On Friday, SeaWorld Entertainment announced that it is building new, bigger enclosures for its signature attractions — the orcas (also known as killer whales). Their jumps and tricks have delighted some, but their alleged poor treatment and inadequate habitats have enraged others.

The theme park company said it plans to upgrade the killer whale tanks at three of its theme parks, starting with the one in San Diego, Calif. The new orca tanks will be 50 feet deep and have a surface area of nearly 1.5 acres.

Will improved conditions be enough to reverseSeaWorld’s declining revenue? Earlier this week the theme park company said its revenue dropped 1 percent in the three months ended June 30 during a period that’s considered the company’s peak season. SeaWorld SEAS also attributed its poor quarter to bad press following the release of the “Blackfish” documentary, which accused the theme park operator of mistreating orcas.

Wall Street wasn’t impressed and sent the company’s stock price down over 30 percent.

President and CEO Jim Atchison said in a press conference Friday afternoon that while the plans for the new habitats had been in the works for some time, he does think that it will have an impact on those people who were swayed by protests, or perhaps by the damning 2013 documentary, which has proven to be very popular on Netflix — although he doesn’t think the move will appease animal rights activists.

“That’s not who we’re trying to appeal to, that’s not our market,” he said.

Tuna Amobi, an equity analyst at S&P Capital IQ, said that while the new habitats could be a step forward in reversing the company’s fortunes, it is by no means a wave of a magic wand.

“This is not going to have any immediate positive impact,” he said. “Most investors are kind of going to take a wait-and-see approach.”

Although the theme park has long been a target of animal rights groups, in the past few months the pressure on SeaWorld has intensified. This summer the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) posted an ad in the San Diego airport featuring actress Kathy Najimy and the words “Welcome to San Diego! If you love animals like I do, please avoid SeaWorld,” according to a story in The Wall Street Journal. The animal rights group also had actress Jessica Biel submit a question on its behalf to Atchison at SeaWorld’s investor day (she asked when SeaWorld would develop a plan to move the orcas to a sea pen in a natural setting).

PETA spokesman Jared Goodman said that the new habitats announced Friday weren’t enough to satisfy his group, and called them “clearly a desperate move.”

He also said that PETA’s ad campaign and demonstrations would continue until the orcas are released into a coastal sanctuary, meaning that SeaWorld may still have to deal with negative headlines as it tries to rebuild its brand.

“This proposal is not going to change things and its not going to save the company,” Goodman said.

As far as investors go, Amobi thinks they should at least be relieved SeaWorld is admitting that negative press is an issue rather than solely blaming other factors, such as weather and school calendars.

“I think that overall management understands now more than ever that this is an issue that needs to be addressed head on,” he said.

In addition to building the new habitats, SeaWorld announced it is giving more than $10 million to killer whale research and creating a partnership focused on ocean health.

Summary: Theme park company is struggling from bad press following the release of a damning documentary.


The long-awaited unveiling may have another goal in mind: to fuel investors’ appetite for a public offering.

It was an awesome spectacle as product launches go: Speeches by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Colin Powell, a panel of top executives from Google, eBay, Wal-Mart, FedEx, Coca-Cola, and Cox Enterprises, video messages from Diane Feinstein and Michael Bloomberg, a heart-tugging slide show about saving the planet, and finally, after eight years and $400 million raised, the unveiling of the Holy Grail in a box — clean, inexpensive full-cell energy!

“I would like to introduce to you the Bloom Energy Server,” said Bloom CEO K.R. Sridhar to applause yesterday as colored lights bounced off the hulking black box on stage. “This is my baby, isn’t she beautiful?”

So did they pull it off? Does the Bloom box live up to its hype? Let’s let board member Colin Powell answer. He promised his wife he would install one of the energy-saving devices in their home instead of a conventional generator, he said, adding, “She’s still waiting.”

The cornerstone of the presentation at eBay’s EBAY corporate headquarters in San Jose, California was supposed to be Bloom’s happy corporate customers — 20 Fortune 100 companies in all — but a quick survey of some of them reveals that, in many important respects, the Bloom box remains in stealth mode.

Coca-Cola KO says its first Bloom fuel cells probably won’t be installed until September. Bank of America BAC ? Sometime later this year. FedEx is close but still not online. Two firms who actually have experience with the Bloom Box since the first units were shipped 18 months ago — Google GOOG and Wal-Mart WMT — declined Fortune’s interview requests.

FedEx FDX did agree to talk but won’t answer the most important question: How much are they paying for Bloom-box electricity? “We’re under a contractual agreement not to disclose the price,” says Mitch Jackson, FedEx’s senior director of environmental affairs.

Okay, so let’s do the math ourselves: Bloom says each 100-kilowatt Bloom box is sold for $700,000 to $800,000. Factoring in the price of the natural gas that most often fuels the unit brings the cost to 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt hour. Hey, that’s cheaper than the 11-cent average retail cost of electricity you can get from the coal-powered grid!

FedEx ran the numbers, too. The five 100 kilowatt systems it’s installing at its west coast sorting hub in Oakland, at $750,000 each, would cost $3.75 million. But the energy production is so cost-effective, Jackson says, “It should pay for itself in less than five years.”

But look at the fine print: That 8-to-10-cents per kilowatt hour includes huge government subsidies — a 30% federal tax credit and $2,500-per-kilowatt rebate from the state of California (see editor’s note below). Take out those subsidies and the true cost of the Bloom box is 13 cents to 14 cents per kilowatt hour, according to analysis by Lux Research — significantly higher than electricity from the fossil-fuel powered grid.

Grid power also doesn’t require the headache of owning your own power plant. Yes, Bloom offers a 10-year warranty and will maintain the unit, but if the system fails — and reliability is a major issue for fuel cells — companies would have to plug back into the grid, which for all its drawbacks remains enormously reliable. A replacement for the grid? So far, it’s more like a supplement at best.

FedEx offers a compelling example: The company says its new Bloom boxes will be enough to provide about 55% of its facility’s energy needs. Another 20% comes from 5,700 solar panels. The rest will come from the grid, which also serves as a convenient backup should the Bloom boxes fail (performance guarantees are built into the company’s contract with Bloom, Jackson says).

So when can FedEx start installing Bloom boxes in the vast majority of states that don’t offer subsidies? “That’s a question for Bloom, not us,” says Jackson. “Any of these technologies, including solar and wind, have to be cost-effective on their own to be commercially viable over the long term.” In the meantime, until the economics work out, at least FedEx employees can help the environment: The Bloom boxes will cut carbon emissions at the Oakland facility by 30 to 35%. “If you combine Bloom boxes with our solar electric array, we should reduce our carbon footprint by around half,” Jackson says.

So if Bloom’s magic boxes are still not cost-effective nationwide — if they remain a niche product still in beta testing — why today’s star-studded coming-out party? Sridhar says his customers were so excited by the product they pushed him to unveil his creation now. Though they were clearly jazzed about the chance to brag about their green cred — and moments at yesterday’s event devolved into an orgy of self-congratulation — many observers think Bloom had another motive: To prime the pump to go public.

“From Bloom’s point of view, an IPO is the number one priority,” says Jacob Grose, senior analyst with Lux Research, who says the success of last year’s public offering by lithium-ion battery maker A123 showed that the market may be ripe for another clean-tech play. “I’d be shocked if this were not a prelude to an IPO over the next 12 to 18 months.”

So after eight years and $400 million, Sridhar needs more time and more money — perhaps another five years to make the Bloom boxes cost-effective, analysts say. For the planet’s sake, let’s hope he pulls it off. Until then — after all the hoopla — the bottom line remains the same as it was last week: The Bloom box remains a promising idea whose time is yet to come.

An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that California’s rebate is $2,500 per kilowatt-hour. The correct figure is $2,500 per kilowatt.

Summary: The long-awaited unveiling may have another goal in mind: to fuel investors' appetite for a public offering. By Paul Keegan, contributor It was an awesome spectacle as product launches go: Speeches by Arnold Schwarzenegger and Colin Powell, a panel of top executives from Google, eBay, Wal-Mart, FedEx, Coca-Cola, and Cox Enterprises, video messages from Diane…


09/11/2014 AT 07:50 AM EDT

was set to meet his fate on Thursday.

In her lengthy review of the verdict facing the double-amputee Olympic track star, the judge stated that under South African law, Pistorius would not be found guilty of murder – the most serious charge he faced.

This left Pistorius, who openly wept in the courtroom Thursday, facing either culpable homicide or a complete acquittal.

The final verdict is expected to be delivered sometime Thursday, as the proceedings continue.

The emotional trial lasted six months in Johannesburg, South Africa, and included a month-long break so the Paralympian sprinter known as "Blade Runner" could be

, along with two legal assistants, then spent the past five weeks deliberating on a verdict in the shooting death of Pistorius's girlfriend – model and women's rights activist

– early in the morning on Valentine's Day 2013.

in April and had remained free on bail throughout the trial.

Reeva Steenkamp and Oscar Pistorius, in 2012

Frennie Shivambu / EPA / Landov

While on the witness stand, Pistorius, 27, said he heard a window open in his bathroom in the early hours of Feb. 14, 2013, causing him to believe

and race to get to his gun to defend himself and his girlfriend, who he claimed he thought was still in bed.

In a quivering voice, Pistorius referred to the moment when he said he thought there was a burglar as when "everything changed."

"I wanted to put myself between the person who gained access to my house and Reeva," Pistorius said.

Prosecutors, however, maintained that Pistorius shot his girlfriend in a rage and presented witnesses who painted him as

Pistorius had faced 25 years to life in prison if convicted of

. A lesser murder charge or negligent killing would also have called for years in jail.

Summary: The emotional trial lasted six months and included a mental evaluation of the paralympian


Alibaba is on track to potentially become the largest U.S. initial public offering ever. If the Chinese Internet giant prices at the high end of its $60 to $66 a share range, it will bring in $21.1 billion.

Much has been touted about the company’s brilliant growth potential as it pioneers Internet retail in China, and investors have already flocked to get into the deal. In its prospectus Alibaba says it has 279 million online customers who spend nearly $300 billion on the company’s sites. By those metrics, it would be the largest online and mobile seller in the world — and its IPO hype would be justified.

