Solvitas perambulum
The cooking instructions for my Tandoori Chicken Breast microwave lunch, are to cook…
…until internal temperature reaches 74C (165F).
How many office kitchens have a cook’s thermometer? Score nothing for usability.
Should you for any reason attempt to sue the manufacturer, it will rapidly become apparent that you didn’t follow the cooking instructions. Score one for legal.
I have been playing Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, or OpenTTD on and off for a while, but I confess I only understood train signals very recently. The game gets a lot more fun once you can have complex track layouts, so here’s a tutorial on train track layout and signaling for complete beginners.
If you’re anything like I was, all your train layouts probably look like this:
You can only run one train on that track, but say you’re happy with that. When you need to connect another station, you might, unsuccessfully, try this:
Notice the three two-way signals. A signal locks an entire section of track from that signal until the next signal or the end of the line. These signals define four locks, color coded on this screenshot. If the train from Lundinghattan Ridge is in the Mardingbury station, it will have a lock on the yellow section, but not on the green section. The signal nearest Mardingbury will be red, but the other two signals will be green. The train from Marbourne will be able to acquire a lock on the green section, and stop at the signal nearest Mardingbury. We have a train stand-off. Not good.
To make that layout work, you’d need to remove the signal nearest Mardingbury, thereby merging the green and yellow sections. You remove that, and you have two trains sharing a station. OK, so now you add a third station to your network. Now things really start to break down.
The blue section is shared between the Lundinghattan train and the Chenningpool train. The Lundinghattan train is top left, just leaving Mardingbury station. It has the lock on the yellow section. Notice the two signals nearest it are red (actually all the signals in this picture are red, but focus on just those two). The train from Chenningpool acquired the lock on the blue section, but and this is the first important concept of this tutorial, once it got level with the depot it had a choice of two paths: Mardingbury, which is blocked by a red signal, and the depot, which isn’t. A train faced with a red two-way signal will always avoid that signal, even if that means going away from it’s destination. If instead of the depot we had a track running to the other side of the map, our Chenningpool would of happily headed down it, to avoid the red signal.
In practice this means our Chenningpool train will head into the depot, turn around, and head back to Chenningpool. It will never make it to Mardingbury. There is something very wrong with our approach, and the short answer is that we were using two-way tracks and two-way signals. We need to think one-way. Let’s start again.
Every shared station should have a one-way loading loop.
Notice the signals around the loop are all one-way. To place a one-way signal place a signal as normal, then click the signal again, once or twice depending on the orientation you want for your signal.
Now let’s connect our loop up to a town, and run two trains betweens those two towns.
We connected the shared track from Marbourne to our loading loop, with two short one-way sections. We can see the back of a one-way signal in the red circle, and the front of a one-way signal just to the right of the blue circle.
Let’s look at what’s going on in this picture. The train circled in red has the lock on the red section of track, and is held at the signal circled in red. It is waiting for a lock on the blue section of track. Notice that it could of kept going around the loop, instead of branching off and stopping at the red signal. Faced with a red one-way signal and a clear track going the wrong way, the train will stop at the signal, which is nearly always what we want. This is exactly the opposite to what would of happened with two-way signals.
The train circled in blue has the lock on the blue section of track, and is about to acquire the lock on the yellow section. As soon as it does, it will release the lock on the blue section, and the train circled in red will move forward. This is a layout that works.
Let’s connect up the other two towns, and not get blocked this time. The trick is to make all shared sections of track one-way.
The only two-way signals in this picture are circled in blue. All the others are one-way. The two-way signals are there to prevent a train on the two-way track from locking part of the one-way loop. If the left-hand two-way signal was not there, a train in Lundinghattan station would hold a lock on it’s two-way section of track, and the bottom part of the one-way section, up to the next signals. Remember, a lock is between two signals or the end of the track. Incidentally, stations don’t end a lock. If you had a station half-way along a track, the lock would run right through it until the next signal.
Mardingbury is getting quite busy now, we’d like to have two tracks in the station. Stop all the trains (or be quick!), bulldoze the station, and build a new, two track one. I moved mine back a square to allow space for the tracks to merge. and made the loading loop a little bigger. To control access to a multi-track station, you need pre-signals.
