It’s the Ikea flatpack vision of ballista. The Trebuchette, designed by Evan Murphy and Michael Woods, turns one of the greatest inventions in the history of siege warfare and makes it a kit you can punch out and assemble in 15 minutes. I should know, I’ve done it. Evan and Michael are two young engineers on [...]

Western fantasy role-playing games have moved in different directions over the years. You have the European type of games like Two Worlds II, the Gothic series, and the original The Witcher. Games that tend to expect a lot of patience from the player while giving you a huge amount of things to do in an open, yet usually (or initially) buggy world.

Then you have games like Dragon Age II that streamline the more hardcore elements to provide a more polished experience, but at the same time restrict your freedom in terms of customizability and things like crafting.

Now it looks like we finally have a game that tries to do it all, and in doing so might blow anything away that we've grown to kind of accept in recent years. If you were one of those people that complained about Game X and said "I'll wait for Witcher 2 instead," then congratulations: you were right.

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (PC)
Developer: CD Projekt RED
Publisher: CD Projekt (Europe), Atari (North America)
Release Date: May 17th, 2011

Geralt of Rivia is back, and he is as bad-ass as he ever was. Following some events during a siege on a castle, Geralt finds himself a prisoner in a dungeon of the very kingdom he once protected. The witcher is being accused of a crime and acts like it's either one he didn't commit, or acts as if he knows more about it than he's willing to tell just anyone. A crime that appears to be a grave one, given the torture marks on Geralt's back and the guards' pleasure in beating him to a pulp.

After the White Wolf is being brought to an interrogation chamber, a seemingly familiar face greets him and asks him just what the hell happened in the events that led to his capture. Thus, Geralt is given the option to start at the beginning and tell his tale in chronological order, or to simply go to key events; events you'll play through yourself.

Choosing to recount his tale from the beginning, you play through Geralt's recollection of a massive assault on a certain castle. After waking up next to the lovely Triss Merigold -- who happens to sport the best areola and shaven vulva textures of any game to date -- the battle-scarred witcher is summoned before the king. As you exit the little tent you woke up in, you are greeted by a massive valley the likes of which you haven't seen before.

Army tents litter the field encampment and the distant scenery as trebuchets lay waste to a castle's defenses in the distance, launching their ammo in 5.1 surround sound. Soldiers idle, train, and talk about rape and glory, and you're instantly transported to a fully realized and living world that stands on the brink of a major assault.

You are free to walk around and talk to soldiers, who sometimes have a few lines to say but always seem engaged in something even if they're just standing around, and a few "friends" from Geralt's past. There is one problem though: Geralt can't remember his past up to a certain event that made him lose a significant part of his memory.

These former acquaintances are happy enough to fill you in on some of your previous dealings with them, including tales of even more rape and murder. If you are sick of JRPGs or anime tropes that deal with sexual innuendo involving 12 year old girls, and prefer a brutal and adult medieval fantasy world, this is the game for you.

Following some dialogue, the unapologetic soldier bandits present you with a choice. They have stolen a magical trinket from some defenseless priestesses and would like to know if it would protect an inexperienced member of their merry band in the battle ahead.

Geralt's witcher medallion reacts to the trinket's magic, but there is no way of telling what the magic item actually does. You are given the choice to tell them that it will protect the new guy or that you just don't know what it will do -- the latter resulting in the guy being donned in armor and sent to battle without magical protection.



After a brief detour, to experience the dialogue system and the way in which The Witcher 2 deals with choice, you make your way to King Foltest who briefs you -- and some of his slippery political advisors -- on the battle ahead. Though the new graphics engine looks fantastic, the camerawork and the production values of the in-engine cutscenes might be even more impressive. Even minor characters show personality before they speak a word -- their posture, brief hesitations, and clothing often communicating more than mere words could ever do.

Instead of having a tiresome chain of events explained to you, the game expects you to figure out what exactly is going on by just dealing with present events and by paying attention to key characters that shed light on the situation at hand. It's a refreshing take on the old narrative structure we've grown accustomed to in RPGs, for sure.

What matters for Geralt there and then is the battle at hand, not why the battle is fought in the first place, and that's what the game focuses on. You make your way to the castle's walls, riding along in a tower with the King's elite, while Geralt notes how the real men fight in the piss- and shit-filled streets below as the aristocracy literally towers above them. Finally, it's time for action.

Combat is now a far easier affair than in the last game. Geralt automatically attacks the nearest enemy when you click to attack, so you can just mash the mouse buttons (for quick and heavy attacks) to hack and slash your way through combat if you please. You'll see Geralt making acrobatic leaps and rolls to cross the distance before he slashes down his foe. That is, until you encounter shielded and heavier enemies who will destroy you if you don't block incoming blows, or dodge out of the way to attack them from behind.

Alternatively, you can use various types of magic to set your enemies on fire, lay traps for them, blow them out of the way or buff your defense. Holding down the control key slows the game down and lets you select magic or weapons with a cursor. Or you can just use the keys centered around the WASD control scheme to do all of that. It works well and it's pretty easy to get the hang of.

As you fight your way through the castle's defenses, you'll mix up regular fighting with supporting the army's advance. Launching a ballista here and opening a gate there, the gameplay varies from scene to scene. The scale and ferocity of the siege is pretty impressive in its depiction, as axe men are ordered to chop down a wooden door instead of having it just magically open as a game's trigger is set off. Cutscenes seamlessly break up the gameplay to depict medieval "special forces" tactics and assaults that propel the main attack ever onwards.

It's what you'd expect from a medieval assault, until a "monster" enters the fray changes the mathematics of warfare. One scene sees you frantically fighting your way to survival alongside a group of soldiers and key characters, while "thing" wreaks havoc on the battleground. Some other scenes are even more dramatic, and breathe fantasy back into what could've otherwise been a plain old medieval world at war.

Eventually the battle reaches a couple of climaxes. In some of them you can choose how to deal with the situation at hand, which affects some events afterward, eventually leading up to Geralt's present predicament back in the dungeon you started in. Throughout the entire siege recollection you go back and forth between the events you just played through and the "present time" interrogation, to discuss what happened before choosing what event to play through next.

Eventually Geralt of course escapes the dungeon somehow, finding some allies (or are they foes?) along the way. If you happened to tell one of the soldier bandits -- who you met at the beginning -- that their magical artifact probably wouldn't protect their new guy in battle, you can find him along the way and he'll recount how your choice saved his life. In return, he'll help you distract some guards. If he used the artifact instead, who knows what would have happened?

Later on in the game you arrive in a forest infested with bizarre creatures and Elves to continue on your quest. And like everything else in the Witcher universe, even the Elves are badass. None of those Lord of the Rings or World of Warcraft graceful kinds of Elves, or even Dragon Age's "Elves as social commentary" stuff. Elves are a race like any other; one that has suffered through many wars and has its own internal political divisions. More than that, they just don't screw around if you get on their bad side. Some, however, are friendly and peaceful enough.

You quickly find yourself in a miniature world of humans, non-humans, and all kinds of social and political themes reflecting both interracial relations and internal divisions within a race. A public hanging, for instance, can be resolved by pointing out that one man is being hanged for debauchery, to which a previously cheering townsman reacts: "Debauchery is one of my favorite pastimes, and I wouldn't want a noose around my neck for it!"

It's great stuff, and if you're a fan of potty-mouthed NPCs who scream random obscenities at you, or at seemingly no-one in particular, you can eat your heart out. Peeking inside a prison cell rewards you with someone shouting a continuous stream of obscenities for almost a minute on end. Elsewhere you can find an NPC named Fliparse. And later on, some shady sidequest NPCs may offer you to participate in an experiment that could perhaps make you stronger. But to finish that quest, you'll have to meet them again in some town two years from now. Two years!

That's the kind of scope you're going to have to expect from this game with regard to choice and consequence. Some consequences may be easy to anticipate when you are given a choice. Other choices may affects things you weren't even aware of. It appears that The Witcher 2 attempts to weave a magical tapestry of non-linear interactive storytelling throughout the entire game. And from the looks of it, it does so without making it as obvious as in other games.

The forest environment also provides a taste of the more open-world affair that the game offers, because the mostly linear castle siege and the escape from imprisonment -- which takes around 3+ hours in itself -- merely forms the Prologue of the game. You'll spend that amount of time only to be greeted by "Chapter 1" being casually thrown in your face as you enter the forest in question -- something that bodes well for the full game's length.

Backtracking seems to be less of an issue compared to the first game -- which for full disclosure I sadly didn't play all that much -- although even 15% of the forest map already yields you a fair number of sidequests that gradually let you explore the area.

You can fight monsters, resolve disputes, help out townsfolk with random things, or even perform tavern fist-fights through QTEs. I was afraid that the QTEs would get tiresome, until I saw Geralt kick a guy in the nuts. It was almost as if you could hear the design team talking to you through the game, holding a meeting where they once went: "How awesome would it be if we'd insert an animation where he kicks a guy in the balls?"

Typical other Witcher elements make a return as well, like crafting, potion making, and an extensive skill tree. The moment you first lay your eyes on the inventory system is when you start to understand just how deep the game will go. It's a hardcore, but still pretty accessible game that attempts to offers both a polished and extremely immersive world while seemingly not restricting you in your freedom.

What I played was a still unfinished preview build, so some bugs are to be expected. And while there were a few instances of getting Geralt stuck, it felt like even those would be minor annoyances if you just quick-save a lot. PC gaming excuses aside, the loading times were reasonable and the game looked and ran playable enough on a two year old PC (E8400 3.0GHz, 4GB RAM, HD4830 512MB) at 1680x1050 and "medium" detail. If you are looking at upgrades and have a good dual core CPU already, then a current-day midrange graphics card will probably let you run the game on pretty good graphics settings without too much trouble.



Overall, my 7 hours or so with The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings left me very impressed. Again, I didn't play The Witcher as much as I would've liked, but the difference between the two games feels like the difference between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2. Everything from the gameplay to the consistently high quality of cutscenes and the voice acting just feels like a labor of love by CD Projekt RED.

I looked back on my experience with Dragon Age II afterwards, and BioWare's fantasy RPG now feels like it's in almost every way a mere toddler in the shadow of The Witcher 2. That's not to say DA II sucked, but a single village in The Witcher 2 already has more personality than all of Kirkwall. Moreover, the politics now run deep without treating you like a child for once. Characters feel human and treat you like an adult, the player is expected to deal with temporal jumps in narrative to keep up with the story, choices actually carry weight, and oh my god the breast textures!

Not that it's a male-oriented or misogynist game in any way, just because it deals with adult content matter. There's plenty of manflesh and pretty boys to admire as well, and the female characters are strong, confident, and don't take any shit or act like girly caricatures. Triss Merigold in particular already feels like she's going to be a fan favorite of gamers regardless of their gender; which is how it should be.

I knew I should keep my eye on The Witcher 2 even before I first saw it in action last year, but now that I've finally played it I feel confident enough to say that as a PC owner you're not likely to find anything like it all year. Sorry Hawke, but your cardboard persona is about to be witched in half. And Shepard? I still love you and I know you star in a different kind of RPG. But I'm really, really glad that your third space adventure is scheduled six months away from what will inevitably be Geralt's assassination of our social lives.

It’s the Ikea flatpack vision of ballista. The Trebuchette, designed by Evan Murphy and Michael Woods, turns one of the greatest inventions in the history of siege warfare and makes it a kit you can punch out and assemble in 15 minutes. I should know, I’ve done it. Evan and Michael are two young engineers on [...]

New snap-together desktop siege engine is in development as a Kickstarter project. Co-inventor Michael Woods gives us a demo.

As part of the Guardian's New Europe series, literary editors reflect on the literary scene in their countries: Borja Hermoso of El País

Not even Don Quixote himself, the sanest madman in the history of literature, could have dreamed of such frenzied publishing activity. If an imaginary bookseller, hidden among bundles of paper and ink, had provided Don Quixote with the thousands of books Spanish publishers supply to readers (and to journalists and critics – right now I cannot move for the dozens of packages sitting on my desk and the shelves in my office), the entire world would have been flooded with chivalry books. Spain is not exactly at the top of Europe's book-reading nations . . . but it is certainly one of the biggest book-producing countries.

This country continues to be "fraternally" divided between advocates of seeking the mortal remains of one of its greatest literary figures – García Lorca, who was assassinated by fascist gunmen in 1936 – and advocates of putting it behind us (among them, the poet's own family).

Meanwhile, the publishing engine continues its unstoppable course. Long ago, a few large publishing companies, such as Santillana, Planeta and Mondadori, took control of the lion's share of the market. However, despite the steamrolling presence of these companies, not only do small publishers survive but new ones keep popping up and – even in this recession-ridden 2011 – it is these small players who manage to keep alive the embers of independence and surprise: Periférica, Libros del Asteroide, Páginas de Espuma, Minúscula and Nórdica, to name but a few distinguished examples.

Talking of new arrivals, one has to mention Juan Marsé's new book Caligrafía de los sueños (Lumen), an introspective inquiry into the Barcelona of the post-war period. Marsé is a master of the art of covering the same territory a thousand times and always making it seem new. The author of unforgettable portraits of a Spain facing a very uncertain future, such as Ronda del Guinardó, Si te dicen que caí and Rabos de lagartija, returns to familiar material: everything is sad in Marsé, a sadness that also includes meanness, humour and, of course, memory. His legions of followers are delighted as always.

But in Spain, right now, the most awaited book of the year is undoubtedly Javier Marías's new novel, Los enamoramientos (Alfaguara). The eternal Spanish Nobel prize candidate and the author of what have already become contemporary classics, such as Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me and A Heart So White, has handed over to the printers a spine-chilling story about the highs and lows of our miserable lives. Marías is always Marías, and his arrival in the bookshops is always the publishing event of the season.

The same applies, of course, to the most Peruvian of Spanish writers (or is it the other way around?), a gentleman from Arequipa with his home in the most quintessentially Madrileño Madrid, the man who had been forever on the cards for the Nobel prize until he finally won last year. Mario Vargas Llosa continues to hold a place of honour in bookshops across the country, thanks not only to his latest book, El sueño del celta – about Roger Casement, one of the first Europeans to report the colonial savagery in Belgian Congo and in the Amazon – but also to the publication of his full works, which the publisher Alfaguara started working on as soon as it was known that the Nobel prize had gone to the author of The Feast of the Goat.

Looking a little further back, Anatomía de un instante (Mondadori) by Javier Cercas is one of those essay/fiction books that is so linked to a real – and brutal – event that it not only managed to hypnotise Spanish readers at the time of its well-publicised launch many months ago, but still manages to do so now. The recent commemorations of the 30th anniversary of the attempted coup d'état by a group of military officers, on 23 February 1981 (the real pretext for this work of literary pseudo-fiction), has helped to maintain interest in Cercas's book. He is undoubtedly one of the most interesting authors on the young literary scene in Spain, besides being an especially lucid and sharp columnist. The Spanish continue to live with the 23-F, as it is known. It is a ghost that has never entirely disappeared, a collective memory which Cercas manages to translate masterfully on to the pages of a book that has become a bestseller. Everyone remembers, we all remember, where we were and what we were doing when the pro-Franco soldiers barged into the parliament, shooting into the air. There is also an insistent rumour that Anatomía de un instante will become a film. If this is true, the Spanish, always so happy to remember the darkest parts of their history, will flock to the cinemas.

The darkest part of history . . . or of the present, like the town-planning corruption along the Spanish coastline and more specifically on the east coast (Valencia and Alicante). This mafia world with a dash of Spanish picaresque served as inspiration for Rafael Chirbes, one of the most remarkable authors on the Spanish scene, in his book Crematorio (Anagrama), which has also returned to the limelight thanks to a new TV series on Canal Plus.

Roberto Bolaño, one of the most popular authors in Spain, although he was Chilean, is another strong presence just now, thanks to Anagrama having rescued his book La literatura nazi en América. All this makes up the spectrum of what is happening in literary Spain – a strange country where ebooks have recently become the new fixation of cultural pirates. We have long been European leaders in film and record piracy. All that remains now is to gain the dubious honour of becoming the most efficient ebook pirates. That doesn't seem altogether unlikely, given that the measures undertaken to date by the Ministry of Culture against piracy are a bit of a joke. If Cervantes rose from the dead today he would head straight back to his tomb.

Bestsellers in Spain

1 El tiempo entre costuras (The Time Between Seams) by María Dueñas (novel in which Madrid seamstress is drawn into international espionage)

2 Fall of Giants by Ken Follett

3 Dime quién soy (Tell Me Who I Am) by Julia Navarro (novel about the anonymous makers of 20th-century Spanish history)

4 El asedio (The Siege) by Arturo Pérez-Reverte (novel set in 1811 Cadiz)

5 Think of a Number by John Verdon (thriller)

Total 2010 book sales 236m

Cataclysm may be just around the corner, but Blizzard is still posting previews of the new zones. The newest preview focuses on Tol Barad, an open world PvP and questing zone similar to Wintergrasp. Tol Barad will accept up to 80 players per faction and feature capture-point gameplay. The defending side will have to protect three keeps and three towers, while the attacking side must destroy them with the help of Abandoned Siege Engines.

The full Tol Barad preview can be found after the jump.

---

Cataclysm Preview: Tol Barad

An island off the coast of the Eastern Kingdoms, Tol Barad is a historic land now sought-after by the leaders of the Horde and the Alliance. Its strategic, isolated location makes it an ideal stronghold from which to conduct military strikes. In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, a battle will be waged to seize control of this prized territory. Should you triumph, unique rewards await you. Read more about this all-new world PvP and questing zone here.

