Monday, June 25, 2018

On Saturday, the plastic ban in the Indian state of Maharashtra came into force. In an attempt to minimise pollution, the state government has introduced a ban on single-use plastics.

The leader of the Yuya Sena political party, Aaditya Thackeray, said on Twitter, “The ban on single use disposable plastic cups, plastic bags, plastic straws, plastic plates and cutlery, styrofoam cutlery and non woven bags”. He added, “these are global issues now and we have taken a step to combat it”.

Plastic pollution has led to the choking of drains, marine pollution and a risk of animals consuming plastics. This year, India’s motto for World Environment Day — June 5 — was “Beat Plastic Pollution”. People violating the plastic ban are to face a fine of 5,000 Indian Rupees (INR) for the first offence. For the second offence, the fine is INR 10,000 and the third time offence is INR 25,000 and a three-month prison term. Deputy municipal commissioner Nidhi Choudhary said, “To weed out corruption, we plan to give inspectors payment gadgets for electronic receipts of the fines”.

The Maharashtra government has given a 90-day period for manufacturers to dispose of existing polyethylene terephthalate (PET/PETE) plastic spoons and plates, while shopkeepers and citizens in general have six months to dispose of plastics. However, the ban does not prohibit plastic usage for wrapping medicines or milk cartons thicker than 50 microns.

The state government had announced the decision for the plastic ban on March 23. According to NDTV’s report, Maharashtra is the eighteenth Indian state to enforce a state-wide plastic ban. Aaditya Thackeray also said, “I congratulate the citizens for making this into a movement, even before the ban was enforceable, giving up single use disposable plastic.”

Wednesday, May 4, 2005

Cambridge, Massachusetts —The 22nd annual Mayfair took place in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 1. The event, which ran from 12-6 pm, featured work from local artists, performers, as well as a large cadre of tents selling beads, ceramics, and fried foods. After light rain in the early afternoon, the sun came out around 4 pm.

Local streets were closed to cars, and vendors and artists set up along the curbs. Church Street was blocked off and dedicated to chalk drawings, which were drawn by professional artists and amateurs alike. One of the largest drawings was a reproduction of Hokusai’s “In The Hollow of a Wave off the Coast at Kanagawa,” known colloquially as “The Wave.”

The Alice Hoffman Breast Cancer Center and Locks of Love held a “charity shave,” in which members of the public were encouraged to donate to the charity. Upon donating they would have their heads shaved, or at least 10″ of their hair trimmed “in support of those who lose their hair to chemotherapy.”

Several bands played in succession on a stage set up in front of the offices of Dewey, Cheetham, and Howe. Performers included Toussaint and the China Band, as well as The Walkmen.

Self-described “voice collector” Halsey Burgund brought his portable recording studio and successfully recorded samples from many passersby. At one point, his small box was packed with five youths who wanted to record a collaborative performance. Not everyone was interested in Burgund’s box, though. “I don’t want to give my name and some crap out,” said one youth, pictured at right, who preferred not to give his name.

Monday, May 7, 2018

On Saturday, United Launch Alliance launched a Atlas V 401 rocket carrying NASA’s InSight Mars lander and two Mars Cube One (MarCO) miniature spacecraft known as cubesats. The pre-dawn launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base Space Launch Complex 3E in Lompoc, California was declared a success. This was the very first deep space launch from the west coast of the United States, and aimed to send a lander to the surface of the planet Mars to study its interior.

Launched alongside InSight were two MarCO cubesats, the first to be sent beyond Earth, nicknamed ‘WALL-E’ and ‘Eve’ after the protagonists of the 2008 animated science fiction film WALL-E. They were designed as a dual telecommunications relay for InSight during the spacecraft’s descent through the Martian atmosphere.

Traditionally, NASA launched interplanetary spacecraft at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on the United States’ east coast. There, rockets were sent eastward over the Atlantic Ocean, borrowing the Earth’s rotational velocity to shoot their payloads out into the solar system. Due to congestion on the launch calendar at Canaveral, NASA chose to launch the spacecraft from from Vandenberg Air Force Base on the country’s west coast instead. A launch eastward from Vandenberg would have been dangerous due to densely populated areas being located downrange. Instead, rockets launched from Vandenberg were sent in a south-southeast trajectory. For Insight and MarCO, the spacecraft was placed in a temporary polar orbit after the launch, with the pair being shot towards Mars during a escape burn performed over the North Pole.

Despite a heavy fog settling in at the rocket’s launch pad in Lompoc, the United Launch Alliance declared a “100% chance of favorable weather for liftoff”. Spectators in Lompoc were treated to a mostly obscured view of the launch, though they were witness nonetheless to the sound and shock waves of the Atlas V’s Common Core first stage as it lifted the spacecraft off the ground on-schedule at 4:05 PDT (1105 UTC). People along the coast of southern California and northern Baja California, however, were in clear view of the Atlas V’s main engine burn and the first burn of the rocket’s Centaur upper stage. People in Orange County, California were treated to the sight of InSight and the Centaur almost eclipsing the planet Jupiter in the night sky.

The recently-inaugurated Administrator of NASA, Jim Bridenstine, congratulated the InSight team in an address televised live on NASA TV after the launch, along with the United Launch Alliance on what was their 128th successful launch in a row. The InSight mission part of NASA’s Discovery program, a class of low-cost solar system exploration missions. It was selected to launch in the program after beating the Comet Hopper and Titan Mare Explorer proposals amongst responses to a 2010 request.

