Drawing Exercises

can you recommend me some books for sketching? i need a book that has lots of sketching exercises... monochromatic rendering.... anything that can me learn more about visual techniques.. tnx... kindly give me the name of the book and the author... and also the website where i can buy it online.. happy new year!!!!

What are good exercises to do daily to improve cartooning and drawing ? I love to draw Disney characters and also have a go at normal sketching. I want to try and do some bits each day. Are there any good exercises to do to improve.

What are the exercises for entrance exam in Interior Design? I want to study Interior Design as a BA, but most art and design institutes ask the candidates to do those practical exercises as part of their entrance exam. 1. What are you suppose to do in them? 2. Do I need to be very skilled in sketching or is a simple training good enough? Many thanks in advance!

how can i start my sketching by my own,please suggest me any beggeners lesson or any good site? i have a deep urge to learn drawing, sketching and paintings. but i believe that i am not very imaginative.also can you suggest me any exercises to improve my imagination power and creativity.your suggestions will be great help to me.thanks

Is it good sketch exercise to copy an image? Or is it better to freehand something clear out of my mind? Oh, and any tips on properly sketching? (Just want to make sure I'm doing this all right?)

Writing exercises to keep me from getting rusty? I've been writing sketch comedy for a while now, and since graduating college I've been without a group to write and perform with. I'm working on putting a new group together. In the meantime, though, I'm trying to write something every day I can, just to keep myself fresh. However, sometimes it's hard if I don't have an idea already in mind when I sit down to write. Are there any writing exercises or books with writing exercises that you'd recommend (comedy or otherwise) just to keep me from getting stale? Thanks!

Drawing speed and accuracy exercises for animators? I'm really starting to get into hand drawn animation after being heavily involved in CG, but find myself sketching either slower than I should be or producing not so up to par images per page (at least to my standard, which is pretty high). What do most animators do to really boost up the level of rendering and speed in their work?

different or new drawing exercises and fun things to do? i like sketching and drawing (as well as painting ect) but i was trying to think of some new things to do just to change it up a little.. like a collage, drawing with different colored pens, drawing on a different surface like sheet music or an old recipe card, maybe focussing on sketching one thing like eyes or hands.. just different ideas like that that wont be serious art work, just something different to do that is still art. (preferably pencil or pen work) thanks

Questions from Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech? Could you help me answer these questions: Three U.S geographical landmarks that Sal, Gram and Gramps Hiddle visited were _____, ____, and _____. Mr. Birkway and Mrs. Cadaver's mother is Mrs. _____. After the _____ second _____ sketching exercise, Sal and Ben drew Identical symbols. What were the three significant events during the story where the "Singing tree" was mentioned. You don't have to answer all of them, but please help!

How can i improve my art work... Read? ok im g & t art (gifted and talented) my art teacher said i need to work on my toning . i was wondering if anyone knows any like art exercises to improve me pencil sketches

What is the best diet/excercise tracking website? I want a free website that tracks my diet and exercise, and will help me gauge my success and set goals. There are so many websites out there and a I don't know where to start (I don't want a sketch website that will sell my information). Something user-friendly would be great. I don't need a diet plan, but diet and exercise tips would be great! Any favorites and why? Thanks!

I have great ideas for artwork but can't seem to put it onto paper? Sometimes when I have a good idea for a sketch, I put it on paper and it looks bad. But it looks so much better in my head. This doens't happen all the time, but are there any exercises I can do to help me put what's in my head directly onto the paper?

what are some good excercises for sketching/drawing ? i want to make my car/automobile drawing hobbies more perfected meaning i want to have more depth and details of effort into my projects. i cant say im the worst artist around but im not certainly the best either. just asking are there any techniques or exercises u can do to improve ur art skills with the pencil on paper. planning to take art classes in college next year so im going to learn these sooner or later but id rather learn sooner. thx for the answers hmm does it really matter if i want to be better in sketching does it have to be seperated by if i want to get into professional designing or just as an art? anyhow i thought i made it clear that its as a hobby that i want to be better at but i also do want to get more serious into art in college but thats something out of what im asking for. to mr.what: good advice on asking urself if that should be there. thatl help. i am practicing more on rendering as i have more of a basic understanding of proportions so im getting there. i am very good with shading but never really execute it on drawings of cars, just havent reached that level yet to make real definitions on them maybe i will in the future. thx for the tips. any other answers guys ?

Are there any useful websites for practice exercises in calculus? Can you please suggest for me useful websites for practising a lot of excersises in calculus as i have a final exam coming very soon. If the website has an answer key that would be a plus.Topics in which i need to practise in are : (limits,continuity,derivatives of all kinds,linear approximation,newton's value,max and minimum,increasing and decreasing functions,l'hopital's rule,anti derivatives,concavity,curve sketching,sums and sigma notation and area,definite integral,integration by substitution,area betwwen curves,volumes of disks, cylindrical shells,slicing and washers)

What should I buy when I go shopping? I'm into guitars, music, my dogs, exercise, movies, and I want to make my bedroom look more stylish. More like a college student's bedroom. I do lots of cool art with paint and sketching. What should I buy? and what stores to get them at?

Do you ever feel the need to exercise your words? I just worked out for a little bit, this is what I churned up: Devoured Delicious Completely Fictitious This isn't Auspicious You know what? Forget this. Does anyone else do little word sketches like this?

What's the music used in the Monty Python sketch were the patients have to do work and exercise?

I am so Confused with these How do oyu work them out to get the table? For each equation in exercises 25 to 28, identify the axis of symmetry, create a suitable table of values, and sketch the graph (including the axis of symmetry).Problem # 1. x^2-5x+3 Problem # 2. x^2+6x-2

exercising during pregnancy? i'm 7 weeks pregnant and i would like to find a site where there are sketches of exercises i can do. thanks

Vectors Question? In the following exercise, sketch each vector as a position vector and its magnitude. v = -6i – 2j

What exactly is a healthy diet? I am 23 and all my life i have struggled with my weight however i have managed to stay normal and i am not overweight according to the doctor .. neway i have always been told that eat right and exercise and i have been doing that.. but i dont seem to lose anymore weight i am sorta stuck so i was just wondering if someone could sketch out a diet plan for a day that is considered healthy eating and i will follow that and exercise and see if i can lose a bit more ... thanks

can anyone help solve a review sheet for pre calculus so i can study the notes for and exam in less then 5 day? I can email the pdf to you just email be at drbm3d at yahoo and i will forward the pdf for u if u cant read the text below Date: Nov 2009 Math 172 Review Test 3 Exercise 1. Solve the following equations (a) e2x = ex2𐀀8 (b) 23𐀀x = 5 (c) e2x + 9ex + 36 = 0 (d) ln x + ln(x + 1) = 7 (e) ln(x + 1) 𐀀 ln(x 𐀀 2) = ln x : Exercise 2. Suppose that 500 dollars are invested into an account that yields an annual interest of 5% compounded every six months. (a) Find the amount in the account after 6 months. (b) Find the amount in the account after 1 year. (c) Let f(t) be the amount in the account after t years. Find a formula for f(t): (d) How long will it take for the amount to double? Exercise 3. The value of a painting V measured in million of dollars can be modeled as V (t) = 10ekt ; where t represents the year, with t = 0 corresponding to the year 1990. In 2004, the painting is worth 65 million dollars. (a) Find the value of the constant k. (b) Estimate the value of the painting in the year 2010. Exercise 4. A population of rabbits start with 100 rabbits. Every 3 months the population doubles. Let P(t) denote the size of the population where t is measured in years. (a) Find P after 3, 6, 9, 12 months. (b) Find P(t). (c) How long does it take for the population to triple in size? 1 Exercise 5. Convert the following angles from radians to degrees = 3 2 ; 5 4 ; 3 8 : Exercise 6. Find the point on the unit circle corresponding to the angle = 2 3 ; 3 4 ;𐀀 4 3 ; 5 6 : Exercise 7. The point is on the terminal side of an angle in standard position. For the points below, determine the exact value of the six trigonometric functions (12; 16); (3;𐀀4) : Exercise 8. Find the values of the six trigonometric functions at given that (a) sec = 6 5 and tan < 0 (b) cos = 𐀀 2 5 and sin > 0 : Exercise 8. Sketch the graph of the functions below. Include two periods. (a) f(x) = 𐀀2 sin(x + 2) (b) f(x) = tan(x) (c) f(x) = cos2x 3 + 1 (d) f(x) = cot(x 𐀀 =4) : Exercise 9. Evaluate the expressions (a) arcsin 1 2 (b) arctanp3 (c) arccos 1 (d) sin 5 4 (e) cos 13 6 (f) tan𐀀 27 4 (g) arcsinsin 5 4 (g) arccoscos 5 4 : 2 Exercise 10. By sketching a right triangle, nd the exact value if the following expressions (a) sinarctan 3 4 (b) cosarcsin 5 13 (c) sin(arccos x) (d) cscarctan x px : this is the rapidshar like to download the pdf i need some real help so please if you can i will study it for dear life http://rapidshare.com/files/312514416/Review_3.pdf.html MD5: B3C629912905CB42A261A90104503D37

Do you think it is appropriate for students ages 13 -15 discuss topics like sexual assault in class? I ask because I am creating a unit plan. I want to use a short story by W.P. Kinsella called 'Dreamcatcher' as part of an exercise in character sketches. In the story, an attack is attempted on a 12 year old girl. She fights off her attacker and manages to get away. She is terrorized; the remainder of the story is about how her friends, family, and professionals help her overcome her trauma. What do YOU think? Too risque? Not an appropriate time and place for such a discussion? Please give me some input and guidance.

What exactly is healthy diet? I am 23 and all my life i have struggled with my weight however i have managed to stay normal and i am not overweight according to the doctor .. neway i have always been told that eat right and exercise and i have been doing that.. but i dont seem to lose anymore weight i am sorta stuck so i was just wondering if someone could sketch out a diet plan for a day that is considered healthy eating and i will follow that and exercise and see if i can lose a bit more ... thanks

I would like to know what a rough sketch of a basic training schedule looks like..? when do they get up, when do they eat, what do they do for exercise first, how far do they run.. that kind of thing. Thank you!

I am studying Linear Relationship at a college in Adelaide and I want to know an Answer for a question. Thanky? Hi There Exercise is, "Sketching Linear Graphs using the Y-intercept and Gradient". Equation — Formula is Y = Mx + c, Here is and Example from my TEXT BOOK C = Y-intercept (Sign and number after the X) M= Gradient ( sign and Number before the X) Example --- "2x + 3y = 6" Step 1- Rearrange into form Y = Mx + C subtract 2x from both sides. 3y = -2x + 6 Step 2- Divide both sides(I.E all terms)by 3 y = -2x/3 + 2 where c = 2 and m = -2/3 Step 3- List the Y-intercept and Gradient Y-intercept = 2 Gradient = 2/-3 Here is the equation I want to know 6x + 2y = 4 (you will need to rearrange this Equation) If you can, can you find the Y-intercept and Gradient for the equation just above, (6x + 2y = 4) If you can can you explain as you go. Thankyou

WILL THIS DIET PLAN MAKE ME LOSE WEIGHT QUICK!!!? Health is not important. I can endure hunger. All I need is to lose 8 pounds FAST (like, in a week or two) and keep them off all summer! So, how much weight will I lose each day on this little plan I've sketched out here? ______________________ Exercise + Diet Routine Breakfast: One banana (100) Lunch: Romaine Lettuce (15-30) + olive oil (60) Snack: Carrots (35-70) Dinner: Salad w/ iceberg lettuce, olives, sunflower seeds, soy cheese (total 60) and Italian dressing (70) Water: 64 ounces or more daily Total maximum calories: 390 ____________________________ Workout Routine: Jump rope for 30 minutes: 259 calories Sit ups: 100 Leg lifts: 25, no rest Jumping Jacks: 100 _____________________________ Supplement: One multivitamin. ---------------------------------------------------- DONT TELL ME NOT TO DO IT. I know it's not healthy. I know I'll get dizzy. I know I'll feel weak. I'ts a short term thing. I JUST NEED TO GET THE FREAKING WEIGHT OFF NOW! How much will I lose? And if I don't work out, how much?

hey this one is sort of easy i got c is that right? 1.A rectangle is twice as long as it is wide. If both its dimensions are increased by 4 m, its area is increased by 88 m2. Make a sketch as in Oral Exercise 1. Find the dimensions of the original rectangle. A. 6 m wide, 12 m long B. 8 m wide, 16 m long C. 10 m wide, 20 m long D. 12 m wide, 24 m long

Question for geometry homework? In exercises 1-3, Let A,B,C and D be four points in a plane. Tell whether the given condition is sufficient to conclude that AB+BC+CD=AD. Justify your answer by using the Segment Addition Postulate or by sketching a counterexample. 1.) B is between A and C and B is between A and D 2.) B is between A and D and C is between B and D. 3.) B and C are both between A and D Can someone please explain this to me? You don't have to solve it, just explain how to do it because I don't really understand the question... Thanks!

S.O.S Math help!? 10 points to you if you help. A rectangle is twice as long as it is wide. If both its dimensions are increased by 4 m, its area is increased by 88 m2. Make a sketch as in Oral Exercise 1. Find the dimensions of the original rectangle. a 6 m wide, 12 m long b 8 m wide, 16 m long c 10 m wide, 20 m long d 12 m wide, 24 m long

Problems while doing a split? I've been trying stretching exercises to achieve a split but whenerver I try doing a lounge or trying a full split stretch my rear leg turns inwards, forming a crooked line like in this sketch wannabe(seen from above): I <----front leg o <----head \ <----rear leg I find it extremely hard to form a "straight line", is there a way to solve this or is it actually something normal?

Priorities and time management? I want to do the following: 1. Sleep on time, wake up on time 2. exercise regularly. 3. Be happy - (am not very happy) 4. Do some personal work regularly like make my own projects, learn somethings, do some sketching. 5. And do my office work All I manage to is work and more work. It never gets done enough. Our bosses make project plans. They involve us but no matter what the work never goes as per plan. I think because we are in software creation and always working on something new we will always have surprises in our work. Net result everyone is continuously slipping in their schedule. I feel like a donkey all the time. Everyone stays late and slogs a lot. Has anyone ever successfully solved this problem. How? Software programming is all about solving problems. Anyone ever solve this one problem?

