text
stringlengths
1
10.6k
Any use of GFDL material which violates the terms of the GFDL is potentially copyright infringement. Infringement issues are managed through a community based approach with the approval and assistance of the Free Software Foundation.
A number of online projects use the GFDL. An online project to license its content under the GFDL is Wikipedia.
The GFDL has been criticized by many people who wish that it made it even easier for content to be re-used. Among the criticisms are that it is very hard to combine GFDL material with other copyleft licenses, that it is not always clear and easy to understand, and that some of its requirements, such as the "invariant sections", are not free at all.
The GFDL was released in draft form for feedback in September 1999. After revisions, version 1.1 was issued in March 2000, version 1.2 in November 2002, and version 1.3 in November 2008. The current state of the license is version 1.3.
Material licensed under the current version of the license can be used for any purpose, as long as the use meets certain conditions.
Glass
Glass is a hard material that can be made in many shapes. It is usually transparent, but it can also be made in colours. Glass is mainly made of silica; glass made of silica only is called silica glass.
Glass used to make windows and bottles is a specific type called soda-lime glass, composed of about 75% silicon dioxide (SiO), sodium oxide (NaO) from sodium carbonate (NaCO), calcium oxide, also called lime (CaO), and several minor additives.
By changing the proportions, and adding different ingredients, many kinds of glass can be made. Coloured glass is made by adding small amounts of metal oxides. For example, a blue colour is given by tiny amounts of cobalt oxide.
Crystal glass is made by adding lead and zinc oxides. It is not actually a crystal because all glass is a non-crystalline solid. Crystal glass is called cut glass if it has been cut by hand:
Because glass is used to make lenses, the word "glasses" often means eyeglasses.
The myth that glass is actually a liquid comes from the fact that old windows in houses and churches (200–300 years old) are sometimes a little out of shape: thicker at the bottom than the top. This is actually due to the process of glass making in the past which led to the glass pane being thicker at one edge than the other. It was sensible to install the windows with the thick edge at the bottom. Sometimes a window can be found with the thick edge at the top of the window.
Glass can be recycled over and over. Glass bottles and jars can easily be recycled to make new glass bottles and jars or used in industry as aggregate (building material) or sand.
God
According to certain philosophies, religions and mythologies, God is the creator of the Earth and of everything else. Hinduism says that there is one God who can come in many forms. Theists believe that God created everything that exists and has ever existed. In most religions, God is believed to be immortal (cannot die), and to have unlimited power.
The belief that God or gods exist is usually called theism. People who reject belief that God or any deities exist are called atheists. Agnostics think we cannot know for sure whether God or gods exist, but still might (or might not) believe at least one deity exists. People who believe in God but not in traditional religions are called "deists". People who believe that the definition of ""God"" should be defined before taking a theological position are ignostic.
In some religions there are many gods. The Hindus worship many gods. This is called polytheism. They may or may not believe in a Supreme Being above the gods. Some polytheistic religions are Hinduism, Shinto, Taoism, Wicca and variants of Buddhism that syncronised with traditional folk religions it came into contact with. The belief that there is only one god is called monotheism. People who only believe in one god usually write God with an uppercase first letter. Some monotheistic religions are Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Bahá'í Faith and Sikhism. In English the word "gods" is written in lowercase letters. "God" is usually written with an uppercase letter when it refers to the Supreme Being. Some polytheists also like to use uppercase when talking about their gods.
Many people have asked themselves if God exists. Philosophers, theologians, and others have tried to prove that it exists. Others have tried to disprove the theory. In philosophical terminology, such arguments are about the epistemology of the ontology of God. The debate exists mainly in philosophy, because science does not address whether or not supernatural things exist.
There are many philosophical issues with the existence of God. Some definitions of God are not specific. Arguments for the existence of God typically include metaphysical, empirical, inductive, and subjective types. Some theories are built around holes in evolutionary theory, as well as order and complexity in the world. Arguments against the existence of God typically include empirical, deductive, and inductive arguments. Conclusions sometimes include: "God does not exist" (strong atheism); "God almost certainly does not exist" ("de facto" atheism); "no one knows whether God exists" (agnosticism); "God exists, but this cannot be proven or disproven" (deism or theism); and "God exists and this can be proven" (theism). There are many variations on these positions, and sometimes different names for some of them. For example, the position "God exists and this can be proven" is sometimes called "gnostic theism" or "strong theism".
There are different names for God in different religions. Some examples are Yahweh, Elohim in Judaism and Christianity, Allah in Islam, Baha in Bahá'í Faith, and Ahura Mazda in Zoroastrianism.