During the Second War between orcs and humans, Tol Barad served as an island citadel of Stromgarde. Tol Barad was of great use to the Alliance as an isolated port for preparing military strikes... until it was invaded by the Horde and decimated. Years later the nation of Kul Tiras reclaimed Tol Barad, establishing a magical prison over the ruins of the old fortifications to contain enemy magi, demons, and a host of other deadly criminals. The existence of such a prison remains unknown to most citizens of Azeroth. In the wake of the Cataclysm and with tension building between the Horde and the Alliance, this will all change. Tol Barad will once more serve as a strategic location for amassing a deadly armada of vessels to lay siege upon enemy strongholds within the Eastern Kingdoms. Because both the Horde and the Alliance are prepared to pay in blood for control of Tol Barad, it is yet unknown which of the two factions will emerge victorious from the war-torn island.

The Fight for Tol Barad

Similar to Wintergrasp, Tol Barad will serve as an open world PvP zone, although there is also a hub on Tol Barad Peninsula for both factions to complete daily quests. Reachable by portals in Stormwind and Orgrimmar, or via a level-85 mage teleport or portal, Tol Barad will accept up to 80 players per faction to engage in brutal combat across the island's surface. Unlike Wintergrasp, Tol Barad will not have Tenacity buffs. Instead, the queue system will attempt to match each side at a 1-to-1 ratio. Battles will take place every two hours and thirty minutes, giving the offensive faction a chance to claim territory.

Tol Barad will feature capture-point gameplay. There are three keeps and three towers for the defending side to hold. When destroyed by the attackers, each tower will add five minutes to the standard fifteen-minute battle timer. In order to win, though, all three keeps must be captured and controlled by the attackers. If these keeps cannot be taken by the attacking forces, the defending faction will claim victory in Tol Barad. Similar to Eye of the Storm, Tol Barad determines whether a keep has been captured by the number of players from each side in the immediate area. There is, however, a new twist: each time a member of your faction is killed in the immediate vicinity of a keep, a slider bar will move slightly in favor of the opposing faction. So not only does the size of each force in the area determine who controls each keep, but losing allies during the contesting process determines control as well.

In order to destroy the defenders' towers, attackers will have access to an all-new type of war machine: Abandoned Siege Engines. Six of these Siege Engines will be placed around the map, and these vehicles can be used to bombard the towers. In contrast to the Siege Engines of Wintergrasp, these machines cannot attack players or buildings while the vehicles are being driven. Instead, players must drive them within range of a tower and jump out, allowing the vehicle to transform into an automated cannon that can lay siege to the tower. The Abandoned Siege Engine will continue to damage the closest tower in range until the machine is destroyed by opposing forces.

To the Victor Go the Spoils

Players who win the battle for Tol Barad will be awarded honor points in addition to Tol Barad commendations. These commendations can be used along with new reputations as currency with special vendors who sell rare and epic items, mounts, and more. In addition, the controlling faction will have unique access to extra daily quests. Similar to the Vault of Archavon, Tol Barad gives those who control it the chance to form a raid and best foul beasts locked within Baradin Hold for precious rewards.

Questing for a Living

Aside from the battle to control Tol Barad, there are many quests available to both factions just off of the main island on Tol Barad Peninsula. Members of the Horde will assist Hellscream's Reach, an all-new faction vying for control of Tol Barad. At odds with the Horde are Baradin's Wardens, an Alliance faction also seeking to command the territory. Six unique quests, randomly determined from a larger pool of missions, will be offered daily. This will allow for diversity in completing quest objectives as you explore Tol Barad Peninsula over time. The faction that controls Tol Barad will also have sole access to six additional daily quests. Completing each of these exclusive quests will award experience, gold, and Tol Barad commendations. By accomplishing these tasks, players will learn of the perilous inmates held within the prison on Tol Barad, as well as why this isolated land is of great importance to Hellscream's Reach and Baradin's Wardens. In addition, increasing reputation with these new factions will grant access to incredible rewards.

With so much at stake in the wake of the Cataclysm, Tol Barad will be fiercely sought-after by the Horde and the Alliance, but it's up to you to help determine which side makes this island the next great military port of the Eastern Kingdoms.

PE Air Show best in SA - Weekend Post
THE Port Elizabeth Air Show, which took place last weekend at the city's airport, has been voted the best air show in the country – for the second time. ...
 
Aviation Summit will land in Long Beach this week - Long Beach Press-Telegram
As at the 2009 Summit and Air Show in Tampa, Fla., diverse types of aircraft will be on view at Long Beach's Airportfest ...

Heavy Metal Jet Team - Press Release 

Here are some of my shots of Snort flying the Heavy Metal Jet Team T-33 over Cocoa Beach last Monday - Fence Check

2010 Wings Over Houston Air Show Recap
LiveAirShowTV has posted its recap of the 2010 Wings Over Houston air show at Ellington Field. It was a busy weekend of flying that included Debby Rihn-Harvey, John Klatt, Julie Clark, ...

Jetman Performs One-Man Aerobatic Airshow (Without an Airplane) from Telstar Logistics 
Yves Rossy is a 51 year-old Swiss pilot who has developed a technology that allows him to strap a pair of carbon-fiber wings on his back and fly through the air powered by four small jet engines. Cleverly, he has branded himself "Jetman." Quite possibly, he is completely insane.
Fortunately, he's also technically adept and more than a little lucky. Rossy has been flying successfully with his strap-on wings since 2006, completing such feats as crossing the English Channel and flying in formation with conventional prop-driven aircraft: ...

Veterans Day Celebrations Across Alabama -Video from Alabama Aviator - Aviation News
Since 1947 National Veterans Day in Birmingham has held many annual events every November 11th, including a major parade, and an awards dinner honoring deserving veterans, and is recognized as the nations oldest and largest Veterans Day observance. Each year, National Veterans Day in Birmingham salutes those men and women who have served their country as members of the armed services and those today who proudly wear the uniform of the active, reserve, and National Guard forces.  ...

Harriers Coming to ERAU, Nov 11th! by Aviation News

United Aero Corporation Home from www.s2ftracker.com
On May 24, 2010 I had the unique one time and one time only opportunity for a non United Aeronautical Corporation (UAC) employee to get inside its Grumman Tracker Storage Yard next to Davis-Monthan AFB and AMARC in Tucson, AZ and photograph all of the airframes located there. United Aeronautical Corp. is the Northrop-Grumman licensee on all of the models and variations of the S2, C-1 an E-1B Aircraft. Not only do they provide certified spares from their aircraft, as an ISO and FAA certified facility, they also produce all of the spares for these aircrafts. They have Northrop-Grumman's complete data packages, and they even manufacture and supply the landing gear systems. ...

B-17 bomber salutes veterans, gives lessons - Laurel Leader Call
Even now, decades later, the 89-year-old Mississippi native gets emotional talking about bombing missions as a pilot in a B-17 Flying Fortress. ...

John Watson: The WASP have landed in Sweetwater - Cleburne Times-Review
Under her leadership, the WASP forever changed the role of women in aviation. With the war in Europe “winding down” and the civilian male pilots lobbying ...

Veteran aviator continues to spread his wings - Inside Nova
...“My most memorable missions in Vietnam centered around breaking the North Vietnamese siege of An Loc, a provincial capital just 55 miles north of Saigon,” he said.
Carey flew 240 combat missions, and for his heroic efforts was presented Vietnamese Crosses of Gallantry with Silver Star and Bronze Star by Vietnamese General Officers; two U.S. Distinguished Flying Crosses, and 15 Air Medals. ...

VIDEO: Tucano aircraft hit the Smoke Squadron vulture during a presentation in Limerick - Cavok | A plane of the T-27 Tucano fleet of smoke that was an air show in Limeira, 151 km from Sao Paulo, had to make an emergency landing after hitting a vulture on Sunday (7). ...

Aero-TV: Pat Harwell -- Balloon Pilot Extraordinaire from Aero-News Network
As Amazing As The ABQ Balloon Fiesta Is... The Pilots Are Even More So! In a few recent Aero-TV programs, we've had the great good fortune to relate some of the amazing sights, sounds and sensations we encountered at the 2010 ABQ Balloon Fiesta... and the word 'amazing' barely does this event justice. Really... it's THAT great an event.

1st Flight of the Shoestring from www.aafo.com

Caribou aircraft were withdrawn from operation of the RAAF are placed for sale - Cavok
The Minister of Defence Material from Australia, Jason Clare, said that the DHC-4 Caribou aircraft were withdrawn from operation of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF - Royal Australian Air Force) will be placed on sale.
Two aircraft were donated to the RAAF Museum at Point Cook and the Australian War Memorial, and two others will be reserved for sale to Australian museums.  ...

Vintage Aircraft Tool Cataloging, Re-housing and Preservation Project from AirSpace by The National Air and Space Museum
In the years following WWII the United States and her Allies conducted engineering and flight tests of many different types of captured or surrendered Axis aircraft, primarily from Germany and Japan. Many of these aircraft were acquired by Allied and US technical intelligence collection teams.  It was ordered that at least one of each type of enemy aircraft be captured and evaluated by these teams, and that each aircraft type be maintained in flyable condition for a minimum of one year. To make this possible all technical data and  ...

Gladys Ingle of the 13 BLACK CATS changes planes in mid-air - YouTube
Gladys Ingle of the 13 BLACK CATS changes planes in mid-air ro replace a lost wheel

November 8 from Cut and Paste Aviation 

The World’s Largest Airliners from ASB.tv 
Superjumbos are in the news recently after a Qantas Airbus A380 blew an engine and had to make an emergency landing in Singapore. These double-decker, 525-passenger crafts have been in the air since October 2007, and this marks the most serious midair incident during that time. ...

The Dogs of War Go Airborne in Afghanistan from Danger Room  | Dogs have been involved in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts since the start; pooches are NATO’s best bomb detectors, for instance. But the canines are taking on new wartimes roles – as paratroopers in Afghanistan and as improvised explosive devices in Iraq. ...

NASA budgets $15 million for hypersonic flight from Engadget 
You're probably familiar with supersonic planes like the SR-71 Blackbird pictured above, which managed to fly at over three times the speed of sound, but imagine this: NASA set aside $15 million to develop a hypersonic plane that could exit our atmosphere at speeds between Mach 5 and Mach 20. The US space agency's not expecting to build it quite that cheaply, of course, and it's not holding out hope for a contractor to  ...

Caption Contest #41 - Ends Wednesday 11.10.10 At 9PM EST  by AirPigz
After a week of rest, the Caption Contest is back and ready to challenge your sense of avgeek wit. I could be wrong (familiar territory for me), but this pic should stir up all kinds of fun. So c'mon,  ...
-Subscribe for daily automatic E-mail delivery directly to your Inbox!

-Also join us on: ---Facebook ---Twitter

-Send Notices > Releases > Updates > Be a Contributor > Contact: IndyTransponder@gmail.com

A dark day

At least 50 people were killed and 100 injured in a suicide attack during Friday prayers at a Sunni mosque in the northwestern Pakistani area of Darra Adam Khel, and the death toll is likely to rise due to a roof collapse (AP, AFP, BBC, ET, Geo). There have been no claims of responsibility yet, but the target may have been an anti-Taliban tribal elder who was staying at a guest room adjacent to the mosque; it's unclear whether he was among the victims. [[BREAK]]

An airplane chartered to the Pakistan branch of an Italy-based oil and gas company crashed near the Karachi airport earlier today after the pilot warned of engine trouble, killing all 21 people in board (AP, ET). Pakistani gunship helicopters reportedly killed a handful of alleged militants in ongoing fighting in Orakzai agency yesterday (Daily Times).

Tom Wright and Owais Tohid have today's must read in the Journal analyzing how the ongoing U.S. drone strikes campaign has pushed some militants from North Waziristan into more northern tribal agencies like Orakzai and Kurram (WSJ). Bonus click: Google map of clickable drone strikes from 2004 to the present (NAF). 

Pakistani officials are said to be anxious about U.S. President Barack Obama's upcoming visit to India but not Pakistan, and the Post writes that among their chief concerns are the administration's "apparent unwillingness to get involved in the long-standing dispute over Kashmir; the blossoming U.S.-India civil nuclear partnership; and the symbolism of Obama starting his visit at the Taj Hotel in Mumbai, site of the 2008 siege that killed 173 people and has been blamed on Pakistani militants" (Post). Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi reportedly asked Obama several times to visit Pakistan on this trip, but he declined and said he'll visit in 2011. And the Treasury Department has announced a freeze on American assets held by Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is blamed for the Mumbai attacks, and Jaish-e-Muhammad, another Pakistani militant group (AFP).

Al-Qaeda watching

Al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri has surfaced with a new audio tape calling for revenge for the sentencing of Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani scientist who was convicted in September of attempted murder of U.S. servicemen in Afghanistan (CNN, AFP). Bonus read: the real injustice in Pakistan isn't the conviction of Aafia Siddiqui (FP).

Osama bin Laden and other Pakistan-based al-Qaeda leaders are believed to be providing "strategic and philosophical guidance" to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has at times sought bin Laden's approval of leadership decisions, though "direct command and control for terror operations is believed to rest chiefly with the local affiliate" (WSJ). Yemen estimates that AQAP has around 400 members in the country. Bonus read: ignoring Yemen at our peril (FP).

Bombs, letters, and protests

A 16 year old suicide bomber reportedly killed at least 10 people and wounded 30, including a provincial council chief, in an attack in the main market of the Khwaja Sabzposh district in the western Afghan province of Faryab earlier today (Reuters, Pajhwok, AP). Scribbled handwritten notes purportedly from Taliban leader Mullah Omar have appeared in mosques all over Afghanistan's Pashtun areas threatening death to those who take up the Karzai government's offer of peace negotiations (AP). The Taliban also again denied reporting that representatives of the group have been involved in talks.

Afghan authorities are investigating electoral officials, whom prosecutors allege have not adequately explained why they tossed more than a million ballots from the September parliamentary contests (AP). In the southeastern province of Khost, unsuccessful candidates and their supporters staged a protest yesterday against the Independent Election Commission, complaining of fraud (Pajhwok).

The LA Times reports that four Afghan police officers were killed, apparently while trying to escape Taliban custody, and may have been part of a group of 16 who disappeared during a Taliban attack on the Khogyani district of Ghazni province earlier this week (LAT). Reports have been mixed as to whether the Afghan policemen defected or were kidnapped.

Three more stories round out the news today: the Post considers how Afghanistan's regional neighbors are responding to Obama administration discussions about negotiations and potential troop withdrawals (Post); the contracting company Louis Berger has agreed to pay as much as $65 million in a settlement over allegations that it overbilled the U.S. government in Afghanistan and in exchange, the Justice Department will drop its investigation (McClatchy); and Nawa district in Helmand is being touted as a "showcase of the counterinsurgency strategy" in Afghanistan (Times).

The eye of the Afghan tiger

Afghanistan's national boxing team is headed to China to participate in the Asian Cups in the next several days (Tolo). Though the team's coach said they lack proper practicing space, the three Afghan boxers have been training for months.

Sign up here to receive the daily brief in your inbox. Follow the AfPak Channel on Twitter and Facebook.

Crush the Castle for iPhone is a simple and fun strategy game. The object of Crush the Castle is to destroy buildings with trebuchets — a fancy siege engine something like a catapult. You get the chance to be the attacking army and, as a twist, you can even build your own structures and destroy them as well.

read more

Crush the Castle for iPhone is a simple and fun strategy game. The object of Crush the Castle is to destroy buildings with trebuchets — a fancy siege engine something like a catapult. You get the chance to be the attacking army and, as a twist, you can even build your own structures and [...]

Crush the Castle for the iPhone a strategy game is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Blood Elf Druids

Nope, sadly they aren't coming anytime soon. That doesn't stop fans from singing about them!

Blue Posts

Patch 4.0.1a Bug Fixes

The following issues have been addressed in the 4.0.1a minor patch.

* Using a "/cast!
* Mousing over objects that generate a cogwheel should no longer cause the client to freeze or disconnect.
* Guild Tabards should no longer display on characters not actually wearing the Guild Tabard.
* Floating combat text should always appear.
* NPC Health Bars/Nameplates are now appearing correctly.

Tol Barad Focus Test w/ Devs - Round 3

Hey Guys,

We have made a number of changes to Tol Barad and are looking to get some good feedback from the beta players. First off, a few of the big changes.

-Siege Engine HP tripled to 1.35m.
-Tower HP reduced from 180000 to 150000.
-Vehicles now protected from 99% of damage until someone hops in the first time.
-There’s now a Spiritual Immunity Area Aura given by the Spirit Healers at all GYs.
-4 guards have been added to the bridge spawn point to protect it.
-The queing system has been modified to keep the balance of players on each team at the same value. The system will not let someone else queue for a team until the balance falls out of sync.

The test is scheduled for 4pm PST tomorrow (Wednesday the 27th) on the Lost Isles beta server. You must be level 85 to queue for the battle and we will be on hand to speed up the time between games. We will use this thread for feedback after the test so please come back to the forums and post your thoughts!

Thanks!

Battle for Gilneas BG Not Currently Available

We have discovered an issue that was preventing the Battle for Gilneas battleground from being available for play. This issue has been corrected and the BG should be available in the next beta build. Once we can confirm that it is playable, we will schedule a playtest with the devs ASAP.

Thanks and sorry for the mixup.

Can we get some info on Cata-Progression

Below is the basic progression map. Obviously your mileage may vary, i.e. If you're Paragon or Premonition you will be able to skip some of the below and/or mix and match at your discretion.