Help Me With Autodesk Inventor Professional 2008? No one will help me, my teacher is always too busy and i'm behind. Please help me! I basically need to do this with Autodesk Inventor Professional 2008: *Note* You don't need to help me with the questions. I just need the Autodesk Inventor Professional 2008 file with the requirements. Please? Or at least teach me it through email? Thanks. Here: http://morrayeclass.com/IED/Project141PuzzleDesignChallenge.htm Project 1.4.1 – Puzzle Design Challenge Purpose Have you ever looked at a product that has been well-designed? Do you find yourself asking questions, such as, “How did the designer think of that idea?” or “What is involved in the creation of that product?” The more you study and learn about design and how designers create items, you begin to learn certain skills and knowledge that you can only acquire through experience. Design challenges provide opportunities to apply skills and knowledge in unique and creative ways. Taking an idea you have and transferring it from a concept to a sketch, to working drawings, to models, and then to a working prototype is exciting and fun. It also entails several steps. When you are a one-person design and build team, the task of effective communication is rather simple. However, what happens when you must communicate your ideas to others, or the responsibility for building a team’s solution falls on someone else’s shoulders? This increases the level of responsibility significantly and requires the development of a complete set of design documentation in order to communicate effectively. Equipment •Engineer’s notebook •Number 2 Pencil •27 – ¾ in. hardwood cubes •Scotch or masking tape •27 – interlocking plastic centimeter cubes(optional) •Digital camera •Paper towels •Isometric grid paper •Markers and Colored pencils •Wood glue •Sandwich size Ziploc® bag for storage •220 abrasive paper •Computer with 3D CAD solid modeling software Procedure This project will provide you the opportunity to exercise your creativity and develop your sketching and modeling skills, as well as your ability to use the computer as an efficient communication tool. What you have learned throughout Unit 1 – Design Process will be applied to this project. The activities that you have completed throughout the lessons of Unit One will provide you with the information, components, and requirements needed to complete this project. Requirements 1.Study the Puzzle Cube Design Brief located on the following page. 2.Brainstorm and sketch on isometric grid paper possible puzzle part combinations for your cube using Activity 1.4.2 Brainstorming Possible Combinations. 3.Neatly sketch and color code your five parts used in the cube solution and show how they fit in the isometric view of the cube on isometric grid paper. See your teacher for an example. You will need a total of two solutions with ten different parts. 4.Choose your best option from the two solutions. 5.Create the five parts to your cube using 3-D modeling software. Color the parts the same color combination used in the sketching phase of your project. 6.Create multiview drawings for each of the five parts using 3-D modeling software and print out using a drawing sheet. 7.Fabricate your five parts using the 27 cubes and glue. Color using markers or colored pencils and assemble your cube. 8.Assemble your cube using 3-D modeling software and print out the completed cube on a drawing sheet. Puzzle Design Challenge Brief Client:Fine Office Furniture, Inc. Target Consumer:Ages 3+ Designer: _____________________________________ Problem Statement: A local office furniture manufacturing company throws away tens of thousands of scrap ¾” hardwood cubes that result from its furniture construction processes. The material is expensive, and the scrap represents a sizeable loss of profit. Design Statement: Fine Office Furniture, Inc. would like to return value to its waste product by using it as the raw material for desktop novelty items that will be sold on the showroom floor. Design, build, test, document, and present a three-dimensional puzzle system that is made from the scrap hardwood cubes. The puzzle system must provide an appropriate degree of challenge to a person who is three years of age or older. Constraints: 1.The puzzle must be fabricated from 27, ¾” hardwood cubes. 2.The puzzle system must contain exactly five puzzle pieces. 3.Each individual puzzle piece must consist of at least three, but no more than six hardwood cubes that are permanently attached to each other. 4.No two puzzle pieces can be the same. 5.The five puzzle pieces must assemble to form a 2 ¼” cube. 6.Some puzzle parts should interlock. Conclusion 1.Why is it important to model an idea before making a final prototype? 2.Based on your experiences during the completion of the Puzzle Design Challenge, what is meant when someone says, “I us

The Purpose of Contour Drawings? Sometimes my art teacher will make us draw 5-10 minute quick sketches of figures or portrits of our clssmates. And I was wondering what the purpose is. She says it's good prcatice but I don't get how. It's not like you get a lot of detail when you draw a 10 mintues sketch of someone's face. I enjoy doing these exercises but I was wondering how these help strengthen your portrait drawing skills (or just your drawing skills in general)?

PLease provide a short explanation with each answer of my C++ program....? Assuming Point is a class type with a public copy constructor, iden¬tify each use of the copy constructor in this program fragment: Point global; Point foo_bar(Point arg) { Point local = arg; Point *heap = new Point(global); *heap = local; Point pa[ 4 ] = { local, *heap }; return *heap; ______________________________... Exercise 13.10: Define an Employee class that contains the employee's name and a unique employee identifier. Give the class a default constructor and a constructor that takes a string representing the employee's name. If the class needs a copy construc¬tor or assignment operator, implement those functions as well. ______________________________... Among the fundamental operations a pointer supports are dereference and arrow. We can give our class these operations as follows: class ScreenPtr { public: // constructor and copy control members as before Screen &operator*() { return *ptr->sp; } Screen *operator->() { return ptr->sp; } const Screen &operator*() const { return *ptr->sp; } const Screen *operator->() const { return ptr->sp; } private: ScrPtr *ptr; // points to use-counted ScrPtrclass Exercise 14.20: In our sketch for the ScreenPtr class, we declared but did not define the assignment operator. Implement the ScreenPtr assignment operator. ______________________________... Exercise 14.21: Define a class that holds a pointer to a ScreenPtr. Define the over¬loaded arrow operator for that class. ______________________________... Exercise 15.4: A library has different kinds of materials that it lends out—books, CDs, DVDs, and so forth. Each of the different kinds of lending material has different check-in, check-out, and overdue rules. The following class defines a base class that we might use for this application. Identify which functions are likely to be defined as virtual and which, if any, are likely to be common among all lending materials. (Note: we assume that LibMember is a class representing a customer of the library, and Date is a class representing a calendar day of a particular year.) class Library { public: bool check_out(const LibMemberk); bool check_in (const LibMember&); bool is_late(const Date& today); double apply_fine(); ostream& print(ostream& = cout); Date due_date() const; Date date_borrowed() const; string title 0 const; const LibMember& member() const; ______________________________... Exercise 15.8: Given the following classes, explain each print function: struct base { string name () { return basenatne; } virtual void print(ostream &os) { os « basename; } private: string basename; }; struct derived { void printO { print (ostream &os) ; os « " " « mem; } private: int mem; }; If there is a problem in this code, how would you fix it? ______________________________... Exercise 15.13: Given the following classes, list all the ways a member function in Cl might access the static members of ConcreteBase. List all the ways an object of type C2 might access those members. struct ConcreteBase { static std::size_t object_count(); protected: static std::size_t obj_count; }; struct Cl : public ConcreteBase { /* . . .*/}; struct C2 : public ConcreteBase { /* ...*/}; ______________________________... Exercise 15.25: Assume Derived inherits from Base and that Base defines each of the following functions as virtual. Assuming Derived intends to define its own ver¬sion of the virtual, determine which declarations in Derived are in error and specify what's wrong. (a)Base* Base::copy(Base*); Base* Derived::copy(Derived*); (b)Base* Base::copy(Base*) ; Derived* Derived::copy(Base*) ; (c)ostreamk Base::print(int, ostream&=cout); ostream& Derived::print(int, ostream&); (d)void Base::eval() const; void Derived::eval();

Please give me short note of my C++ program...? Problems are taken from C++ Primer book -Ensure you can complete prior to accepting and emailing me. -If you do not provide your price to do this I will not respond… -I require this completed in 1 week. Exercise 13.3: Assuming Point is a class type with a public copy constructor, iden¬tify each use of the copy constructor in this program fragment: Point global; Point foo_bar(Point arg) { Point local = arg; Point *heap = new Point(global); *heap = local; Point pa[ 4 ] = { local, *heap }; return *heap; _____________________________________________________ Exercise 13.10: Define an Employee class that contains the employee's name and a unique employee identifier. Give the class a default constructor and a constructor that takes a string representing the employee's name. If the class needs a copy construc¬tor or assignment operator, implement those functions as well. _____________________________________________________ Among the fundamental operations a pointer supports are dereference and arrow. We can give our class these operations as follows: class ScreenPtr { public: // constructor and copy control members as before Screen &operator*() { return *ptr->sp; } Screen *operator->() { return ptr->sp; } const Screen &operator*() const { return *ptr->sp; } const Screen *operator->() const { return ptr->sp; } private: ScrPtr *ptr; // points to use-counted ScrPtrclass Exercise 14.20: In our sketch for the ScreenPtr class, we declared but did not define the assignment operator. Implement the ScreenPtr assignment operator. _____________________________________________________ Exercise 14.21: Define a class that holds a pointer to a ScreenPtr. Define the over¬loaded arrow operator for that class. _____________________________________________________ Exercise 15.4: A library has different kinds of materials that it lends out—books, CDs, DVDs, and so forth. Each of the different kinds of lending material has different check-in, check-out, and overdue rules. The following class defines a base class that we might use for this application. Identify which functions are likely to be defined as virtual and which, if any, are likely to be common among all lending materials. (Note: we assume that LibMember is a class representing a customer of the library, and Date is a class representing a calendar day of a particular year.) class Library { public: bool check_out(const LibMemberk); bool check_in (const LibMember&); bool is_late(const Date& today); double apply_fine(); ostream& print(ostream& = cout); Date due_date() const; Date date_borrowed() const; string title 0 const; const LibMember& member() const; _____________________________________________________ Exercise 15.8: Given the following classes, explain each print function: struct base { string name () { return basenatne; } virtual void print(ostream &os) { os « basename; } private: string basename; }; struct derived { void printO { print (ostream &os) ; os « " " « mem; } private: int mem; }; If there is a problem in this code, how would you fix it? _____________________________________________________ Exercise 15.13: Given the following classes, list all the ways a member function in Cl might access the static members of ConcreteBase. List all the ways an object of type C2 might access those members. struct ConcreteBase { static std::size_t object_count(); protected: static std::size_t obj_count; }; struct Cl : public ConcreteBase { /* . . .*/}; struct C2 : public ConcreteBase { /* ...*/}; _____________________________________________________ Exercise 15.25: Assume Derived inherits from Base and that Base defines each of the following functions as virtual. Assuming Derived intends to define its own ver¬sion of the virtual, determine which declarations in Derived are in error and specify what's wrong. (a)Base* Base::copy(Base*); Base* Derived::copy(Derived*); (b)Base* Base::copy(Base*) ; Derived* Derived::copy(Base*) ; (c)ostreamk Base::print(int, ostream&=cout); ostream& Derived::print(int, ostream&); (d)void Base::eval() const; void Derived::eval();

Guess my sun, moon, rising, n midheaven signs? Hints: Sun= Earth Moon= Air Rising= Earth Midheaven= Water I am known as: Helpful, nice, caring, lucky, curious, moody(a little), emotional, disorganized, intelligent, and artistic! Hobbies: Helping others, hanging out with friends, music, drawing, learning new things, sketching, making new things, painting, movies, watching sports, n exercising! @Zombie- U r rite on 1 thing!

HELP!! OMG HELP HELP!!! math. A line with slope 3/2 that pases through the point (-2,0)??? omggg helpp? Okay HELPP PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i dont get this at all!! Its says For exercises 1-4, write an equation and sketch a graph for the line taht meets the given conditions. 1. A line with slope 3.5 and y-intercept (0,4) - i think the equation is: y=12/2x+4 yes? now these i need help!! 2. A line with slope 3/2 that passes through the point (-2,0) y= ?????? 3. A line that passes through the points (2,7) and (6,15) y=?????? 4. A line that passes through the points (2,1) and (6,9) y=?????? arghhh omg ill giev you like as many stars as i can just please helpp meee and i need a graph!!! :(

history question please help? What Renaissance painting technique creates the illusion of depth? a. Perspective b. The use of mirrors c. Oil paints d. 3-D rendering How long did cleaning of the Sistine Chapel take? a. 3 months b. 40 years c. 20 years d. 1 year Why did the Renaissance happen in northern Italy? a. Italy had many artists and marble quarries. b. Increased trade helped the region move away from the feudal system, creating wealth and political stability. c. In Italy, the Roman Catholic Church was gaining power. d. International trade routes were blocked. Why did humnaists believe that rhetoric was an important skill? a. They wanted their scholars to be able to create illustrations that would convince others to follow a path of virtue and wisdom. b. They believed that their scholars should know how to spell properly. c. They valued poetry. d. They wanted their scholars to convince others to follow a path of virtue and wisdom. What activity helped Leonardo document his ideas? a. Sketches b. Extensive diaries c. Photographs d. Exercise

Please answer me? Hi my wife recently delivered a baby. At the time of pregnancy she got black sketches on her back and stomach How to reduce the sketches. And her belly is very loose now how to retain it please suggest. Any medicine or exercises

Help, I cant draw anymore? So I used to study art and design, I could draw reasonably well but I wasn't amazing. Then I went to university to study graphic design and spent three years on a computer and I cant draw anymore. I have tried all the exercises i can think of and I try to make rough sketches to get me back in the mood but I see them next to work I used to be able to do and what others are capable of and I feel useless. In particular with still life work, my objects look so flat and badly shaded. Unfortunately I cannot afford tuition and learning out of books has never worked so well for me, I learn by being shown and by doing practical things. Drawing used to be such a big part of me and I get so upset and frustrated every-time I try. I do not want to take a break, I've had three years break, thats long enough! I don't expect to be amazing but I would like to see some improvement which I am not at the moment. Many thanks.

PRC Study? I'm currently in Beijing, living in the Chaoyang district. I started the May 7th program at ACLS, but the management is terrible. The teachers are ok, but I studied traditional at college and when I told them that's why I was having a bit of difficulty, they just kind of scoffed at me. But, whatever. I was ready to move on. But they ignore my questions, forces the teacher to move at this ridiculous pace that no one can keep up with, and basically, the books are crap. Utter crap. We do repetition exercises that end up being no help at all. Anyways, I was thinking of switching schools to PRC Study Academy since they appear to be the same price. I'm switching homestays too, cause my homestay family was terrible. Which is another rant. But anyways, I'm kind of suspicious cause it seems pretty sketch and so I was wondering if any of you guys have had any experience. Thanks. Jason Ong, I am very, very disappointed in you and your company. I'm NOT falling for this again. Isn't it just a little bit suspicious that you signed up just yesterday and the ONLY question you answered was in response to my anger at ACLS. I'm saying this now for everyone's benefit. ACLS is a school of Worldlinkedu. That's ok. But you guys are pretending to be students and saying false stuff about your school that gives prospective students false hope and expectations. Please stop. BLCU is DEFINITELY a better school than ACLS and if it wasn't for the fact that my schedule didn't work out, I would be attending there. Please just stop lying to your customers. It's really pissing me off. Hardly anybody at that school applauds its amazing faculty and teachers. Trust me, I know what I'm talking about, cause I'm actually a student there. Do you want my name so you can check the records? Jesus christ. Jason Ong, please, people aren't stupid. Don't put your company into a ditch any further. Right now, it's just getting a tad obvious what you're trying to do. I'm sorry I called you out, but let's not go crying wolf. Also, I'm sorry but I'm just getting really kind of pissed off about this. I'm glad you like to point fingers, but WHY is it that the only post you made deals with ACLS when I wasn't even asking ABOUT ACLS? If you aren't one of the MANY puppets set up by Worldlink/ACLS, fine, good for you. But your answer did not even remotely tie into my question, and so one has to really wonder. Whatever. I'm just getting really sick of all the disingenuous behavior I've encountered with so many people so far.

