Wikimedia of The World
PHOTOGRAPHY Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed in many fields of science, manufacturing (e.g., photolithography), and business, as well as its more direct uses for art, film and video production, recreational purposes, hobby, and mass communication. Hercules Florence, a French painter and inventor living in Campinas, Brazil, used the French form of the word, photographic, in private notes which a Brazilian historian believes were written in 1834. This claim is widely reported but is not yet largely recognized internationally. The first use of the word by the Franco-Brazilian inventor became widely known after the research of Boris Kossoy in 1980.
KODAK The Eastman Kodak Company (referred to simply as Kodak) is an American public company that produces various products related to its historic basis in analogue photography. The company is headquartered in Rochester, New York, and is incorporated in New Jersey. Kodak provides packaging, functional printing, graphic communications, and professional services for businesses around the world. Its main business segments are Print Systems, Enterprise Inkjet Systems, Micro 3D Printing and Packaging, Software and Solutions, and Consumer and Film. It is best known for photographic film products. Kodak was founded by George Eastman and Henry A. Strong on May 23, 1892. During most of the 20th century, Kodak held a dominant position in photographic film. The company's ubiquity was such that its Kodak moment tagline entered the common lexicon to describe a personal event that deserved to be recorded for posterity. Kodak began to struggle financially in the late 1990s, as a result of the decline in sales of photographic film and its slowness in moving to digital photography, despite developing the first self-contained digital camera.
As a part of a turnaround strategy, Kodak began to focus on digital photography and digital printing, and attempted to generate revenues through aggressive patent litigation. The Kodak was a camera box built in the shape of a parallelepiped, with a fixed-focus lens on the front and no viewfinder; two V shape silhouettes at the top aided in aiming in the direction of the subject. At the top it had a rotating key to advance the film, a pull-string to set the shutter, and a button on the side to release it, exposing the celluloid film. Inside, it had a rotating bar (this bar was soon replaced by a simpler mechanism due to its manufacturing price) to operate the shutter: when the user pressed the button to take a photograph, an inner rope was tightened and the photographic exposure began. Once the photograph had been taken, the user had to rotate the upper key to change the selected frame within the celluloid tape
1984 WORLD OLYMPICS
O.J. SIMPSON
The 1984 Summer Olympics (officially the Games of the XXIII Olympiad and also known as Los Angeles 1984) were an international multi-sport event held from July 28 to August 12, 1984, mainly in Los Angeles, California, United States. It marked the second time that Los Angeles had hosted the Games, the first being in 1932. California was the home state of the incumbent U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who officially opened the Games. These were the first Summer Olympic Games under the IOC presidency of Juan Antonio Samaranch.
Orenthal James Simpson (born July 9, 1947), nicknamed ”the Juice”, is an American former football running back, broadcaster, actor, and advertising spokesman. Once a popular figure with the U.S. public, he is now best known for being tried for the murders of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman. Simpson was acquitted of the murders in criminal court but was later found responsible for both deaths in a civil trial.
The 1984 Games were boycotted by a total of fourteen Eastern Bloc countries, including the Soviet Union and East Germany, in response to the American-led boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow in protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Romania was the only Eastern Bloc state that opted to attend the Games. Albania, Iran and Libya also chose to boycott the Games for unrelated reasons. Despite the field being depleted in certain sports due to the boycott, 140 National Olympic Committees took part in the 1984 Games, a record number at the time The United States won the most gold and overall medals, followed by Romania and West Germany. The 1984 Summer Olympics are widely considered to be the most financially successful modern Olympics,serving as an example on how to run a model Olympic games. As a result of low construction costs, due to the use of existing sport infrastructure, coupled with a reliance on private corporate funding, the 1984 Games generated a profit of over $250 million.
On July 18, 2009, a 25th anniversary celebration of the 1984 Games was held at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. The celebration included a speech by former Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee president Peter Ueberroth, as well as a re-enactment of the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. Los Angeles will host the Summer Olympics for the third time in The 1984 Olympic Torch Relay began in New York City and ended in Los Angeles, traversing 33 states and the District of Columbia. Unlike later torch relays, the torch was continuously carried by runners on foot. The route covered more than 9,320 mi (15,000 km) and involved 3,636 runners. Noted athlete O. J. Simpson was among the runners, carrying the torch up the California Incline in Santa Monica. Gina Hemphill, a granddaughter of Jesse Owens, carried the torch into the Coliseum, completed a lap around the track, then handed it off to the final runner, Rafer Johnson, winner of the decathlon at the 1960 Summer Olympics. With the torch, he touched off the flame which passed through a specially designed flammable Olympic logo, igniting all five rings. Johnson became the first person of African descent to light the cauldron in Olympic history. The flame then passed up to the cauldron atop the peristyle and remained aflame for the duration of the Games.