Pre-signals come in two types, entrance and exit. An entrance pre-signal will be red if all the exit pre-signals behind it are also red. The motivation for pre-signals is nicely illustrated here: Pre-signals on the OpenTTD wiki.
The entrance pre-signal is circled in blue. Notice that it has a horizontal white-bar, to show it is different. The exit pre-signals are circled in purple, and have vertical white bars. There is currently a train in the station, so one of the exit pre-signals is red. Because one of the tracks is free (green signal), the entrance pre-signal is green. The next arriving train will correctly go to the empty track. Even though they are pre-signals, we are still using one-way signals
What you can’t see on the picture, but which are very important, are the two normal one-way signals circled in black. They control station exit, by forcing a train wanting to leave the station to acquire a lock on the yellow section. This prevents two train leaving at the same time crashing into each other.
When a train is in the station, it still holds a lock on it’s section of track. The lock runs from the exit -pre-signal at the entrance to the station, to the regular one-way signal at the exit of the station.
You now know all the key concepts, the rest is just more of the same. Here for example is what you would do if Lundinghattan got busy.
You give it a loading loop, and a multi-bay station. Pre-signals control station entrance, and regular one-ways control the exit. You can see the one-way’s at the exit much better on this station.
There’s one final change we need to make to allow lots of trains - we need to replace the two-way section highlighted in blue with two one-way sections.
We don’t have any more two-way signals. Each station has a loading loop, and one-way tracks connect the stations. In our first tries we had one track connecting the stations, and could only run one train between them. Now we have two tracks connection the stations, and in this picture alone there are eight trains, all serving Mardingbury. Now that’s more like it!
The stations are quite close together, so it might not be clear what is loading-loop and what is the tracks that connect them, so here’s an example with stations further apart.
Other stations would have their own loading loops, and as long as the one way tracks connect, you end up with a network spanning the world. Trains can run from anywhere to anywhere, and new stations just need plugging in to the network.
I have one final tip: Playing with virtual toy trains can be quite addictive, so remember to get some sleep :-)
When I was 16, I wrote a computer game, called Micro Zooides. It was called that partly because on Windows .EXE files all start with the two characters MZ, and partly because it was about small creatures. Micro-Zooides was going to be about humanity’s progress, it was going to be Civilization, which didn’t exist yet.
The game had a splash screen of a Far Side comic, then a short video of me tromping through the woods like a Neanderthal, which my Dad filmed and which I digitized with a very early video capture card.
In Borland’s Turbo C++ 3.0 I wrote a basic graphics engine to display the tiles of the world, and an event loop so I could move the main character around the world. I drew sprites for a proto-human (the micro zooid), dirt, rocks and sticks. He could walk around the world, and pick up and put down rocks or sticks.
Then I took a break to plan. I have a proto-human, rocks, and sticks. How do I get to civilization?
I’ve been using Picasa to edit my pictures for a long time, and it’s an excellent program. Recently however I’ve started shooting RAW, and I’d like control, so I’ve started using GIMP. It’s more powerful and more complicated than Picasa, so to start myself off I went through all the features of Picasa and made notes on how to duplicate that operation in GIMP. Here are those notes.
Most of what Picasa does can be replicated with the Colors / Levels or Colors / Curves tool. It’s well worth spending a little time experimenting with both of those (the documentation is very good too).
In the Toolbox, click the Rectangle select tool
In its options (beneath the tools), tick ‘Fixed: Aspect Ratio’
Enter 6:4 ratio (for 1.6 sensor, most DSLRs)
Tick Highlight.
Draw a rectangle on the image that you want to crop to.
Image menu / Crop to Selection
Click one of the rulers above or to the left of the image, and drag a guideline onto your picture
In the Toolbox, select the rotate tool
Select ‘Clipping: Crop to result’. Maybe ‘Interpolation: Sinc (Lanczos3)’, although that doesn’t seem to matter
Rotate until your picture is straight, using your guideline
Click Rotate
Image / Fit Canvas to Layers or Image / Autocrop Image
Image / Guides / Remove all guides
Filters / Enhance / Red-Eye Removal (I have never used this)
Colors / Levels / Auto
Colors / Auto / something
Colors / Levels
Drag the middle triangle (grey) to the left
Colors / Levels
Drag the right side (white) triangle
Colors / Levels
Drag the left side (black) triangle
Tools / GEGL Operation / color-temperature
Adjust Intended Temperature
Colors / Levels
There are three color pickers near the bottom right
Use the left one to select black, the middle one neutral gray, and the right one white
Filters / Enhance / Unsharp mask
Try these values: Radius: 1 - 5 Amount: 0.5 - 1
OR
Colors / Components / Decompose.
