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I was reading a letter to Tramore Town Council, about the new Guillamenes cattle-crush, from someone who'd been involved in International Water Safety for many years. In the letter the person pointed out how someone had been "swept off the diving platform by a freak wave". I said the Club Secretary Aidan Farrally that his points were valid but subsequent to that assertion, his arguments became suspect.
Now despite my deliberately somewhat provocative title, yes there are such things as freak waves. However while they are long reported, they are an only recently confirmed open ocean phenomenon, and more commonly known as rogue waves, (twice the height of the significant wave height around them).
But here we are discussing so-called freak waves at the coast, the interface of land and sea.
Every year we read or hear stories of coastal drownings caused by freak waves, where people at the coast are caught by a wave seemingly out of scale or size to the preceding waves, and swept off rocks, out to sea or suffering a fatal concussion from rocks. These are tragedies, but I have long had a problem with this reporting because it perpetuates a myth about the sea, and somewhat shifts the responsibility of care away from the person into a force-majeure situation, an "act of god".
If there are freak waves, how can an average person realistically protect themselves except to stay away from the coast? If there aren't freak waves, then the responsibility shifts to people themselves to be more vigilant.
The phrase freak wave implies that what has happened is unusual and unforeseen, neither of which are the case. Ask any surfer. So we need once again to talk about waves and safety at the coast.
Most waves are caused by wind. Wind blows over the water surface and the friction pushes the water. The distance of water over which the wind blows is called the fetch, and the longer the fetch, and the longer the time and stronger the wind that blows, the bigger the initial waves. If the wind continues to blow, as the waves grow, they present even more surface for the wind to push. The waves continue to grow.
Waves are an energy pulse that travels through the water and will continue to travel unless something stops them. That something from our point of view, is land.
I said initial waves above, and that's really important. Wind that blows in a Western Atlantic storm cause waves, which if unimpeded by other contrary weather, may blow those winds toward Ireland and Europe, across 2000 miles of open water.
We need to think about the fundamentals of a wave.
Imagine the wind blowing and causing waves.
- The height of a wave is called the amplitude.
- The greater the amplitude the more energy in the wave.
- The number of waves in a particular time is called the frequency.
Waves of different amplitudes usually have different frequencies. The higher the amplitude or height, the lower the frequency.
The bigger the wave, the longer the time between them and the less frequently they appear.
Waves travel at different speeds. Wind that cause waves nearby can have lots and lots of chop, small waves really close to each other.
Now the critical things about waves of any kind, not just water, is if they are even fractionally different heights they will travel at different speeds. What happens if two things, in case waves, are travelling the same direction at different speeds? The faster one will pass the slower one.
The further away the initial wind, the further the waves will travel. If a faster waves catches a slower one, the basic physics means that they will be added together. The amplitude, the height of the waves, will become the two combined heights.
A one and half metre wave catching a one metre wave, will become a two and half metre wave.
This wave, in surfer's parlance, is called a Set Wave. Surfers don't see them as freaks, but as normal aspects of the ocean's behaviour.
This doesn't happen quickly but when you have hundred or thousands of miles or kilometres in which it can happen, it doesn't have to be quick.
The result is that you have a wave that is now a third higher than the higher of the two previous waves. And that may be higher than all the surrounding waves. And the bigger it is the faster it's travelling but the longer time between them, so there can up to many minutes between large waves like this. Any experienced surfer can tell you that the period between the largest set waves could be up to 15 minutes.
Now we've explored the formation and irregularity of waves, we've seen that these are not freak waves, but normal ocean behaviour.
The important thing becomes that the responsibility for understanding this lies with the person on the shore, just as it lies with a pedestrian crossing a road, except the ocean can't see or react to you like a motorist can even when you are in the wrong.
Therefore the most important action to watch the water. Always.
This is NOT expect the unexpected. This is how the ocean works.
It should be noted, unlike beaches facing directly into the swell, at reefs and rocks, especially those that are not directly facing the oncoming swell, set waves can be difficult to see. if the water around a reef or rocky shore is deep, the first indication you may have is the wave actually breaking onto where you are standing
Watch the water for twice as long as the waves are high (in imperial measurement).
If the waves look to be two feet high, watch the water for four minutes before venturing close to the shore.
If the waves are two metres high on initial appraisal, you should (approximately) convert that to feet, and watch the water for six to seven minutes before getting close. Do this regularly and you will start to gain a better appreciation for the sea and its rhythms. And more importantly, you and the people around you will be safer.
Coastal safety is your responsibility!


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subset: commoncrawl


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Gerhard Müller, Bishop of Regensburg, takes over from retired Cardinal Levada as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
Liam sent me this link, with the following commentary from "New Catholic" at Rorate Caeli:
Müller's nomination is also meant as a sign of a positive reevaluation of Liberation Theology, of which Müller is an enthusiast, in the Vatican – signaled by an article by Müller himself highlighting "positive" aspects of this dreadful movement published last December in L'Osservatore Romano. Which considering last week's news on the collapse of the Church in Brazil, the one most ravaged by Liberation Theology, probably means people in the Vatican simply cannot understand numbers… Or do they want those numbers?
If the traditionalists are dismayed, is that good news for the Church? My friends know I don't subscribe to the enemy-of-my-enemy meme. I see equal opportunity splinters all over the place. Will Bishop Müller be a CDF head in the image of Joseph Ratzinger, an active theologian as well as a bureaucrat? Or should we pay more attention to the man as an administrator: the guy who blew up consulting bodies in his diocese, alienated himself from his brother bishops somewhat, and extended a hard line to stray sheep regardless of their ideology?
I think the internet conservative Catholics are really in trouble spiritually, if they expect like-minded leadership in their own image, and start spouting "heresy" at every bishop's every published word–which they watch carefully, I'm sure. Given what I've seen in the comboxes at RC and WDTPRS, the ministry of Peter sure has it's work cut out for it in the cyber-age.


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Snowed under right now…..I am frantically wrapping up first marking period grades, trying to keep up with my NaNoWriMo novel, and reading for the Cybils. Needless to say, I am more than a little busy. I have reviews to write and promise to get some of them up this week,
Oh! But tomorrow morning the mailman is picking up the first two ARCsFloatOn packages! I have three more boxes that will be ready to go out on Tuesday. Tomorrow I have to stop at the post office and get more flat rate boxes. So far, ARCsFloatOn is a huge success!
Finally, I am very sad that I will not be at NCTE this coming week. 😦 I am hoping to attend vicariously through people's tweets, so please tweet if you are there! The hashtag is #NCTE10.
Filed under: Random Notes |


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Today's Workout column: Angled crunches target abs
Summertime is surely upon us! Between 95-degree days and thunderstorms, it's beach time and pool parties!
I'm sure abs are at the top of all our fitness plans, which makes this week's exercise a good addition.
Today's move is an angled crunch.
It will be working your whole midsection, from upper to lower, and transverse abdominals. All you need is a flat surface and you are ready to crunch.
Begin this move by laying flat on the floor. Press your back into the floor and roll your hips up to engage the midsection. Draw in one leg by bending in the knee and planting the foot on the floor. Then, extend the opposite leg straight up in the air.
Now, position the upper body by holding the chest tall with good spacing between the chin and chest. Place the arms as follows: Bent arm with fingertips gently behind your ear, on the same side as the raised leg. The other leg is extended straight and slightly angled across the body.
Once everything is in place, start to lift the upper body off the floor. Use the straight arm to guide you up and over, reaching for the extended foot. This should create a slight twist in the middle along with the contraction of the midsection. Once you reach your deepest point, return to the start.
Continue on the same side for at least 10 times. Release your positioning then restructure yourself on the opposite side. Give yourself the same amount of repetitions.
Continue to alternate your sets from side to side, shooting for at least three sets on each side.
This exercise is great for all levels. If you need to intensify, flatten out the vent knee. If it is too much for the extended leg, bend that one down to match the other.
This abdominal move is good to add to any routine for variation and extra challenges.
Marlo Alleva, an instructor at Gold's Gym and group fitness coordinator at Fontaine-Gills YMCA in Lakeland, Florida, can be reached at email@example.com.