Simpson attended the University of Southern California (usc), where he played football for the usc Trojans and won the Heisman Trophy in 1968. He played professionally as a running back in the National Football League (NFL) for 11 seasons, primarily with the Buffalo Bills from 1969 to 1977. He also played for the San Francisco 49ers from 1978 to 1979. In 1973, he became the first NFL player to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a season. He holds the record for the single-season yards-per-game average, which stands at 143.1. He was the only player to rush for over 2,000 yards in the 14-game regular season NFL format. Simpson was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1983 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985. After retiring from football, he began new careers in acting and football broadcasting.
In 1994, Simpson was arrested and charged with the murders of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman. He was acquitted by a jury after a lengthy and internationally publicized trial. The families of the victims subsequently filed a civil suit against him. A civil court awarded a $33.5 million judgment against him in 1997 for the victims' wrongful deaths. In 2000, he moved to Florida and settled in Miami to avoid paying any more of the liability judgment, which as of 2021 he has mostly not paid.
In 2007, Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas, Nevada, and charged with the felonies of armed robbery and kidnapping. In 2008, he was convicted and sentenced to 33 years' imprisonment, with a minimum of nine years without parole. He served his sentence at the Lovelock Correctional Center near Lovelock, Nevada.Simpson was granted parole on July 20, 2017, which was the minimum sentence. He was eligible for release from prison on October 1, 2017, and was released on that date.
A-TEAM
HANOI
A show about former members of a fictitious United States Army Special Forces unit. The four members of the team were tried by court martial for a crime they had not committed. They were convicted and sentenced to serve terms in a military prison, but later escaped to Los Angeles and began working as soldiers of fortune, while still trying to clear their names and avoid capture by law enforcement and military authorities. The series was created by Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo. A feature film based on the series was released by 20th Century Fox in 2010.
Hanoi traced its history back to the third century bce, when a portion of the modern-day city served as the capital of the historic Vietnamese nation of u Lac. Following the collapse of u Lac, the city was part of Han China. In 1010, Vietnamese emperor Ly Thai To established the capital of the imperial Vietnamese nation Dai Viet in modern-day central Hanoi, naming the city Thang Long (“literally "Ascending Dragon”). Thăng Long remained Dai Viet's political centre until 1802, when the Nguyen dynasty, the last imperial Vietnamese dynasty, moved the capital to Hue. The city was renamed Hanoi in 1831, and served as the capital of French Indochina from 1902 to 1945. On 6 January 1946, the National Assembly of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam designated Hanoi as the capital of the newly-independent country, which would last during the First Indochina War (1946–1954) and the Vietnam War (1955–1975). Hanoi has been the capital of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam since 1976.
During the Vietnam War, the A-Team were members of the 5th Special Forces Group (see the episode “West Coast Turnaround”). In the episode “Bad Time on the Border”, Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith (George Peppard), indicated that the A-Team were “ex-Green Berets”. During the Vietnam War, the A-Team’s commanding officer, Colonel Morrison, gave them orders to rob the Bank of Hanoi to help bring the war to an end. They succeeded in their mission, but on their return to base four days after the end of the war, they discovered that Morrison had been killed by the Viet Cong, and that his headquarters had been burned to the ground. This meant that the proof that the A-Team members were acting under orders had been destroyed. They were arrested, and imprisoned at Fort Bragg, from which they quickly escaped before standing trial.
Hanoi’s population only started to increase rapidly in the second half 20th century. In 1954, the city had 53 thousand inhabitants, covering an area of 152 km². By 1961, the area of the city had expanded to 584 km², and the population was 91,000 people. In 1978, National Assembly (Vietnam) decided to expand Hanoi for the second time to 2,136 km², with a population of 2.5 million people. By 1991, the area of Hanoi continued to change, decreasing to 924 km², but the population was still over 2 million people.
During the 1990s, Hanoi's population increased steadily, reaching 2,672,122 people in 1999. After the most recent expansion in August 2008, Hanoi has a population of 6.233 million and is among the 17 capitals with the largest area in the world. According to the 2009 census, Hanoi’s population is 6,451,909 people. As of 1 April 2019, Hanoi had a population of 8,053,663, including 3,991,919 males and 4,061,744 females. The population living in urban areas is 3,962,310 people, accounting for 49.2% and in rural areas is 4,091,353 people, accounting for 50.8%. Hanoi is the second most populous city in the country, after Ho Chi Minh City (8,993,082 people). The average annual population growth rate from 2009 to 2019 of Hanoi is 2.22%/year, higher than the national growth rate (1.14%/ year) and is the second highest in the Red River Delta, only after Bac Ninh Province (2.90% / year).976.