*Normal Dungeons/Crafting/Questing to get full set of 85 blues (non-heroic) to do Heroic dungeons.
*Heroic dungeons to get full set of 85 Heroic blues to do Normal mode raids.
*Normal raids to get full set of 85 epics (non-heroic) to do Heroic mode raids.
*Heroic Raids to get full set of 85 Heroic epics, which will presumably help a bit on Sinestra and the next tier (when released with patch 4.1.0)

*Badge vendors to help fill in gaps at all tier levels.

*No real gating to speak of for ship.

*Sinestra opens after Cho'gall is defeated on HEROIC mode. No timers or attempt limits, but she will pound you relentlessly. She has better than Heroic epic level gear (half a tier better).

Normal mode raids are currently too easy (with few exceptions). You'll likely be seeing substantial buffs across the board in the next beta patch.

Thank you for the outdoor raid bosses

There are a COUPLE of these bosses in Cataclysm, but they're not true outdoor raid bosses. They're just much harder group bosses that drop heroic dungeon level items and specialty items. Have fun!

A good STRONG 5 player group should be able to handle these bosses, but you certainly have the option to make a raid and give it a shot as well. Good luck.

BlizzCon 2010 Highlight Reel

Did you miss out on the BlizzCon festivities this weekend at the Anaheim Convention Center? We’ve put together a highlight video featuring some of the show’s most epic moments, from the opening ceremony on Friday morning to Tenacious D rocking people’s socks off Saturday night. Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oWr9KezQt0

October 8, 2010 6:00 AM

Feral Interactive has announced that Battlestations: Pacific for the Mac will be released today. Developed by Square Enix London Studios, the sequel to Battlestations: Midway expands upon the original game with two large campaigns, one based on the actual events of the War in the Pacific and the other a ‘what-if?’ scenario based on the premise of Japanese victory. Battlestations: Pacific features 14 missions for each campaign, over 100 different types of war machines to control, impreoved graphics, and enhanced multiplayer modes.

“Battlestations: Pacific is massive and beautifully balanced,” said Feral Interactive’s David Stephen. “The compelling mix of action and strategy inherited from Battlestations Midway remains as good as ever, but the expansion of the game to encompass a ’what-if?’ Japanese campaign adds a whole new dimension to the experience.”

“Battlestations Pacific was a labor of love,” said Square Enix London Studios’ Jonathan Eardley. “We are delighted to see it so well replicated on the Mac.”

Battle your way to victory on land, sea and air in this unique combination of action and strategy. Relive the key battles of the Pacific by leading the US forces from the Battle of Midway to Okinawa or else take command on the Imperial Japanese forces and change the course of World War II by destroying Pearl Harbor and expanding the Empire of the Sun across the ocean to Hawaii. Battlestations Pacific strikes a fine balance between the advanced tactics required to command entire battles and the adrenaline-pumping action of air and naval combat. It is an accessible, well-rounded and substantially improved sequel to Battlestations Midway.

Key features:

• 2 huge single-player campaigns, US and Japanese comprising 14 missions each
  
• Command and take direct control of over 100 air, sea and undersea units, from fighters, bombers and kamikaze planes to cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers, submarines and prototype jets.
  
• 5 customizable mutiplayer modes allow players to take part in massive and thrilling online battles.
  • Island capture
    
  • Siege
    
  • Competitive
    
  • Duel
    
  • Escort
• Superb new graphics engine with a new level of visual realism that shows off the attention to detail.
  
• Switch between active units at will.
  
• Endless replay value.

Minimum Requirements:

• Processor: 1.8Ghz
  
• RAM: 2GB
  
• Graphics: 256MB VRAM
  
• OS: 10.5.8
  
• Hard Disk: 9GB
  
• Optical Drive: DVD
  
• Devices: Mouse

Recommended Requirements:

• Processor: 2.4Ghz
  
• RAM: 3GB
  
• Graphics: 512MB VRAM
  
• OS: 10.6.4
  
• Hard Disk: 9GB
  
• Optical Drive: DVD
  
• Devices: Multi-button Mouse

  Requires an Intel processor.
  The following cards are NOT supported: ATI X1xxx series, NVIDIA 7xxx series and Intel GMA series.

Battlestations: Pacific retails in North America for US $39.95, £34.95 (inc VAT) in the UK and €39.95 (inc VAT) throughout Europe.

Visit the links below to learn more.

Feral Interactive
Battlestations: Pacific

Here are plans and pictures on how to build this medieval trebuchet. It is a siege engine that wreaked havoc in the middle ages and you can make this small 12 inch table top version with materials from around the house. Building this catapult-like weapon is easy and you can do it in a couple of h...
By: adornakimpura

Continue Reading »

September 30, 2010 6:00 AM

Feral Interactive has announced the upcoming release of Battlestations: Pacific for the Mac. Developed by Square Enix London Studios, the sequel to Battlestations: Midway expands upon the original game with two large campaigns, one based on the actual events of the War in the Pacific and the other a ‘what-if?’ scenario based on the premise of Japanese victory. Battlestations: Pacific will feature 14 missions for each campaign, over 100 different types of war machines to control, improved graphics, and enhanced multiplayer modes.

“Battlestations: Pacific is massive and beautifully balanced,” said Feral Interactive’s David Stephen. “The compelling mix of action and strategy inherited from Battlestations Midway remains as good as ever, but the expansion of the game to encompass a ’what-if?’ Japanese campaign adds a whole new dimension to the experience.”

“Battlestations Pacific was a labor of love,” said Square Enix London Studios’ Jonathan Eardley. “We are delighted to see it so well replicated on the Mac.”

Battle your way to victory on land, sea and air in this unique combination of action and strategy. Relive the key battles of the Pacific by leading the US forces from the Battle of Midway to Okinawa or else take command on the Imperial Japanese forces and change the course of World War II by destroying Pearl Harbor and expanding the Empire of the Sun across the ocean to Hawaii. Battlestations Pacific strikes a fine balance between the advanced tactics required to command entire battles and the adrenaline-pumping action of air and naval combat. It is an accessible, well-rounded and substantially improved sequel to Battlestations Midway.

Key features:

• 2 huge single-player campaigns, US and Japanese comprising 14 missions each
  
• Command and take direct control of over 100 air, sea and undersea units, from fighters, bombers and kamikaze planes to cruisers, destroyers, aircraft carriers, submarines and prototype jets.
  
• 5 customizable mutiplayer modes allow players to take part in massive and thrilling online battles.
  • Island capture
    
  • Siege
    
  • Competitive
    
  • Duel
    
  • Escort
• Superb new graphics engine with a new level of visual realism that shows off the attention to detail.
  
• Switch between active units at will.
  
• Endless replay value.

Minimum Requirements:

• Processor: 1.8Ghz
  
• RAM: 2GB
  
• Graphics: 256MB VRAM
  
• OS: 10.5.8
  
• Hard Disk: 9GB
  
• Optical Drive: DVD
  
• Devices: Mouse

Recommended Requirements:

• Processor: 2.4Ghz
  
• RAM: 3GB
  
• Graphics: 512MB VRAM
  
• OS: 10.6.4
  
• Hard Disk: 9GB
  
• Optical Drive: DVD
  
• Devices: Multi-button Mouse

  Requires an Intel processor.
  The following cards are NOT supported: ATI X1xxx series, NVIDIA 7xxx series and Intel GMA series.

Battlestations: Pacific is scheduled for an October 8 release. It will retail in North America for US $39.95, £34.95 (inc VAT) in the UK and €39.95 (inc VAT) throughout Europe. It is currently available to pre-order.

Follow the links below to learn more.

Feral Interactive
Battlestations: Pacific

I had a free two hours the other day and put together a trebuchet from a kit. The counterweight siege engine dates back to about the twefth century. Muslim scrivners first wrote about them but it is in dispute as...

Developing a real-time strategy game is challenging enough when you've got money and a publisher behind your efforts, because even then you have to contend with the tried and true big boy franchises, like Starcraft, Civilization, Age of Empires, and the like. All of which just had or are about to have new releases. So how do you do it when you're an indie developer?

If you're anything like Longbow Games, you just put your head down and churn out your own product. Hegemony: Philip of Macedon is what came out of their efforts, and when I first walked by their booth I did a double take, thinking that no indie game developer could produce an RTS title that looked this polished.

 

Watch Larger Version | Watch HD Version

 

Ubisoft has made much of the IrisZoom engine that powers their 3D pullouts and zooms for R.U.S.E., but the developers at Longbow have created a similar effect with their own 3D engine, and the result is a seamless transition from tabletop-style game pieces, all the way down to individual units that have different faces. That's the sort of attention to detail you'll find throughout Hegemony, which uses a satellite-accurate map of Ancient Greece as its backdrop.

The game tells the story of Philip of Macedon, who besides fathering Alexander the Great was also a great leader in his own right. You'll take part in over 100 historical objectives as you rise to power, and learn how to lay siege to your enemies. Capture their units and put them to work, burn their crops to starve them out, or just batter down their defenses and wipe them out. And you aren't just limited to ground units. You'll also create and use naval units as well.

Unlike the other indie titles in the PAX 10, most of which require very simple controls, Hegemony a robust set of controls that are going to require your full attention to get used to them. There isn't an in-game tutorial, per se, although you are presented with on-screen instructions where appropriate. The game features  31 page instruction manual, which is unheard of in the realm of indie games, which can usually get the game instructions on a single page. In a huge font. With triple spacing.

That's the only barrier to leaping right into Ancient Greece, and I would recommend that you do. This game is for the PC only, which is unfortunate, given that Longbow has some Mac versions of some of their past games. But it has fairly low system requirements, and it has deep and immersive gameplay that you would expect to see in a full retail title. It's more than worth picking up, which is exactly what I did at PAX. It's on sale right now for $29.99, and will keep you busy for hours.

by Tom Philpott.

The Feeding the City series is profiling several cities with thriving urban-agriculture and alt-food scenes.

“We Shall Rise Again from the Ashes.
We Shall Hope for Better Things.”
—Mottoes on the Official Seal of Detroit (1826), quoted in Thomas Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit

“Detroiters have an edge to us,” community organizer and urban-agriculture activist Malik Yakini told me. “We were forged in a furnace. You have to have a rough exterior to survive, to not be crushed.”

If he were talking about nearly any other U.S. city, Yakini’s language might sound overblown. In Detroit, it comes across as understatement.

Yakini was born at mid-century, at the peak of Detroit’s heyday as a manufacturing power, and he has watched the city’s long economic decline. Now, as chairman of the Detroit Black Food Security Network and a leader in several farm and garden projects around the city, he is at the center for a budding movement to revive it through food production.  

Few cities outside of war zones have been subjected to such rapid, relentless economic decline. For the city’s legion of food activists, the vexations of the garden—marauding insects, galloping weeds, ravenous squirrels—must seem like child’s play. It’s impossible to understand Detroit’s urban-ag revival without understanding the forces that made it necessary.

Down and out in the Rust Belt

Like a weed shooting up through a crack on a well-trafficked sidewalk, Detroit’s urban-ag movement flourishes under difficult conditions. It marks the triumph of a resilient citizenry over a long series of brutal shocks stretching back 60 years.

Hailed by the media as the “Capital of the Twentieth Century,” 1940s-era Detroit was an industrial behemoth, churning out the vehicles in which a growing and prosperous middle class would glide down Eisenhower’s freshly laid highways. But those same cars and highways facilitated post-war America’s rapid suburbanization—and the economic evisceration of Detroit itself.

Getting a grip on the scale of Detroit’s economic catastrophe is difficult, like trying to estimate the size of an mastodon. You could start by looking at the fate of mass transit. By 1950, the nation’s most extensive network of streetcars connected the dense neighborhoods of the metropolis to its bustling factories. Confident in the automobile as the urban transportation vehicle of the future, Detroit’s leaders dismantled the streetcars in 1956.

Ironically, the city’s manufacturing engine had already begun to sputter. As the car industry consolidated and shifted toward automation, its factories needed more room to spread out. It found that room in the suburbs. As the historian Thomas Sugrue writes in his 1998 book, Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, “Between 1947 and 1958, the Big Three built 25 new plants in the Detroit metropolitan area, all of them in suburban communities, most more than 15 miles from the center city.” And the car industry headed for the ‘burbs, inner-city employment plunged. Between 1947 and 1963, Sugrue reports, Detroit surrendered more than a third of its manufacturing jobs. Later, the car industry would begin fleeing Michigan altogether, seeking bargain-priced labor in the union-hostile South.

A steadily accelerating torrent of residents followed jobs to the suburbs. In 1950, Detroit’s population peaked at 1.8 million. Within a decade, the city had shed 10 percent of its residents, or more than 100,000 residents. Meanwhile, the suburban frontier swelled; the population of Detroit’s suburbs grew by 25 percent over the same period.

The long process of Detroit’s hollowing out—and the expansion of its suburban ring—had begun. Today, Detroit’s population stands at 900,000—half of its 1950 level. Meanwhile, the greater metropolitan area houses 4.8 million people—an 85 percent jump from 1950.  

“If you’re here in the city, you cannot hide from poverty and suffering. It’s right there in your face. You can either embrace humanity and try to live every moment to try to make everyone’s life easier, or you leave ... if you have the option to.”—Ashley Atkinson, Greening of Detroit

Detroit’s economic collapse also had an ugly racial dimension. As Sugrue makes clear, the hundreds of thousands of African-Americans who streamed into Detroit from the South in the 1930s and ‘40s confronted savage racism along with economic opportunity. By the ‘50s, economic opportunity had begun to crumble, but discrimination persisted. Racist real estate practices largely kept blacks in the inner city, Sugrue shows.

While all Rust Belt cities experienced “white flight” after World War II, in Detroit, the phenomenon reached its zenith. Yakini remembers encountering hostility when his family moved into a largely white neighborhood around 1960. Within a few years, he told me, it had transformed into a black neighborhood. Today, more than 80 percent of Detroit’s population is African-American; whites make up just 12 percent of the population. Jobs remain scarce; the city’s unemployment rate stands at 15.5 percent—more than 50 percent higher than the national average. Crime filled the vacuum as jobs vanished. The onetime “Capital of the 20th Century” now reigns as the U.S. “murder capital.”

Unbuilding boom

As Detroit’s manufacturing base shrunk and population halved in the decades after 1950, its tax receipts plummeted. That meant as, Yakini pointed out to me, a long, slow decline in the quality of public services—everything from mass transit to road and park maintenance and garbage collection and fire fighting.

“We have half the population, but we still have to to maintain the whole footprint” of the city, Yakini points out.

The city’s population exodus left hundreds of thousands of residences empty. The roar of bulldozers knocking down homes has been a familiar sound for decades. In an extraordinary 2006 essay in Lost Magazine called “Disappeared Detroit,” Jeff Byles teases out the ramifications of life in a city with more homes than people. “Unbuilding,” a local architect told Byles, “has surpassed building as the city’s major architectural activity.” The citizenry, fed up with the hazards of living near rotting structures, has gotten caught up in recurring demolition frenzies over the decades.

Between 1970 and 2000, Byles reports, “more than 161,000 dwellings were demolished in Detroit, amounting to almost one-third of the city’s occupied housing stock—that’s more than the total number of occupied dwellings today in the entire city of Cincinnati.”  And demolition activity continues today. “Mayor Readies Detroit Demolition Plan,” declares a March headline. As Byles makes clear, every Detroit mayor since the ‘70s placates the public by boasting of the next big demolition spree.

All of the resulting vacant land, much of which ends up owned by the city, provides the very asset that fuels the garden movement.

Fertile ground for a revival

Given the past half-century, it’s no wonder that Yakini and his fellow Detroit citizens “have an edge” to them. Yet Detroit’s postwar furnace has also forged a remarkable resiliency and creativity in its citizens. You can hear it in the Motown Sound of the ‘60s—and see it in the urban-agriculture movement of today. Detroit residents have a “fortitude and resilience that produces creativity,” Yakini told me. “People trying to survive in a hard environment tend to become very creative.”

Ashley Atkinson, 31, director of urban agriculture and project development for Greening of Detroit, a nonprofit founded in 1989, echoes that idea, adding that the relentless tension of living in a city under economic siege can bring people together. “You can be the most wealthy, privileged person in the world,” she told me. “But if you’re here in the city, you cannot hide from poverty and suffering. It’s right there in your face. You can either embrace humanity and try to live every moment to try to make everyone’s life easier, or you leave ... if you have the option to.”  

It’s that civic-minded impulse to “make everyone’s life easier” that drives the garden movement. I talked to several agriculture activists for this essay, and they all characterized the urban-ag revival as a community-based, almost painfully cooperative effort, anchored by a few key local nonprofit institutions. Greening of Detroit may be the most pervasive of them—it provides a broad array of support, including tools and compost, to the city’s nearly 1,200 registered vegetable gardens. These gardens range from single-family plots to community and school gardens to 37 market gardens, which are business enterprises that sell their goods at farmers’ markets.

According to Atkinson, gardens of all types continue sprouting up at a steady rate throughout the city. What kind of potential do they have to bring healthy food to the city as well as jobs? Atkinson pointed me to a study released in June by the C.S. Mott Group at Michigan State University gauging “The Production Potential of Detroit’s Vacant Land.”  

The city’s food-production capacity is, in a word, immense. The Mott researchers reckon that there are 44,000 vacant publicly owned land parcels, representing nearly 5,000 acres, around the city. That’s more than enough land for the city’s farmers and gardeners to crank out a significant portion of Detroit’s fruit and vegetable needs, the study showed. They calculate that with proper investments in season-extension infrastructure like hoop houses (which wouldn’t require fossil fuel for heating even in Detroit’s frigid winters) and space to store crops like potatoes, skilled farmers using biointensive techniques on just 570 acres could produce 70 percent of the vegetables consumed in Detroit and 40 percent of the fruit. (Non-professional-level gardeners could produce that much food with 2,100 acres under cultivation.)

