Spring Night Research Articles

Effects of a weak supply of light at night on the growth and quality components of tea plants

Abstract Supplying artificial light is widely used in crop cultivation to improve yield and quality. In this study, we investigated the effects of a weak supply of light (WSL) on the growth and quality components of tea plants. Starting from mid-winter (20 January 2021), the purple tea (Camellia sinensis) cultivar ‘Ziyan’ was exposed to four different spectra at an intensity of 2 μmol · m−2 · s−1 or 5 μmol · m−2 · s−1 for 3 h or 5 h after sunset. The field observations showed that the sprouting index, which represents the time and speed of bud flush, was significantly higher in most of the WSL treatments than in the control (CK, p < 0.01). The total content of catechin in the harvested leaves of 3 WSL treatments was 11.51%–18.94% higher than that of the CK, but the content of anthocyanin of 4 WSL treatments unexpectedly decreased by 6.77%–11.69% (p < 0.05). The differences in yield, free amino acids and caffeine contents between the WSL treatments and CK were not significant. We concluded that the WSL treatments during the early spring night had positive impacts on the growth and some quality components of tea plants.

Iselin as Object of Desire in Knut Hamsun's Pan and Victoria

Iselin as Object of Desire in Knut Hamsun's <i>Pan</i> and <i>Victoria</i>

The Literary Code of Vincent van Gogh

The Literary Code of Vincent van Gogh Christa DiMarco (bio) Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him Mariella Guzzoni University of Chicago Press https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/V/bo51205258.html224 Pages; Print, $25.00 Vincent van Gogh’s reading practice is as legendary as his paintings. While he devoted his days to his canvases, at night he would “light the lamp and go on reading.” In his letters (of which we have over 800), he devoted many passages to discussing literature from Shakespeare to popular periodicals and modern novels. Reading Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Émile Zola as well as French historical studies by Jules Michelet, cultural criticism by Thomas Carlyle, and studying printed illustrations by Frédéric Montenard, Hubert von Herkomer, and George Cruikshank laid the thematic and stylistic foundation for his art. Van Gogh, for example, noted that he sympathized with Madame François and Florent, two working-class characters who attempt to navigate bourgeois Paris in Zola’s Le Ventre de Paris (1873). Prints that depicted those who lived on the economic or geographic margins likewise captured his attention. In a letter to the artist Anthon van Rappard, Van Gogh shared one of his important artistic influences: The Graphic, a British illustrated publication from which he saved prints to “form a kind of Bible for an artist, in which he reads now and again to get into a mood.” Among the many prints he mentioned, Van Gogh compared George John Pinwell’s The Sisters “to the full song of the nightingale on a spring night” and regularly touted the quality and the impact of the prints he came across. Both the novels he read and the prints he cherished conveyed the dignity of a humble life amid inescapable societal difficulties, a central theme he explored in the imagery of his short, ten-year painting career. Despite the fluency between the written word and painting, we seldom recognize the literary imprint that permeates Van Gogh’s oeuvre. Even art historians pay relatively scant attention to the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of his artistic approach. Cursory references to Van Gogh’s reading habits abound in biographical accounts and exhibition catalogs, and just two scholarly explorations come to mind: Judy Sund’s 1992 True to Temperament: Van Gogh and French Naturalist Literature and Wouter van der Veen’s 2009 Vincent van Gogh: A Literary Mind. Given that Van Gogh mentioned over two-hundred authors in his letters and read in Dutch, English, French, and German, surely there is more to explore. Mariella Guzzoni’s Vincent’s Books: Van Gogh and the Writers Who Inspired Him offers newfound connections between Van Gogh’s paintings and his insatiable literary curiosity that will be of interest to Van Gogh enthusiasts and bibliophiles. Finding a worthwhile approach to Van Gogh’s large body of work — over 800 paintings and 1000 works on paper — requires a method as innovative as the paintings themselves. Guzzoni uses the extensive collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as well as her own collection of the editions Van Gogh read and discussed in his letters. She leads readers chronologically through Van Gogh’s works without becoming entangled in the myriad facts of the painter’s biography, a temptation few authors navigate well. Instead, she explores specific references and stops to rest on telling exchanges between text and art that the book’s engaging layout complements. Vincent’s Books is a beautiful publication that pays homage to the art of the book. It is carefully structured, poignantly designed, and includes full-color matte reproductions of journal pages and book covers. Reproductions of the editions Van Gogh read appear throughout and Guzzoni also includes pictures of the books open to the passages she discusses so you can view the print in its original publication. These pictures appear alongside Van Gogh’s paintings, drawings, or letters and are often accompanied by germane quotations. Readers can pause on passages dedicated to reflecting on the interplay between text and image, an experience akin to spending time with a rare edition in an archive...

