Sunday, December 23, 2012

Wind storms swept across a large part of Texas on Wednesday, leaving property damaged and many homes without power.

Downed lamposts and trees were reported in multiple locales. One media source reported overturned playground equipment in the city of Rockwall. Winds up to 40 miles-per-hour (mph) were reported over much of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. Approximately 9,500 people within Tarrant and Dallas counties were without electrical power as late as Thursday afternoon.

Late Wednesday evening, the National Weather Service reported winds at Dallas Love Field up to 66 mph. The city of Edgewood recorded wind speeds up to 70 mph during the storm; three homes, two barns and two business buildings sustained damage. A home in Chandler was damaged when a tree was toppled during the storm (see photo at left).

Dust from as far away as west Texas covered vehicles and other property early Thursday morning in the eastern part of the state. A car wash manager in Tyler told media his business cleaned about three hundred cars on Thursday, busier than usual even for holiday season.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Two days before Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography, a biography of actor Tom Cruise written by journalist Andrew Morton, was released in the United States, a video showing Cruise promoting Scientology was leaked to the Internet. The promotional video appeared on video-sharing sites including YouTube, Gawker.com and radar online.com, and clips from the video were also shown on Wednesday morning talk shows in the United States.

In the 9-minute video produced by the Church of Scientology, Cruise is seen discussing his beliefs while the theme from his Mission: Impossible films plays as background music. Cruise appears wearing a black turtleneck sweater, speaking about his dedication to changing people’s lives. The format of the video appears to be an interview with Cruise, and it is edited with questions cut out. Some of Cruise’s responses end abruptly.

Throughout the video, Cruise uses Scientology jargon terms such as “KSW”: “For me, it’s all about KSW.” The term stands for Keeping Scientology Working, which refers to a 10-point letter written by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard in 1965 to ensure the organization’s survival. Cruise also discusses “SPs”, or Suppressive Persons, “PTSPs”, a “potential trouble source” influenced by a Suppressive Person, and the need to “confront and shatter suppression”.

Cruise makes assertions about programs which use Hubbard’s teachings such as Criminon and Narconon “We’re the authorities on getting people off drugs. We’re the authorities on the mind. We’re the authorities on improving conditions. We can rehabilitate criminals. Way to happiness. We can bring peace and unite cultures.” Of the manner in which he wishes to spread Scientology’s message, he says “You’re in the playing field or out of the arena.” Cruise also expresses his disdain for psychiatrists, “Crush these guys [psychiatrists]! I’ve had it! Psychiatry doesn’t work. No mercy! None! Go to guns!”

The video concludes with Cruise laughing, and then a voiceover says: “Scientology can be defined by a single question: would you want others to develop the knowledge you have? In answering that question, Tom Cruise has introduced LRH [L. Ron Hubbard] technology to more than 1 billion people on earth. And that is only the first wave he has unleashed. That is why the story of Tom Cruise, Scientologist, has only just begun.”

According to Reuters, the Church of Scientology stated that the video was shown at a 2004 meeting of the International Association of Scientologists. In a statement, the Church of Scientology said that the video was Cruise’s acceptance speech after he had been given the organization’s “Freedom Medal”, and was shown “before an audience of 5,000 church parishioners and their guests.” The statement also called the video that appeared on the Internet a “pirated and edited version.” A representative for Cruise confirmed the Church of Scientology statement: “The video is of Mr. Cruise making an acceptance speech to fellow parishioners at a private church event in 2004.” David Miscavige, head of the Church of Scientology, had presented Cruise with the “Freedom Medal of Valor” at the 2004 ceremony. Eighty Scientologists have received the “Freedom Medal” since the award’s establishment in 1985, but Cruise is the only recipient of the Freedom Medal of Valor. Andrew Morton’s Tom Cruise: An Unauthorized Biography characterizes Cruise as the second most powerful individual within the organization.

The video first appeared on the Internet on Sunday, and disappeared after the footage was linked to from Gawker.com and The Huffington Post. Gawker.com posted a copy of the video Tuesday morning, and said that the video had “been passed around privately by reporters and writers investigating Cruise’s ties to Scientology.” Gawker.com noted that a smaller video clip which had previously been available on YouTube “is no longer available, most likely after the Church of Scientology sent in a copyright infringement notice.” Gawker.com has stated that the video will stay up on its site, and has reprinted correspondence with Ava Paquette, an attorney with Moxon & Kobrin, a law firm representing the Church of Scientology. Nick Denton of Gawker.com commented on the posting of the video “It’s newsworthy, and we will not be removing it.”

Investigative journalist Mark Ebner is helping to post more than two hours of additional footage related to the Cruise video, and called it “the most unintentionally hilarious footage you’ve ever seen,” and characterized it as “better than” when Cruise jumped on Oprah’s couch during a May 23, 2005 appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show, and the South Park parody of Cruise in the controversial episode “Trapped in the Closet“. Ebner appeared on The Today Show on Wednesday, and discussed the video’s appearance on the Internet. In response, the Church of Scientology called Ebner a “fraud”. Ebner told the New York Daily News that “These tapes were made for purposes of recruitment.”

Attempts by the Church of Scientology to stop distribution of the video via the Internet “seem to have backfired spectacularly,” according to The Press Association, and by Thursday the video was viewable on websites other than Gawker.com, including the New York Post, Independent Television News and the BBC. For websites based in Britain usage of the video is protected under copyright laws, specifically for reporting news and current affairs. Still other reports on the video linked to locations where it could be watched, including a report in The Times. Copies of the video were not available on Google Video on Thursday, but were still available on YouTube.