The Mott study doesn’t comment on the possible economic benefits, but back-of-the envelope calculations suggests that they are significant. Detroit residents spend less than the residents of any other American city on food—about $2,200 combined at home and in restaurants and bars in 2009, according to the data crunchers at the financial website Bundle. If fruit and vegetables make up about 7.5 percent each of that $871 spent on food consumed at home, going by USDA estimates, and if Detroit growers were to provide 70 percent of the vegetables consumed by the city’s 900,000 residents, that would amount to $41.2 million million in annual sales. For fruits, receipts would be $23 million. Grand total: $63 million per year into the local economy.

Seeding the next phase of growth

One can imagine that infusion rippling through the economy in myriad ways. In her book The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs argues that in vibrant urban economies, new industries are always arising from existing one. Once that process stops—as it did in the case of Detroit’s car factories—economic stagnation sets in. Urban agriculture, dispersed throughout the city at the scale envisioned by the Mott study, could provide a Jacobsian engine for sustainable growth.

New distribution networks, for example, would need to arise to move that produce from farmers to retail outlets, providing opportunity for entrepreneurship. Then there’s retail, which in itself represents a massive opportunity, both to capture profits from local produce and to improve public health. In 2007, A&P closed its last two Detroit-area supermarkets. It had been the last national supermarket chain operating in the city. Now, more than half of Detroit residents live in areas that have severely limited access to healthy food, a study from Yale’s Rudd Center recently found, making them “statistically more likely to suffer or die prematurely from a diet-related disease, holding other key factors constant,” the report concluded.

Yet high-quality food retail could be economically viable activity. “A 2003 University of Michigan study concluded that the city could support 41 supermarkets with at least 40,000 square feet of space based on its population and spending habits,” the Detroit Free-Press reports. Today there are none. If a bounty of city-grown vegetables began to overwhelm existing farmers markets, local citizens might be moved to band together, raise investment cash, and create full-service food retail outlets that feature local produce. Such projects would keep food dollars circulating within the community, broaden access to healthy food, and provide robust market access to local farmers.

Detroit’s heritage as a manufacturing powerhouse could come into play as well. Yakini told me that people are already talking about launching businesses to fabricate the kind of hardware necessary for intensive urban agriculture: hoop houses for season extension, hand tools, etc. Working closely with innovative farmers at the frontier of intensive urban agriculture, such businesses could generate urban-farming tools sought out the world over.

To hear Atkinson tell it, the city is well on its way to becoming a powerhouse of community-based urban agriculture: dotted with smallholder farms, along with myriad family and community gardens, churning out top-quality produce, feeding the city’s citizens as well as its economy.

The obstacles mainly have to do with policy, she says. “Right now, farming is essentially illegal in the city,” she told me. Farming can’t be the principle use of city land, legally. That means you can have a market garden on the land around your home—the principle use of your land; but you can’t buy an empty parcel explicitly to farm it. “Those rules have to change for market gardening to take off here,” she told me.

Happily, policy change is afoot, even if the pace is slow.

Late in 2009, the Detroit Food Policy Council, which advises the City Council, started meeting. Yakini chairs it— Atkinson told me it grew out of efforts by the Black Food Security Network—and Atkinson also sits on it. One of its tasks is to amend and propose policies to facilitate urban agriculture. Then there’s the Urban Agriculture Work Group, which operates under the City Planning Commission, and which has also been working on tweaking city policy to make it friendly to for-profit farming.

Atkinson is confident that these efforts will change city policy. She and fellow members of the Policy Council and Work Group “wouldn’t be working so hard, doing homework and attending theses meetings, if we didn’t believe it would happen ... eventually.”

Yakini agrees that urban agriculture has “tremendous economic potential” in Detroit, but doesn’t want to overplay it. He stresses the need for investments in infrastructure along with policy change. Moreover, he sees Detroit not in isolation, but rather as part of a regional food economy, joined in a network with urban centers and rural areas in Michigan as well as Illinois and Ohio.

Yakini also sees vast value beyond the economics of Detroit’s urban agriculture scene. “Even if the gardening movement had no economic viability, just the fact that it’s bringing people together for the common good is very significant,” he said. “African-Americans in Detroit tend to have a sense of despair and helplessness that is a direct result of oppression. Producing even some of our own food restores a sense power, a sense that we can shape our own destiny.”

In the next week, I’ll profile three of the projects that are greening Detroit’s fate.

Related Links:

My Intentional Life: Hot Flies in the Summertime

My Intentional Life: Things Get Messy

Seattle’s new urban-ag models are sprouting in friendly soil

Lothian and Borders police have arrested 12 campaigners during protests against the Royal Bank of Scotland's tar sands funding

• Climate Camp day of action – as it happened

Police arrested 12 climate campaigners during yesterday's protests in Edinburgh against the Royal Bank of Scotland's funding of the oil and mining industries. One man was charged with assault.

Lothian and Borders police said the 12 were arrested at five protests during the day, including incidents at the RBS headquarters on the outskirts of Edinburgh and at four RBS and energy industry sites in the city.

The protests culminated in a physical confrontation between scores of activists and riot police inside the landscaped grounds of the RBS headquarter yesterday evening.

Protesters attempted to wheel a mock "siege engine" made from corrugated steel and timber down from the camp site across a bridge in the grounds. Others fired four "bombs" filled with molasses at the RBS building, while riot police grappled with protesters trying to reach the building.

There were no arrests at the site, but police said one man, 58, was arrested for assault during an incident at Gogarburn Bridge flyover nearby.

The force confirmed there were five arrests earlier in the day for breach of the peace at the headquarters of Forth Energy in Leith docks, where activists occupied the roof and building in protest at the firm's plans for biomass plants at Scottish ports.

On Nicolson Street, where an RBS branch was twice occupied by protesters smeared in molasses, to signify oil, a 25-year-old man and two women aged 38 and 34 were arrested and later charged with breach of the peace.

The force said a 24-year-old woman was charged with vandalism at a bank branch at Hunter Square while two men aged 31 and 33 were charged with breach of the peace after an incident on the A8 Glasgow Road.

The police later said they had seized what they describes as "weapons" – including hammers, a coal chisel and other tools. The force also accused the activists of "recklessness" for allegedly pouring an oil-like substance on two major roads, the A8 and A720 Edinburgh bypass, causing difficult driving conditions for several hours and a short delay to bus services.

At least 18 people have been arrested since Wednesday evening, when the Climate Campers first occupied the site.

Harry Reynolds, one of the activists, said: "We've done a lot to disrupt RBS dirty energy operations today, but we are committed to keeping up the pressure until we manage to cut off the flow of capital from the banks to the fossil fuel industry."

Haemimont games, of Tropico 3 fame, have turned its attention towards the third person co-op action genre. That genre seems to be growing a lot these days, which definitely isn’t a bad thing. With The First Templar the developer hopes to create a compelling entry into the genre with a story set in the Templar times.

In The First Templar, you are *shock* a Templar. The story drives you and a female ranged character, branded as a heretic, through 8 levels. It ends around the time the Templars either got slaughtered, turned into the Illuminati so they could play with UNATCO and MJ-12, hunted assassins or did something with Jesus’s offspring. Templars are cool, no arguing about that. Actually, The First Templar sees the Templars and the church becoming more and more at odds while a quest for the Holy Grail provides a backdrop.

Finding the fabled Holy Grail would give the owner vast power and maybe even immortality. The game is said to show the moral implications of things like immortality and perhaps whether or not such a thing should even be found. While the story is pure fiction, the setting and world are all based on historically correct backgrounds. That means magic is out, but a big siege battle of Jerusalem is in.

Gameplay wise, The First Templar can be played either solo with an AI partner or in co-op. Co-op lets you drop in and out of a game at any time as long as your friend sets his game up for it to be allowed. And yes, there will be offline splitscreen.

It is your typical third person action fare, but combat was inspired by Arkham Asylum’s timed combat system. If you play on the hardest difficulties, combat is said to be more realistic and probably very punishing. As you fight through enemies, you fill up "Zeal Orbs" below your health bar. These orbs can be used to unleash special attacks. When playing co-op, you can also team up for special co-op attacks where, for instance, you will use the co-op player as a launching point for a devastating attack. You can revive fallen partners by standing next to them and holding a button, but I didn’t see any requirement like a revive potion you could throw to revive them from a distance.

Experience also plays a role with a Templar cross shaped skill board that has to be expanded from the center. You can’t just grind XP and unlock the entire board though; you will have to find a sort of recipe for skills before you can unlock them. These could be found in chests in the game world in the demo I was shown. When you play in single-player, you can use the XP to level up skills for both characters. However, that XP was shared in the demo so you’ll have to plan ahead a bit for what kind of focus you want to have for high-level attacks for both characters. In co-op you should just have your own XP, though.

Graphically, the game uses the Tropico 3 engine that is also being used for the upcoming Tropico 4. While the first level didn’t really impress me graphics wise, the second, forest level actually looked a lot nicer than I expected to see when walking in. Kalypso, the game’s publisher, is known for publishing games that tend to get overlooked but that are always something different than what is out there on the market, and I love their games because of that.

People overlook these games because they are not the same old 5-8 hour shooter or some action adventure by a big name. And they don’t get as much marketing exposure either -- other than average metacritic scores based on reviews from people who always compare them to games in the same genre with probably 50 times the budget.

While The First Templar didn’t strike me as a game that will win over graphics whores or people who only buy AAA games with an enormous budget, it did win me over with the idea of being able to relax on my couch and just play and see what the developer came up with.

The game will have 10-15 hours of content if you only play the story, and 20-40 hours if you do all the sidequests and things like that. I think I spent about 80-100 hours with Haemimont’s Tropico 3 already and while The First Templar is an action adventure game, I’m sure they put in enough content to keep you happy for a while. The story looked pretty interesting for an action adventure game and I’ll be happy to give it a go when it’s released, if only to see what the Hungarian developer has created for us this time.

The First Templar will be available in Q1 2011 for PC and 360.

by: Nathan Murray
NEWS -

• Gamescom Bulletstorm screenshots still lack bullets and/or storms
• Nintendo dates their holiday lineup of big first and third party titles
• Get SMART with new Brink Dev Diary, Parkour Tour
• Infernal Engine heats up with more games utilizing it
• Harry Potter & Deathly Hallows - Part 1 is Kinect friendly
• New expansion coming for Dawn of War II in 2011
• NHL 2011 first impressions
• NHL 2011 demo is on XBox Live (and coming to those suckers who own PS3s tomorrow)
• Mad Catz tightens its grip on Rock Band peripherals
• Ceton's multi-stream cable card tuner is now in the house
• WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2011 suffering from identify crisis?
• Rock Band 3 has some international flair
• Dance Central sporting an eclectic mix of songs
• Insomniac announces Rachet & Clank: All 4 One and Resistance 3 at Gamescom -Update- Added Ratchet video
• Two special editions announced for Crysis 2
• City of Heroes Going Rogue now available
• Collector's Edition revealed for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
• Realtime Worlds in a world of hurt
• Marcus makes fun of the iPhone for gaming
• Dragon Age 2 will be out on March 8, 2011
• Mass Effect 2 coming to the PlayStation 3 in January 2011
• Boom! Total Annihilation released on GOG
• Bill Roper leaves Cryptic
• Disciples III gets patched
• The wireless R.A.T. G.L.I.D.E.s in Europe
• Tony Hawk: Shred trailer tries to cell you on new look
• Three Mafia II events that'll let you play the game in 3D
• RUMOR: Force Unleashed 3 gets Force choked
• Pay to play online for Smackdown vs. Raw 2011
• Kane and Lynch 2 DLC for the Dog Days of summer
• Virtua Tennis 4 will be a Moving experience
• Hunted gets some preorder goodies
• Medal of Honor Tier One video series parts 1-4
• Final Fantasy XI/XIV aka "those MMOs" get a bonus tie-in
• Warhammer 40k: Space Marine gets a "patch"
• Gamescom Dungeon Siege III screenshots show game is coming along very well thank you
• Windows Phone 7 games lineup looks like a mixed bag
• WAR patch 1.3.6 highlights
• Watch Isaac fly through space in this Dead Space 2 video
• Latest Guitar/Band Hero DLC spans Weezer career
• Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock Act 3 set list in one video
• Two new characters announced for Mortal Kombat
• Gamescom: Enter the village of F.E.A.R. 3
• NBA 2K11 features Jordan... in case you didn’t know
• Wolfenstein gets set free
• Torchlight II gets a Gamescom trailer and pull quote from a familiar source
• Mafia II gun montage shows off your tools of the trade
• Gratuitous Space Battles receiving a campaign mode
• 360 avatars are getting a makeover... sort of
• Fighters Uncaged revealed by Ubisoft
• Warriors of Rock reveals its set list
• Goldeneye gets a Golden-date
• inFamous 2 Gamescom trailer
• Little Big Planet 2 gets a Gamescom trailer
• Sony rolls out two new PlayStation 3 SKUs
• Portal 2 sets a date
• Virtua Tennis 4 announced
• GamesCom: MvC3 confirms 2 more characters
• GamesCom 2010: Hydrophobia underwater combat
• Need for Speed Hot Pursuit gets a limited edition, online taunting feature
• Lord of the Rings Online to go free to play on September 10th
• Latest teaser for Deca Sports 3
• Patrician 4 trades in beauty
• Learn more about Tera at Gamescom, see new screenshots here
• Gamers Outreach raffling off epic Hummer Xbox 360 at PAX Prime (you can still get tickets if you don't go though)

Back in 1993, Electronic Arts was still small time compared to the entertainment siege engine that we gamers recognize today. The fun thing about old school EA, I would argue, is that they were more willing to take chances on unique IP. The Haunting Starring Polterguy (THSP from this point on) is one such game; wholly unique and so ahead of its time I’m not sure we’ll see anything like it again. While the story could have used some tooling, and the difficulty level perhaps tamed a bit — THSP is still easily one of my favorite Sega Genesis offerings. The Game Polterguy is dead, and he’s looking to use the Sardini family as a means to remedy this by haunting their newly bought home. He targets them for no other reason than perhaps that Vito, Flo, Mimi, and Tony are collectively dicks. His name being key to the gameplay, Polterguy must frighten the Sardini family using items in the home, freaking each member out so badly that they run screaming from room-to-room — eventually abandoning their abode altogether. As they flee, each Sardini leaves behind a pool of ectoplasm. Collect enough over the four homes you’ll chase the family through (while avoiding the only thing that can see you; the curiously pesky family dog), and Polterguy will be restored to a flesh and blood punk with torn jeans and a studded leather jacket; presumably to stick it to the man and smoke behind the local Circle K. The gameplay and visuals were unique, with a [...]

After years of delay, uranium-packed fuel rods for 1,000-megawatt plant will be installed next week

Russia will begin to load fuel into the reactor at Iran's Bushehr nuclear power station next week, marking the start of its launch after years of delay, Russian officials said today.

Russian and Iranian specialists are to begin loading uranium-packed fuel rods into the reactor on 21 August, a process that will take about two to three weeks. This will be a key step towards starting up the reactor, although it will not be considered operational from that date.

"This will be an irreversible step," Sergei Novikov, a spokesman for Russia's state nuclear corporation, Rosatom, said. "At that moment, the Bushehr nuclear power plant will be certified as a nuclear energy installation."

Novikov said that the head of Rosatom, Sergei Kiriyenko, would travel to Bushehr, in southern Iran, for next week's ceremony. Iran's vice-president, Ali Akbar Salehi, who also heads the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran, is scheduled to attend as well.

In March, the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, on a visit to Moscow, criticised Russia's plans to start up the Bushehr plant, describing them as premature, given western suspicions about Tehran's nuclear programme.

In June, the UN security council approved a fourth round of sanctions against Iran over its nuclear programme, including tougher financial controls and an expanded arms embargo, as well as an asset ban on three dozen companies and a travel freeze on individuals.

Despite American reservations about the facility, nuclear experts say Bushehr does not contain sensitive technology, which is why it does not figure in any UN security council resolutions. Moreover, Bushehr has no link with Iran's secretive uranium enrichment programme, seen as the main "weaponisation" threat, at other installations.

"The Iranians have been able to go ahead with Bushehr because it's clean," said a nuclear expert, adding that the light-water reactor in Bushehr was internationally tolerated because of Russia's involvement.

Moscow points out that the project has been closely supervised by the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and that Iran has signed a pledge to ship all the spent uranium fuel from Bushehr back to Russia for reprocessing, ruling out the possibility that any of it could used to make nuclear weapons.

Construction of this, Iran's first nuclear plant, was begun in 1975 by several German companies. They pulled out following a US embargo on high-technology supplies to Iran, after the 1979 Islamic revolution and the subsequent US embassy siege in Tehran. Russia stepped in and agreed to build the 1,000-megawatt reactor 15 years ago, in a project that has been likened to efforts to fix a German engine in a Russian car.

Delays have plagued the $1bn (£640,000) project, with diplomats saying that Moscow has used it as a lever in relations with Tehran. Iran has had to put up with the long timescale because it has no other potential nuclear partners.

Derbyshire spa town revels in its role as setting for festival of Victorian light opera

Hay-on-Wye has its books festival, Edinburgh its arts and comedy on the fringe. And Buxton has Gilbert and Sullivan. For the last week and until 21 August, the slightly dowdy Derbyshire spa town will be ringing to the sounds of Victorian light opera.

You can make a little list – there'll none of 'em be missed: just about the whole canon – from a youth production of The Sorcerer, with a cast of teenagers, to the Belfast Light Operatic's Pirates of Penzance – will have played before the curtain comes down. Nearly 3,000 performers and an audience topping 20,000 are expected, spending upwards of £2m.

