Trurls M - 1077 Words

Title: Trurl’s Machine Author: Stanislaw Lem As a boy Stanislaw Lem showed an early interest in science as well as in the imaginary worlds of fantasy and science fiction. The young Lem’s interest in tinkering mechanical devices of all sorts was put to use by secretly damaging the German vehicles during the Nazi occupation. Later on, he became a full time writer establishing himself as leading science fiction writer in Eastern Europe. This writer from Lvov Poland (now Ukraine) worked on serious themes as the purpose of life and relationship between human beings and technology. Characters: Trurl -He is a constructor who built an eight-story thinking machine. -He is so disappointed that his machine can’t answer his mathematical†¦show more content†¦Thunder and sulfurous fumes filled the cave and sparks flew from the blows of steel on rock, yet through all this pandemonium one could still make out, now and then, the ragged voice of Trurl. They heard an explosion and saw the machine, lay smashed and flattened, nearly broken in half by an enormous boulder that had landed in the middle of its eight floors. With the greatest care they picked their way down through the smoking rubble. In order to reach the riverbed, it was necessary to pass the remains of the machine. Without a word, the two stopped together in the shadow of its twisted hull. The machine still quivered slightly, and one could turning, creaking feebly, within. â€Å"Yes this is bad enough you’ve come to, and two and two is—as it always was—â€Å" began Trul, but you just then the machine faint, barely audible croaking noise and said for the last time, â€Å"SEVEN.† Then something snapped inside, a few stones dribbled down from overhead, now before them lay nothing but lifeless mass of scrap. The two constructors exchanged a look and silently, without any further comment or conversation, walked back the way they came. Lesson Learned: †¢ There’s a good side to everything. †¢ Don’t expect too much, it can hurt you. †¢ One must not hurt others, even the machines/robots, because we don’t know what will happen after

Geography Edexcel Igcse Case Study Chinas One Child...

†¢ In 1970, China’s population of 830 million increased by 2.6%. To reduce this high rate of population growth, the Chinese government introduced ‘voluntary’ schemes, such as: ïÆ'Ëœ State-run family planning programmes. ïÆ'Ëœ State-sponsored advertising campaigns with the slogan ‘later, longer, fewer’, meaning marrying later, having longer gaps between babies, and fewer children. †¢ These schemes caused the birth rate to start falling. However, in 1979, the ‘one-child’ policy was introduced, meaning that couples who had more than one child would be penalised. Sometimes they would be sterilised or forced to have an abortion. †¢ If couples kept to having one child, they were given rewards, such as: ïÆ'Ëœ Cash bonuses. ïÆ'Ëœ Better childcare. ïÆ'˜â€ ¦show more content†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¢ Having only one child also means that families could provide a better education for their child, which meant that the new generation became better educated and therefore more able to find employment and escape the cycle of poverty. †¢ A better educated workforce also helped attract investment from TNCs later on and helped to economy to develop further. †¢ N.B the one-child policy was not the only thing that stimulated economic development. China’s communist policies relaxed, allowing more trading. This allowed industrialisation and investment from TNCs, which were attracted to China’s large, cheap labour supply, its large consumption and its good natural resources, e.g. coal. †¢ However, it has also had may unwanted consequences: ïÆ'Ëœ The Chinese tradition to prefer sons has caused widespread sex-selective abortion. ïÆ'Ëœ There are now 120 males to every 100 females. ïÆ'Ëœ Parents spoil their sons as they are an only child, and as a result he tends to be obese, demanding and delinquent. ïÆ'Ëœ And increasing shortage of women of marrying age has caused bartering (exchange of goods not money) for wives and even kidnapping of women to marry them in rural areas. ïÆ'Ëœ Young women are leaving the countryside and moving to towns and cities, as men are preferred for farm work. †¢ For these reasons, the ‘Care for Girls’ plan was introduced to change Chinese traditional attitudes towards the gender of women and reduce the