By the year 2000, approximately 53% of the world's population were part of one of the three main Abrahamic religions (33% Christian, 20% Islam, less than 1% Judaism), 6% with Buddhism, 13% with Hinduism, 6% with traditional Chinese religion, 7% with various other religions, and less than 15% as non-religious. Most of these religious beliefs involve God or gods. Some religions do not believe in a god or do not include the concept of gods.
Abrahamic religions are very popular monotheistic ones. Well-known Abrahamic religions include Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Monotheistic means the people in these religions believe there is only one God. The name of God is usually not allowed to be said in Judaism, but some Jews today call him YHWH (Yahweh) or Jehovah. Muslims say the word Allah, which is the Arabic word for "God."
Believers in the Abrahamic religions (except Islamic believers) believe that God has created human beings in his image, but this idea is not easily understood by humankind. One artistic idea is that of an wise elder man in use since the Renaissance.
The Christian Holy Bible talks about God in different ways. Within Christian canon the Old Testament talks about "God the Father", whilst the New Testament is about Jesus, or "God the Son". Many Christians believe that Jesus was God's incarnation on Earth. Christians consider the Holy Spirit to be God as well, the third person of God.
In the New Testament, there are three beings who are said to be God in different forms: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (also known as the Holy Ghost). This is called the Holy Trinity. Although the word "Trinity" is not in the Bible, the word used for God in chapter one of Genesis is actually plural, and the phrase "in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit' is used in the New Testament, (e.g. Matthew 28:19). Another word that Christians believe has exactly the same meaning as "Trinity" is the word "Godhead", which "is" in the Holy Bible.
Christians believe that God incarnated in a human body, through the normal birth process, normally growing up into a man named Jesus or (Yeshua), coming to Earth specifically to give every person an opportunity of salvation from their own evil, called sin. The effect of personal evil far transcends the repercussions humans cause to one another in the world, but affects one's relationship with God the Father, and that aspect of the self cannot be addressed through one's own self-improvement efforts, but requires God to intervene in order to set one right. When Jesus prayed and talked to God, he called him "Father," and taught others to do the same.
Jesus also taught that one must be born again in order to receive God's Spirit, otherwise one remains separated from God, acting merely from their own mind, thus being vulnerable to deception by human philosophies or the many spiritual philosophies which do not come from God but from Fallen angels, which are within various false religions. After a person consciously accepts the free gift of eternal life, which Jesus's sacrifice offers, God comes to live in the individual, as God lived in humankind before the Fall.
In Hinduism, there is only one God, named Brahman, but Brahman is said to have taken on many different incarnations. Some of these are Rama, Krishna, Buddha, Shiva, Kali, Parvati, and Durga. To many outsiders, the worship of God's different incarnations is considered to be the worship of many gods. However, it is really only the worship of one God in different ways.
Some Hindus also believe that the spirit of God lives in everyone. This idea is called Advaita Vedanta, which is the Hindu term for Monism.
Religions like Buddhism and Confucianism involve the worship of many gods, or sometimes no gods at all.
In Shinto, there is not a single specific God, as is in most religions, but instead, a wide variety of deities called "kami", they are the spirit and essence of all nature things, both animate and inanimate, even including rocks, trees and poetry, for example. As Shinto is a polytheistic religion, it is usually believed that there are "eight-million Kami" (八百万の神 yaoyorozu-no-kami), in the Japanese language, the number "eight-million" is normally used to mean infinity.
Philosophers can talk about God or god; sometimes they talk about a specific god, but other times they are just talking about the idea of god.
One of the earliest Western philosophers to write about God in a monotheistic way was the Greek Aristotle, who describes god as the Supreme Cause. Aristotle saw God as a being that makes everything happen, but is not influenced by anything else.
The idea of an "all powerful" God raises some interesting questions. One of them is called the God paradox. It asks whether God can make a mountain (or rock) that is so heavy he cannot lift it. The question considers if a god "who can do anything" could do two things that are mutually contradictory.
There have been several attempts to prove the existence of God with logic. Blaise Pascal said that it is better to believe there is a god, than to believe there isn't. This argument is known as Pascal's wager today. Note that Blaise Pascal was a mathematician, and he used this argument to illustrate the concept of expected value in statistics. Other attempts known as the ontological argument, the cosmoolgical argument, and teleological argument today. Kurt Gödel formulated an argument for the existence of God using modal logic in the 1970s.
Ghost
In folklore, a ghost is considered to be the spirit of a dead person or they are referred to as the supernatural by others. Scientists say that there are no real ghosts, but many people believe that there are. There a are huge amount of stories about ghosts in books and movies. Sometimes the ghost is the spirit of a person who was killed by someone or who was already dead. The ghost may stay on Earth because he or she has unfinished problems or is still trying to say goodbye to people who they missed. Sometimes ghosts are said to live in a particular locality, for example an abandoned house or a place that existed hundreds of years ago.