If performances are not enough there are talks and lectures, including one on Sullivan's music from Robin Wilson, just retired after years as a maths lecturer for the Open University, who was taught to love Gilbert and Sullivan by his father, Harold Wilson, the late prime minister.

"It's a very big occasion now," said Neil Smith, who with his father, Ian, has run the festival since it started 16 years ago. "If you say Buxton every G&S; fan across the world knows about the festival. We get visitors from New Zealand and America and we're even exporting it – there was a first festival in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, a month ago."

Sure enough, on the pavement outside Buxton's Edwardian opera house there is an excited buzz as the audience gathers, American accents mingling with British, South African and Scandinavian

"I just love the words," said Larry Baylor from San Jose, California, now on his fifth visit." I've loved it ever since my parents gave me a record when I was eight."

Most of the audience, in their cardigans and sensible shoes, are admittedly of a certain age, but not all. It's clearly a knowledgeable crowd, too – if a cast member inserts an "and" instead of a "but" into the text, they know it. Gilbert would have approved.

The liberettist famously didn't like his operas being tampered with, which meant they became pickled in aspic over the years as the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company jealously guarded its repertoire, relentlessly touring the country with increasingly threadbare productions until it folded in 1982 – leaving amateur companies to carry the flag of shows long out of copyright.

Fresher, innovative, professional productions have been tried since, and proved to be wildly popular. Jonathan Miller's version of The Mikado, updated to a 1930s grand hotel, has been a banker for the English National Opera for more than 20 years and Opera North's version of Ruddigore was a critically-acclaimed sell-out earlier this year.

"There is a certain amount of resentment among fans that Gilbert and Sullivan remain overlooked by the arts establishment: not quite grand opera and not quite musical theatre, although their plots and lyrics foreshadowed writers such as Cole Porter and Oscar Hammerstein.

Gilbert's satire is obviously part of the appeal, some of it surprisingly modern. The audience at Iolanthe (written in 1882) gasped with delight when it was announced that the hero, Strephon, was going into parliament as a Liberal Conservative.

Ian Bradley, a theologian at St Andrews University and expert on the pair, said their appeal was part nostalgia and part security. "It's a particularly male enthusiasm, a bit like being steam engine fanatics – sometimes the same people are both. That can lead to a siege mentality: middle-brow, middle class, a feeling that the cultural elite despise the operas, so supporters must protect them."

Ian Smith, a lifelong amateur performer, is worried that something quintessentially British is being lost now few schools mount productions and turn instead to Grease and High School Musical. "This is part of our heritage," he said. "You are more likely to understand Gilbert than Mr Shakespeare. This will teach you music, drama, heritage, history, team-work. G&S; should be a compulsory part of the curriculum."

As part of their father and son mission, the Smiths offer support to schools by providing directors and musical accompanists. There are ambitious plans for a G&S; discovery centre in Buxton, and of inviting foreign societies to London to perform the operas during the 2012 Olympics.

"Buxton's great fun," said Bradley. "I even had an American woman come up to me and say: 'I have had more pleasure from the festival than from either of my husbands.'"

some might recall a year ago when i thought it’d be fun to build a trebuchet and later discovered that there was on in the area. already built! and ready for launching stuff. so some friends and i packed it up, moved it and attempted to fling things. only to discover that it [...]

Strange noises have become familiar to the population. Walk the unpaved Gaza streets and roads, and all you will hear are the buzzing, whirring sounds of power engines mixed with the smell of smuggled Egyptian fuel. Almost one in five houses owns a power engine to compensate for the continuous lapses in power which have afflicted us for the last four years. Like the politicians, it is impossible for the normal population ever to be calm: there are nothing but problems - from water to power to food to medicine…

The power crises, this summer, have got under our skin. Angry people can readily be picked out on the streets of Gaza. They desperately need a change: but no change is in sight.

Gaza’s population of more than 1.7 million is served by three main energy sources – all old and in need of constant mending and maintenance: the first from Egypt, second from Israel and third from Gaza’s own power plant. In 2006, Israel destroyed the sole power plant in the centre of the Gaza Strip totally disrupting the supply so that hundreds of thousands of people lived in darkness for months until a patched-up repair of some kind was secured.  That was the first year that Egypt provided Gaza with power. Meanwhile, the power coming from Israel covers some parts of Gaza city and the north.

The knock-on effects of the uncertain supply, of course, are huge. In the current heat - record temperatures have just hit 42 degrees - perhaps it’s not surprising that I found myself heading for the Demyati company in Gaza  - a large , 35-year old business distributing tons of frozen foods: fish, meat and vegetables, to talk to its director, Ismail Demyati.-

Demyati company

He too, is cross:

"We are a very big company that supply hundreds of small shops and companies with our products. Our distribution reaches every market in Gaza and nearly every shop for food. However, the power cuts are affecting our performance as well as changing the habits of those who buy our products. Many of the food shops refrain from buying our products, due to lack of power. Many send back what they have bought, because as summer takes over, they know these goods will spoil and quickly expire."-

Alternative power engines at Demyati company

Demyati’s company imports foodstuff from Europe, China, South America, Egypt and Israel.  They too are affected by the imposed siege as no regular access of their products can get into the Gaza Strip. To combat this problem, the company operates its own giant power engine. But on normal days, Gaza’s power cuts last for at least four hours:  and in the last month, this has extended to between eight and ten hours a day. From June 25 onwards for some reason, power cuts have exceeded 20 hours, and sometimes they have lasted for 24 hours. Many areas in Gaza at the moment are plunged into darkness.-

Spoiled due to power

Where I live, we have been without power for the past 48 hours. I use the power generator very sparingly, to write this.

Secondary school and university students are taking their final exams at the moment. Inevitably people who are trying to study lose focus. You can come across angry students like Nedal Sakani, who I met in a small shop in Gaza city:

"Our life is repulsive. Haven’t we had enough already with the siege, enough with the war, enough fear and restlessness.  We can't even study. We are supposed to study in the nighttime but it's always dark. We are supposed to study in the daytime, but while the sun’s constantly burning – there is no power. And all you can think of is the sound of your neighbours’ power generators. it's crazy."-

Nedal Sakani - the angry student

The owner of the shop, Muhammad Bakeer, gave me what has become a familiar greeting, " I want go abroad. Will you help me? I'm tired of Gaza.”  As usual I didn't reply: there is nothing to say. Bakeer has had to decrease the number of his goods steadily as the power cuts have kicked in:

"I no longer supply milk, yoghurt or ice cream, nor frozen foodstuffs. I have had 7500 ($1973)NIS losses. I blame Hamas for this problem. They spend their time trying to gain funds from abroad. They should help us solve this problem. They are the government, not us. I am owed $10,000 by my customers. They have no money to pay. That’s why I want to take my small family and leave Gaza now."-

Bakeer - this shop owner

In fact, the reasons behind our latest power cuts are lost in the ether somewhere between Fateh and Hamas. The Hamas government in Gaza points out that the European Union is funding Gaza’s power plant with industrial fuel. So, according to our Hamas Government, it is the Fateh Government in the West Bank, headed by Salam Fayyad, that has full responsibility for the power supply. They say that since the start of this year, Fayyad's people have asked the EU to transfer money directly into their accounts so that they may purchase industrial fuel to send to Gaza. The EU, they say, have agreed to this plan and the money duly began to go directly to the West Bank Government. Hamas says that Fayyad's government is trying to turn Gazans against their own leaders. Fayyad's people, for their part, point out that they have nothing to do with this crisis. They allege that Hamas is responsible for the power cuts. They insist that Hamas should collect money from the people of Gaza, and then pay it to the power company which is owned by the West Bank Government. Indeed, the story is so mixed, with neither of the rival factions giving us a definitive answer – and meanwhile, nothing happens except deadlock and dead ends.

Today, Hamas is mobilising its supporters to go onto the streets in protest at the measures that they say, have been adopted by Fayyad's government.  Meanwhile, the power problem is growing.  The Gaza municipality has just announced that power failures have started to hit services like sewage and drinking water networks. If the crisis continues, some areas will flood with sewage water and fresh drinking water will be contaminated.

Of course, we ordinary inhabitants are the losers.  The more we dig for the truth in Gaza, the deeper the pit we expose: the blacker the future for Gaza.-

A worker points his fingers at the spoiled goods

Thanks to flexibility of StarCraft 2's engine, you can now play Metal Slug with Siege Tanks and Dropships!

The Trebuchet!This article outlines how to build a 1 meter scale siege engine at home in your spare time. For less than fifteen dollars, you can build a one by one-half meter trebuchet that will throw a croquet ball thirty meters.

PlayStation Store Update Posted by Grace Chen // Senior Manager, PlayStation Store Hi Everyone – It’s time for the weekly PlayStation Store Update. I’m excited to show everyone the new MLB.TV application for the PS3 that will be available from PlayStation Network, in both U.S. and Canada, later today. This app allows MLB.TV subscribers to watch every regular season game live in HD (local blackout restrictions do apply), with tons of new interactive features designed exclusively for PSN. This week Spring Fever highlights Action games. 50% off Ratchet & Clank Quest for Booty (sale price $7.49, reg. $14.99) and Revenge of the Wounded Dragons (sale price$4.99, reg. $9.99) Download today! Offers good through Wednesday, 4/28/10. *_Updates_* Ubisoft Game Sale: Tom Clancy’s HAWX: European Assault Pack Sale (now $2.49, original price $4.99) Tom Clancy’s HAWX: US Eagles Pack Sale (now $2.49, original price $4.99) Petz Dogz Family Sale (now $14.99, original price $29.99) Petz Hamsterz Bunch Sale (now $14.99, original price $29.99) Petz Saddle Club Sale (now $14.99, original price $29.99) *_Downloadable Games_* Hyperballoid HD ($4.99) Welcome to the future! Hyperballoid HD is a next-gen brick breaking game that features two visually stunning game worlds complete with animated levels and realistic physics. As you break apart these complex creations, you’ll enjoy using outrageous new powerups and will be surprised by the game’s smooth controls. Amazing art and animation, along with a bass-heavy techno soundtrack, will immerse you in the psychedelic world of Hyperballoid HD! ERSB Rated E File size: 84 MB Puzzle Chronicles ($9.99) Enter the dark and savage lands of the Ashurin Empire as you battle to avenge the atrocities the Empire brought upon your tribesmen. On your heroic quest to topple the Empire you will fight fierce beasts and battle hardened warriors in this new Puzzle RPG hybrid game. Featuring an active puzzle combat mechanic, deep story, and robust character development Puzzle Chronicles will bring you into the next era of Puzzle RPGs. ERSB Rated E10+ File size: 664 MB Secret Of Monkey Island Special Edition ($9.99) Pirates! Adventure! Monkeys! Relive the hilarious swashbuckling misadventures of the wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood all in HD as he attempts to become the most infamous pirate in the Caribbean! Featuring a re-imagined contemporary art style, complete voice over by members of the original Monkey Island™ franchise cast, a re-mastered musical score, plus scene-for-scene hot swap to transition between Special Edition and Classic modes at anytime. ERSB Rated E10+ File size: 433 MB After Burner Climax ($9.99) The classic arcade game After Burner has now returned for a new generation of gamers. After Burner Climax is fast and frantic action, putting you in the cockpit of the world’s fastest fighter planes. Dodge planes, rockets and bullets while trying to target multiple on-screen enemy aircraft. Take to the air and blaze through a branching storyline and over 20 stages! ERSB Rated E10+ File size: 527 MB *_Psone Classics _* XS Moto ($5.99) Take control of the Superbike and race your way to the top! Download this PS one® Classic today! ESRB Rated E File size: 59 MB *_Game Demos (free)_* Lost Planet 2 Multiplayer Demo Join 15 other players in this multiplayer demo for the Turbulent Jungle map. Choose from either Elimination or Post Grab modes and use all the new VSs, weapons and support items from the Campaign mode. Grab your weapon and get into the heat of battle with players from all over the world! ESRB Rated T File size: 368 MB *_Add-on Game Content_* BUZZ!: The ‘00 Quiz ($5.99) Relive the greatest moments of the first decade of the 2000’s! Laugh and compete with your friends over trivia that defined the 2000’s in this BUZZ!: The ‘00 Quiz pack, featuring hundreds of questions to play in your favorite BUZZ!: Quiz TV and BUZZ!: Quiz World game modes. Download this quiz pack today and challenge friends and family with new questions and “Show ‘em Your Trivia!” File size: 46 MB UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves – Siege Expansion Pack ($5.99) UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves is under “SIEGE”! This new DLC Pack for 2009’s Game of the Year is loaded with 2 new multiplayer maps, “The Museum” and “The Highrise”, 11 new multiplayer Trophies to win, 6 multiplayer skins, and an intense new Co-op game mode, “Siege”! Can you hold your ground under the “SIEGE?” Download the “Siege Expansion Pack” now! File size: 242 MB Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing DLC 2 – Metal Sonic & Death Egg Zone Track ($7.99) Get your telescopic limbs, jet engine and Black Shield forcefield ready and race as new character Metal Sonic with this exclusive download! Also speed around new track the Death Egg, a huge orbital fortress created by Dr. Eggman, containing some of his most diabolical creations. Take care not to fall off the edge in the frantic battle for cosmic first place! Download the character and track pack now! File size: 149 MB Guitar Hero 5 For all song credits please visit www.guitarhero.com. “Everything Is Everything” by Phoenix ($1.99) “Lisztomania” by Phoenix ($1.99) “1901″ by Phoenix ($1.99) Phoenix Track Pack ($5.49) – Downloadable Track Pack featuring “Everything Is Everything”, “Lisztomania”, and “1901” by Phoenix. Please Note: Many songs are available both as singles and as part of a Track Pack, so please carefully consider your purchases before downloading. File size: 28 MB – 41 MB (singles), 369 MB (track pack) Rock Band Build your Rock Band library by purchasing these song game tracks. For song credits, visit www.RockBand.com. Rock Band DLC: Coheed & Cambria Pack 01 ($5.49) – Build your Rock Band library by purchasing this song game track pack: The Used Pack 01. This pack includes “Blood On My Hands,” “Born To Quit,” and “The Taste Of Ink” by The Used. “The Broken” – Coheed & Cambria ($1.99) “Guns of Summer” – Coheed & Cambria ($1.99) “Here We Are Juggernaut” – Coheed & Cambria ($1.99) “American Music” – The Violent Femmes ($1.99) “Peek-a-Boo” – Siouxsie & The Banshees ($1.99) “Sun Hits the Sky” – Supergrass ($1.99) Rock Band Network: “Australia” – The Shins ($1.99) “Code Monkey” – Jonathan Coulton ($1.99) “Drunken Lullabies (Live)” – Flogging Molly ($0.99) “Even Rats” – The Slip ($1.99) “For the Love of God (Live)” – Steve Vai ($1.99) File size: 23 MB – 47 MB (singles), 109 MB (track pack) *_Game Videos (free)_* MLB 10: The Show – Opening Day Trailer See the Opening Day trailer! Brought to you by the most realistic baseball game ever, MLB 10 The Show. File size: 76 MB (HD) 127 MB (1080) ModNation Racers – UFG Tutorial: Mod Creation Join United Front Games Associate Art Director, Roberto Oliveira, in a three part Tutorial Video series. In Part 1, Rob reveals the easy to use Mod Studio and its powerful character creation features. Players will start with a blank slate and customize every feature of their Mod. Learn about the handy features and shortcuts that will make your Mod come to life in minutes. File size: 384 MB (HD) ModNation Racers – UFG Tutorial: Kart Creation Welcome back to Roberto Oliveira’s Tutorial Videos! Part 2 shows how easy it is to build a kart from scratch. Watch Rob reveal some of the handy tools that make kart creation a breeze, from color matching to visual effects. You’ll see a sampling of the hundreds of parts and accessories players can choose from to fully express themselves. File size: 332 MB (HD) ModNation Racers – UFG Tutorial: Track Creation Jump in behind the seat of the revolutionary Track Studio! Roberto Oliveira wraps up his Tutorial Videos by showing you how you can drive your own track into existence. Learn about the Auto Complete and Auto Populate features that make track creation a breeze and let you start test driving right away. The deep edit tools let you tweak every part of the track that you want. File size: 307 MB (HD) 3D Dot Game Heroes: Promo Trailer #2 Most Interesting Hero In 3D Meet the “Most Interesting Hero in 3D” and learn how you can be just as interesting! Retro chic meets modern sleek in this, the ultimate love letter to retro gamers. Seamlessly fusing new and old, the golden era of gaming is felt in every detail of this adventure. File size: 42 MB Lost Planet 2 Developer Diary: Story Get the inside scoop from Producer Jun Takeuchi as he describes the Story of Lost Planet 2. File size: 40 MB (HD) Red Dead Redemption: Gentlemen And Vagabonds “Gentlemen & Vagabonds” is an introduction to just a few of the men of repute and dubious valor you’ll meet across the frontier – including Nigel West Dickens, Seth Briars, Professor Harold MacDougal and many more. File size: 53 MB Red Dead Redemption: Lawmen Meet The Law – the men who aim to enforce justice against the outlaws, bandits and crooks in the wild frontier and burgeoning towns of Red Dead Redemption. File size: 60 MB Red Dead Redemption: The Women Through our Red Dead Redemption video series, you’ve met John Marston, you’ve come face to face with the Law – now it’s time to meet the women of Red Dead Redemption: Sinners, Saints and Survivors. File size: 63 MB Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days – Debut Trailer Get a glimpse of the stark circumstances facing gaming’s two most notorious criminals in the highly-charged debut trailer. File size: 70 MB (HD) Tecmo Bowl Throwback Trailer The legend is back! Tecmo Bowl Throwback is a remake of the classic Tecmo Super Bowl, with the same rules and fast-paced gameplay as the original, but with the option to play it in brand new high definition 3D graphics. Switch it back to old school in real time with the same graphics and music from back in the day! File size: 35 MB (SD) 38 MB (HD) *_PS3 Themes_* ModNation Racers: PS3 Tag Theme (free) File size: 1.54 MB ModNation Racers: PS3 Jez Theme (free) File size: 1.21 MB American Flags ($1.99) File size: 5.69 MB Tentakill ($1.49) File size: 4.74 MB Underwater Disco ($1.49) File size: 6.03 MB NBA Premium Themes (x16) ($1.99) File size: 5.00 MB – 5.48 MB *_PlayStation Store for PSP Downloadable Games (also available from PS3 Storefront)_* UNO ($7.99) Get ready to call “UNO” on your PSP (PlayStation Portable) system! The world famous card game is faithfully reproduced for the PSP system and also features exciting new rules. With a multiplayer mode played locally between up to 4 PSP systems or on PlayStation Network, UNO has never been so fun and easy, so be the first to get rid of all your cards! ESRB Rated E File size: 29 MB *_PSP Minis (also available from PS3 Storefront)_* Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess! ($4.99) ESRB Rated E File size: 101 MB Hysteria Project ($1.99) ESRB Rated E File size: 83 MB Homerun Hitters (PSP Only – $1.99) ESRB Rated E File size: 7.02 MB Shogi (PSP Only – $1.99) ESRB Rated E File size: 10 MB Charge! Tank Squad! (PSP Only – $1.99) ESRB Rated E File size: 7 MB *_Add-on Game Content (also available from PS3 Storefront)_* The Eye of Judgment Legends Card Expansion Pack Volume 2 ($1.99) Expand your digital card collection with the second add-on card pack! Give your duels an upper hand with 5 unique cards not found in the full game, including rare and ultra rare cards. Add these cards to your deck for unique combinations to win battles against the computer, or head-to-head online against other players. Unlike other cards, these can’t be traded or earned any other way. Download the add-on cards today! File size: 1.51 MB *_Game Videos (free)_* MLB 10: The Show – Opening Day Trailer File size: 13 MB ModNation Racers – UFG Tutorial: Mod Creation File size: 61 MB ModNation Racers – UFG Tutorial: Kart Creation File size: 52 MB ModNation Racers – UFG Tutorial: Track Creation File size: 52 MB 3D Dot Game Heroes: Promo Trailer #2 Most Interesting Hero In 3D File size: 5.16 MB 3D Dot Game Heroes: Natural Sword Enhancement File size: 5.82 MB *_PSP Themes (also available from PS3 Storefront)_* NBA Premium PSP Themes (x16) ($1.49) File size: 352 KB – 406 KB American Flags PSP Theme 1 ($1.99) File size: 482 KB American Flags PSP Theme 2 ($1.99) File size: 548 KB *_PSP Wallpaper (also available from PS3 Storefront) (free)_* DJ Max Fever Wallpaper 5 File size: 35 KB DJ Max Fever Wallpaper 6 File size: 28 KB DJ Max Fever Wallpaper 7 File size: 34 KB DJ Max Fever Wallpaper 8 File size: 34 KB Strikers 1945 Plus Wallpaper 5 File size: 20 KB Strikers 1945 Plus Wallpaper 6 File size: 21 KB Reposted from the Playstation Blog (http://blog.us.playstation.com/2010/04/22/playstation-store-update-133/).

