How did those Britons who believed that free trade and the gold standard had effortlessly made Britain a world hegemon in 1885 lose the faith by 1931 when their Empire was the largest in the world?

This chapter demonstrates the routine prevalence of forced labor in Germany prior to World War II, its expansion during the early years of the fighting, the slow introduction of concentration camp slave labor to the German economy, and the reasons for its adoption by nearly every major German enterprise. Contrary to common belief, the chief motivation driving both processes was the shortage of German workers, thanks to conscription and wartime demand for output, not the cost of the forced and slave laborers. But the great growth of German industrial capacity during the war owed much to these labor inputs.

Let us optimistically assume that sooner or later a workable interstellar propulsion system will be found, and also be built and successfully tested in space. While this would be a great advance toward making interstellar travel possible, it nevertheless does not automatically follow that a voyage to the stars will in fact be attempted. There are a few other issues that must also be settled first: for example, a habitable exoplanet must be identified. It must be suitable for human colonization and ought to be a reachable distance away from Earth within a reasonable period of travel time. Second, engineers must provide a plausible space vehicle design architecture, and a spacecraft of that design must then be constructed, and tested successfully. Such a craft does not exist as yet, one among many reasons being that the specifications for it depend in turn upon the size and makeup of the likely boarding population. But both of those factors are still unknown. In addition, and perhaps most important of all, an unprecedented level of funding and resources must be allocated to the project.

In the early part of the 20th century, Hermann Minkowski developed a novel geometric approach to several questions in number theory. This approach developed into a field called the geometry of numbers and it had an influence on fields outside number theory as well, particularly functional analysis and the study of Banach spaces, and more recently on cryptography and discrete optimization. This chapter covers those aspects of the geometry of numbers that are most relevant for the second part of the book on optimization. Topics include the basic theory of lattices (including Minkowski’s convex body theorem), packing and covering radii, shortest and closest lattice vector problems (SVPs and CVPs), Dirichlet-Voronoi cells, Khinchine’s flatness theorem, and maximal lattice-free convex sets. Several topics like lattice basis reduction and SVP/CVP algorithms are presented without making a rationality assumption as is common in other expositions. This presents a slightly more general perspective on these topics that contains the rational setting as a special case.

How was the British imperial state transformed from an ancien régime in 1819 to a liberal one that depended upon a new science of government?

Ganciclovir is related to aciclovir but is more active against CMV. It is also more toxic. It causes profound myelosuppression when given with zidovudine; the two should not be given together, particularly during initial ganciclovir therapy.

The revival of the heliocentric model by Copernicus in the sixteenth century led to speculation about planets orbiting other stars. In a heliocentric model, stars must show annual parallax as the Earth moves around the Sun.

The argument here is that German industry and finance were preprogrammed to participate in the murder of the Jews by decisions made before the war that could not be reversed. Big business thus collaborated fully in the process, becoming “bagmen” and “fences” for stolen Jewish property and providers of goods and services to death camps.