Hydroxycut... anyone used it? My brother has been going on and on about this stuff lately. He's about 30 pounds overweight but he exercises quite a bit and isn't happy that he's not losing weight. He wants to start taking it and pills like that kind of sketch me out so I want some info to give to him. Does it work? Side effects... I've read that it makes you jittery and nauseous. Does this happen to most people, or only the ones who don't exercise to compensate for the energy boost given by the caffeine? (In other words, if you use it like you're supposed to with proper exercise, will you still feel the side effects?) How long does a bottle last and how long is it recommended to be taken for? If he continues to eat healthy will he keep the weight off when he stops taking them? If you've used it, info and answers would really be appreciated. He's 18, I don't want him to take something that will screw his body up. Philip... interesting theory but then how do they do the mens before/after pictures? lol

My parents don't seem to listen, and I'm depressed? Please read this before answering. I'm a 16-year-old, and I definately believe that I have depression. I always feel stressed when there isn't anything to stress about, I keep forgetting every little thing, I just want to sleep all the time and don't feel rested when I wake up, I can't seem to feel happy other than laughing when something funny happens, I'm easily irritated when other people try to talk to me or call me, and I don't enjoy doing anything any more (even hanging out with my friends who I love dearly). I feel like my life is really empty right now because I have an impossible time trying to focus on even school work or my writing, and I have no inspiration to do anything AT ALL. I also have a hard time thinking anything good about myself, which I used to be able to do. I often have random crying spells too. However, I AM NOT suicidal and do not want to be directed to an emergency hot line or anything like that. Suicide is something I never, ever see myself doing. I am also homeschooled, so please don't direct me to a school counselor, which I have seen many people say to questions like these. I have taken online quizzes (which are not always accurate, I know), and they all say that I have moderate to severe depression and beg me to get help. I've talked to both my parents, but my Dad says that: 1. It may be caused by lack of exercise (I'm not overweight- actually very skinny, but I barely get exercise in) since he knew that even he was much happier when he was more active. Even if this is the problem, no one in my family does anything to help me exercise or get fresh air when I ask/plead for it. My Mom makes excuses not to take me to the gym or pool, my Dad is always working, and I'm not allowed to go out by myself. I can not drive yet. 2. He says that what I'm feeling also sounds like what a lot of extremely gifted artistic types go through. I do love writing/sketching, but this answer I am absolutely not satisfied with. My IQ is 127, but I've never found myself able to do anything special that someone else around me couldn't do much better. This may just be the depression talking, but it's the way I feel. My Mom never gives me much of a response, and although she tries to seem genuine, she doesn't appear to take it very seriously. My Mom isn't adamant about it, but by the way she complains about her life and always finds a way to ignore the meaning of what I'm really talking about and start talking about what she's doing, it's not hard to tell that she's a bit narcistic. Don't get me wrong. I'm not some brooding teenager who hates my life and my parents. I know I have a good life, but I just can't enjoy it at all. I love my parents dearly also, but they don't seem to be listening. Please tell me what I should do. I feel utterly trapped, and I don't know what else to do. I don't need a pep talk (those never work any more, unfortunately), I just need to be guided. Please. Also- I'm not sure if this even affects anything, but- --I don't do drugs. --I don't use alcohol. --I am not, nor have I ever been, sexually active. I don't eat a lot of sugar. I probably eat the most vegetables and fruit out of anyone else in my family. Yes, I am a Christian for those wondering, and I do need to trust God more. When I trust Him, it always relaxes me. Thanks to all of you who have tried to help so far. Your answers have been great.

What can I do to have better control of my temper? It is really starting to affect my day to day life.? What are some exercises that will help me lighten up? Like today in class...my teacher made me go last in presenting my sketches, and when it was finally my turn (with only 20 minutes left in the class), she gave me two comments and blew me off. Where as the other students took up about 20 minutes to show and explain their work. A few of the other students didn't even have their sketches, and she sat there and helped them come up with ideas. I was so pissed. I'm going to schedule an appointment with her and I ask that you all pray that I approach her in a humble manner, but meanwhile guys...I get so pissed at everything and I don't understand why. What can I do? I'm 24 years old and I don't even have friends. I'm serious about my life and what I do, but how come people won't let me be me? I'm not rude or anything...I just don't get it. I'm having a hard time trying to build a balance between lightening up to have fun and not let people take advantage of me. I just don't get it. What can I do to help better control my temper? Sorry for the bad grammar. Yoga! That sounds like a great idea. Thank you Sinister.

statistics plz helppppppppppppppppp? How heavy a load (pounds) is needed to pull apart pieces of Douglas fir 4 inches long and 1.5 inches square? Here are data from students doing a laboratory exercise: 33,190 31,860 32,590 26,520 33,280 32,320 33,020 32,030 30,460 32,700 23,040 30,930 32,720 33,650 32,340 24,050 30,170 31,300 28,730 31,920 Data Set We are willing to regard the wood pieces prepared for the lab session as an SRS of all similar pieces of Douglas fir. Engineers also commonly assume that characteristics of materials vary Normally. 1. After sketching a graph, which of the following is correct? A. The distribution is exactly Normal. B. We cannot say whether the data appear to follow a Normal distribution because a stemplot cannot be sketched. C. The distribution seems to be quite close to Normal. D. The distribution doesn't seem to be Normal because all the values are positive. Use a 98% confidence to estimate the mean percent change in the population. A. -4.468 to -2.504 B. -4.435 to -2.739 C. -4.526 to -2.648 D. -3.017 to -1.846 thnx in advance, any help would be appreciated

Help with biology questions? 1. Plasma is an example of A intracellular fluid. B extracellular fluid. C lymph. D interstitial fluid. 2. Open circulatory systems A are characteristic of mammals. B do not have a muscular pump. C have low pressure. D have specialised transporting fluid and vessels. 3. All arteries A have valves to prevent the back flow of blood. B carry oxygenated blood. C have thick muscular walls. D are connected to ventricles. 4. All white blood cells A are produced in the bone marrow. B produce antibodies to provide immunity. C are less numerous and smaller than red blood cells. D are able to move. 5. In autumn, the leaves of deciduous trees change colour and eventually fall. The change in colour is due to the movement of nutrients out of the leaves for storage. This involves A xylem and phloem. B only the xylem. C only the phloem. D diffusion. 6. Insects have an open circulatory system, yet in flight they may have a very high rate of energy use. Explain how highly active insects can function with an open circulatory system. 7. A human red blood cell is specialised for oxygen transport and exchange. When mature, it does not contain a nucleus. The human body needs to make about 2 million new red blood cells every minute. (a) Sketch a red blood cell. (b) Explain how its structure and shape facilitate oxygen exchange. (c) What advantages and disadvantages might there be in a red blood cell not having a nucleus? (d) How large is a red blood cell compared to the smallest blood vessels? Suggest how this might be an advantage. 9.A common problem for passengers on a long plane trip is that, upon arrival, their feet have become so swollen that they will not fit into their shoes. Airlines recommend exercises to help reduce this problem. (a) Explain what causes feet to swell. (b) How could exercise help? (c) Deep vein thrombosis (DVT, also known as economy class syndrome) is of major concern to long-distance travellers. Explain why clots are likely to form and what precautions and measures could be taken to prevent this. 10. The treatment of snake bite has changed greatly since the days of cutting open the bite, sucking blood and applying a tight tourniquet. Now the recommended first aid treatment is to apply pressure to the bitten area with a fairly tight bandage, immobilise the bitten body part (usually a leg or arm), and transport the victim quickly for further medical treatment. (a) Suggest some problems that could arise from the old method of treatment. (b) Explain, from a cardiovascular point of view, the reasons for using the pressure–immobilisation method. 11. Why do the leaves of fresh vegetables, such as lettuce and celery, wilt after being picked? Suggest three ways of reducing wilting. 12. Celery curls are an attractive way of serving celery. They are made by taking sections of celery stalk, making several lengthwise cuts in one end and submerging them in cold water. (a) What are ‘celery strings’? (b) Explain what causes the celery ends to curl. 13. (a) Ringbarking was a common method of killing trees when Australia was first settled. Explain how the tree is killed. (b) Unintentional ring barking is more common nowadays. Explain how this occurs and how it can be treated. Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance =]

I really don't understand these questions so please help me.? In Exercises 45,47,49,and 51, find the general form of the equation of the line that passes through the points. Use a graphing utility to sketch the line. 45. (-8,1), (-8,7) 47. (2, 1/2), (1/2, 5/4) 49. (-1/10, -3/5), (9/10, -9/5) 51. (1, 0.6), (-2, -0.6) In Exercises 55 and 57, write an equation of the line that passes through the points. 55. x-intercept: (2,0) y-intercept: (0,3) 57. x-intercept: (-1/6,0) y-intercept: (0,-2/3)

What is the standard free energy change for this cell? The following two half-reactions are used in a voltaic cell. A strip of silver metal is placed in a 1 M solution of silver nitrate, and a strip of nickel metal is placed in a 1 M solution of nickel nitrate. The metal strips are connected by a wire, and the solutions are connected by a salt bridge. Draw a sketch of the cell on a piece of paper and use this information for the exercises on this page. Ag+ + e– → Ag E°red = + 0.80V Ni2+ + 2e– →Ni E°red = −0.25V

Do you think this will convince my parents to let me unschool? ##I'd like to hear some feedback. I've had a week back at school after the summer holidays and already I'm hating it. I'm starting 5th Form in New Zealand, if that helps.### These are the alternatives presented to me at school. I could stay in the mainstream classes and bore myself to death with topics I've covered a thousand times. Or, I could go back to the extension classes and let my self esteem lower because I'm at the bottom of the class. Or I could leave and unschool myself. I plan to convince you to let me leave school using common sense and logic, instead of gut feelings and false ideas absorped from society. I will present to you examples from my own life where I've taken an unschooling approach and how it has worked for me. I will show examples of ways school has not worked for me. And as a last resort, I could try to explain to you how school makes me feel. Firstly, you'll want to know how well I'll learn outside of school. After all, you know I don't have much motivation for homework as it is. How will I do anything if there is nobody to tell me to? To answer your question, look at my computer. I built that, using skills I've learned without aid from teachers. I installed the operating system, set up the media server, and now I'm looking into compiling my own system from source code. It is an excellent example of what I can learn when it is something I can find interesting. That's just one example. But almost anything else works in the same way if the tools I need are available. I learned to use Photoshop to quite an advanced level, and I started on the track to making music but the tools I needed weren't freely available. I do have the capacity to learn when what I need is there. I've started learning Python, because I have all the tools I need. I haven't started sewing because I can't thread my machine properly, so that tool isn't avaiable to me right now. If this plan is to work, we are all going to want me to learn at least as much as I would in school. I am confident that I will. I read 3 new books in the summer holidays. It doesn't sound like much, but it's as many as I read in a whole year of studying English. I already know more than they will teach me this year at school. In maths I have covered most of the stuff already. I'm pretty much doing what I did last year, with slightly different tests at the end. I can do some tests from previous years to prove it to you if you really want. There will no doubt be some gaps in my knowledge, but I can cover those instead of waiting for a class of individual, different people to slowly get to the subject I need to work on, and then move on before I've made some proper progress. I can work on what I need to work on, rather than what the rest of the class does. This applies to all subjects: 1.I can work on some interesting essays, static images and creative writing for English, rather than overanalysing a crap book. 2.I can paint without pressure for art, instead of being made to feel what I do isn't good enough. 3.I can keep working on freehand sketching for Graphics, instead of moving on to other things that I'm already good at. 4.I can study events in more recent history, that are having a very direct effect on what is going on now, rather than the relatively distant events we are studying now. 5.Physics is a tricky one. Most of the stuff is new, but I can take exams from previous years to see what I can already do, and then work on what I need to know. As well as these subjects being covered thoroughly, I will have a flexible timetable that will allow me to go to university lectures, read books, learn some code, sew, get more exercise and meet new people. Going to Toastmasters is a good idea I've shown you how I can be self motivated, but you probably still want to impose some new rules. I will need some structure, after all. I have come up with a list of new rules I am willing to abide by if you let me unschool. 1.2 hours of computer time most days, 3 hours twice a week. If there's something I really want to read I can print it out. 2.No pocket money unless I earn it. I feel bad for getting so much money for doing nothing, it's not fair. 3.I keep my workspaces organized. None of this will work if I live in a mess like I do now. 4.You can look at any work I do, and assign extra work on things you think I need to focus on. 5.I get up at 7 every day, doing stuff by 9. No sleeping in on weekends, no staying up late except under special circumstances. A regular sleep pattern will help me greatly. 6.I do regular exercise. I'm not as fit as I should be right now. 7.I go out every day. That's one benefit of school, it gets me outside. 8.If I do not meet these standards, I go back to school. That will be very good motivation Obviously these rules are negotiable. I'm doing this because I want to improve my life. I can't do that if 6 hours of my day is wasted at school, and the rest is spent trying t Please explain. And why would I work an 8 hour day job doing something I don't like? I'm not exactly planning to do that. My dad did, and he got quite a lot of money, but he wasn't happy. He's quit his job, and is now studying history at university. He's been a lot better since then, but I don't want to wait until I'm 50 to be free. I want to study something interesting, and get a job I enjoy. Not go straight into business like my dad did.

So much to do ... so little time? I want to do a lot of things. like practice painting and sketching as much as I can since I am planning to get a degree in fine arts (some day) , craft work (just for fun), making fashion designing portfolios (i just feel so passionately about fashion designing), self studying Social Psychology (planning to get a Master's degree in that too) , developing healthy eating habits, incorporating regular exercise in my routine, be an early riser, be more inclined towards my religion, lose weight (I can save that for later when I have had a baby) etc... the thing is I can't get my mind off each of them... I mean all of them seem equally important to me right now ... I feel like the world is going to end if I skip any one of these ... and I really really want to get into doing each of the things I mentioned ... but I can't seem to be able to prioritize them ... it's really really overwhelming for me to take out the list of the things I want to do and go through it prioritizing... I am stuck ... so any advice? I'm married by the way ... and live with my inlaws too and I'm a housewife ...

Geometry Help Please...?!? I Need Help With My Geometry Homework Which Is Due Tomorrow. I'm Not Very Good At It. So Please Help. Here Are My Problems: In Exercises 8-11, use the following information. S is between T and V. R is between S and T. T is between R and Q. QV = 18, QT = 6, and TR = RS = SV. Make a sketch and answer the following. 8. Find RS. 9. Find QS. 10. Find TS. 11. Find TV. Please Help Quickly. +5 Stars for all answers.