Was Guy Fawkes Framed free essay sample

Before Elizabeth I death in 1603, the Catholics had a rough time with the religious changes and after her death, thought they would have a catholic king. They got James VI of Scotland and soon to be James I of England. The whole catholic religion celebrated for they thought it would be the end of their religious troubles. Sadly they were wrong and it got even worse. He made the Catholics become Protestants and if they didnt he would punish them severely. This made the Catholics angry and so they plotted to kill James and all the protestant government.The perfect time to do this was at the next meeting at the houses of parliament. They would destroy parliament with all the people in it. They rented a house next to them and started digging a cellar under the houses of parliament. They stored the gunpowder in barrels under the parliament and waited for the day of the meeting. We will write a custom essay sample on Was Guy Fawkes Framed? or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page On the day, Guy Fawkes, an explosives and gunpowder expert, volunteered to light the gunpowder resulting in suicide as well. He was willing to die for his religion and to help all Catholics all around Britain to live happy lives once again.In the morning of November 5th, he was caught by the authorities protecting the gunpowder from theft. He was tortured and executed in the tower of London the following days. How did the king know they were plotting to kill him? Many people take the information into consideration and think that the Catholics were framed. Firstly, many of the Catholics were known as traitors since England was at war with the Catholic country, Spain. It would have been unlikely that they could gather 36 barrels of gunpowder. Even if they did the chances of it being too old to blow up were very high.Secondly, a letter was sent to one of the members of parliament to stay away from the parliament on that day is believed to be produced by one of the kings officials since it had no signature. Historians suspect that a letter was the perfect tool for the kings officials who already knew about the plot from one of the mouths of the plotters. Jeremy Tresham. He was suspected to be related to the person he sent the letter to, but there is no evidence about this. When they did find the gunpowder with Guido Fawkes, they slowly found the other conspirators. Only one escaped capture Jeremy Tresham.In the letter there was no evidence about where and when the gunpowder was going to blow, so how did the king find out It is suspected that the gunpowder plot was planned by a king official named Cecil. Why would he do it? He would obviously want the Catholics to end their religion since he was a protestant and to do this he could turn the king against them so much that he would go to the point of killing them all. In conclusion I think that Robert Catesby and his plotters were framed by the king and his officials but even though they failed in killing James they are still remembered today for their life-ending story.

