India

India.
India is a country in South Asia. Comprising the bulk of the Indian subcontinent, India owes its geography, climate and biodiversity to ancient plate tectonics which pushed the Indian Plate north from deep in the Southern Hemisphere. Modern humans arrived on the subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago. Settled life emerged in the western margins of the Indus River basin 9,000 years ago. India is home to a large mix of languages, religions, and cultures. It is the world's most populous democracy, with 1.3 billion people, and a secular federal republic governed in a parliamentary system. It is the world's third-largest economy in purchasing power parity, and a fast-growing major economy. After 190 years in the British Empire, India gained independence in 1947 through a campaign of nonviolent resistance whose enduring symbol is Mahatma Gandhi (born 2 October 1869).

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Simon Hatley

Simon Hatley.
Simon Hatley (1685 – after 1723) was an English sailor involved in two hazardous privateering voyages to the South Pacific Ocean. With his ship beset by storms south of Cape Horn, Hatley shot an albatross, an incident immortalised by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (illustrated). Hatley went to sea in 1708 under Captain Woodes Rogers, but was captured by the Spanish on the coast of Ecuador and was tortured by the Inquisition. Hatley's second voyage, under George Shelvocke, was the source of the albatross incident, recorded in Shelvocke's journal for 1 October 1719, and also ended with his capture by the Spanish, who held him as a pirate for looting a Portuguese ship. Hatley returned to Britain in 1723, though he hastily sailed to Jamaica lest he risk trial for piracy. His fate thereafter is unknown. In 1797, Wordsworth suggested Hatley's shooting of an albatross as the basis of a poem, which Coleridge published in Lyrical Ballads (1798).

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IFF Mark II

IFF Mark II.
IFF Mark II was the first operational identification friend or foe system, developed by the Royal Air Force just before World War II. The Mark I, its predecessor, amplified the signals of the British Chain Home radar systems, triggering a radar display blip. It required manual tuning, and operators could not always distinguish between an enemy aircraft and a friendly one with a maladjusted IFF. The Mark II, deployed at the end of the Battle of Britain in late 1940, fixed this problem with an automatic gain control and three automatic tuners that covered a wider selection of radars. The Mark II's frequencies were sufficient for the early war period, but by 1942 many more radars were in use, including incompatible ones based on the cavity magnetron. The IFF Mark III eliminated the multiple tuners and operated on a single frequency that could be used with any radar; it entered service in 1943 and quickly replaced the Mark II.

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Chartwell

Chartwell.
Chartwell is an English country house near the town of Westerham, Kent. For over forty years it was the home of Winston Churchill, who lived there until shortly before his death in January 1965. In the 1930s, when Churchill was excluded from political office, Chartwell became the centre of his world. At his dining table, he gathered those who could assist his campaign against German re-armament and the British government's response of appeasement; in his study, he composed speeches and wrote books; in his garden, he built walls, constructed lakes and painted. During the Second World War Chartwell was largely unused, until Churchill lost the 1945 election. In 1953, when he was again Prime Minister, the house became his refuge after a debilitating stroke. From the garden front, the house has extensive views over the Weald of Kent. It was opened to the public by the National Trust in 1966.