CERN BECOMES WORLD WIDE WEB PROTOCOLS FREE

The Grandma wants to commemorate an important fact. On a day like today in 1993, CERN announced World Wide Web protocols will be free. It was the beginning of the Internet as we understand nowadays.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research, in French Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire, known as CERN; derived from the name Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, is a European research organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world.

Established in 1954, the organization is based in a northwest suburb of Geneva on the Franco–Swiss border and has 23 member states. Israel is the only non-European country granted full membership. CERN is an official United Nations Observer.

The acronym CERN is also used to refer to the laboratory, which in 2019 had 2,660 scientific, technical, and administrative staff members, and hosted about 12,400 users from institutions in more than 70 countries. In 2016 CERN generated 49 petabytes of data.

CERN's main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research -as a result, numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN through international collaborations. 

The main site at Meyrin hosts a large computing facility, which is primarily used to store and analyse data from experiments, as well as simulate events. Researchers need remote access to these facilities, so the lab has historically been a major wide area network hub. CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web.

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system where documents and other web resources are identified by Uniform Resource Locators (URLs, such as https://example.com/), which may be interlinked by hyperlinks, and are accessible over the Internet.

The resources of the Web are transferred via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), may be accessed by users by a software application called a web browser, and are published by a software application called a web server. The World Wide Web is not synonymous with the Internet, which pre-dated the Web in some form by over two decades and upon which technologies the Web is built.

More information: CERN

English scientist Timothy Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. He wrote the first web browser in 1990 while employed at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The browser was released outside CERN to other research institutions starting in January 1991, and then to the public in August 1991. The Web began to enter everyday use in 1993-4, when websites for general use started to become available. The World Wide Web has been central to the development of the Information Age, and is the primary tool billions of people used to interact on the Internet.

Web resources may be any type of downloaded media, but web pages are hypertext documents formatted in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). Special HTML syntax displays embedded hyperlinks with URLs which permits users to navigate to other web resources. In addition to text, web pages may contain references to images, video, audio, and software components which are either displayed or internally executed in the user's web browser to render pages or streams of multimedia content.

Multiple web resources with a common theme and usually a common domain name, make up a website.

Websites are stored in computers that are running a web server, which is a program that responds to requests made over the Internet from web browsers running on a user's computer. 

Website content can be provided by a publisher, or interactively from user-generated content.

Websites are provided for a myriad of informative, entertainment, commercial, and governmental reasons. The underlying concept of hypertext originated in previous projects from the 1960s, such as the Hypertext Editing System (HES) at Brown University, Ted Nelson's Project Xanadu, and Douglas Engelbart's oN-Line System (NLS). Both Nelson and Engelbart were in turn inspired by Vannevar Bush's microfilm-based memex, which was described in the 1945 essay As We May Think.

Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a global hyperlinked information system became a possibility by the second half of the 1980s.

By 1985, the global Internet began to proliferate in Europe and the Domain Name System (upon which the Uniform Resource Locator is built) came into being.

In 1988 the first direct IP connection between Europe and North America was made and Berners-Lee began to openly discuss the possibility of a web-like system at CERN.

While working at CERN, Berners-Lee became frustrated with the inefficiencies and difficulties posed by finding information stored on different computers.

More information: Web Foundation

On 12 March 1989, he submitted a memorandum, titled Information Management: A Proposal, to the management at CERN for a system called Mesh that referenced to ENQUIRE, a database and software project he had built in 1980, which used the term web and described a more elaborate information management system based on links embedded as text: Imagine, then, the references in this document all being associated with the network address of the thing to which they referred, so that while reading this document, you could skip to them with a click of the mouse.

Such a system, he explained, could be referred to using one of the existing meanings of the word hypertext, a term that he says was coined in the 1950s. There is no reason, the proposal continues, why such hypertext links could not encompass multimedia documents including graphics, speech and video, so that Berners-Lee goes on to use the term hypermedia.

With help from his colleague and fellow hypertext enthusiast Robert Cailliau he published a more formal proposal on 12 November 1990 to build a Hypertext project called WorldWideWeb (one word, abbreviated W3) as a web of hypertext documents to be viewed by browsers using a client-server architecture. At this point HTML and HTTP had already been in development for about two months and the first Web server was about a month from completing its first successful test.

More information: High Performance Browser Networking

This proposal estimated that a read-only web would be developed within three months and that it would take six months to achieve the creation of new links and new material by readers, so that authorship becomes universal as well as the automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available. While the read-only goal was met, accessible authorship of web content took longer to mature, with the wiki concept, WebDAV, blogs, Web 2.0 and RSS/Atom.

By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web the first web browser (WorldWideWeb, which was a web editor as well) and the first web server. The first website, which described the project itself, was published on 20 December 1990.

The Web began to enter general use in 1993-4, when websites for everyday use started to become available. Historians generally agree that a turning point for the Web began with the 1993 introduction of Mosaic, a graphical web browser developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (NCSA-UIUC).

More information: Web Design

 We mustn't forget we chose the name 'WWW'
before there was even one line of code written.
We could do that because the Internet
as an infrastructure was already there.

Robert Cailliau

JAMES DUNLOP DISCOVERS 'CENTAURUS A' OR 'NGC5128'

Today, The Grandma has received the wonderful visit of one of her greatest friends, Joseph de Ca'th Lon.

Joseph likes Astronomy, and they have been talking about Centaurus A, the galaxy in the constellation of Centaurus that was discovered by James Dunlop on a day like today in 1826.

James Dunlop (31 October 1793-22 September 1848) was a Scottish astronomer, noted for his work in Australia. He was employed by Sir Thomas Brisbane to work as astronomer's assistant at his private observatory, once located at Paramatta, now named Parramatta, New South Wales, about 23 kilometres west of Sydney during the 1820s and 1830s.

Dunlop was mostly a visual observer, doing stellar astrometry work for Brisbane, and after its completion, then independently discovered and catalogued many new telescopic southern double stars and deep-sky objects. He later became the Superintendent of Paramatta Observatory when it was finally sold to the New South Wales Government.