HSV, Decompose to layers
Switch off the hue and saturation layer
Apply the Unsharp mask, as detailed above
Colors / Components / Recompose
Filters / Decor / Old Photo
Image / Mode / Grayscale
OR
Colors / Desaturate
Colors / Curves
Select Blue - pull the center-right of the curve down most of a grid box
Select Red - pull the center-right of the curve up most of a grid box
OR
Tools / GEGL Operation / color-temperature / Increase intended temperature by 10k or 20k
Colors / Hue-Saturation / Pull the Saturation slider to the right
Duplicate layer (right click / Duplicate or use the icon bottom of layers pane)
Filters / Blur / Gaussian Blur.. Set to 60
Reduce Opacity to ~60%
Right click on blur layer, Add Layer Mask, White (full opacity)
Click the foreground color, set S to 0 and V to 50 (or 60, 70)
Select a brush, the Paintbrush tool, paint over the parts you don’t want fuzzy
To replicate Picasa this would be a big circle somewhere in the middle of the picture
Duplicate layer
Switch off Background by clicking the eye
Edit that layer with Levels and Curves to expose sky correctly
Right click on new layer / Add Layer Mask/ White (full opacity)
Select Blend tool
Draw a line on the image to make a gradient. Try again.
Click the Background eye back on
Right click on the edited layer, and Apply Layer Mask
Merge the layers
Los Angeles is under attack, by trigonometric functions! OMG! Trigo-what? If I wanted to do maths, I’d go to San Francisco!! You, like, totally gotta save L.A man. Enter your name, then move your tank.
Use the left and right arrow keys to rotate, the forward and back arrow keys to move.
The barrel of the tank is the little black line. That’s the front.
No, your tank can’t fire. Avoid the mathematical blobs. YEAH!
The longer you live, the more points you get. A score above 100 is, like, totally AWESOME! Good luck Bro.
Let me know in the comments how much you score.
Have I told you that I have never owned a TV, and never watch it? http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694
Joshua-Michéle Ross at O’Reilly Radar writes about the money the American taxpayer (government) is giving Genera Motors, Chrysler and Ford to save them from bankruptcy:
This is the privatization of profit and the socialization of loss.The very concept of “Too Big To Fail” points to a deeper truth: the U.S.’s auto industry does not operate within the “free market” at all. Far from it. As their moniker suggests, the “Big Three” are an oligopoly with a long record of eschewing innovation ( electric cars, hybrids etc.), killing off alternatives like mass transit and bullying public policy (lobbying against CAFÉ standards, environmental and tax policies [Hummer owners get a $34K tax credit!], the threat of relocating factories etc.) all in an effort to conform the not so “free market” to its lumbering non-strategies of pursuing short-term profit.
Full article: Catch 22: Too Big To Fail, Too Big To Suceed
The consensus in the comments to that article is that if the government is saving a company that is too big too fail, it should be split up into several smaller companies, so that we only ever have to save it once.
For many months now I have been making and receiving telephone calls from my computer. There are two advantages:
I am running Ubuntu Linux on a Thinkpad, but most of this should apply to Ekiga on all platforms, and the principles apply to all Softphones.
Gamay, pinot noir, sangiovese, tempranillo, zinfandel, syrah, merlot, cabernet sauvignon, nebbiolo.
Please note that this is a general indication – the origin of the wine and process used (such as aging) may change the order of this list. See Somm’s comment below.
I have recently moved all my photos from a Gallery 2 instance I ran myself, to Flickr. This means I don’t need to keep my Gallery2 install up to date, it frees up lots of disk space on my server, and allows me to more easily share pictures with friends and family. Here’s how I did it:
The silence around here is because I have been traveling for two months. I should be back in December. In the meantime you can keep up with our adventures on our other site.