Lost Artist, help required...? I trained at college for 4yrs in fine art, specifically life drawing and painting. I was actually doing really well for a long time. However, for the past 4yrs I've been working a dead end office job and my art has fallen behind as a result. I haven't painted or even drawn for over 3years now and just cant seem to get anything done when I try to. Every time I get my sketch pad out my hand goes dead and my talent leaves me with a blank page or just some very useless doodles. Does anyone know of any techniques or exercises that will help me get back into the swing of things? Or do I simply need to give myself a good kick up the butt, stop moaning and just get creating! lol Any help... suggestions... most welcome! (" ,)

what should my job be when im older?:)? im 15 atm and i hate school i can do mathc or science or nothing. im really creative though and im good at art . everyone says my paintings look real. i luv graffiti and painting and sketching and stuff. i hate anything you have to learn like history and stuff. i wil never study school books for as long as i live.! i also love sports and fitness!! i know alot about nutrition, exercise and muscles. im thinking i would like a job to do with are, fitness or beauty, i love doing hair and make up and fashion. people always tell me i could be a model if i wanted but i dont want to look like one of those skinny weak models becaus ei would perfer eat and do weights and stuff! so what do you think i could be when im older?

Tips on self-confidence? Okay, many people tell me that I need to have self-confidence and I accept that fact. I really want to improve myself. But the thing is, I dunno HOW! I don't know, I am confused. I am 16 if it helps. I posted a question of rate-me on yahoo, the average of girls that rated me was 7 and the average of guys that rated me was 9..but then again, they said I need to have self-confidence. Some other things about me (if they help to suggest): I am an anime-freak, I LOVE watching animes. I am also a health freak. I take good care of myself, exercise regularly and eat a good diet. I concentrate on my natural looks than to put make-up. I am the kind of person who doesn't have many friends, but the friends I have are very very VERY close to me. I do talk to other people but I am very shy. My smile looks fake (I dunno why) and I am not very popular in the school. I am just normal. I am more of a day dreamer and I love sketching and painting. I am a little above average at studies. I am a lazy ass :p Thanks in advance ^_^

How deal with frustration once you've been diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome on both hands? Doctor advised me to get some rest and wear a splint for over a month. During this time am not allowed to overexhaust both hands. As we speak, it's taking me forever to comple this sentence!!!! This sickness is not really of a big deal compared to what other people are experiencing. But as an artist it's one of most painful news you would ever hear. Honestly, it's quite depressing when you cannot as much as draw or sketch. How do you cope with the frustration? Will I have to suffer this for a long time? Is it something recurring? I honestly do not need pity. I'm pretty sure it's one of those phases I'll eventually get over but I just want advices on how to deal with it. I just need tricks or exercises to cope up with this health issue.

Can someone help me with my Algebra 2 homework? PLEASE? Consider the system of equations: 3x + 2y + z =10 x + y – 2z = 4 -2x + y – 3z =12 1. (D) List the three possible outcomes for intersection when sketching the graph of three planes in a three-dimensional coordinate system. (E) Give examples of at least two of the possible outcomes from part (D) by creating systems with those characteristics. 2. Use the constraints below to answer the following. X ≥ 0 Y ≥ 0 2x + y ≤ 120 x + 3y ≤ 150 2x + 2y ≤ 140 (D) Write an objective function for the given constraints to satisfy the following conditions •(30,40) is where the maximum occurs •(50,20) is where the maximum occurs •(60,0) is where the maximum occurs 3. Write a linear programming problem that could be described by the constraints in Exercise 2.

what the heck does this math question mean, and how do I solve it? **Something dealing with sets, where R= real numbers, The (principal) logarithm function plog : H ∪ {∞} → S(−π/2,π/2) ∪ {∞} is defined as plog(a + bi) = log(a) + arctan(b/a)i (Principal Log) with log( ∞) = ∞. Again, well known identities involving the real valued functions log : R>0 → R, arctan : R → (−π/2, π/2) are fair use. Now we will repeat an exercise similar to the one for the exponential for z = 1 − i and w = 3 + 4i. We have the line segments and arcs: ℓ0,z (t) = t(1 − i) 0 ≤t ≤ 1 ℓ0,w (t) = t(3 + 4i) ℓ0,zw (t) = t(7 + i) αz (θ) = √2e^it −π/4 ≤θ ≤ 0 αw (θ) = 5e^it 0 ≤θ ≤ arctan(4/3) αzw (θ) = 5√2e^it 0 ≤θ ≤ π/4 + arctan(4/3) Determine the result of applying the principal logarithm to the trigono- metric parallelogram by sketching plog(ℓ(t)) and plog(α(t)) for the lines ℓ and arcs α above. (c) Explain in your own words what happened to the sectors once run through the principal logarithm. (d) How does the principal logarithm relate to the exponential? (Hint: make choices in fibers for Bijections(exp)).

desperately need help with the math linear programming exercise? I have to solve this exercise using linear programming and I need equations from the given info so that I can sketch the graph etc. Could you tell me the possible equations? I can not figure out anything from word problems like this: "A tailoring firm takes 2 hours cutting and 4 hours of sewing to make a suit. To make a dress, it takes 4 hours of cutting and 2 hours of sewing. at most 20 hours per day are available for cutting, and at most 16 hours per day are available for sewing. The profit is $34 on a suit and $31 on a dress. How many of each kind of garment should be made in order to maximize profit?"

please help (:? so my history homework worksheet has -Alexander Hamilton -James Madison -Benjamin Franklin on them, and they each have descriptions about them written by [William Pierce], who was observing them when the Constitutional Convention met.. and one of the question was "Why must historians exercise caution in using Pierce's character sketches?" what does it mean?

What do you think "BIO INTRODUCTION" means on this "Drawing Class" student evaluation form? Here's the form; you don't have to read the whole thing. It says BIO INTRODUCTION towards the bottom. I don't know what that means. This is for Butler County Community College. Drawing ARTS 102 3 credits – 2 lecture / 2 lab Instructor: Debra Shingledecker E-mail: debra.shingledecker@bc3.edu - preferred Phone: 724.658.1651 Location: http://blackboard.bc3.edu (there is no www.) Students can login a week before classes begin, however, courses are NOT available until the first day of the semester. Course Description: This is a basic drawing course which will introduce the fundamental issues: Principles and elements of composition and design; use of material; techniques; and use of various traditional subject matter. A focus will be placed on perception and “seeing” skills so that the individual’s drawing skills can be gained or current skills improved upon. Text: Dodson, Bert. Keys to Drawing. North Lights, F&W Publications: Cincinnati, Ohio,1990. (ISBN: 0891343377) Additional Course Materials: 1. Digital camera or scanner. Further explanation on using these to transmit your drawings is in COURSE CONTENT 2. Photo software/ You may already have this on your computer: Free software downloads: Picasa: http://picasa.google.com/ HP Photo Software: http://www.hp.com/united-states/consumer/digital_photography/free/software/index.html 3. Drawing pads (2): * 9” X 12” sketch book * Drawing pad contingent on how you will be transmitting drawings. See below: I recommend that you determine the size of paper that you use for your drawing by the means that you will be transmitting your drawing. * If you are using a Digital Camera, I suggest that you use 16” X 20” or 18” X 24” Drawing Paper. * If you are using a Scanner, I suggest that you use a size of paper that is closest to your scanner bed. If you are proficient with Photoshop go ahead and use whatever size you prefer and you can past it together. 4. Compressed Charcoal stick 5. Pink Pearl Eraser or white eraser 6. Blending sticks 7. Fixative (hairspray) 8. Ebony Pencil (6 B) (pick up about 3 of these). If you have pencils of various hardness you can use the set (ie. HB, 2B, 4B, 6B, 2H, 4 H etc. / B refers to the soft leads/ H refers to the hard leads.). 9. A good pencil sharpener 10. Straight edge/ruler Page 2 Chat sessions: (These require students to be online at a specific time) None. On-campus sessions: Tuesday, August 26 @ 8-9:30pm / Lab #1: Transferring images of your Drawings through the internet; Introduction to Perceptual Skills Tuesday, September 23 @ 8-9:30pm / Lab #2: Value; Technique- Use of varied artistic media and tools; Rendering effective Texture; Midterm Sketchbook submission Tuesday, October 21 @ 8-9:30pm / Lab #3: Improving Compositions; Using Perspective Tuesday, November 25 @ 8-9:30pm / Lab #4: Drawing Figures and Faces Tuesday, December 9 @ 8-9:30pm / Lab #5: Final Critique/ Final Sketchbook submission Internet Student Resources: Before classes begin, go to BC3 Distance Education – www.bc3.edu/onlinelearning for the System check – check your computer equipment and Internet connection Technical skill check – check your ability level Personality test – check your chance of success Orientation schedule – all NEW Internet students MUST attend an orientation session. Objectives: The student will learn: To develop a strong understanding and application of the principles of composition and design. To develop and demonstrate strong perceptual, compositional, problem solving and critical thinking skills. To develop and demonstrate a command of the fundamental elements of drawing: line, shape, gesture, value, and spatial relationships. To demonstrate proven craftsmanship using various drawing material. To develop proficient use of required technology and software. Course Mechanics/Schedule: See information in course when available. Student Evaluation: * BIO INTRODUCTION (15 points) * SKETCHBOOK ASSIGNMENTS (Total= 50 points: Midterm Check /25; Final Check /25) * 3 EXERCISES (Total 60 points/ 20 points each) * 7 MASTER DRAWINGS/ASSIGNMENTS (Total= 525 points / 75 points each/20 % is based on critiques) * EFFORT AND ATTENDANCE at On-campus Sessions (10% OF GRADE) EFFORT is a vital component of this class! "Practice makes perfect"

