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Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Japanese Tunnel was Massacre's tunnel, West Sumatera

The longest Tunnel on the bottom of the town Bukittinggi

Japanese tunnel in Bukittinggi
Japan hole in Bukittinggi is one of the historical attractions in the city of Bukittinggi, West Sumatra, Indonesia. Japan hole is a tunnel (bunker) the protection of the Japanese occupation forces built around the year 1942 for defense.

History

Earlier, Japan's Hole was built as a storage supplies and equipment Japanese soldiers of war, with a long tunnel that reaches 1400 m and winding and has a width of about 2 meters. A number of specific rooms contained in this tunnel, among them the space reconnaissance, ambush rooms, prisons, and armory.

One of Japan's entrance into the holes in the Ngarai Sianok 
In addition to its strategic location in the city that was once a center of government of Central Sumatra, the land that became the wall of this tunnel is a type of soil which, when mixed with water will be more robust. Even the earthquake that shook West Sumatra in 2009 and then not much damage to the tunnel structure.

It is estimated that tens to hundreds of thousands of forced labor or romusha deployed from the island of Java, Sulawesi and Kalimantan to dig this tunnel. Election workers from outside this area is the Japanese colonial strategy to maintain the confidentiality of this mega project. Labor from Bukittinggi itself deployed them to work on the tunnel defenses in Bandung and Biak Island.

Tourist Attraction

Japan began to run into holes historical attractions in the year 1984, by the town of Bukittinggi. Some of Japan's entrance into these holes are located on Gorges area Sianok, Panorama Park, next to the Bung Hatta Palace and Zoo in Bukittinggi.

Quoted from WIKIPEDIA
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Published by Gusti Putra at: 12:21 AM
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Tuesday, December 13, 2011

4 soldiers die in training exercise


Two Army helicopters crash at Washington base, four soldiers killed

SEATTLE - Two Army helicopters crashed Monday night at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in an accident that killed four soldiers, a military spokesman said late Monday.

The two-seat OH-58D Kiowa Warrior observation helicopters crashed after 8 p.m. (11 p.m. ET) in the southwest training area of the sprawling base near Tacoma, Wash., according the Army.

KIRO TV reported that local fire crews reached the crash sites, but there were no survivors. The victims were not immediately identified, even by unit, pending notification of relatives.
It was not immediately clear whether the aircraft collided or crashed separately.
"We don't have details on what actually occurred," base spokesman J.C. Mathews said. "That will be part of the investigation."

He was unable to say whether the wreckage of the two helicopters was found in close proximity.
The crash site is geographically closest to the civilian community of Rainier, which is south of Tacoma, Mathews said. There were no injuries on the ground, KCPQ TV reported.
Joint Base Lewis-McChord spokesman Lt. Col. Gary Dangerfield
gives a brief statement about the crash of two Army OH-58 Kiowa helicopters Monday.

There are more than 40,000 military personnel stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and with dependent family members the population is 100,000, KCPQ TV said.

Base officials secured the crash site late Monday and immediately began an investigation. The Combat Readiness Center at Fort Rucker, Ala., will lead the overall investigation into the accident, base spokesman Joe Piek said.

"Our thoughts and prayers go out to the family, friends and loved ones of the soldiers involved in this tragic accident," said Maj. Gen. Lloyd Miles, acting senior Army commander at Lewis-McChord and deputy commanding general of I Corps.

"We will conduct a thorough investigation into this incident, and we will do everything in our power to support the families of the brave soldiers who died this evening," he said.

Temperatures at the base were around the mid-20 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday evening, and local media reported a likelihood of fog in the woods where the crash was said to have occurred.
The Kiowa Warrior is a single-engine, four-bladed aircraft used for armed reconnaissance, Mathews said. It's often called a scout helicopter.

Adapted from MSN
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Published by Gusti Putra at: 11:34 PM
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A Ghost Ship at Full Sail ... Without a Crew

Ghost Ship

In 1872, the crew of the Mary Celeste disappeared without a trace. Her story only got weirder from there.