More information: NASA

Centaurus A (also known as NGC 5128 or Caldwell 77) is a galaxy in the constellation of Centaurus.

It was discovered in 1826 by Scottish astronomer James Dunlop from his home in Parramatta, in New South Wales, Australia.

There is considerable debate in the literature regarding the galaxy's fundamental properties such as its Hubble type, lenticular galaxy or a giant elliptical galaxy, and distance (10–16 million light-years).

NGC 5128 is one of the closest radio galaxies to Earth, so its active galactic nucleus has been extensively studied by professional astronomers. The galaxy is also the fifth-brightest in the sky, making it an ideal amateur astronomy target. It is only visible from the Southern Hemisphere and low northern latitudes.

The centre of the galaxy contains a supermassive black hole with a mass of 55 million solar masses, which ejects a relativistic jet that is responsible for emissions in the X-ray and radio wavelengths. By taking radio observations of the jet separated by a decade, astronomers have determined that the inner parts of the jet are moving at about half of the speed of light. X-rays are produced farther out as the jet collides with surrounding gases, resulting in the creation of highly energetic particles. The X-ray jets of Centaurus A are thousands of light-years long, while the radio jets are over a million light-years long.

More information: European Southern Observatory

Like other starburst galaxies, a collision is suspected to be responsible for the intense burst of star formation. Models have suggested that Centaurus A was a large elliptical galaxy that collided with a smaller spiral galaxy, with which it will eventually merge. For that reason, the galaxy has been for years under particular interest in astronomers. While collisions of spiral galaxies are relatively common, the effects of an elliptical and a spiral collision are not fully known.

NGC 5128 was discovered on 29 April 1826 by James Dunlop during a survey at the Parramatta Observatory.

In 1847 John Herschel described the galaxy as two semi-ovals of elliptically formed nebula appearing to be cut asunder and separated by a broad obscure band parallel to the larger axis of the nebula, in the midst of which a faint streak of light parallel to the sides of the cut appears.

In 1949 John Gatenby Bolton, Bruce Slee and Gordon Stanley localized NGC 5128 as one of the first extragalactic radio sources. Five years later, Walter Baade and Rudolph Minkowski suggested that the peculiar structure is the result of a merge event of a giant elliptical galaxy and a small spiral galaxy. The first detection of X-ray emissions, using a sounding rocket, was performed in 1970. In 1975–76 gamma-ray emissions from Centaurus A were observed through the atmospheric Cerenkov technique.

The Einstein Observatory detected an X-ray jet emanating from the nucleus in 1979. Ten years later, young blue stars were found along the central dust band with the Hubble Space Telescope.

The Chandra X-ray Observatory identified in 1999 more than 200 new point sources. Another space telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, found a parallelogram-shaped structure of dust in near infrared images of Centaurus A in 2006.

Evidence of gamma emissions with very high energy, more than 100 GeV, was detected by the H.E.S.S-Observatorium in Namibia in 2009.

The following year, Centaurus A was identified as a source of cosmic rays of the highest energies, after years of observations by Pierre Auger Observatory. In 2016 a review of data from Chandra and XMM-Newton, unusual high flares of energy were found in NGC 5128 and the galaxy NGC 4636. Jimmy Erwin of University of Alabama hypothesized the discovery as potentially a black hole in a yet unknown process or an intermediate-mass black hole.

Centaurus A may be described as having a peculiar morphology. As seen from Earth, the galaxy looks like a lenticular or elliptical galaxy with a superimposed dust lane. The peculiarity of this galaxy was first identified in 1847 by John Herschel, and the galaxy was included in Halton Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, published in 1966, as one of the best examples of a disturbed galaxy with dust absorption. The galaxy's strange morphology is generally recognized as the result of a merger between two smaller galaxies.

More information: Nine Planets

The bulge of this galaxy is composed mainly of evolved red stars. The dusty disk, however, has been the site of more recent star formation; over 100-star formation regions have been identified in the disk.

Two supernovae have been detected in Centaurus A. The first supernova, named SN 1986G, was discovered within the dark dust lane of the galaxy by R. Evans in 1986. It was later identified as a Type Ia supernova, which forms when a white dwarf's mass grows large enough to ignite carbon fusion in its center, touching off a runaway thermonuclear reaction, as may happen when a white dwarf in a binary star system strips gas away from the other star. SN 1986G was used to demonstrate that the spectra of type Ia supernovae are not all identical, and that type Ia supernovae may differ in the way that they change in brightness over time.

The second supernova, dubbed SN2016adj, was discovered by Backyard Observatory Supernova Search in February 2016 and was initially classified as a Type II supernova based on its H-alpha emission line. A subsequent classification found the spectrum best resembled the Type Ib core-collapse supernova 1999dn.

Distance estimates to Centaurus A established since the 1980s typically range between 3–5 Mpc. Classical Cepheids discovered in the heavily obscured dust lane of Centaurus A yield a distance between ~3–3.5 Mpc, depending on the nature of the extinction law adopted and other considerations.

More information: Constellation Guide

Mira's variables and Type II Cepheids were also discovered in Centaurus A, the latter being rarely detected beyond the Local Group. The distance to Centaurus A established from several indicators such as Mira variables and planetary nebulae favour a more distant value of ~3.8 Mpc.

Centaurus A is at the centre of one of two subgroups within the Centaurus A/M83 Group, a nearby group of galaxies. Messier 83, the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy, is at the centre of the other subgroup. These two groups are sometimes identified as one group and sometimes identified as two groups. However, the galaxies around Centaurus A and the galaxies around M83 are physically close to each other, and both subgroups appear not to be moving relative to each other. The Centaurus A/M83 Group is located in the Virgo Supercluster.

Centaurus A is located approximately 4° north of Omega Centauri, a globular cluster visible with the naked eye.

Because the galaxy has a high surface brightness and relatively large angular size, it is an ideal target for amateur astronomy observations. The bright central bulge and dark dust lane are visible even in finder scopes and large binoculars, and additional structure may be seen in larger telescopes.