Alibaba’s massive offering would put it at the top of the biggest-ever U.S. IPO list, beating out Visa V , which currently holds the record after it raised $17.9 billion in 2008, according to Bloomberg data. Standout tech companies such as Google GOOG and Amazon AMZN don’t even make the list.

And if the bankers choose to execute an option to sell more shares, Alibaba’s IPO sum could jump to $24.3 billion, beating out Agricultural Bank of China to become the biggest IPO worldwide.

At the high end of its IPO price range, Alibaba would bring in enough money to give it a market capitalization of $162.7 billion. That would make it larger than Amazon, but less than half the size of Google’s massive market value.

Alibaba’s stats sound huge in its prospectus: its 279 million shoppers bought $248 billion in gross merchandise volume sold. Its mobile sales expanded 100% last year. Those are impressive figures.

Much further down, on page 94, Alibaba records its most recent annual revenue: $8.5 billion.

That beats out only Facebook FB (see chart below). Amazon brought in almost 9 times that much in its most recent fiscal year. (Wal-Mart’s WMT figures, not shown on the chart, dwarfed everyone at $245.7 billion.)

The comparison is not exactly apples-to-apples. Alibaba’s business model is similar to that of Ebay, in that it is a middleman coordinating sellers and buyers. Alibaba doesn’t house and manage any products itself. Gross merchandise volume, the metric the company likes to highlight, is the total sum of goods and services transacted on all its sites.

Alibaba’s revenue is the cut it takes out of each sale. In comparison, Wal-Mart’s nearly $250 billion in revenue represents the total value of all the goods purchased along with their built-in margins.

This shows how complicated it is to value Alibaba. While Fortune’s Shawn Tully points out that Alibaba would have to grow at breakneck speed to justify its IPO price, others are arguing that Alibaba at $66 a share is cheap. And some, such as short seller Carson Block, are even outright critical of Alibaba’s business model.

No matter how the IPO shakes out, there will be at least one big winner next week: Yahoo YHOO . The company’s 22% stake in Alibaba is worth at least $31.4 billion, at the low-end of the IPO range, and will likely be worth much more once the stock hits the market.

Summary: The Chinese Internet giant’s massive offering would put it at the top of the biggest-ever U.S. IPO list, beating out Visa, which currently holds the record.


Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective V&A, London SW7, until 25 July

Bill Brandt: Portraits National Portrait Gallery, London WC2, until 30 August

It is a testament to the enduring power of his images that, on the centenary of his birth, Bill Brandt is being lauded by the Victoria & Albert Museum as 'Britain's best-loved photographer of modern times'. That Brandt was actually born in Germany, and did not settle in Britain until 1931, aged 27, hardly seems to matter. His photographs of a beleaguered Britain, during and after the Second World War, have made his the foremost social documentation of British life in the last century.

Brandt was a shy, self-effacing and intensely secretive individual, uneasy with his German origins to such an extent that he reinvented himself as an Englishman, insisting until his death in 1983 that he had been born in south London rather than Hamburg. Though he willed himself to be English, and captured Englishness on camera like no one before or since, his gaze was that of the outsider. He had assisted Man Ray in Paris in 1929, and surrealism, that most European of twentieth-century art movements, informed even his social reportage. An image such as Miners Returning into Daylight from 1934 is startling not just for its depiction of working class hardship, but for its dark, subversive humour: eyes like white pinpricks stare out of sooted faces that call to mind blacked-up minstrels or theatrical demons as much as exhausted workers. A gaggle of animated ticktack men at Epsom racecourse, captured from ground level, look for all the world like shadow boxers in some lost Buñuel film.

His portraits, some included here, many more on display simultaneously at the National Portrait Gallery, show that, even in his magazine work, Brandt never lost his sense of surrealist mischief. He framed Pinter beneath a blackened railway arch, looking like a close relative of the Krays. He captured Le Carré peering out from behind some shrubbery in a Victorian cemetery, the name 'John' just visible on the gravestone in the foreground. Often, as in his celebrated shot of Francis Bacon on Primrose Hill in 1963, he foregrounds the subject in a looming and ominous landscape that suggests a Britain unchanged since Victorian times.

For all their subversion, these portraits emphasise that Brandt was first and foremost a supreme formalist, a master of composition. The first portrait here is of a young and defiant Ezra Pound, and dates from Brandt's apprenticeship in a photographic studio in Vienna in the Twenties. Contrast it with his later, more staged studies of Laurie Lee or Henry Moore, and you see the development - no pun intended - of a vision that grows both more refined and more mischievous until, some time in the Forties, it becomes a signature.

A smaller show in an adjacent room shows some beautifully maintained scrapbooks belonging to his wife Eva, many of which feature familiar images before Brandt had cropped them, or reversed the negatives, or, long before digital manipulation, touched them up a bit to obtain the desired effect. In an early semi-surrealist shot of a fountain in Barcelona, he didn't capture the rain to his satisfaction, so he simply sketched in falling droplets of water.

For all his personal self-effacement, Brandt seems to have been certain of himself as an artist to the point where he openly acknowledged his influences throughout his working life. Chief among them may be Brassai, whose Paris by Night he homaged in his own London by Night series. Here, London bobbies stand sentinel in the shadows over a sleeping capital populated by tired revellers, knots of overcoated young men huddled in alleyways or on corners. A tramp rooting in a dustbin before a startled young man in formal attire signals the later work for which Brandt is perhaps best known, his documenting of British social life during and just after the war. As an outsider posing as an Englishman, he was acutely attuned to the class distinctions that in the Thirties created a country made up of two distinct nations. The elite are caught at play in ballrooms and social gatherings, the poor are pictured amid grime and deprivation. A single year separates the image of dinner-suited and fur-draped couples captured in Cocktails in a Surrey Garden, 1935, and the stooped figure pushing a bike though a blackened landscape in Coal-searcher Going Home to Jarrow, 1936, but the subjects might as well inhabit different planets.

By 1938, Brandt was in thrall to artificial light, trawling the night-time streets of the capital with his lamps and cables, drawn once again by the surreal possibilities of shadows and semi-darkness. Using long, slow exposures of up to half an hour, he lit up Bayswater to look like Vienna, captured St Paul's in moonlit silhouette, the remains of a blitzed building in the foreground looking like the ruins of the Parthenon.

By the mid-Forties, you can see his vision shifting once again. 'When I find a landscape I want to photograph,' he said, 'I wait for the right season, the right weather, the right time of day or night, to get the picture I know to be there.' Stonehenge arising out of the snow beneath a glowering sky is elemental going on mystical, the first hints of a late-flowering style that lent both his landscapes and his late nudes - and his eventual merging of the two - an otherworldliness that, though still steeped in surrealism, is all his own.

Somewhere along the way, though, perhaps around the time of his first, still arresting female nude - The Policeman's Daughter, Hampstead 1945 - Brandt's way of seeing the world had darkened. In 1944, he found a Kodak wide-angle camera by accident in a shop in Covent Garden. Its fixed lens was designed for use by the police in recording crime scenes, but with this determinedly old-fashioned instrument, Brandt took most of his late nudes, their perspectives distorted, their settings the bleak rooms of Victorian buildings. By the time he was creating his Nudes in Landscapes series, his way of seeing was literally dictated by the lens. 'I photographed what the camera was seeing,' he said of these still extraordinary images, where the human and the elemental merge. 'I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical inmates and shapes which my eyes had never observed.'

A surrealist to the end, Bill Brandt brought a distinctly European gaze to bear on his emphatically English subject matter and, in doing so, showed his adopted country, and its people, in a whole new light. 'Over and over again,' writes Paul Delany in his illuminating new biography, Bill Brandt: A Life , 'the history of art shows how the extraordinary vision of a culture ends up being the typical one.' That, in essence, was Bill Brandt's achievement, to render the everyday extraordinary, to light up the familiar until we could see it anew in all its beautiful strangeness.

Summary: Photography: In his studies of postwar England, Bill Brandt brought a surreal, European eye to his adopted homeland.


I was arguing in this column (March 13) that museums all too often make basic mistakes in the display and lighting of sculpture. A reader, Paul Bonaventura of the Ruskin School of Drawing, wrote to suggest I was oblivious to the fact that some of the best sculptors wanted to create objects "that function, at least in part, as shadow-throwing devices or in silhouette". Two examples he gave were Bernini's Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and Rodin's The Walking Man. The other two were contemporary.

But the problem is not with contemporary art. Nor is it likely to arise with that great ensemble by Bernini, which is in the Cornaro Chapel, in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome (from which it does not travel). Bernini, something of a stage designer as well as an architect, painter and sculptor, planned the Ecstasy so that it is illuminated by a concealed source of natural light (above the famous sculpture itself) which appears to be directed along gilded rays.

Very fortunately, this great masterpiece remains in the setting designed for it, which enjoys two other sources of natural light (a stained glass window in the transept, and reflected light from the nave) and would have had the benefit, as Charles Avery reminds us in his monograph, of innumerable candles on feast days. We know exactly what effect Bernini wanted, because the whole chapel is like a mechanism for creating that effect.

What about Rodin? What did Rodin want for his Walking Man? This is a sculpture that belongs both to the beginning and to the end of the great man's career. In its earlier manifestation, it is a bearded figure of John the Baptist. In its latter version, it loses its head and arms and is enlarged. Rodin supervised its display at the Farnese Palace in Rome (then and now the French Embassy). It was placed in the centre of the courtyard, though Rodin said that anywhere in the courtyard would do.

I have in front of me a photograph from 1912 on which Rodin has indicated in pen how the plinth (a temporary version in wood) should be tapered in order to create a less massive effect. Clearly he was happy with the height of the display and with the piece being shown in daylight. So, if the sculptor's intentions are to be respected (the assumption made by Paul Bonaventura, which I share), neither the Bernini nor the Rodin undermines the point I was making, that "diffuse daylight is great, when it is available".