The Mary Celeste
It's the stuff of maritime legend: a ship sighted in the distance, hailed without response, and boarded to reveal a vessel under full sail, its wheel creaking aimlessly, cabin doors slamming open and shut in the wind, and ...not a soul onboard.  

On Dec. 4, 1872, it actually happened. The Mary Celeste was discovered between the Azores and Portugal—her crew vanished without a trace of a struggle, the ship still fully provisioned. What calamity befell the ship remains a mystery. A final log entry, on Nov. 24, showed no hint of distress. The cabin of Capt. Benjamin Briggs was untouched, right down to the sewing machine and parlor melodeon belonging to his wife and infant daughter; the child's ghostly indentation remained visible on a bed. The crew must have "left in a great hurry," reported the boarding party, for their pipes and tobacco were still there—and no sailor, they noted, willingly abandons ship without his pipe.

Theories on the cause of the disappearance have ranged from cargo fumes to mutiny to (inevitably) alien abduction. The Mary Celeste's fate inspired fictional solutions in an Arthur Conan Doyle story (which blamed a race war), a 1935 Hammer horror film (a hook-armed Bela Lugosi), and a Dr. Who episode (Daleks, of course.)

What's not as well-known is that the Mary Celeste was also at the center of a second mystery. The disconcerting disappearance of its crew notwithstanding, the Mary Celeste still had plenty of life left in her, and soon went back into service. Thirteen years and 17 hapless owners later, Mary was mostly infamous for being in poor shape and for losing money on runs from Boston to Africa and the West Indies. It was merely one final indignity when she wrecked off Haiti in January 1885, slamming squarely into Rochelois Reef, a known hazard. The ship didn’t sink, but its hopelessly splintered remains would never leave the reef. Capt. Gilman Parker declared the cursed ship a loss, and then went ashore to sell the salvage rights to a load of ale, cutlery, and shoes for $500. That's where the story might have ended—except that police showed up at the captain's door in Boston three months later. The Mary Celeste, they charged, was a 282-ton, fully-rigged insurance scam.

The July 1885 trial of Capt. Parker and the ship's co-owners, now buried in the Boston Globe archives, offers a fascinating glimpse into a Gilded Age flimflam. Laying out charts and totting up blackboard figures in a broiling Boston courtroom, prosecutors revealed a chain of scams that reached from Haiti back to the alleyways of their own city.  

Capt. Parker might have pulled it off, too, except that he'd gotten greedy: Not content to rip off just his insurers, he also tried to con the local salvager in Haiti. The salvager hadn't found anything near the 125 casks of Bass ale promised on the ship's manifest, and the few he did locate weren't exactly good drinking. Called to the stand, a Boston bottler revealed they were moldy blanks with Bass labels pasted to them, and filled with "ullage"—bottom-of-barrel runoff from smashed and leaking bottles. The bottler hadn't even bothered filling many of them; some were “half full, some a third full, and some just enough to wet the bottle."
The rest of the cargo was similarly suspect. The 975 barrels of "New Fortune Herring"? That was actually 780 barrels of rotten fish that stank so badly that one fish merchant said it was good only "for fertilizers." Wooden barrels of "Fine" butter proved to be rank "slush." The Haiti-bound food cargo was so foul that one conspirator was overheard musing, "If these n— eat that fish and drink that beer, they will all be dead."

A crate supposed to contain $1,000 in cutlery, when pried open, revealed $50 worth of dog collars. Boxes of "women's high-button boots" were old galoshes. The ship and its cargo, covered by five insurers for a whopping $34,000, were hardly worth the kerosene necessary to burn the wreck. Capt. Parker, in short, was in deep trouble.

"The defense lawyers were wild," one investigator later marveled of Parker's shambolic team. Parker's attorney cited famed Massachusetts eccentric "Lord" Timothy Dexter—a late-18th-century merchant who supposedly shipped mittens and warming pans to the West Indies—to assert that the Mary Celeste's cargo belonged to a splendid tradition of crazy-like-a-fox speculations. If the vulpine side of the simile was left unexplained, the crazy part was easy to spot. Haitians didn't typically buy new Bass ale or salted herring, let alone rotten beer and fish.