Wordschmidt Essay Example For Students

Wordschmidt Essay the translator, the actor and the poet are of imagination all compactat least for Paul Schmidt they are. A true renaissance man of the theatre, Schmidt seems anomalous in our late 20th-century world of micro-specialization: a poet who translates, a translator who acts, an actor who writes plays, a playwright who writes poems. But lest this conjure up an image of some dusty relic in knee-breeches and powdered wig, consider a few of his thoroughly modem accomplishments: acting roles in the Wooster Groups Brace Up! and Tom Kalins experimental film Swoon; a racy poem which accompanied Robert Mapplethorpes controversial X portfolio; a stage adaptation of Alice in Wonderland directed by Robert Wilson with music by Tom Waits; a Ph.D. from Harvard and an Equity card; theatre translations of Brecht, Chekhov, Genet and Khlebnikov for Liz Diamond, Elizabeth LeCompte, Joanne Akalaitis and Peter Sellars. We will write a custom essay on Wordschmidt specifically for you for only $16.38 $13.9/page Order now A tall, handsome man with a dignified bearing and liquid speaking voice, its easy to see why the 59-year-old Schmidt gets occasional work acting on television soaps. He is a literate, entertaining conversationalisthis careful diction and lively vocabulary are clues to a consuming passion for language. It is this love of wordsor perhaps more accurately, this love of the spoken wordwhich is at the bottom of all his artistic pursuits, especially his translations. Liz Diamond, who directed Schmidts translation of Brechts St. Joan of the Stockyards, calls him a poet of the theatre who loves language and the sound of rhythmic speech, in particular in the theatre. When Schmidt talks about translation, his views are never abstract and theoretical, but refreshingly pragmatic, rooted in his own theatrical experience. He likens the translators craft to the actors: For me, translating is performing and performing is translating. You have to be able to let someone elses words come through you, and not impose your voice. You have to find a voice. And to do that, says Schmidt, you need to use your ear rather than your dictionaryto listen for the playwrights voiceprint. If that voiceprint exists, say, in Russian, he continues, and I know enough Russian to be able to hear that voiceprint in my ear, then what I have to do is to recreate in American English a voice which echoesand I mean that rather metaphoricallywhich echoes the same way the Russian voice echoes in the Russian language. Thats an elaborate process, its very complex. One of the things that makes translating for the stage particularly tricky is that the translator must negotiate between three parties: the playwright, the actor and the audience. Whatever language I speak as the translator must either be the language of the audience, Schmidt maintains, or if it isnt their current language, be recognizable to them as an echo of what they already know. Theatre only works if the actors speak the same language as the audience. The language must be as natural in the actors mouth as it is in the audiences ear. And for Schmidt, that common language is American English. One of the constant stumbling blocks to staging foreign plays in this country has been the fact that most of the published translations are British. A play that is marked as British is, to my American ear, foreign. There can be a strangeness or a charm to the foreignness, but its there. When he worked on St. Joan, which Brecht set in the Chicago stockyards he had found in Upton Sinclairs The Jungle, he faced a particular challenge: Whats interesting about working with Brecht in English in his American plays is that hes already doing this fictional |American. In St. Joan, for instance, you have stockbrokers talking in dactylic hexameter, and so you have to keep the meter and still make them sound like American stockbrokers. .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5 , .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5 .postImageUrl , .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5 .centered-text-area { min-height: 80px; position: relative; } .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5 , .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5:hover , .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5:visited , .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5:active { border:0!important; } .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5 .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; } .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5 { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #95A5A6; } .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5:active , .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #2C3E50; } .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5 .centered-text-area { width: 100%; position: relative ; } .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5 .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #2980B9; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; } .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5 .postTitle { color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100%; } .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5 .ctaButton { background-color: #7F8C8D!important; color: #2980B9; border: none; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 26px; moz-border-radius: 3px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-height: 80px; background: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts/assets/images/simple-arrow.png)no-repeat; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5:hover .ctaButton { background-color: #34495E!important; } .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5 .centered-text { display: table; height: 80px; padding-left : 18px; top: 0; } .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5 .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0; padding-right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .u982f88eee52deb3fc501ee81744150e5:after { content: ""; display: block; clear: both; } READ: Dialogue in Bethlehem Essayas a fourth-generation New Yorker, Schmidt knows what America sounds like. Of Irish and German ancestry, he started experimenting with languages in high school: I remember reading the Aeneid and translating a passage into English, and then my focus shifted at one moment from understanding the Latin to writing something in English. It was one of those moments where you think, ahh, thats interesting. During his college years he continued acquiring languages at Colgate University not for career reasons, but because it was fun for him. I never had at any point a real clear sense of what I wanted to do, Schmidt confesses. His wandering interests led him to try acting, and after a year of graduate work in Russian at Harvard, he shocked his parents with the news he was quitting school to be an actor. Which is what he did, working in the Boston area, and landing his first Equity job in a summer Shakespeare festival in Cambridge. Then, in 1956, the 22-year-old Schmidt followed his muse to Paris, where he stayed for two years. While perfecting his French, he fell in with a group of actors from the Combdie Francaise and went to the theatre almost every night. Just when he had been accepted into a French conservatory to study acting, Schmidt was drafted into the U.S. Army and had to return to the States. It was the late |50s, between the Korean and Vietnam warsa safe time to be a recruit. Stationed in Texas (It was more foreign to me than Paris, Schmidt remembers), Schmidt was trained as a Russian prisoner-of-war interrogator in a period when there were, inconveniently, no prisoners of war. During war maneuvers, he would be assigned to the aggressor battalion, made up of American soldiers dressed in funny uniforms that were vaguely futuristic, vaguely Nazi. Armed with fake weapons and smoke grenades, Schmidts job was to get captured by the