflict, America had finally joined World War II.
 

Pearl Harbor and the Road to War

The attack on Pearl Harbor was a surprise, but Japan and the United States had been edging toward war for decades. The United States was particularly unhappy with Japan’s increasingly belligerent attitude toward China. The Japanese government believed that the only way to solve its economic and demographic problems was to expand into its neighbor’s territory and take over its import market; to this end, Japan had declared war on China in 1937. American officials responded to this aggression with a battery of economic sanctions and trade embargoes. They reasoned that without access to money and goods, and especially essential supplies like oil, Japan would have to rein in its expansionism. Instead, the sanctions made the Japanese more determined to stand their ground. During months of negotiations between Tokyo and Washington, D.C., neither side would budge. It seemed that war was inevitable.The attack on Pearl Harbor was intended to neutralize the U.S. Pacific Fleet, and hence protect Japan's advance into Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, where it sought access to natural resources such as oil and rubber.^[3] War between Japan and the United States had been a possibility of which each nation had been aware (and developed contingency plans for) since the 1920s, though tensions did not begin to grow seriously until Japan's 1931 invasion of Manchuria. Over the next decade, Japan continued to expand into China, leading to all-out war between those countries in 1937. Japan spent considerable effort trying to isolate China and achieve sufficient resource independence to attain victory on the mainland; the "Southern Operation" was designed to assist these efforts.^[25]

 

History of Titanic

 

Titanic was a British passenger liner that sank in the North Atlantic Ocean in the early morning of 15 April 1912 after colliding with an iceberg during her maiden voyage from Southampton, UK to New York City, US. The sinking of Titanic caused the deaths of more than 1,500 people in one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in modern history. The RMS Titanic, the largest ship afloat at the time it entered service, was the second of three Olympic class ocean liners operated by the White Star Line, and was built by the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast with Thomas Andrews as her naval architect. Andrews was among those lost in the sinking. On her maiden voyage, she carried 2,224 passengers and crew.

The Making of Titanic

The Royal Mail Steamer Titanic was the product of intense competition among rival shipping lines in the first half of the 20th century. In particular, the White Star Line found itself in a battle for steamship primacy with Cunard, a venerable British firm with two standout ships that ranked among the most sophisticated and luxurious of their time. Cunard’s Mauretania began service in 1907 and immediately set a speed record for the fastest transatlantic crossing that it held for 22 years. Cunard’s other masterpiece, Lusitania, launched the same year and was lauded for its spectacular interiors. It met its tragic end–and entered the annals of world history–on May 7, 1915, when a torpedo fired by a German U-boat sunk the ship, killing nearly 1,200 of the 1,959 people on board and precipitating the United States’ entry into World War I.


According to some hypotheses, Titanic was doomed from the start by the design so many lauded as state-of-the-art. The Olympic-class ships featured a double bottom and 15 watertight bulkheads equipped with electric watertight doors which could be operated individually or simultaneously by a switch on the bridge. It was these watertight bulkheads that inspired Shipbuilder magazine, in a special issue devoted to the Olympic liners, to deem them “practically unsinkable.” But the watertight compartment design contained a flaw that may have been a critical factor in Titanic’s sinking: While the individual bulkheads were indeed watertight, water could spill from one compartment into another. Several of Titanic’s Cunard-owned contemporaries, by contrast, already boasted innovative safety features devised to avoid this very situation. Had White Star taken a cue from its competitor, it might have saved Titanic from disaster.

Disaster Strikes Aboard Titanic

That encounter took place roughly four days out, at about 11:30 p.m. on April 14. Titanic was equipped with a Marconi wireless, and there had been sporadic reports of ice from other ships, but she was sailing on calm seas under a moonless, clear sky. A lookout saw the iceberg dead ahead coming out of a slight haze, rang the warning bell and telephoned the bridge. The engines were quickly reversed and the ship was turned sharply, and instead of making direct impact the berg seemed to graze along the side of the ship, sprinkling ice fragments on the forward deck. Sensing no collision, the lookouts were relieved. They had no idea that the iceberg’s jagged underwater spur had slashed a 300-foot gash well below the ship’s waterline, and that Titanic was doomed. By the time the captain toured the damaged area with Harland and Wolff’s Thomas Andrews, five compartments were already filling with seawater, and the bow of the ship was alarmingly down. Andrews did a quick calculation and estimated that Titanic might remain afloat for an hour and a half, perhaps slightly more. At that point the captain, who had already instructed his wireless operator to call for help, ordered the lifeboats to be loaded.