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"The little farmhouse in Pennsylvania where I grew up was always alive with singing, laughter and a love of the arts. My father, a voice instructor, introduced us to the steady flow of eccentric, larger-than-life characters found in his greatest passion – the dramatic world of the Italian opera. Aida s rich theme always seemed to be playing in the background as I went in search of a reality I could call my own, escaping into the quiet roar of the singing crickets and song of the meadowlark. I could lose myself in the turquoise twilight magic of a summer evening or breath of sweet fields of winter wheat beneath the rising sliver of a moon. I found my true love and years later found myself longing for the beautiful fields of my childhood, where everything was the way it should be. My passion springs forth through the beauty of the fertile earth, which has always been my real teacher. I began painting full time in 1982, doing my time as a starving artist while raising my young son. I was happy to trade this tragic cliché for the happy success of sell-out gallery shows and award banquets. In 1991, I married maritime artist David Thimgan, and we thrived together. On one late summer afternoon escape, traveling to the Mendocino coast, I discovered the California wine country. I was so happy to have found a place in California that reminded me of my long lost fields of Pennsylvania. I painted my first vineyard scene in 1996 and, as time passed, this interest has taken me to the countryside of Tuscany, where I feel I probably lived in a former lifetime. My Italian opera theme song has never left my heart, and somehow life seems to have come full circle, to connect, again, the passions of my life. "


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By Joshua Miller
October 28, 2013
Nine days before Boston voters choose the city's next mayor, John R. Connolly and Martin J. Walsh visited churches and an Islamic cultural center — and Walsh stopped by a synagogue — in a day of campaigning that pivoted on speaking to faith groups.
Both candidates hoping to succeed Mayor Thomas M. Menino attended Boston church services Sunday morning and gathered in the evening for an interfaith organization's event at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center in Roxbury.
Bruce Thatcher of the Dearborn Community Alliance spoke at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center's forum.
At the Roxbury forum organized by the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization and the Massachusetts Minority Contractors' Association, the candidates, appearing separately, were peppered with questions and asked to make pledges about what they would do if elected mayor.
Among the actions they agreed to support, Connolly and Walsh committed to pushing to limit handgun sales to one per person per month, to increasing city support for women- and minority-owned businesses, and to turning Roxbury's Dearborn School into a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics academy.
In front of a diverse audience of more than 200 people, each candidate said yes to each of the organizations' "asks," receiving hearty applause.
Walsh, who spoke second, was prepared with a joke when he got the final question: Would he meet with leaders of the two sponsoring organizations within 90 days of his inauguration? "Fuhgeddaboudit!" Walsh said, drawing laughter, before agreeing that he would indeed meet with the groups.
The Rev. Burns Stanfield, president of the interfaith organization, said he was pleased that both candidates agreed to support everything they were asked to.
"I feel good about both of them as candidates," he said.
Leaving the forum, Connolly lauded the effort of the event's sponsors. "I think it's great when we see the intersection of faith and civic action and the desire to bring people together across different faiths to work for making Boston a better place," Connolly said as he was leaving the event. "There's an energy to it that's always great."
Walsh said the heavy focus on religious congregations Sunday was part of the wide variety of groups he saw as he campaigned. "Running for mayor, you have to hit a lot of different constituencies and part of that is hitting the different faith-based organizations."
"It shows the diversity of the city," he said.
Walsh started the day at the Charles Street AME Church in Dorchester, while Connolly made appearances at Mt. Olive Kingdom Builders' Church in Dorchester, Metropolitan Baptist Church in Dorchester, and Gate of Heaven Parish in South Boston.
Later, Walsh met with members of Congregation Kadimah-Toras Moshe, a Modern Orthodox synagogue in Brighton.
Just before 9 p.m., standing a few feet from a spread of bagels and hummus, Walsh spoke to about 30 people and explained what he would do if he is elected mayor.
Beyond his standard stump speech, which ranged from discussion of economic development issues to education, he tailored his remarks to the audience, speaking about traffic in Brighton and a trip he took to Israel in 1999.
Walsh tied his own religious education into his stance on improving Boston schools. "I am a product of a parochial school, because rather than sending me to the public school down the street, my parents sent me to St. Margaret's, largely because of busing," Walsh said.
Now, Walsh said he wants to boost Boston schools by introducing a public preschool program for 4-year-olds, as well as taking advantage of state funds to renovate city school buildings.
At the Roxbury cultural center, both candidates were engaged with their questioners, drew laughs, and received hearty applause from the audience. But the signs of the toll of a long and grueling campaign were also clear.
Connolly could not remember the name of one of the people who had spoken earlier. "I don't sleep anymore, so I don't remember anything anymore," Connolly said to laughter.
Globe correspondent Jaclyn Reiss contributed to this report.
URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/walsh,-connolly-visit-faith-groups/d/14210


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1. Looks like North Carolina is bucking for The State That Squeezes Every Possible Drop Of Sweat From Its Citizens this summer.
2. We're running a close second for The State That Preheats Your Car To A Fiery 450° In The Shade.
3. Because nothing says July like dozens of sweaty tissues overflowing your cupholders.
4. You know it's bad when you say stuff like, "Hey! It's only gonna be 89° today! Woo hoo!"
5. Then again, there's no denying that's a far sight better than these 95, 97, and 99 degree pressure cookers. So. Very. HOT.
6. And, as any good Southern gal will tell you, "It's not just the heat, it's the humidity." Truer words were never spoken.
7. It's so humid – how humid is it? – It's so humid, bangs lie limply against foreheads everywhere.
8. It's so humid, mascara smears cheeks by 10am.
9. It's so humid, shirts get soaked through on the walk across a parking lot.
10. So go forth, fair North Carolinians, and may the force of powerful air conditioning be with you.
Disclaimer: I wrote this piece last week when we were deep in the throes of forecasts like "It's a hot one out there! We're looking at a high of 97 today!" Then the long term forecast told me you're getting a break from the heat – wait for it – right when I've scheduled this post. For the love. Whatever. I'm leaving it as is. This is North Carolina – wait four days and it'll be tropical again.


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Scientists from IBM unveiled a software ecosystem designed for programming silicon chips that have an architecture inspired by the function, low power, and compact volume of the brain.
The technology could enable a new generation of intelligent sensor networks that mimic the brain's abilities for perception, action, and cognition.
Dramatically different from traditional software, IBM's new programming model breaks the mold of sequential operation underlying today's von Neumann architectures and computers
It is instead tailored for a new class of distributed, highly interconnected, asynchronous, parallel, large-scale cognitive computing architectures, said a press release.
"Architectures and programs are closely intertwined and a new architecture necessitates a new programming paradigm," said Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha, principal investigator and senior manager, IBM Research.
"We are working to create a FORTRAN for synaptic computing chips. While complementing today's computers, this will bring forth a fundamentally new technological capability in terms of programming and applying emerging learning systems," added Modha.
To advance and enable this new ecosystem, IBM claims that the researchers at IBM developed the following breakthroughs that support all aspects of the programming cycle from design through development, debugging, and deployment:
Simulator: A multi-threaded, massively parallel and highly scalable functional software simulator of a cognitive computing architecture comprising a network of neurosynaptic cores.
Neuron Model: A simple, digital, highly parameterized spiking neuron model that forms a fundamental information processing unit of brain-like computation and supports a wide range of deterministic and stochastic neural computations, codes, and behaviors.
Programming Model: A high-level description of a "program" that is based on composable, reusable building blocks called "corelets." Each corelet represents a complete blueprint of a network of neurosynaptic cores that specifies a based-level function. Inner workings of a corelet are hidden so that only its external inputs and outputs are exposed to other programmers, who can concentrate on what the corelet does rather than how it does it. Corelets can be combined to produce new corelets that are larger, more complex, or have added functionality.
Library: A cognitive system store containing designs and implementations of consistent, parameterized, large-scale algorithms and applications that link massively parallel, multi-modal, spatio-temporal sensors and actuators together in real-time. In less than a year, the IBM researchers have designed and stored over 150 corelets in the program library.
Laboratory: A novel teaching curriculum that spans the architecture, neuron specification, chip simulator, programming language, application library and prototype design models. It also includes an end-to-end software environment that can be used to create corelets, access the library, experiment with a variety of programs on the simulator, connect the simulator inputs/outputs to sensors/actuators, build systems, and visualize/debug the results.
Paving the path to SyNAPSE
Modern computing systems were designed decades ago for sequential processing according to a pre-defined program. Although they are fast and precise "number crunchers," computers of traditional design become constrained by power and size while operating at reduced effectiveness when applied to real-time processing of the noisy, analog, voluminous, Big Data produced by the world around us. In contrast, the brain-which operates comparatively slowly and at low precision-excels at tasks such as recognizing, interpreting, and acting upon patterns, while consuming the same amount of power as a 20 watt light bulb and occupying the volume of a two-liter bottle.
In August 2011, IBM successfully demonstrated a building block of a novel brain-inspired chip architecture based on a scalable, interconnected, configurable network of "neurosynaptic cores." Each core brings memory ("synapses"), processors ("neurons"), and communication ("axons") in close proximity, executing activity in an event-driven fashion. These chips serve as a platform for emulating and extending the brain's ability to respond to biological sensors and analyzing vast amounts of data from many sources at once.
Having completed Phase 0, Phase 1, and Phase 2, IBM and its collaborators (Cornell University and iniLabs, Ltd) have recently been awarded approximately $12 million in new funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for Phase 3 of the Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) project, thus bringing the cumulative funding to approximately $53 million.
Smarter Sensors
IBM's long-term goal is to build a chip system with ten billion neurons and hundred trillion synapses, while consuming merely one kilowatt of power and occupying less than two liters of volume.
Systems built from these chips could bring the real-time capture and analysis of various types of data closer to the point of collection. They would not only gather symbolic data, which is fixed text or digital information, but also gather sub-symbolic data, which is sensory based and whose values change continuously. This raw data reflects activity in the world of every kind ranging from commerce, social, logistics, location, movement, and environmental conditions.
Take the human eyes, for example. They sift through over a Terabyte of data per day. Emulating the visual cortex, low-power, light-weight eye glasses designed to help the visually impaired could be outfitted with multiple video and auditory sensors that capture and analyze this optical flow of data.
These sensors would gather and interpret large-scale volumes of data to signal how many individuals are ahead of the user, distance to an upcoming curb, number of vehicles in a given intersection, height of a ceiling or length of a crosswalk.
Like a guide dog, sub-symbolic data perceived by the glasses would allow them to plot the safest pathway through a room or outdoor setting and help the user navigate the environment via embedded speakers or ear buds. This same technology — at increasing levels of scale — can form sensory-based data input capabilities and on-board analytics for automobiles, medical imagers, healthcare devices, smartphones, cameras, and robots.
Story Source:
The above story is based on materials provided by CIOL Bureau.