Americans, and then speak Russian to them. The fun was to see how far behind the lines we could get, and how much destruction we could wreak before they picked us up. It was all like a very funny improv. When he got out of the army in 1960, parental pressures led him back to Harvard to work on his doctorate, although he somehow managed to find time to keep up his acting, even doing a season at the Charles Playhouse in 1964. When in 1967 he was offered a teaching job in the Russian Department at the University of Texas in Austin, he accepted and spent the next 11 years teaching in Austinwhich was, in the late 60s, according to Schmidt, a real paradise, a hippie heaven. It was there that he also began to translate seriously, encouraged by his two mentors, Richard Howard and Roger Shattuck. His first major piece of translation was the complete works of French poet Arthur Rimbaud, published in 1975 by Harper and Row. But actually Schmidt kept up his double life as actor/academic, acting part-time with a Mexican theatre company and returning to spend several summers in Boston with the Agassiz Players, a classical company founded by director Tim Mayer, playwright Thomas Babe and producer Honor Moore. It was a remarkably talented group of actors, counting among its members John Lithgow, James Woods, Kathryn Walker, Tommy Lee Jones and Stockard Channing, to whom Schmidt was married for seven years. By 1978 Schmidt had received tenure (what his father had always wanted for him), but felt burdened by the concomitant administrative responsibilities and sticky university politics. He also felt a growing distance between himself and the students of the mid-70s, who were what turned out to be yuppies, he recalls. Its hard to teach people with whom you have very little commonality of interest. They hadnt seen the movies I had seen, I hadnt seen the TV shows they had seen. So he made the difficult, frightening decision to chuck the security of his life as a professor and return to New York and the vagaries of a life in the theatre. .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a , .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a .postImageUrl , .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a .centered-text-area { min-height: 80px; position: relative; } .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a , .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a:hover , .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a:visited , .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a:active { border:0!important; } .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a .clearfix:after { content: ""; display: table; clear: both; } .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a { display: block; transition: background-color 250ms; webkit-transition: background-color 250ms; width: 100%; opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #95A5A6; } .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a:active , .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a:hover { opacity: 1; transition: opacity 250ms; webkit-transition: opacity 250ms; background-color: #2C3E50; } .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a .centered-text-area { width: 100%; position: relative ; } .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a .ctaText { border-bottom: 0 solid #fff; color: #2980B9; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; margin: 0; padding: 0; text-decoration: underline; } .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a .postTitle { color: #FFFFFF; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 600; margin: 0; padding: 0; width: 100%; } .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a .ctaButton { background-color: #7F8C8D!important; color: #2980B9; border: none; border-radius: 3px; box-shadow: none; font-size: 14px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 26px; moz-border-radius: 3px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; text-shadow: none; width: 80px; min-height: 80px; background: url(https://artscolumbia.org/wp-content/plugins/intelly-related-posts/assets/images/simple-arrow.png)no-repeat; position: absolute; right: 0; top: 0; } .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a:hover .ctaButton { background-color: #34495E!important; } .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a .centered-text { display: table; height: 80px; padding-left : 18px; top: 0; } .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a-content { display: table-cell; margin: 0; padding: 0; padding-right: 108px; position: relative; vertical-align: middle; width: 100%; } .u51280d2da2473a211e62238a6f4fcc5a:after { content: ""; display: block; clear: both; } READ: Directors in Rehearsal: A Hidden World EssayHis academic reputation served him well in his new freelance lifestyle; about the same time he was approached by the Dia Art Foundation to do a massive translation project: the complete works of the Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov. Schmidt was at first hesitant about jumping right back into such a vast scholarly project, but he eventually agreed: The notion of tackling everything a poet had writtenI had already done that with Rimbaudis a really interesting challenge. If you commit yourself to translating the writers entire work, you really have to think through the whole thing. You have to know, for example, if he uses that w ord there, when he uses it again, the resonances are all the sameits like three dimensional chess. The enormous undertaking, which gave him 10 years of fairly constant work, has been published in three volumes by Harvard University Press. but with increasing frequency he was drawn towards the stage, putting his knowledge of Russian, French and German to good use at regional theatres across the country. In 1985, with Elizabeth Swados, he wrote The Beautiful Lady, a musical about a cafe full of Russian poets of the 1920s, which was produced in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Peter Sellars staged his translation of Khlebnikovs Zangezi in 1987; the production, with music by Jon Hassell and featuring Ruth Malaczech, was performed in Los Angeles, Boston and Brooklyn. That same year his collaboration with composer Stanley Silverman Black Sea Follies, produced in New York by the Music-Theatre Group and Playwrights Horizons, won the Kesselring Award. He translated Genets The Screens for JoAnne Akalaitiss 1989 production at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and his play The Bathtub, adapted from Mayakovskys 1929 political satire The Bathhouse, was commissioned and staged by the Empty Space Theater in Seattle in 1990. Some of his most recent projects have provided hybrid, collaborative challenges. He just joined forces with Theatre de la Jeune Leunes Dominique Serrand and Paul Walsh on an adaptation of Marivauxs The Triumph of Love for the Guthrie, which combined that play with another Marivaux play, The Dispute. Last year he worked with Robert Wilson and Tom Waits on an adaptation of Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland that came to be titled Alice. Starting with Wilsons initial visual ideas, it was Schmidts job to fashion a text from the famous childrens story. Although the task seemed daunting at first, the fact that the work would be produced in Germany helped: It was a little easier because I was working for a German audience who were not familiar with the language the way we are, the Lewis Carrollisms and the famous phrases. So I didnt have to worry about competing with Lewis Carroll. Schmidt decided to use the relationship between mathmetician Charles Dodgson (Carrolls real name) and his youn g pupil Alice Liddell as a framework for the fairy tale. The text, as delightfully mischievous as Carroll without copying him, puts Alice in Wonderland in poetic, not sociological, relationship to Alice Liddell, illuminating a wild fantasy world through the looking glass of Victorian England: ALICE: Chase the chickens, choke the child.