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Tuesday, January 26, 2010

The mystery of the location of a viewpoint used by English painter John Constable has been solved, after nearly 200 years. The Stour Valley and Dedham Church was painted in Suffolk, England, between 1814 and 1815, but changes to the landscape meant that the spot he chose was not known, despite the best efforts of historians and art experts.

Now the puzzle has been answered. Martin Atkinson, who works for the National Trust as property manager for East Suffolk, used clues from the painting and looked at old maps to track down the viewpoint. Trees had grown, a hedgerow had been planted and boundaries had moved or disappeared, but Atkinson eventually worked out where Constable had stood. He said, “When I discovered that I had worked out the location where Constable painted this particular masterpiece, I couldn’t believe it. All the pieces of the jigsaw finally fitted together.”

Atkinson used an 1817 map of East Bergholt, where Constable grew up, as a reference point, but found that the view would have changed not long after the painting was completed. “The foreground didn’t fit at all, it was quite unusual as we know Constable painted it in the open air so he would have been standing in the scene. The hedgerow in his work no longer exists and there’s another hedgerow that runs across the scene today which wasn’t there. When you stand on the road on which he would have stood, and use the oak tree as a reference point, you see the same view. It’s great to see where an old master stood – and be inspired by the same view,” he said.

Suffolk, where Constable painted many of his finest paintings, is often called “Constable country”. Most, but not all, of the locations that Constable depicted are known. The picture is now housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts.

Thursday, October 29, 2009

NASA completed the first successful space flight of the new Ares I-X rocket yesterday. After delaying the launch 24 hours because of poor weather, Ares lifted off at 11:30 (EDT) in the morning from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The 327-foot tall Ares I-X test vehicle produced 2.6 million pounds of thrust to accelerate the rocket to nearly 3 g’s and Mach 4.76 — just shy of hypersonic speed. It capped its easterly flight at a sub-orbital altitude of 150,000 feet after the separation of its first stage, a four-segment solid rocket booster. After reaching an altitude of about 40 km, the first stage separates from the launch vehicle. The second stage was very brief, reaching around 46,000 metres, before an uncontrolled descent. The Orion capsule model should splash down approximately 230 nautical miles from the launch site. The first stage booster from the test descended for recovery using a parachute braking system.

“This is a huge step forward for NASA’s exploration goals. Ares I-X provides NASA with an enormous amount of data that will be used to improve the design and safety of the next generation of American spaceflight vehicles — vehicles that could again take humans beyond low Earth orbit,” said Doug Cooke, associate administrator for the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C..

The Ares I is a new rocket developed under the Constellation program, part of the Vision for Space Exploration announced in 2004 by then-president George W. Bush. Derived from a booster used on the current United States Space Shuttle, it should help to lift the Orion spacecraft carrying people and supplies for the International Space Station (ISS). The rocket with Orion is also planned to lift the crew to Altair lunar landing module, which will be lifted into orbit using the Ares V heavy-lift rocket.

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Buffalo, New York —According to National Grid and NYSEG during an afternoon press conference, at least 300,000 people and businesses are still without power as the City of Buffalo, New York begins to clean up after the worst October lake effect snow storm in “137 years of records” being kept, according to the National Weather Service. The NOAA calls the weather event “unprecedented.” Power in many areas may not be fixed until early next week. Electric crews from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania have been called in to assist in the clean-up efforts, but power to many areas may not be fully restored until next weekend.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency or FEMA has cleared the way for at least US$5 million to be given to Erie County and Western New York to be used for the efforts of cleaning up the city. Shelters will also be reimbursed for their services. Residents will also have a chance to be reimbursed for goods, food and water that they needed to purchase during the storm. Items such as bottled water, radios and flashlights could be among those items eligible for reimbursement, according to a press conference with city officials and National Grid this afternoon.