The first plantation house we came to, there were six or eight eligibles loafing around and we dismounted and proceeded to business. We found them much interested in the subject but could get no decision from them. They would not say they would not go, nor would they say they would.

They did not pay much attention to me, but riveted their eyes on Jack, whom they must have thought a brigadier at least...Jack dismounted and proceeded to set these coons up in line with about as much ceremony as he would use if he was setting up so many ten-pins...When the wenches discovered the men were being marched away, they set up a terrible howl. But it did not faze Jack. He kept them going and they were soon out of sight and hearing.

Big Jack Jackson passed me like a rocket. With the fury of a tiger he sprang into that gang and crushed everything before him. There was nothing left of Jack's gun except the barrel and he was smashing everything he could reach. On the other side of the levee, they were yelling "Shoot that big nigger! Shoot that nigger!" while Jack was daring the whole gang to come up and fight him. Then a bullet reached his head and he fell full on the levee.

These new screenshots showcase the environments, siege warfare and MMORTS campaign powered by the studios' custom Mythrill engine We have several more screenshots from Dawn of Fantasy , illustrating this 3D RTS in the works at Reverie World Studios for PC and Xbox 360.

The first ever RubyConf India took place in Bangalore, India at the Royal Orchid Hotel last weekend. Our Director of Research & Development, Pradeep Elankumaran, and I were there speaking. The event was put together by ThoughtWorks and was unlike any other tech conference we've ever attended. It wasn't the talks, the speakers, or the format -- it was the overall attitude of everybody who attended RubyConf India 2010 that made it very special to us. Everybody who attended were extremely passionate about learning and showed so much interest in all of the topics that were presented for the two days of the conference.

 

All of the topics presented at RubyConf India 2010 were interesting. Roy Singham, Founder and Chairman of ThoughtWorks, kicked off and closed the event. Ola Bini of ThoughtWorks gave a talk on "The Future of Programming Languages". Nick Sieger from Engine Yard was there to give his talk on "Rails 3 Through Choices". The highlight of the two-day event was when Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, the father of Ruby, gave a talk via Skype about the future of Ruby. He also mentioned that work on Ruby 2.0 would start in August of this year. There were also talks by Nick Sieger, Arun Gupta, Aman King, Brian Guthrie, and many others. You can see the whole list of speakers and talks by going here.

 

Our very own Pradeep Elankumaran gave two talks. His first talk was titled "The Big Wave of Indian Startups - (Almost) Effortless Entrepreneurship", which sparked a large amount of audience participation and was one of the most interactive sessions of the weekend. His other talk was "Messaging Queueing in Ruby - An Overview", which went over different choices we could use to do queueing in Ruby. I gave my talk on MacRuby, titled "MacRuby to The Max", which went over MacRuby, HotCocoa and how it compared to Objective-C. I even did some live coding and created a quick and easy currency converter.

We had a great time at the first ever RubyConf India. We definitely want to thank ThoughtWorks for putting together a great conference that was extremely informative and enjoyable. You can bet that we'll be there again for RubyConf India 2011.

Nanotechnology pioneer Richard W. Siegel, the Robert W. Hunt Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at

 

This weekend ThoughtWorks in collaboration with RubyCentral and several sponsors arranged the first ever RubyConf India. I was there as a keynote speaker and wanted to take a few minutes to tell you about the experience, since I think this was an event that showed how much pent up interest there really is for Ruby in India.

When planning the conference we aimed for about 150 delegates - but that sold out in a few days so we rearranged the event to accomodate about 400 people, and we managed to fill that. At the end of the day, there was about 420 people there, including both delegates and speakers.

Unfortunately there had been some problems with visas for Chad Fowler and Ivan Porto Carrero. We solved that by having Ivan present over Skype, and rearrange some of the talks and give Brian Guthrie a last minute spot.

The conference started out with Roy Singham, the founder and chairman of ThoughtWorks, setting the tone for the rest of the conference by getting people to think about how India can start innovate for real using technologies such as Ruby.

After that I did a keynote about programming languages, quite similar to what I did at RailsWayCon in Berlin last year. Hopefully people thought it was interesting. I tried to first discuss why we need different languages, where some Ruby language features comes from, a small taxonomy of languages, and some ideas about what might happen in the future.

Obie Fernandez was next up with a controversial keynote called Blood, Sweat and Rails. The basics of the keynote was a description of different lessons Obie has learned from running HashRocket. The controversial bit was based around two different factors, the first being Obie’s heavy use of profanity. (Heavy enough that one of the organizers went up on stage halfway through the presentation and asked him to tone it down). The other controversial part was that Obie used his keynote spot to spend quite a lot of time promoting HashRocket. Later in the day, a representative from ThoughtWorks, and one representative from Castle Rock (another sponsor) went on stage, mentioning that the point of sponsorship was not to push their respective companies but push Ruby in India.

After Obie’s keynote it was lunch time. I was tired and jetlagged so I walked around in a bit of a daze after my keynote was done. I did catch some of Aman’s talk about Ruby OO with objects instead of classes. What I saw sounded intruiging, but I didn’t get the full picture since I walked in and out of the presentation.

The highlight of the day was definitely Matz keynote, where he called in using Skype and did a presentation and some Q&A. Matz talked a bit about the history of Ruby and then started mentioning some things about the future of Ruby. The most interesting concrete information was that 1.9.2 will come this summer, and after that they will start work on 2.0. This version will also make some heavier changes, some of them which I’m not sure I like (such as requiring parenthesis for invocation).

The second day started out with Nick Sieger from EngineYard talking about the next version of Rails. Lots of useful information about what we can expect from the next major revision. Compared to mine and Obie’s keynotes, this was shock full with technical information instead of high level concepts. Good stuff.

After that, Pradeep Elankumaran from Intridea doing a very interesting session about startups. His talk ended up being a long discussion with most of the audience about startups. This discussion kept most people in the audience interested enough to stay long into lunch time. Very good session.

After lunch I had a major conflict of interest. Both colleagues of mine had interesting sessions going. Sarah Taraporewalla talking about Ruby view technology and Sidu Ponnappa and Niranjan Paranjape talking about entropy in long running Ruby projects. I ended up choosing Sarah’s talk - which was brilliant. She did a great job explaining why the current view technologies are generally too permissive and make it harder to test the behavior of your view correctly.

Of course, Sidu and Niranjan got good reviews - and I heard lots of things that sounded like it was a session full of controversial ideas. Sounds like fun - wish I’d been there too.

The next session was about building a Ruby Application Server. Sadly, I’d kinda misunderstood what this session was about, since I was assuming that “Application Server” was meant in the Java environment meaning. This was not the case - instead it was about implementing a Ruby web server. I kinda lost interest quite quickly and ended up doing some work instead.

Brian Guthrie’s replacement session was called “Advanced Ruby Idoms so clean you can eat off of them”, and was both hilarious and very on point. The room was standing room full and Brian’s presentation sparked lots of debate. The gist of it was that basically there is no such thing as magic in programming. Everything is a function of your understanding of what’s going on in the language. You can have good code or bad code. Clean code and dirty code. But magic code just means you don’t understand the language, and is not really something you should use as an argument for or against an implementation. Brian expanded on this by giving loads of tips and tricks on what to do and what not to do.

I didn’t catch the final session, since I was very tired at that point. After the final session, Roy Singham came back with a keynote about a number of different things. He talked about the current state of agile in the world, the Ruby and Rails culture in the US, and how that should inform the Ruby culture in India, what things Unicef has been doing lately with Rails and other technology, and how we can use new technology to start being more socially responsible. The keynote sparked a lot of debate, and as usual Roy made quite a large amount of controversial statements in soundbite form. Take a look at my twitter stream for this weekend to get some quotes.

All in all, I think this was a total success. Lots of interesting talks, fantastic networking opportunities and a great vibe in the air. Looking at the tweets from the conference, RubyConf India seems to have been very appreciated by a large majority of all attendees. Here’s hoping for an even better next year!

Google Inc. will shift its search engine for China off the mainland but won't shut it down altogether, and it will maintain other operations in the country. The compromise is an attempt by Google to balance its stance against censorship with its desire to profit from an explosively growing Internet market. NPR's Laura Sydell talks to Robert Siegel.

Direkter Download: SPPD-137-2010-03-21

(Please visit the site to view this media)

Diese Ausgabe des SharePointPodcast wird präsentiert von Ontrack PowerControls für SharePoint und Exchange.
Dem leistungsstarken Tool aus dem Hause Kroll Ontrack zum einfachen Wiederherstellen ganzer SharePoint-Sites, Ordner, Bibliotheken.
Sogar wenn der SharePointserver nicht mehr zugänglich ist. www.powercontrols.de

Intern

• 3 Jahre Gezwitscher
• SharePointCommunity verzeichnet den 1.500.000ten Besucher
• Verlosung 2 Bücher + Map4Plan Lizenz

ShareCamp 2010

• ShareCamp 2010
• SharePointCommunity SharePoint 2010 Launch Event am 12.5.2010

Veranstaltungen

• UG Südwestfalen, 24.3.2010, 17:30 Uhr, Siegen
• DOTNET Developer Group Ulm SharePoint 2010 - For Developers
• UG Karlsruhe, 12.4.2010, 18:00 Uhr, ServicePortals

 

SharePoint und Office 2010

• Office 2010 Developer Atlas
• SharePoint 2010: What’s New in Surveys
• EDiscovery in SharePoint Server 2010
• Introducing Web Content Management in SharePoint 2010
• Business Data Search in SharePoint 2010: Crawling associated external content types
• Configuring Profile Image Export in SharePoint 2010
• SharePoint 2010 Logging Improvements – Part 1
• SharePoint 2010 Logging Improvements – Part 2 (Introducing Developer Dashboard)
• SharePoint 2010 Shared Service Architecture Part 1

Frühlingsgedicht

Webcasts von MSDN und TechNet (US)

• MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Server 2010 (Part 5 of 8): Developing for SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7 (Level 100)
• TechNet Webcast: Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for SharePoint (Level 200)
• MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Server 2010 (Part 6 of 8): Developing with the New User Interface Features in SharePoint 2010 (Level 100)
• MSDN Webcast: BenkoTips Live and On Demand: Visual Studio 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010 (Level 200)
• MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Server 2010 (Part 7 of 8): Developing with SharePoint 2010 Sandboxed Solutions (Level 100)
• MSDN Webcast: SharePoint Server 2010 (Part 8 of 8): Developing with Data Technologies in SharePoint 2010 (Level 100)
• TechNet Webcast: Elegant Engineering in SharePoint Server 2007: Continuous Integration (Level 200)
• TechNet Webcast: Federated Collaboration Using Office and SharePoint Server 2010, AD RMS, and AD FS 2.0 (Level 200)
• TechNet Webcast: Deep Dive - Microsoft Virtualization Best Practices for SharePoint 2010 (Level 300)

Tipps

• Twynham School Learning Gateway 2007-10 Chapter One part 1- The Staff Gateway
• Add character or word count to SharePoint multi line plain text field and restrict input length
• Filter Radio Buttons or Checkboxes based on selection in another field
• Show active list filter above list view

Tools

• Free Lightbox Web Part
• SharePoint Silverlight Slideshow Viewer for SharePoint

 Sponsor

• Kroll Ontrack Powercontrol

Technorati: SharePoint, Podcast, SharePoint 2007, SharePointcommunity, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010, Michael Greth, Office 2010

 Feedback: sharepointpodcast (at) gmail.com

 
Background: PROJECT SWIRL - THE SOFA MIX

Reply to: michael.siegel@e-hps.com

Date: 2010-20-03



If you consider yourself an exceptional, entrepreneurial sales professional, who knows the value of residual income, portfolio equity, and with no cap on earnings, you may find a lucrative home at Heartland Payment Systems.



The Heartland philosophy and business model are simple: Offer talented sales professionals the training, tools and superior product to build personal wealth and lasting residual income.



Heartland also believes in employee ownership and now boasts hundreds of employee owners and option holders who are building value for their own personal future.



Share in the success of our dynamic company, Selling Power Names Heartland Payment Systems Best Service Company to Sell For



Source: BW

Date: 08:05 AM



11/24 08:05 Selling Power Names Heartland Payment Systems Best Service Company to Sell For



Marks Second Consecutive Year Heartland Receives Distinction





PRINCETON, N.J.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--November 24, 2009--



For the second consecutive year, Heartland Payment Systems(R) (NYSE: HPY) has been named the top service company to sell for in the United States by Selling Power(R) magazine. Heartland, one of the nation's largest payments processors, competed against companies including FedEx, IKON, Aramark and Google for this distinction.



"Earning this award two years in a row is a great tribute to our entire organization," said Sanford Brown, chief sales officer at Heartland. "This is a testament to the efforts put forth by our incredible sales force, sales leaders, account management channel, service center and all the employees who support the outstanding Heartland sales engine. We are extremely proud of our team."



Heartland's entrepreneurial business and compensation model uses proven rewards to incentivize its sales force, including weekly signing bonuses and long-term portfolio ownership with residual income. Combined with its talented team of professionals, this model has enabled Heartland to grow from 25 employees to 3,100, and from $0.4 billion to $80 billion of annualized Visa(R)/ MasterCard(R) volume since its founding in 1997.



"Being #1 affirms that Heartland offers the best direct sales opportunity in America," said Brown. "Despite hard economic times and growing unemployment rates, individuals can take control of their own livelihoods with rewarding, professional careers based on hard work and integrity. Heartland provides the opportunity and infrastructure for them to thrive."



Selling Power's "50 Best Companies to Sell For" list, in its ninth year, ranks the top 25 best service and the top 25 best manufacturing companies to sell for. Companies are evaluated on three key categories: compensation, training and career mobility. This year's list _ featured in the 2009 November/December issue of the magazine _ represents a wide variety of sub-industries including software/systems, food/beverage, household, health, construction, information/ communications, hospitality transportation, and financial services. Heartland also made Selling Power's "500 Largest Sales Forces In America" list, ranking 83rd in the service sector (October 2009). This was a significant increase from its ranking of 98 the previous year.



