The famous Chinese drone manufacturer Hubsan is going to release their newcomer the Zino H117S folding quadcopter. Hubsan Zino H117S Folding Quadcopter will be very similar like the famous DJ Spark, for an unbeatable price. At least I hope so. The release date and the exact specifications are not officially presented yet, but all the signs lead to that the rumor is in fact true.
The CEO of Hubsan on a non-official platform confirmed that indeed the Hubsan Zino H117S is in a development phase. At first sight on the images, it looks like very much that it will have the same or at least similar design that the DJI Spark has. The arms are foldable too, and the gimbal structure of the camera is like the DJI drones have.
Zino H117S can be a great alternative for those who want a decent drone that can film great quality video footages. The image stabilization and the gimbal mechanism is lacking in this segment of drones. Hubsan has some attempts to shake up the market and produce drones that somewhat beat the dominant DJI models. This attempt was the H109 model, that meant to be a competitor for the DJI Phantom. It has been proved that the expertise of Hubsan is not in that hight as the DJI background has in this field.
Their model the H501s is been around for some years. It has been shown that a less priced drone is capable to pick up the race with the DJI's. H501s has some features that the more expensive drones have. It has a place in the market for those budgeteers who won't want to buy the Brand. It is suitable for those who want brushless motors and GPS functionalities, and some characteristics that the pros have.
Although the H501s is a great model it was time to fill the gap of the image stabilization side.
With the new Hubsan Zino H117S, this gap hopefully will be covered. As the first images tell us, the gimbal will be a great addition to this model, even though the similarities to DJI Spark are obvious.
Since I have no official confirmation of the exact specifications these parameters are only guessings, but roughly enough.
As prominently in the teaser video, we see, the new Zino H117S has foldable arms and a gimbal system for the camera that I hope have 3 axes, or at least 2 mechanical and one digital.
The rumors say that the new Zino H117S will get a 2.7K camera, and the flight range distance will be around 5 kilometers. It will have all the flight features that the competitor already has.
Functions: GPS, Altitude Hold, Return to Home, Waypoints, Headless mode, Follow me mode.
I don't know exact dates of the release yet since it has not officially confirmed. Although the trademark was registered by the Chinese company in late April. This is undoubtedly a clear sign that the Zino H117S is a true project in development.
If all the rumors seem to be proved, the new Hubsan Zino H117S will be a great competitor for the DJI Spark, at a much less price range.
The $300 – $400 price tag will definitely beat the DJI Spark. It will attract those customers who have a much tighter budget.
If you are curious about this drone segment of the market, have a look at this short top 5 selfie drones article covering some interesting models.


If Charles Krauthammer's description is accurate, then Bush's much vilified position was extremely important, on its own merits and for its future implications. I don't know enough about the subject to say if Krauthammer's depiction is accepted by everyone, but the relative silence the breakthrough has been greeted with may be an indication it is.
I venture to say that nothing has happened to you in your whole life that had such importance for you as the attempts at marriage have had for me. By this I do not mean that you have not experienced anything in itself as important; on the contrary, your life was much richer and more care-laden and more concentrated than mine, but for that very reason nothing of this sort has happened to you. It is as if one person had to climb five low steps and another person only one step, but one that is, at least for him, as high as all the other five put together; the first person will not only manage the five, but hundreds and thousands more as well, he will have led a great and very strenuous life, but none of the steps he has climbed will have been of such importance to him as for the second person that one, firstly high step, that step which it is impossible for him to climb even by exerting all his strength, that step which he cannot get up on and which he naturally cannot get past either.