Hundreds of trees in Buffalo and the surrounding suburbs such as Amherst and Tonawanda are severely damaged and in many cases have to be cut down completely.

Erie County has been declared a natural disaster area and the Mayor of Buffalo, Byron Brown said in a press conference yesterday that the city and county will file several applications for federal aid and assistance with FEMA.

A flood watch still remains in effect for much of the region, as melting snow pack is causing storm drains to over flow, and debris from trees is causing some drains to clog completely making many inaccessible to city workers.

Delaware Park, located near the Albright Knox Art Gallery, is nearly flooded as the banks of Hoyt Lake are beginning to over flow.

City workers are working to clear debris from a main storm drain near the overpass next to the intersection of Delaware and Forest Avenues.

A local business, the Lexington Co-op on Elmwood Avenue in Buffalo had to throw out nearly every perishable good in the store after being without power for almost 2 days. During the late afternoon on October 14, the Co-op acquired a generator which is currently supplying the entire store with electricity, but power itself has not yet been restored.

These pictures are just some of the very widespread damage caused by the storm.Many were taken within less than 1 mile from Forest and Elmwood in Buffalo.

Saturday, February 5, 2005

Australia –James Gosling, the creator of the Java programming language, said last week that he believes Microsoft is wrong in its decision to support C and C++ programming languages in the common language runtime in Microsoft .NET. According to him, this decision may lead to severe security flaws in .NET. Gosling is currently in Australia, giving talks and visiting friends.

According to Gosling, the problem lies with the programming languages and some of their characteristics: “C++ allowed you to do arbitrary casting, arbitrary adding of images and pointers, and converting them back and forth between pointers in a very, very unstructured way.”

The Java language was developed due to limitations of C++. Gosling began using C++ for the former Sun Microsystems‘s star-seven project. At that time Gosling concluded C++ was inadequate and created the Oak language. The Oak language would become the language known today as Java. The former star-seven project shares its defining characteristics with networked software applications today: safety and portability.

Gosling continues: “If you look at the security model in Java and the reliability model, and a lot of things in the exception handling, they depend really critically on the fact that there is some integrity to the properties of objects. So if somebody gives you an object and says ‘This is an image’, then it is an image. It’s not like a pointer to a stream, where it just casts an image.”

Charles Sterling, a Microsoft developer and product manager of the .NET framework, didn’t entirely disagree with Gosling’s thoughts. But he said that .NET defines different types of code. And there is the code which is managed by the .NET framework. All new Microsoft languages, such as C# and Visual Basic.NET, produce only code managed by the .NET framework, so they are safe.

A key idea that has not shown up in Gosling’s talk is that Java itself allows a very similar process to occur. Java’s JNI (Java Native Interface) allows the integration of the same unsafe code that prompted Gosling’s central thesis.

However, Gosling says languages like C and C++ can still produce unsafe code which would not follow the rules of safety of .NET. This sort of code, usually found in old software applications, requires additional .NET permissions to execute. Sterling says it is up to developers to decide whether or not to use unsafe code in their .NET applications.

Monday, February 16, 2009

In the 1970s, she was one of the most popular female vocalists in France, and became well-known internationally. Anne Marie David, from Arles in the south of France, parlayed her initial success from playing Mary Magdalene in the French production of Jesus Christ Superstar into taking home the “grand prix” at the Eurovision Song Contest in 1973. Her winning song, “Tu te reconnaîtras” (You will recognize yourself), became a Europe-wide hit that spring.

At the height of her popularity, David perfomed world tours, and even lived abroad in Turkey for a time. In 1979, she tried once again to win the Eurovision, and placed a respectable third. Her song “Je suis l’enfant soleil” (I’m a child of the sun) became similarly popular across France and in the Francophone nations.

As time went on, however, her place in the French music scene became less certain. Touring the world had taken a personal toll, and David decided to retire from music completely in 1987. However, with the help of her fan base, she was coaxed out of retirement in 2003 and is returning to a part of her life that she tried to leave, but never left her. Celebrating four decades in the music scene, David is looking forward to adventurous new projects and a newfound zest for life.