CELL O MANIA

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1. Stay connected anytime and anywhere: The most basic benefit of a cell phone for which most of us use it is that we can stay connected with our loved ones in any part of the world and anytime. Gone are the days when we used to stand in queues to make an STD or ISD calls. You can talk to your loved ones staying even seven seas far with cell phones.
2. SMS: When initially SMS was invented, the makers were not actually sure whether it will work. I mean when people can straightaway make a call and talk, then why would anybody like to take the pain of typing a message! But to their surprise SMSs are today the most widely used service across the world. There are many situations in which a person can’t attend a call, so all you have to do is simply send an SMS and without talking your message is delivered.
3. Your way out in emergencies: Imagine you are stuck in a traffic jam, getting late for a meeting or your car has broken down in middle of nowhere. Cell phones are of great use in time of such emergencies. You can contact help with the use of cell phone easily.
4. Navigation in your hand: cell phones are constantly being upgraded with new technology and the recent phones are equipped with navigation and GPRS systems. You can never get lost if you have a cell phone with navigation system. Imagine, it gives you the details of every nook and corner of your destination.
5. Mini PC: cell phones are nowadays almost equivalent to mini computers.
6. The latest ones are equipped with windows and internet facilities. So you don’t need to wait for the newspaper! You can simply access the internet on your cell phone and get to know about the latest news, your e-mails, movie shows and a lot more!
7. Enhance your business: cell phones are a great help even at your business. With cell phones, you can constantly stay in touch with your employees and get to know about crucial information of your business.
8. Help in legal matters: a lot of criminals are these days being held because of their cell phones! The police can track a criminal via tracking the place where his mobile phone is using GPS. Also checking a cell phone’s call records give vital information to the defense forces about the criminals.
9. Wholesome entertainment: with a cell phone in your hand, you don’t need a TV or PC to get entertained. It is all in your cell phone. You can play games, listen to music, and click pictures and even record videos in your cell phone.
10. Transfer of data: these days cell phones are equipped with infrared and bluetooth technologies which allow you to transfer data like mails, pictures, music and even videos just in span of seconds.
11. Prestige and fashion statement: cell phones have become a matter of prestige and fashion statement, especially among the youth. If you have a latest handset then you can definitely impress others!

 

The disadvanteges of mobile phones are:it can damage your ear, its quite expensive, sometimes the reception is poor in some areas, you cant talk underground and in planes, people use bluetooth and the camera in bad ways, people use the phone while they are driving and this can couse problems. There are some disadvantages of owning a cell phone. As mentioned earlier in this unit, cell phones are those in which information is sent to one or more receiver by means of a modulated electromagnetic wave. Electromagnetic radiation can occur as a result of electromagnetic waves. The wavelength of electromagnetic wave determines its properties X-rays, infrared microwaves, radio waves and light waves . The frequency of an electromagnetic wave is the number of cycle that occurs in one second.
There are concerns about cell phones like many other electronic devices. First, the cell phone physically has non-repairable internal parts that can corrode. For example if a cell phone gets wet, you may damage internal parts. Also, extreme heat in a car can damage the battery or the cell-phone electronics and extreme cold may cause a momentary loss of the screen display. Second, analog cell phones may have problems of cloning. Cloning means someone has stolen its ID numbers and makes long distance calls on the owner's account. Third, another disadvantage of cell phones is that it does not have the ability to provide the callers location like a land line telephone. If you do not know where you are, you can not be found, if in trouble, on a cell phone. The tower can be located, but the caller can not because cells use base stations and towers to hand off calls as the user moves from one location to another. Fourth, like all electromagnetic waves, radio waves contain vibrating, electric and magnetic fields. In free space, these electric and magnetic fields are constrained to be perpendicular to each other, and to the direction of propagation. The waves can also be polarized. For example, if the electric field vibrates only in the vertical direction, the wave is vertically polarized. This polarization will not change as the wave travels through free space. In urban areas, radio waves are usually scattered by buildings and other large objects. This type of scattering effectively creates extra polarization states in all three spatial directions at a receiving antenna.

E-MAN

E-Man is a fictional comic book superhero created by writer Nicola Cuti and artist Joe Staton for Charlton Comics in 1973. Though the character's original series was short-lived, the lightly humorous hero has become a cult-classic sporadically revived by various independent comics publishers.E-Man is a sentient packet of energy thrown off by a nova. Traveling the galaxy he learned about life, how to duplicate the appearance of life, and good and evil. Reaching Earth, he met exotic dancer/grad student Katrinka Colchnzski (who attended Xanadu University), also known as Nova Kane (novocaine), and formed himself into a superhero dubbed E-Man, with a civilian identity dubbed "Alec Tronn" (electron).Nova would later be caught in a nuclear explosion and gain the same powers as E-Man and become his partner; later still, she would lose her powers and become a normal human being again, only to regain her powers sometime afterward. During their early adventures they picked up a pet koala named Teddy Q, whose intelligence grew to the point where he had a job waiting tables in a cafe.His emblem was the famous mass-energy equivalence formula "E=MC2" (postulated by Albert Einstein), and E-Man's 
powers included firing energy blasts from his hands, changing his appearance, and transforming part or all of his body into anything he could envision (e.g., turning his feet into jet engines so he could fly).