Still later, I did see it again differently and realized why it was possible for you to think that in this respect too I was malevolently betraying you. You really had brought some traces of Judaism with you from the ghetto-like village community; it was not much and it dwindled a little more in the city and during your military service; but still, the impressions and memories of your youth did just about suffice for some sort of Jewish life, especially since you did not need much help of that kind, but came of robust stock and could personally scarcely be shaken by religious scruples unless they were strongly mixed with social scruples. Basically the faith that ruled your life consisted in your believing in the unconditional rightness of the opinions of a certain class of Jewish society, and hence actually, since these opinions were part and parcel of your own nature, in believing in yourself. Even in this there was still Judaism enough, but it was too little to be handed on to the child; it all dribbled away while you were passing it on. In part, it was youthful memories that could not be passed on to others; in part, it was your dreaded personality. It was also impossible to make a child, overacutely observant from sheer nervousness, understand that the few flimsy gestures you performed in the name of Judaism, and with an indifference in keeping with their flimsiness, could have any higher meaning. For you they had meaning as little souvenirs of earlier times, and that was why you wanted to pass them on to me, but since they no longer had any intrinsic value even for you could do this only through persuasion or threat; on the one hand, this could not be successful, and on the other, it had to make you very angry with me on account of my apparent obstinacy, since you did not recognize the weakness of your position in this.
And yet: for all the failures described in the letter, one needs to keep in mind that it's Franz Kafka we're talking about, one of the most important writers of the 20th century, and in his own way, an important Jewish figure, too.
Why not Talk about Annapolis?
Some of you may have been disappointed that I didn't talk all week about Annapolis. Well, here's a comment about methodology. This blog deals, of course, with politics, as one of it's main themes. However, I don't see my task as merely repeating what others are saying. The world's media was chock-full of punditry about the Annapolis meeting all week long; I didn't see much that I had to add, especially as I honestly don't know what there is to say. When I do, I will.
A while ago I reminisced about Sadat's visit to Israel, 30 years ago. I can't do the same on the 60th anniversary of the UN's decision of November 29th 1947 to partition Mandatory Palestine between Jews and Palestinians.
However, Amos Oz can, and does very well, in his magnificent book A Tale of Love and Darkness. If you haven't read it yet, do. And if this means choosing between reading blogs and reading his book, read the book. (That, by the way, is a general statement. There are many books out there which are more important than blogs...).
(For our German readers, it's Eine Geschichte von Liebe und Finsternis).
Not clear what this is a picture of, is it? A multi-lane road, some nondescript buildings, and a thingy in the middle of the picture.
Now, if I knew better how to operate Blogger's software, I'd tell the rest of the story in one post, but since I don't, it'll have to come in installments. Such is life.
So. We've crossed the street and approached the thingy. Still not much clearer what it might be, huh? Though there is a vague resemblance to that super cannon the Iraqis tried to construct back in the 1980s - remember that one? But I digress.
Is this any help? It looks like a rather banal though unusually white bridge over a road.
Hint: the thingy is just outside the frame of this picture, to the left. And also, you might want to note that the bridge is supported, between the lanes, by some scaffolding. So It's a bridge that's under constructions, perhaps. Which might explain why it's so white and clean: it's new.
Here's the picture that should explain all.... But it doesn't, does it. Ah, well.
Santiago Calatrava has been commissioned to build a bridge in Jerusalem. Admittedly, there are no rivers in Jerusalem over which to build a bridge, so the bridge will carry the new municipal train over the road into town at the entrance to Jerusalem. The idea is that the Thingy will grow to twice it's present height, and then steel cords will be hung from it, and the bridge will hang on them. If Jerusalem didn't already have far more than its share of unique world-class tourist attractions, this will be another one.
Unconvinced? Don't understand what I'm talking about? Well, you'll just have to keep visiting this blog to see the next installments, as the thingy rises higher and eventually becomes a bridge. And when your grandchildren someday assume that the Calatrava bridge in Jerusalem was always there, you can send them to the (by then defunct) Lozowick Ruminations site, to see pictures of the bridge during its construction.
This picture was taken from underneath the bridge, looking up.
Siegmen's article is here, and my comments on it are here.
Are Peace Negotiations Similar to Buying a House?
Prof. Moshe Sharon compares negotiating styles of Arabs vs. Israelis (and not only them). In a nutshell: Arabs are better at it.
Some of what he writes is pretty basic stuff, and can be summarized along the lines of "The negotiating side that can get up from the table and walk away will win". And also, don't show your cards. And don't give anything away, and if you have to part with something, make sure that the other guy parts with something more important. This is what they teach in freshman courses in law school and business school, isn't it? And if it isn't, what do they teach?