It is true that if I turn the page of the book I am consulting (In Rodin's Studio by Albert E Elsen) I come to another photo from the same year, a gum print by Haweis and Coles, in which the statue has lost its plinth as it appears to float before a vague landscape. This is a high-contrast image, in which most of the detail of the piece is lost, leaving only certain areas of chest, kneecap and thigh as a clue to the plasticity of the object. And it is true that this kind of photo was carefully vetted and sanctioned by Rodin.

But this is a photograph - it is not an installation shot. It conveys an impression. It does not recommend a method of display, any more than Steichen's great photograph of the monument to Balzac by night is supposed to recommend that this monument be displayed in a dark room.

The issue between Bonaventura and me is one of what is called, in museum cant, "interpretation". "Experienced curators and exhibition lighting experts," Bonaventura tells us, "sometimes play with these preoccupations in illuminating displays, and it is misguided to castigate all such experiments as horror-inspired, sexed-up or perverse." Alas it is precisely the exhibition lighting experts, and their habits of interpretative "play", who are doing so much damage - not to the objects themselves, but to our ability to perceive them. Much of the problem with the new V&A British Galleries was caused by experienced curators working with exhibition lighting experts.

Of course, there are experts and experts. The new display of Italian Renaissance bronzes at the Metropolitan Museum in New York is very brilliantly lit, in both senses of the word. The Adriaen de Vries show at the Rijksmuseum not long ago, which brought together numerous large bronzes, placed each figure beneath a square of white scrim, through which the numerous spotlights shone on each. The purpose was to provide multiple sources of diffuse light for every large sculpture on display.

The purpose was not to play with preoccupations. The works of art had come from far and wide - no one had seen so many of them together, not since the Thirty Years' War. And the assumption would be that most visitors had not even thought about de Vries's work. Their first requirement would be: they would want to be able to see it. If they could see it, they might be able to interpret it. But what an impoverishment it would have been if all they could have seen was some expert's shadow, some daft curator's interpretation.

Summary: Displaying sculpture is too important to be left to the lighting experts, argues James Fenton


Updated OCT 06, 2014 8:36p ET

TUCSON, Ariz. -- Arizona coach Rich Rodriguez is well aware his team will be congratulated plenty this week for knocking off No. 2 Oregon last week. It started Friday and will probably last until Saturday when USC visits Arizona Stadium.

"It's probably from the same people who didn't mention anything to them a week or so ago," Rodriguez said Monday.

Winning does that. Believing all the talk is the problem. Having a chip on your shoulder isn't.

"It's like poison, " Rodriguez said. "It's OK unless you swallow it."

Case in point: Thursday night's gave vs. Oregon. The words: bigger, stronger, faster were used to describe the Ducks.

It meant nothing. Arizona countered with grit and determination. Now, UA has been rewarded -- sort, of -- with a No. 10 ranking in this week's Associated Press poll.

"I don't mind, because it don't matter," Rodriguez said. "It don't matter. I told the team, it don't matter right now. It matters at the end but not right now. But if it helps us get a little bounce in our guy's steps and the fans will be happy and be in the stands Saturday night, then it will be (good)."

Later Monday afternoon the game had been declared a sellout.

As for the rankings, 10 is but a number. A good number, but ...

"Making the big leap is pretty good, but our mindsets are pretty good," said defensive back Will Parks. "Our mindsets won't change. It's stay humble, stay ready and stay focused for whatever challenge comes our way."

The No. 10 ranking is Arizona's highest since 1999. But even so, odds makers have USC as a 2-point favorite on Saturday night (down from an opening line of three).

"I'm glad we are the underdog," said Parks. "That keeps the guys focused for the task at hand. USC is a pretty good team. But we will prepare just like every other team that comes into our house."

Arizona hasn't started a season with six wins since going 7-0 to start the season in 1993, eventually finishing 10-2 and beating Miami in the Fiesta Bowl. In 1999, the Wildcats started 5-0 and then lost to UCLA at home. They regrouped from there and eventually defeated Nebraska in the Holiday Bowl to finish No. 4 in the polls.

Follow Steve Rivera on Twitter

Summary: Wildcats jump into poll at No. 10 after shocking win at Oregon, but another big test awaits at home.


Thrill seekers everywhere flock to amusement parks and theme parks to find the scariest, stomach-turning rides on the planet. Though roller coasters aren't for the faint of heart, they do attract a number of different ages. Every year means an added inch or two closer to reaching a height requirement for a ride a youngster has always dreamed of.

Living in the United States, home to Six Flags and Cedar Point, we are privileged to be closely distanced to some of the best roller coasters in the world. From the tallest steel coaster to the fastest wooden coaster, these rides might be right in your home state.

As of late, many problems arise when accidents and faulty constructions result in injuries and even sometimes deaths. But roller coaster companies do their best to develop new ways to build and implement safer rides.

Manufacturers such as Intamin, Rocky Mountain Construction, S&S Worldwide, or The Gravity Group continue to be big names in the theme park industry. And the manufacturers are always looking to beat a World Record by engineering some of the biggest and baddest rides on the planet. So here we’ve compiled a list of the craziest records that they have beaten, from the steepest angles, to longest rides to tallest, these are the big bad coasters that are sure to have you screaming a higher pitch then you knew possible.

A new addition to the Six Flags Great America park is the record breaking wooden roller coaster, Goliath. Traveling up to 72 miles per hour, this wooden coaster has two upside down inversions and the longest wooden roller coaster drop at 180 feet. It also set the record at the steepest wooden record drop of 85 degrees.

This steel accelerator roller coaster comes in second to Kingda Ka but still means serious business. Located in Cedar Point Park in Sandusky, Ohio, Top Thrill Dragster held the title of tallest and longest drop before Kingda Ka was built. It launches from 0 to 120 miles per hour in less than four seconds, and brings you up to over 400 feet in the air following with the second largest drop in the world at 400 feet.

Coming in second for the longest wooden roller coaster drop to Goliath (previously mentioned), El Toro brings out the power of the bull. It has a drop height of 176 feet and reaches a top speed of 70 miles per hour. Along with many other top coasters, El Toro is located in Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey.

Coming in at 8,133 feet, Steel Dragon 2000 is by far the longest steel roller coaster in the world. Located at Nagashima Spa Land amusement park in Mie Prefecture, Japan. Opening in the year 2000, the coaster was appropriately named because of its opening falling within “The Year of the Dragon.”

Opening in 1979, The Beast is a main attraction at Kings Island in Mason, Ohio. The coaster is the longest wooden roller coaster in the world at 7,359 feet and the ride lasts for over four minutes (that’s a long time in roller coaster time!)

The famed Takabisha may just be the scariest roller coaster you can ride. It has a drop angle of 121 degrees making it the steepest in the world. Located in the Fuji-Q Highland theme park in Fujiyoshida, Yamanashi, Japan this ride attracts thrill seekers everywhere.

Coming in second to Goliath (of 85 degrees), Outlaw Run, a wooden roller coaster at Silver Dollar City amusement park in Branson, Missouri, has a steep drop of 81 degrees from 162 feet in the air. Outlaw Run was the first wooden roller coaster with multiple inversions (or upside-down loops) making it a truly thrilling ride.

Inversions, or instances when the the coaster turns riders upside-down and then back again can be one of the most stomach-turning aspects of the ride. The Smiler, located at Alton Towers in Staffordshire, United Kingdom broke the world record with 14 total inversions. The ride also includes blinding lights, optical illusions, and twisted effects to mess with your mind.

For the complete list of the 11 Biggest, Baddest Roller Coasters In The World, go to TheActiveTimes.com.

More From The Active Times: -- The World's 15 Craziest Zip Lines -- New Ways to See the National Parks: 7 Alternative Adventures -- The World’s Most Thrilling Cliff Diving Spots -- The Most Amazing Scuba Dives on the Planet

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The 10 Players Drafted Before J.J. Watt In 2011

The 10 Players Drafted Before J.J. Watt In 2011

Few people enjoy the trifecta Newton enjoyed starting in his last season at Auburn. The quarterback won the Heisman Trophy and then led the school to a BCS Championship before the Panthers picked him first overall.

Newton may not be as elite a player as Watt, but it's hard to argue with Carolina taking him with the top pick. He's a two-time Pro Bowler who led the Panthers to the second round of the playoffs last year.

Like Newton, Von Miller had a strong track record coming out of college. He was a two-time AP All-American who led the NCAA in sacks in 2009.

Miller actually won the NFL Defensive Rookie of the Year award over Watt in 2011. The one blemish on his resume came in 2013, when he missed the first six games of the NFL season to serve a suspension for allegedly trying to cheat on a drug test. But on the field, Miller has shined, making the Pro Bowl twice.

Combining size with surprising speed, Marcell Dareus was a nightmare for anyone facing Alabama's defensive line. The defensive end was a sight to see when picking up a fumble and running it back at an impressive clip.

Darueus brought that dominance into the NFL, where he's a star player on an underrated Buffalo defense. Despite having legal troubles involving guns and controlled substances, Dareus was a 2013 Pro Bowl selection.

Standing 6-foot-4, Green was a star from day one at Georgia, using his length to dominate the opposition en route to two straight All-SEC team selections.

But one could argue Green is even more dominant in the NFL, accumulating 30 touchdowns in his short career while earning three straight Pro Bowl selections.

Peterson's 2010 season at LSU was truly special. As a sparkplug for the Tigers' defensive and special teams units, Peterson was a unanimous All-America choice, as well as winner of the Thorpe Award and Bednarik Award.

In the NFL, little has changed. Peterson still stars regularly on defense and special teams, and he's become one of the most renowned cornerbacks in the league.

Jones earned acclaim at Alabama as a rare true freshman starter on the team. He developed into one of the team's most reliable stars on a team that won the BCS Championship in 2010.

Playing opposite receiver Roddy White, Jones has had an exceptional career. In 2012, he made the Pro Bowl thanks to a 1,200-yard, 10-touchdown season.

Aldon Smith was a big contributor at Missouri since he was a freshman, when he won the Big 12 Freshman of the Year award.