"They say the goods were overinsured. Suppose they were. It is a common thing to overinsure," sputtered Parker's attorney. And if the crew said the goods were worthless, well, everyone knew they liked to tell stories. "Spinning a yarn is a sailor's phrase," he insisted. For more click Continue!


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Published by Gusti Putra at: 4:29 PM
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Monday, December 12, 2011

Google Logo Commemorates Birthday to Robert Norton Noyce 84th

Robert Norton Noyce Birthday 84th

Google Logo Commemorates Birthday to Robert Norton Noyce 84th
Robert Norton Noyce (December 12, 1927 - June 3, 1990), nicknamed "the Mayor of Silicon Valley", founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 and Intel in 1968. He is also credited (along with Jack Kilby) with the invention of the integrated circuit or microchip that sparked the personal computer revolution and gave Silicon Valley Noyce's name is also a mentor and father figure to a whole generation of entrepreneurs.

He was born on December 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa. He was the third of four sons of the Rev. Ralph Brewster Noyce His father is a 1915 graduate of Doane College, 1920 graduate of Oberlin College, and graduated in 1923 from the Chicago Theological Seminary. He was a Congregational pastor and associate superintendent of the Conference of Congregational Churches of Iowa in the 1930s and the 1940s. His mother, Harriet May Norton, a graduate of Oberlin College in 1921, is the daughter of the Rev. J. Milton Norton, a Congregational minister, and Louise Hill. He has been described as an intelligent woman with a will to rule

Robert Norton Noyce
Childhood memory of his father's beatings involving the ping pong and feel absolutely shattered when his mother's reaction to the news was thrilling disturbed "Is not that a good father to let you win?" Even at the age of five years, Noyce was offended by the idea of ​​intentionally losing anything. "That's not a game," he sulked to his mother. "If you're going to play, play to win!"

In the summer of 1940, when he was 12, he built a mini-sized airplane with his brother, which they use to fly from the cage roof Grinnell School. Then he built a radio from scratch and his sled motor with a propeller and welding machines from the former washing machine.


Education

He grew up in Grinnell, Iowa and attended local schools. He exhibited a talent for math and science while in high school and took courses in physics Grinnell College student's senior year. He graduated from Grinnell High School in 1945 and entered Grinnell College in the fall of that year. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA in physics and mathematics from Grinnell College in 1949. He also received the signal honor of her classmates: Brown Derby Prize, which recognizes "the senior who won the best value with the least amount of work". He received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953. He studied first transistor, developed at Bell Laboratories, in Grinnell School classrooms.

Meanwhile, Noyce scholars attending courses physics professor Grant Gale and fascinated by physics. Gale won two of the first transistor ever come out of Bell Labs and showed them to his class and Noyce terpikat.Hibah Gale advised to follow the doctoral program in physics at MIT that he did.


Career

After graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953, he took his first job as a research engineer at Philco Corporation in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He left in 1956 for the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California.

He joined William Shockley at the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, a division of Beckman Instruments, but left with the "Eight traitorous" in 1957, after experiencing problems with respect to quality management, and co-founded the influential Fairchild Semiconductor corporation. According to Sherman Fairchild, Noyce passionate presentation of his vision is the reason Sherman Fairchild has agreed to create the semiconductor division to Eight traitor.

Noyce and Gordon E. Moore founded Intel in 1968 when they left Fairchild Semiconductor.Arthur Rock, chairman of the board of Intel and major investor in the company said that for Intel to succeed, Intel needed Noyce, Moore and Grove. And it requires them in that order. Noyce: visionary, was born to inspire; Moore: The Virtuoso technology; and Grove: technologist turned management scientists [22] relaxed corporate culture that Noyce brought to Intel is a carry over from the force at Fairchild Semiconductor.