And yet, it's not so simple, I fear. For many of us, the negotiation to purchase a home will be the biggest haggle we ever participate in - and there, it's us against the other side. There is no public opinion, no ideology, and, one might add, no danger of getting killed if you're wrong. Negotiations with an enemy over terms of peace do have all those complications, and then some.
My point is that there may be an inherent, structural problem with peace negotiations, in that at the very least the democratic side has to carry out its discussions publicly before its leaders can reach agreements, and in the meantime, the other side has been watching. Thus, if Olmert can negotiate away Israeli control over Jerusalem or not, is not a secret he can hold close to his chest where Abbas can't see it and can only guess. Likewise, the possibility that Abbas might relinquish the Palestinian demand for a Right of Return is not an ace to be put on the table at the final, dramatic moment, if his public will get rid of him (perhaps literally) should he try to do so.
Over the coming months, expect to be inundated with lies, spins, trial balloons, misinformation, accurate insider information, propaganda, pure nonsense, malicious nonsense, foolishness, silliness, and all the other tools with which the negotiators will try to craft negotiations in an environment where there are no real secrets, and the leaders cannot make decisions on their own.
Yesterday he put up a short post about how Bush's Middle East Unravels Further (to be fair: this on the day representatives from all over the Arab world convene at Annapolis, an event somehow connected with Bush). He writes: The Palestinian Authority is divided and is a mess, with the elected government having been overthrown by a US-backed coup.
Does Hamas Believe what it Says?
We all see the world through a prism of our experience, our values, our context, and so on. The point is to try to balance this inevitable conditioning with intellectual integrity - both to be honest about what forms our position, and willing to change if the facts force us too. Not everyone can do this.
Quite some years ago I wrote an MA thesis about a group of mid-echelon SS officers in Berlin whose job it was to persecute Jews. I must have read a few thousand pages of their documents, but my conditioning was heavily influenced by the faddish interpretations of the time, and I explained that what I had learned was that they must not have liked Jews, those SS officers, but the persecution was mostly the result of peer pressure, situational pressure as cogs in a totalitarian bureaucracy, the winds of war, and so on. Once I had finished, I went on to write a doctoral thesis about a similar group, more widely cast over most of Europe. For the PhD I must have read tens of thousands of pages of their documents, as well as a significantly larger amount of literature.
In the doctoral thesis I proved that my MA thesis had been all wrong. It turned out, for example, that the bureaucrats had been committed antisemites years before they began persecuting the Jews, and that this was an important reason for their becoming SS officers in the first place. During the 1940s, they contributed significantly and very proudly to the evolution of the murder policy because they were convinced that it was the correct thing to do.
So when this afternoon I read that the leaders of Hamas in Gaza are announcing that the Annapolis summit is essentially part of a conspiracy against the Palestinians, because it won't fulfil the elementary Palestinian needs, I think I know what they mean: That the elementary Palestinian needs are to have no Israel controlling any part of their definition of Palestine. And that's what they really think. Not as a reaction to Israeli settlements, or roadblocks, or Colonialism, or what have you.
Not everyone agrees with me - perhaps because the facts don't support my understanding, they'd tell you. Or, perhaps because their understanding of the world doesn't include the concept of anyone really and truly thinking the way the Hamas fellows talk, hence it must be that they talk but don't meant what they say.
Who could I possible be referring too? Well, here's Henry Siegman of the New York Review of Books back in April 2006; and here he is now, quite unfazed by anything that has happened in the world since last year. If I find the time tommorrow, I may decide to systematically take apart his recent contribution.
Update: Here's my take on him.
Labels: Antisemitism, Mideast General, Peace Negotiations, Rational Discourse?
A copy of the annual report of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study recently found it's way to my desk. (The ways of the world are mysterious, aren't they?). For those of you who've never been to Boston, Radcliffe used to be the women's part of Harvard; since 1999 it is a semi-autonomous part of Harvard dedicated to advanced studies. All in all, an important place as such places go. And the annual report is an important document, because it's used for fundraising and such. Chrome pages, lots of color, lots of grand words.