Smith started just as quickly in the NFL, setting the 49ers' rookie sack record and winning NFC Defensive Player of the Year in 2012. But after a run-in with TSA at an airport, during which he allegedly became belligerent, Smith was handed a nine-game suspension for this season.

Locker was considered an excellent pro prospect in college, where he led Washington while running a pro-style offense and displaying accurate throwing and strong footwork.

But Locker's career with Tennessee has been a roller coaster, with flashes of brilliance weighed down by injuries and poor decision-making. Without more consistent play, Locker's time as a starter might be winding down.

At USC, Smith became one of college football's best lineman while protecting Trojan quarterbacks that also went to the NFL.

In Dallas, Smith has evolved into a reliable Pro Bowl lineman. His service is one reason the Cowboys have jumped out to a fast start this season.

Gabbert was an electric quarterback in college, where he displayed great ground speed to go with a beautiful throwing motion.

But Gabbert didn't translate to the NFL game. He struggled with timing and comfort in the pocket and lost his starting job last season. This past NFL draft, the Jaguars selected Blake Bortles to start their QB project anew.

J.J. Watt was already a monster in college. After two years at Central Michigan, Watt transferred to Wisconsin, where he won the Lott Trophy in 2010.

But you could make a strong argument that Watt has been even better in the NFL. This year alone, he's scored three touchdowns -- a remarkable feat for a defensive end.

Summary:
By Catarina Cowden
TheActiveTimes.com
Thrill seekers everywhere flock to amusement parks and theme parks to find the scariest, stomach-turning rides o...


Zaha Hadid was flying to Frankfurt to give a talk, in which I was her interlocutor. Her plane taxied from its stand, developed a minor fault, and stopped. She refused to believe the reassurances that the delay would be brief, and demanded that she be put on another flight. Her wish was impossible – to return to the stand, to unload and reload her baggage in the hold, it couldn't be done – but Hadid insisted, vigorously. The cabin staff tried to calm her, warn her, admonish her, until a stewardess noticed that this was the same woman whose picture was in the current edition of the in-flight magazine, attached to a profile of the Pet Shop Boys, for whom she had designed a set. "Are you Zaha Hadid?" she asked. Then the impossible became possible, and the architect got to change planes.

There are hundreds of stories like this about Hadid and they tell the same story, which is also that of her life: the testing of boundaries, the determination to get her way, the fury, the indifference to practical constraints, the opposition of conventional society, here represented by the cabin crew. And then the ultimate victory aided by fame, a fame earned through personality and talent.

To say she divides opinion is to put it mildly. To some, including several fellow architects that I spoke to, she is a tyrant; her work is "unbelievably arrogant" and "oppressive; I don't believe she cares what it's like actually to be in one of her buildings". To others she's a genius, and a hero, the only ground common to all these views being a remark once made by her mentor, Rem Koolhaas, that she is "a planet in her own inimitable orbit". The truth is that she is all these things, and more. She tests everyone – her staff, her clients, the users of her buildings, and herself – and offers an unspoken deal. If you survive all this, I will make something fantastic, and you could be part of it, is roughly how it goes, and people's view of her will depend on which part of the deal they experience most.

Over the past decade or so Hadid has gone from being the Architect Who Never Got Anything Built to someone who can't stop building. At the turn of the millennium she was still best known for winning at an early age the competition to design the Peak in Hong Kong, a leisure complex that was never realised, and for her martyrdom in Cardiff. Here, although she twice won the commission to design the city's opera house, local politicians did everything they could to ensure they got a mediocre project by another practice. Now, her office boasts 400 staff and 950 projects in 44 countries. Their work includes colossal developments in Changsha, China, and in Bratislava, a large luxury villa in Moscow and a role advising on the airport that Boris Johnson would like to build in the Thames Estuary.

Hadid's first building was a fire station near the German-Swiss border, for the furniture company Vitra, a building that celebrated its 20th birthday this summer. This autumn two of her more important projects are opening, at opposite ends of the constructional scale. In Baku, Azerbaijan, there is the colossal Heydar Aliyev cultural centre, a billowing creation that promises to be the most complete realisation yet of the Hadid universe. The Serpentine Sackler is opening in Kensington Gardens, a conversion and extension of an 1805 gunpowder store that will be a sister gallery to the nearby Serpentine. The latter is to the Baku building as a waterdrop is to a whale, but significant because it is in the heart of London, a place that, although it has been her base for 40 years, has been slow to build her works. It is not however her first building in the capital. There is also the Evelyn Grace academy in Brixton, which won the Stirling prize in 2011; a little further from the centre her Olympic Aquatics Centre is reopening next year, adapted from its games mode to a swimming pool for public use.

The rapid expansion of Hadid's practice has several causes, including its own determination to lose its "unbuildable" tag. Most of all it is a consequence of the 00s boom in "iconic" buildings, when spectacular architecture was believed to work regenerative miracles for the cities and companies that bought it. Hadid, equally extraordinary in her personality and architecture, is the perfect iconic architect. She is collectible, with her furniture designs commanding astounding prices. When money vanished in the west, oil-rich and Asian countries carried on. Her earlier buildings tend to be in European or American cities insecure about their urban dynamism – Wolfsburg, Leipzig, Strasburg, Cincinnati, the outskirts of Basel. Now she's popular in China, Russia, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia.

Now aged 62, Hadid has won all the biggest awards in her business. She is a celebrity, a phenomenon, continuously feted, with connections with Brad Pitt and Barack Obama. She has also bought, for a reported £10m, the building that the Design Museum will vacate when it moves to new premises in 2015, whose purpose is to house her archive, and to "engage in a collective dialogue by exhibiting the research and innovation of global collaborations in art, architecture and design". A prototype of this institution can be seen in the design gallery she has opened in Clerkenwell. On its ground floor there is her extravagantly curvilinear furniture; upstairs is kept an ever-expanding array of architectural models.

Her temper provokes fear, but she also inspires admiration. Where many leading architects seem robotic, Hadid is human – funny, frank, unafraid to show her emotions, sometimes fond of talking a little dirty. Aaron Betsky, writer, museum director, and an old friend, says: "People wonder why anyone works for her, given that she can be a stern taskmaster, but she can also show incredible loyalty and support, and passion for what she does." She has worked hard since student days, sometimes succumbing to bouts of illness. She has never married or had children, although she has denied that she sacrificed family life to her work. "I'm sure I could have managed," she told Lynn Barber in the Observer in 2008.

Stories abound of her grandeur, such as dispatching an assistant from the Venice Architecture Biennale to her London flat, who returned with the shoes she wanted to wear for a particular party, but she can also be down-to-earth. Rather than occupy an exclusive room, she preferred for years to sit among the tables in the old school house that is her practice's office, throwing out instructions to staff. She has shown courage, not least in overcoming the real obstacles of being a woman and an Arab in a white, male business. She dresses spectacularly, never favouring the mannish jackets and boyish haircuts with which some women in her profession attempted to smuggle their gender past the invisible barriers. Her approach was to blow them down.

Julia Peyton-Jones, co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, has said that Hadid's life and her work constitute "an all-encompassing vision" and "a complete work of art", that she is "a pioneer", "well ahead of her time". In the Hadid-designed Roca showroom in west London, a curvaceous sci-fi quasi-shrine with the ostensible purpose of selling bathroom fittings, a visitors' book is rich in tributes. One reads: "One of the most beautiful experiences in the life. I am the future. Best best xxx love." Also: "a mesmerising trip to the future"; "I love Zaha Hadid. Very peaceful place"; and "I trust in Zaha Hadid. I was sure that this place should be amazing!"

From Peyton-Jones to the scribblers in the Roca book, there are common themes: Hadid is amazing, and she shows us the future. The same themes can be found in her own and her practice's descriptions of her work. Her senior partner, Patrik Schumacher, with whom she has worked for 25 years, has written that her designs are "manifestos of a new type of space" that pursue "the conquest of a previously unimaginable realm of constructive freedom".

The love is not, however, universal. The Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre, for example, has stated that it is "shocked" that Hadid's Galaxy Soho development of shops and offices has been given an RIBA award. Where RIBA's president, Angela Brady, praised its "visionary new thinking about urban issues", the heritage group called it "a typical example of the destruction of Beijing's old town". Hadid has been criticised for her Baku project, commissioned to glorify a regime notorious for its human rights abuses, and for its forced evictions of homeowners to make way for new development. Here at least she has the company of Lord Foster and Rem Koolhaas, who have designed comparable monuments for the oppressive rulers of Kazakhstan and China.

In Baghdad, the city where Hadid was born, she entered the competition to design a new parliament for Iraq, which was won by an emerging London practice, Assemblage. The former British minister Lord Howarth, a member of the competition jury, calls the latter's plans "the product of rigorous thought" and "becoming for an institution replacing a dictatorship", "rather than a grandiose and egotistic flourish". Hadid's entry has been called "convoluted", but her failure to win the competition did not stop her office continuing to talk to parliamentary officials, in the apparent hope that she will be awarded the project after all. If so, this would be a reversal of her treatment at Cardiff, and something with which she should have nothing to do.

Behind these stories questions recur: does her success, her associations with the mighty, her splendour, mean that she is losing touch with the complexities and contradictions that were once part of her work? Is she now in danger of favouring the spectacular to the exclusion of the dirty realities of cities, in which she used to profess an interest? If she has been dominating/generous, and grand/earthy, is the first half of each pairing now ascendant?

My own experiences of Zaha Hadid include writing in her support during the Cardiff battles, and following and reviewing her works. I have also been her client twice, or three times if you include a speculative proposal for the rebuilding of the burned-down Teatro Fenice in Venice, which I helped commission for a newspaper.

The first time was when I was editor of Blueprint magazine, and we collaborated with the constructional trade show Interbuild to realise a Zaha-designed pavilion in the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham. It was to be paid for partly by Blueprint advertisers, whose products would be incorporated into the structure, and a tricky moment came when she presented her designs to them. Her explanations were obscure to this sceptical audience, and when she finished an awkward silence fell. The pavilion seemed doomed, but then a northern voice broke out – "I think it's bloody brilliant" – and its owner, the head of the high-quality toilet cubicle company Thrislington, led a round of applause. The other advertisers had to join in, and then write the necessary cheques.