Sometimes the ghosts in these stories exist because of some problem the person had during life or to say goodbye to loved ones, that was not solved before he or she died. The ghost stays on Earth trying to fix the problem. If the problem is fixed, the ghost can leave. Many people say they have seen or heard ghosts. People who try to talk to ghosts as their job are called mediums.
There can be bad ghosts and there can also be good ones. There have never been any ghosts that have actually hurt or killed people, although people tell stories about it.
Many people believe they have seen ghosts. Others believe they have felt ghosts near them. Often the ghost is said to appear as a feeling of cold and a light or a misty cloud, but sometimes people say they have seen ghosts that look more like people. Sometimes ghosts are said to come in human form. Some ghosts might cause fear in the person who sees them, by being seen suddenly. Some ghosts are said to be friendly and help people who have problems. People or animals that can sense ghosts cannot feel them touching them as they are the spirit of a person, or a personified force.
Ghosts are said to form right after people die, or even centuries later. Many people make up stories or urban legends. Many try to prove the existence of these paranormal creatures with special technology such as heat sensors. They also make TV shows dedicated to proving the existence of ghosts. They often investigate cases where a person has seen one or visit a place of sighting.
Stories of ghosts can be found all over the world. Chinese philosopher Confucius said "Respect ghosts and gods, but keep away from them."
The most feared spirit in Thailand is Phi Tai Hong, the ghost of a person who has died suddenly of a violent death. The Koran discusses spirits known as "jinn". In Europe there is the recurring fear of "returning" or "revenant" deceased who may harm the living. This includes the Scandinavian "gjenganger", the Romanian "strigoi", the Serbian "vampir", the Greek "vrykolakas" among others.
Green
Green is a color. It is one of the colors of the rainbow. Green is between the yellow and blue colors in a rainbow. Green paint can be made by mixing yellow paint and blue paint together.
Green light, like all light, is quanta—composed of photons. The wavelength of green light is about 550 nanometers (one-billionth of a meter).
Most leaves of growing plants, such as trees and bushes, are green. This is because there is a chemical in leaves, called chlorophyll, which is colored green.
Green is a color, the perception of which is evoked by light having a spectrum dominated by range with a wavelength of roughly 570-520 nm.
God's eye view
God's eye view is a name for a point of view where the speaker or writer assumes they have knowledge only God would have. It appears several ways:
A special case of the last is in a wiki with a GodKing. Often this person can get others to believe what they say about what is right, without making any special effort to be fair to other views.
Many people think René Descartes took a God's eye view when he said cogito ergo sum. George Berkeley argued that optics from Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler also had this problem.
Google
Google is a multinational corporation from the United States. It is known for creating and running one of the largest search engines on the World Wide Web (WWW). Every day more than a billion people use it. Google's headquarters (known as the "Googleplex") is in Mountain View, California, part of Silicon Valley. The motto of Google is "Do the right thing".
Since 2 September 2015, Google has been owned by a holding company called Alphabet Inc.. That company has taken over some of Google's other projects, such as its driverless cars. It is a public company that trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbols GOOG and GOOGL.
Google's search engine can find pictures, videos, news, Usenet newsgroups, and things to buy online. By June 2004, Google had 4.28 billion web pages on its database, 880 million pictures and 845 million Usenet messages — six billion things. Google's American website has an Alexa rank of 1, meaning it is the most widely visited website in the world. It is so widely known that people sometimes use the word "google" as a verb that means "to search for something on Google". Because more than half of people on the web use it, "google" has also been used to mean "to search the web".
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University, USA, started BackRub in early 1996. They made it into a company, Google Inc., on September 7, 1998 at a friend's garage in Menlo Park, California. In February 1999, the company moved to 165 University Ave., Palo Alto, California, and then moved to another place called the Googleplex.
In September 2001, Google's rating system (PageRank, for saying which information is more helpful) got a U.S. Patent. The patent was to Stanford University, with Lawrence (Larry) Page as the inventor (the person who first had the idea).
Google makes a percentage of its money through America Online and InterActiveCorp. It has a special group known as the Partner Solutions Organization (PSO) which helps make contracts, helps to make accounts better and gives engineering help.
Google makes money by advertising. People or companies who want people to buy their product, service, or ideas give Google money, and Google shows an advertisement to people Google thinks will click on the advertisement. Google only gets money when people click on the link, so it tries to know as much about people as possible to only show the advertisement to the "right people". It does this with Google Analytics, which sends data back to Google whenever someone visits a website. From this and other data, Google makes a profile about the person and then uses this profile to figure out which advertisements to show.