Some of the research described sounded pretty impressive to me: "Tissue engineering to reverse the damage of heart disease", for example, or the "biocomplexity of infectious diseases such as cholera". Sounds like some people are hard at work making the human condition more bearable.
Some projects, however, left me slightly uneasy. There was a group of historians who spent a year together with the purpose of exploring "the promise and perils of biography as a mode for understanding the past". I'm an historian, and can see why biography could or could not be useful: If done well, it is; if not, then not.
One guest lecturer "made the case for a major shift in international resource allocation toward spending on development, education and health care. 29,000 children die daily from preventable causes; how many jumbo jets would terrorists have to crash in a day to kill that many people?" At the annual gender conference, subjects such as history, politics and ecology were explored through the prism of food. At one event, a group "attempted to use insights from Native [American] history to reconceptualize the existing framework for approaching history".
If there were seminars on, say, the French Revolution, or the Greek and Roman classics, or theology, or Shakespeare, I missed the mention of them.
In the meantime, you might want to visit Michael Totten's website. Michael is currently reporting from Fallujah, but on his way there he read us sections of Staff Sergeant David Bellavia, House to House, about the fighting in Fallujah a couple of years ago. Michael is a centrist, and voted Democratic last year. Still, if you can find any overlap between the things he's thinking about, and the things the folks at Radcliffe are thinking about, feel free to tell me what it is.
Mishna: A man dies, leaving a widow, debtors, and inheritors, and also property. Rabbi Tarfon says: The weakest takes precedence. Rabbi Akiva says: Mercy doesn't supersede law. (Ketubot 84a, my translation).
Admittedly, the Gemarah then complicates the crystal clarity of these two statements by adding layers of ifs, buts, and whens.
So what is my take on the Annapolis Summit? I'm posting this for future reference, since making predictions is so tough, especially about the future (and thanx, Allan, for pointing out it was Yogi Berra who crafted that great sentence).
I'd love for the negotiations to succeed. Like everyone else, I fully realize this will necessitate dismantling most of the settlements and some sort of land swaps for the rest. Much as I think it will be a bad idea, I know that reaching a deal will include changing the status of Jerusalem. Most Israelis knew this before the previous round, in 2000, but I think more accept it now than then, as indicated by the results of the previous elections. So does that mean peace is in the offings? Of course not. Because there are absolutely no indications that I've seen or heard of that the Palestinians have changed since 2000, unless perhaps for the worse - as indicated by the results of their previous elections. The only potentially significant change on the Arab side since 2000 is that this time much of the Arab world, lead by the Suadis, seems willing to back the Palestinians should they decide to make peace with Israel. Nice, that, but not enough if the Palestinians themselves aren't changing.
If I'm proved wrong, feel free to link to this post as much as you wan't to rub my face in it. It will be a pleasure.
30 years ago I was an instructor at the Armour Academy when Sadat came for his historic visit (as I reminisced here). During the visit the staff did everything possible to spend as much time possible watching the visit on TV; our trainees mostly continued training as usual.
Achikam is now at exactly the same stage of training that my soldiers were at then. Without wishing to divulge any military secrets here I can say that his unit has interrupted their training, and has joined the effort of ensuring there are no terror attacks during the week of the summit.
I guess someone is less optimistic now than then.
Haaretz is Israel's most important high-brow paper, which doesn't mean it necessarily gets things right, but it's an important publication. Inevitably, it's also mostly left-leaning, though not in an atavistic, thoughtless way, like The Guardian. For weeks I've been watching with interest as the paper struggles to align its political line with its reading of reality regarding the negotiations with the Palestinians in general, and the upcoming Annapolis event in particular. It has been an uphill job, resulting in what seems to me a bit of farce this weekend, the last before the event itself.
Aluf Benn looks at Olmert and decides he's serious about the process, but past experience tells that every one of his predecessors who similarly changed their positions came to grief.
Veteran pundit Yoel Marcus reminisces about Begin and Sadat, see no resemblances to Olmert and Abas, and sums it it thus: If peace comes out of Annapolis, I'll eat my hat.