VIETNAM WAR
Frequent Wind continued around the clock, as pavn tanks breached defenses near Saigon. In the early morning hours of 30 April, the last U.S. Marines evacuated the embassy by helicopter, as civilians swamped the perimeter and poured into the grounds.On 30 April 1975, pavn troops entered the city of Saigon and quickly overcame all resistance, capturing key buildings and installations. A tank from the 304th Division crashed through the gates of the Independence Palace at 11:30 am local time and the Viet Cong flag was raised above it. President Duong Văn Minh, who had succeeded Huong two days earlier, surrendered to Colonel Bùi Tín.
A
The conflict emerged from the First Indochina War between the French colonial government and a leftwing revolutionary movement, the Viet Minh. After the French military withdrawal from Indochina in 1954, the US assumed financial and military support for the South Vietnamese state. The Viet Cong (VC), also known as Front national de libération du Sud-Viêt Nam or nlf(the National Liberation Front), a South Vietnamese common front under the direction of North Vietnam, initiated a guerrilla war in the south. North Vietnam had also invaded Laos in the mid-1950s in support of insurgents, establishing the Ho Chi Minh Trail to supply and reinforce the Viet Cong. U.S. involvement escalated under President John F. Kennedy through the maag program, from just under a thousand military advisors in 1959 to 23,000 in 1964. By 1963, the North Vietnamese had sent 40,000 soldiers to fight in South Vietnam. In the Gulf of Tonkin incident in early August 1964, a U.S. destroyer was alleged to have clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft.
Chaos, unrest, and panic broke out as hysterical South Vietnamese officials and civilians scrambled to leave Saigon. Martial law was declared. American helicopters began evacuating South Vietnamese, U.S. and foreign nationals from various parts of the city and from the U.S. embassy compound. Operation Frequent Wind had been delayed until the last possible moment, because of U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin's belief that Saigon could be held and that a political settlement could be reached. Frequent Wind was the largest helicopter evacuation in history. It began on 29 April, in an atmosphere of desperation, as hysterical crowds of Vietnamese vied for limited space.
A
The Vietnam War (Vietnamese: Chien tranh Viet Nam), also known as the Second Indochina War, was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist allies; South Vietnam was supported by the United States, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Thailand, and other anti-communist allies.The war, considered a Cold War-era proxy war by some, lasted almost 20 years, with direct U.S. involvement ending in 1973, and included the Laotian Civil War and the Cambodian Civil War, which ended with all three countries becoming communist states in 1975.
NATO On 4 March 1947, the Treaty of Dunkirk was signed by France and the United Kingdom as a Treaty of Alliance and Mutual Assistance in the event of a possible attack by Germany or the Soviet Union in the aftermath of World War II. In 1948, this alliance was expanded to include the Benelux countries, in the form of the Western Union, also referred to as the Brussels Treaty Organization (BTO), established by the Treaty of Brussels. Talks for a new military alliance, which could also include North America, resulted in the signature of the North Atlantic Treaty on 4 April 1949 by the member states of the Western Union plus the United States, Canada, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark and Iceland. The North Atlantic Treaty was largely dormant until the Korean War initiated the establishment of NATO to implement it, by means of an integrated military structure: This included the formation of Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in 1951, which adopted the Western Union's military structures and plans, including STANAGs and bipartite SOFAs. In 1952, the post of Secretary General of NATO was established as the organization's chief civilian. That year also saw the first major NATO maritime exercises, Exercise Mainbrace and the accession of Greece and Turkey to the organization. Following the London and Paris Conferences, West Germany was permitted to rearm militarily, as they joined NATO in May 1955, which was, in turn, a major factor in the creation of the Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact, delineating the two opposing sides of the Cold War.
The building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 marked a height in Cold War tensions, when 400,000 US troops were stationed in Europe. Doubts over the strength of the relationship between the European states and the United States ebbed and flowed, along with doubts over the credibility of the NATO defence against a prospective Soviet invasion – doubts that led to the development of the independent French nuclear deterrent and the withdrawal of France from NATO's military structure in 1966. In 1982, the newly democratic Spain joined the alliance.
The Revolutions of 1989 in Europe led to a strategic re-evaluation of NATO's purpose, nature, tasks, and focus on that continent. In October 1990, East Germany became part of the Federal Republic of Germany and the alliance, and in November 1990, the alliance signed the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) in Paris with the Soviet Union. It mandated specific military reductions across the continent, which continued after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact in February 1991 and dissolution of the Soviet Union in that December, which removed the de facto main adversaries of NATO. This began a draw-down of military spending and equipment in Europe.
NASA NASA was established in 1958, succeeding the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency was to have a distinctly civilian orientation, encouraging peaceful applications in space science. Since its establishment, most US space exploration efforts have been led by NASA, including the Apollo Moon landing missions, the Skylab space station, and later the Space Shuttle. NASA is supporting the International Space Station and is overseeing the development of the Orion spacecraft, the Space Launch System, Commercial Crew vehicles, and the planned Lunar Gateway space station. The agency is also responsible for the Launch Services Program, which provides oversight of launch operations and countdown management for uncrewed NASA launches. NASA’s science is focused on better understanding Earth through the Earth Observing System; advancing heliophysics through the efforts of the Science Mission Directorate's Heliophysics Research Program; exploring bodies throughout the Solar System with advanced robotic spacecraft such as New Horizons; and researching astrophysics topics, such as the Big Bang, through the Great Observatories and associated programs.
