The low quality of American literary production during the colonial period helped maintain an open market for imported products and emphasized forms of importation. Never before, of course, has a civilization so numerous and occupying vast expanses been so educated and such an educated people would not have created less fiction. Perhaps there was some connection between these two features of American culture - between the education of the whole society and the lack of education of the ruling circles? In modern Western European culture, the most respectable use of the printed word, with the exception of sacred religious texts, takes place in the refined literature of the privileged classes. Such cultures are judged by dramas, poems, novels and essays, which, like palaces and castles, are monuments of aristocratic cultures. But should we judge our culture by its ability to create such monuments? Should we hope to initiate the greater part of the American people into the mysteries of aristocratic fiction?
The printed word had a different destiny in America, a role less understood by the traditional set of criteria for literary historians. An exclusively American emphasis on relevance, usefulness, "reader interest", different tastes made a different institution out of printed matter.
Not a writer, but a journalist, not an essayist, but an author of practical guides, not an artist, but a publicist - this is a typical representative of the American writing fraternity. You will find his reader not in the salon, but on the market square, not in the monastery or in the university courtyard, but in the hairdresser's or by the fireplace of a simple person. His print production is "objective": it draws attention to the subject, and not to itself. By placing less emphasis on form, such a printed word does not tend to create a class of professional "connoisseurs," a circle of initiates who value form for form's sake. Here, too, American life focuses more on the process than on the end result: printed matter is seen less as "literature" than as information. These tendencies go deep into our past and have flourished in part because a literary culture did not yet grow on our soil during the colonial period.
In Western Europe the literature of the ruling classes was first written in a dead and alien "classical" language; its inaccessibility increased its prestige, as well as the power and conceit of those who possessed the keys to the ancient temples of knowledge. In aristocratic cultures, it is still generally assumed that the works of ancient Greece and Rome can never be compared with the work of ordinary modern authors. Classical training for the English ruling class has long consisted in the study of the ancient classics - at Oxford they are pointedly called simply "the great ones"; it was assumed that the future representative of the ruling classes should learn the literature for the elite in Greek and Latin before turning to national literature. In America, much in this area had to be changed. Some of the most cultured people might have opposed the perpetuation of "classical" norms in education. Despite such romantic exceptions as George Sandys translating Ovid in Virginia in the 1620s, knowledge of the ancient languages has never conferred such high prestige in our culture as it did in England. /1s downloaded from the national literature, which has gained a lot of popularity due to its practicality.
Because books in both colloquial and colloquial languages needed to be transported, the peculiarity of book culture in colonial America (or in various parts of it) was associated with the development of means of transportation. Since books are physical objects manufactured in a particular place, they tend to end up near the place of production, or at least not far from centers of distribution. Therefore, writing about the books of colonial America as if they were the same everywhere is completely wrong.
During the colonial period, centers for importing and selling books, and perhaps even reading, were located along the Atlantic coast. It was easier to travel a thousand miles by water than a hundred by land, and it was far less troublesome to carry a dozen books aboard a ship for six weeks than ten days on land. Book culture consisted largely of imports. Many of the characteristics of American life were due to this simple circumstance and to the peculiar ways of importing.
Books were a product of urbanization, and before the Revolution there was not a single city inland of any significant importance. Even in 1790, each of the eight cities with more than six thousand inhabitants was on the coast. The consequence of the advance to the West and the construction of cities remote from the sea was the emergence of urban centers that were less influenced by European literary culture. However, only many decades after the first books were published in America, they began to replace books imported from England.
The consciousness of the American city was directed across the sea to London. “Because his eyes were turned more to the east than to the west,” notes Carl Bridenbo, “he was more like a European society in an American setting.” Moreover, almost without exception, the most important routes of settlement in America originated from some eastern coastal city. The main cities on the coast were like numerous funnels through which British book culture flowed inland and spread further into the countryside. The literary culture of colonial America thus remained filtered through the urban filter for a long time. The only major exception was Virginia, where many rivers and tobacco production led to the spread of books to the borders of private plantations, but the cultural stream that flows through all of Virginia was already filtered in London.