Compositional Process and Technique in Happy Rain on a Spring Night (2004)

The composer discusses her musical training at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and at Columbia University in New York, and the effect of that musical heritage on her compositional style. She describes the techniques she uses in her chamber ensemble Happy Rain on a Spring Night (2004), including the use of speech tones for the development of her pitch material, and the Golden section for proportional relationships in the formal structure of the work.

Introduction

This short introduction describes the contributions to a special issue on the music of Chen Yi, which originated in a special session on Chen’s music sponsored by the Committee on the Status of Women at the Society for Music Theory’s annual meeting in 2017. The contributions begin with a discussion by the composer, Chen Yi, of her chamber ensemble Happy Rain on a Spring Night, followed by three articles by Nancy Rao, John Roeder, and Marianne Kielian-Gilbert that offer varied approaches to analyzing her music, including Ba Ban (1999) and Ning for Pipa, Violin and Cello (2002). A brief overview of and link to an edited transcription of the question and answer period that concluded the original session is also provided.

The Concept ofShi: Chinese Aesthetics andHappy Rain on a Spring Night(2004)

The article brings a conceptual framework of Chinese aesthetics, music analysis, and theory developed in North America to bear on the analysis of Chen Yi’s chamber ensembleHappy Rain on a Spring Night(2004). As a framework to analyze the work (both the poem by Du Fu and the music composition), it proposes the concept ofshi, which can be described as “dynamic configuration” or “the probability and propensity that drive the process.” The end of the article discusses issues related to culturally situated analysis.

The Danger of Sleep Deprivation.

Late one spring night in 1986, around 1:30 a.m., the residents of Pripyat, a Ukrainian city of 50,000 people at the northern tip of the Dnieper River, were shaken from sleep by a giant explosion originating in the nuclear reactor of the nearby power plant in Chernobyl. It was an event that would forever change the course of their lives, and that of human history. Hundreds of people died, both directly and indirectly from the explosion, which is now regarded as the worst nuclear power plant catastrophe in history. Today, the Chernobyl power plant and Pripyat are completely abandoned, unsafe due to nuclear contamination. Within a 19-mile radius in every direction of the plant, the landscape is considered unfit for human life for the next 50,000 years. And the cause? Well, when the dust settled, it was a simple condition we all suffer from time to time: an error caused by a worker with too little sleep.

John Updike and David Foster Wallace: Of Binaries, Sports Writing, and Transcendence

ABSTRACTA comparative analysis of John Updike and David Foster Wallace which directs attention to their efforts in sports writing and memoir. The essay problematizes the binary of Updike and Wallace as polar opposites: the former uncool, traditional, and narcissistic; the latter hip, postmodern, and empathic. After an analysis of Wallace’s denigrating review of Updike’s Toward the End of Time, the essay reveals substantive similarities and differences through a consideration of two sets of paired essays: Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu” and Wallace’s “Federer Both Flesh and Not”; Updike’s “A Soft Spring Night in Shillington” and Wallace’s “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” Updike is seen as an observer and storyteller, a writer drawn to celebration of the visual world. In contrast, Wallace is more critic and philosopher than observer, continually struggling to figure things out. With attention to ambition and transcendence, both in sports and writing, the essay posits the two authors less as competitors or antagonists, and more as fellow aspirants to the American sublime.

