Feature Post

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Plato (History for Kids)

Plato is known today as one of the greatest philosophers of all time. He was born about 429 BC, about the time when Pericles died, and he died in 347 BC, just after the birth of Alexander the Great. Plato was born in Athens, a very rich and aristocratic family. Many of his relatives were involved in Athenian politics, although Plato was not himself.

When Plato was a young man he went to listen to Socrates, and I learned a lot of Socrates on how you think and what kinds of questions to consider. When Socrates was killed in 399 BC, Plato was very sad (it was 30 years old when Socrates died). Plato began to write some of the conversations he had heard Socrates a. Almost everything we know about Socrates comes from what Plato wrote.

After a while ', however, Plato began to write their own ideas on philosophy, not only to write about Socrates' ideas. One of his early work is a republic, which explains what Plato thought would be a better form of government that the government of Athens. Plato thought that most people were pretty stupid, and so should not vote on what to do. Instead, the best people to be elected Guardians of the rest. (Remember Plato was from a wealthy aristocratic family in a way that probably was considered the best people!).

Plato also thought a lot about nature and how it works. Thought it was all a kind of ideal form, like the idea of ​​a chair and a chair was a real sort bad imitation of the ideal chair that exists only in your mind. One of the ways Plato tried to explain his ideas was the famous metaphor of the cave. He said: Suppose there is a cave, and inside the cave men are chained to a wall so you can not see the back wall of the cave and nothing else. These men can not see anything out of the cave, or even to see clearly, but you can see the shadows of what is happening outside the cave. These prisoners did not come to believe that the shadows were real, and that's what things really look like?

Suppose now that one of the men fled and left the cave, and saw what looked like real people, and live plants and grass. If he went back to the cave and told others what he had seen, would believe in him, or would have thought he was crazy?

Plato says that we are like the men are sitting in the cave, we think we understand the real world, but because we are locked into our body, we can not see the shadows on the wall. One of his goals is to help us understand the real world better by finding ways to predict or understand the real world, even without being able to see it.

Source : http://www.historyforkids.org

Friday, September 30, 2011

Football (Soccer) History


The contemporary history of the world's most popular sport, spanning over 100 years. It all started in 1863 in England, rugby football and association football separated from their different courses and the Football Association of England was formed - becoming the first sports car of the Board.

These two codes from a common root and both have a long shaft and branched ancestral complex. A search through the centuries, reveals at least half a dozen different games, varying to different degrees to which the historical development of football has been traced. This can be justified in some cases is questionable. However, the fact is that people have enjoyed kicking a ball around for thousands of years and there is absolutely no reason to consider as an aberration in the most "natural" to play ball with your hands.

On the contrary, apart from the need to recruit the legs and feet in hard Tussle for the ball, often without any laws for the protection, it was recognized from the outset that the art of controlling the ball with feet was not easy, and as such requires no small degree of skill. The oldest form of the game, because there are scientific evidence was an exercise from a military manual dating from the second century BC and the third in China.

The ancestor of the Han dynasty football was called Tsu Chu and was kicking a leather ball stuffed with feathers and hair through an opening, measuring only 30-40cm wide, in a small long poles fixed network bamboo. According to a variant of this exercise, the player was not allowed to point to your target without obstacles, but had to use the feet, chest, back and shoulders to try to resist the attacks of his opponents. The use of the hand is not allowed.

Another type of game, also from the Far East, Japanese Kemari, which started about 500-600 years later and is still played today. It's a sport lacking the competitive element of Tsu Chu 'possession without fighting involved. Standing in a circle, players had to pass the ball to each other in a relatively small space, trying not to let it touch the ground.

The Greek "Episkyros" - which few concrete details survive - was much more animated, as was the Roman "Harpastum." The latter was played with a smaller ball with two teams on a rectangular field marked by boundary lines and a central line. The goal was to get the ball over the boundary lines of the opposition and when the players walked them, tricks were commonplace. The game was popular for 700-800 years, but the Romans took it to England with them, using the feet were so small that they hardly be of consequence.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Plankalkül First Fill The World With High-level Language

First fill the world with high-level language was designed in 1940 (probably between 1941 and 1945, but the concept was first published in 1948), the German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse, the creator of the first relay computer.

From 1941-1946 (at the same time, he developed the computer Z4), Konrad Zuse developed ideas on how its machines can be programmed with a very powerful way. Language Plankalkül was originally described in Zuse designed, Ph.D. thesis in 1943, then developed in his 1945 (also unpublished, was still a war), the work of "Plankalkül. Theorie of Angewandte Logistics." and, finally, to the public in 1948 (but does not attract a lot of feedback, and long periods of time programming the computer would just think about programming, machine language). Plankalkül finally published a more comprehensive document in 1972, when the first translation was done later in 1998.

Using the programming language is a modern high Plankalkül typed imperative programming language with the following main points:

1. Program can be reused features and functions are not recursive
2. Variables are local functions (programs)
3. Types of data are the tables and tables of tuples, but there are also floating point, fixed point, complex numbers, records of hierarchical data structures, list of pairs.
4. The type of variables need not be declared in a special header
5. There is no GOTO construct
6. Operation tasks (eg: V1 + V2 =>R1.
7. Conditional statement (ie: V1 = V2 =>R1 This means that:. Compare the variable V1 and V2: If they match then assign real value to R1, false otherwise affect the operations can also be applied to structures complex data ..
8. The opportunity to define the sub-programs.
9.  Ability tostatements (loops), while the construction of iteration.
10. Logical operations (predicate logic and Boolean algebra).
11. Arithmetic exception handling.