None of the five major cities established undeniable cultural dominance over colonial life in general. Despite the similarities in government, taverns, and social entertainment, there were significant local differences that were important for the future of American culture. We used to think of Boston as the cultural center of 17th-century America, but before 1680, the city life of both New York (then still called New Amsterdam) and Newport could compete with Boston. Although Boston was the most populous of the early colonial cities, by 1760 it was already outpaced by New York and Philadelphia. Throughout the eighteenth century, therefore, there was a competition for leadership among the colonial cities: even in the early decades, Philadelphia was on equal footing with Boston, and New York was not far behind; Newport and Charleston were already big cities by the English provincial scale. Numerous smaller towns gradually emerged: Portsmouth, Salem, Hartford, NewHaven, New London and Albany, to name but a few. Any priority, if any, often moved in one direction or another. When Philadelphia became the most populous city, people could not forget that it had been Boston not long before, and by the end of the 18th century, New Yorkers began to harbor the hope that they might, in turn, supplant Philadelphia. However, there has never been an American London or Paris, an undeniable historical center, a leader in the political, cultural and commercial spheres.
As a result, American literary culture, despite its main connection with London, began to react differently to local problems and the diverse life of the continent. In the following centuries, this will also determine the book culture of the nation. The colonial period created its cultural heritage from a variety of religious beliefs, from numerous local ways of making a living, from a hundred other regional differences, each of which would make the hegemony of any one area difficult. The flourishing of book imports in several colonial cities thus increased the choice of the best products.
In this Photoshop tutorial, you'll learn how to quickly add realistic light rays to your photo. To do this, we will use the features of Photoshop version CS5. Go!
Open your photo. In this case, we will be adding rays to the forest photo.
Now we need to create a selection area that captures the areas of the sky that look through the canopy of trees. To do this, go to the channel panel Channels, which is next to the layers panel. Duplicate a channel Blue.
As you can see, parts of the sky have turned white. But the other part of the image also has a grayish color. We need to clearly separate the sky from the trees, making the sky white and the trees black. This is required in order to make it easier to create the desired selection area.
There is a very simple way to achieve this result. Call the fill window Fill by pressing Shift+BackSpace, or go Edit > Fill. Set the fill source to black. To black fill everything but the obvious white color, set the blending mode to overlay.
Click OK. Now holding the button ctrl, click on the channel icon. The selection area we need will appear. Go back to the layers panel and create a new layer. Then fill the selection area with white.
Next, create a duplicate of this layer. At this stage, we begin to use the capabilities of Photoshop to work with three-dimensional objects. Select both layers you created (by holding ctrl, click on them) and go 3D > New Volume From Layers.
It seems like nothing happened. But, now, pay attention to the tools for working with 3D objects, which are located in the left toolbar at the bottom. Choose a tool 3D Zoom Camera Tool and click on the icon perspective camera on the tool's property bar.
You will see the image change.
Now select a tool 3D Object Slide Tool, click in the center of the image and hold Shift, drag the mouse down. It will turn out like this:
In this tutorial, the sun will shine between two trees at the location indicated by the red circle!
As you can see, our beams have a center where they come from. Choose a tool 3D Object Rotate Tool and move the center to the specified location.
Now apply style Outer Glow to the 3D layer. To do this, simply double-click on it. Choose a glow color of light yellow.
Here's what we got.
It remains to emphasize the center of "radiation". Tool Gradient Tool On a new layer, create a small white to transparent radial gradient from the center of our rays.
Now I need to create a ray - a triangle shape with an angle of 20°. And here we are faced with a problem - in Photoshop there is no tool that allows you to create a corner of a given size. You can rotate an object by a given angle, but you cannot create a figure with a certain angle, the same 20 °. Therefore, we will look for workarounds.
Take the tool "Rectangle" (Rectangle Tool), on the options bar, switch to the "Shape" mode. The fill color is not important. We create a rectangle shape in such a way that one of its corners is located exactly at the crosshairs of the guides, and the rectangle itself goes beyond the dimensions of the canvas:
On the options bar, switch the path intersection mode to "Shapes intersection area:
We create another similar rectangle, do not copy the old one, but create it. Press Ctrl+T to activate the Free Transform tool. Anchor to the lower left corner and rotate the rectangle by minus 70°:
Press Enter twice, a warning window appears, agree, click OK. Next, right-click on the layer with rectangles and select "Rasterize Layer". As a result, we got a beam with an angle of 20 °:
Note. Since we made rectangles that extend beyond the canvas, the pixels of this beam also extend beyond the boundaries of the canvas.