From the 9th to the 15th May 2004, I went on the Fundamental Bushcraft course with the Ray Mears School of Bushcraft, in the Kent countryside. Here’s what happened:
The reason new world wines use the grapes they do, is because those are the grapes from the big French wines. But which grapes from which wines ? To find out, you could go to the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine and read the text of each appelation. There are over 300. Or there’s the Wikipedia list of French wine Appelations. Or there’s the handy guide below on which grapes are in which French wines. Happy sipping !
Some notes from a talk / taster I went to on food and wine pairing. It was led by Tom Forrest - and a very interesting and knowledgeable chap he is.
This is the webgroup’s first online gallery show. It is titled 10 ways to kill a pig.
I got the strangest email today, which I originally took to be spam. Read for yourself:
May 9, 2006 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: mailto:EPDU@halliburtoncontracts.com Photos: http://www.halliburtoncontracts.com/EPDU/
HALLIBURTON SOLVES GLOBAL WARMING SurvivaBalls save managers from abrupt climate change
I went on a basic fire fighting course a long time ago. Here is a write up of the course notes:
Fire is a chemical reaction called combustion (usually oxidation) resulting in the release of heat and light. To initiate and maintain this chemical reaction - i.e. for the outbreak of fire to occur and continue - three elements are required, and the removal of any of these three will extinguish the fire:
Fuel: Any combustible substance either solid, liquid or gas. Starving a fire will extinguish it.
Heat: The attainment of a certain temperature (the ignition point). Once a fire has started it normally maintains its own heat supply. Cooling a fire will extinguish it.
Oxygen: This is usually in plentiful supply as it makes up one fifth of the air we breathe. Blanketing or smothering a fire will extinguish it.
If the rate of heat generation is less than the rate of heat dissipation, combustion cannot continue. For instance if a match is applied to a block of wood, the heat from the flame is absorbed by the mass of the wood and the heat is insufficient to raise the whole block to its ignition temperature. If the block is reduced to shavings, the surface area of a single shaving is high in relation to its weight, and it will easily catch fire. Gases and flammable vapors are extremely dangerous because of their large surface areas. Water is normally used for cooling a fire as it has a great capacity for absorbing heat, and it is cheap and readily available.
Portable fire extinguishers are ‘first-aid’ fire fighting equipment; they have a limited duration of discharge, and are only for tackling small fires.
The most common type of extinguisher. For use on fires involving combustible materials, such as wood, paper, textiles and fabrics. They remove the heat from the fire by cooling. They should not be used on electrical equipment. To use:
Best suited to fires in electrical equipment, but will also cope very effectively with flammable liquids. The extinguisher delivers a high concentration of carbon dioxide gas under pressure, producing inert vapor which excludes oxygen and smothers the fire.
The mechanism to operate is similar to that for trigger operated water extinguishers.
Best suited to larger flammable liquid fires, but can also be used on electrical fires. Powder is expelled from the extinguisher by means of gas pressure. Dry powder is very effective as a knock-down agent for flammable liquid fires (it is used by the fire service in road traffic accidents). However it is also very messy and can damage electrical equipment such as motors.
Suitable for us on flammable liquid fires and on electrical fires. The liquid is stored in the extinguisher under nitrogen pressure. When it is expelled, it is vaporised by the heat of the fire producing a smothering effect by reducing the oxygen content. The vaporised liquid also interacts with the process of combustion chemically and this helps extinguish the fire.
Most fires begin in a very small way and can be put out easily if some form of extinguisher is nearby and there is someone who knows how to operate it. However discretion is essential in deciding the lengths to which ‘first-aid’ fire fighting is carried out. If you do decide to tackle a minor fire follow these rules:
Convection is the transport of heat by movement of the heated substance. Over four-fifths of the heat of the fire is carried away by air and other gases in this way. By being heated the air becomes less dense than the surrounding atmosphere and, mixed with gases produced by the fire, moves upwards forming convection currents which carry away with them heat and smoke. The temperature of this rising air is likely to be very high.
Radiation: Objects in the neighborhood of a fire are exposed directly to the radiant heat from its flames and burning fuel. The nearer these are to the fire the greater the intensity of the radiated heat reaching them and the more likely they are of heating to ignition point. This is what happens when clothes drying in front of a fire ignite.