The pavilion was built, not without difficulty or busted budgets, as it required a kind of steel-frame construction more suitable for small bridges than a week-long trade show. But Interbuild, Blueprint and the advertisers got their publicity, for achieving what was in 1995 Zaha's first structure in Britain. And it was a memorable thing, putting into the shade a classical hut that Prince Charles's architectural institute erected next door.

The last time was when the Architecture Foundation, of which I was director, ran a competition to design a new building to house its activities. Zaha Hadid won, and another meeting gathered in her office, in the same room where Patrick Wilson, the Thrislington man, had won the day. This time it held the many consultants who would help get the building built, who were there to learn about and be enthused by the project on which we were embarking. Hadid wandered in and out, while her project architect attempted an explanation of the designs, occasionally telling him from the doorway that he was doing it wrong.

It was not an auspicious start, and after three years, many sleepless nights and some hair loss, the project was abandoned. We experienced the same impatience with practical constraints that she had shown on the Frankfurt flight – the cafe would not be easily heatable in the winter, the window-cleaning bill equalled the salary of a member of staff of this small organisation, the project architect turned up at a meeting called to cut costs with a redesigned staircase that would increase them. At the same time she and her office showed dedication, working long hours to address problems, producing an entirely new design when necessary, and dealing with frustrations not of their making. As clients, it should be said, we at the Architecture Foundation had our own imperfections.

We were not alone among Hadid's clients in facing practical challenges – the Aquatics Centre, for example, uses prodigious quantities of steel, which dented London 2012's pride in using the material economically on their stadium, and coped awkwardly with the need to have temporary additions to house the seating required during Games time. But nor are such challenges unique or new among celebrated architects. Early houses by Richard Rogers were cold, damp and/or nightmarish to build. The functional shortcomings of Le Corbusier's and Frank Lloyd Wright's works are legendary. Andrea Palladio's church of Il Redentore in Venice, consecrated in 1592, was seven times over budget and had poor acoustics. As choral music was one of its functions, the latter was a serious fault, but it is still seen as a masterpiece.

Patrik Schumacher has even addressed this question of practicality as part of the practice's philosophy. "Functional optimality," he wrote, "is… renounced in favour of the experimental advancement of social practices of potentially higher functionality." This seems to say that, if you have to choose between firing someone and having dirty windows, it's worth it, because at some point in the future Hadid's architecture will lead to a better world. It is almost religious: sacrifices now for reward in the hereafter.

Such sacrifices are infuriating to other architects who try responsibly to avoid them, but sometimes they are indeed worth it. If we had got her Architecture Foundation building built it would have been a permanent addition to London's stock of extraordinary places, and we would all have felt good about it. For cultural institutions there can often be a trade-off, in that the spectacle and celebrity of a Hadid building brings benefits of fundraising and publicity that can help pay for costs in cash and neuralgesics.

Pippo Ciorra is the senior curator of architecture at Maxxi, the museum of contemporary art that Zaha designed in Rome. He acknowledges that it was "very expensive", but says that Hadid was the right choice for the project when she won the competition in 1998. It was "the outcome of a season of optimism" in Italy in the late 1990s, when the government of Romano Prodi promoted cultural innovation. "Then everything went wrong," says Ciorra, but at the time it was "necessary to have hope". The building finally opened in 2010, after a tortuous gestation and in a very different Italy.

The building is in essence a series of concrete tubes, writhing and overlapping, which connect an external courtyard to the internal exhibition galleries in what aspires to be a continuous flow of space. It is dynamic, in what was a sleepy district, with long curving interiors accelerated by longitudinal fins in the ceilings. It is modern baroque in an old-baroque city. "It is more and more successful," says Ciorra. "People like to come and enjoy this public space, to take advantage of it."

It is, he adds, "really incredibly well built… Immense attention was poured on it. There were dozens of models made, and it didn't lose anything in the transition from the design to the finished building." He also opposes the most common criticism of Maxxi, which is that it is a poor place for displaying exhibits, that the construction dominates the content. "It works well" for the architecture exhibitions that Ciorra mounts, and he likes the fact that it creates no boundaries between art and architecture shows. It is "a little more challenging for art curators, but they are getting better." The secret is to be bold, "not to pay too much respect to the place… in the beginning they were too shy."

Maxxi fulfils many of the promises of the first part of Hadid's career. It is powerful, distinctive, spectacular and displays her ability, evident in the Peak, of conceiving complex spaces in three dimensions. More importantly, it contains ideas about cities and public life, also evident in the Cardiff project. According to Aaron Betsky, Hadid's work is about "the gathering together and bundling of the energy inherent in a site and situation", and "the intensities that come from condensing things then opening up. At best it is intensely democratic, about removing barriers."

Through her architecture she has sought to create new and heightened relationships between the inner and outer lives of her buildings, between the contents of an opera house or an art gallery, and the streets outside. At Cardiff the audience would themselves have become performers, as they moved through a sequence of external spaces and internal foyers. In Rome she made a three-dimensional passeggiata that fuses an old city and new art. Critics of Hadid have always accused her of making extraordinary shapes for the sake of it, to which she responded by saying that they were means to the end of creating new urban experiences, as at Maxxi. According to Schumacher, the purpose is to "reflect emerging social demands".

With some of the more recent work, however, this defence is harder to make. The CMA CGM tower in Marseille and the Roca showroom in London look very much like shape-making for its own sake, with multiple curves that have little purpose but to create an updated version of a 1960s vision of what the future was going to look like. In the glimpses so far possible of the Serpentine Sackler, Hadid's undulating, tent-like addition joins the old gunpowder store clumsily. Some hidden intelligence might be revealed when it is opened, but for now its curves seem lumpy and overwrought, earthbound rather than floating.

It would be surprising if Ilham Aliyev, ruler of Azerbaijan, has much interest in Schumacher's "emerging social demands", or in reflecting them in the Heydar Aliyev centre, which is named after his father and immediate predecessor as president. From a distance of a few thousand miles this building looks extraordinary, with almost every surface, inside and out, being both white and curving, offering an experience of total immersion in Zaha-ness. But it doesn't look like a work of the democratic urban energy of which Betsky speaks. Rather, it seems an exercise in isolated magnificence not so different from the colossal cultural palaces long beloved of Soviet and similar regimes – it is just that the giant Asiatic-classical columns that they would once have used have been traded for futurist swooshes.

Nor does her Galaxy Soho building in Beijing, which has upset the preservationists, fulfil her practice's promise that its projects "work in synchronicity with their surroundings". Huge, bulbous and uniform, it looms menacingly over neighbouring hutongs, the streets and alleys bordered by courtyard houses that are characteristic of old Beijing. This menace is actual as well as metaphorical, as similar streets were obliterated to make way for Galaxy Soho. "During the land acquisition process," says the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre, "the legal rights of the original hutong residents were also grossly disregarded." Walking in and around it, the experience is not of flow but of disconnection, of a space station descended on the city.

The architect Sean Griffiths is one of several of Hadid's fellow professionals who question her work, but he is more outspoken than most. "It's basically an empty vessel," he says, "that sucks in whatever ideology might be in proximity to it. In Moscow in 1923 it might have been interesting, but in the age of hyperventilating global capitalism, that's what gets sucked in." Another architect calls her current designs "commodified images of progress". Looking at the projects in Baku and Beijing, it's hard to disagree.

Even a supporter, Pippo Ciorra of Maxxi, doubts that Hadid can still be seen as ahead of her time. Her style, he says, "is a glorious prolongation of the 20th century", whereas now younger architects "work for the future in a different way". They profess interest in the environment, for example, about which "Zaha doesn't give a shit". He also questions what he calls the "industrial" methods of design her practice now uses – its huge output means that the close personal attention she gave Maxxi is no longer possible on every project. The production line of city centres and cultural monuments tends to create projects that look like parodies of the Zaha Hadid style, hard to distinguish from the increasingly large number of imitations by lesser firms. It is a particular feature of her approach, of the idea she embodies of architect-as-artist, that it relies heavily on the intensity of her individual creativity, which works less well when it is diluted.

Partly, this is a phenomenon that often comes when pioneering architects achieve success. It is probably humanly impossible to continue to invest the effort and emotional energy that goes into the early work. It could be argued that it is better to employ talent and experience on dozens of buildings, than on a few agonisingly crafted masterpieces, even if this disappoints fans from the days before the star in question was so famous. Norman Foster has made this trade-off as, to a lesser extent, has Frank Gehry.

I'd also say that there is still some X-factor, some oomph, that sets almost any Hadid project apart from the copyists. I am fully expecting her Aquatics Centre, for example, to be one of the greatest places in London in which to swim, even if its new-look exterior is a bit ponderous.

But it is hard to escape the feeling that she has become a prisoner of her grandeur. She and her work now seem to inhabit a bubble of celebrity, with a decreasing connection to the rest of the world. The bubble is sustained by often uncritical media: when the BBC made an Imagine programme about her, they managed not to air any of the controversies raised by Baku, Beijing and Baghdad, but presented her purely as a great creative talent.

The Serpentine Gallery, meanwhile, is not a neophyte among Hadid's admirers. She has been a long serving trustee of the gallery, and designed the first of its annual series of temporary pavilions, in 2000. It says that since then "it had always been the intention… to commission a permanent structure for the gallery by Zaha. This presented an unrivalled opportunity to realise a ZHA landmark building in central London." She was appointed for the project without a design competition which, although it is unusual for organisations such as the Serpentine, it was entitled to do.

Entitled, but not wise – there are many architects more obviously suited to a small-scale addition to an historic building, but its awe and desire for a "landmark" seems to have dazzled an organisation usually sure-footed in its appointment of architects. By failing to look outside its loop of admiration, and by playing her out of position, it has done neither itself nor her any favours.

And, visiting the showroom and archive in Clerkenwell, which will eventually require a museum building to house it, I am struck by the disappearance of a sense of scale. Scale is something that connects an object to something outside itself; without it what is left is the Zaha look, the Zaha brand, that can be digitally expanded or reduced to suit the size of a project.