Centaurus A is visible to the naked eye under excellent conditions.

More information: Constellation Guide

Who are we?
We find that we live on an insignificant planet
of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away
in some forgotten corner of a universe
in which there are far more galaxies than people.

Carl Sagan

MICHAEL COLLINS, FLYING THE APOLLO 11 TO THE MOON

Today, The Grandma wants to pay homage to Michael Collins, the American astronaut who flew the Apollo 11 command module Columbia around the Moon in 1969, who has died in Naples, Florida at the age of 90.

Michael Collins (October 31, 1930-April 28, 2021) was an American astronaut who flew the Apollo 11 command module Columbia around the Moon in 1969 while his crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, made the first crewed landing on the surface.

He was also a test pilot and major general in the U.S. Air Force Reserves.

Collins graduated from the United States Military Academy with the Class of 1952. He joined the United States Air Force, and flew F-86 Sabre fighters at Chambley-Bussières Air Base, France. He was accepted into the U.S. Air Force Experimental Flight Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in 1960, also graduating from the Aerospace Research Pilot School (Class III).

Selected as part of NASA's third group of 14 astronauts in 1963, Collins flew in space twice. His first spaceflight was on Gemini 10 in 1966, in which he and Command Pilot John Young performed orbital rendezvous with two spacecraft and undertook two extravehicular activities (EVAs, also known as spacewalks).

On the 1969 Apollo 11 mission he became one of 24 people to fly to the Moon, which he orbited thirty times. He was the fourth person (and third American) to perform a spacewalk, the first person to have performed more than one spacewalk, and, after Young, who flew the command module on Apollo 10, the second person to orbit the Moon alone.

More information: NASA

After retiring from NASA in 1970, Collins took a job in the Department of State as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs. A year later, he became the director of the National Air and Space Museum, and held this position until 1978, when he stepped down to become undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution. In 1980, he took a job as vice president of LTV Aerospace. He resigned in 1985 to start his own consulting firm.

Along with his Apollo 11 crewmates, Collins was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1969 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2011.

Collins was born on October 31, 1930, in Rome, Italy. He was the second son of James Lawton Collins (1882-1963), a career U.S. Army officer, who was the U.S. military attaché there from 1928 to 1932, and Virginia C. née Stewart (1895-1987). Collins had an older brother, James Lawton Collins Jr. (1917-2002), and two older sisters, Virginia and Agnes.

Collins' decision to join the United States Air Force (USAF) was motivated by both the wonder of what the next fifty years might bring in aeronautics, and to avoid accusations of nepotism had he joined the Army -where his brother was already a colonel, his father had reached the rank of major general and his uncle, General J. Lawton Collins (1896-1987), was the Chief of Staff of the United States Army.

Collins began basic flight training in the T-6 Texan at Columbus Air Force Base in Columbus, Mississippi, in August 1952, then moved on to San Marcos Air Force Base in Texas to learn instrument and formation flying, and finally to James Connally Air Force Base in Waco, Texas, for training in jet aircraft. Flying came easily to him, and unlike many of his colleagues, he had little fear of failure. He was awarded his wings upon completion of the course at Waco, and in September 1953, he was chosen for advanced day-fighter training at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, flying F-86 Sabres.

The inspiration for Collins in his decision to become a NASA astronaut was the Mercury Atlas 6 flight of John Glenn on February 20, 1962, and the thought of being able to circle the Earth in 90 minutes.

Collins applied for the second group of astronauts that year. To raise the numbers of Air Force pilots selected, the Air Force sent their best applicants to a charm school. Medical and psychiatric examinations at Brooks Air Force Base, Texas, and interviews at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston followed. In mid-September, he found out he had not been accepted. It was a blow even though he did not expect to be selected.

Collins rated the second group of nine as better than the Mercury Seven who preceded them, or the five groups that followed, including his own.

After this basic training, the third group were assigned specializations. Collins received his first choice: pressure suits and extravehicular activities (EVAs, also known as spacewalks). His job was to monitor development and act as a liaison between the Astronaut Office and contractors. He was disturbed by the secretive planning of Ed White's EVA on Gemini 4, because he was not involved despite being the person with the greatest knowledge of the subject.

More information: Digital Photography Review

Shortly after Gemini 10, Collins was assigned to the backup crew for the second crewed Apollo flight, with Borman as commander (CDR), Stafford as command module pilot (CMP), and Collins as lunar module pilot (LMP). Along with learning the new Apollo command and service module (CSM) and the Apollo Lunar Module (LM), Collins received helicopter training, as these were thought to be the best way to simulate the landing approach of the LM.

The mission patch of Apollo 11 was the creation of Collins. Jim Lovell, the backup commander, mentioned the idea of eagles, a symbol of the United States. 

Collins liked the idea and found a painting by artist Walter A. Weber in a National Geographic Society book, Water, Prey, and Game Birds of North America, traced it and added the lunar surface below and Earth in the background. The idea of an olive branch, a symbol of peace, came from a computer expert at the simulators. The call sign Columbia for the CSM came from Julian Scheer, the NASA Assistant Administrator for Public Affairs. He mentioned the idea to Collins in a conversation and Collins could not think of anything better.

On August 12, 1946, Congress passed an authorization bill for a National Air Museum, to be administered by the Smithsonian Institution, and located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Under the U.S. legislative system, authorization is insufficient; Congress also has to pass an appropriation bill allocating funding. Since this was not done, there was no money for the museum building.

Collins held the directorship until 1978, when he stepped down to become undersecretary of the Smithsonian Institution. During this time, although no longer an active-duty USAF officer after he joined the State Department in 1970, he remained in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. He attained the rank of major general in 1976, and retired in 1982.

On April 28, 2021, Collins died in Naples, Florida, at the age of 90.

More information: NBC

I think a future flight should include a poet,
a priest and a philosopher...
We might get a much better idea of what we saw.

Michael Collins

MONTSERRAT, A SYMBOL OF THE CATALAN NATION

Today, The Grandma wants to commemorate a cultural event, the day of Our Lady of Montserrat, Patron of Catalonia.