how do u feel about the articles of faith lds church? http://www.lds.org/portal/site/LDSOrg/menuitem.b12f9d18fae655bb69095bd3e44916a0/?vgnextoid=2354fccf2b7db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=c26876e6ffe0c010VgnVCM1000004d82620a____&hideNav=1 Gospel Classics: The Wentworth Letter By Joseph Smith Jr. (1805–44) Next > < Previous Print E-mail Joseph Smith Jr., “The Wentworth Letter,” Ensign, Jul 2002, 27 Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization modernized. Of this classic, Elder B. H. Roberts (1857–1933) of the First Council of the Seventy wrote: “The letter is one of the choicest documents in our church literature; as also it is the earliest published document by the Prophet personally, making any pretension to consecutive narrative of those events in which the great Latter-day work had its origin. … For combining conciseness of statement with comprehensiveness of treatment of the subject with which it deals, it has few equals among historical documents, and certainly none that excel it in our church literature.” 1 March 1, 1842.—At the request of Mr. John Wentworth, editor and proprietor of the Chicago Democrat, I have written the following sketch of the rise, progress, persecution, and faith of the Latter-day Saints, of which I have the honor, under God, of being the founder. Mr. Wentworth says that he wishes to furnish Mr. Bastow [Barstow], a friend of his, who is writing the history of New Hampshire, with this document. As Mr. Bastow has taken the proper steps to obtain correct information, all that I shall ask at his hands is that he publish the account entire, ungarnished, and without misrepresentation. I was born in the town of Sharon, Windsor County, Vermont, on the 23rd of December, a.d. 1805. When [I was] ten years old, my parents removed to Palmyra, New York, where we resided about four years, and from thence we removed to the town of Manchester. My father was a farmer and taught me the art of husbandry. When about fourteen years of age, I began to reflect upon the importance of being prepared for a future state, and upon inquiring [about] the plan of salvation, I [found] that there was a great clash in religious sentiment. If I went to one society they referred me to one plan, and another to another, each one pointing to his own particular creed as the summum bonum of perfection. Considering that all could not be right, and that God could not be the author of so much confusion, I determined to investigate the subject more fully, believing that if God had a church it would not be split up into factions, and that if He taught one society to worship one way, and administer in one set of ordinances, He would not teach another, principles which were diametrically opposed. Believing the word of God, I had confidence in the declaration of James—“If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him” [James 1:5]. I retired to a secret place in a grove and began to call upon the Lord. While fervently engaged in supplication, my mind was taken away from the objects with which I was surrounded, and I was enwrapped in a heavenly vision and saw two glorious personages, who exactly resembled each other in features and likeness, surrounded with a brilliant light which eclipsed the sun at noonday. They told me that all religious denominations were believing in incorrect doctrines and that none of them was acknowledged of God as His Church and kingdom; and I was expressly commanded “to go not after them,” at the same time receiving a promise that the fullness of the gospel should at some future time be made known unto me. On the evening [of] the 21st of September, a.d. 1823, while I was praying unto God and endeavoring to exercise faith in the precious promises of scripture, on a sudden a light like that of day, only of a far purer and more glorious appearance and brightness, burst into the room. Indeed the first sight was as though the house was filled with consuming fire. The appearance produced a shock that affected the whole body. In a moment a personage stood before me, surrounded with a glory yet greater than that with which I was already surrounded. This messenger proclaimed himself to be an angel of God, sent to bring the joyful tidings that the covenant which God made with ancient Israel was at hand to be fulfilled; that the preparatory work for the second coming of the Messiah was speedily to commence; that the time was at hand for the gospel in all its fulness to be preached in power unto all nations, that a people might be prepared for the millennial reign. I was informed that I was chosen to be an instrument in the hands of God to bring about some of His purposes in this glorious dispensation. I was also informed concerning the aboriginal inhabitants of this country [America] and shown who they were, and from whence they came; a brief sketch of their origin, progress, civilization, laws, governments, of their righteousness and iniquity, and the blessings of God being finally withdrawn from them as a people, was [also] made known unto me; I was also told where were deposited some plates on which were engraven an abridgment of the records of the ancient prophets that had existed on this continent. The angel appeared to me three times the same night and unfolded the same things. After having received many visits from the angels of God, unfolding the majesty and glory of the events that should transpire in the last days, on the morning of the 22nd of September, a.d. 1827, the angel of the Lord delivered the records into my hands. These records were engraven on plates which had the appearance of gold. Each plate was six inches wide and eight inches long, and not quite so thick as common tin. They were filled with engravings, in Egyptian characters, and bound together in a volume as the leaves of a book, with three rings running through the whole. The volume was something near six inches in thickness, a part of which was sealed. The characters on the unsealed part were small, and beautifully engraved. The whole book exhibited many marks of antiquity in its construction and much skill in the art of engraving. With the records was found a curious instrument, which the ancients called “Urim and Thummim,” which consisted of two transparent stones set in the rims of a bow fastened to a breastplate. Through the medium of the Urim and Thummim I translated the record by the gift and power of God. In this important and interesting book the history of ancient America is unfolded, from its first settlement by a colony that came from the Tower of Babel at the confusion of languages to the beginning of the fifth century of the Christian era. We are informed by these records that America in ancient times has been inhabited by two distinct races of people. The first were called Jaredites and came directly from the Tower of Babel. The second race came directly from the city of Jerusalem about six hundred years before Christ. They were principally Israelites of the descendants of Joseph. The Jaredites were destroyed about the time that the Israelites came from Jerusalem, who succeeded them in the inheritance of the country. The principal nation of the second race fell in battle towards the close of the fourth century. The remnant are the Indians that now inhabit this country. This book also tells us that our Savior made His appearance upon this continent after His Resurrection; that He planted the gospel here in all its fulness, and richness, and power, and blessing; that they had apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, and evangelists—the same order, the same priesthood, the same ordinances, gifts, powers, and blessings, as were enjoyed on the eastern continent; that the people were cut off in consequence of their transgressions; that the last of their prophets who existed among them was commanded to write an abridgment of their prophecies, history, etc., and to hide it up in the earth; and that it should come forth and be united with the Bible for the accomplishment of the purposes of God in the last days. For a more particular account I would refer to the Book of Mormon, which can be purchased at Nauvoo, or from any of our traveling elders. As soon as the news of this discovery was made known, false reports, misrepresentation, and slander flew, as on the wings of the wind, in every direction; the house was frequently beset by mobs and evil designing people. Several times I was shot at, and very narrowly escaped, and every device was made use of to get the plates away from me; but the power and blessing of God attended me, and several began to believe my testimony. On the 6th of April 1830, the “Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” was first organized in the town of Fayette, Seneca County, state of New York. Some few were called and ordained by the spirit of revelation and prophecy and began to preach as the Spirit gave them utterance. And though weak, yet were they strengthened by the power of God; and many were brought to repentance, were immersed in the water, and were filled with the Holy Ghost by the laying on of hands. They saw visions and prophesied, devils were cast out, and the sick healed by the laying on of hands. From that time the work rolled forth with astonishing rapidity, and churches were formed in the states of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. In the last-named state a considerable settlement was formed in Jackson County. Numbers joined the Church, and we were increasing rapidly. We made large purchases of land; our farms teemed with plenty; and peace and happiness were enjoyed in our domestic circle and throughout our neighborhood. But as we could not associate with our neighbors (who were, many of them, of the basest of men, and had fled from the face of civilized society to the frontier country to escape the hand of justice) in their midnight revels, their Sabbath breaking, horse racing, and gambling, they commenced at first to ridicule, then to persecute, and finally an organized mob assembled and burned our houses, tarred and feathered and whipped many of our brethren, and finally, contrary to law, justice, and humanity, drove them from their habitations, who, houseless and homeless, had to wander on the bleak prairies till the children left the tracks of their blood on the prairie. This took place in the month of November, and they had no other covering but the canopy of heaven. In this inclement season of the year this proceeding was winked at by the government, and although we had warranty deeds for our land, and had violated no law, we could obtain no redress. There were many sick who were thus inhumanly driven from their houses, and had to endure all this abuse and to seek homes where they could be found. The result was that a great many of them, being deprived of the comforts of life and the necessary attendances, died; many children were left orphans, wives [were left] widows, and husbands, widowers; our farms were taken possession of by the mob; many thousands of cattle, sheep, horses, and hogs were taken; and our household goods, store goods, and printing press and type were broken, taken, or otherwise destroyed. Many of our brethren removed to Clay County, where they continued until 1836, three years; there was no violence offered but there were threatenings of violence. But in the summer of 1836 these threatenings began to assume a more serious form. From threats, public meetings were called, resolutions were passed, vengeance and destruction were threatened, and affairs again assumed a fearful attitude. Jackson County was a sufficient precedent, and as the authorities in that county did not interfere, they [the Clay County authorities] boasted that they would not [interfere] in this, which on application to the authorities, we found to be too true; and after much privation and loss of property, we were again driven from our homes. We next settled in Caldwell and Daviess Counties, where we made large and extensive settlements, thinking to free ourselves from the power of oppression by settling in new counties with very few inhabitants in them. But here we were [also] not allowed to live in peace, but in 1838 we were again attacked by mobs, an exterminating order was issued by Governor Boggs, and under the sanction of law an organized banditti ranged through the country, robbed us of our cattle, sheep, hogs, etc., many of our people were murdered in cold blood, the chastity of our women was violated, and we were forced to sign away our property at the point of the sword. And after enduring every indignity that could be heaped upon us by an inhuman, ungodly band of marauders, from twelve to fifteen thousand souls, men, women, and children were driven from their own firesides, and from lands to which they had warrantee deeds—houseless, friendless, and homeless (in the depths of winter) to wander as exiles on the earth, or to seek an asylum in a more genial clime, and among a less barbarous people. Many sickened and died in consequence of the cold and hardships they had to endure. Many wives were left widows, and children [were left] orphans and destitute. It would take more time than is allotted me here to describe the injustice, the wrongs, the murders, the bloodshed, the theft, misery, and woe that have been caused by the barbarous, inhuman, and lawless proceedings of the state of Missouri. In the situation before alluded to, we arrived in the state of Illinois in 1839, where we found a hospitable people and a friendly home, a people who were willing to be governed by the principles of law and humanity. We have commenced to build a city called “Nauvoo” in Hancock County. We number from six to eight thousand here, besides vast numbers in the county around and in almost every county of the state. We have a city charter granted us and [a] charter for a [military] legion, the troops of which now number 1,500. We have also a charter for a university, for an agricultural and manufacturing society; [we] have our own laws and administrators and possess all the privileges that other free and enlightened citizens enjoy. Persecution has not stopped the progress of truth, but has only added fuel to the flame. It has spread with increasing rapidity. Proud of the cause which they have espoused and conscious of our innocence and of the truth of their system, amidst calumny and reproach, have the elders of this Church gone forth and planted the gospel in almost every state in the Union. It has penetrated our cities; it has spread over our villages and has caused thousands of our intelligent, noble, and patriotic citizens to obey its divine mandates and be governed by its sacred truths. It has also spread into England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, where, in the year 1840, a few of our missionaries were sent, and over five thousand joined the Standard of Truth; there are numbers now joining in every land. Our missionaries are going forth to different nations, and in Germany, Palestine, New Holland, Australia, the East Indies, and other places, the Standard of Truth has been erected; no unhallowed hand can stop the work from progressing; persecutions may rage, mobs may combine, armies may assemble, calumny may defame, but the truth of God will go forth boldly, nobly, and independent, till it has penetrated every continent, visited every clime, swept every country, and sounded in every ear; till the purposes of God shall be accomplished, and the Great Jehovah shall say the work is done. [The Articles of Faith] We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost. We believe that men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression. We believe that through the Atonement of Christ, all mankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel. We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel are: first, Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ; second, Repentance; third, Baptism by immersion for the remission of sins; fourth, Laying on [of] hands for the gift of the Holy Ghost. We believe that a man must be called of God, by prophecy, and by the laying on hands by those who are in authority, to preach the Gospel and administer in the ordinances thereof. We believe in the same organization that existed in the Primitive Church, namely, apostles, prophets, pastors, teachers, evangelists, and so forth. We believe in the gift of tongues, prophecy, revelation, visions, healing, interpretation of tongues, and so forth. We believe the Bible to be the word of God as far as it is translated correctly; we also believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God. We believe all that God has revealed, all that He does now reveal, and we believe that He will yet reveal many great and important things pertaining to the Kingdom of God. We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes; that Zion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon the American continent; that Christ will reign personally upon the earth; and, that the earth will be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory. We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may. We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law. We believe in being honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and in doing good to all men; indeed, we may say that we follow the admonition of Paul—We believe all things, we hope all things, we have endured many things, and hope to be able to endure all things. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things. Respectfully, etc., Joseph Smith [illustration] This new painting of the Prophet Joseph Smith depicts what he may have looked like at age 25. The blue tie is typical of the colorful neckwear worn in his day. (Joseph Smith as a Young Man, by Gary Smith.) [photo] Written in the Prophet’s own hand or dictated, this letter was published in 1842. [illustrations] Inset: Joseph Smith Receives Stewardship of the Plates, by Gary Smith; left: The First Vision, by Ted Henninger [illustrations] Above: Mr. John Wentworth. (Etching by John C. McRae.) Right: First Church organization meeting. (Organization of the Church, by Paul Mann.) [illustration] Saints Driven from Jackson County, Missouri, by C. C. A. Christensen, © courtesy of Museum of Art, Brigham Young University, all rights reserved [illustration] Published in Nauvoo as part of the Wentworth Letter, the Articles of Faith provide strong evidence of the divine calling of the Prophet Joseph Smith. (Nauvoo, Illinois, 1859, by John Schroder.) Notes 1. History of the Church, 4:535–41. The Wentworth Letter was originally published in Nauvoo in the Times and Seasons, 1 Mar. 1842, and it also appears in A Comprehensive History of the Church, 1:55. ^ Back to top

y=sin x and y= sin y? i tried to sketch a graph for y=sin x and y= sin y in my note book and i find some the angles like 30, 45 and 60 not in use as used during other trigonometric exercise. is it just because the minimum and maximum values are only counted? if so why? plz plz help me.

Maths question, help please? I kinda messed up this maths exercise and can't seem to get it right... Can someone show me how to do it? "Show (x-1) is a factor of f(x)=x^3+6x^2-15x+8 hence factorize f(x), and sketch f(x). Solve f(x)>0 " I always get stuck at the factorizing part of it :S Can someone help me?

My cat breathing fast? My kitty is around 4 years old... a girl.. quite overweight.. 16 pounds... very very furry and indoor... so she doensnt get much exercise! But I've never really paid attention to her breathing before... and ever since about 6 months ago I brought my cat to the vet to get her shaved (her hair is so long she gets mats all over her back)... I went to this vet I never used to go to... And so while my cat was still at the vet... they called me and said "We are suspecting that your cat has a minor heart murmur and we think it is best if we do an X-ray of her heart..." So of course I said yes... and it cost about $150... So when that was finished, they called me to pick up my cat... and they said "everything is perfect, you can take her home" That kind of sketched me out... but it made me feel better knowing that my cat was fine...So a DAY after... they called me again... and they said "Sorry to do this but we know we told you yesterday that your cat is fine, but today there are 2 doctor ...doctors in our office and they looked at the X-ray again and we do think your cat has a minor heart murmur.. and the next best step is to get ..... (I dont remember waht they said it was)... another procedure done to make SURE.... which is about $500-700 dollars.. So after that my mom said no theyu're scamming us... so I never bothered with it... I spoke to a few of my friends they all said it sounded sketchy.. But yesterday I was playing with my cat and she was purring really loud... but when she purs her breathing is really fast too... like almost one breath every 2 seconds... is that normal for cats to breathe faster when they purr? Yes she only breathes fast when she is purring... and I can actually see her tummy go in and out lol... but she is the happiest girl ever at home... The reason why I'm so hesitant in contulting a vet is because my cat is a chicken... she is petrified of being out of the house... when I bring her to the vet she hides as soon as she sees the carridge... and as for people.. she only gets along with me and my mom... she doesn't like anybody else... Which means everytime she goes to the Vet... they need to give her anesthesia... and she has had that 3 times in her 4 years of living... which I am trying to keep as low as possible beause Im sure getting the anesthesia is probably VERY bad and not very good to do once a year