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Meteorological data from 1969 shows that London was bitter cold in February and March of that year. It also shows that in April, the same area set a record for 189 sunlight hours – not exceeded until 1984. This weather trivia syncs perfectly with the biography of Eric Clapton who describes Beatle, George Harrison wondering about in his garden with a guitar and composing a song. It was Here Comes the Sun.
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Here Comes the Sun
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Low Saxon facts for kids
Plattdüütsch is a Germanic language. It is known in English as Low Saxon or Low German, or as in German, Plattdeutsch.
Plattdüütsch is spoken by many people across northern Germany. It extended from East Prussia and northern Poland, across northern Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and to Dunkirk in France. Especially since World War II the name "Low Saxon" has been used in the Netherlands instead of "Low German", and use of the language has shrunk so that it is now only protected in Germany and the Netherlands.
Estimates are that there are 3 to 10 million speakers. Most of them have a passive knowledge of the language; there may be about 3 million people who speak it at a good to very good level (or who are native speakers).
Official Status
The European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages gives some official recognition and protection to Plattdüütsch as a Regional language in Germany and the Netherlands. In Germany it has the protection of the rules in part III of the Charter in the states of Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, and the protection of part III of the charter in Brandenburg, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony-Anhalt. It has part II protection in the Netherlands.
Some people say that Plattdüütsch is not really a language at all. But the European Charter does not apply to dialects, only to languages, and so the German government must think that the language is not just a dialect of German.
Outside northern Europe
Several groups of people outside Europe speak Low-German.
Mennonite communities use their Plautdietsch everywhere they live, especially in Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, Germany, South Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and the Americas (i.e. the Mennonite colonies in Paraguay, South America, or Chihuahua, Mexico, use Low German as a "co-official language" of the community, in addition to the country's official language, Spanish).
Some communities in the Midwestern United States have their own dialects that developed from the dialects of Schleswig-Holstein and Lower Saxony in the 19th century. Nobody knows how many people speak Low German in the United States, and the language may have died out in the mid 20th century. The many German-American communities were further assimilated (mixed) into the English speaking United States and lost many of their traditions, including using Low German and other German dialects/languages.


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'American Idol' winner Ruben Studdard now 'Biggest Loser'
Ruben Studdard didn't even get one last pig-out session before making his way to "The Biggest Loser" ranch.
"You know, the funny thing is, I was actually working the night before, so I didn't get an opportunity to have a pig-out session, no," Studdard said in a phone call. "I actually flew from a concert to the ranch. ... I'm sure I probably would have had a piece of cake or something before I went up to the ranch for months and months."
The 35-year-old singer became famous winning another reality show - "American Idol" - but had seen his weight climb in the years since. He is the 15th season's heaviest contestant at 462 pounds. "The Biggest Loser" returns Oct. 8 at 8 p.m on NBC.
The Grammy-nominated artist said after the show, he'll record his sixth album, but he will also make sure to "give every day of my life some Ruben time."
"That's what I've been taught, as you know. I have to get up every day and give myself the two hours that I need to keep myself together before I even get into any music stuff, and that's just going to have to be how I do it," he said.


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Who Wants to Be A Princess When You Can Be A Scientist?
Made from our super-soft 100% combed ring-spun cotton, this jersey crew neck t-shirt feels amazing all day long.
Features: Side seamed. Relaxed fit. Tear-away label
Fabric: (Solid Colors): 100% combed ring-spun cotton, 32 single 4.2 oz. (Deep Heather): 90/10 Cotton/Polyester
Care Instructions: Machine wash cold, inside-out, gentle cycle with mild detergent and similar colors. Use non-chlorine bleach only (when necessary). No fabric softeners. Tumble dry low, or hang-dry for longest life. Cool iron inside-out (if necessary). Do not iron design. Do not dry clean.
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Microsoft gets into the smarter city game
CityNext will help cities choose a combination of cloud technology, mobile devices, data analytics, and social networks to tackle the challenges of urbanization.
More than half of the world's population lives in towns and cities, and the number of urban dwellers is expected to swell to almost 5 billion by 2030, according to some estimates. As a result, city officials worldwide are turning to smarter technology to help them deliver citizen services more efficiently as well as to promote economic, social and environmental sustainability.
Seeking to tap into this era of "the smarter city," Microsoft has launched a new initiative called CityNext, which includes an ecosystem of partner solutions designed to help cities choose the right combination of cloud technology, mobile devices, data analytics and social networks to tackle the challenges of urbanization, according to a Microsoft release.
CityNext offers a diverse, global Microsoft Partner Network of more than 430,000 technology experts that can help transform city functions, such as building planning and infrastructure, education, energy and water, government administration, health and social services, public safety and justice, transportation and tourism, recreation and culture.
For example, CityNext can assist city leaders with emergency response planning and smart-building projects that monitor and reduce energy consumption. In fact, Microsoft, Accenture and the City of Seattle recently launched an energy management pilot powered by Microsoft Azure cloud platforms across five buildings in Seattle's downtown business core, the company said in a recent blog.
"The platform aggregates and analyzes millions of points of data within buildings and energy systems in real-time, identifies issues, instantly estimates the cost savings of fixing them and alerts engineers to fix the problem," writes Microsoft official Bill Mitchel. "The cloud solution will collect data from the myriad systems in those buildings and use data analytics to provide a prescriptive approach to how the building management systems can be tuned to improve energy efficiency."
The center of the pilot is the Accenture Smart Building & Energy Solutions working in conjunction with Microsoft Azure cloud technology. Microsoft is looking to implement these types of solutions via CityNext working with cities that include Auckland, New Zealand; Barcelona; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Hainan Province, China; Hamburg, Germany; Manchester, England; Moscow; Philadelphia; and Zhengzhou, China.
Barcelona, for example, has harnessed cloud computing, data and apps to improve administrative operations. Microsoft and CityNext partner BISmart worked with the Barcelona City Council to launch OpenData BCN, an initiative to make data accessible to the public. Using the Windows Azure cloud, the OpenData BCN platform aggregates facts about the city, such as population density and total unemployment, into a secure central hub. Citizens then can download Microsoft's bigov Better City Indicators app, giving them information for decisions such as where to start a business and where to settle down with their families, Microsoft officials said.
While Microsoft launches its initiative for cities, IBM is an established player in smart-city technology – including cloud-based and data analytic solutions – to improve city operations and transform their societies.
For instance, Miami-Dade County officials are collecting and analyzing data from across 35 municipalities to help them make decisions about managing water resources, reducing traffic jams and fighting crime. IBM's Intelligent Operations Center, styled as an executive dashboard, will let city and county leaders scoop up information from one department and share it with others, thereby improving access to pertinent and time-sensitive information, Miami-Dade officials said.
Many cities are now in the first stages of implementing smart technology solutions as part of a 10- to 15-year path to realizing full transformation potential, according to IDC's Smart City Maturity Model. "Today's cities know they must tackle urban challenges through coordinated and focused investments that enable collaboration across departments and agencies, leverage existing assets, engage citizens and stakeholders and tackle long-standing problems," said Ruthbea Yesner Clarke, director of the Smart Cities Strategies program at IDC.
"The result of 'smart city' initiatives will ultimately enable cities to attract businesses and citizens to build more vibrant city landscapes and competitive economies," Yesner Clarke said.