Professor Emmanuel Sivan, one of the most important scholars on the Arab world anywhere, frames the whole event in terms of Condoleezza Rice's mediocrity (he apparently has been observing her for decades), and concludes with the prediction that all we're about to see is "a parody of Camp David 2000" (which in my opinion was something of a parody itself, but that's just me).
Nathan Sharansky, a foe of Soviet tyranny of the stature of Vaclav Havel if not greater, says that Annapolis will inevitably fail because its assumptions are all wrong, and we're dealing with the wrong Palestinians.
Most telling of all, Avi Issacharoff tells that on the Palestinian side, nothing has changed since the fiascoes of 2000-2001; the Palestinians have learned nothing, and moderated none of their positions. His report seems not to have been translated into English, and I wasn't able to find even the Hebrew original on Haaretz' website.
There is also an amusing caricature. The words in Barak's balloon are something like "Gosh, I really hope it succeeds".
Finally, as a last stab at being optimistic, Akiva Eldar tells of a working group of Israelis and Palestinians who think the issue of refugees (or, I might note: the descendants of the refugees) can be resolved with 85 billion $, no more. Yet even here, the English version of the website does not offer the post-script of the article, which talked about Jerusalem, and, though I read it three times, I managed to find nothing in it to reassure me. The working group suggests, for example, that Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem , with hundreds of thousands of Jews, be dismantled, while the expectation is that Israel will continue footing the bill for social security and health insurance for the soon-to-live-in-Palestinian-Jerusalem Arabs.
All this, I remind you, in a Lefty-newspaper.
I'd like to wish a Happy Thanksgiving to readers of the American persuasion, and also to wish them much patience on their travels.
I have it from a reliable source that the first pilgrims to celebrate Thanksgiving, way back in the early 17th century, partook not only of Turkey and cornbread but also of potato kugel. So for the veggies among you, take heart!
Timoty Garton Ash wonders what to call those who would murder us. Ash is a thoughtful scholar who often has interesting things to say, and I've linked to him in the past.
In the last 50 years the label "fascism" and "fascists" has been profligately over-used and hollowed-out to mean little more than "something the left hates at the moment". If it's bad, and you're on the left, you call it "fascist"; if it's fascist, it feels good to be against it. The list of things described by people on the left as "fascist" over the last half-century would fill several pages, and certainly include Margaret Thatcher, the United States, the Federal Republic of Germany, capitalism, men (aka male chauvinists) and the Daily Mail.
There is a delightful irony here, that Ash doesn't notice, in that it isn't the Left that's using the epithet "Islamofascists", it's the Right. This is because much of the Left (tho not people of Ash's stature or intellectual integrity) is too busy pretending there isn't really a problem of much magnitude, while Rightists who do use the term are also, as a side benefit, trying to re-claim the term in its 1930 meaning, before the Left did with it what Ash says they did.
So why not use "Islamist"?
Most Islamic terrorists are, in some sense, Islamists, but most Islamists are not terrorists. They are reactionaries. They propose a profoundly conservative religious vision of society which, in its attitudes to free speech, apostasy, homosexuality and women, is generally anathema to secular liberal convictions (including, emphatically, my own). But for the most part they do so through peaceful political means, not through violence. At the most moderate end of the broad spectrum of political Islamism, as represented by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Justice and Development party in the secular state of Turkey, they are closer to the Christian religious right in the US (for many of whom homosexuality is a sin and abortion is murder) than they are to al-Qaida. For us secular liberals, this religious reaction is also a very bad thing, to be combated with all the peaceful means at our disposal, but it is a different thing - and we make a mistake if we blur the distinction.
Well, no, not really. He's right, of course, that most Islamists in the broader meaning are not violent, but then, many supporters of fascism didn't personally intend violence, either. There's a continuum here, and it seems to me he's too sanguine. What's true about Erdoagan's Islamist party in Turkey (and, you might add, the Islamist party in Israel) may well not be true elsewhere; I'd say that once you've distinguished between Islamist parties in democracies (Turkey, Israel, and no-where else) and Islamists everywhere else, his reasoning seems less convincing.