He treats his employees as family, rewarding and encouraging teamwork. Your follow-happiness of his management style set the tone for many Valley success story. Noyce's management style could be called a "roll up your sleeve." He avoids the luxury car company, reserved parking spaces, private jets, offices, and furnishings that support a less structured environment, a relaxed working where everyone contributes and no one benefited from lavish perquisites.

With the decline in regular executive privilege, he stood as a model for future generations of Intel's CEO. At Intel, he oversaw Ted Hoff invention of the microprocessor-the second revolution.

Building the headquarters of Intel, Robert Noyce Building, in Santa Clara, California, named in his honor, such as Robert N. Noyce '49 Science Center, which houses the science division of Grinnell College.
In a recent interview, Noyce was asked what he would do if he's "Emperor" of the United States. He said that he would, among other things, "make sure we are preparing the next generation to thrive in high-tech age, and that means low education and poor, as well as at the graduate school level .."


Family

He married Elizabeth Bottomley in 1953 and divorced in 1974. They have four children together. On November 27, 1974 married Ann Noyce Schmeltz Bowers. Bowers was the first Director of Personnel for Intel Corporation and the first Vice President of Human Resources for Apple Inc. He now serves as Chairman of the Board and founder trustee Noyce Foundation. Active all his life, Noyce enjoyed reading Hemingway, flying his own plane, hang gliding, and scuba diving.

He believed that microelectronics will continue to advance in complexity and sophistication far beyond its current state, leading to questions about what the public will make use of technology.

Noyce died of a heart attack at home on June 3, 1990 at Seton Medical Center in Austin, Texas. At the time of his death, he was president and CEO of Sematech Inc., a nonprofit consortium conducting basic research into semiconductor manufacturing. It was organized as a partnership between the governments of the United States and 14 companies in an effort to help the American computer industry catch up with Japan in the field of semiconductor manufacturing technology.


Awards and honors

In July, 1959, he filed U.S. Patent 2,981,877 "Semiconductor Device and Structure of Lead", the kind of integrated circuits. Efforts to independently recorded only a few months after the key findings of the inventor Jack Kilby. For his co-invention of integrated circuits and the impact of changing the world, three presidents of the United States in his honor.

Noyce is a holder of honorary degrees and awards. President Ronald Reagan awarded him the National Medal of Technology in 1987. Two years later, George H.W. Bush appointed him to the Hall of Fame Business. President George HW Bush presented the award, sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering, in a black tie ceremony held at the State Department. In 1990, Noyce also shared with Jack Kilby, inventor of the transistor John Bardeen, and several other celebrities, received the "Lifetime Achievement Medal" for the celebration of two centuries of the Patent Act.

Noyce received the Franklin Institute Stuart Ballantine Medal in 1966. [28] He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1978 "for contributions to silicon integrated circuits, the foundation of modern electronics." In 1979, he was awarded the National Medal of Science. Noyce was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980. The National Academy of Engineering awarded him the 1989 Charles Stark Draper Prize.
Mr. Noyce inducted into the Junior Achievement U.S. Business Hall of Fame in 1989. Science building at his alma mater, Grinnell College, named after him.


Legacy

Noyce Foundation was founded in 1991 by his family. The Foundation is dedicated to improving public education in mathematics and science in grade K-12.

Edited from Stanastanza



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Published by Gusti Putra at: 12:49 AM
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Niagara Falls displays dazzling light shows

Niagara Falls displays dazzling light shows in winter

NIAGARA FALLS, Ontario – You can't take a boat ride into the roar and spray of Niagara Falls in the winter, but this time of year offers a different spectacle: Nighttime illumination of the falls in a changing array of colors - red, white, blue, purple, orange, amber and green.

The tourism season at Niagara Falls is slowing,
but November started the busy season for those
who light the falls in colors every night.
In spring and summer, the colored lights shine for just three hours, but with less daylight in winter, curtains of color wash over the falls each night for up to seven hours.

Crowds gather along the sidewalk and railing on Niagara Parkway to see the show as mist rises from the falls and basin in front of them; others watch from the windows of hotels and restaurants on the Canadian side.