Our Lady of Montserrat or the Virgin of Montserrat, in Catalan Mare de Déu de Montserrat, is a Marian title associated with a statue of the Madonna and Child venerated at the Santa Maria de Montserrat monastery on the Montserrat Mountain in Catalonia.

She is the Patron Saint of Catalonia, an honour she shares with Saint George (Sant Jordi, in Catalan). The famed image once bore the inscription Nigra Sum Sed Formosa in Latin, I am Black, but Beautiful.

Pope Leo XIII granted the image a Canonical coronation on 11 September 1881. The image is one of the Black Madonnas of Europe, hence its familiar Catalan name, La Moreneta, the little dark-skinned one or the little dark one. Believed by some to have been carved in Jerusalem in the early days of the Church, it is more likely a Romanesque sculpture in wood from the late 12th century.

An 18th century polychrome statue of the same image is also displayed in Saint Peter's basilica, previously stored in the Vatican Museums which was gifted by the President of Brazil, Joao Goulart on the Papal election of Pope Paul VI in 1963. The image has been on display for Papal masses since the Pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI.

The mountain of Montserrat has been of religious significance since pre-Christian times, when the Romans built a temple to honour the Roman goddess Venus.

By one account, the image of the Madonna was moved to Montserrat in 718, to avoid the danger posed by invading Saracens.

Legend has it that the Benedictine monks could not move the statue to construct their monastery, choosing to instead build around it. The statue's sanctuary is located at the rear of the chapel, where an altar of gold surrounds the icon, and is now a site of pilgrimage.

The 95-cm statue shows evidence of Byzantine conventional and stylized form, and is painted in polychrome. The reliquary statue of Sainte-Foy in Conques, in southern France, may have been a model. The art historical designation for this type of pose is called Throne of Wisdom. The body is thin, the face elongated. She holds an orb of the earth in her right hand. The Child's hand is raised in a formalized and traditional Eastern blessing.

More information: Abadia de Montserrat

In 2001 renovators working for the government observed that the black hands and face of La Moreneta had over the centuries undergone a change in colour. They attribute the change -from a lighter tone to black- either to prolonged exposure to candle smoke or a chemical reaction caused by a varnish used as a paint sealant. The statue was repainted black by successive generations of restorers. A series of tests, including X-rays, revealed the statue's original colour and also showed that the last repainting took place at the turn of the 18th century.

After making a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Montserrat around 1203, Pere Nolasc went to Barcelona where he began to practice various works of charity. Nolasc became concerned with the plight of Christians captured in Moorish raids and decided to establish a religious order to succour these unfortunates.

Upon his recovery from battle wounds, Ignatius of Loyola visited the Benedictine monastery of Montserrat, on 25 March 1522, where he laid down his military accoutrements before the image. He then led a period of asceticism before later founding the Society of Jesus.

The hymn to the Virgin of Montserrat, known as el Virolai and sung at noon each day by the Escolania de Montserrat boys' choir, begins with the words: Rosa d'abril, Morena de la serra... (Rose of April, dark-skinned lady of the mountain...). Therefore, this virgin is sometimes also known as the Rosa d'abril. Her feast is kept on April 27.

The statue has always been considered one of the most celebrated images in Europe.

The name Montserrat, traditionally abbreviated to Serrat, Rat, Rateta, Tat or Tóna, and also to Montse in recent years, is a popular girl's name in Catalonia.

More information: Montserrat Visita

Rosa d'abril, Morena de la serra
De Montserrat estel
Il·lumineu la catalana terra
Guieu-nos cap al Cel
Guieu-nos cap al Cel

April rose, dark-skinned lady of the mountain
From Montserrat star,
Illuminate the Catalan land
Guide us to Heaven
Guide us to Heaven

Jacint Verdaguer

CHERNOBYL, THE WORST NUCLEAR DISASTER IN HISTORY

On a day like today in 1986, the Chernobyl disaster occurred. It is considered the worst nuclear in our history and today, years and years later, the effects of this terrible tragedy are still visible.

The citizens of Pripyat and the members of the emergency services who were the first to arrive to the central to try to avoid more tragic consequences were the most affected. The most part of them died or suffered (and suffer) the sequels of this terrible accident.

The Grandma wants to talk about this incident, and she wants to think about the real necessity of having nuclear plants when we are a planet rich in natural sources and green energies.

The Chernobyl disaster was a nuclear accident that occurred on Saturday 26 April 1986, at the No. 4 reactor in the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, near the city of Pripyat in the north of the Ukrainian SSR in the Soviet Union.

It is considered the worst nuclear disaster in history both in terms of cost and casualties, and is one of only two nuclear energy accidents rated at seven -the maximum severity- on the International Nuclear Event Scale, the other being the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.

The initial emergency response, together with later decontamination of the environment, ultimately involved more than 500,000 personnel and cost an estimated 18 billion Soviet rubles -roughly US$68 billion in 2019, adjusted for inflation.

The accident started during a safety test on an RBMK-type nuclear reactor. The test was a simulation of an electrical power outage to help create a safety procedure for maintaining reactor cooling water circulation until the back-up electrical generators could provide power. Three such tests had been conducted since 1982, but they had failed to provide a solution. On this fourth attempt, an unexpected 10-hour delay meant that an unprepared operating shift was on duty.

More information: Chornobyl NPP

During the planned decrease of reactor power in preparation for the electrical test, the power unexpectedly dropped to a near-zero level.

The operators were able to only partially restore the specified test power, which put the reactor in an unstable condition. This risk was not made evident in the operating instructions, so the operators proceeded with the electrical test. Upon test completion, the operators triggered a reactor shutdown, but a combination of unstable conditions and reactor design flaws caused an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction instead.

A large amount of energy was suddenly released, and two explosions ruptured the reactor core and destroyed the reactor building.

One was a highly destructive steam explosion from the vaporizing superheated cooling water; the other explosion could have been another steam explosion or a small nuclear explosion, akin to a nuclear fizzle. This was immediately followed by an open-air reactor core fire that released considerable airborne radioactive contamination for about nine days that precipitated onto parts of the USSR and Western Europe, especially Belarus, 16 km away, where around 70% landed, before being finally contained on 4 May 1986.