Eventually he suggests using the term Jihadists. In spite of the reservations I've just mentioned, I tend to agree with him.
PS. If after reading the article you then spend a couple minutes reading the comments, you'll get a fine sense of what some of the readership of the Guardian thinks about all this. Enjoy.
Does anyone know if and how to use Google Earth as a blogging tool? Because if I knew how, it would be possible - within G-E's limitations - to show lots of places and areas that get talked about all the time by people who really don't know what they're talking about.
So if you can help, either tell us all in Comments, or send me a mail.
The front page of Haaretz this morning carried these two stories: In France, Israel is becoming trendy, especially Israeli literature and arts, but this is happening in a generally positive light. Meanwhile, at the other end of the Chunnel, in London Israel is regarded more and more as the most evil country on earth, and it has become bon-ton to talk about dismantling it and replacing it with something else.
The French turnabout is surprising and needs to be explained. The British story is what you'd expect of a country where respectable newspapers consistently lie (see previous post). Then again, to be fair, it's worth pointing out that many of the instigators of the anti-Israeli actions in the UK are... Israelis. They belong to the farthest fringe of Israeli loonies, but in London they're popular and eagerly sought guests.
Most conspicuous of all are the settlements. Miliband was driven from Jerusalem to Jericho past mammoth new housing developments, stretching deep into the West Bank. To serve them, a myriad of new roads was being scored into the earth: smooth and black and closed to Palestinians, whose olive groves were left as rows of black stumps.
Now it just so happens that I took that same road, yesterday, twice. Once down towards Jericho, once back up to Jerusalem. It's one road, not "myriad". So far as I could see, it isn't closed to Palestinians, otherwise how to explain the fact that at the (few) checkpoints, Palestinian cars are checked? I mean, if they're not there? Most significantly, however, in both directions I looked at the two only fields that could possibly fit Borger's description of blackened olive trees. I stared at them, because they are indeed rather puzzling. Back in the 1970s, so far as I can remember, they weren't there at all: merely a parched and dusty hillside. Then in the 80s, as Jewish settlements were built nearby, someone planted them with some kind of desert crop - acacia, perhaps? I sort of thought it must have been the initiative of the new settlers, but maybe I was wrong. I didn't give it much thought - two fields out in the desert, nothing all that noteworthy. And then yesterday, I was struck by the fact that all the stumps look dead.
There was never an olive tree there, the stumps aren't blackened stumps of them, and anyway, what's the connection between Maaleh Adumim, some miles up the road, and those two fields? Maybe the acacia's all died of something? Maybe the owner, whoever he or she might be, stopped watering them and they died? Indeed, I don't know - but I do know that Borger's version is hogwash.
I spent the day out in the desert, far from the Internet, newspapers, political matters et.al. S0 no talk about any of that today.
At the end of the day I came across William Saletan's attempt to deal with growing evidence that there probably is some sort of connection between race and IQ results. I liked his article (actually, a mini series of three) for his starting point: if there are uncomfortable facts out there, they remain facts even if they're uncomfortable. And now, let's try to understand the issue.
Wouldn't it be nice if most people used this method most of the time? Or even, twice a week? Once a month, but predictably and consistently?
Bisecting the West Bank. Or Not.
Yesterday I linked to an article in the Guardian about the evil Israelis. One of the standard things about such articles is the lack of facts, and their substitution by statements that sound factual and convincing but are actually pure propaganda. In this case, the statement that Israeli construction in E1, east of Jerusalem, will for ever prevent a viable Palestinian state.
Which of course is nonsense. On various levels. To take just one: say there's a Palestinian state to the north of Jerusalem, and it's southern half is south of Jerusalem, and to the east there's a band of connecting territory that's a mere 10-15 miles wide, why is that different from the mirror situation along the coast, where Israeli territory is only some 12 miles deep? Well, actually, there is a topographic difference, in that the coastal area is flat, while to the east of Jerusalem the land falls steeply to the east, and a Palestinian road from north to south would have to go down and up again.