Beginning in 1946, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) began experimenting with rocket planes such as the supersonic Bell X-1. In the early 1950s, there was challenge to launch an artificial satellite for the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958). An effort for this was the American Project Vanguard. After the Soviet space program's launch of the world's first artificial satellite (Sputnik 1) on October 4, 1957, the attention of the United States turned toward its own fledgling space efforts. The U.S. Congress, alarmed by the perceived threat to national security and technological leadership (known as the "Sputnik crisis"), urged immediate and swift action; President Dwight D. Eisenhower counseled more deliberate measures.
ISS The result was a consensus that the White House forged among key interest groups, including scientists committed to basic research; the Pentagon which had to match the Soviet military achievement; corporate America looking for new business; and a strong new trend in public opinion looking up to space exploration. It is of great urgency and importance to our country both from consideration of our prestige as a nation as well as military necessity that this challenge [Sputnik] be met by an energetic program of research and development for the conquest of space ... It is accordingly proposed that the scientific research be the responsibility of a national civilian agency ... NACA is capable, by rapid extension and expansion of its effort, of providing leadership in space technology.
On July 29, 1958, Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, establishing NASA. When it began operations on October 1, 1958, NASA absorbed the 43-year-old NACA intact; its 8,000 employees, an annual budget of US$100 million, three major research laboratories (Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory) and two small test facilities. Elements of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency and the United States Naval Research Laboratory were incorporated into NASA. A significant contributor to NASA's entry into the Space Race with the Soviet Union was the technology from the German rocket program led by Wernher von Braun, who was now working for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), which in turn incorporated the technology of American scientist Robert Goddard's earlier works.
The International Space Station (ISS) is a modular space station (habitable artificial satellite) in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA ( Japan), ESA (Europe), and CSA (Canada). The ownership and use of the space station is established by intergovernmental treaties and agreements The station serves as a microgravity and space environment research laboratory in which scientific research is conducted in astrobiology, astronomy, meteorology, physics, and other fields. The ISS is suited for testing the spacecraft systems and equipment required for possible future long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars. The ISS program evolved from the Space Station Freedom, an American proposal which was conceived in 1984 to construct a permanently manned Earth-orbiting station,and the contemporaneous Soviet/Russian Mir-2 proposal from 1976 with similar aims. The ISS is the ninth space station to be inhabited by crews, following the Soviet and later Russian Salyut, Almaz, and Mir stations and the American Skylab. It is the largest artificial object in space and the largest satellite in low Earth orbit, regularly visible to the naked eye from Earth's surface.It maintains an orbit with an average altitude of 400 kilometres (250 mi) by means of reboost manoeuvres using the engines of the Zvezda Service Module or visiting spacecraft.The ISS circles the Earth in roughly 93 minutes, completing 15.5 orbits per day.
The station has since been continuously occupied for 21 years and 20 days,the longest continuous human presence in low Earth orbit, having surpassed the previous record of 9 years and 357 days held by the Mir space station. The latest major pressurised module, Nauka, was fitted in 2021, a little over ten years after the previous major addition, Leonardo in 2011. Development and assembly of the station continues, with an experimental inflatable space habitat added in 2016, and several major new Russian elements scheduled for launch starting in 2021. In December 2018, the station's operation authorization was extended
to 2030, with funding secured until 2025.There have been calls to privatize ISS operations after that point to pursue future Moon and Mars missions, with former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine saying "given our current budget constraints, if we want to go to the moon and we want to go to Mars, we need to commercialize low Earth orbit and go on to the next step." The ISS consists of pressurised habitation modules, structural trusses, photovoltaic solar arrays, thermal radiators, docking ports, experiment bays and robotic arms. Major ISS modules have been launched by Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets and US Space Shuttles.The station is serviced by a variety of visiting spacecraft: the Russian Soyuz and Progress, the SpaceX Dragon 2, and the Northrop Grumman Space Systems Cygnus,and formerly the European Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV), the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle,and SpaceX Dragon 1. The Dragon spacecraft allows the return of pressurised cargo to Earth, which is used, for example, to repatriate scientific experiments for further analysis. As of August 2021, 244 astronauts, cosmonauts, and space tourists from 19 different nations have visited the space station, many of them multiple times; this includes 153 Americans, 50 Russians, 9 Japanese, 8 Canadians, 5 Italians, 4 French, 3 Germans and 1 Brazilian.
“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.” -Iris Murdoch