Research of Residential Area Ecological Green Roof for Reduce the Heat Efficiency in Taichung

The study of empirical research in the field test, the roof by sunlight exposed control area of the roof panels, roof test area, scaffolding pilot area, vegetation area of the facade, radiation heat absorption temperature change monitoring, explore the roof surface heat transfer temperature difference change.In this study, set the empirical plane pilot area planting the groove (long 425cm × width 300cm × Height 20cm ) in the Taichung City Shenkang residential area on the second floor roof, planting the groove bottom up sequence laying frame high-rise, water proof layer, drainage layer,filter layer (non-woven, water-pottery -stone), the medium layer and planting of layer, planting the groove around the hollow brick interval income side to lighten the load; scaffolding pilot area elevated 60cm ,facade vegetation zone.12:00 temperature change, display the extensive green roof indeed can significantly reduce the building's roof floor surface temperature 8.5-14.2°C, 1-5 months of highest temperature can even cooling up to 17.2-26.2°C, thereby regulating the indoor temperature of carbon reduction effect; extensive green roof during the day at noon in winter and spring period can indeed achieve the cooling effectiveness. The temperature change the extensive green roof on 24:00 pm indeed can save the radiant heat energy to raise the roof of the building, the floor surface temperature of 0.4-2.1 °C, thus achieving the effect of insulation; 1-5 months of minimum temperature can even warming up to 1.9-4.1°C; the extensive green roof winter and spring night time can really achieve the insulation effectiveness.

The Conductor

The Conductor Marsha Rabe (bio) There were times on the train, late at night or just before dawn, when Theodore felt innocent, as if he and all his passengers were smooth, unhatched eggs riding inside a huge, slithering reptile. He loved being a stranger among all those strangers, and he loved all those strangers. He also loved his dark blue uniform with its garden row of buttons, which made him feel both anonymous and known. Tonight these feelings were strong. The train stopped for passengers in Carlinville and, as usual, Theodore hoisted them aboard, welcomed them to his train—the Number 7, from Chicago to St. Louis. He collected their fares, as the ticket office was closed at this late hour, and then, with everyone settled at last, he took his seat, too, at the rear of the last car. He closed his eyes for just a moment, better to feel the train surge to life beneath him—that first quick shudder that leveled into a rocking motion, the car heaving left and right, and the passengers shifting like rag dolls in their seats, until all effort and movement converged as the train gained speed, and speed became momentum, and everything rolled forward toward a destination. It was late; everyone slept but Theodore. A few passengers had fallen asleep with their reading lights on, like children needing the bedroom door ajar. He looked to his left into the window and saw his long hawklike face caught in the glass between the warm, sleepy car and the cool spring night outside. Leaning back in his seat, he slowly opened his moneybag, carefully counted out forty-two dollars, and placed the cash in his wallet over his heart. Then he sorted through the cash receipts, removed exactly forty-two dollars worth, and wadded the receipts into a ball. He spit on the ball and placed it in his pants pocket. He put the remaining receipts into the moneybag with the remaining cash. There. That was done. He turned back to the window. Motion and darkness blurred the cornfields that rolled on indistinctly, mile after stubborn mile, on the other [End Page 72] side of the glass. But his face, white and calm as a full moon, held steady through it all. Wonderfully calm, he thought, wonderfully steady. He stared into the dark and saw the brass buttons on his jacket scintillate in the wavering glass like the studs in Orion's great belt. The next day in St. Louis, Theodore Godwin Metz, passenger conductor on the Chicago and Alton Railway for twenty-one years—through the Great Depression and now, into the war—got fired for poking his boss, Lloyd Firestone, in the nose. Though he had no evidence, Lloyd called Theodore a thief. Theodore took offense. Stories varied, but the upshot was universally acknowledged: The last time Theodore Metz ever rode the train was from St. Louis, Missouri, to Clayton, Illinois, his hometown; he did so as a passenger, and the trip was "on the house." That's how he ended up at the Dickey Institute the following fall, babysitting rich drunks. The Dickey Institute was the old Dickey Estate converted into a hospital for alcoholics who could afford the three-thousand-dollar cure. Raymond G. Dickey had made his own millions in Chicago real estate, developing the lakefront. When he retired, he and his wife built a large house in Clayton, where they spent most of their time entertaining friends from Chicago. For three months each year, usually in the winter, the Dickeys left Clayton and traveled to Africa for safari. People said Mrs. Dickey hated safaris and began to drink. One year, when the couple was in New York preparing for the trans-Atlantic crossing, Mrs. Dickey went into Abercrombie and Fitch, gathered together a complete hunting outfit, entered the ladies' dressing room, took off her street clothes, put on the safari clothes, removed a pistol from her purse, and shot herself right between the eyes. Mr. Dickey blamed himself, and so did most of Clayton. To make amends, he established the Dickey Institute, hiring the best doctors from as far away as Paris and Vienna to devise a...