Anne Marie David corresponded with Wikinews’ Mike Halterman about her eventful career, her personal anecdotes regarding living abroad, her successes in past Eurovision contests and her grievances with the way the show is produced today. This is the second in a series of interviews with past Eurovision contestants, which will be published sporadically in the lead-up to mid-May’s next contest in Moscow.

Sunday, July 2, 2006

A rally organised by a coalition of nearly 30 environmental groups took place at the site of the Eden wood chip mill in the south east forests of New South Wales today. Organisers estimate that 600 people attended the event, many of whom had travelled hundreds of kilometers to the site from various parts of New South Wales and Victoria.

The protesters sought to highlight the trade in wood chips made from old growth native forests which has continued in Australia despite promises by governments to discontinue the practice. It is thought to be an unnecessary sacrifice of a publicly owned resource and the habitat of native animals for short term profits. The industry is subsidised through provision of publicly funded infrastructure and a unreasonably low royalty levied on harvesters of the resource.

All Eden wood chips are exported, mostly to pulp and paper mills in Japan and the paper made from Eden chips is generally copy paper used in the printing industry and it is consumed within Japan. Since its establishment, Eden has exported over 35 million tonnes of native forest chips.

The Eden chip mill exports approximately 900,000 tonnes of chips a year, and is heading for 1 million tonnes in the next couple of years, produced from native forests each year and Australia is the only country that continues to trade forest wood chips to Japan, as all other supplier countries use plantation stock to produce chips.

The rally was organised with police cooperation and was conducted without any incident.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

The American satirist Stephen Colbert has announced that he will run for the Presidency of the United States. He made his announcement on his mock news show The Colbert Report.

However, Colbert said that he would only run in his home state of South Carolina as a favorite son. He also said that he would represent both major political parties: the Republicans and the Democrats. It is not known how far Colbert will go with his character during his electoral run.

Colbert has hosted The Colbert Report, a spin-off to another satirical television series, The Daily Show, since its creation in 2005. “I didn’t have a job back then. I wonder what it was like to have a job back then. I am sure I could ask a dentist or a surgeon. He would know.” On the show he plays a right-wing political pundit, based on real-life pundits such as Bill O’Reilly and Stone Phillips. Colbert has been credited with popularizing certain words such as “Truthiness”, meaning to believe something intuitively, without regard for actual facts, logic or evidence.

Filling in for New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on Sunday, Colbert wrote: “I am not ready to announce yet — even though it’s clear that the voters are desperate for a white, male, middle-aged, Jesus-trumpeting alternative.”

Monday, October 10, 2005

Guardian journalist Benjamin Joffe-Walt has claimed to have witnessed democracy activist Lu Banglie beaten “lifeless” by a mob on Saturday night. Joffe-Walt and Lu were in a taxi attempting to enter the villiage of Taishi, which the journalist described as “the hotspot of the growing rural uprisings in China”.

According to Mr Joffe-Walt, their car was surrounded by a group of about 30 men. When the men recognised Mr Lu, “… they completely lost it. They pulled him out and bashed him to the ground, kicked him, pulverised him, stomped on his head over and over again. The beating was loud, like the crack of a wooden board, and he was unconscious within 30 seconds. They continued for 10 minutes. The body of this skinny little man turned to putty between the kicking legs of the rancorous men.”

Mr Lu was later found to have survived but suffered serious injuries. Mr Lu has told the Guardian that he was battered unconscious and later driven hundreds of miles to his home town where he is now recuperating. Civil rights lawyers said they were considering a legal case against his attackers, thought to be a group of thugs hired by the local authorities to put down an anti-corruption campaign against the chief of Taishi village.

The time is 5:40 UTC and this Audio Wikinews Brief for Sunday, October 14, 2007.

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