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Design submitted by Peter from the UK.
Peter says: This is Turbine LCD (MkII).
Following the popularity of the original Turbine I decided that I would like to make a more feasible version, as this seemed to be the biggest stumbling block with the original.
This version uses a simple always on LCD display in conjunction with a moulded lens in the shape of the original version's turbine blades. The LCD would be constantly animated with a very simple two state animation which through the lens gives the impression that the blades are turning . When the Knob is pressed briefly the time scrolls across the top of the display and would stay on for 10-15 sec's. When the knob is double pressed the time and backlight are activated. When the knob is pressed and held just the backlight is activated for illuminated animation. The knob can be pulled out like a conventional crown for setting the time, a date mode could also be possible.
Hopefully this version will appeal to the same people that the original did, people who like gadgets and gizmos, toys, big toys, cars and planes etc.
This design stands out due to its inspiration, always on animation and 3d lens. Also the range of special editions that could be available may make this design stand out.
UPDATE: Additional animations (Feb 21)


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Words and images from home and away
Watching the sky in the evening is like watching the sea — every sunset is extraordinary in its own way.
Shona Patel's thoughts on Tea, Writing & Life
Home of the Australasian Urban History Planning History Group
The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
All ye that come my grave to see
Challenging the Consensus
Other Side Of Shillong
Interdisciplinary research and public events on nineteenth and twentieth century Britain at the University of Birmingham
Analyzing the shades of white
Your brick wall is in India!
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Convenor: Professor Antonia Finnane
connecting researchers interested in the history of the family in colonial contexts
Power, Politics and America's Noble Families
Just another WordPress.com site
A fine WordPress.com site
Connecting researchers interested in the history of cities and towns


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Mountain Lion can help you do more than organize your music library, compose and receive email, and work out the complex equations necessary to design a hamster capable of sustained flight. With the aid of a bundled application, it can ensure that you know about upcoming chiropractic appointments, a favorite grandchild's birthday, or the dreaded yearly visit from a particularly long-winded cousin. That application is Calendar.
Launch Calendar (you'll find it in the Dock by default, as well as within the Applications folder at the root level of your Mac's hard drive), and you're presented with what's supposed to look like a real-world desk calendar—complete with leatherette top and bits of torn paper where pages have been ripped away.
The big picture
Calendar's design is different from what you may have seen in other Apple applications. Here's how it breaks out.
The leather bit: In most applications, this area would sport a configurable toolbar. Not so in Calendar. Unlike with traditional toolbars, you can't remove, add, or rearrange the items found here. What you see—the Calendars, Create Quick Event, Day, Week, Month, and Year buttons plus the search field—is what you get.
The Calendars list: Along the left side of the Calendar window is the Calendars list. (If you don't see it, click the Calendars button above and the list will appear.) By default you'll see two calendar entries—Work and Home—and a Birthdays calendar that appears under the Subscriptions heading. (Birthdays are pulled from any birthdays you've entered in the Contacts application.) If you've set up an iCloud account, Work and Home appear under that heading. If you haven't configured iCloud, Work and Home appear under an On My Mac heading. When you add calendars, their names will appear in this list.
The tiny month-view calendar pane: I'm sure Apple has a more elegant name for this thing, but until I learn it, tiny month-view calendar pane it will remain. As my cumbersome name implies, this is where you view the current month. The current date is highlighted in blue.
You can show more than the current month by dragging the top of this pane up. As you do, succeeding months are exposed. To quickly move to one of these other months in the calendar pane to the right, just click that month. You can also navigate through months by clicking the left- and right-pointing triangles to the side of the month's name.
The Calendar pane: Finally, where the bulk of the action takes place, the Calendar pane. What you see here depends on which view is selected in the leather bit above. Let's discuss those views now.
Calendar views
Calendar allows you to focus your view in the four obvious ways—Day, Week, Month, and Year—but each view has different elements. They are:
Day view (Command-1): Day view is split into two broad areas. In the left side of the view you see the date, day, month, and year. To the right is that month's calendar with the date highlighted in blue. You can quickly choose another date in that month by clicking it. Below is a list of events scheduled for that day.
To the right is a list where the day is broken into half-hour increments, with the hours from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. in white and the other, nonwork hours shown in a light gray. Any events will be shown here as a colored bar, complete with the event's name. The color of the bar conforms to the color assigned to a particular calendar. So, by default, events connected to your Home calendar are blue and work events are green. All-day events appear as colored bars in the All-Day Events area at the top of this list. If you're viewing the current day's calendar, you'll see a small red pin-like object that indicates the current time. This is to help prevent you from creating events for times that have already passed.
If events overlap—say you have a meeting on your work calendar from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. and your Home calendar tells you that your daughter has a soccer game from 1:30 p.m. to 3 p.m.—the events will share the same space and will also be slightly offset so that you can see that there are multiple events scheduled for this time. Additionally, the selected event is slightly transparent so that you can view the event underneath it more clearly.
Week view (Command-2): Week view runs, by default, from Sunday to Saturday. Again, you see events denoted by colored bars that reflect the color of the calendar they're part of. Above the events are the dates for that week: April 14 – 20, 2013, for example.
Although this view lacks the small monthly calendar found in Day view, you can use the tiny month-view calendar pane for this same purpose. To navigate to another week just click on it in this small calendar.
Month view (Command-3): Yes, as you've likely surmised, this is your month calendar. The current day is highlighted and events appear as bars on each day. There's a subtle difference between limited events—1 p.m. to 2 p.m., for example—and all-day events. All-day events appear at the top of the date and bear a colored bar. Limited events lack the bar and appear below all-day events. In each case, a small colored dot appears next to each event. As with other views, the color of these dots is associated with their host calendar.
Year view (Command-4): Click the Year button and you're presented with an overview of the year. Dates that bear events are highlighted, as is the current date. Click one of these highlights, and a small window appears that provides the name and time of the day's events. If you double-click a date in Year view, you're transported to Month view, with the idea that you'll use the view to create an event.
Regardless of which view you're enjoying, you'll see a Today button at the top right that, when clicked, transports you to the current day, regardless of the day, week, month, or year you're looking at. Back and Forward buttons are found on either side. When you're in Day view, they move you one day back or ahead. In Week view, a week back or ahead. You can probably guess what happens when you employ these buttons when in Month and Year views.
Creating calendars
Though Home and Work may cover much of your life, you'll undoubtedly wish to create more-specific calendars. For instance, a performance calendar for your dad band or a schedule for your kid's jai alai team.
Adding calendars is a little confusing. The command is simple enough—just choose File > New Calendar. But if you've configured your Mac with an iCloud account, your only option is to create a new calendar in iCloud. What if you want to create it on just your Mac? (Because, for example, you don't want it to be shared with your iOS devices.) There's a trick to doing this.
Choose Calendar > Preferences and then click the Accounts tab. Select your iCloud account in the list, disable the Enable This Account checkbox, and close the window. When you now choose File > Calendar, no iCloud entry will appear. Create a new calendar, and it will appear under a newly created On My Mac heading. You can now return to the Accounts preference and enable your iCloud account. When you do, you'll find that when creating a new calendar you have the option to choose either iCloud or On My Mac.
Creating events
You now know the lay of the land (not to mention, what day it is). Let's do something practical and create an event.
There are a couple of ways to do this. The old-fashioned way is—in Day or Week view—to click and drag on a time in the events list. A colored bar appears that bears the New Event name. Just resize the event so that it covers the event's time. In the case of an all-day event, double-click in this area to create the event.
In Month view you double-click on a date to create an event. By default this will be an all-day event and, as with other events you create, be called New Event. As I mentioned earlier, when you double-click a date in Year view, Month view opens, where you can again create the event.
But again, that's the old-fashioned way. Apple would prefer that you instead click the Create Quick Event button (the one that shows a plus sign), choose File > New Event, or press Command-N. This exposes the event field. Into it enter some of the details of your event—"Meet Galahad at 3 on Friday for coffee," for example. In Day, Month, or Week view, you'll be taken to the date of the event and an Edit window will appear, where you can configure the event. (I'll describe how to do this shortly.) The words you enter appear as the name of the event.
Note that I used a couple of shortcuts in this example. I didn't have to tell Calendar the date of the event, nor did I have to specify 3 p.m. It's smart enough to know that I mean the next Friday and that 3 is going to be p.m. rather than a.m.
Calendar can be smarter still. If I were to enter "Galahad lunch Friday," Calendar would create that event on Friday at noon. Substitute dinner for lunch and the event is created for 8 p.m. Breakfast events are automatically scheduled for 9 a.m.
And, of course, you can be more specific. Enter "Meeting Arthur 10 AM 5/16," and a 10 a.m. meeting on May 16 will be created.
If you'd like to move an event to a different day, just drag it to that day. And you can make copies of events by holding down the Option key and then dragging the event to the day you'd like to add. The original event will remain, and the copy will be put in place.
Configuring events
If all you could do with Calendar was scribble down events, you'd be just as well served by a paper calendar (with real leatherette). But Calendar does far more—and it does much of that within the Event Edit window.
To expose the Event Edit window, create an event using the Create Quick Event field (or select an existing event and press Command-E). In the window you'll find the following elements.
Event name: Found at the top of the window, the name field is highlighted, ready for you to edit. It's prehighlighted because the text you enter in the Create Quick Event field isn't always as descriptive as you'd like it to be. Just type in new text and press Return, and the event's name will change.
Location: "Let's see, was that Meeting Room 265A East or Meeting Room 265A West? Ah, that's right, I put 265A West in the Location field."
All-day: Enable this option, and you designate your event as taking up the entire day. You might use this for a vacation or sick day, for example.
From and To: Here is where you choose the beginning dates and times for your event. Click on a date and a small month-view calendar appears. Click on another date to quickly change the event to that day.
There's a tiny convenience hidden in the time area. Click on the time in the To area, and a small menu appears that lets you add or subtract time from the currently scheduled time in half-hour increments (up to three hours). Slick.
Repeat: If you attend the same meeting (or poker game) at the same time, week after week you'll want to familiarize yourself with the Repeat field. Click the default None entry, and from the menu you can choose how often you'd like the event to repeat—every day, every week, every month, or every year. If one of these intervals doesn't fit the situation—you want the event to repeat every two weeks on Tuesday and Thursday, for example—choose Custom and do what needs doing.
Show As: You have two options here: Busy and Free. Choose the most appropriate.
Calendar: You can choose to attach this event to any calendar that appears in the Calendars list.
Alert: Your Mac can alert you to an upcoming event in a variety of ways. From the Alert menu you can choose Message, Message With Sound, Email, and Open File. When you select one of these items, one or more options appear below. At the very least, a time entry appears—'15 minutes before', for instance. You can choose a different interval by clicking on minutes before and choosing from the options 'hours before', 'days before', 'minutes after', 'hours after', 'days after', and 'on date'. Click on the number that precedes one of these entries to change it to something more to your liking—30 minutes rather than 15, for example.
If you choose Message With Sound, you can select the sound you'd like to hear from a sound menu. Select Email and an email menu appears where you can choose the account you'd like the alert sent to, assuming you have more than one account listed on your contact card. (We'll discuss the ins and outs of the Contacts app in a future lesson.) And when you select Open File, you can navigate to a file that you'd like to have automatically opened as an alert—a presentation you're supposed to give in 15 minutes, say, or a rendition of "Take This Job and Shove It" as a reminder that you have an appointment with HR in half an hour.
Invitees: Countless studies show that meetings are most effective when attended by more than one person, and that's why the Invitees item exists. To add someone in your list of contacts, just start typing their name. A list of suggestions will appear. From this list choose the person you'd like to add. If the person you want to invite isn't in your contacts, just enter the complete email address. You can then choose to add them by clicking the small triangle at the end of the address and choosing Add to Contacts.
When you add invitees, you'll notice that a Send button appears at the bottom of the window. This indicates that those you've added to the event will be notified by email. Click Send, and an invitation will wing its way to them. This invitiation includes the information you've added in this window, including the items I describe below. When the invitation is received, your invitees will have the option to click Accept, Decline, or Maybe buttons.
Attachments: If you attach documents to your event, they will also be sent to your invitees.
URL: You can attach Web links to your event. This might include a link to a Google map to show invitees where a meeting will be held; or it could be a link to the webinar you'll be presenting.
Notes: The Notes field serves to provide additional information about the event. For instance, if the event is for your eyes only, you might add a couple of notes about a client's personal interests—"Hey, Bob, how about them Brewers, eh?" And if you're sending the event to a group of people, you can use this field to provide more details about what will happen at the event (which might motivate them to attend).
There's more to be said about Calendar—subscribing to public calendars, sharing your calendars with others, and using other calendar services. We'll get to all of these things in the next lesson.
Next week: Working with shared calendars