The name "Google" is a misspelling of the word "googol". Milton Sirotta, nephew of U.S. mathematician Edward Kasner, made this word in 1937, for the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes (10). Google uses this word because the company wants to make lots of stuff on the Web easy to find and use. Andy Bechtolsheim thought of the name.
The name for Google's main office, the "Googleplex," is a play on a different, even bigger number, the "googolplex", which is 1 followed by one googol of zeroes 10
Notes
Gallon
A gallon is a volumetric unit of measurement. People have used many different gallons throughout history. There is only one type of gallon still commonly used.
Government
A government is a group of people that have the power to rule in a territory, according to the administrative law. This territory may be a country, a state or province within a country, or a region. The government may be various types of : Democratic, Parliamentary, Presidential, Federal or Unitary.
Plato listed five kinds of government in "The Republic:"
The most common type of government in the Western world is called democracy. In democracies, people in a country can vote during elections for representatives or political parties that they prefer. The people in democracies can elect representatives who will sit on legislatures such as the Parliament or Congress. Political parties are organizations of people with similar ideas about how a country or region should be governed. Different political parties have different ideas about how the government should handle different problems. Democracy is the government of the people, by the people and for the people.
However, many countries have forms of democracy which limit freedom of choice by the voters. One of the most common ways is to limit which parties who can for parliament, or limit the parties access to mass media such as television. Another way is to rig the voting system by removing votes from opposition voters and substituting votes for the party in power. Few countries are textbook democracies, and the differences between them has been much studied.
A monarchy is a government ruled by a king or a queen who inherits their position from their family, which is often called the "royal family." There are two types of monarchies: absolute monarchies and constitutional monarchies. In an absolute monarchy, the ruler has no limits on their wishes or powers. In a constitutional monarchy a ruler's powers are limited by a document called a constitution.
In modern times, monarchies still exist in Great Britain and the Commonwealth, the Netherlands, Spain, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand, along with several other countries. A monarch may have one of several titles: King or Queen, Emperor or Empress, or Emir.
An aristocracy is a government run by the people of a ruling class, usually people who come from wealthy families, families with a particular set of values, or people who come from a particular place. A person who rules in an aristocracy is an aristocrat. Aristocracy is different from nobility, in that nobility means that one bloodline would rule, an aristocracy would mean that a few or many bloodlines would rule, or that rulers be chosen in a different manner.
Under a dictatorship, the government is run by one person who has all the power over the people in a country. Originally, the Roman Republic made dictators to lead during time of war. The Roman dictators (and Greek tyrants) were not always cruel or unkind, but they did hold on to power all by themselves, rather than sharing power with the people. The Roman dictators only held power for a short period of time.
In modern times, a dictator's rule is not stopped by any laws, constitutions, or other social and political institutions, and can last many years or even decades. After World War II, many governments in Latin America, Asia, and Africa were ruled by dictators. Examples of dictators include Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Augusto Pinochet, Idi Amin, Muammar al-Qaddafi, and Gamal Abdul Nasser. The rules of these dictators continued from when they took power until when they died, because they would not allow any other person or law to take power from them. There is no evidence of a woman serving as a dictator in modern times.
An oligarchy is a government ruled by a small group of powerful people. These people may spread power equally or not equally. More so a different version of a monarchy, where everyone makes decisions together instead of one person making them all or telling people what to do, such as in a Dictatorship. An oligarchy is different from a true democracy because very few people are given the chance to change things. An oligarchy does not have to be hereditary or passed down from father to son. An oligarchy does not have one clear ruler, but several powerful people. Some past examples of oligarchy are the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and Apartheid South Africa. A fictional example is the dystopian society of "Oceania" in the book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Some critics of representative democracy think of the United States as an oligarchy. This view is shared by anarchists. An oligarchy may have a leader in the ruling group.
The simplest idea of government is those who rule over people and land. This may be as small as a community or village or as big as a continent (like Australia and India).
The people who rule can allow others to own land. It is a deed by government that gives this right in the way that laws describe. Some think they have the right to hold land without government permission. This view is called libertarianism. Others think they can do without government. This view is called anarchism.
Almost every place on Earth is connected to one and only one government. Places without government are where people follow traditions instead of government rules, small border disputed areas and the continent of Antarctica, because almost no people live there. For every other place on Earth there is a government that claims 'sovereign control' over it. The word "sovereign" is old and means "control by a King" (sovereign). Governments of villages, cities, counties and other communities are subordinate to the government of the state or province where they exist, and then to that of the country.