Conduction: Although some metals such as steel will stand up to great heat without igniting, their presence, e.g. in girders or partitions, in a burning structure will not necessarily check a fire. Metal is a very good conductor of heat throughout its length and may cause combustible materials at its other end to smolder until they reach their ignition point. A metal door becoming heated may ignite materials in contact with its other side.
At work, at home, on holiday, in any building you occupy for longer than a few hours, ask yourself these questions:
The term ‘Christian’ was first used in Antioch in Syria around 35-40 AD to designate a new religious community there which included both Jewish and non-Jewish adherents and was marked out by it attachment to ‘Christos’, a Greek translation of the Hebrew title ‘Messiah’, used by Jews to designate their expected national savior. In this case it was applied to the prophet-teacher Jesus of Nazareth, executed in Judea, where the movement had originated, a few years earlier
The paragraph above and all herein are sourced from The New Penguin Handbook of Living Religions, edited by John R. Hinnells, specifically from the chapter on Christianity written by Andrew Walls. It is a marvelous book, which I recommend. All miss-representations and inaccuracies are mine.
Christianity started in Jerusalem, as a variation of Judaism. All its initial followers were Jewish by birth and followed Jewish custom. The marked difference from the rest of the Jewish faith was their following of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, know at the time to have been recently crucified. His followers claimed he had resurrected and was the Messiah, as predicted in the Hebrew Bible (called the Old Testament by Christians) – the rest of the Jewish faith held (and still holds) that the Messiah has not yet come.
The apostles, chosen during his life by Jesus as his closest followers, were the recognized leaders of the movement. Christianity fit into the framework of Jewish history and for many years the apostles confined their teaching to the Jewish.
It was written in the Jewish scriptures that one of the signs of the Age to Come would be that non-Jews (called Gentiles) would seek the salvation of God, and attempt to convert. Hence it was no surprise when Greeks from Antioch were attracted to Jesus, through the talk of Jewish believers.
The tradition method of accepting an individual into the Jewish faith required them to observe the Torah (detailed Jewish law) and (for males) to be circumcised. The followers of Jesus changed this, and simply required the individual to express faith in Jesus the Messiah. This understandably accelerated the spread of the new religion.
As the Greeks of Antioch were the first non-Jews to adopt this faith, and the faith now included both Jews and non-Jews, a name was required for the faith, so they became know as Christians.
The popularity of Christianity and the amount of Gentiles involved had already placed the new faith in Jerusalem on an insecure footing, and the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD to the Roman advance effectively broke the link between Christianity and Jerusalem, and the faith became predominately Hellenic.
Christianity retained its link to the land of Palestine through the use of Jewish scripture (know as the Old Testament) and the idea of Jerusalem as the land of Jesus, but most of it’s followers now had never been to Palestine, and most inhabitants of Jerusalem were not Christians.
In Greece, the term Messiah, meaningful only in a Jewish context, changed to Lord. More crucially, Christian thinking entered into the intellectual discourse of Greek philosophy. Early Christian organization had been based around a synagogue. Now, influenced by Greek civic organization, they switched to a system of locally linked hierarchies each under a bishop. The bishops were seen as the successors of the apostles, and were seen as the ones to interpret the voice of God. They consulted regularly and helped keep ‘orthodoxy’, or ‘catholicity’ – a uniform standard of Christianity.
The Christians allegiance to Christ prevented them from participating in the veneration of the Roman emperor, and they frequently refused military service. The growing numbers of Christians in the third and fourth century brought about increasing persecution from the Roman empire which, for the reasons mentioned previously, viewed them as disloyal, potentially dangerous, and outside of their control.
All this changed dramatically when Emperor Constantine (after whom Constantinople was named) came to power in 313 AD. He at first tolerated then favored Christianity, and by degrees it became the state religion of the Roman empire.
Number of converts grew rapidly, attracted by the idea of moral improvement, the majesty and solemnity of Christian worship, the close relationships within the church (a factor which differentiated the followers of Jesus from the other Jews from the early days was their habit of dining together), and for some the presentation of Christianity as a coherent philosophy (evolved in Greece) offering what Plato declared as the true aim of philosophy; the vision of God.