plz. help me to write the main idea of this article in the NY Times. in two pages.? November 5, 2006 Where Plan A Left Ahmad Chalabi By DEXTER FILKINS 1. London, August 2006 Many miles away in a more dangerous place the dream is ending badly. The bodies pile up. Good people stream to the borders. Leaders pile money onto planes. The center is giving way. The apartment on South Street in London is an antidote to Baghdad in nearly every respect. Where the Iraqi capital rings with chaos and violence, the sidewalks of Mayfair are quiet enough to hear your own voice above the cars. Baghdad is treeless and tan; the South Street apartment opens onto a private park filled with the lushness of an English garden. Just across the way is the Anglican church where General Eisenhower, stationed here as the commander of Allied forces during the war, came to pray. A maid greets you at the door, an elderly Lebanese woman who doubles as an Arabic teacher for the children. The parlor is neatly appointed and filled with art, most of it European, different from the Baghdad house, where most of it is Iraqi. There is “Sketch of a Woman,” by Lucien Pissarro, the French painter who propagated Impressionism in London; it catches the light nicely. The furniture is expensive, the kind that makes you hesitate to sit down. But the place has a lived-in quality too; family members come and go, clutching bags and calling to one another down the hallways. No one seems the least bit awed by the man of the house, who is dressed in a bespoke suit and carries himself like a monarch, and who, until now, hasn’t spent more than a day at a time here since before the Iraq war began. For Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq is an abstraction again. Once again, his native country is a faraway land ruled by somebody else, a place where other people die. It’s a place to be discussed, rued, plotted over, from a parlor on an expensive Western street. Iraq’s new leaders, the men who excluded Chalabi from the government they formed this spring, still call for advice — several times a day, Chalabi says. He is here in London, his longtime home in exile, temporarily, he says, taking his first vacation in five years. At lunch at a nearby restaurant an hour before, he ordered the sea bass wrapped in a banana leaf. He walks the streets unattended by armed guards. But the interlude, Chalabi says, is just that, a passing thing. His doubters will come back to him; they always have. As ever, he wears a jester’s smile, wide and blank, a mask that has carried him through crises of the first world and the third. Still, a touch of bitterness can creep into Chalabi’s voice, a hint that he has concluded that his time has come and gone. Indeed, even for a man as vain and resilient as Chalabi, his present predicament stands too large to go unacknowledged. Once Iraq’s anointed leader — anointed by the Americans — Chalabi, at age 62, is without a job, spurned by the very colleagues whose ascension he engineered. His benefactors in the White House and in the Pentagon, who once gobbled up whatever half-baked intelligence Chalabi offered, now regard him as undependable and — worse — safely ignored. Chalabi’s life work, an Iraq liberated from Saddam Hussein, a modern and democratic Iraq, is spiraling toward disintegration. Indeed, for many in the West, Chalabi has become the personification of all that has gone wrong in Iraq: the lies, the arrogance, the occupation as disaster. “The real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz,” Chalabi says, referring to his erstwhile backer, the former deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz. “They chickened out. The Pentagon guys chickened out.” Chalabi still considers Wolfowitz a friend, so he proceeds carefully. America’s big mistake, Chalabi maintains, was in failing to step out of the way after Hussein’s downfall and let the Iraqis take charge. The Iraqis, not the Americans, should have been allowed to take over immediately — the people who knew the country, who spoke the language and, most important, who could take responsibility for the chaos that was unfolding in the streets. An Iraqi government could have acted harshly, even brutally, to regain control of the place, and the Iraqis would have been without a foreigner to blame. They would have appreciated the firm hand. There would have been no guerrilla insurgency or, if there was, a small one that the new Iraqi government could have ferreted out and crushed on its own. An Iraqi leadership would have brought Moktada al-Sadr, the populist cleric, into the government and house-trained him. The Americans, in all likelihood, could have gone home. They certainly would have been home by now. “We would have taken hold of the country,” Chalabi says. “We would have revitalized the civil service immediately. We would have been able to put together a military force and an intelligence service. There would have been no insurgency. We would have had electricity. The Americans screwed it up.” Chalabi’s notion — that an Iraqi government, as opposed to an American one, could have saved the great experiment — has become one of the arguments put forth by the war’s proponents in the just-beginning debate over who lost Iraq. At best, it’s improbable: Chalabi is essentially arguing that a handful of Iraqi exiles, some of whom had not lived in the country in decades, could have put together a government and quelled the chaos that quickly engulfed the country after Hussein’s regime collapsed. They could have done this, presumably, without an army (which most wanted to dissolve) and without a police force (which was riddled with Baathists). In fact, the Americans considered the idea and dismissed it. (But not, Wolfowitz insists, because of him. His longtime aide, Kevin Kellems, said that Wolfowitz favored turning over power “as rapidly as possible to duly elected Iraqi authorities.”) The Bush administration decided to go to the United Nations and have the American role in Iraq formally described as that of an “occupying power,” a step that no Iraqi, not even the lowliest tea seller, failed to notice. They appointed L. Paul Bremer III as viceroy. Instead of empowering Iraqis, Bremer set up an advisory panel of Iraqis — one that included Chalabi — that had no power at all. The warmth that many ordinary Iraqis felt for the Americans quickly ebbed away. It’s not clear that the Americans had any other choice. But here in his London parlor, Chalabi is now contending that excluding Iraqis was the Americans’ fatal mistake. “It was a puppet show!” Chalabi exclaims again, shifting on the couch. “The worst of all worlds. We were in charge, and we had no power. We were blamed for everything the Americans did, but we couldn’t change any of it.” It’s three and a half years later now. More than 2,800 Americans are dead; more than 3,000 Iraqis die each month. The anarchy seems limitless. In May 2004, American and Iraqi agents even raided Chalabi’s home in Baghdad. He has been denounced by Bremer and by Bush and accused of passing secrets to America’s enemy, Iran. At the heart of the American decision to take over and run Iraq, Chalabi now concludes, lay a basic contempt for Iraqis, himself included. “In Wolfowitz’s mind, you couldn’t trust the Iraqis to run a democracy,” Chalabi says. “ ‘We have to teach them, give them lessons,’ in Wolfowitz’s mind. ‘We have to leave Iraq under our tutelage. The Iraqis are useless. The Iraqis are incompetent.’ “What I didn’t realize,” Chalabi says, “was that the Americans sold us out.” Turkish coffee is served, then tea. I consider Chalabi’s predicament: the Iraqi patrician, confidant of prime ministers and presidents, the M.I.T.- and University of Chicago-trained mathematics professor, owner of a Mayfair flat, complaining of being regarded, by the masters he once manipulated, as a scruffy, shiftless native. “I’ve been a friend of America, and I’ve been its enemy,” he says. “America betrays its friends. It sets them up and betrays them. I’d rather be America’s enemy.” And so he is. Sort of. With Chalabi, it’s hard to be certain, and not just because his motives are so opaque, but because he is never still. He is enigmatic, brilliant, nimble, unreliable, charming, narcissistic, finally elusive. The journey to Mayfair is a long one. What happened to Chalabi? Well, you might ask: What happened to Iraq? 2. Mushkhab, January 2005 The election is coming, and we are heading south. Twenty cars, mostly carrying men with guns. They hang out the windows, pointing their Kalashnikovs at the terrified drivers. Get out of the way or we shoot, and maybe we shoot anyway — that’s the message. But that’s Iraq. We move quickly, weaving, south in the southbound, south in the northbound. Very fast. Unbelievably fast. Drivers veer and career. We go where we want. We’re low on fuel, and a gas station beckons. It is one of the strange and singular facts of Iraqi life that despite sitting atop an ocean of oil, Iraqis must wait hours — often days — for gasoline at the pumps. Lack of refining capacity, smuggling, stealing, insurgent attacks, Soviet subsidies: it’s complicated. On the road outside Salman Pak, the line is perhaps 300 cars long. The Chalabi convoy cuts straight to the front of the line. No one protests. It’s the guns. The Iraqis wait for days, and our effrontery brings no protest. Not a peep. We get our gas and we speed away, guns out the windows. Very fast. An hour later, we arrive at our destination, Mushkhab. It’s a mostly Shiite town about 100 miles south of Baghdad. It is friendly country — to Chalabi, and still, then, to Americans. The whole town — the males, anyway — gathers round. Chalabi stands in the center, dressed in a dark gray Western suit. The Iraqis clap and read poetry; some of it they sing. It’s a tradition, a kind of serenade to the honored guest. “Hey, listen, Bush, we are Iraqis,” the poet says, and everyone is clapping. “We never bow our heads to anyone, and we won’t do it for you. We have tough guys like Chalabi on our side — be careful.” Everyone laughs. We move inside the mudhif, a tall, long, fantastic structure woven of dried river reeds, a kind of pavilion of rattan. The room is laid with hand-woven carpets, and on the walls hang framed yellowed photographs of the leaders of the tribe, Al Fatla, meeting with their British overlords many years ago. A pair of loudspeakers are set up in the front. Chalabi takes a microphone. “My Iraqi brothers, the Americans pushed out Saddam, but they did not liberate our country,” Chalabi tells the group. “We are asking you to participate in this election so that we can have an independent country. This is not just words. The Iraqi people will liberate the country.” He goes on a little more, warming to the Iraqis assembled about him. “On my way here, I saw a huge line of people waiting for gasoline,” Chalabi tells the group. “Some of them were there for two nights, carrying blankets with them. It makes me very sad to see my brothers wait for days to get gas at the station.” Shameless, huh? I thought so, too. Almost a thing of beauty. It was so outrageous I almost wanted to forgive him, as a teacher might her sassy but cleverest boy. And that’s the thing about Chalabi: he’s very difficult to dislike. It may be his secret. It was Chalabi, after all — a foreigner, an Arab — who persuaded the most powerful men and women in the United States to make the liberation of Iraq not merely a priority but an obsession. First in 1998, when Chalabi persuaded Congress to pass the Iraq Liberation Act (in turn leading to payments to his group, the Iraqi National Congress, exceeding $27 million over the next six years) and then, later, in persuading the Bush administration of the necessity of using force to destroy Saddam Hussein. And when it all went bad, when those nuclear weapons never turned up, the clever child shrugged and smiled. “We are heroes in error,” Chalabi told Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Almost with a wink. Lunch is served: a long table heaped with rice and roasted lamb. No seats. Everyone stands, dozens of us, and we dig in with our fingers. After a time, we prepare to leave. The table and the ground around it are littered with rice and lamb bones. We re-form into a convoy and speed toward the holy city of Najaf. By the time we arrive in Najaf, it’s dark. The fighting between American soldiers and the Mahdi Army irregulars laid waste to the city only a few months before, but on this night, Najaf seems remarkably calm. The pilgrim hotels lie in ruins, but the golden dome of the shrine of Imam Ali shimmers under a January moon. Chalabi exits his S.U.V. and strides inside through the 20-foot-high wooden doors. A clutch of Sunni leaders, whom Chalabi has agreed to show around, trail in step. The curiosities intersect: the Sunnis are not Shiites, and this is the holiest of Shiite places, the tomb of the son-in-law of the Holy Prophet and the very heart of the Shiite faith. But they are still Muslims, and they are allowed to pass. As a non-Muslim, I wait outside in the street. More unlikely than the presence of the Sunnis is their tour guide, Chalabi. Or it was unlikely. Not anymore. Chalabi, the Westernized, Western-educated mathematician, has entered his Islamist phase. It’s not terribly convincing. He does not don a turban. He has no beard. He does not pray. He does not, really, even pretend. But as a practical politician — as an exile come home to a strange land getting stranger by the day — Chalabi had to do something. Relations between Chalabi and the Bush administration began to sour almost immediately after the fall of Hussein, when the Americans decided against putting Iraqis — presumably Chalabi — in charge. Bremer considered him an egomaniac. When no W.M.D. turned up, more and more Americans came to blame Chalabi for the war. Chalabi’s association with the Americans grew more disadvantageous by the day. The break came on May 20, 2004, when the Americans, accusing Chalabi of telling the Iranian government that the Americans were eavesdropping on their secret communications, swooped in on his Baghdad compound. American troops sealed off Mansour, the neighborhood where Chalabi lived, while scores of Iraqi and American agents kicked in the compound doors. One of the Iraqis, Chalabi said, put a gun to his head. “Look, I think they tried to kill him,” Richard Perle, the former Pentagon adviser and longtime Chalabi friend, said of the American and Iraqi agents. “I think the raid on his house was intended to result in violence. They had sent 20 or 40 Humvees over there. Chalabi was being protected by a force of about 100 guys with machine guns. It is a miracle that it didn’t result in a massive shootout.” No shots were fired, but the break seemed final. Isolated, Chalabi turned to Islam — and, in particular, to Moktada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric and leader of two armed uprisings against the Americans and the Iraqi government. Sadr is an erratic and unpredictable young man who sometimes ends his sermons with apocalyptic visions of the “hidden” 12th imam revealing himself. He is also the most popular man in Iraq. In the anarchy that ensued following the fall of Hussein, Iraqis, once known for their largely secular outlook, ran headlong toward Islam. Religion and anarchy moved together: the worse conditions got in the streets, the more Islamic Iraqis became. In the three and a half years that I have known Chalabi, I never once saw him pray. Or give any indication that he harbored religious beliefs at all. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser and a devout Shiite, told me once that when he and a group of five senior Iraqi politicians visited the Imam Ali shrine in 2004, all of them prayed but Chalabi. While the others knelt, Rubaie said, Chalabi stood quietly with his hands folded in front of him. On this return visit to the Imam Ali shrine, Chalabi and his Sunni colleagues spent 10 minutes inside and exited without saying a thing. But word travels quickly down Najaf’s narrow streets, and by the time our convoy sped back to Baghdad, there were very few people in Najaf who did not know that Chalabi had come. Once, when I asked Chalabi about his flirtation with the Islamists, he answered not in terms of religion but of politics. Moktada, he explained, was not essentially dangerous but merely misunderstood, an outsider who could be coaxed into Iraq’s new democratic order. Chalabi was happy to act as the bridge, and if he benefited politically from his efforts, he was not complaining. “The Americans made a mistake when they excluded Moktada in the beginning,” Chalabi told me. “Our real business is to persuade everybody that Sadr is better inside than outside, and to provide some measure of comfort to the middle class that he is not going to eat them up.” Indeed, Chalabi and Sadr are not as unlikely a pair as they may seem. Musa al-Sadr, the late Iranian-born ayatollah and Moktada’s cousin, presided over Chalabi’s wedding in Beirut in 1971. Chalabi’s wife, Leila, is the daughter of Adel Osseiran, a leader of the Lebanese independence movement. Musa al-Sadr was the founder of Amal, which became the prototypical Shiite party in the Middle East. It seemed like a game, and not one that Chalabi liked to give away. Whenever I asked him about his coziness with Moktada, and how it squared with his own religious beliefs, I usually received a curt retort. For a time, Chalabi — and the Americans — got the better of the deal. Moktada fielded candidates in the January 2005 election, and his militia, though still untamed, fell into line behind its leader. He endorsed something less than an absolute role for Islam in the Iraqi Constitution. By early 2006, parties loyal to Sadr held the largest bloc in the Iraqi Parliament. As for Chalabi, Moktada kept him afloat a little longer. But in siding with the Islamists, Chalabi helped make them stronger than they were, and he threw his weight behind a number of trends that were only then becoming dominant: the Islamization of Iraqi society, the division of Iraq into sectarian cantons. Those trends later spiraled out of control, into the de facto civil war that is unfolding now. Some Iraqis who watched Chalabi then still don’t forgive him — and they think that ultimately, the Islamists got the better of him. “Ahmad’s problem is that Ahmad is usually the smartest man in the room, and he thinks he can control what happens,” I was told by an Iraqi official who worked with Chalabi at the time and who would speak only anonymously. “But these guys don’t care if you have a Ph.D. in math; they’ll kill you. In the end, things went way past the point where Ahmad thought they would ever go. I can’t imagine he wanted that. But he helped start it.” 3. Baghdad, October 2005 Chalabi is standing on the rooftop of his ancestral home in Khadimiya, a heavily Shiite neighborhood known for its shrine. Mansour, the area where he has lived since Hussein’s fall, has slipped into anarchy. The final round of nationwide elections is a couple of months away. For the moment, Chalabi is the deputy prime minister, behind the affable but ineffectual Ibrahim Jaafari. Across the street stand a pair of grain silos built by his father, Abdul Hadi Chalabi. Downstairs, on a wall in the sitting room, there is an old British map dating to the 1920’s, showing Baghdad, which was much smaller than it is now. North of Baghdad, in what was then farmland and what is now Khadimiya, a dot indicates a town. The dot says, “Chalabi.” At