It is from Kings and feudalism that modern governments and nation states came. The capital of a country, for instance, is where the King kept his assets. From this we get the modern idea of capital in economics. A government may regulate trade as well as to rule over land.
Governments also control people and decide things about what morality to accept or punish. In many countries, there are strict rules about sexual intercourse and drugs which are part of law and offenders are punished for disobeying them.
Tax is how government is paid for in most countries. People who buy, sell, import, invest, own a house or land, or earn money are made to pay some of the money to a government.
There are many theories of how to organize government better. These are called theories of civics. Many people think leaders must be elected by some kind of democracy. That way, they can be replaced at election. Many governments are not a democracy but other forms in which only a few people have power.
There are many theories of how to run a government better, and keep people from hurting each other. These theories are part of politics.
Galaxy
A galaxy is a group of many stars, with gas, dust, and dark matter. The name 'galaxy' is taken from the Greek word "galaxia" meaning milky, a reference to our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
Gravity holds galaxies together against the general expansion of the universe. In effect, the expansion of the universe takes place between groups of galaxies, not inside those groups. Gravity holds the galaxy together. The same applies to groups and clusters of galaxies, such as our Local Group where the Milky Way is, and the Virgo Cluster, a collection of more than 1,000 (might even be 2,000) galaxies. The gravitation is produced by the matter and energy in a galaxy or group of galaxies. Everything in a galaxy moves around a centre of mass, which is also an effect of gravity.
There are various types of galaxies: elliptical, spiral and lenticular galaxies, which can all be with or without bars. Then there are irregular galaxies. All galaxies exist inside the universe. The observable Universe contains more than 2 trillion (10) galaxies and, overall, as many as an estimated stars (more stars than all the grains of sand on planet Earth).
There are galaxies of different sizes and type. Typical galaxies range from dwarfs with as few as ten million (10) stars up to giants with a hundred trillion (10) stars, all orbiting the galaxy's center of mass. Galaxies may contain many multiple star systems, star clusters, and various interstellar clouds. The Sun is one of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy; the Solar System includes the Earth and all the other objects that orbit the Sun.
Star clusters are not galaxies, they are inside galaxies. Globular clusters are spherical-shaped star clusters which are part of the outer halo of the Milky Way. One of the largest (and oldest) known star clusters, Messier 15, has several million stars, packed closely together, with a black hole at its centre. The stars are too closely packed to get an accurate count, but it certainly has more stars than some of the smaller galaxies.
Within galaxy clusters, galaxies move relative to other galaxies. They can and do collide. When this happens, the stars generally move past each other, but gas clouds and dust interact, and can form a burst of new stars. Gravity pulls both galaxies into somewhat new shapes, forming bars, rings or tail-like structures.
Many galaxies continue to form new generations of stars. The Milky Way, and all spiral shaped galaxies like it (see right side image of NGC 2997), produce new stars at a rate of one or two stars per year. This star formation happens in the vast interstellar clouds that account for about 1% to 10% of the mass of these galaxies. Globular star clusters, on the other hand, are not currently forming stars because this activity happened billions of years ago and then stopped once all of the gas and dust clouds were used up.
In the astronomical literature, the word 'Galaxy' with a capital "G" is used for our galaxy, the Milky Way. The billions of other galaxies are written as 'galaxy' with a lowercase "g". The term "Milky Way" first came out in the English language in a poem by Chaucer.
When William Herschel wrote his catalogue of deep sky objects, he used the name "spiral nebula" for objects like the Andromeda Galaxy. 200 years later astronomers discovered that they are made of stars as the Milky Way is, so the term 'nebula' is now only used for diffuse structures within a galaxy.
There are two main kinds of galaxies, spiral galaxy and elliptical galaxy. They are classified according to the Hubble Sequence.
A spiral galaxy is a galaxy that has a spiral shape. Most of the galaxies in the universe observed by astronomers are spiral galaxies (about 77%).
They are divided into two :
NGC 1300 and NGC 1672 are examples of barred spiral galaxies. The Whirlpool galaxy and Messier 81 are examples of unbarred spiral galaxies.
The identifying characteristics of a spiral galaxy are disk-shaped rotating, spiral arms, and a bulge in the galactic core. The spiral arms are where new hot stars are born. "Bulge" in the galactic core has old stars. This feature is common to the most spiral galaxies.
An elliptical galaxy is a galaxy that has a ellipsoid (3D of ellipse) shape. This type of galaxy are dominant in universe, especially in galaxy clusters. The shape ranges from circle, ellipse, and cigar-shaped. In Hubble Sequence, this shape can be represented as class :