The display starts with patriotic themes - red, white and blue for the American Falls, red and white for the horseshoe-shaped Canadian Falls - and frequently includes colors to honor a cause. When Niagara Falls hosted the first wedding following New York's legalization of same-sex marriage in July, Mayor Paul Dyster arranged for a rainbow of colors, the symbol of gay pride. On Nov. 16, the falls were lit by white light for 15-minute stretches for lung cancer awareness, a request made by Christine Dwyer, who founded a group called Make Some Noise for Lung Cancer Awareness after losing her best friend to the disease.

"I think it validates us a bit," said Dwyer, of Becket, Mass. She said supporters sent her emails after the lighting saying, "I heard about this, I'm in tears, I'm so grateful."

The light beams emanate from a bank of 18 spotlights, each 30 inches in diameter, sitting atop a raised stone bunker across the road. For more than 50 years, Peter Gordon, 80, has been manning the light show, splitting the week with "the rookie," Dick Mann, 78, who has been at it just under 30 years. Both are from Ontario.

"I never get tired of it," Gordon, 80, said one night in November, the start of his busy season, when fewer daylight hours mean longer nights to light.
The best views come on crisp winter nights, Gordon said, when the mist is transformed to sparkling ice crystals that catch the soft colors.

For the past year, Gordon and Mann have used a relatively new technology to control the lights - computerized touch screens. But the history of Niagara's illumination goes back more than 150 years. The falls were lit for the first time at 10 p.m. on Sept. 14, 1860, when 200 lights like those used to signal for help at sea were put in place for a visit from the Prince of Wales. Electricity was first used in 1879. An Illumination Tower, still used today, was built in 1899.

Colors appeared in 1907 when gelatin films were included in a 36-light system near the base of the gorge designed by General Electric Co. of Schenectady. Workers, including Peter Gordon's father, were paid $3 a night to change the gels when a foreman shouted cues.

The Niagara Falls Illumination Board, a cross-border body established in 1925, has kept the lights on most nights since with a few exceptions. They were turned off during World War II, for example, to conserve power.

The control room where Gordon and Mann work 75 feet above street level has a musty old feel with stone walls, well-worn wooden floors, cobwebby beams overhead and a couple of bare bulbs above a bank of humming generators. "This place is a dump, really," said Gordon, laughing.

But then there's that million-dollar view. After changing the lights' colors on the touchscreen, the controller can see the result 15 seconds later by looking out the windows or stepping through a door to a platform outside where the lights are mounted.

On the face of the waterfalls, colors fade to white as the next colored gel covers the spotlight and a new hue spills with the water over the falls. With each color change, it's as if someone has dumped dye into the river above as it careens over the edge to the rocks below.
The 4,000-watt spotlights burn with a combined brilliance of 8.2 billion candles, about what NASA used to light the runway for night space shuttle landings. Gordon staggers the lights to avoid repeating color combinations, changing them as often as every five minutes to keep things fresh for tourists milling across the street below.

Like other landmarks, including the Empire State Building and Eiffel Tower, the falls have been lit to honor a variety of causes: Alzheimer's Disease, World AIDS Day, Canada's Remembrance Day, March of Dimes and others. The charities are not asked to pay the $85 an hour it takes to light the falls. The cost is split among Niagara Falls, N.Y., Niagara Falls, Ontario, Niagara Parks and Ontario Hydro. Each bulb costs $1,500.

Not everyone loves the illumination. "All that does is make it into a sideshow," said Niagara Falls historian Paul Gromosiak, who advocates for keeping the falls in their most natural state and questions the logic and expense of using artificial light on a natural wonder. "The only light we should have on the falls is moonlight."
As midnight nears, Gordon goes back to the patriotic colors that began the night, leaving them on for 15 minutes. The colors retract and the water rushes white for the last few minutes, and the falls fade to black.

Republished from USAtoday
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Published by Gusti Putra at: 12:31 AM
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