Or, perhaps, it could hug Jerusalem on its Eastern perimeter, without climbing up or down? Sort of like a bridge from, say, Washington DC to Alexandria, VA, where the Pentagon and Reagan National Airport reside? Does that bridge make Washington non-viable? And does the need for tunnels and bridges between Manhattan and everywhere else make Manhattan non-viable?
The reason I ask is that Haaretz today tells that precisely such a road is being built. Haaretz doesn't like it, naturally, and says that it looks like Apartheid, but to my jaundiced eye it looks more like a border between two nations who can't live together and wish to divide their land between us and separate from one another.
Reality can be so complicated, can't it?
The New Republic is currently carrying an article which starts from the preposition that Democrats and Republicans alike have no intention of funding health treatment of illegal immigrants in the US: they don't pay taxes, and they're illegally in the country, so the US owes them nothing.
I have no position in this debate.
In Israel there has been a discussion recently of the problems our security forces sometimes make for ailing Palestinians who wish to be treated in Israeli hospitals (would you want to be treated in a Palestinian hospital if there was any alternative?). In a rather unusual but extreme case, a number of Gazans were refused entry into Israel last week, and now one of them has died of the cancer he hoped to be treated for. Kind of hard to see what sort of security threat he could have posed.
Here's something I wrote about this subject and others, about three and a half years ago; a version of it then appeared in the Jerusalem Post. The situation was complicated then, and is no less so now.
Anwar Sadat's truly historic visit to Israel began thirty years ago today. For all of us old enough to remember it, it was a truly awesome event, unforgettable down to small details.
Context: by 1977 Israel had fought four full wars with Egypt. In 1948 Egyptian forces whose mission was to destroy Israel were stopped some 30 miles south of Tev Aviv, while others reached as far north as the southern suburbs of Jerusalem. The explicit goal of eradicating Israel led to the next two wars, in 1956 and 1967. After the resounding Israeli victory in the Six Day War in 1967, the Egyptians couldn't credibly plan to destroy Israel, but the war they launched in October 1973 was more devastating for Israel, in many ways, than any of the previous ones. It was launched by Anwar Sadat - the same man. Some 2,500 Israelis died in that war - more than in any other campaign between 1949 and today.
In 1977 I was an instructor in the Armour Academy; previously, I had served in an armoured brigade in Sinai, facing the Egyptians. Our training was all geared against the Egyptian enemy; anyone more than two years older than us, meaning all our officers when I was in training, had fought against them. November 19th 1977, if I remember correctly, was a Saturday. On the previous Wednesday, when I announced to the soldiers we were training, who had no access to the media, that by the end of the week the Egyptian president would be in Israel, they gave an incredulous shout of astonishment.
That Saturday evening we suspended whatever had been planned and crowded around (black and white) TV sets. What followed were two days of unbelievable events: An Egyptian airliner on the tarmac; the Egyptian President appearing in the opening, then descending the steps, then shaking hands with our entire leadership; the next day, the President of Egypt standing in the Knesset, talking, in Arabic, about peace, and his immortal sentence in English, which I can still recite today with his accent and inflections: "No more war. No more bloodshed".
Gideon Levy, with whom I rarely agree, writes about the same events here, in similar terms. It's a fine description, until near the end he implies that the wars were the result of brainwashing. This is a fallacy easy to fall into: that once warring sides have made peace, they gain a new perspective on their wars, which seem foolish and unnecessary. I have no doubt that this can happen, but it doesn't have to. Sometimes, no matter how much perspective one gains, and even with all the possible hindsight, past wars steadfastly remain justified.
Present and future ones too, potentially.
Seth Freidman, writing in The Guardian, offers the usual fare: Both Palestinians and Israelis will have to make compromises, but since Israel is the stronger side, she must do more, and first, and responsibility for no peace is Israel's. And of course the settlements are the source of all evil. If I were in London, and was paying for a dead-tree version of a newspaper, I probably wouldn't choose the Guardian if only because of the sheer predictability and boredom factor.