Both InSight and the MarCO cubesats are en route to Mars. InSight carries eight scientific instruments, including a seismometer known as Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS). The SEIS instrument will be recording the very first seismic measurements of Mars, which scientists hope will shed light on the structure of Mars beneath its surface. The lander was equipped with two cameras, based on the architecture of the Mars Exploration Rover’s navigation camera and hazard avoidance camera, to allow mission scientists to monitor the activity of the instruments. NASA scheduled a November 26 landing for InSight on a broad plain in the planet’s northern hemisphere, known as Elysium Planitia.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

A complex series of events, including a five month-old computer error, was responsible for the battery failure that led to the loss of NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor last year, an internal review board says. Findings from a preliminary report released on Friday say that while NASA controllers followed procedures while operating the craft, the procedures did not cover the types of errors that occurred.

According to NASA, on November 2, 2006, the Global Surveyor was ordered to perform a routine adjustment of its solar panels. However, the Global Surveyor reoriented to an angle that exposed one of its two batteries to direct sunlight. The battery overheated, which led to the depletion of both batteries. An incorrect setting in antenna orientation prevented Global Surveyor from relaying its status to NASA controllers. Its preprogrammed systems did not take into account the need to maintain a thermally safe orientation.

That was the last communication that NASA controllers had with the spacecraft.

The Global Surveyor was the first US mission to Mars in twenty years, For ten years, the craft returned detailed information to NASA scientists providing new insights, including evidence that appeared to show the presence of water on Mars and identification of deposits of water-related minerals, which led to selection of a Mars rover landing site.

“The loss of the spacecraft was the result of a series of events linked to a computer error made five months before the likely battery failure,” said Dolly Perkins, board chairperson and deputy director-technical of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

The board concluded that NASA controllers had followed procedures, but that the procedures did not adequately cover the type of errors that occurred. In its final report, the board will offer recommendations applicable to future missions.

“We are making an end-to-end review of all our missions to be sure that we apply the lessons learned from Mars Global Surveyor to all our ongoing missions,” said Fuk Li, Mars Exploration Program manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The Global Surveyor was the longest operating spacecraft at Mars and had lasted four times longer than expected.

Saturday, March 15, 2008

The Internet group Anonymous today held further protests critical of the Church of Scientology.

The global protests started in Australia where several hundred protesters gathered at different locations for peaceful protests.

In a global speech, the Internet protest movement said Scientology “betrayed the trust of its members, [had] taken their money, their rights, and at times their very lives.” The protesters welcomed the public interest their protests have led to, and claimed they witnessed “an unprecedented flood of Scientologists [joining] us across the world to testify about these abuses.” The group said it would continue with monthly actions.

In a press statement from its European headquarters, Scientology accused the anonymous protesters of “hate speech and hate crimes”, alleging that security measures were necessary because of death threats and bomb threats. This also makes the Church want to “identify members” of the group it brands as “cyber-terrorists”.

Wikinews had correspondents in a number of protest locations to report on the events.

Anonymous states that the next protest is scheduled to take place on April 18, which happens to be the birthday of Suri, the daughter of Tom and Katie Cruise.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

The music video for “Gangnam Style”, a song by South Korean artist Psy, has become the first YouTube video to surpass one billion views. The video, which was uploaded to the video sharing website on July 15, became the most viewed of all time last month after overtaking the music video for “Baby”, a song by Canadian singer Justin Bieber, which was placed on YouTube two years ago.

With more than 6.1 million likes, Guinness World Records has recognised “Gangnam Style” as being the most liked YouTube video ever; it also has over 449,000 dislikes. ‘officialpsy’, the YouTube channel upon which the video was uploaded, now has in excess of 2.1 million subscribers and has achieved over 1.4 billion video views overall. According to Google, the company which owns YouTube, the video has attracted between seven and ten million daily views on average since being uploaded to the site.

Park Jae-Sang, the actual name of Psy, explained the meaning of the song in an August 2012 interview with CNN. “People who are actually from Gangnam never proclaim that they are — it’s only the posers and wannabes that put on these airs and say that they are ‘Gangnam Style’ — so this song is actually poking fun at those kinds of people who are trying so hard to be something that they’re not”, he said. Despite its international popularity, in a separate interview with Reuters earlier in August, Park Jae-Sang said “Gangnam Style” — a satire of consumerist aspects of the Gangnam District of the South Korean capital of Seoul — “never targeted foreign countries. It was for local fans”. He said his intention with the video “was to look uncool until the end. I achieved it.”

“Gangnam Style” has inspired countless parody versions, prompting UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph to suggest it was “the most parodied video ever”. Among the parody versions are one performed by inmates of the Philippines’ Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, one with students from Eton College in the United Kingdom, one from Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and one created in the approach to the 2012 United States presidential election called “Mitt Romney Style”.

Numerous prominent figures have attempted to imitate the “Gangnam Style” dance — which involves crossing one’s wrists over each other and motioning as if “you’re riding an invisible horse in your lower body,” Park Jae-Sang explained — including United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, US President Barack Obama and Google chairman Eric Schmidt.