Three Poems

Three Poems W. S. Di Piero (bio) QUE TAL I’m in this bright café, this yellow tropical air: a plaster green toucan and potted palm, motionless heads in thrall to laptop screens and bottomless data mines, when some bereavement, sourceless and angular, visits the heart. Lovers look away from one another, the service girl wipes the counter top, foodcase doilies, coffee-maker, and comes a sagging of life in things. I want to make it comic, mug the camera, do a daffy, feckless song and dance. How unbecoming to receive it here, where my poet writes of his soul tiedto a dying animal, and fountain water pours from a jaguar’s gristled teeth down to volcanic stone. I hope the water’s motion carries me through the hour’s heaviness and rain outside, to the bathroom mirror, the humid flesh, the face’s pouchings and matchtip scars. Let me be fool enough to read meaning into the twiggy lightning that splits the darkening distance, such meaning as animals like us need to see. The rain falls. The heart, helpless, beats. [End Page 99] ON A CLEAR NIGHT AT THE END OF WINTER The steady rain isn’t really steady. It ticks my roof, hushes, rouses, slows, then ticks harder. I depend on steady irregularity. Tonight, a storm moon, winter’s last full moon before expectation’s axis tips toward spring, when the rains are gone and the rabbit’s in the moon, no more windowpane veronicas to weep our opaque, weather-chased, eroded selves. On such a clear spring night, the kind of night that comes around when the rabbit is in the moon, a clear night when no rain fell to staunch our restlessness under these impassive stars, on this planet going around the boiled sun: on such a night the women of my people stood outside, opened their billfolds, and yelled to the know-nothing night, with an ain’t-it-useless laughter, Full moon, full moon, fill ’er up, fill ’er up! Today’s rain falls in Pisces, and ordinary want secretes our helpless petitions while the night, wanting nothing, turns and turns as its galaxies in time past and future burn, collapse, darken. And what of prayers and words if our universe is one of identical others that burn with us in time, and we live this moment in every other universe? And these rains fall tonight in all our worlds, falling in the mind? And our similars in every world wish for an end to rain, clarified windows through which we finally see the recurring moon’s promise that gives us reason to exist? [End Page 100] OTHER WAYS TO HEAVEN The unspeakable beauty of facts, their acts and scenes, the trapeze flier rolling toward the catcher across our gasp, trolley contact rods, bowing from catenaries, cresting a hill before the bulky ahnnn appears, systemic pleasures, a little off but actual, that make us feel at home in our elusive lives. A husband slices morning toast while the wife, still asleep, wanders among secrets scratched like starlines in the skull’s compact heavens. And hillside windows at dawn, watered gold, like consciousness waking, filling up with time. Rivers pokey in April snow, torrential now, rising under our feet. These aren’t illustrations, they happen, more hours pass. A sea-blown summer wind hums through the window harp across your face, a book drowsy in your hands, the breathy stir a passing shadow poetry, an ecstasy of presence, the sweet, the sour, motions in the wind being only what they are. Wait and watch. Wood smoke atomizes birches, coons tip garbage cans that slime backstairs, fog bumps casements years have rattled loose, hedgerow shadows rise like heads and hair of children rising from bed, their shadows thrown like storm clouds on bedroom walls, their voices coming awake like rain from those clouds, or the creaky arbor ladder your neighbor climbs to string Christmas lights in mock oranges that bloom so sweet in spring and hold this stormy turning still fresh set of last night’s stars. [End Page 101] W. S. Di Piero W. S. Di Piero is the author of many books of...