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Oprah Winfrey built a lucrative empire out of getting stories out of people, mostly for the entertainment (or enlightenment, if you're into that sort of thing) of her female audience.
She promises a good one on Thursday, when she says cyclist and accused doper Lance Armstrong will roll out his apology tour. It's not a bad venue for him: Armstrong was a storied athlete, then a disgraced one, stripped of his titles and banned from his competitions. But the cancer survivor and founder of Livestrong is — like Oprah, herself — a brand name, himself, a beloved American treasure, both a fighter and a winner.
So if he comes clean, can he find forgiveness for using the very drugs that are so prevalent in his sport, and move on? He certainly wouldn't be the first athlete to use drugs, nor the first person to lie about something illegal in a self-preserving way.
But there's something about his lies, to his fans and sponsors and those who contributed to his charity, that complicates his potential comeback trajectory.
He lied. And lied, and lied, and lied, and lied. People who accused him of doping, from athletes to a masseuse, were set on the path for ruin by the powerful Armstrong himself. He won a settlement against a journalist — whom he also viciously verbally attacked — for a story that now turns out to be true.
But we — all of us, not just sports fans or Americans — just love a comeback story. It explains in part the longevity of "Les Miserables," the 1862 novel whose hero Jean Valjean still captivates with his redemption on stage and in movie theaters 151 years later.
But as Americans we have a certain affection for the plucky protagonists of real life dramas. Actors Drew Barrymore and Robert Downey Jr., once poster children for young Hollywood burnouts, are at the top of their games, now. Former President Jimmy Carter, once remembered as an ineffective leader, is now an elder statesman well-regarded as a humanitarian around the world. The late former First Lady Betty Ford turned her painful struggle with alcoholism into an enduring legacy of awareness and treatment of the disease.
We like it, more often we love it, when someone can get up and dust himself off and re-emerge as something better than his previous self. It might seem impossible today with Armstrong's "apology" — to whom? Oprah Winfrey? The people whose lives he tried to destroy? The whole spectacle is being rolled out slowly by a shrewd man, a savvy brand who seems to think his comeback is something to which he is entitled — which should automatically disqualify him from it in the near term. But in the long term, stranger things have happened.
— Erika Stutzman, for
the Camera editorial board