"I am delighted to congratulate Heartland," commented Gerhard Gschwandtner, Selling Power's founder and publisher. "Heartland is only the second company to receive the #1 designation two years in a row. This is truly a company that makes a concerted effort to create a world-class sales organization determined to help its customers win."



For more information about Heartland and available career opportunities, please visit HeartlandPaymentSystems.com





Here is what Wall Street is saying about our company and our career opportunity for talented sales professionals:



SUNTRUST:



“Impressive Sales Culture Drives Organic Revenue Growth: We view Heartland as perhaps the purest sales organization in the Merchant Acquiring industry. While there certainly exist more aggressive ISOs, we believe few possess the depth of commitment to organic revenue growth and sustained customer service instilled in Heartland, from the top, down through the entire organization.”



SMITH BARNEY – CITIGROUP:



“We see Heartland as being differentiated through its use of proprietary technology, merchant advocacy policies, and a unique compensation model. Heartland has sought to compensate its internal salespeople, allowing the company to employ the same talented salespeople without bearing the risks associated with a typical ISO relationship. Furthermore, the company’s merchant-advocacy policies are an easy selling point for these talented salespeople, as they garner the company good will with merchants.”



ROBERT BAIRD:



“Differentiated positioning with transparent pricing: In an industry rife with price gouging and murky deals, Heartland promotes a clear pricing strategy with a strategy that focuses on long-term success through merchant retention.”



Heartland Payment Systems, NYSE listed: HPY

http://www.heartlandpaymentsystems.com/careers/

http://www.heartlandpaymentsystems.com

http://www.merchantBillOfRights.com



Serious applicants please respond with your resume and contact information to

michael.siegel@e-hps.com

Filed under: App Store

I've been playing with a beta of Game Doctor's Zombie Smash! for three weeks now and I can honestly say it's the most fun I've ever had on my iPhone. ZombieSmash! is a "Survival Comedy" game featuring undead-themed castle defense and entertaining, physics-based gameplay. The game casts players as Joey, a lone survivor pit against a herd of writhing, unrelenting zombies. To defeat the undead masses players must use their fingers to flick and smash the zombies until they're un-undead.

The game features six "species" of zombies, each with their own skills and abilities. Picking up and smashing zombies together, or flicking them into the air only to see their bodies crumple on the ground is fantastically entertaining thanks to the rag doll "SplatterEngine" used in the game. In addition to your fingers, you can acquire over 20 special weapons from the in-game store. The weapons can be purchased using the star points that you collect when defeating a zombie. Besides the standard collection of guns, you're able to purchase land mines, grenades, wrecking balls, liquid nitrogen containers, and even a friggin' asteroid.

In addition to the 31-night Campaign Mode, the Endless Siege and Sandbox modes lend towards the re-playability of this game when you just need to do some zombie smashing to relieve your frustrations. The game is also helped by its original soundtrack which was composed by famed game music composer Chris Hülsbeck who scored many Commodore 64 games.

ZombieSmash! goes on sale today for $1.99 for iPhone and iPod touch running OS 3.0.

TUAWHands-on with Zombie Smash! originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

And we’re humble about it too.






2010 is the year of the daddy blogger.



You can also follow Jack on Twitter @TheJackB and become a Fan on Facebook





Advance copies of Sugar Milk are now available. Click here for details.

Trebuchets are the dominant siege engine in parts of the world. They have advantages over many other weapons, including longer range, the ability to throw a variety of objects, easy maintenance, and variable power. Trebuchets include a frame from which a long, unbalanced arm (virga) swings. The...

[...]

"Search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning continues to be alive and well, with an unusually large wave of these attacks spotted during the past seven days targeting 284 of the top Google search terms. SonicWALL found 6,600 malicious URLs attacking the top search terms, including "what time do the oscars start 2010" and "disney princess half marathon." As many as nine of these terms are under attack at any one time. More than 60 malicious URLs for the princess query appeared on Google's top 30 search results between March 7 and 8, and 34 malicious URLs for the Oscars query...."

In yet another bit of climate-change-is-a-hoax snark, the braintrust over at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review smears. AND they don't get the irony of that smear. Here it is:

The climate science community says it's ready to fight back against the forces of truth responsible for exposing extensive fraud in global warming research, reports The Washington Times. At least one scientist involved in the fight-back campaign -- Stephen H. Schneider -- already is dropping the "M"-bomb, claiming that legitimate questions about such "settled science" amount to "McCarthyism." Which prompts only one logical question: Are you now, Mr. Schneider, or have you ever been, a real scientist?

Here's the Washington Times piece the braintrust cites. When you read it (and I wonder if the braintrust gave it more than a cursory glance) you'll see that the Times does NOT characterize what the science community is fighting back against as anything close to "the forces of truth responsible for exposing extensive fraud". Here's how they describe the stolen East Anglia emails:

The scientists have been under siege since late last year when e-mails leaked from a British climate research institute seemed to show top researchers talking about skewing data to push predetermined outcomes.

And:

The e-mails emerged months after another set of e-mails from a leading British climate research group seemed to show scientists shading data to try to bolster their claims, and are likely to feed the impression among skeptics that researchers are pursuing political goals as much as they are disseminating science.

That's as close as they get. Where is the indication that it's the "forces of truth"? The Times even uses the weasel-phrase "seems to show" to characterize the emails. If it did show what they want you to believe, they'd say it. But because it doesn't, they inject the "seems to show" wiggle.

In honor of both DIY Movie Making Month and our ongoing love affair with simple machines that hurl stuff, Jeff DelPapa, founder of NERDS (The New England Rubbish Deconstruction Society), sent us a link to this time-lapse video of a group of teens building a trebuchet. Jeff describes the video as "stone-simple...120x real-time, using a webcam, 8 hours in 4 minutes." He's planning on doing another trebuchet build with teams of adults, in late April, early May, as a fundraiser for the Charles River Museum of Industry.

CRMI Spring Fundraiser: Be a Siege Engineer

Read more | Permalink | Comments | Read more articles in Video Making | Digg this!

When you pick up a bag labelled organic potato chips, don't you ever think "what exactly does organic mean"? Is it a guarantee that all the ingredients in this chip bag are genetically modified organism (GMO)- and pesticide-free, better for me and for the environment? How do we know our dollars are going to fund organic farmers and practices if we don't know the definition of what passes for organic in this country?

If only Canada had an organic certification logo like America's USDA or Germany's Bio-Siegel to let us know in no uncertain terms which food products are free of chemicals and GMOs and, indeed, organic.

Well, we do have standardized organic certification in Canada. There's even a handy logo to advertise it. But most have no idea it exists—and that's a big problem for Canadian organic agriculture promotion.

According to the Canadian Government's Organic Production System Standards (OPSS) [PDF], organic food cannot be aided by genetic engineering, growth regulators, sewage sludge, or any synthetic pesticides, fungicides, or herbicides. When you buy something claiming to be organic, this is what you should be buying.

In June 2009, the Federal Ministry of Agriculture passed the Organic Products Regulation, standardizing organic certification and creating the logo. What does the logo mean? If a product carries the logo, it's got to be at least 95% organic. (According to OPSS, it's difficult to claim something is 100% organic as non-organic soil and water substance residues can find their way into organic production.) If it's 70–94% organic, it can claim X% of the product is organic, but can't carry the logo. If it's below 70% organic, it can identify the organic ingredients on the ingredients list but can't claim it's organic on the label and can't use the logo. Sounds simple enough.

Torontoist decided to engage in a little practical test to see how available Canadian Certified Organic (CCO) products were to the average Torontonian. Dipping into our local Fresh and Wild, we asked if someone could point us in the direction of products branded with the Canadian Organic logo. After being passed around to three managers, one finally presented us with a jar of salsa stamped with a USDA Organic logo.

"Actually, we're looking for the Canadian Organic logo?" Blank stare. "Um, with a maple leaf coming over rolling hills?" The blank stare morphs into a confused, mildly judgmental stare before a "We don't have that." Torontoist ventures: "Do you know what we mean, though?" Manager, chuckling: "Absolutely not."

We hadn't heard of it either until Your Food, Your Choice, hosted by the Canadian Organic Growers in February.

Dr. Andreas Boecker, associate professor with the Department of Food, Agricultural & Resource Economics at the University of Guelph, thinks our lack of logo awareness has everything to do with brand power.

"People are willing to pay a higher price for Coke [than a no-name brand], because they associate a higher value with it that is largely determined by the brand value," says Boecker. Canadian consumers might well choose CCO foods over USDA Organic if they were aware that their choice could help out Canadian farmers.

This logo is a brand. And since it's been created by the Government of Canada, Canadians own this brand. And it would appear that our PR team is shit.

So how do we spread the word to Canadians that this choice is out there? We ask for transparency. We ask restaurants to identify CCO ingredients right on their menus and post the logo in their windows. We ask farmers' markets to promote their CCO status with obvious signage. We ask grocers to advertise the fact that this logo exists and to fill their shelves with CCO food. And that they direct us to the stuff when we ask for it.

Having organic standardization is of little use if it remains largely unknown to the Canadian public. We need a groundswell to get this logo known and used. Educate yourself here. Ask your grocer if they carry CCO products the next time you do your weekly shop. Hopefully, if you ask enough times, the blank stare will turn into "Sure do, right over here."

[Image: National Geographic: "A spelunker in a glacier cave in Greenland gazes upon colors and shapes that look more like a swirling galaxy than a cave formation." Photo by Carsten Peter].

Having now spent every available moment of every day for more than a week stuck inside Storefront for Art and Architecture, painting the floors and walls, installing vinyl, coordinating deliveries, sweeping up loose tape and sawdust, and more, I've decided to upload a slightly longer than normal cache of links. It might be a few more days before I can post again.

I hope to see some of you at the exhibition opening, though, which takes place Tuesday, March 9, at 7pm: Landscapes of Quarantine.

[Image: The future is not what it used to be: MIT's thresholds seeks essays on critical futurism].

thresholds 38 | Futures: Call for Submissions: "Whether it is a revolt against the futures of the past or a curiosity towards the unknown, thresholds 38 invites methods, projects, practices and alternative kinds of critique that imagine unorthodox futures that can emerge from within this institution." Submissions due March 12.

Synthetic Aesthetics | Call for Participants: "We seek participants for a project on synthetic biology, design, and aesthetics. The project will provide funding to bring together scientists and engineers working in synthetic biology with artists, designers, and other creative practitioners." Applications due March 31.

Open Agenda | Call for Submissions: "Open Agenda is a new annual competition aimed at supporting a new generation of experimental Australian architecture. Open to recent architecture graduates, Open Agenda is focused on developing the possibilities of design research in architecture and the built environment... Open Agenda will award seed funding to three exceptional design research proposals that explore new positions in architecture for critical consideration." Register by May 1.

[Image: The Niagara Falls without their water, photographed by Flickr user rbglasson, via mammoth].

mammoth | Absent Rivers, Ephemeral Parks: "For six months in the winter and fall of 1969, Niagara’s American Falls were 'de-watered' as the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a geological survey of the falls’ rock face, concerned that it was becoming destabilized by erosion. During the interim study period, the dried riverbed and shale was drip-irrigated, like some mineral garden in a tender establishment period, by long pipes stretched across the gap, to maintain a sufficient and stabilizing level of moisture. For a portion of that period, while workers cleaned the former river-bottom of unwanted mosses and drilled test-cores in search of instabilities, a temporary walkway was installed a mere twenty feet from the edge of the dry falls, and tourists were able to explore this otherwise inaccessible and hostile landscape."

BBC | North Tyneside high street "revived" by fake shop front: "Fake businesses are to be used to lessen the impact of the recession on high streets in North Tyneside... The government-funded project involves colourful graphic designs featuring a range of different shop types, which are either taped inside the windows or screwed to the fascia so they can be removed and reused as required."

InfraNet Lab | Terrestrial Discontinuities: "...these [energy corridors in the western United States] range from 3,500-feet wide to upwards of 5 miles wide. With these widths, we could almost begin to see these corridors as an ecology in and of themselves—rather than an ecology competing with National Parks, they could become the New National Parks, infrastructural vectors, protected as natural reserves by virtue of their very danger to us."

Guardian | Greece should sell islands to keep bankruptcy at bay: "Greece must consider a fire sale of land, historic buildings and art works to cut its debts, two rightwing German politicians said today in a newspaper interview that is bound to exacerbate tensions between Athens and Berlin. Alongside austerity measures such as cuts to public sector pay and a freeze on state pensions, why not sell a few uninhabited islands..." It might be ethically wrong, as well as politically dubious, and I have no money, but BLDGBLOG would certainly buy one. The Sovereign Neo-Cyclades.

[Image: Tactical drone seed-bombing, courtesy of Design Under Sky].

Design Under Sky | Ludic Guerrilla Gardening Drone Warfare: "...with recent advancements in augmented reality and virtual gaming, I can't help but imagine that a new style of drone-based urban landscape replenishment isn't a far off possibility."

Post-Traumatic Urbanism | Mediterranean Union: "A [high-speed rail] line running along the Mediterranean littoral is a seemingly impossible idea based in visionary assumptions. After all, it would need to pass through a region mired by instability and fractured by impenetrable borders. Functioning like a conveyor at the scale of continents, it would redistribute flows of people, warping the space-time fabric of an entire region—linking long disputed territories and as yet unformed nations. It would string together a seemingly impossible series of names: Gaza, Barcelona, Beirut, Haifa, Tel Aviv, Cairo. In doing so it would open a conduit between the differential pressures of North Africa and Europe—all this in the context of EU policy that increasingly conceives of Southern Europe as a bulwark against refugees. The political question we asked ourselves is the following one: what are the emancipatory potentials of infrastructure?"

City of Sound | Notes on New Songdo City (Part 1): "...it occurs to me that the logical thing to do would be the greatest engineering project of the next centuries; quite possibly the greatest diplomatic and economic project of the next centuries too, linking Japan with China via Korea via a high-speed rail link across gigantic bridges."

Spaceinvading | Sandwiched by INABA: "As part of the 2010 Whitney Biennial, Jeffrey Inaba's firm INABA was commissioned to design a pop‐up café located in the museum's interior courtyard. The project consists of three large‐scale lanterns that occupy the courtyard's double‐height space; a 24‐foot long service counter; communal tables; high‐top counters; and 'droopy' seat cushions."

[Image: A project by CJ Lim].

SCI-Arc | London Eight Exhibition: "SCI-Arc presents London Eight, curated by renowned English architect Sir Peter Cook. A founding member of the 1960s futurist group Archigram and a visiting faculty member at SCI-Arc, Cook invited five architects who currently teach at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where Cook was professor from 1990 to 2005, to participate in an exhibition at the SCI-Arc Library Gallery. These architects were then asked to select a 'protege' whom they had mentored through their studies at the Bartlett to exhibit alongside their own work in the gallery." Includes work by Smout Allen, Johan Hybschmann, Marjan Colletti & Marcos Cruz, Yousef Al-Mehdari, CJ Lim, and Pascal Bronner.

Hudson Valley Seed Library | "The Hudson Valley Seed Library strives to do two things: to create an accessible and affordable source of regionally-adapted seeds that is maintained by a community of caring gardeners; and, to create gift-quality seed packs featuring works designed by New York artists in order to celebrate the beauty of heirloom gardening."

Urban Forest Map | "The Urban Forest Map is a collaborative project among city agencies, tree advocacy groups, and citizen foresters like you to map every tree in San Francisco, which will help protect and expand our urban forests."

GOOD | Fallen Fruit's Tree-planting Dreams Are Uprooted In Madrid: "For the last 10 days Fallen Fruit had been scouring the area [around Madrid], leading urban foraging trips to find what other fruit-bearing trees existed in the neighborhood around the city-funded Matadero art space, plotting the best locations for future apples, peaches, plums, pears, and apricots... The plan was to have the trees planted before their final presentation that night, giving the people of Madrid a map to all the public fruit they could eventually eat."

Cleveland Plain Dealer | Galleria mall is giant greenhouse, raising organic crops in Cleveland: "...by late spring or early summer, there will be fresh tomatoes for sale among the shops and galleries at the downtown Cleveland mall. Very fresh—as in vine-grown in bags and troughs hanging from steel stair banisters and ceiling beams in the shopping center that stretches between East Ninth and East 12th streets."

[Image: King's Vineyard, London by Soonil Kim, via Pruned].

Pruned | King's Vineyard, London: "One can certainly imagine such a network [of aerial vineyards and urban viticultural installations] built to grow others things, such as vegetables, herbs, fruits, cash crops, commercial flowers and plants, with the winery turned into a farmer's market."

Independent | Syria's Stonehenge: Neolithic stone circles, alignments and possible tombs discovered: "Dr. Mason explains that he 'went for a walk' into the eastern perimeter of the site—an area that hasn’t been explored by archaeologists. What he discovered is an ancient landscape of stone circles, stone alignments and what appear to be corbelled roof tombs. From stone tools found at the site, it’s likely that the features date to some point in the Middle East’s Neolithic Period—a broad stretch of time between roughly 8500 BC – 4300 BC. It is thought that in Western Europe megalithic construction involving the use of stone only dates back as far as ca. 4500 BC. This means that the Syrian site could well be older than anything seen in Europe."

New York Times | A Jewish Ritual Collides With Mother Nature: "From Washington to New York State, a series of 'snowmageddons' have wreaked a particular form of havoc for Orthodox Jews. The storms have knocked down portions of the ritual boundary known as an eruv in Jewish communities... Almost literally invisible even to observant Jews, the wire or string of an eruv, connected from pole to pole, allows the outdoors to be considered an extension of the home. Which means, under Judaic law, that one can carry things on the Sabbath, an act that is otherwise forbidden outside the house. Prayer shawls, prayer books, bottles of wine, platters of food and, perhaps most important, strollers with children in them—Orthodox Jews can haul or tote such items within the eruv. When a section of an eruv is knocked down by, let’s say, a big snowstorm, then the alerts go out by Internet and robocall, and human behavior changes dramatically."