the time, Chalabi’s family owned nearly two and a half million acres throughout Iraq. Those vast holdings are reduced to the compound where Chalabi now stands. It’s about 10 acres, including the main house, which a team of workers is renovating, a large swimming pool, a grove of date palms and, in the back, a mudhif. There is a row of garages, decrepit now, where workers once serviced the machinery and trucks that brought the wheat and dates to market. “Imagine,” Chalabi says, turning to me. “And C.I.A. says I have no roots here.” Chalabi spent 45 years in exile. Under the Hashemite monarchy installed by the British after World War I, the ruling class of the new Iraq was largely made up of Sunni Muslims, as it had been under the Ottoman Turks. The Chalabis were part of the small Shiite elite; most of the rest of the Shiite majority formed a vast underclass. The remnants of that Shiite elite now form a sizable slice of the political establishment of post-Saddam Iraq. In addition to Chalabi, there is Adil Abdul Mahdi, the vice president, a Chalabi friend since boyhood; Ayad Allawi, the former president, who is a Chalabi relative by marriage; and Feisal al-Istrabadi, the deputy ambassador to the United Nations in New York. In the 1950’s, Chalabi, Mahdi and Allawi were schoolmates at Baghdad College, an elite Jesuit high school. Even in their class photos, nearly a half-century old, all three men are instantly recognizable: Mahdi, the soft-spoken intellectual; Allawi, the charming bully; and Chalabi, the boy genius in a bow tie. On July 14, 1958, King Faisal II, the British-backed monarch, was deposed and killed; a day later, the prime minister, Nuri al-Said, fled to the home of Chalabi’s sister, Thamina. She dressed Said in an abaya, the head-to-toe gown worn by women. With the army closing in, Thamina Chalabi took Said to the home of Feisal al-Istrabadi’s grandparents. Ahmad Chalabi, then 14, watched his mother and Bibiya al-Istrabadi weep as they pondered the prime minister’s fate. “Three or four hours later, Said was dead,” Chalabi told me. “He shot himself.” Chalabi fled Iraq a few months later, first for Lebanon, then England and then America, where he received a degree in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a doctorate from the University of Chicago. (Dissertation title: “Jacobson Radical of Group Algebras Over Fields Characteristic p.”) He did not return to Baghdad until April 11, 2003. Chalabi’s homecoming, after the U.S. invasion, was not the triumphant return he hoped it would be. What should have been his principal claim to legitimacy — his central role in toppling Saddam — never carried him very far; it became a liability as Iraq descended into chaos. In the new Iraq, Westernized elites carried less and less authority. Power belonged to the clerics and to the populists. And then there was the scandal at Petra Bank in Jordan, the outlines of which every Iraqi, no matter how dimly educated, seemed already to know: that Chalabi had been convicted in absentia for fraud and sentenced to 22 years in prison for embezzling almost $300 million. (Chalabi, who fled Jordan before he could be arrested, has long denied the charges, maintaining that they were cooked up by the Jordanian government under pressure from Saddam Hussein. Last year, the Jordanians signaled that they were willing to pardon Chalabi. But Chalabi insisted on a public apology, which the Jordanians refused to give.) Even the small army of Iraqi exiles that Chalabi had raised before the war never grew to be much more than a personal militia. One poll, conducted in early 2004, showed him to be the least trusted public figure in Iraq — even less trusted than Saddam Hussein. Dexter Filkins The suspicions that ordinary Iraqis harbored about Chalabi were never relieved by his industriousness. As oil minister and deputy prime minister, Chalabi worked night and day, often on the minutiae of Iraq’s oil pipelines and electricity lines or the precise wording, in Arabic and English, of the Iraqi Constitution. I typically went to see Chalabi at night, sometimes at 9 or 10, and usually had to wait an hour or so while he finished with his other visitors. If it was true that Chalabi had returned to Iraq with the expectation of acquiring power, it was not true that he was unwilling to work for it. Chalabi, like all Iraqi political leaders, functioned in conditions of mortal danger at nearly all times. Even when he wanted to walk into his backyard, he had to be followed by armed guards. It’s an exhausting and debilitating way to live. But while many Iraqi exiles either gave up and returned to the West, or now spend as much time outside the country as in, Chalabi stayed in Iraq almost continuously following Hussein’s fall. For all the hard work, his zigging and zagging across the political spectrum frustrated many of the Iraqi elites — his only natural constituency — especially after his flirtation with the Islamists. “I don’t think Chalabi has any credibility left,” Adnan Pachachi, the 83-year-old former foreign minister, told me before the 2005 elections. “He is not acceptable to Iraqis. People don’t like him shifting all the time. This thing with Moktada — it’s ridiculous.” One who remained true was his friend Mahdi, who seemed, perhaps from his boyhood days swimming in the Tigris with Chalabi, to carry a deeper understanding of his old friend. “This is the style of Ahmad,” Mahdi told me just before the elections. “He was a banker. He works a dossier. Each time it’s different — he invests here, he invests there, he invests elsewhere. He has had successes, he has had maybe his failures. I can work with him.” Chalabi never grasped his essential unpopularity. In the first round of elections, in January 2005, Chalabi rode into office as a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite coalition pulled together by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the powerful Shiite religious leader. Nearly every Shiite in Iraq voted for the U.I.A., and a name on its slate all but guaranteed a seat in the Parliament. The leadership of the U.I.A. was sharply Islamist. Nearly a year later, as the December 2005 elections approached, Chalabi veered again, away from the Islamists, away from Moktada. Chalabi publicly chided the Shiite coalition as being too Islamic-minded, declaring he didn’t want to be a member of a government that was planning to transform Iraq into an Islamist state. By that time, of course, Iraq was already quite Islamist anyway. “They’re Islamist, and I don’t want to be part of the sectarian project,” Chalabi told me just before the elections that December. I actually believed him, but given his association with Moktada, it didn’t seem that many other Iraqis would. The reality, anyway, was more complicated. In the weeks before the election, the Shiite alliance offered Chalabi and his supporters 5 seats on its 275-seat slate; Chalabi demanded 10. Some Shiite leaders told me that they had deliberately offered Chalabi a low figure in the hope that he would leave their alliance for good. Mahdi, the vice president, denied that this was true. “For four days I tried to convince him; I even threatened him,” Mahdi told me. “I said, ‘Ahmad, if you leave this room, we will be no more friends.’ I was not serious. I was only threatening.” So Chalabi went his own way. If he had wanted only a seat for himself, he could have taken his place in the Shiite alliance; plenty of other Iraqis did. In going alone, he must have known that he was risking disaster. He went ahead anyway. A few days before the election, I drove up to Chalabi’s compound in Khadimiya for a lunch he was holding for tribal leaders. In much the same fashion as in Mushkhab 11 months before, about 100 sheiks from Sadr City listened to a Chalabi speech before descending on heaps of lamb and rice. One of the sheiks, a man named Sahaeh Masif al-Kindh, approached me as he walked out. “Chalabi didn’t forget us when we were living under Saddam,” al-Kindh told me. “He was Saddam’s biggest enemy. We don’t forget that.” 4. Washington, November 2005 The second round of Iraqi elections is only a few weeks away, and the wheel is turning again. Chalabi, once in favor, then out, is back in. Ostensibly, he has been invited to Washington by Treasury Secretary John Snow to talk about the Iraqi economy. But it’s more than that. He’s going to see Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The allegations that prompted the raid on Chalabi’s compound 18 months before, that he tipped the Iranians to American eavesdropping, are mysteriously forgotten. Indeed, everything seems to have been forgotten. Chalabi is rising on the catastrophe that Iraq has become. The Bush administration is grasping for anyone who might help them. On paper at least, Chalabi has a shot at becoming prime minister. Most of the meetings are private. There is a dinner at the home of Richard Perle for some of Chalabi’s old Washington friends. One of the events, a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, is public. The room is filled. At the end of a speech, Chalabi is asked by someone in the crowd if he would like to apologize for misleading the Bush administration about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Chalabi nods as if he knew the question was coming. “This is an urban myth,” he says. The audience gasps. Chalabi told me later that his role as an intelligence conduit on weapons of mass destruction began shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, when he was contacted by the Department of Defense. Not vice versa. “They came to us and asked, ‘Can you help us find something on Saddam?’ ” he said. “We put out feelers.” By that time, the autumn of 2001, Chalabi had a long record of working with the American government in its shadow war against Hussein. Throughout the 1990’s, however, Chalabi demonstrated time and again that he would pursue his own interests, even if they clashed with those of the United States. There was the time in 1995, for instance, when Chalabi, under the employ of the C.I.A. in the Kurdish-controlled city of Erbil, launched an unauthorized attack on Hussein’s army. The attack failed to spark an uprising against Hussein; the Turks sent troops into northern Iraq; the C.I.A. was furious. It was a fiasco. “Very quickly he got out of control,” one retired C.I.A. officer who worked with Chalabi told me. “We didn’t know what he was doing over there. He was trying to provoke a war with Saddam.” Then there was the time, in 1996, when Chalabi interfered with a C.I.A. plot to topple Saddam. I heard the story not from Chalabi but from Perle, the Bush defense adviser and Chalabi friend. As Perle tells it, Chalabi called him in a panic from London, telling him that a C.I.A.-backed plot against Hussein was fatally compromised. The fact that the C.I.A.’s Iraqi front-man for the plot, Ayad Allawi, was a rival of Chalabi’s (as well as his relative) had nothing to do with his concerns, Perle said. As Perle tells it, he quickly telephoned the C.I.A. director at the time, John Deutch, who agreed to meet in downtown Washington. Perle said he spent an hour laying out Chalabi’s worries. “He was obviously concerned,” Perle said of Deutch. The plot went ahead anyway. It was a catastrophe. Hussein arrested as many as 800 people and reportedly executed dozens of high-ranking officers. As a final indignity, Hussein’s men dialed up Allawi’s headquarters in Amman, Jordan, on a C.I.A.-provided communications device they captured from the plotters and left a message: “You might as well pack up and go home.” Some people in the C.I.A. held Chalabi responsible, believing that he had spread word of the plot in order to deny Ayad Allawi the upper hand in the exile movement. “There was abiding suspicion in the agency that Chalabi blew it,” the former C.I.A. agent said. The fallout over the failed coup precipitated the C.I.A.’s decision to break ties with Chalabi. Chalabi dismisses those claims, and some in the C.I.A. from the period back him up. “Chalabi was as true to me as the day was long,” says Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. field agent in northern Iraq. “If Chalabi was going to blow the operation, why would he tell the C.I.A.?” There was the money issue, too. Throughout the 1990’s, as the C.I.A. and Congress funneled millions of dollars to Chalabi’s organization, the Iraqi National Congress, rumors swirled about corruption. One of the skeptics was W. Patrick Lang, a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency. In 1995, Lang told me, he was sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, when he overheard a group of Iraqis talking about the money they had received from the American government. “I knew who these guys were, and I heard them speaking Arabic, and it was obviously Iraqi Arabic,” Lang said. “So I went over and sat next to them and listened. So what they were talking about was how to spend the Americans’ money, going on shopping trips, stuff like that. Oh, they were talking about going shopping for jewelry for women, toys for kids. Consumer goods. They were also talking about Las Vegas. ‘We will sneak out of here and go to Las Vegas. We have a lot of money now.’ ” A couple of years later, Lang said, he visited the office of Senator Trent Lott, then the Senate majority leader. After introducing an Arab businessman to Lott, Lang sat in Lott’s anteroom with a number of Capitol Hill staff members who helped draft the Iraq Liberation Act, which provided millions of dollars to Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. They were praising Chalabi: “They were talking about him, that Chalabi fits into this plan as a very worthwhile, virtuous exemplar of modernization, somebody who could help reform first Iraq and then the Middle East. They were very pleased with themselves.” Lang, an old Middle East hand who had worked in Iraq in the 1980’s, said he was stunned. “You guys need to get out more,” Lang recalls saying at the time. “It’s a fantasy.” Years later, Lang said, many of the same men who were sitting in Lott’s office that day became key players in the Pentagon’s plans for an invasion of Iraq. Which brings us back to Chalabi’s “urban myth”: the notion that he provided bogus intelligence to the Bush administration and helped persuade them — or provide the pretext — to invade Iraq. In his speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Chalabi exhorted the audience to turn to Page 108 of the Robb-Silverman report, a recently completed blue-ribbon investigation, which, he said, exonerates him. It does, in a way. The report does not say that Chalabi & Company played an important role in the events leading to the war. It says only that the Bush administration did not rely much on intelligence Chalabi handed over in making the decision to invade. “In fact, overall, C.I.A.’s postwar investigations revealed that I.N.C.-related sources had a minimal impact on prewar assessments,” the report says. This is also Chalabi’s version. In the run-up to war, he says, he provided only three defectors to the American intelligence community. “We did not vouch for any of their information,” Chalabi told me. One of the people whom the I.N.C. made available to American intelligence was Adnan Ihsan al-Haideri, who claimed that he had worked on buildings that were used to store biological, nuclear and chemical weapons equipment. Chalabi told me that he made Haideri available to American intelligence at a safe house in Bangkok. He didn’t think much of Haideri or his information, he says, and was astonished to learn later that the information he provided became a pillar of the Americans’ charges against Hussein. “We told them, ‘We don’t know who this guy is,’ ” Chalabi said. “Then the Americans spoke to him and said, ‘This guy is the mother lode.’ Can you believe that on such a basis the United States would go to war? The intelligence community regarded the I.N.C. as useless. Why would the government believe us?” Perle, from his perch on the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Advisory Committee Board, backs Chalabi’s version. He was privy to much of the intelligence the administration was collecting on Hussein in the days before the war. He says that American intelligence officials began from the premise that Hussein had never destroyed his stocks of banned weapons and that he had kept his programs alive. American spies were only looking to confirm what they thought they already knew. In any event, Perle said, very little of their information came from Chalabi. “I had all the security clearances,” Perle said. “I was pretty much aware of the people that the I.N.C. was bringing to the table to talk about what they knew. Everything they did came with a disclaimer. To the best of my knowledge, there was no single important fact that was uniquely conveyed to U.S. intelligence by anyone who had been assisted by the I.N.C.” Indeed, Chalabi says, much of the most important evidence that led America to war did not come from the I.N.C.: not the report on the uranium from Niger, and not Curveball, the Iraqi defector who made bogus claims about mobile biological weapons labs. “It’s not our fault,” Chalabi says. But the story doesn’t end there. A second report, released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in September 2006, reached far more damning conclusions. The report states flatly that Chalabi’s group introduced defectors to American intelligence who directly influenced two key judgments in the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which preceded the Senate vote on the Iraq war: that Hussein possessed mobile biological-weapons laboratories and that he was trying to reconstitute his nuclear program. The report said that the I.N.C. provided a large volume of flawed intelligence to the United States about Iraq, saying the group “attempted to influence United States policy on Iraq by providing false information through defectors directed at convincing the United States that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had links to terrorists.” (Five Republican senators disagreed with the report’s conclusions about the I.N.C.) Chalabi’s denials are unconvincing for another reason. His role in the preparations for war was not just as a source for American intelligence agencies. He was America’s chief public advocate for war, spreading information gathered by his own intelligence network to newspapers, magazines, television programs and Congress. (A New York Times reporter, Judith Miller, was one of Chalabi’s primary conduits; in an e-mail message sent in 2003 that has been widely quoted since, she wrote that Chalabi “has provided most of the front-page exclusives on W.M.D. to our paper” and that the Army unit she was then traveling with was “using Chalabi’s intell and document network for its own W.M.D. work.”) Indeed, the press proved even more gullible than the intelligence experts in the American government. In a June 2002 letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee, the I.N.C. listed 108 news articles based on information provided by the group. The list included articles concerning some of the wildest claims about Hussein, including that he had collaborated in the Sept. 11 attacks. David Kay, the former chief weapons inspector in Iraq, offers one of the most compelling explanations for how pivotal Chalabi’s role was in taking America to war. Kay said that while the C.I.A. had long regarded Chalabi with suspicion, disregarding much of what he gave them, Chalabi had succeeded in persuading his more powerful friends in other parts of the government — Vice President Dick Cheney, for instance, and Wolfowitz. The pressure brought by those men, Kay told me, ultimately persuaded George Tenet, director of the C.I.A., that the White House was committed to war and that there was no point in resisting it. “In my judgment, the reason George Tenet and the top of the agency came over to the argument that Iraq had W.M.D. was that they really knew that the vice president and Wolfowitz had come to that conclusion anyway,” Kay said. “They had been getting information from Chalabi for years.” Of Wolfowitz, whom he has known for years, Kay said: “He was a true believer. He thought he had the evidence. That came from the defectors. They came from Chalabi.” Kay said he continued to feel Chalabi’s influence with Wolfowitz even after the invasion, when Kay was leading the team searching for W.M.D. from mid- to late 2003. “Paul, when faced with evidence that we had developed on the ground, would say, Well, Chalabi says this, the I.N.C. says this, why are you not seeing it?” Kellems, the Wolfowitz assistant, disputed Kay’s story, saying that Tenet’s views were shared by officials across the government. “The position taken on weapons was the consensus view of the United States, including of the Clinton administration and other Western intelligence agencies — as well as that of Mr. Kay himself prior to visiting Iraq,” Kellems said. Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell in Bush’s first term, adds a final turn to the labyrinth. In the frantic days leading up to Powell’s speech at the United Nations in February 2003, when he laid out the case for war, Wilkerson said he spent many nights sleeping on a couch in George Tenet’s office. During those preparations, Wilkerson told me, Powell insisted that every point he would make at the U.N. had to be supported by at least three independent sources. “We had three or four sources for every item that was substantive in his presentation,” Wilkerson told me in an interview in Washington. “Powell insisted on that. But what I am hearing now, though, is that a lot of these sources sort of tinged and merged back into a single source, and that inevitably that single source seems to be either recommended by, set up by, orchestrated by, introduced by, or whatever, by somebody in the I.N.C.” Wilkerson said that the revelations, some of which he says he has heard from his own friends inside American and European intelligence agencies, have forced him to rethink how America went to war. “I have maintained pretty much the same thing that the president said, ‘Well, we all got fooled, it was lousy intelligence, and no one in the national leadership spun the intelligence,’ ” Wilkerson said. “I am having to revisit that. And that is disturbing to me.” Wilkerson raises a crucial point. Assuming that Chalabi was a source for at least some of the bogus intelligence, we might ask ourselves: so what? Was the American national security apparatus so incompetent that it could be hoodwinked by a handful of shopworn engineers and an Iraqi mathematician to take the country into war? Or is the lesson more disturbing — that Chalabi simply gave the Bush administration what it wanted to hear? “I think Chalabi and the I.N.C. were very shrewd,” Wilkerson said. “I think Chalabi understood what people wanted, and he fed it to them. From everything I’ve heard, no one says he is dumb.” 5. Tehran, November 2005 Amid the debate about Chalabi’s role in taking America to war, one little-noticed phrase in a Senate Intelligence Committee report on W.M.D. offered an important insight into Chalabi’s identity. One of the principal errors made by the Bush administration in relying on Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, the report said, was to disregard conclusions by the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency that “the I.N.C. was penetrated by hostile intelligence services,” notably those of Iran. The Iran connection has long been among the most beguiling aspects of Chalabi’s career. Baer, the former C.I.A. operative, recalled sitting in a hotel lobby in Salah al-Din, in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, in 1995 while Chalabi met with the turbaned representatives of Iranian intelligence on the other side of the room. (Baer, as an American, was barred from meeting the Iranians.) Baer says he came to regard Chalabi as an Iranian asset, and still does. “He is basically beholden to the Iranians to stay viable,” Baer told me. “All his C.I.A. connections — he wouldn’t get away with that sort of thing with the Iranians unless he had proved his worth to them.” Pat Lang, the D.I.A. agent, holds a similar view: that in Chalabi, the Iranians probably saw someone who could help them achieve their long-sought goal of removing Saddam Hussein. After a time, in Lang’s view, the Iranians may have figured the Americans would leave and that Chalabi would most likely be in charge. Lang insists he is only speculating, but he says it has been clear to the American intelligence community for years that Chalabi has maintained “deep contacts” with Iranian officials. “Here is what I think happened,” Lang said. “Chalabi went and told the guys at the Ministry of Intelligence and Security in Tehran: ‘The Americans are giving me money. I’m their guy. I’m their candidate.’ And I’m sure their eyes lit up. The Iranians would reason that they could use this guy to manipulate the United States to get what they wanted. They would figure that the U.S. would invade. They would figure that we would come and we would go, and if we left Chalabi in charge, who was a good friend of theirs, they would be in good shape.” Lang’s thesis is impossible to prove, and Chalabi denies it. And even if it were true, Chalabi’s role would be difficult to discern: so many different Iranian agencies are thought to be pursuing so many different agendas in Iraq that a single Iranian national interest is difficult to identify. Still, if Lang’s and Baer’s argument is true, it would be the stuff of spy novels: Chalabi, the American-adopted champion of Iraqi democracy, a kind of double agent for one of America’s principal adversaries. In late 2005, I accompanied Chalabi on a trip to Iran, in part to solve the riddle. We drove eastward out of Baghdad, in a convoy as menacing as the one we had ridden in south to Mushkhab earlier in the year. After three hours of weaving and careering, the plains of eastern Iraq halted, and the terrain turned sharply upward into a thick ridge of arid mountains. We had come to Mehran, on one of history’s great fault lines, the historic border between the Ottoman and Persian Empires. As we crossed into Iran, the wreckage and ruin of modern Iraq gave way to swept streets and a tidy border post with shiny bathrooms. Another world. An Iranian cleric approached and shook Chalabi’s hand. Then he said something curious: “We are disappointed to hear that you won’t be staying in the Shiite alliance,” he said. “We were really hoping you’d stay.” The border between Iraq and Iran had, for the moment, disappeared. More curious, though, was the authority that Chalabi seemed to carry in Iran, which, after all, has been accused of assisting Iraqi insurgents and otherwise stirring up chaos there. For starters, Chalabi asked me if I wanted to come along on his Iranian trip only the night before he left — and then procured a visa for me in a single day: a Friday, during the Eid holiday, when the Iranian Embassy was closed. Under ordinary circumstances, an American reporter might wait weeks. Then there was the executive jet. When we arrived at the border, Chalabi ducked into a bathroom and changed out of his camouflage T-shirt and slacks and into a well-tailored blue suit. Then we drove to Ilam, where an 11-seat Fokker jet was idling on the runway of the local airport. We jumped in and took off for Tehran, flying over a dramatic landscape of canyons and ravines. We landed in Iran’s smoggy capital, and within a couple of hours, Chalabi was meeting with the highest officials of the Iranian government. One of them was Ali Larijani, the national security adviser. I interviewed Larijani the next morning. “Our relationship with Mr. Chalabi does not have anything to do with his relationship with the neocons,” he said. His red-rimmed eyes, when I met him at 7 a.m., betrayed a sleepless night. “He is a very constructive and influential figure. He is a very wise man and a very useful person for the future of Iraq.” Then came the meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president. I was with a handful of Iranian reporters who were led into a finely appointed room just outside the president’s office. First came Chalabi, dressed in a tailored suit, beaming. Then Ahmadinejad, wearing a face of childlike bewilderment. He was dressed in imitation leather shoes and bulky white athletic socks, and a suit that looked as if it had come from a Soviet department store. Only a few days before, Ahmadinejad publicly called for the destruction of Israel. He and Chalabi, who is several inches taller, stood together for photos, then retired to a private room. At the time of Chalabi’s visit, Iran and the United States were engaged in a complicated diplomatic dance; the American ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay Khalilzad, had been authorized to open negotiations with the Iranians over their involvement in Iraq. Still, Chalabi insists he carried no note from the Iranians when he flew to Washington the next week. Officially, at least, Iran and the United States never got together. As ever, Chalabi had multiple agendas. One was to learn whether the Iranians would support his candidacy for the prime ministership (the same reason he traveled to the United States). It makes you wonder, in light of the Baer and Lang thesis: was Chalabi telling the Iranians, or asking them for permission? Or making a deal, based on his presumed leverage in the United States? The possibilities seemed endless. Chalabi played it cool. “The fact that Iraq’s neighbor is also a country that is majority Shia is no reason for us to accept any interference in our affairs or to compromise the integrity of Iraq,” he said after his meeting with Ahmadinejad. Richard Perle, Chalabi’s friend, discounted the idea that Chalabi might be a double agent. “Of course Chalabi has a relationship with the Iranians — you have to have a relationship with the Iranians in order to operate there,” Perle said. “The question is what kind of relationship. Is he fooling the Iranians or are the Iranians using him? I think Chalabi has been very shrewd in getting the things he has needed over the years out of the Iranians without giving anything in return.” For all of the skullduggery surrounding the trip to Iran, though, the greatest revelation came later in the day. When the meeting with Ahmadinejad ended, he asked Chalabi if there was anything he could to do to make his stay more comfortable. Chalabi said yes, in fact, there was: would he mind if he, Chalabi, took a tour of the Museum of Contemporary Art? So there we were, in the middle of the Axis of Evil, strolling past one of the finest collections of Western Modern art outside Europe and the United States: Matisse, Kandinsky, Rothko, Gauguin, Pollock, Klee, Van Gogh, five Warhols, seven Picassos and a sprawling garden of sculpture outside. The collection was assembled by Queen Farah, the shah’s wife, with the monarchy’s vast oil wealth. And now, with the mullahs in charge, the museum is largely forgotten. The day we were there, the gallery was all but empty. We had the museum’s enthusiastic English-speaking tour guide all to ourselves. “Thank you, thank you, for coming!” Noreen Motamed exclaimed, clapping her hands. We walked the empty halls. Chalabi moved through the place deliberately, nodding his head, pausing at the Degas and the Pissarro. “Wow,” Chalabi said before Jesus Rafael Soto’s painting “Canada.” “Look at that.” A retinue of Iranian officials walked with us, unmoved by the splendor. Ahmadinejad had stayed behind. For all of the furies that emanate from the halls of the Iranian government, it has taken fine care of Queen Farah’s collection. Indeed, about the only way you would know you were not in a museum in New York or London was the absence of the middle panel from Francis Bacon’s triptych “Two Figures Lying on a Bed With Attendant,” which depicts two naked men. “It is in the basement, covered,” Motamed said with disappointed eyes. Finally, we came across a pair of paintings by Marc Chagall, the 20th-century Modernist and painter of Jewish life. The display contained no mention of this fact. Chalabi gazed at the Chagalls for a time. Then, with a rueful smile, turned, to no one in particular, and said loudly: “Imagine that. They have two paintings by Marc Chagall in the middle of a museum in Tehran.” The Iranian officials seemed not to hear. 6. Baghdad, December 2005 A winter rain is falling. Chalabi is standing inside a tent in Sadr City, the vast Shiite slum of eastern Baghdad. He’s talking about his plans for restoring electricity, boosting oil production and beating the insurgency. People seem to be listening, but without enthusiasm. The violence here, worsening by the day, is washing away the hopes of ordinary Iraqis. Less and less seems possible anymore. People are retreating inward, you can see it in the glaze in their eyes. As Chalabi speaks, I pull aside one of the Iraqis who had been listening. What do you think of him? I ask. “Chalabi good good,” the Iraqi man says in halting English. Whom are you going to vote for? “The Shiite alliance, of course,” the Iraqi answers. “It is the duty of all Shiite people.” When the election came, Chalabi was wiped out. His Iraqi National Congress received slightly more than 30,000 votes, only one-quarter of 1 percent of the 12 million votes cast — not enough to put even one of them, not even Chalabi, in the new Iraqi Parliament. There was grumbling in the Chalabi camp. One of his associates said of the Shiite alliance: “We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn’t even get that many.” He shrugged. But the truth seemed clear enough: Chalabi was finished. Chalabi, who could plausibly claim that he, more than any other Iraqi, had made the election possible, had been shunned by the very people he had worked so hard to set free. No amount of deal making or of public relations foot-work, or of endorsements from friends, was able to save him. Chalabi may have helped bring democracy to Iraq, but it was democracy that finished him. He was, in the end, a parlor politician, someone from the world of his father or grandfather, or maybe of Victorian England: a brilliant negotiator and schemer who might settle a country’s problems over a cup of tea. But in Iraq, by late 2005, real power was no longer held by the parlor men, or by politicians at all. It was held by people like Moktada al-Sadr, populist leaders with a militia and a mass following in the street. The election results were a harbinger of the civil war. Iraqis voted almost entirely along sectarian and ethnic lines: Kurds for the big Kurdish parties, Sunnis for the Sunni parties and Shiites for the big Islamist Shiite alliance. Iraqis who tried to run on a secular platform — Chalabi, for instance, and his relative, Allawi, in another party — found themselves abandoned. Just two months later, in February of this year, following the destruction of the Askariya shrine, a holy Shiite temple in Samarra, the civil war began in earnest: Shiite gunmen, who had for years been restrained by the Shiite leadership in the face of the Sunni onslaught, were finally free to retaliate. Chalabi, shut out of the government, claimed that his sin was one of miscalculation. There was some truth to this: in all likelihood, Chalabi did not lose because he had been convicted of stealing millions of dollars from a Jordanian bank. Or because of the rumors swirling around Baghdad that he had looted the treasury. Or even because he was an exile close to the Americans. No: plenty of Westernized Iraqi exiles were elected to Parliament — among them Mowaffak al-Rubaie and Adil Abdul Mahdi — who, like Chalabi, didn’t have local followings and were trailed by similar questions. Practically speaking, Chalabi lost because he had broken from the big cleric-backed Shiite alliance that swept the election. “I had not realized how polarized Iraq had become,” Chalabi told me after the election. He might have gotten a seat in the cabinet, but that didn’t work out, either. That stung: the new Iraqi government is staffed with Chalabi’s old colleagues, many of them members of the exile alliance he once led. Jalal Talabani is president. Adil Abdul Mahdi, his boyhood friend, is vice president. Barham Salih, comrade of many years, is deputy prime minister. His old confidant Zalmay Khalilzad, who played a central role in forming the new government, is the American ambassador. In the end, they couldn’t — or wouldn’t — bring him aboard. “Chalabi really made a mess of things,” said one Iraqi political leader who now occupies a key post in the government. He declined to elaborate. As anticlimactic as was Chalabi’s fall, its real meaning lay in a paradox: democratic politics no longer mattered. For three years, the American-backed enterprise in Iraq rested on the assumption that the exercise of democratic politics would drain away the anger that was driving the violence. Instead of bullets, there would be ballots. But at the culmination of that long process — two constitutions, two elections and a referendum — the violence was worse than ever. It turns out that democratic politics does not stop violence; indeed, the elections, by polarizing Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic communities, may have helped push the country into civil war. Effectively, by the fall of 2006, the overwhelming majority of Iraq had no government at all. It was a failed state. Yes, there were Iraqis — Chalabi’s friends — who went to their jobs every day, toiling dutifully and not so dutifully inside the Green Zone, which every day seemed more and more divorced from the reality outside. In the Red Zone, as the real Iraq is called, Iraq was a nightmarish, apocalyptic place, where gunmen kidnapped children and sometimes killed them, where bodies turned up at the morgue peppered by holes from electric drills and corpses lay uncollected in the streets, along with the trash, for days on end. Ahmad Chalabi devoted his whole adult life to toppling a dictator and achieving power in the place of his birth. He felled the dictator, helping along a reckless gamble that wagered the future of a nation. The gamble failed, a nation imploded and Chalabi never ascended to the throne he so coveted. But in an odd turn of fortune, the throne no longer had anything to offer. 7. London, August 2006 The conversation is wrapping up. The talk turns to the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the machinations of those around him, what the future might hold. Chalabi, in an expansive mood, gets up, goes into a closet and brings out a note that Bob Baer, the C.I.A. agent, scribbled to him in that hotel lobby when the two men plotted a coup many years before. The talk, improbably, turns to memoirs; at the moment, Baer’s, “See No Evil,” was a best seller. I ask Chalabi, who is back on the couch, if it isn’t time that he write his own. He doesn’t hesitate to answer. “Too early!” Chalabi says. “Too early!”