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The darkest, grandest noise of the musical season so far—the fanfare to an angry American autumn—was Michael Gordon's film symphony "Decasia," as played by fifty-five furiously committed students from the Manhattan School of Music, at St. Ann's Warehouse, in Brooklyn. The performance took place back in September, but the experience is still burned in my mind. Gordon, one of the founding members of the New York-based Bang on a Can collective, created "Decasia" in 2001, in collaboration with the filmmaker Bill Morrison, the director Bob McGrath, and the visual designer Laurie Olinder. The idea was to create a contemporary equivalent of Disney's "Fantasia," a dream procession of image and sound. Morrison assembled the film portion from ancient, decaying footage that he found in various archives. The images are stitched together in seemingly random order, yet they tell a hallucinatory tale. Camels trundle across a desert, children stampede through a nunnery, a man in a fez performs a dervish dance, parachutists descend from the sky. As the nitrate stock disintegrates, the images melt and shatter.
Gordon's score weds the hypnotic aura of minimalism to the detuned snarl of highbrow punk. It packs a punch on CD, but it needs a live performance to unveil all its power. At St. Ann's, the orchestra was arrayed on scaffolding around the audience, in order to highlight Gordon's spatial effects: bass instruments in the back tuned to the given pitch; instruments on one side tuned an eighth-tone above; those on the other side an eighth-tone below. Also, the music demands to be played at maximum volume so that it can acquire the proper monumental presence. With chattering figures building into great washes of sound, the score is a feat of symphonic minimalism akin to John Adams's "Harmonielehre," except that the façade of grandeur is as unstable as the images in Morrison's collage.
In one hair-raising passage, four trombones slide up and down intervals of a minor third, beginning on E-flat minor, the unofficial key of death. Glissando trombones were a signature motif in twentieth-century music: they roared happily in the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's "Livery Stable Blues," and more darkly in Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" and Shostakovich's "Lady Macbeth." Gordon's trombones have both a festive and a sinister air, embodying the ambiguity of the work. Even as "Decasia" celebrates raw sound, it summons an atmosphere of dread. Too many of its images resemble Cold War footage of structures vaporizing in nuclear tests. Why, then, are you left with a visceral thrill? Perhaps it's the joy of surviving what looks and sounds like the end of the world.
A month later, the experimental theatre La MaMa presented Sounds Like Now, a four-day festival of composers associated with New York's venerable downtown scene. All manner of unearthly, post-John Cagean noises were heard, making "Decasia" seem like "Dance of the Hours." Programs were long, some more than three hours. Minutes passed while new gizmos were plugged in and laptops booted up. There were, inevitably, spells of time-stopping tedium. When one composer's modest set of burbling ideas had gone on twenty minutes too long, I began to feel the sort of silent-scream frustration that grips air passengers at the end of a hellish flight: the plane's at the gate, you're crouched under the overhead baggage compartment, but some unseen delay in first class prevents you from escaping. Of course, this being a crowd filled with the old guard of New York bohemia, listeners generally played it cool, nodding to a nonexistent beat.
History instructs us to pay close heed to the musical avant-garde, for the squawks and bleeps that Unabomber-looking composers unleash in depopulated lofts have a way of showing up twenty years later in the mainstream. Sounds Like Now convened many giants of American experimental music—the descendants of such lone wolves as Cowell, Partch, Cage, and Nancarrow. Alvin Lucier, whose 1970 spoken-word composition "I Am Sitting in a Room" is an iconic work of electronic music, offered up icy arrays of oscillating tones, and also tapped pencils over containers of various sizes. The untouchably far-out composer Robert Ashley gave us "Empire," a scene from his opera "Atalanta," which mixes family memories with a history of tomato soup. Pauline Oliveros created an achingly beautiful soundscape with the Deep Listening Band. Phill Niblock was represented by "Hurdy Hurry" and "Sethwork," in which gyrating masses of tone seemed to be emanating from the listener's own brain. (No, I wasn't stoned.)
Downtown composers generally spurn bourgeois conceptions of narrative, but a little sense of arrival never hurt anyone. Roscoe Mitchell and Muhal Richard Abrams achieved it in their jazz improvisation with the drummer Tani Tabbal: at the climax, Mitchell played steel-girder tones on the saxophone while Abrams and Tabbal spun a spiderweb of piano figuration and cymbal washes. David First and Tom Hamilton, who organized Sounds Like Now, caught a similar wave of energy in "Two Party System," pairing long-held drones with rapid, flippy-dippy patterns. Kyle Gann's pieces for Disklavier piano—"Texarkana," "Bud Ran Back Out," and "Unquiet Night"—were an oasis of crystalline chords and jitterbugging polyrhythms. And Morton Subotnick's "Until Spring Revisited," at the end of the festival, sent everyone home happy: the chief pioneer of synthesizer composition tapped madly on a laptop, generating swarms of pointillistic sound that coalesced into shining major triads. The wilderness of noise was bought up and drilled dry decades ago, but the plainest chords still have the power to surprise.
There was a fair amount of political commentary during the Sounds Like Now festival, spouting variously from the left, the far left, and beyond the fringe. If any avant-gardists raised hell for Bush this fall, I didn't hear about it—although I admittedly made no effort to find them. The composer-pianist "Blue" Gene Tyranny set the tone by dedicating a melancholy, bluesy fantasia on "America, the Beautiful" to Ray Charles and John Kerry. Tyranny repeated this piece at the remaining five concerts—I couldn't attend the fifth in the series—and each time he was joined by a new player, until the tune disappeared into a rage of improvisation.
Meanwhile, up at Merkin Hall, Phil Kline offered two pieces entitled "Rumsfeld Songs" and "Zippo Songs," as part of a concert presented by John Schaefer's "New Sounds" show on WNYC. (The cycle is also available on Cantaloupe Music, the same label that released "Decasia.") The notion of making music out of Donald Rumsfeld's press conferences, which include such T. S. Eliot-like ruminations as "As we know, there are known knowns," sounds like a throwaway joke, but Kline, a composer with a keen ear for speech rhythms, delivers a cunning portrait of a bureaucrat's soul. The music is fey and detached, leaning on the raised fourth degree of the Lydian scale, which supplies a lighter-than-air quality. By some arcane alchemy, Kline draws clean melodic lines from such unpromising material as Rumsfeld's analysis of the looting of Baghdad: "It's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase." I caught myself singing this the other day, to my alarm.
The "Zippo Songs" show the underside of Rumsfeld's flippancy. In Vietnam, soldiers etched mordant sayings on Zippo lighters. Kline collected twenty-six of them into one of the most brutally frank song cycles ever penned. The texts range from the caustic ("If you got this off my dead ass, I hope it brings you all the luck it brought me") to the mystic ("You've never lived until you've nearly died"). The detachment between music and subject works differently than in the Rumsfeld series: the soldiers' voices seem to be floating in from the beyond, as, no doubt, many of them are. When you hear all the songs in sequence—at Merkin Hall, Theo Bleckmann sang with unpolished grace—you can't mistake Kline's agenda. Yet the music has too much psychedelic mystery to be characterized as mere hectoring from the left. As the composer-monologuist Chris Mann said at one point during Sounds Like Now, "I'm pretty sure that music itself votes Republican." ♦


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Congrats on a job well done!
Below is a repost from the original WSJ.com India Realtime blog.
"It was our vision to create an entertainment theme park of international standards in India," says Manmohan Shetty, the chairman of Adlabs Entertainment Lt. Despite Walt Disney Co. DIS -0.27%'s reluctance so far to open an amusement park in India, Mr. Shetty says the country's growing middle class is now ready for it.
Top attractions at the theme park, which is located between Mumbai and the city of Pune, include a ride inspired by the Bollywood movie "Mr. India." In this ride, visitors are taken through a park, where they are confronted by Mogambo, the film's villain.
A haunted house becomes a haunted "kila," or fort, in a ride called "The Curse of Salimgarh," named after a Mughal-era fort in Delhi that was converted into a prison under Emperor Aurangzeb. This ride is set to open later this month.
Another attraction, the "Wrath of Gods," incorporates high-end technology with Indian mythological characters. An archaeologist guides visitors through a hidden door that opens onto a room with three gigantic idols of Indian gods blowing water, fire and air.
One ride, is inspired by "Ali Baba Aur Challis Chorr," (Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves), an Arabic tale that is also very popular in India. This ride involves aiming at thieves with laser guns.
The park is tailored to Indian tastes in another way: If they want, they don't have to walk. Instead, a shuttle takes visitors between rides. Keeping in mind soaring temperatures and monsoon rains, there are plenty of indoor attractions, too.
The park also boasts of India's largest roller coaster, which opens in May, a vertical drop, a crazy swinging ride, and the country's first complete dome theatre.
There are now 16 rides open to the public, and five more will open by the end of April.
But we weren't impressed with all the rides. For instance, we found there was little going for "I for India," a movie shot from a helicopter that you watch on seats suspended from the ceiling. The film felt like fast-forwarded footage of Indian monuments and festivals.
Adlabs Imagica will have five restaurants, including an American diner, a Mexican joint and a restaurant where food is served on a mini-rollercoaster.
Keeping in mind India's V.I.P.s, there is a special "Imagica Express" ticket that for 2200 rupees (1900 rupees for children) allows visitors to skip queues.
Built with an initial investment of 16 billion rupees (around $290 million) and spread over 110 acres, the theme park is built and run by Adlabs Entertainment Ltd., in collaboration with U.S.-based companies Attraction International, Contour Entertainment and Sally Corporation.
The park hopes to attract around three million visitors in its first year.
It has its own power station, water treatment plant, a sewage treatment plant, and even a small dam to ensure steady water supply in the drought-struck state of Maharashtra.
A hotel is set to open in the grounds of the park by the end of December. An adjacent water park is set to open by mid-2014.
The company also plans to open a new park in the city of Hyderabad by early 2015.
While Adlabs Imagica is India's largest theme park, it's not the country's first. Others include "Wonderla," near Bangalore and near Kochi, and Essel World near Mumbai.
Follow India Real Time on Twitter @indiarealtime.