The fire gradually released about the same amount of contamination as the initial explosion. As a result of rising ambient radiation levels off-site, a 10-kilometre radius exclusion zone was created 36 hours after the accident. About 49,000 people were evacuated from the area, primarily from Pripyat. The exclusion zone was later increased to 30 kilometres when a further 68,000 people were evacuated from the wider area.

More information: World Nuclear Association

The reactor explosion killed two of the reactor operating staff. A massive emergency operation to put out the fire, stabilize the reactor, and clean-up the ejected nuclear core began. In the disaster and immediate response, 134 station staff and firemen were hospitalized with acute radiation syndrome due to absorbing high doses of ionizing radiation. Of these 134 people, 28 died in the days of months afterward and approximately 14 suspected radiation-induced cancer deaths followed within the next 10 years. Significant clean-up operations were taken in the exclusion zone to deal with local fallout, and the exclusion zone was made permanent.

Among the wider population, an excess of 15 childhood thyroid cancer deaths were documented as of 2011. The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) has, at multiple times, reviewed all the published research on the incident and found that at present, fewer than 100 documented deaths are likely to be attributable to increased exposure to radiation.

Determining the total eventual number of exposure related deaths is uncertain based on the linear no-threshold model, a contested statistical model, which has also been used in estimates of low level radon and air pollution exposure. Model predictions with the greatest confidence values of the eventual total death toll in the decades ahead from Chernobyl releases vary, from 4,000 fatalities when solely assessing the three most contaminated former Soviet states, to about 9,000 to 16,000 fatalities when assessing the total continent of Europe. 

To reduce the spread of radioactive contamination from the wreckage and protect it from weathering, the protective Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant sarcophagus was built by December 1986.

It also provided radiological protection for the crews of the undamaged reactors at the site, which continued operating.

Due to the continued deterioration of the sarcophagus, it was further enclosed in 2017 by the Chernobyl New Safe Confinement, a larger enclosure that allows the removal of both the sarcophagus and the reactor debris, while containing the radioactive hazard. Nuclear clean-up is scheduled for completion in 2065.

The ionizing radiation levels in the worst-hit areas of the reactor building have been estimated to be 5.6 roentgens per second (R/s), equivalent to more than 20,000 roentgens per hour. A lethal dose is around 500 roentgens (~5 Gray (Gy) in modern radiation units) over five hours, so in some areas, unprotected workers received fatal doses in less than a minute. However, a dosimeter capable of measuring up to 1,000 R/s was buried in the rubble of a collapsed part of the building, and another one failed when turned on. All remaining dosimeters had limits of 0.001 R/s and therefore read off scale. Thus, the reactor crew could ascertain only that the radiation levels were somewhere above 0.001 R/s, while the true levels were much higher in some areas.

Because of the inaccurate low readings, the reactor crew chief Aleksandr Akimov assumed that the reactor was intact. The evidence of pieces of graphite and reactor fuel lying around the building was ignored, and the readings of another dosimeter brought in by 04:30 were dismissed under the assumption that the new dosimeter must have been defective. Akimov stayed with his crew in the reactor building until morning, sending members of his crew to try to pump water into the reactor. None of them wore any protective gear. Most, including Akimov, died from radiation exposure within three weeks.

More information: BBC

The nearby city of Pripyat was not immediately evacuated. The townspeople, in the early hours of the morning, at 01:23 local time, went about their usual business, completely oblivious to what had just happened. However, within a few hours of the explosion, dozens of people fell ill. Later, they reported severe headaches and metallic tastes in their mouths, along with uncontrollable fits of coughing and vomiting. As the plant was run by authorities in Moscow, the government of Ukraine did not receive prompt information on the accident.

To expedite the evacuation, residents were told to bring only what was necessary, and that they would remain evacuated for approximately three days. As a result, most personal belongings were left behind, and remain there today.

By 15:00, 53,000 people were evacuated to various villages of the Kiev region. The next day, talks began for evacuating people from the 10-kilometre zone. Ten days after the accident, the evacuation area was expanded to 30 kilometres.

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Exclusion Zone has remained ever since, although its shape has changed and its size has been expanded.

 More information: United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission

The surveying and detection of isolated fallout hotspots outside this zone over the following year eventually resulted in 135,000 long-term evacuees in total agreeing to be moved.

The years between 1986 and 2000 saw the near tripling in the total number of permanently resettled persons from the most severely contaminated areas to approximately 350,000.

Contamination from the Chernobyl accident was scattered irregularly depending on weather conditions, much of it deposited on mountainous regions such as the Alps, the Welsh mountains and the Scottish Highlands, where adiabatic cooling caused radioactive rainfall.

The resulting patches of contamination were often highly localized, and localized water-flows contributed to large variations in radioactivity over small areas.

Sweden and Norway also received heavy fallout when the contaminated air collided with a cold front, bringing rain. There was also groundwater contamination.

More information: National Geographic

Chernobyl is a unique place on the planet,
where nature revives after a world-wide man-made disaster,
where there is a real 'ghost town.'

Volodymyr Zelensky

ALFREDO J. PACINO, SICILIAN ROOTS FROM CORLEONE

Alfredo James Pacino (born April 25, 1940) is an American actor and filmmaker. In a career spanning over five decades, he has received many awards and nominations, including an Academy Award, two Tony Awards, and two Primetime Emmy Awards.

He is one of the few performers to have received the Triple Crown of Acting. He has also been honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and the National Medal of Arts.

A method actor and former student of the HB Studio and the Actors Studio, where he was taught by Charlie Laughton and Lee Strasberg, Pacino's film debut came at the age of 29 with a minor role in Me, Natalie (1969). He gained favourable notice for his first lead role as a heroin addict in The Panic in Needle Park (1971). Wide acclaim and recognition came with his breakthrough role as Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), for which he received his first Oscar nomination, and he would reprise the role in the sequels The Godfather Part II (1974) and The Godfather Part III (1990).