Attorney Mark Stephens of London-based firm Finers Stephens Innocent commented on the Church of Scientology’s attempts to remove the video from the Internet: “The Scientologists, by taking action to enforce their copyrights, have made it a news story. The mistake was not to foresee that a news story has special protection in copyright law in reporting news and current events.”

Monday, May 30, 2011

The University of Chicago’s Joe and Rika Mansueto Library was shut down by a power outage for a short time on Saturday, preventing library personnel from providing full services to its patrons.

The US$81 million library, which opened May 16, includes a 180-seat reading room under a 691-panel glass dome. Five stories underground, a system of five cranes retrieves books sorted into bins, carrying a maximum of about 3.5 million volumes. As of 3:50 p.m. CDT, the automated storage and retrieval system, along with staff computers at the circulation desk, were shut down, preventing patrons from retrieving materials stored underground.

The glass ceiling normally allows enough natural light to pass, but rain clouds in the area darkened the room. Patrons began to flip light switches in front of their seats, but to no avail, and a circulation clerk announced that there had been a power outage. Some patrons then moved to the adjacent Regenstein Library, which still had power. Power was still running along the corridor linking Mansueto and Regenstein Libraries, along with the nearby restrooms and Special Collections Research Center.

An electrician arrived at the building at around 3:50 p.m., and power had been restored by 5:45 p.m.

Saturday, February 3, 2018

On Wednesday, English football club Chelsea FC announced signing French forward Olivier Giroud from cross-town rivals Arsenal FC on a eighteen-month contract. The deal is reportedly worth about £18 million. Olivier Giroud is to wear jersey number 18, the club announced via their website.

31-year-old Giroud joined The Gunners in 2012. Since then, the Frenchman has played 253 games for Arsenal and scored 105 goals. During his tenure at the Emirates Stadium, Giroud has won three FA Cups. He has also won the Community Shield trophy with Arsenal.

Giroud remarked on joining The Blues, “Chelsea is one of the biggest teams in the Premier League. They have won maybe the most trophies in the last six or seven years. It’s a massive club and I am proud to sign for Chelsea, and I’m looking forward to playing.”

Chelsea loaned Belgian forward Michy Batshuayi to German club Borussia Dortmund. Giroud’s departure from Arsenal was announced shortly after Arsenal announced signing Gabonese striker Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang from Dortmund for about £56 million making him the costliest player in Arsenal’s history.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

NASA’s Cassini–Huygens spacecraft has discovered evidence for a large-scale saltwater reservoir beneath the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The data came from the spacecraft’s direct analysis of salt-rich ice grains close to the jets ejected from the moon. The study has been published in this week’s edition of the journal Nature.

Data from Cassini’s cosmic dust analyzer show the grains expelled from fissures, known as tiger stripes, are relatively small and usually low in salt far away from the moon. Closer to the moon’s surface, Cassini found that relatively large grains rich with sodium and potassium dominate the plumes. The salt-rich particles have an “ocean-like” composition and indicate that most, if not all, of the expelled ice and water vapor comes from the evaporation of liquid salt-water. When water freezes, the salt is squeezed out, leaving pure water ice behind.

Cassini’s ultraviolet imaging spectrograph also recently obtained complementary results that support the presence of a subsurface ocean. A team of Cassini researchers led by Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, measured gas shooting out of distinct jets originating in the moon’s south polar region at five to eight times the speed of sound, several times faster than previously measured. These observations of distinct jets, from a 2010 flyby, are consistent with results showing a difference in composition of ice grains close to the moon’s surface and those that made it out to the E ring, the outermost ring that gets its material primarily from Enceladean jets. If the plumes emanated from ice, they should have very little salt in them.

“There currently is no plausible way to produce a steady outflow of salt-rich grains from solid ice across all the tiger stripes other than salt water under Enceladus’s icy surface,” said Frank Postberg, a Cassini team scientist at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.

The data suggests a layer of water between the moon’s rocky core and its icy mantle, possibly as deep as about 50 miles (80 kilometers) beneath the surface. As this water washes against the rocks, it dissolves salt compounds and rises through fractures in the overlying ice to form reserves nearer the surface. If the outermost layer cracks open, the decrease in pressure from these reserves to space causes a plume to shoot out. Roughly 400 pounds (200 kilograms) of water vapor is lost every second in the plumes, with smaller amounts being lost as ice grains. The team calculates the water reserves must have large evaporating surfaces, or they would freeze easily and stop the plumes.

“We imagine that between the ice and the ice core there is an ocean of depth and this is somehow connected to the surface reservoir,” added Postberg.

The Cassini mission discovered Enceladus’ water-vapor and ice jets in 2005. In 2009, scientists working with the cosmic dust analyzer examined some sodium salts found in ice grains of Saturn’s E ring but the link to subsurface salt water was not definitive. The new paper analyzes three Enceladus flybys in 2008 and 2009 with the same instrument, focusing on the composition of freshly ejected plume grains. In 2008, Cassini discovered a high “density of volatile gases, water vapor, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, as well as organic materials, some 20 times denser than expected” in geysers erupting from the moon. The icy particles hit the detector target at speeds between 15,000 and 39,000 MPH (23,000 and 63,000 KPH), vaporizing instantly. Electrical fields inside the cosmic dust analyzer separated the various constituents of the impact cloud.

“Enceladus has got warmth, water and organic chemicals, some of the essential building blocks needed for life,” said Dennis Matson in 2008, Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

“This finding is a crucial new piece of evidence showing that environmental conditions favorable to the emergence of life can be sustained on icy bodies orbiting gas giant planets,” said Nicolas Altobelli, the European Space Agency’s project scientist for Cassini.

“If there is water in such an unexpected place, it leaves possibility for the rest of the universe,” said Postberg.