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The heady daytimes of midsummer were made for growing green things, construction projects and loving refurbishments, laying supplies and fortifications for the long winter nights ahead. What with its rolling papers and noon wakeups, skateboarding leans toward the lazily fiddling, devil-may-care grasshopper in the tale of old, or perhaps a chaotic Fraggle. But the bold ant, in its levelheaded industriousness and generous way, can provide an alternate insect avatar, and skating must never overlook the rebuildatory tendencies of the lowly Doozer. Half-submerged in a midsummer night's dream of positive vibes, Bowl The Ocean site examines three visions of a world that is not yet the future, but could be.
Clint and Reef, Ollie Men: Since time's beginning, skateboarders of all stripes have celebrated that singular and uniting thrill, the big jump. Even so, one of the biggest ollies of recent years has sown division. After dueling ollies down the Wilshire 15 and over the yellow poles (implanted for pure gnarlieness enhancement) appeared last year on the Instagram pages of Birdhouse bad boy Clint Walker and FA-affiliated ATLien Reef Johnson, Jenkem magazine probed the backstory — whereas Clint Walker had tamed the massive gap and sat on the photo in hopes of bagging Thrasher's cover, comer-upper Shareef Grady unknowingly did the same ollie and, over Clint Walker's career-minded protestations, they both wound up pushing their tricks to the socializing internet masses to get what shine they could. The scenario was a debacle made possible by a unique fender-bender involving old and new media, and though few hard feelings were aired publicly, nobody seemed satisfied with the outcome, which also had the effect of clouding a legitimately heavy trick.
This year, Jason Hernandez is videotaping Clint Walker and the rest of Tony Hawk's brood for what's being billed as 'The End' for a new generation. Clint Walker, who has nollie heelflipped atop bone-crushing canyons and conquered fear itself, will have an assuredly crazy part. But what about that one ollie, now loaded with so much baggage? An old caveman saying from the planet's spryer years holds that 'the crazy thing about baggage is that it's lighter when a friend helps carry the load,' and the statement never was truer than when applied to the Birdhouse video in progress. Imagine a break in the middle of Clint Walker's section where he rolls up to the Wilshire 15 and Poles, then it cuts to him jumping it, but the camera keeps rolling and then Yung Reef comes right behind him and jumps it too, riding out into a torrent of bro hugs and high fives. The vibes would runneth over.
Lakai Collabo Matchup: Even upon opening a new chapter with a winning full-length built around mostly new faces, storied shoe group Lakai faces turbulence, over the past month reportedly having to send back and reprint all physical DVD copies on some music rights shit and Fort Miley burler Jon Sciano leaving, apparently to skate for Vans. Amid Lakai's various high-profile team defections over the last few years, Blackpooler Danny Brady has held tight, getting a shoe design recently for his efforts.
Lakai's collaborative shoe projects have run an extremely varied gamut of partners, from entertainment figure Lena Dunham to certain Wild Things to further investments in pastel paneling via several sneakers colored by Illegal Civilization person Nico Hiraga. But the Danny Brady link provides a lane for Mike Carroll and Rick Howard to potentially something together with Palace, which has made deluxely curated bathrobes and swishy shirts with any number of mega sports gear manufacturers such as Adidas and Umbro and Reebok. Palace's teaming with Bronze helped elevate the New York bolt factory to a sought-after street fashion sensation. A similar project could further invigorate Lakai and keep Danny Brady shod on his current productive path.
Brian Wenning For Hire: For those fumbling toward some nightlight amid dark hours of the soul this summer, Brian Wenning's recent podcast unburdenings have left DNA Distribution devotees of a certain vintage aglow. By all accounts, Brian Wenning reached the bottom of his own self-fulfilling prophecy and a humble halfway-house rebuild seemingly has done wonders for his self-regard, career reassessment and, importantly, his switch backside nosegrinds. Slimmed down and again in DCs, Brian Wenning is starting to look like he never went anywhere, venturing back onto the road and appearing to deeply enjoy himself.
His could be a feel-good summertime story, especially as Habitat prepares to reissue one of his OG graphics in what looks like a tribute to clamoring back onto life's board. But Al Davis, another former Habitater asked and answered what must be the ultimate question in the matter: 'PUT HIM BACK ON!!!!'


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By David Allen
the darkness closes in
as the theater spills its patrons
into the street.
the last act is finished,
the curtain is down,
no fanfare,
no standing ovation,
mild applause.
the reviews, save the one
from the underground rag,
were all bad.
The players will look
for new work in the morning.
the theater will house
a new playwright's child.
I leave meekly out the stage entrance
into the alley —
always the alley —
overflowing garbage cans
stray cats
stench of vomit.
You join the crowd
push your way out into the street,
with its bright lights, laughter
smell of hot pretzels
carnival air.
The crowd moves past the alley
where my unnoticed shadow climbs
a fire escape to a small
cluttered room
to study far into the morning,
reviewing the mistakes
of his past performance,
practicing his new lines.


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A delightful tale sent to me by Richard Maugham.
Richard and I go back too many years! He has been a dear friend despite the obvious hurdle that when we first met, he declared that he was a typewriter salesman for Olivetti in the UK with me admitting that I was a typewriter salesman for IBM UK! Here's the story.
Helga is the proprietor of a bar. She realizes that virtually all of her customers are unemployed alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize her bar. To solve this problem she comes up with a new marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but pay later.
Helga keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers' loans).
Word gets around about Helga's "drink now, pay later" marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of customers flood into Helga's bar. Soon she has the largest sales volume for any bar in town.
By providing her customers freedom from immediate payment demands, Helga gets no resistance when, at regular intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine and beer – the most consumed beverages.
Consequently, Helga's gross sales volumes and paper profits increase massively. A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank recognises that these customer debts constitute valuable future assets and increases Helga's borrowing limit. He sees no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.
He is rewarded with a six figure bonus.
At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert traders figure a way to make huge commissions, and transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS. These "securities" are then bundled and traded on international securities markets.
Naive investors don't really understand that the securities being sold to them as "AA Secured Bonds" are really debts of unemployed alcoholics. Nevertheless, the bond prices continue to climb and the securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of the nation's leading brokerage houses.
The traders all receive six figure bonuses.
One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the original local bank decides that the time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the drinkers at Helga's bar. He so informs Helga. Helga then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons but, being unemployed alcoholics, they cannot pay back their drinking debts. Since Helga cannot fulfil her loan obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes and Helga's 11 employees lose their jobs.
Overnight, DRINKBOND prices drop by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the bank's liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus freezing credit and economic activity in the community.
The suppliers of Helga's bar had granted her generous payment extensions and had invested their firms' pension funds in the BOND securities. They find they are now faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a family business that had endured for three generations; her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.
Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multibillion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from the government.
They all receive a six figure bonus.
The funds required for this bailout are obtained by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-drinkers who've never been in Helga's bar……………………….!
I can add not a single word to this!