Pacino received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor for Serpico (1973), The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and ...And Justice for All (1979), ultimately winning it for playing a blind military veteran in Scent of a Woman (1992). For his performances in The Godfather, Dick Tracy (1990), Glengarry Glen Ross (1992), and The Irishman (2019), he earned Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominations.

Other notable portrayals include Tony Montana in Scarface (1983), Carlito Brigante in Carlito's Way (1993), Benjamin Ruggiero in Donnie Brasco (1997), and Lowell Bergman in The Insider (1999). He has also starred in the thrillers Heat (1995), The Devil's Advocate (1997), Insomnia (2002), and appeared in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

On television, Pacino has acted in several productions for HBO, including Angels in America (2003) and the Jack Kevorkian biopic You Don't Know Jack (2010), winning a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Film for each.

Pacino currently stars in the Amazon Video series Hunters (2020–present). He has also had an extensive career on stage. He is a two-time Tony Award winner, in 1969 and 1977, for his performances in Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? and The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel.

Pacino made his filmmaking debut with Looking for Richard (1996), directing and starring in this documentary about Richard III; Pacino had played the lead role on stage in 1977. He has also acted as Shylock in a 2004 feature film adaptation and 2010 stage production of The Merchant of Venice.

Pacino directed and starred in Chinese Coffee (2000), Wilde Salomé (2011), and Salomé (2013). Since 1994, he has been the joint president of the Actors Studio.

More information: The Talks

Alfredo James Pacino was born in the East Harlem neighbourhood of New York City on April 25, 1940. He is the son of Italian-American parents Rose Gerardi and Salvatore Pacino. His parents divorced when he was two years old. He then moved with his mother to the Bronx to live with her parents, Kate and James Gerardi, who were Italian immigrants from Corleone, Sicily. Pacino's father was from San Fratello, Sicily, and moved to work as an insurance salesman and restaurateur in Covina, California.

In his teenage years, Pacino was known as Sonny to his friends. He had ambitions to become a baseball player and was also nicknamed The Actor. He attended Herman Ridder Junior High School, but soon dropped out of most of his classes except for English. He subsequently attended the High School of Performing Arts, after gaining admission by audition. His mother disagreed with his decision and, after an argument, he left home. To finance his acting studies, Pacino took low-paying jobs as a messenger, bus boy, janitor, and postal clerk, as well as once working in the mailroom for Commentary magazine.

On February 25, 1969, Pacino made his Broadway debut in Don Petersen's Does a Tiger Wear a Necktie? at the Belasco Theater, produced by A&P Heir Huntington Hartford. It closed after 39 performances on March 29, 1969, but Pacino received rave reviews and won the Tony Award on April 20, 1969.

Pacino found acting enjoyable and realized he had a gift for it while studying at The Actors Studio. However, his early work was not financially rewarding. After his success on stage, Pacino made his film debut in 1969 with a brief appearance in Me, Natalie, an independent film starring Patty Duke.

His role as a heroin addict in The Panic in Needle Park (1971) brought Pacino to the attention of director Francis Ford Coppola, who cast him as Michael Corleone in what became a blockbuster Mafia film, The Godfather (1972). Although Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, and the little-known Robert De Niro were tried out for the part, Coppola selected Pacino, to the dismay of studio executives who wanted someone better known.

During the 1970s, Pacino had four Oscar nominations for Best Actor, for his performances in Serpico, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and ...And Justice for All.

Pacino received an Academy Award nomination for playing Big Boy Caprice in the box office hit Dick Tracy in 1990, of which critic Roger Ebert described Pacino as the scene-stealer. Later in the year he followed this up in a return to one of his most famous characters, Michael Corleone, in The Godfather Part III (1990). The film received mixed reviews, and had problems in pre-production due to script rewrites and the withdrawal of actors shortly before production.

Pacino won three Golden Globes since 2000; the first being the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2001 for lifetime achievement in motion pictures.

In September 2012, Deadline reported that Pacino would play the former Penn State University football coach Joe Paterno in the television film Paterno based on a 2012 biography by sportswriter Joe Posnanski. Paterno premiered on HBO on April 7, 2018.

Pacino starred alongside Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio in Quentin Tarantino's comedy-drama Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which was released on July 26, 2019. Later in 2019, Pacino played Teamsters chief Jimmy Hoffa, alongside Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, in Martin Scorsese's Netflix film The Irishman, based on the 2004 book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt; this was the first time Pacino was directed by Scorsese, and he received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor nomination.

In February 2020, Pacino starred as Meyer Offerman, a fictional Nazi hunter, in the Amazon Video series Hunters. This is Pacino's first television series since Angels in America (2003). Hunters was renewed for a second season in August 2020.

In Ridley Scott's forthcoming film, House of Gucci, Pacino, in the star role, plays Aldo Gucci.

More information: Interview Magazine

 The actor becomes an emotional athlete.
The process is painful -my personal life suffers.

Al Pacino

ARMENIAN RED SUNDAY, THE BEGINNING OF A GENOCIDE

Today, The Grandma has been reading about one of the most horrible historical facts of the last century, the Armenian Genocide, the systematic mass murder and ethnic cleansing of around 1 million ethnic Armenians from Asia Minor and adjoining regions by the Ottoman Empire during World War I.

 

The arrest of 250 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders in Istanbul, on a day like today in 1915, marked the beginning of the Armenian Genocide.

The deportation of Armenian intellectuals, sometimes known as Red Sunday, in Western Armenian Կարմիր կիրակի Garmir giragi, is conventionally held to mark the beginning of the Armenian Genocide.

Leaders of the Armenian community in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, now Istanbul and later other locations, were arrested and moved to two holding centres near Angora, now Ankara.

The order to do so was given by Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha on 24 April 1915. On that night, the first wave of 235 to 270 Armenian intellectuals of Constantinople were arrested. With the adoption of the Tehcir Law on 29 May 1915, these detainees were later relocated within the Ottoman Empire; most of them were ultimately killed. More than 80 such as Vrtanes Papazian, Aram Andonian, and Komitas survived.

