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Monday, October 24, 2011

Marco Simoncelli Killed in Racing Accident: A Fan’s Reaction


Race marshal gather around the motorcycle of Italy's rider Marco Simoncelli,
unseen in photo, after a crash at the Malaysian MotoGP Grand Prix in Sepang, Malaysia, Sunday.

Just minutes into the Malaysian MotoGP on Sunday, October 23, 2011, Marco Simoncelli lost control of his bike and swerved across the track, right into the path of fellow riders Colin Edwards and Valentino Rossi. Edwards and Rossi were unable to avoid hitting Simoncelli. While Rossi clipped Simoncelli's Honda, Edwards had a direct hit. Simoncelli's helmet came off as he fell between the two bikes. Rossi and Edwards got their bikes off the track and appeared fine, though Edwards did suffer a dislocated shoulder, but Simoncelli was down on the track and not moving. To everyone watching the events play out, it was a horrific crash and clearly very bad. After being rushed to the medical center, he was reportedly conscious. However, shortly after, Simoncelli was pronounced dead. He was 24 years old.

Simoncelli began his professional racing career in 2002 and moved up from riding 125cc bikes, to 250cc bikes before finally entering the MotoGP series. He was considered a rising star, but he had not hit his stride yet in the two years he rode in the MotoGp series. In his second season, he had been a part of a crash with fellow rider, Dani Pedrosa. Simoncelli made contact with Pedrosa as Simoncelli was attempting to pass him. Pedrosa lost control and crashed, breaking his collarbone. Although Pedrosa fully recovered, he missed several races during the 2011 season. Recently, Simconcelli had agreed on a new contract with stay with his team, and Honda, for 2012.

Although the Malaysian MotoGp was cancelled after the crash, many are still expecting the race at Valencia, in Spain, to go on as scheduled on November 6, 2011. No official decision regarding that race has been made yet, however. That race is to be the final one of the season for the MotoGP series.

It is always sad to see a driver or rider injured while racing or training. It is tragic to see someone killed. With two high profile drivers, IndyCar's Dan Wheldon and Marcos Simoncelli, killed in crashes within on week of each other, it is awful for race fans, drivers, riders, friends and family members. Hopefully, some innovative safety improvements will be made in the offseason for both MotoGP and IndyCar so that the lives of other drivers and riders will be saved and deaths will be prevented.

Kristin Watt has been a fan of motorsports since she was a young girl and she watched NASCAR races with her mother. That love of NASCAR quickly evolved into a great enjoyment of many different motorsports including everything from local dirt track action to the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans to the adrenaline rush of the extreme motocross events. She has been following motorsports for many years.

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Published by Gusti Putra at: 1:40 AM
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Google considers funding bid for Yahoo

GOOGLE is considering providing financing for an acquisition of Yahoo! Inc by another company or a group of bidders, according to a source.
The company may opt not to take part in an offer and has not engaged in serious discussions with potential partners, said the source.

Google, which is under regulatory scrutiny from governments around the world, may lend its financial support to preserve Yahoo as a rival and bolster competition in the Internet industry, according to Greg Sterling, an analyst at US-based Opus Research.

Sterling said: "If competition is diminished or marginalized, then all the arguments about Google being a monopoly ring more true."

Google, which has US$42.6 billion in cash and short-term investments, is considering helping to finance other bidders, rather than trying to acquire Yahoo outright, the source said.

The US Federal Trade Commission has begun a review of Google's business practices, including search and advertising. The European Union and the state of Texas have also begun investigations into the company's leadership in search and advertising markets.

Potential financing by Google for a bid for rival Yahoo has parallels with the US$150 million investment Microsoft made in competitor Apple in 1997 to help preserve competition in the computer market, Sterling said.

Nonetheless, regulators might scrutinize any Yahoo acquisition that involves Google. The US government threatened to challenge an earlier proposal by Google to place ads on Yahoo's site, causing Google to abandon the move in 2008.