Verification of a Clear-Sky Mesoscale Simulation Using Satellite-Derived Surface Temperatures

Abstract A mesoscale simulation for Majorca Island is made using the Méso-NH model for a spring night, under a slack synoptic pressure gradient with weak general winds and clear skies. The circulations over and around the island are driven mostly by the locally generated flows, due to the topography and the land–sea thermal contrast. The verification of mesoscale simulations in clear-sky conditions is difficult, especially if the network of stations is not very dense. The main objective of this work is to try to verify the mesoscale simulation using measurements from automatic weather stations and satellite measurements. The model outputs are compared with the available instrumental data and the representativeness of the stations is discussed. Furthermore, complete two-dimensional comparisons are made between the radiative surface temperatures produced by the model and those processed from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite sensors. The high temporal resolution of the MSG images also allows comparison of the temporal evolutions of the surface temperature between satellite pixels and model grid cells. The procedure permits assessment of the closeness of the simulation to in situ and remote sensing observations. The results of the comparison show that the model is able to reproduce most of the observed patterns, such as intense local cooling or persistent outflows at the largest basins.

Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln.

Many Confederates believed that Abraham Lincoln himself was the sponsor of the Union army's heavy destruction of the South. With John Wilkes Booth as its agent, the Confederate Secret Service devised a plan of retribution--to seize President Lincoln, hold him hostage, and bring the war-weary North to capitulation. code word for this stratagem was Retribution. But when Booth was stymied, the Secret Service took another course. They conspired to bomb the White House during a conference of senior Union officials. But this plot also failed. Next, the Confederates devised for Confederate forces to abandon Richmond and Petersburg and to link up with General Joseph E. Johnston in the South before General Grant's forces were prepared to move. This plan was thwarted, however, when Grant took Richmond. By April 9, 1865, Lee was forced to surrender. Yet the willful, ardent Booth, smarting from the South's loss of the war, took decisive action at Ford's Theater during that spring night in 1865. Investigating the assassination from their perspective as career intelligence officers, William A. Tidwell and David Winfred Gaddy, joined by James O. Hall, one of the leading authorities on the assassination, find and follow the clues, interpret the clandestine evidence, and draw well-founded conclusions. They are the first to explore the Confederate Secret Service's link to the death of Lincoln. In Come Retribution, originally published in 1988 and now available again in a paperback edition, they offer startling insights and give a new direction to the well-known and often-told story of Lincoln and Booth. The facts presented and the inferences drawn are provocative, said Nathan Miller in Baltimore Sun. Every account of the Lincoln assassination published in the future will have to take account of the arguments presented in this book.

Perhaps the Ultimate Communications Challenge: Informing the Nation of a President's Condition

DENNIS O'LEARY, MD, had lectured in Room 101 many times. But on a spring night in Washington, DC, in 1981, he faced more than the usual inquiring George Washington University medical students. He faced the people and machines of what theWashington Postlater called a near-ugly press corps. It was just hours after President Reagan had been shot and the nation awaited the prognosis. In the midst of glaring television lights and blaring reporters, O'Leary, pressed into service as medical spokesperson, displayed grace under pressure. He explained the procedures being used on the President in lay terms. He held up his arm to show the site of an incision. He became a symbol of calm and reassurance. Perhaps no physician before or since has faced greater pressure in dealing with the news media. Now, six years after that historic event, O'Leary, who left his position as dean for clinical