The church of the Western Roman empire adopted Latin as the language of worship, while the Eastern Empire continued to worship in Greek. After the first four ‘ecumenical’ (world-wide) bishops councils, the Western church ceased to participate. This was the first visible split, which gives us today the Greek Orthodox and the Roman Catholic versions of Christianity.
The Kingdom of Armenia had become a Christian state a few years before the Roman Empire, as had several small Mesopotamian states. By 500AD there were also sizeable Christian communities in south India, southern Arabia, the Sudan, the Nile valley, southern Africa and the Persian empire. Christianity’s stronghold was now in Rome, but it had already spread quite widely.
By 500AD Christianity was closely coupled with the literary, intellectual and technological prowess of the Roman Empire, and spread with it. Dedicated people preaching the faith and ordinary people going about their daily lives both served this expansion, into Eastern Africa and significantly into the North of Europe.
As the Empire crumbled Christianity lived on amongst the people. Charlemagne, King of the Franks spread it by force to the Saxons, and Olav Trygvason spread it to the whole of Norway as he assumed power over it. Often whole communities adopted it when their leaders did, and Christian rules got written into local law. In parallel, official and un-official church missions and holy men continued their work.
The switch from local gods and spirits to the God of what was becoming the Christian Empire was made easier by the technological and scientific advancements it was seen to bring with it (which came from the Roman Empire), the simplicity of its spiritual universe (only one God, and clear channels for him to communicate through), and the ease with which local practices could be mapped onto Christianity, allowing the symbols to change but the beliefs to continue (for example what had been called spirits were now called saints). Teaching and scholarship spread, primarily through monasteries, where the language was Latin and the subject was the scriptures.
The newer converts saw Rome as the source of Christianity, and Rome’s connection with Peter (leader of the apostles) gave it a special spiritual significance. Rulers such as Charlemagne pressed for a view of Christendom, the whole of Western Europe, as one Christian Empire under a ‘universal’ church based in Rome. The bishop of Rome (also called the Pope) was seen as the successor of the apostle Peter and earthly representative of Christ.
In the East, the Roman Empire still existed, based in Constantinople. The spiritual leader here was still the Emperor, and the language was Greek. This was being pressed from the south by the expansion of the newfound faith of Islam. The old heartland’s of Christianity, Egypt and Syria, had already converted, and Christianity lives on to this day there as a minority faith. Eastern Christianity spread north into Russian (founding the Russian Orthodox church in Kiev in 988) as it lost ground to Islam to the south.
Islam to the south inherited much of the legacy of Greco-Roman civilization, and by now the typical Christian was a northern farmer. The Christian stronghold was Europe. It was key in establishing literary and learning habits amongst the ex-barbarians of Europe, and in uniting them (although they still fought, they now shared a common faith).
With all of Western Europe under rule of law based on Christianity, and with Latin as the official language of learning, Christianity was seen as territorial. From this emerged the idea of a crusade to take back the holy land. These happened with varied success, but in 1204 Western crusaders looted Constantinople, firmly dividing Eastern and Western Christianity, and setting the stage for the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire to the Turks in 1453. With that, the final vestiges of the Hellenic phase of Christianity disappeared. Ironically, at around the same time grew a renewed interest in studying the scriptures in their earlier Greek version (as opposed to the Latin translations).
The most important technological development of this period was the printing press. The wider availability of the scriptures in local languages, and the amount and extent of the corruption and manipulation that had spread in the higher levels of Christianity (which were often the higher levels of local power), brought about the Reformation period.
The Catholic, or conservative reformation, continued the view that the one and only true center of worship was the church of Rome, with the Pope at its head. The Protestant reformation held that salvation is by grace only, received through faith only, and the guide to it is the scripture only. They did not recognize Roman rule, and encouraged local, regional and national ‘Reformed’ churches. The Catholic view was a significantly softened version of the ‘three onlys’. Martin Luther (1483-1546) and John Calvin (1509-64) were originally leaders of local reform movements.
A third and more radical reform movement, the Anabaptist movement, also dates from this period. They encouraged living outside the civil community and to a strict Christian way of life (according to Christian law as opposed to civil law). They re-created the image of the persecuted Christian and identified the church with its members rather than an institution or building.
A century of conflict between Catholic and Protestant ensued (the Anabaptists were a small minority). Eventually Southern Europe settled as Catholic, with Latin as the primary language of worship, and Northern Europe as Protestant, with worship in local languages.