Spillway | Why Ambassador, With This Perimeter You Are Really Spoiling Us: "One progresses from queue to queue before entering the building, progressing to slightly higher echelons of security clearance each time depending on the paperwork one has brought with one. Unsmiling police officers with automatic weapons stare at you, and you realize that if you made a dash towards the building itself, you would have to enter an area of open space that designed as a killzone, surrounded by armed representatives of the Metropolitan constabulary. Behind crossfire plaza is the building itself, its generous Scandinavian spaces seemingly as distant as the country you are trying to visit. The contradictions of that space are horribly unsettling, with a strongly dystopian odour: we can see the structures of a democracy retrofitted with the apparatus of authoritarianism. It gives a sense of how far we've fallen in 10 years."

[Image: The "High Houses" of Lebbeus Woods].

Lebbeus Woods | High Houses: "The High Houses are proposed as part of the reconstruction of Sarajevo after the siege of the city that lasted from 1992 though late 1995. Their site is the badly damaged 'old tobacco factory' in the Marijn dvor section near the city center."

Serial Consign | Toronto Sound Ecology: "Toronto Sound Ecology is a web mapping project dedicated to archiving field recordings collected in and around Toronto."

Some landscapes | Alpine Symphony: "Birdsong, thunderstorms and flowing water are pretty standard, but... would it be possible to move away from the sublime and the picturesque, to convey more unusual settings or simply nondescript landscapes through purely orchestral sound?"

Google Earth Blog | Solving a Murder With Google Earth: "On January 24, 2006, Jennifer Kesse vanished. The police quickly determined that she was abducted, but nothing solid has turned up in the past four years... During this time, users on her site discussed the new events and came to a stunning revelation: using Google Earth's historical imagery, they found an image from approximately one month after she disappeared. The image seems to show some promising information."

Related from last summer: Sydney Morning Herald | Mugging suspects snapped by Google Street View: "Dutch police have arrested twin brothers on suspicion of robbery after their alleged victim spotted a picture of them following him on Google Map's Street View feature."

National Geographic | Quintana Roo Underwater Cave Project: "Beneath the jungles of the Yucatan peninsula, [Sam] Meacham and his team are exploring and mapping the longest underwater cave system in the world." See also: Blue Holes Project: "Blue holes can run extremely deep underground, with one Bahamian blue hole exceeding 600 feet (180 meters) below sea level, and contain a series of mazelike passageways going miles in many directions. These cave systems can transition from giant rooms to tiny holes that divers must remove all of their gear in order to squeeze through. To add to the challenge, currents reverse in the ocean caves, making timing of dives critical."

[Image: Architizer comes to Los Angeles].

Architizer | Los Angeles Launch Announcement: "We are happy to announce that on March 18th, we will be hosting a party in Los Angeles at the new A+D Museum space [at 6032 Wilshire Boulevard]. In partnership with Haworth, Dwell Magazine, LA Forum, SCI-Arc, and BLDGBLOG, the event will be an evening to meet fellow Los Angeleno architects as well as a celebration of Los Angeles architecture culture." Here is a map. If you're in LA, stop by and say hello!

[Image: Rendering of the new A+D Museum].

(Some links via @doingitwrong, @javierest, @geoparadigm, @stevesilberman, and possibly elsewhere. Don't miss Quick Links 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7).

It seems strange to think now that, until recently, the ICTY was intended to be closed by December 2010; the UN Security Council recently extended its mandate to December 2012, meaning that the work of the court will continue past the milestone of twenty years since the start of the devastating wars in the former Yugoslavia. Yet the events of the past week seem to indicate that even two more years is not long enough for the ICTY to fulfil its goal of prosecuting those responsible for war crimes and genocide—high profile war crimes fugitives Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic have still not been arrested, whilst Radovan Karadzic managed to hide from justice for twelve years between his ICTY indictment and his arrest in 2008. Meanwhile, as Karadzic is now busy making a mockery of the ICTY’s process, Britain has found itself in a divisive diplomatic row with Bosnia over the arrest of University of Sarajevo professor Ejup Ganic, whilst last week saw the announcement of a concert to raise money for those indicted by the ICTY in Croatia.

While war crimes were committed by all sides during the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, the 44 month siege of Sarajevo—estimated to have killed 10,000 and injured 56,000—stands out as one of the most shocking. One of the 11 indictments against Radovan Karadzic is his role in the siege as Bosnian Serb leader during the 1992-1996 assault on the city. On Tuesday, a day after Karadzic’s trial reopened, the former Bosnian leader—as defiant as Milosevic at the start of his trial in 2001—claimed that Bosnian Muslims orchestrated the siege of Sarajevo in order to engineer a Nato attack on Bosnian Serbs, whilst dismissing the 1995 massacre of over 7,000 men and boys in Srebrenica as a “myth.” Then, just as these old wounds were being reopened, Karadzic’s trial was postponed once more, so that the Appellate Chamber could decide on Karadzic’s appeal against a previous decision in which the Trial Chamber rejected his request for postponement. Like a bad parody of Kafka, the court has postponed Karadzic’s trial in order to rule on an earlier postponement. In the meantime, witnesses who came to The Hague to testify have been turned away a second time, and the traumas of those affected by the siege and by Srebrenica have been forced to the surface without any chance to respond.

Whilst Karadzic has been allowed to make a mockery of the ICTY’s process, there was nonetheless a glimmer of hope this week that, despite Karadzic’s theatrics, the process of bringing war criminals to justice was functioning at least as well as normal. The arrest of alleged Montenegrin war criminal Veselin Vlahoiv Batko, known as the ‘Monster of Grbavica’, in Spain on Tuesday had little of the drama and myth-making that Karadzic has brought to the justice process: Batko claims he is “tired of running” from the arrest warrants against him and seems likely to co-operate with the judicial process. Spanish newspaper El Pais quoted police sources saying that Batko confessed to his role in raping, torturing and killing civilians in the Grbavica area of Sarajevo during the war. Both Montenegro and Bosnia requested his extradition to their countries after his arrest in Spain; Serbia’s Ministry of Justice later added their own extradition request for crimes they claim Batko has committed in Serbia. While the question of which country will succeed in extraditing Batko largely rests on the still unresolved question of whether he has a Bosnian passport, his confession and Bosnia and Serbia’s mutual desire to see him brought to justice, could have signalled a return to the grim normality of prosecuting war criminals.

However, Batko’s arrest has been quickly overshadowed by that of Ejup Ganic at London’s Heathrow airport, provoking a diplomatic row to rival the dispute in late 2009 in which Britain failed to guarantee that Israeli politician Tzipi Livni would not be arrested for war crimes. It seems fair to say that Britain has not yet given a consistent answer as to why they arrested Ganic without bail, yet quickly attempted to make amends with Israel after ‘universal jurisdiction’ was very briefly invoked in relation to Livni. () A source of particular grievance to many Bosniaks this week has been that Ganic was arrested in Heathrow after an extradition appeal that came directly from Serbia to Britain: the ICTY has already investigated allegations made against Ganic and has refused to issue an indictment for war crimes.

An academic by profession, Ganic was President of Bosnia for around 48 hours in 1992, whilst Alia Itzetbegovic was held hostage by the JNA in Sarajevo airport as he returned from peace talks in Portugal. During this period, Serbian officials claim that Ganic ordered an ambush of a UN-sponsored evacuation, leading to the deaths of 42 soldiers. That Ganic’s arrest came just as Karadzic’s trial commenced in The Hague has strained tensions between Serbia and Bosnia, as Bosnian officials have seen the arrest of Ganic as ‘retaliatory’ and an attempt to make an equivalence between Ganic and Karadzic. As of Thursday, a Facebook fan page calling for the release of Ganic has reached over 17,000 members, and the Bosniak member of BiH’s three-seat Presidency has vowed to “fight to defend the rights of our citizens and the dignity of war resistance to the aggression that was launched on Bosnia.”

It remains to be seen how the ICTY will respond to this escalation of accusations and counter-accusations. It is, however, becoming clearer that citizens from all countries involved in the 1990s conflicts are losing faith in the processes of prosecuting those responsible for war crimes. Last week, it was announced that a concert of Croatian musicians will be held in Split to raise funds for the defence of three we crime indictees accused of the deportation and murder of Serb civilians in 1995—another indication that the UN Tribunal can no longer ignore the issue of its declining credibility in the region, and that allowing Karadzic to turn his trial into a farce is further exacerbating the issue.

Of course, the ICTY’s credibility has often been disputed. In her 2004 book ‘They Would Never Hurt A Fly’, journalist Slavenka Drakulic describes how, in the early days of the Tribunal, nationalist politicians—often the same politicians as had been in power in the early 1990s—created a powerful rhetoric equating defiance of the ICTY with patriotism, and evidence of its alleged bias were widely disseminated. As Drakulic notes, Serbia’s experience of sanctions and the NATO bombings in the 1990s also lent weight to feelings that Serbia has been disproportionately targeted or portrayed as the sole aggressor, as did the comparative lack of public acknowledgement of the war crimes committed against Serb civilians. In Bosnia, meanwhile, post-Dayton institutional entrenchment of ethnic divisions means that children from the three official ‘constituent nations’ now study different curricula based on their official ethnic identity: history classes attended by Bosnian Croat and Bosnian Serb children use textbooks from the neighbouring states, while lessons for Bosnian Muslims use textbooks created for their purposes. All three curricula explain the 1990s wars in terms of a struggle for independence and self-defence against the aggressors of the other ethnic groups: the ICTY prosecutions betray these official histories.

With Karadzic’s mocking theatrics, a concert for war crime indictees in Croatia, and a diplomatic row over Ejup Ganic’s arrest in London, it is hard to see how the ICTY will recover legitimacy amongst the communities to whom it is intended to bring justice, whilst in the time since the Tribunal was established the compulsory ethnic-identification has become increasingly institutionalised and entrenched. Relations between Bosnia and Serbia had recently been improving—the Sarajevo-Belgrade railway had symbolically re-opened in late 2009—yet Ganic’s arrest could easily set back this normalisation. Moreover, the election of the moderate Jospovic in late 2009 in Croatia had been seen as a sign of hope that the country could fully move on from the Tudjman era. The events of this week unfortunately seem to indicate that there is much further to go than had recently seemed possible.

Sideboxes

Related stories: 

Radovan Karadzic: the politics of an arrest

Radovan Karadzic’s capture: a moment for history

Serbia's tipping-point arrest

Bosnia's error of othering

A Social Democrat wins in Croatia – and the Balkans move forward

Has Europe dropped the Balkans?

oD-wide classification

Topics: 

Conflict

Democracy and government

International politics

Photo/Sara Krulwich

In a cruelly ironic jab to Circle in the Square's theater-in-the-round production of The Miracle Worker, many of the audience members will, at one point or another, be entirely blind to what's happening on stage. Thankfully, William Gibson's script--which has aged surprisingly well--is far from deafening, and is neatly delivered by a talented cast.

The tear-jerking plot, as you've surely seen (or seen parodied) before, is based on the true story of the attempts of twenty-year-old Annie Sullivan (Alison Pill) to teach the blind and deaf Helen Keller (Abigail Breslin) to understand words. Along the way, she must deal with Keller's coddling mother (Jennifer Morrison), strict yet spoiling father (Matthew Modine), as well as with her own youth and inexperience. Of these four main characters, Morrison has the least the work with; that she still finds a way to show a heartfelt resolve beneath those manners is a sign of how well Kate Whoriskey works with her actors. (In other words, anyone would struggle to stage The Miracle Worker in the round: a play built around still, quiet, and tentative moments has few opportunities to cheat out.)

In any case, The Miracle Worker leaves little room for directorial "meddling," and the production is very smoothly and straightforwardly done, so as to leave the emphasis on the story itself. Derek McLane's set slides up as easily from the floor as it glides down from the sky, and Kenneth Posner's lighting neatly focuses the action during Sullivan's nightmares of childhood (even when her back is to the audience). It's all so functional, in fact, that we forget the old-timey bits (the social status of the 1880s) and focus entirely on the bravura performances from Breslin and Pill.

It's no surprise to find Pill entirely capable of playing this strong woman--her rigorous convictions were cemented in The Lieutenant of Inishmore, her determination in Mauritus, and her fiery doubts in Reasons To Be Pretty: she's been engineered to crisply say things like, "You think I'm so easily gotten rid of? I have nothing else to do." Her steeliness is abetted by those killer shades of her (the ones for her own ocular conditions): "The room's a wreck, but her napkin is folded," she says, staring down an increasingly flustered Modine. It's a delight to find her matched by Breslin, who has the near-impossible role of playing a wild child without sinking to cheap melodrama. Though she has no vocabulary, she is filled with an expressive language, a wide range of frustrated emotions. When she fights with Sullivan, unwilling to use a spoon, there is a moment when she realizes how useful the spoon can be--her face lights up--and then quickly hides that, and, rebelliously determined not to give in, she flings it to the ground again. These action-packed moments bring out the best of the cast and the director, even if the nuance is unfortunately always lost on a quarter of the audience.

The real miracle of The Miracle Worker is that, despite being entirely predictable, it is still filled with the desperate hopes that make for engaging drama. Though many of the scenes between Keller and Sullivan are based on the same spelled-out repetitions ("It has a name"), neither actress is at a loss for finding new tactics or deeper motivations. When Sullivan pushes to take Keller away from her family and the crippling nature of pity, Captain Keller rebukes her: "This is hardly a war." But Sullivan (and Whoriskey) know better: "Well, it's not love. A siege is a siege." By keeping such high stakes and refusing to indulge in platitudes, the production remains dramatically sound, even when the staging slips.

The Manchester United forward's latest addition to his armoury is another step on the path to greatness

The Germans have a knack for bestowing their football players with pithy nicknames: Kaiser for Franz Beckenbauer, Bomber for Gerd Müller and Afro-Paule for the magnificently hirsute Paul Breitner. But my favourite has always been Kopfballungeheuer, the Header Beast, for Horst Hrubesch, the striker with an amazing gift for scoring headed goals with bullet-like power and precision.

Trawling the internet after the Carling Cup final I was intrigued to note that a website had marked the development of one of our own and decided to elevate him on to the tubby Hamburg forward's pedestal. There's only one Kaiser but the match report's headline, Kopfballungeheuer Rooney, suggests that Manchester United's No10 has stolen Hrubesch's moniker and mantle.

Over the past few months Wayne Rooney has become remarkably adept at scoring with headers. He has showcased a full range of deft, cushioned deflections, ones drilled powerfully off his forehead, loopers off the side of his head and snide, little glancers. Against West Ham United he even managed one from the most sublime category, the diving header, and though it does not rank as high as Allan Clarke's for Leeds United in the 1972 FA Cup final win over Arsenal, Keith Houchen's for Coventry City against Tottenham Hotspur at Wembley in 1987 or the majestic, graceful swoop of Michel Platini's goal for France against Yugoslavia in the 1984 European Championship, it did illustrate how much progress Rooney is making in refining his repertoire.

In the defeat of Milan at San Siro he even showed that he is perfecting the scientifically dubious art of hanging in the air. Everton's Tim Cahill is the current master of that and it allows him to spring up a split-second earlier than his marker anticipates and gives him an advantage over defenders whose height would normally allow them to snuff out the Australian's aerial threat. Gary Speed also used to be very good in the air, brilliantly timing his run and jump, bravely craning his neck to nip in front of a centre-half's challenge and taking a smack in the back of the head as an acceptable price to pay.

Courage on the field comes in many forms – risking taking a kick in the tackle, being hungry for the ball however tight the situation and having the technique and temperament to deal with it without panic – but it would be difficult to dispute that those players who were willing to launch headfirst into challenges were the most intrepid of all. Some, of course, had to, having realised they were far more comfortable heading it than kicking it. Andy Gray or Lee Chapman, for example, must have regularly had grass burns on their noses so low did they stoop to head crosses in preference to throwing out a foot at the ball.

Duncan Ferguson was a fearless attacking header of the ball and so was Jack Charlton. Earlier in his career Charlton sometimes played as an emergency centre-forward but the majority of his hundred-plus goals for Leeds and England were scored with his head from set-pieces while playing at centre-half. No wonder the opposition referred to him as the "effing giraffe". Even if at the age of 74 he was pushed on to the pitch at corners like a siege engine I would not put it past him to remain pretty effective.

Give him an opportunity with his head and he would usually bury it but he was less confident with the ball at his feet. During the 1966 World Cup final, with the score at 1-1, he was disturbed to find it approaching him in West Germany's penalty area on the rebound from Wolfgang Weber's block. At first, in Brian Glanville's evocative phrase, "it rose tantalisingly in the air as though on a jet of water in a shooting gallery". But when it dipped and Charlton realised he was going to have to kick it he felt frozen. To his immense relief Martin Peters took the initiative and, with a crisp half-volley, put England ahead.

Heading is a skill that does not enjoy the same cachet as passing and shooting, especially among those puritans and pedants who say things such as "it's called football for a reason". Indeed, there's that old north-west English insult for someone who is a bit daft – "head-the-ball".

Rooney has shown, however, with his dedication to practice and numerous games of head tennis and headers and volleys that honing his craft and broadening his armoury brings huge rewards. Given his unrelenting quest for improvement one can only speculate what he will turn to next – cultivating scoring with his thighs and knees or, like Ian Rush towards the end of his career, polishing his ability to bundle the ball over the line with his arse. Now, that would really make him the complete player.