A Ton of Crap (108 page)

V
represents volume and
T
represents absolute temperature. In each formula, the volume of gas increases proportionally when the absolute temperature increases.

PASHTO

Pakistan
Pashto is not an official language in Pakistan as it is in Afghanistan, even though in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (which used to be known as North-West Frontier Province), and Balochistan Province a total of 27 million people (or 15 percent) speak the language. In Pakistan, the official languages are Urdu and English. Pashto was allowed to be used in schools as a medium of instruction for the first time in 1984. Even though Pashto has no official status, there is a long literary tradition of Pashto in Pakistan.

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN CHINA

The Cultural Revolution
From 1966 to 1976, in an effort to prevent the bureaucratization and capitalization of Communism as in the Soviet Union, Mao Zedong created what would be known as the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” The Cultural Revolution is now considered one of the darkest periods in China’s history. All schools were closed, and the students were encouraged to join the Red Guard, which was responsible for persecuting intellectuals and teachers. The Red Guard turned increasingly more violent (over a million people died from the purges) and split into factions. Mao then enforced the People’s Liberation Army to suppress the factionalism of the Red Guard. During this time period, Mao’s ideology was harshly enforced. Youths were taken out of cities and forced to work in agrarian areas. Artists who made antisocialist work and ethnic minorities were highly persecuted.

VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Poetry
The most highly regarded poet during the Victorian era was Alfred, Lord Tennyson. His poetry reflected the feelings of the era, expressing melancholy and doubts about religion, yet a confidence in class. There was a movement in the middle of the nineteenth century known as the Pre-Raphaelite movement that focused on reviving the work of medieval and classical times. The greatest example of this movement can be found in Tennyson’s
Idylls of the King
, which combined the story of King Arthur with ideas and issues of the modern day.

GROUP THEORY

Transformation Groups
Transformation groups deal with symmetry. Both permutation and matrix groups are special types of transformation groups. These groups act on a specific space (in permutation groups, it is a set, and in matrix groups, it is a vector space), but the structure is preserved. As transformations preserve an object, there will be more symmetry. Transformation groups have two properties:

If transformations
f
and
g
belong to G, then the composition
f
o
g
, meaning (
f
(
g
(
x
)), also belongs to G.

The set G contains the inverse transformation
f
-
¹
with every transformation
f
.

GAS LAWS

Gay-Lussac’s Law
Gay-Lussac’s law builds upon Boyle’s law and Charles’s law, and actually represents two ideas. The first part is known as the law of combining volumes. This law states that gases combine in simple proportions (for example, water is simply two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen). The other part of Gay-Lussac’s law is the pressure-temperature law. This law states that pressure of an amount of gas at a constant volume is proportional to the absolute temperature.

This can be expressed as:
or
P
α
T

PASHTO

Dialects
In both Pakistan and Afghanistan, there are two main dialects of Pashto. The northern dialect is known as Pakhto, and the southern dialect is simply known as Pashto. Pakhto, the northern dialect, is known for its harder sound, while Pashto sounds softer. The difference in name stems from these changes in pronunciation. In general, there are not that many morphological differences between the two dialects, and they are generally mutually intelligible. The dividing line between the two dialects passes through Paktika, where north of the line, Pakhto is spoken, and south of the line, Pashto is spoken.

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION IN CHINA

Tiananmen Incident
Zhou Enlai, the premier who founded the People’s Liberation Army, died on January 8, 1976. The Gang of Four forbade anyone to take part in any of the activities honoring his death, creating great uproar. On April 4, 1976, the eve of a festival that paid homage to the deceased, an estimated 2 million people gathered in Tiananmen Square to memorialize Zhou Enlai and express their anger over the Cultural Revolution. The next day, the people discovered that their wreaths and items for Zhou Enlai were removed, leading to outrage. A violent riot began, police cars were set ablaze, and thousands of people forced their way into government buildings.

VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Scientific and Philosophical Writing
During the Victorian era, Charles Darwin’s ideas of evolution in his book
On the Origin of Species
shook the world, and writings about nature and evolution became widely popular. It is also during this time period that some great philosophers began to write. The Victorian era saw the work of John Stuart Mill, John Henry Newman, and Henry Edward Manning. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the two founders of Communism, wrote their books during this time in Victorian England.