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Egypt to try 200 suspected of terrorist attacks
CAIRO (AP) - Egypt's chief prosecutor charged 200 suspected militants Saturday with carrying out over 50 terrorist attacks, killing 40 policemen and 15 civilians and conspiring with the Palestinian militant group Hamas, in the first mass trial of a Jihadi group since the country's recent turmoil.
The defendants, 98 of whom remain on the run, are all suspected members of the al-Qaida-inspired Ansar Beit al-Maqdis group, or Champions of Jerusalem, which has claimed responsibility for the bloodiest attacks since a wave of violence picked up following the military overthrow of Islamist President Mohammed Morsi last summer.
The prosecutor's statement refers to the group as "the most dangerous terrorist group," and accuses the defendants of receiving military training in the Palestinian Gaza Strip under the patronage of Hamas. It also says they traveled to Syria where they took part in fighting against government forces before returning to Egypt.
Washington designated the group as a terrorist organization in April, accusing it of carrying out attacks in Israel, against security forces and tourists in Egypt.
Officials in Egypt accuse Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood of orchestrating the violence. The government has gone further, outlawing the Brotherhood and branding it a terrorist organization.
Although producing little evidence of any links, authorities, including ex-military chief Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, allege the militant groups are a front for the Brotherhood. In this referral, the prosecutors say Morsi had dealings with the group while in office but gave no further evidence of the alleged links.
The Brotherhood, which officially renounced violence in the 1970s, denies the accusations and calls them a pretext to wipe out the government's top political rival, which won a string of elections since the 2011 fall of longtime autocrat Hosni Mubarak.
El-Sissi, who overthrew Morsi, is the front-runner in the presidential elections scheduled later this month, and has vowed to fight terrorism and said he will not allow the Brotherhood to return to politics during his term.
In the first rally to back el-Sissi's bid for presidency since the campaigning began last week, supporters of the former military chief organized an evening event in the gardens of a Cairo conference center, drawing several thousand people but far less than the 30,000 organizer and media personality Mahmoud Bakry had expected. The rally, not part of the official campaign's events, included dancing bands and speeches by supporters of the retired military chief.
So far, el-Sissi, who is riding an overwhelming media frenzy lauding him as Egypt's savior for overthrowing Morsi, has appeared in one pre-recorded interview, and met privately with representatives of professional groups, businessmen, and tribal leaders. His campaign is expected to include few street appearances, mainly because of security concerns. In the interview, he said two assassination plots against him have already been uncovered, without giving details.
"El-Sissi saved Egypt. We pushed him to finish off his good deed and run for president," 63-year Abdel-Aal Darwish, the head of a bakers association, said at the rally. Asked about the lack of el-Sissi appearances in public, he said: "It is an honor for us to come see him wherever he is. He doesn't have to come to us."
Since Morsi's ouster, authorities have cracked down heavily on Islamists, arresting thousands and putting hundreds on trial, including Morsi, on charges that include instigating violence and holding illegal protests. Morsi is also accused of conspiring with foreign groups to destabilize Egypt.
In the Saturday referral, prosecutors charged the defendants with founding and leading a terrorist group, attacking state institutions, conspiring with Hamas, premeditated murder and possession of weapons. A date for the trial will be set later.
The statement said the defendants carried out 51 attacks in recent months, including a spectacular bombing of the capital's security headquarters in January that left six killed. The attacks also include a failed assassination attempt against the interior minister in September, and a December attack against the security headquarters in the Nile Delta city of Mansoura that killed 16, almost all policemen.
The attacks also included the assassination of a senior police officer, who was the main investigator and a key witness in one of the trials in which Morsi is the main defendant.
The group had claimed responsibility for the attacks.
The statement also said the prosecutor's investigation revealed that Morsi had negotiated with the group while in office to ensure it abstained from violence during his rule in exchange for a presidential pardon to their colleagues in prison.
The prosecutor's statement said the group had operated in eight clusters, which oversaw eight different cells handling recruitment, explosives making, arms smuggling from Libya, Sudan and Gaza, documenting attacks, monitoring targets and implementation and planning of attacks.
The statement said the group's leading figure, Tawfiq Freij, and Mohammed Badawi of Yemen's al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula had helped organize the training of Ansar Beit al-Maqdis recruits in Gaza with Hamas. Ansar Beit al-Madqis said in March Freij died when he accidentally set off a bomb he was transporting in a car.
The statement said the group is linked to another little known militant group known as Furqan Bridages, which claimed responsibility for an attack on a carrier ship in the strategic Suez Canal. The prosecutors said Furqan Brigades members were recruited among supporters of former presidential hopeful and ultraconservative Islamist preacher Hazem Abu Ismail, a Morsi supporter who is favored by many young conservatives and who is currently on trial.
The prosecutors also refer to Hamas as the military wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, saying the trainees adopted the more radical ideology of a late Egyptian Brotherhood leader. Hamas is an offshoot of the Brotherhood.
Ansar Beit al-Maqdis first arose in the Sinai Peninsula, lobbing rockets into neighboring Israel and at times opening fire on military and police. Attacks escalated after the fall of Mubarak, when militants turned their guns more directly against Egyptian soldiers and police.
But after Morsi's July 3 overthrow, militants dramatically stepped up their campaign, and it has since spread to cities of the Nile Delta and in Cairo. In recent months, al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri took up the cause, urging Egyptians to join the fight against the man who removed Morsi. Al-Qaida in Yemen also praised the group.
In February 2014, the group expanded its targets to include foreign tourists, claiming responsibility for the bombing of a bus in Sinai carrying South Korean tourists, killing three of them and the Egyptian driver.


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Biker killed: He wasn't driving a car because he'd lost his license
The 60-year-old Marshfield man hit and killed by an alleged drunken driver on Tuesday was riding his bicycle because his driver's license had been taken away.
"He got pulled over. It scared him. He was smart about it," said Sanborn's sister Marilyn Sanborn of Cape Cod. "He learned his lesson. He didn't want his license back because of it."
Gary Sanborn, 60, formerly of 244 Webster St., was riding that bicycle to his mother's apartment at about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday when he was hit and killed by an alleged drunken driver on Route 139.
The driver, Adrian D. MacKinnon, 44, of 111 S. River St., Marshfield, was charged with motor vehicle homicide and drunken driving. He was ordered held in lieu of $3,000 bail at his arraignment Wednesday.
Sanborn, a Scituate native, Vietnam veteran and Marshfield resident the last 15 years, had a history of drunken driving dating to 1991, according to the Registry of Motor Vehicles.
In 1998, Sanborn was found guilty of fourth-offense drunken driving and leaving the scene of an accident with property damage and sentenced to one year in jail. Pembroke police had charged him with damaging Muckey's Convenience Store while driving drunk.
His license was revoked in 1998 for eight years. In 2002, it was suspended indefinitely for failure to pay child support.
Marilyn Sanborn said that after her brother's last drunken driving incident, he didn't want to renew his license.
"He was stone-cold sober last night. He had a ginger ale at the DAV (hall in Brant Rock)," Marilyn Sanborn said Wednesday. "He was just going to get his license back. Things were starting to happen in a very positive manner for him."
For the past few days, Sanborn said, her brother had been staying with their mother in her Winslow Village apartment. He was about to get his own apartment in the complex, she said.
Sanborn said her brother went out to look for his boss and was on his way home when the accident occurred. He had called to tell his mother that he would stop to pick up milk and toilet paper. His mother, Helen Sanborn, 84, said she knew something was wrong when he didn't show up.
MacKinnon told police that Sanborn rode in front of his truck at 1079 Ocean St. (Route 139) and that he could not avoid hitting him, according to documents filed in Plymouth District Court.
Police said Sanborn was under the truck when they arrived. They said they could smell alcohol on MacKinnon. He denied that he had been drinking and refused a field sobriety test. The accident is still under investigation by Marshfield police and the State Police accident reconstruction team.
Besides his mother and sister, Sanborn leaves four siblings, four children and about 10 grandchildren, his sister said. She said her brother served in the Army in Vietnam and later worked as a painter, carpenter and "jack of all trades."
Marilyn Sanborn, a Methodist minister, said her brother loved the ocean, fishing, his family and painting. At one point, she said he sparred with former middleweight champion Marvin Hagler. She last spoke with him Monday.
"He says, 'I love you. Will you pray for me?'" she said. "He just loved life, he loved all sports. Would take the shirt off his back for anybody."
Sydney Schwartz may be reached at firstname.lastname@example.com.


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This is one of my favorite paintings by Toulouse Lautrec, the French painter who took the name of the beautiful city of Toulouse as his pseudonym (he was not in fact from Toulouse, but Albi, a gorgeous medieval city about 60k from where I was – Saint-Sulpice – very near Toulouse). This really hasn't much to do with our trip, but since we were near Toulouse, and we went to Toulouse often during our visit…er…ok, anyway…
Spring has most definitely spring down there, there were blossoms and flowers and buds galore…but with the exception of my daily runs and literally running to the car or to the house to escape the hail and pelting rain, we didn't really get to be part of the beauty outdoors. You can see my brush with the elements here.
The beauty we did get to enjoy was inside the toasty-warm walls of my in-laws home. We had such a wonderful time- especially the Guppy who was so excited to have other people around from the moment she woke up (we don't get to see much of our families & extended families so this was a very special treat).
My in-laws have a beautiful home and they had a roaring fire going at all times keeping the house feeling very cosy and homey, and they were so great about my vegan dietary considerations. During their visit to our house during the holidays I had cooked up a vegan storm, wielding whisk and spatula to make satisfying meals for omnivores (and to charm the in-laws of course!). So it was only natural that they suggest I help cook up some dinners- because creating healthful, varied, vegan meals takes some planning and experience, and if you're not used to it, well, it may seem a bit daunting.
The really big hit dish of our vacation was this fabulous recipe for orange chicken-style tofu. I have seen this recipe floating about all over the blogosphere, and it has lots of variations, but this is a great "base" recipe that you can easily expand on. For example I use way more orange juice – at least a cup – which means that you need to add more corn starch or arrowroot to compensate for the added liquid. I also usually add at least 1 red and 1 orange pepper, an entire sweet onion, and chunked pineapple.
My super-sweet 19-year-old nephew proved to be a wiz in the kitchen! He not only helped me make the orange-tofu, but he was also my main helper when rolling the 49 spring rolls for our final dinner there (my fingers were all puckery when I was done!). He was also amazing with the Guppy who just fell in love with him. He was so great with her, very intuitive for such a young guy, knowing if she needed a juice box or some applesauce, etc., and had no problem letting her jump on his bed or "hang out" with him while he was playing guitar (he even played on demand for her…)
It was also so fun to hang with my sister-in-law, L. She is so handy and crafty- a real inspiration with so many great ideas for various projects. She graciously donated a skein of yarn and some needles and showed me a great pattern for a skull-cappy-chuky thing, which I need to make time to finish. Plus she gave me various huge fabric scraps to amuse myself with.
Now if only we could find jobs down there…we'd pack up and move in a flash!


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Among the gravestones in the Old Granary Burying Ground in Boston is this one, near John Hancock's grave.
This is a great example of an 18th century gravestone and is one of my favorites. Although settled some, it is still very readable and the carving is crisp and very clear. I would like to know more about Frank.