Hadid remains ahead of her time, and responsive to emerging social demands, in the sense that the world is becoming a series of concentrations of wealth and power, which express themselves through lavish, singular trophies. To this extent there is a reality to the work. But it is different from the ideals she used to express, or of her achievements at their best. There has always been conflict, or tension, between her artistic ego and her public spirit, which is what made her interesting, but it's getting hard to see the latter.

Summary: From the Olympic Aquatics Centre to a new Serpentine gallery, from Beijing to Baku, Zaha Hadid's buildings are everywhere. But she divides opinion: she's a genius, say some, but to critics she has lost touch with her original ideals. By Rowan Moore


FORTUNE — Over the weekend, Yahoo YHOO announced a data partnership with restaurant reviews site Yelp YELP . The partnership “will incorporate Yelp’s listings and reviews of local businesses into results on Yahoo’s search engine,” according to the Wall Street Journal .

The surprising part of this announcement is not that Yahoo partnered with Yelp; it’s who Yahoo did not partner with: Foursquare. Speculation about a Foursquare data partnership with Yahoo has been a popular topic of late.

But the news of Yahoo teaming up with Yelp, not Foursquare, puts this speculation to rest. Yahoo probably doesn’t need two location data partnerships.

Yelp and Foursquare are competitors; the biggest differentiator is that Foursquare, which was founded in 2009, is a mobile-first company. Yelp, which started in 2004 and went public in 2012, has had to transition its business over to mobile to meet the shift in traffic. Almost 60% of Yelp’s search queries are now mobile.

The other big difference between the two is that Yelp has figured out how to make a lot of money from local business owners faster than Foursquare.

Foursquare is working hard to catch up — the company now has six streams of revenue, according to a spokesperson: venue claims, in which a business owner pays $20 to get control over his venue’s account; promoted search results; promoted “Explore” results; ads that are shown after a person checks in at a venue; a self-serve ad platform, where venues can buy ads independently; and data partnerships. Currently Microsoft and data clearinghouse Gnip are Foursquare’s two clients for that offering.

MORE: How a quiet Boulder startup is finding ‘million-dollar Tweets’ for businesses

Since last fall, Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has been touting the value of his mobile app’s location and check-in data. He’s right to: Foursquare has collected a trove of data, through 5 billion check-ins within its own app, as well as data points from its 50,000 API partners like Instagram that use Foursquare’s location database. Location data is valuable — look no further than Google’s GOOG $1 billion acquisition of traffic app Waze last year for proof. And last year Apple AAPL bought three local mapping apps: one called Embark, another called Locationary, and subway mapping site HopStop.

Last week, Microsoft MSFT said it found Foursquare’s data valuable enough to pay for and invest in. The companies announced that Foursquare location data would show up in Microsoft’s Windows Phone and Bing search results. The news was a reminder that, aside from boosting its valuation, data could be a big business for Foursquare, which has struggled to monetize as it matures. (The company brought in just $2 million in revenue in 2012; reports vary over whether it hit revenue expectations of $20 million last year.)

Foursquare was once New York’s hottest tech company, and it commanded a frothy valuation to match. The company’s challenge of living up to the hype and the valuation have been well-documented: Last Spring the company raised $41 million in debt to avoid taking a down-round. The recent investment from Microsoft, which was added on to a $35 million Series D round of funding led by DFJ Growth and the Capital Group’s Smallcap World Fund, valued the company at $650 million, a small step up from its $600 million valuation three years ago.

It’s not clear why Yahoo chose Yelp over Foursquare, though a person familiar with Foursquare says the startup walked away because Yahoo was not interested in the strategic investment part of the deal. And the Foursquare-Microsoft data partnership is not exclusive, so Foursquare could theoretically revisit the topic with Yahoo. Still, this partnership seemed like an easy layup for Foursquare. And at this point, the company needs to make every shot it gets.

Summary: The media wanted a Yahoo-Foursquare deal more than the companies did.


One actor’s elusiveness is another’s versatility. If the actor is Alec Guinness, those qualities can be one and the same. Range distinguished his career as much as understatement did. Over the course of more than 60 years on screen, Guinness’s roles included:

(“Situation Hopeless . . . But Not Serious,” “Tales from Hollywood”)

“Great Expectations,” “Oliver Twist,” “Scrooge,” “Little Dorrit”

“Our Man in Havana,” “The Comedians,” “Monsignor Quixote”

“The Fall of the Roman Empire,” “Caesar and Cleopatra”

“The Swan,” “Lawrence of Arabia”

“Hitler: The Last Ten Days”

“Hitler: The Last Ten Days.”

“The Quiller Memorandum,” “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” “Smiley’s People”

“To Paris With Love,” “The Bridge on the River Kwai”

“Baker’s Dozen,” “Tunes of Glory,” “The Comedians”

“The Captain’s Paradise,” “All at Sea,” “Damn the Defiant!”

“Kind Hearts,” “The Lavender Hill Mob”

“The Man in the White Suit”

“Lovesick” — Sigmund Freud, no less

- Alec Guinness: eluding description

Summary: Is there anything Alec Guinness couldn’t play?


01/29/2015 AT 04:05 PM EST

In this week's PEOPLE, Broadway legend Joel Grey, 82,

for the first time that he's a gay man.

"[Sexuality] doesn't matter any more," Grey, who's had a career spanning over seven decades, tells PEOPLE. As proof, he points to another gay Broadway and Hollywood star who's been an inspiration to him.

is a star in every way," Grey says. "And he's a dad. He's the most gifted, charming, talented actor who is himself, and that's it. There are no limits."

," he adds. "He is just excellent at everything, and he is totally who he is."

It wasn't always this way for gay men in show business.

"When I started to come up in the business, like Neil Patrick Harris, no one ever talked about their sexuality," says Grey, the legendary star of

. "It was hidden. It was held against you. It was really dreadful. It could have finished a career if anyone knew. So everyone was very, very careful and fearful about it."

"It's not like that now," says Grey, who was married for 24 years and raised two children, including the actress Jennifer Grey.

Grey is now focusing on what's ahead – his fifth book of photos and a memoir, due later this year. And his message, he says, is simple. "Be yourself, embrace yourself," he says. "And whatever it is you are, you are something wonderful."

Summary: The Broadway legend reveals how he was inspired to come forward as a gay man by young Hollywood


Vereen says he has seen it twice and knows the words to its songs. In addition to genuinely enjoying the content, Vereen says there is a practical bonus: "Girls like musicals."

Seahawks-Patriots: Totally Not The X's & O's

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Summary: Running back Shane Vereen was among the Patriots who gave American Sniper a rave review after the team watched the film together. But Vereen also appr...


“Remember,” Richard Strauss once wrote, “you are making music not to amuse yourself but to delight your audience.” He was addressing young conductors, but the comment could surely apply to the master’s own early works, so brilliantly constructed and capable of inducing in an audience (as Clara Schumann once described it) “such ecstasies as I have seldom seen aroused by any new work.”

Strauss’s “Burleske,” a dazzling showpiece for piano and orchestra, would seem a case in point. If other 19th-century composers had tried to elevate or ennoble the concerto, Strauss seems to be reminding us of the unalloyed pleasures of shameless, featherweight virtuosity. The music’s underlying impish spirit would find wider renown when channeled into the merry pranks of a certain German folk character, but Till Eulenspiegel’s nose-thumbing antics are already present in the scampering runs and keyboard gymnastics of the “Burleske.”

Pianist Emanuel Ax is back this week in Symphony Hall, and he played the “Burleske” on Thursday night with skill and gusto under the baton of Christoph von Dohnanyi. In this score, piano and timpani are often co-conspirators, a partnership that once helped kindle Ax’s own fantasy of learning to play the timpani himself (which he ultimately did). On Thursday, Timothy Genis handled his part in the collaboration with elegance and precision.

The night began with more Strauss: the gorgeous opening string sextet written for his final opera, “Capriccio,” completed in 1941 and premiered the following year under politically fraught circumstances in wartime Munich. Now at the other end of his career, some five decades after the youthful “Burleske,” Strauss seems here to have inverted his maxim about the outer-directedness of art. One hears in this introverted music of soft radiance, the sound of a composer cocooning himself in retrospection and autumnal beauty. “Capriccio” takes place in the year 1777, and as the curtain goes up, the opera’s own characters are listening to this music. If the past is another country, Strauss was ready for a visit.

Six BSO string players, among them concertmaster Malcolm Lowe and three principals, gave the sextet a warm-toned and sensitive reading on Thursday night. Tellingly, after the wistful lambent music of the sextet’s closing bars played out, a large audience in the hall allowed for a few seconds of silence before jumping in with applause — always a good sign that the music has reached its mark.

Offsetting the Strauss selections were two Mozart works: the Piano Concerto No. 14 (again with Ax) and the “Haffner” Symphony. Dohnanyi had the violins seated antiphonally, and led clear-eyed and thoughtful accounts with just a few rough edges. Ax’s tone in the concerto was full and ripe, and he conveyed the vitality and sparkle of the finale particularly well. In the closing pages of the “Haffner,” Dohnanyi played up the dynamic contrasts to striking effect. It was presumably just a taste of what’s to come: Next week he leads a program solely devoted to the composer’s final three symphonies.

• BLO season will feature Puccini, Glass, Massenet, Lehár

• Betty Buckley on her signature song and new album

Summary: The Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Christoph von Dohnanyi and featuring guest pianist Emanuel Ax, played works by Richard Strauss and Mozart at Symphony Hall on Thursday.


Though the company was at one point in development of Android products, it has now shifted completely to webOS.

Jon Rubinestein, the former CEO of Palm, which HP HPQ picked up for $1.2 billion earlier this year, dispelled any myths of multiple portable operating systems happening at HP to the Financial Times today. Specifically, he said there wouldn’t be any Windows Mobile and HP killed off its Android efforts:

HP is on track to deliver a tablet computer running webOS early next year, as well as a Windows-based tablet that will ship sooner, he said. It has abandoned a project to launch a smartphone based on Google’s Android open source operating system and there will be no tablet based on the system, Mr Rubinstein said.