The event has been described by historians as a decapitation strike, which was intended to deprive the Armenian population of leadership and a chance for resistance.

To commemorate the victims of the Armenian Genocide, 24 April is observed as Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day. First observed in 1919 on the four-year anniversary of the events in Constantinople, the date is generally considered the date on which the genocide began. The Armenian Genocide has since been commemorated annually on the same day, which has become a national holiday in Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic and is observed by the Armenian diaspora around the world.

More information: Armenian Genocide

The Ottoman Minister of the Interior Talaat Pasha gave the detention order on 24 April 1915. The operation commenced at 8 p.m. In Constantinople, the action was led by Bedri Bey, the Chief of Police of Constantinople.

On the night of 24–25 April 1915, in a first wave 235 to 270 Armenian leaders of Constantinople, clergymen, physicians, editors, journalists, lawyers, teachers, politicians, and others were arrested upon an instruction of the Ministry of the Interior. The discrepancies in numbers may be explained by the uncertainties of the police as they imprisoned people with the same names.

There were further deportations from the capital. The first task was to identify those imprisoned. They were held for one day in a police station (Ottoman Turkish, Emniyeti Umumiye) and the Central Prison. A second wave brought the figure to between 500 and 600.

By the end of August 1915, about 150 Armenians with Russian citizenship were deported from Constantinople to holding centres. A few of the detained, including writer Alexander Panossian (1859-1919), were released the same weekend before even being transferred to Anatolia. In total, it is estimated that 2,345 Armenian notables were detained and eventually deported, most of whom were not nationalists and did not have any political affiliations.

After the passage of Tehcir Law on 29 May 1915, Armenians left at the two holding centres were deported to Ottoman Syria. Most of the arrested were transferred from Central Prison over Saray Burnu by steamer No. 67 of the Şirket company to the Haydarpaşa train station. After waiting for ten hours, they were sent by special train in the direction of Angora (Ankara) the next day. The entire convoy consisted of 220 Armenians.

An Armenian train conductor got a list of names of the deportees. It was handed over to the Armenian Patriarch of Constantinople, Zaven Der Yeghiayan, who immediately tried in vain to save as many deportees as possible. The only foreign ambassador to help him in his efforts was US ambassador Henry Morgenthau.

After a train journey of 20 hours, the deportees got off in Sincanköy, near Angora, Tuesday noon. At the station Ibrahim, the director of the Central Prison of Constantinople, did the triage. The deportees were divided into two groups.

One group was sent to Çankırı and Çorum between Çankırı and Amasya and the other to Ayaş. Those separated for Ayaş were transported in carts for a couple of hours further to Ayaş. Almost all of them were killed several months later in gorges near Angora.

More information: DW

Only 10 or 13 deportees of this group were granted permission to return to Constantinople from Ayaş. A group of 20 latecomers arrested on 24 April arrived in Çankırı around 7 or 8 May 1915. Roughly 150 political prisoners were detained in Ayaş, and another 150 intellectual prisoners were detained in Çankırı.

Some notables such as Dr. Nazaret Daghavarian and Sarkis Minassian were removed on 5 May from the Ayaş prison and taken under military escort to Diyarbakır along with Harutiun Jangülian, Karekin Khajag, and Rupen Zartarian to appear before a court-martial. They were, seemingly, murdered by state-sponsored paramilitary groups led by Cherkes Ahmet, and lieutenants Halil and Nazım, at a locality called Karacaören shortly before arriving at Diyarbakır. Marzbed, another deportee, was dispatched to Kayseri to appear before a court-martial on 18 May 1915.

The militants responsible for the murders were tried and executed in Damascus by Djemal Pasha in September 1915; the incident later became the subject of a 1916 investigation by the Ottoman Parliament led by Artin Boshgezenian, the deputy for Aleppo. After Marzbed's release from the court, he worked under a false Ottoman identity for the Germans in Intilli, Amanus railway tunnel. He escaped to Nusaybin, where he fell from a horse and died shortly before the armistice.

Several prisoners were released with the help of various influential people intervening on their behalf. Five deportees from Çankırı were freed upon the intervention of the United States ambassador Henry Morgenthau. In total, 12 deportees were granted permission to return to Constantinople from Çankırı. These were Komitas, Piuzant Kechian, Dr. Vahram Torkomian, Dr. Parsegh Dinanian, Haig Hojasarian, Nshan Kalfayan, Yervant Tolayan, Aram Kalenderian, Noyig Der-Stepanian, Vrtanes Papazian, Karnik Injijian, and Beylerian junior. Four deportees were granted permission to come back from Konya. These were Apig Miubahejian, Atamian, Kherbekian, and Nosrigian.

The remaining deportees were under the protection of the governor of Angora Vilayet. Mazhar Bey defied the orders of deportation from Talat Pasha, the Interior Minister. By the end of July 1915, Mazhar was replaced by central committee member Atif Bey.

After the Armistice of Mudros (30 October 1918), several surviving Armenian intellectuals came back to Constantinople, which was under an allied occupation. They started a short, but intense, literary activity that was ended by the Turkish victory in 1923. Those who have written memoirs and books about their accounts during the deportation include Grigoris Balakian, Aram Andonian, Yervant Odian, Teotig, and Mikayel Shamtanchyan. Other survivors, such as Komitas, developed serious cases of post-traumatic stress disorder. Komitas underwent 20 years of treatment in mental asylums until his death in 1935.

The official date of remembrance for the Armenian Genocide is 24 April, the day that marked the beginning of the deportation of Armenian intellectuals.

The first commemoration, organized by a group of Armenian Genocide survivors, was held in Istanbul in 1919 at the local St. Trinity Armenian church. Many prominent figures in the Armenian community participated in the commemoration. Following its initial commemoration in 1919, the date became the annual day of remembrance for the Armenian Genocide.

More information: The New York Times

This was a tragic event in human history,
but by paying tribute to the Armenian community
we ensure the lessons of the Armenian Genocide
are properly understood and acknowledged.