A growing roster of private equity firms is considering whether to pursue Yahoo, which has a market value of US$20 billion. Microsoft is considering providing financing, according to sources.

A potential investment by Microsoft, a longtime Google rival, may also have prompted Google's interest in a financing deal involving Yahoo, Sterling said.

Alibaba, whose largest shareholder is Yahoo, has said it is "very interested" in facilitating the Chinese company buying back its 43 percent stake.

Private equity companies Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and Blackstone are among firms considering an offer for Yahoo, sources said. Alibaba has discussed a plan with Silver Lake Partners and Russia's Digital Sky Technologies to make a joint bid, according to sources. Another group apparently interested in an offer includes Providence Equity Partners and former News Corporation executive Peter Chernin.

Google advertising customers are able to buy space on Yahoo sites through Google's Invite Media service, according to a source.

Quoted from Shanghaidaily
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Published by Gusti Putra at: 1:30 AM
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Google Earth reveals ancient stories

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," science fiction author Arthur Clarke once suggested.


A "kite" structure seen from the air used in prehistory to trap game in the Arabian desert.
Say a magic carpet and a genie's lamp, the stuff of Arabian Nights, which made the Arab desert famous for fables and legends?

Well, how about Google Earth instead? Like a friendly genie, that modern technology has started answering archeologist's wishes with its worldwide catalog of satellite views of the Earth. A pair of studies in the Journal of Archaelogical Science this year suggest these views are revealing a vast and ancient story, one only starting to emerge from the fabled desert of Arabia.

"(W)e are on the brink of an explosion of knowledge," writes archeologist David Kennedy of University of Western Australia in Perth, in a report in the current edition of the journal. Aerial photography and satellite images from Syria to Yemen are, "revealing hundreds of thousands of collapsed structures, often barely (19 to 30 inches) in height and virtually invisible at ground level," he writes.

Most often seen in the vast lava-rock fields called "harat" and the 251,000-square mile Rub'al Khali desert of Saudi Arabia, the structures take their names from their appearance from the air— "wheel" homes, "pendant"-shaped cairns, "keyhole" tombs and "kites" animal-pen traps. They are, Kennedy says, "opening up for re-interpretation the hugely inhospitable interior of Arabia which is proving to be the unexpected location of extensive human activity 2,000 (or more) years ago."

Who were the "Old Men of the Desert", as the Bedouin called the builders of these structures in 1927, when first asked about them by a Royal Air Force flight lieutenant named Maitland. Maitland published a report in a journal Antiquity, noting "hill fortresses" and other structures in the desert ear of the Dead Sea spotted on the air mail route from Cairo to Damascus.

"(T)hey certainly have the appearance of being of great antiquity," he noted at the end of his report on "The 'Works of the Old Men' in Arabia."

They actually do date from the Roman era, judging from inscriptions, all the way back to perhaps 7,000 B.C. based on flint tools found at others, Kennedy says, by e-mail. Monumental prehistoric structures cover the world from South America to Stonehenge, but the "Works" represent a "huge undertaking by prehistoric man that created an immense archaeological landscape in one of the most arid parts of the planet," he notes.
The best-known structures are the "kites," made with a diamond shape. They are animal pens with their open mouths placed at low points between hills, where gazelles, antelopes and other prey were driven by hunters. "Mass kills" of Persian gazelles in these pens likely led to the loss of the species from the region, suggested an April Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesreport led by archeologist Guy Bar-Oz of Israel's University of Haifa, looking at a mass gazelle gravesite, a kite in modern day Syria dating back to around 4,000 B.C.

The other structures are more mysterious. "Wheels overlie Kites but never vice-versa, therefore Wheels are probably younger than Kites," Kennedy says. Some walls just seem to meander purposely and random "gates," more than 100 spotted so far, appear to have no purpose at all. "There is no complete agreement on two key questions: 'When were they built?' and 'What for?'" he says about the structures.