The bad news for Rubinstein is that HP released an Android tablet as part of a printer package just last week. The bad news for HP’s customers is that that product is likely to be orphaned as HP moves its printers to the webOS. HP VP (and likely CEO successor to Mark Hurd) Todd Bradley said this week that he expected to sell 15 million WebOS printers next year.

He also let slip the name PalmPad for HP’s line of webOS tablets.

We’ll have a webOS-powered PalmPad that will be set for release early in 2011.

HP will also be competing with Google GOOG and Apple AAPL for Music sales according to the FT:

One early cloud service to be aimed at consumers will be a system for streaming music to multiple devices. “As we roll out PCs to folks, we can give them opportunities to store and upload music to the cloud,” Mr McArthur said.

The music will be streamed to HP’s smartphones, which will also store the most listened-to songs on the gadget for faster playback.

Something tells me that this doesn’t keep Steve Jobs up at night.

Summary: Though the company was at one point in development of Android products, it has now shifted completely to webOS. Jon Rubinestein, the former CEO of Palm, which HP picked up for $1.2 billion earlier this year, dispelled any myths of multiple portable operating systems happening at HP to the Financial Times today.  Specifically, he said…


Harold Edgerton’s “Water From a Faucet,” on display at the MIT Museum.

CAMBRIDGE — It took a long time for photography to be considered art. It’s always been technology. The medium as intersection of art and technology are on display at the MIT Museum (a fitting location) in “Images of Discovery: Communicating Science Through Photography.” The show runs through March 1 of next year.

“Images of Discovery” consists of work from three photographers associated with MIT: Harold “Doc” Edgerton, who was a much-beloved figure on campus for many decades; Berenice Abbott, who spent time at MIT in the ’50s working on the photographic visualization of science; and Felice Frankel, who’s affiliated with the university’s Center for Materials Science and Engineering.

The show has another notable element: a half dozen interactive stations where museumgoers can create digital versions of the sorts of images seen in the gallery. It’s a striking way to get across how these three photographers combined experimentation and artistic creativity. It’s hard to predict who’ll enjoy the stations more: kids or their parents.

Through his development of stroboscopic photography, Edgerton produced some of the most striking images in the history of the medium. Several of them are among the most familiar, such as the “coronet” produced by a drop of milk. It like a pearly crown of creation. That photograph is in the show (we learn that Edgerton chose milk because it photographed better than water), as is a less familiar image in the series, with the displaced milk forming a spout.

“Bullet through Balloons” echoes Edgerton’s more famous image of a bullet bursting an apple. “Hammer Breaks Plate Glass” turns an act of destruction into one of aesthetic purity. “Water From a Faucet” effects a different sort of transformation: giving liquid the appearance of solidity as a swirling crystal — assuming, that is, crystal ever swirled. That’s the essence of what Edgerton did: upending our visual expectations and making us see the world differently.

In a nice curatorial touch, an Edgerton photograph of bursting soap bubbles hangs by one Abbott took in which they look so solid as to seem unburstable. A wall label tells us that Abbott took many exposures over the course three days or longer to get the image just right since “most of them came out mushy.”

Mushiness, either personal or visual, is about the last word one would associate with Abbott. Where Edgerton’s photographs take the mundane and produce something (seemingly) miraculous, Abbott’s aim was to take scientific principles and concepts — interference patterns, the conservation of momentum, refraction, magnetism — and make them visible. The same exacting eye she had brought to her portrait work in Paris during the ’20s and documenting of New York cityscapes during the ’30s she brought to science. A photograph like “Light Passes through a Prism” is at once superbly illustrative and supremely elegant. Is it art? Is it science? Yes.

Unlike Edgerton and Abbott, Frankel works in color. Some of her most vivid images show materials invisible to the naked eye — so much so as to be almost invisible to comprehension. Ferrofluids, for example, are particles just nanometers in length suspended in fluids. Or there’s the laser etching on silicon chips necessary to enable microelectromechanical systems.

As with what Edgerton and Abbott show us, these images are so startling (and so often beautiful) that seeing almost isn’t believing. It’s learning.

Summary: In “Images of Discovery,” at MIT, Harold Edgerton, Berenice Abbott, and Felice Frankel put photography at the service of science.


NEW YORK — Raytheon Co. has agreed to acquire Websense Inc. from the private equity firm Vista Equity Partners LLC for $1.9 billion and plans to combine it with its cyber-products unit, people with knowledge of the matter said. The new company would be 80 percent owned by Raytheon, and Vista would keep a 20 percent stake, said the people, who asked not to be identified. Raytheon would contribute $1.6 billion in cash to the new company, of which $600 million would be a loan, the people said. Raytheon also plans to contribute Raytheon Cyber Products, a $400 million unit, to the new company, one of the people said. Raytheon is said to be buying Websense to improve cyber-protection technology. John McCormack, chief executive of Websense, would lead the new company as a division of Raytheon, the person said. Representatives of Raytheon did not immediately respond to requests for comment left outside of normal business hours. Raytheon, based in Waltham, Mass., is the world’s biggest missile maker In November, it acquired Blackbird Technologies, a surveillance and cybersecurity company, for $420 million. Websense’s technology allows companies to identify potential hackers and set rules about who can access confidential information. Vista acquired Websense on June 25, 2013, for about $990 million. — BLOOMBERG NEWS

PLYMOUTH — Operators of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station said they have begun a power reduction for the station’s scheduled refueling, done every two years. Entergy, the plant’s owner, said Sunday that it is spending $70 million and bringing in more than 1,000 skilled temporary workers to work with 600 full-time employees on the refueling. The workers will upgrade, replace, and inspect hundreds of pieces of equipment. Pilgrim began commercial operation in 1972 and was relicensed in 2012 to operate until 2023. Spokeswoman Lauren Burm said in a statement that the time when Pilgrim will return to the power grid is ‘‘sensitive information that can’t be shared.’’ — ASSOCIATED PRESS

MINNEAPOLIS — Huge demand for the Lilly Pulitzer for Target collection has overwhelmed the Minneapolis retailer’s website. Many Lilly Pulitzer fans who tried to buy pieces from the limited-edition collection were greeted with website issues on Target.com early Sunday. Customers then learned that most items had already sold out online. And The Star Tribune reported that many Target stores sold out of the collection within minutes of their doors’ opening at 8 a.m. Sunday. Target said the website did not crash, but the retailer had to take steps to manage the site due to overwhelming traffic. That included limiting access at certain times. At one point, Target made the site inaccessible for about 15 minutes. — ASSOCIATED PRESS

SAN FRANCISCO — California almonds are one of the world’s favorite snacks. But the crop extracts a staggering price, consuming more water than all the showering, dish-washing, and other indoor household water use of California’s 39 million people. As California enters its fourth year of drought, almonds are ‘‘the poster child of all things bad in water,’’ grower Bob Weimer said. Almond trees cover nearly 1 million acres in California. Since each nut requires a gallon of water, almonds are consuming 1.07 trillion gallons annually in the state, one-fifth more than California families use indoors. So when Governor Jerry Brown ordered water consumption cut 25 percent but exempted farms, almonds got toasted in the debate that followed. “The tomato growers use a lot more water than we do. You should go after those guys,’’ said Ryon Paton, who is a principal of Trinitas Partners. In all, agriculture uses 80 percent of the water Californians draw but produces just 1.5 percent of the state’s gross domestic product, said Christopher Thornberg, an economist. — ASSOCIATED PRESS

HONG KONG — In the latest sign economic growth may be slowing faster than anticipated, China on Sunday freed up roughly $200 billion for new lending. The central bank sharply reduced the amount of money banks must keep on reserve, a stimulus measure to pump more money into the economy. But the move comes as China’s securities regulator is trying to curtail new debt-driven investments in the country’s frothy stock market. Overall economic growth is slipping, which argues for looser monetary policy. But the country’s stock markets are soaring, driven by inexperienced new investors and rising levels of borrowing in order to bet on shares. On Friday, the securities regulator moved to curtail the funding for buying stocks on borrowed money. That gave the central bank room to free up broader monetary policy by reducing the chances that new bank funding would find its way into the stock market. Still, the cut does not automatically translate into lending. China’s banks have grown wary of issuing loans to smaller or riskier borrowers, given the country’s slowing growth. — NEW YORK TIMES

Summary:
Technology

Raytheon may buy Websense for $1.9b

NEW YORK — Raytheon Co.


After nearly three decades of research, Honda is ready to show off its latest model, which is a bit different from what the Japanese company has produced before: it’s a jet.

The HondaJet started its world tour in Japan this week, reports The Wall Street Journal. It seats seven people and will start deliveries in a few months, and is designed for use as a business jet.

This is the first time the HondaJet is flying outside of the U.S., where much of the development has taken place. The fuel-efficient jet will go to five more airports in Japan including Sendai, Kobe, and Narita over the next two weeks where it will have demonstration flights. Afterwards, it will go to Europe including Switzerland, Britain, France and Belgium for demonstration flights. The jet is still waiting final approval from the FAA for deliveries, but it has already won approval for flying.

One interesting factoid: in designing the nose of the aircraft, [Honda Aircraft Company CEO Michimasa] Fujino says he was inspired by a Ferragamo high-heeled shoe he saw at a duty free shop during a trip to Hawaii. The tip of the shoe was so beautiful that it caught his eye. “It represented beauty and functionality and comfort,” he said. “They must have reached the current shape after years of designing beauty and ergonomics. That beautiful tip of the Ferragamo shoe served as a hint for my sketches.”

The jet costs $4.5 million and has already received more than 100 orders.

Summary: The newest model from Honda can get up in the sky.


Trans Worlds Airlines' president C. Edwin Meyer Jr. said yesterday that he had dropped two senior vice presidents to reduce costs and that the airline's managerial staff would be further reduced, at least somewhere.