Select the colors of the rays, set these colors on the color palette, I took blue #05f9b7 and purple #7d6dad .:
Now we are writing an action. I recommend that you be careful, do not miss a single item. (Learn more about recording an action).
1. Press the X key (x) to replace the foreground and background colors
2. Copy the layer by pressing Ctrl+J
3. Press Ctrl+T to activate "free transform"
4. Move the transformation center a little with the mouse (it doesn’t matter where, the main thing is to “move” it a little (important! The white dot on the transformation center indicator should disappear). On the options panel, set the coordinates of the transformation center to 250 and 250 (coordinates of the center of the canvas) and the angle of 20 °:
5. Press Enter
6. Move one layer down by pressing Alt+[
7. Hold down the Ctrl key and click on the new layer icon in the layers panel
8. Press Alt + Delete to fill the selection with the main color
9. Press Ctrl+D to deselect
10. Move up a layer by pressing Alt+]
11. Move the layer down in the layer stack by pressing Ctrl+[
Stop recording the action.
Delete the copy layer (it is now above the layer with the original ray), stand on the layer with the original ray. We launch the action eighteen times. Actually, that's all.
The second study was led by A. Boyarsky from Leiden University. He used x-ray data at the XMM-Newton observatory collected as part of the analysis of the Perseus clusters and the Andromeda galaxy. The unrelated groups nevertheless came up with the same results. Their conclusions were almost identical: an inexplicable emission line with an energy of 3.52 keV.
The energy and location of the signal is consistent with the decay of a form of dark matter - a 7.1 keV sterile neutrino, which turns into a photon and an ordinary neutrino. The photon receives almost exactly half the energy of the original particle due to the tiny mass of the ordinary neutrino.
Sterile neutrinos are neutrinos that are not included in the Standard Model of physical particles and are not subject to weak interactions - they do not interact with W- and Z-bosons, which are carriers of the weak interaction. There are many reasons why sterile neutrinos can be considered as possible members of the "zoo" of particles. In particular, the simplest, well-working models that say that ordinary neutrinos with their mass require the existence of at least two sterile neutrinos.
The lack of interaction between sterile neutrinos makes it extremely difficult to create them. In order to originate in the early Universe, sterile neutrinos had to mix slightly with ordinary neutrinos via neutrino oscillations, so active neutrinos created during the cooling of the Universe after the Big Bang can partially convert into a sterile variety. The same process, only in reverse, occurs during the decay of sterile neutrinos under the action of neutrino oscillations.
Wimp at 35 GeV
The latest study of gamma-ray emissions from the central regions of the Milky Way, by astrophysicists from Harvard, the University of Chicago, MIT, Fermi Laboratories and Princeton, has provided a deeper look into the Fermi Space Observatory data. As a result, convincing evidence of manifestations of dark matter in the form of WIMPs was found. 
Scientists have found that after taking into account the known sources of gamma radiation, there are additional sources of GeV-gamma rays to be analyzed. The presence of such an excess is said to have a statistical probability of 40 sigma (5 sigma is generally considered experimental evidence in particle physics).
The signal was first registered in 2009 and has been interpreted in different ways: as synchrotron radiation, millisecond pulsars and annihilation, or the decay of dark matter.
The latest study showed that the excess of gamma rays is roughly spherically symmetrical and located at the center of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A*. The study concluded that the current best interpretation would be evidence of annihilation of the 35 GeV WIMPs of the bottom quark-antiquark pair, which themselves eventually decay into components, including several GeV gamma rays.
Even though the study described above suggests the annihilation of a 35 GeV dark matter WIMP, this alone is not strong enough evidence. The best evidence would be the detection of such a signal in dwarf galaxies, which are full of dark matter.
But even without this, the search, which was carried out by the Fermi-Large Area Telescope collaboration, covered all 25 known dwarf spheroid galaxies that surround the Milky Way. Although the results of this study are formally negative, with a statistical probability of around 2.5 sigma, this excess may hint that dwarf galaxies emit the same excess of gamma rays as the Milky Way galaxy. Enhanced sensitivity observations may shed light on this issue in the coming years.
Signs of the existence of dark matter particles are becoming more significant. To date, "", that is, there is no concrete evidence yet, but it is likely that dark matter may consist of several types of new particles, in accordance with the assumption of Harvard physicist Lisa Randall. That doesn't make dark matter any less fascinating and complex.