Figuring that out will take archeologists on the ground, Kennedy suggests in a look at cairns, wheels and other structures seen at just one site in Jordan published earlier this year in the Journal of Archeological Science. "Aerial imagery can take research so far but is not an end - merely a means to an end. What is needed is more intensive and extensive field research," he says.

For now though, satellite images will have to do for inspecting places like Yemen, and Saudi Arabia, difficult for foreign researchers to investigate. "The number of high-resolution 'windows' onto the landscape of Saudi Arabia is still limited; most imagery is too poor for our purposes. We need the high-resolution coverage to be considerably extended," he says. An alternative, Bing Maps, has higher quality images, but less of them, he says.

Arthur Clarke, who famously called for the development of communication satellites in 1945, likely would be delighted by this latest advance in space-based archeology. "The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible," he wrote, after all, in the same essay where he propounded his law of magic technology.

Quoted from Usatoday
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Published by Gusti Putra at: 1:23 AM
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Scientist: Satellite must have crashed into Asia

BERLIN (AP) — A defunct German research satellite crashed into the Earth somewhere in Southeast Asia on Sunday, U.S. scientist said — but no one is still quite sure where.

Undated artist rendering provided by EADS Astrium shows the scientific satellite ROSAT.
Andreas Schuetz, a spokesman for the German Aerospace Center, said Saturday Oct. 22, 2011
the best estimate is still that the ROSAT scientific research satellite
will impact sometime between late Saturday and Sunday 1200 GMT.
Photo: EADS Astrium / AP
Most parts of the minivan-sized ROSAT research satellite were expected to burn up as they hit the atmosphere at speeds up to 280 mph (450 kph), but up to 30 fragments weighing a total of 1.87 tons (1.7 metric tons) could have crashed, the German Aerospace Center said.

Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said the satellite appears to have gone down over Southeast Asia. He said two Chinese cities with millions of inhabitants each, Chongqing and Chengdu, had been in the satellite's projected path during its re-entry time.
"But if it had come down over a populated area there probably would be reports by now," the astrophysicist who tracks man-made space objects told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

Calculations based on data made available to scientists by the U.S. military indicate that satellite debris must have crashed somewhere east of Sri Lanka over the Indian Ocean, or over the Andaman Sea off the coast of Myanmar, or further inland in Myanmar or as far inland as China, he said.

The satellite entered the atmosphere between 0145 GMT to 0215 GMT Sunday (9:45 p.m. to 10:15 p.m. Saturday EDT) and would have taken 15 minutes or less to hit the ground, the German Aerospace Center said. Hours before the re-entry, the center said the satellite was not expected to land in Europe, Africa or Australia.

There were no immediate reports from Asian governments or space agencies about the fallen satellite.
The satellite used to circle the planet in about 90 minutes, and it may have traveled several thousand kilometers (miles) during its re-entry, rendering exact predictions of where it crashed difficult.

German space agency spokesman Andreas Schuetz said a falling satellite also can change its flight pattern or even its direction once it sinks to within 90 miles (150 kilometers) above the Earth.

Schuetz said the agency was waiting for data from scientific partners around the globe. He noted it took the U.S. space agency NASA several days to establish where one of its satellites had hit last month.

The 2.69-ton (2.4 metric ton) scientific ROSAT satellite was launched in Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 1990 and retired in 1999 after being used for research on black holes and neutron stars and performing the first all-sky survey of X-ray sources with an imaging telescope.

ROSAT's largest single fragment that could have hit is the telescope's heavy heat-resistant mirror.
"The impact would be similar to, say, an airliner having dropped an engine," said McDowell. "It would damage whatever it fell on, but it wouldn't have widespread consequences."

A dead NASA satellite fell into the southern Pacific Ocean last month, causing no damage but spreading debris over a 500-mile (800-kilometer) area.

Since 1991, space agencies have adopted new procedures to lessen space junk and having satellites falling back to Earth. NASA says it has no more large satellites that will fall back to Earth uncontrolled in the next 25 years.

Quoted from Seattlepi

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Published by Gusti Putra at: 1:10 AM
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