Mr. Meyer said he had dismissed thw two vice presidents, Donald Casey and Robin Wilson, out of a conviction that T.W.A. "must be trimmer and more cost efficient." Their base pay was $140,000 and $125,000 a year, respectively. Mr. Carey oversaw marketing, Mr.Wilson, operations.

The New York-based Trans World Corporation, the airlines's parent company, had a loss of $57.5 million in this year's first quarter, compared with $49.3 million, compared with $59 million in the 1980 quarter.

Explaining the abolition of the two executive's jobs, Mr. Meyer said that, within T.W.A. he had been "looking around and demanding of other people that they reduce their fixed staffs, saying we can't support that same level." He continued, "And as I kept making those speeches I finally had to come back to my office one day and say to myseld, 'Ed, can you run your ortfit a little more efficiently and maybe work a little harder and do away with some people?'"

Mr. Meyer denied suggestions by some Wall Street analysts that he had let the two men go because of dissatisfaction with their performance or because he wanted to improve himself more directly in operating the airline. The two men were considered possible eventual successors to Mr. Meyer, who is 52 years old.

Asked how many other executives might be dropped, Mr. Meyer said he did not know. But he added that reviews would be made of where additional managers might be pared from the staff. The airline has already reduced its payroll by 5,000 within two and a half years, to 32,000 employees.

"I'm asking everybody to go back and take a look" at where further economies can beachieved, Mr. Meyer went on, adding: Sitting at the top, I don't know wherewe can do without and still run a good airline; the managers of this airlind down the line do know that, and I've got to motivate them to do it."

He sid he did not plan any reductions in the staff at less-than-executive levels in the month to come. But he emphasized that in forthcoming union negotiations he would be pressing for productivity increases.

In that connection, he said he had read with interest a long report about the airline industry by Robert J. Joedicke, a first vice president and airline analyst at Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb. Entitled, "The Goose That Laid Golden Eggs," it was published in February and has been widely disseminatied.

The Joedicke report emphasized the improtance of large, older airlines' increasing productivity to hold down their unit cost in order to be competitive with newer, nonunion airlines.

"He's brought things into very clear focus," Mr. Meyer sid, and he added, speaking of himself and the heads of other large, unioized airlines: "We're all singing out of the same hymnals, telling our labor forces that we've got more productivity. And I'm trying to say that the management is going to be moving to set an example."


By Christopher Lehmann-Haupt THE MAPMAKERS. By John Noble Wil- ford. 414 pages. Illustrated. Knopf. $20.

DESPITE everything, we were all a little amazed. First John H. Glenn, when he looked down and saw ''the whole state of Florida'' near the end of his earth orbit in 1962; then subsequent astronauts; then the rest of us when we saw the first photography from space - we were all a little amazed. The earth looked just like a map; they had gotten it right! And though even the dumbest among us knew the approximate answer when we stopped to think about it, there was part of all of us that exclaimed: How did they know? How on earth did they know?

That is the question John Noble Wilford tries to answer comprehensively in ''The Mapmakers.'' How did they know? The answer, of course, is basically triangulation, or the surveying technique of establishing the relative position of the apex of a triangle by measuring the length of the baseline and the angles to the apex. Ptolemy Helped, Too

But there was more to it than that. There was the job of establishing such first principles as the notion of comprehending and measuring the universe and of representing it on a map. As usual, the Chinese got good at it first, but the Greeks worked it out for Western purposes. A second-century (A.D) Egyptian named Claudius Ptolemy helped too, even if he did think the Earth was the center of the universe. Also useful was a 16th-century German named Gerardus Mercator, who squared the circle by figuring out a way to project the spherical world onto a flat surface.

Then there was the donkeywork -exploring, discovering and surveying, endlessly surveying. Men died surveying, and also got mosquito-bitten. The rest of the story is pretty much technology - progressing from a wheel whose revolutions you counted so as to measure distance, to a laser beam bounced off distant mirrors at calculable intervals of time. That's the story of mapmaking in a nutshell.

Mr. Wilford, who is science correspondent for The New York Times, where he has covered all the major space explorations, doesn't try to tell the story in a nutshell. Instead, he makes his way at a leisurely and detailed pace. He starts around the time that Eratosthenes, an Alexandrian librarian of the third century B.C., tried to figure out the circumference of the globe from a sundial, missed by only 16 percent, and thus became the father of geodesy, the science of earth measurement. He ends with the incredible story of the mapping of Mars.

In between, there is something for everybody - gadgetry for the technically avid, the story of the clandestine survey of forbidden Tibet, for admirers of human intrepidness. For collectors of unlikely facts, there is news that there seem to be lakes beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, containing water melted by heat flowing up from the earth's interior. For those who wonder if maps ever lead to discovery instead of vice versa, there is an account how the mapping of the great Mid-Ocean Ridge led to confirmation of Alfred Wegener's theory of Continental Drift. Of Human Perseverance

My own preference in ''The Mapmakers'' was for the stories of human perseverance - explorers in the Age of Discovery nosing about for the Northwest Passage; the 18th-century Frenchmen who suffered disastrous expeditions to learn whether Isaac Newton was right in calling the planet Earth an oblate spheroid; the Cassini family, who mapped France and took four generations to complete the job. I got a little bogged down in the later stages of ''The Mapmakers,'' where Mr. Wilford takes up such matters as isolines, the difference between geometric and dynamic geodesy, the uses of Doppler positioning and John P. Snyder's mathematical equations for Alden P. Colvocoresses' Space Oblique Mercator Projection, known in mapmaking circles as Colvo's Projection.

But these matters will no doubt be meat for anyone who happens to be more interested in where mapmaking is headed than in where it's come from. The way it looks to me is that if the computers and the people who feed them get any more resourceful, they are not only going to provide us with a photograph of the whole earth - one with all faces exposed simultaneously - they are also going to end up building a full-scale model of the planet.

We can probably use one.

Illustrations: Photo of John Noble Wilford


ATHENS— With pink carnations, revolutionary songs and promises of change, Andreas Papandreou and his opposition Panhellenic Socialist Movement held a pre-election victory party here recently.

Several days later, Prime Minister George Rallis took a triumphal train tour through the Peloponnesus, preaching progress through stability with the governing New Democracy Party and warning against the Marxist alternative.

Although no date has been set for Greece's general elections, which must be held by November, the campaign is already under way and promises to be a close and bitter struggle.

''These elections are crucial because for the first time, a nonbourgeois, Marxist party has challenged the establishment and has a chance of winning,'' said a source close to President Constantine Caramanlis, a conservative.

Western diplomats also show concern over the strong neutralist tendencies of the Socialist Movement, its threats to take Greece out of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Common Market and its opposition to American bases here.

At this point, however, independent political experts make no predictions because developments could change the electoral picture radically between now and the fall, when the voting is most likely to take place. They point out that while Mr. Papandreou's party is ahead in the polls, a large percentage of the electorate is still undecided.

Even if the Socialist Movement won, the realities of governing would probably not permit any major foreign policy changes, according to long-time observers. They point out that the party would probably not get a majority in Parliament and would have to form a minority government or a coalition with the smaller center parties.

Mr. Papandreou has prudently avoided committing himself on what he would do if he won, clearly hoping to keep his leftist, anti-American constituency while not frightening away the essentially pro-Western center. Alludes to Father's Strategy

''We believe we will win a majority, but even if we get a simple plurality, we could push for new elections,'' Mr. Papandreou said, in an allusion to the precedent set by his late father.

Prime Minister George Papandreou's Center Union won a narrow victory in 1963 and forced new elections several months later, winning a majority and breaking the 12-year monopoly of power by the conservatives. It was, however, his leftist program and his son's radical policies that led to the military dictatorship from 1967 to 1974.

The old radicalism was still very much alive in the Socialist Movement's ''victory'' celebration offered by Socialist trade unions in a downtown restaurant.

With Mikis Theodorakis's music in the background, Mr. Papandreou delighted the crowd with traditional Greek dances and fiery oratory. He predicted that his party would sweep to power like ''an avalanche'' and denounced the governing right as ''spokesman for the oligarchy'' and ''guarantor of the foreign powers that have regulated the life of this country since 1821,'' the year that Greece's war of independence from the Ottoman Empire began. Attacks Market Entry

The 62-year-old Socialist leader called Greece's entry into the Common Market ''an enormous historical mistake,'' attacked the Government's recent return to NATO and warned that he would accuse the administration of treason if it agreed to the presence of American bases here ''without gaining guarantees of Greek rights in the Aegean and the sovereign rights of Cyprus.''

Nevertheless, in an interview later in his home in an Athens suburb, Mr. Papandreou emphasized that the Socialist Movement was a responsible party and would act accordingly if and when it came to power. While he said its ''strategic aim'' was a nonaligned Greece, occupying a position like Sweden, Yugoslavia or Austria, he stressed that he wanted to maintain close relations with the West.

''We're not against the E.E.C.,'' he said, ''but we believe membership will be economically disastrous for Greece, and we would like a special agreement similar to the one with Yugoslavia.'' He acknowledged, however, that since Greece formally joined the European Economic Community on Jan. 1, it would be difficult to get out. Opposes Foreign Bases

The Socialist leader said that his party was against all foreign bases here and that the American bases represented ''more of a danger than a protection'' for Greece. He said, however, that since the Government wanted the bases, it should at least use them as a bargaining point to obtain guarantees from the United States and NATO on the balance of forces in the Aegean.

Like most other Greeks on both the left and the right, Mr. Papandreou considers that the ''one threat'' to Greece is Turkey and what is perceived as its challenge to the Greek position in the Aegean.

Recent opinion polls have consistently shown the Socialist Movement with about 31 percent of the electorate, compared to 21 percent for the New Democracy Party. But Mr. Papandreou acknowledged that there was a large number of undecided voters and that there could be a shift.

The principal issue in the election will be the economy, according to Mr. Papandreou, a former economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley. He predicted that the inflation rate would be 30 percent by fall and that the Government would be ''bankrupt.''

Government leaders feel confident that they have defused the opposition on foreign policy issues by reaching agreements with NATO and the Common Market, and they hope they will conclude an agreement with the United States on the bases by the end of March.