Jerry Costello

APRIL 23-SAINT GEORGE, BOOKS & ROSES IN CATALONIA

Today is Saint George, the favourite Grandma's day. It is a beautiful festivity, especially if you live in Catalonia, because Catalan people pay homage to their patron with books and roses. It is the greatest Catalan culture day.

Saint George's Day, also called the Feast of Saint George, is the feast day of Saint George as celebrated by various Christian Churches and by the several nations, old kingdoms, regions, states, countries and cities of which Saint George is the patron saint including Bulgaria, England, Georgia, Portugal, Cáceres, Alcoi, Aragon and Catalonia. The saint also has his state holiday in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with the difference that St. George is not the patron saint of the region, but with his populism and the day of local festivals and masses, in addition to being part of the history of the suburb of Rio by syncretism, made the saint the most venerated in the city.

Saint George's Day is normally celebrated on 23 April. However, Church of England rules denote that no saints' day should be celebrated between Palm Sunday and the Sunday after Easter Day, so if 23 April falls in that period the celebrations are transferred to after it. 23 April is the traditionally accepted date of the saint's death in the Diocletian Persecution of AD 303.

Saint George became the patron saint of the former Crown of Aragon, when King Pere I won the Battle of Alcoraz in 1096 commending his army and people to the auspices of the saint. He is also patron of several former territories under the Crown of Aragon, including Valencia, Catalonia, Sicily, Sardinia, and several regions of Italy.

In most cases, the reason for those cities' adoption of the Saint as their holy Patron and shared flag is linked to the Aragonese colonial influence and various battles that occurred throughout the Mediterranean during the Reconquista. The international expansion of the Reconquista that followed over the next two centuries across the Mediterranean also led to the adoption of the cross of Saint George as a coat of arms by Christian Crusaders.

More information: English Heritage

The Catalan version of the legend of Sant Jordi says that after a fierce battle between the knight and the dragon, the beast fell through the sharp iron and that from the drops of blood that reached the ground a rose was born that bloomed profusely every April. This is the explanation that the oral tradition gives to the custom of giving roses on St. George's Day, April 23.

Legends and imaginary stories aside, we know that the tradition of giving roses to lovers comes from afar. St. George's bond with the world of chivalry and courtly love may have been the germ of tradition. We also know that in the 15th century the so-called Fira dels Enamorats was held in Barcelona and that sellers of this flower settled around the Palau de la Generalitat. At the same time, it was customary to present with a rose the women who attended the Eucharist officiated in the chapel of St. George in the palace. And finally, there are those who say that the custom of giving roses has Roman roots, specifically the festivals in honour of the goddess Flora, which were later Christianized.

In the symbolic universe, the red rose, the colour of passion, is the flower of female love, while the carnation is reserved for male love. The decoration of the rose, for Sant Jordi, is also quite curious and mixes elements from different sources. On the one hand, female love represented by the rose of red, velvety and fragile petals, and sometimes accompanied by a spike representing fertility, gives rise to a very ancient interpretation of cereal seeds. But there are also those who make a more prosaic reading of it and relate it to the arrival of good weather. On the other hand, the flower of Sant Jordi is also usually decorated with elements that evoke Catalan culture, such as ties or ribbons with the flag, which recall the vindictive content of the day.

Today, florists, corners, avenues, streets and squares become points of sale and distribution of thousands and thousands of roses that are given to loved ones, as tradition dictates, but also to friends, girlfriends, parents, co-workers and clients. Because this flower has transcended the original meaning of love and has also become a gift of courtesy and friendship. As you can see, the rose has become the protagonist of the festival, to the point that domestic production does not cover the demand, so it is necessary to resort to imports from other parts of the world far away.

In the 15th century, a rose fair was held in Barcelona on the occasion of Sant Jordi. It was attended mainly by grooms, fiancés and young couples, and this suggests that the custom of giving a rose has its origins in this festival, which was held at the Palau de la Generalitat de Catalunya. It was proposed to turn this date into a precept festival for the first time in 1436, when the proposal was formulated in the Catalan Parliament. The proposal would take effect in 1456.

More information: GenCat (Catalan Version)

Since the 15th century, in Catalonia, St. George's Day has been a special day, and it is customary for couples to give each other a red rose like blood and a book. The monarchs Pere the Catholic, Jaume I or Pere the Ceremonious contributed to the saint's popularity. Despite being traditional, the popularization of giving roses was actively restored in 1914, thanks to the impetus of the Commonwealth.

Sant Jordi has been declared a National Day of Catalonia by the Generalitat, but this day is not a work holiday: it is a work and school day for students. For Sant Jordi, official receptions are held at the Palau de la Generalitat de Catalunya and in the world of education, where Floral Games are held, it is a day of big celebration and participation in which the printed and recited word has all the prominence.

The town of Montblanc, according to the Catalan Customs of the folklorist Joan Amades, was the place in Catalonia where Saint George killed the dragon and saved the princess. That is why, since 1987, the people of Montblanc have been reviving the Medieval Week of the Legend of Sant Jordi. The high point of the celebration is the representation of the legend of the noble horseman, hero and saviour of princesses, in the scenes picked up by the popular tradition.

The day has a vindictive aspect of Catalan culture and many balconies are decorated with the flag of Catalonia. There are stops with political demands, to help humanitarian organizations, to raise funds for schools or just to get some extra money. The media broadcast live from the most emblematic points. But above all it is necessary to emphasize the festive atmosphere that generates the day. There are activities in libraries and concerts in the streets that add to the busy Catalan cultural agenda.

Books and roses are sold all over Catalonia, but it is on the Rambla de Barcelona where the event reaches its maximum expression. Storms are added to the usual stops on the Rambla. There are also readings of poems or excerpts from books and theatres and performance halls do special promotions.

More information: Casa Batlló

Cavaller, bon cavaller,
alerta al drac,
que s'amaga rere els núvols
ran d'aquest llac.

Knight, good knight,
dragon alert,
which hides behind the clouds
ran of this lake.

Gabriel Janer Manila