To the East Christianity spread to Bulgaria, Serbia and Russia, and the fall of Constantinople shifted the center of the Orthodox church to Rome.
From around 1500 Spain, Portugal, France, Holland and England all acquired vast maritime empires. With the Western people went Christianity. The territorial model of Christianity, that the leader of the nation should enforce Christian rule, that Christian law was the basis for civil law, and the memory of the crusades, encouraged the view that territorial expansion meant the expansion of God’s kingdom.
In a spirit of crusading zeal, especially early on in Spanish America, local cults were forbidden and whole populations incorporated into Christendom (by force, inducement, conviction, settlement and intermarriage). Portugal, an over-stretched small country, had much more difficulty. It was in Portugal’s failure to convert its subjugated peoples that the missionary movement was born. This was a body of people whose role was to promote and illustrate Christian teachings over the new territories, but with no power to coerce. Missionaries mostly came from Catholic Europe and relied on the monasterial orders for their support. New orders, such as the Society of Jesus (the ‘Jesuits’) sprung up.
The spreading of the faith largely out of the control of national governments, often even out of the control of Rome meant that the new territories did not develop a link between church and state. The economic and political expansion of Protestant Northern Europe (much of this expansion being avowedly non-religious) extended this divide.
North America, particularly what became the United States, was settled by a variety of peoples, each bringing their local church, making the US a Christian pluralist society, with no state church. In particular the Anabaptists moved over in large numbers, and the vision of America as a virgin continent gave rise to new, ‘primitive’ versions of Christianity, attempting to recreate older models.
The large-scale importation of Africans through the slave trade to work in the plantations of Southern North America and the Caribbean meant these new Afro-Americans adopted Christianity. The interaction with traditional African religion gave birth to new religions such as Candomble, Umbanda, Santeria and Voodoo.
During this period Europe saw a gradual decline of the Christian faith. The Enlightenment, the option of a rational world view instead of a Christian one, and the increased importance placed on the individual (which in Christian circles produced Pietism and the Evangelical revival) meant that many were no longer following Christian teachings. Rational, non-Christian, often non-religious, movements of thought emerged such as Marxism and Humanism. Religion became a private choice rather than a state imposed rule.
The decline in Europe continues to this day. The Eastern church almost vanished when Russia and the whole of Eastern Europe adopted a Communist system. Since the fall of Eastern Communism Eastern Europe has adopted a Western European model of free choice, which often means a rational and non-religious view. During the same period immigration brought Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities into Europe.
In Asia, the Philippines and Korea represent the bulk of the Christian population, who with the reduction of numbers in Europe comprise a more significant proportion of world Christianity.
In North American, despite the attraction of Afro-Americans for Islam, Christianity still has a very strong grip, with the United States as one of its strong-holds.
The second stronghold of Christianity is Latin America. Latin America still largely follows the Catholic model of church and state in allegiance imposed by the Spaniards, but in recent years there has been a strong growth in Protestantism.
The third and final stronghold of Christianity is sub-saharan Africa, with a phenomenal progression of followers, their numbers doubling about every twelve years. Here Christianity has adapted and mixed with local beliefs and customs and is quite different in appearance to its European incarnation.
Probably a decline in North America, the center of Christianity shifting south to Latin America and Africa, with the Pacific islands playing a part. But, as they say, and to stay with the theme, God only knows !
An unexpected page, dedicated to the world’s strange collection of Michael Jacksons.
The one people usually think of when the name is mentioned. Yet, I doubt he can write software, he couldn’t recommend a good whiskey, and probably never saved the world.
Official site
Author of specifcation and design methodology JSD (Jackson System Development) and of several influential books. If you studied software, you should have heard of him in college.
His site
Author of the Malt Whiskey Companion and beer hunter.
Malt Whiskey Companion
Beer Hunter
General Sir Michael Jackson (to give him his full title), former Paratrooper, former commander of NATO “peacekeeping” forces in Kosovo (KFOR), and probably something important in the second Gulf War
BBC news profile from Kosovo time, seemingly before promotion
More details on the time he saved the world (well, read the article !)
The bad side: Seems he was implicated in the Bloody Sunday massacre.
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