All the while, the situation in Gaza is a daily demonstration of the foolishness of the Guardian thesis: Israel took the initiative, dismantled the settlements, pulled out her forces, and at the time - late summer 2005 - handed over control of Gaza's border with Egypt to the Egyptians and teams of inspector from the EU. And lo and behold: No peace! Nor even anything remotely resembling peace.
And yet... The situation in Gaza really is awful. Steven Erlanger of the New York Times has just filed a report from there (and note the recorded parts that can be listened to only on the web-site version of the NYT).
In spite of what the Guardianistas and their ilk like to say, Israel is fundamentally not responsible for the misery in Gaza. But no decent person can observe the misery and remain unmoved. It truly is awful, and apparently not getting any better; the prospects are mostly that it will get worse. And Israel is part of the story - past, present, and future. I don't know what we might do that would make things better, but simple human compassion for people in dire straights is still called for. I wish the Gazans had a better life, and a rosier future. I really do.
Israel is the country that broke the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in the Middle East and introduced nuclear weapons into the region, kicking off an arms race with Iraq that in many ways led to the Iraq War. US and American complaints about Iran's civilian energy research program never acknowledge Israel's own outlaw status with regard to nonproliferation.
Well, no. Israel didn't break the NPT, because along with India and Pakistan, Israel never signed it (North Korea signed, violated, and withdrew). Iraq violated the NPT, tho may have desisted after Israel destroyed its Tammuz reactor in 1981. Iran is probably violating the NPT.
Actually, since the NPT was open to be signed in July 1968, Israel may already have had either nuclear weapons or at least a nuclear program well before then, though I don't see how I (or Cole, or anyone else outside of a very small circle of relevant Israelis) can prove this.
Having falsely identified Israel as an "outlaw", Cole then goes on to tell that this is cause for the present war in Iraq. If you want to follow that kind of path, however, why not go further? The Jewish insistence on preserving an identity and culture has created endless tension and even violence these past 3,000-some years, and the world might have been a much calmer place without the Jews.
Here's a long article abut a new Israeli documentary film, "lir'ot im ani mechayechet" (To See if I'm Smiling"), about women soldiers in the IDF who served during the first and second Intifadas. It's not pleasant reading, but it's necessary.
At the moment, I'm simply posting, not commenting and certainly not arguing - especially as the stories are themselves mostly complex, and morally complicated, and the moral reality portrayed in them is not easy to unravel. I will however note that Meir, my older son, served for a while in Hebron not long after one of the periods described in the article, and came back with stories that were no less compelling but quite different. So sometime soon I'll come back to this post.
Last week I linked to a review of Sages, an interesting book published recently by the Rav Benni Lau, who officiates as the Rabbi of our congregation.
At the risk of appearing to be a groupie, which I'm not, here's a link to an article published yesterday about Lau's understanding of what the Rabbinate should be doing and what it's not; I mostly subscribe to his positions.
Judith Apter Klinghofer looks at Israel's economy, and also at the Palestinian one, and decides it's the Palestinians who need peace more than the Israelis (which isn't so surprising); foreign aid is bad for the Palestinians; and living in a state of war doesn't particularly damage the Israeli economy. Not so much counter-intuitive (which it actually isn't) as much as counter-everything-the-pundits-say-all-the-time.
Jerusalem's open air market, Mahane Yehuda, is a colorful, fascinating, bustling, noisy, and mobbed place. This morning, as I passed through the southwestern security gate on Agripas street, I noticed an elderly beggar in a wheelchair, and a 30-something haredi man squating in front of him. Both had open books in their laps, and they were poring over them, deep in discussion. From the briefest of glances that I managed to sneak I'd say they were studying Torah, perhaps the weekly portion; the page seemed not to have the format of a Gemarah page.
They were quite oblivious of the rest of us.
Someone put up posters on billboards in Jerusalem (perhaps also elsewhere?) featuring a glum-looking Olmert with bars superimposed in front of him, and the caption (in English, for some reason): Annapolis WON'T Save You!
This would be referring to the theory that Sharon invented the disengagement from Gaza to escape criminal investigations into an assortment of alleged scams. Olmert's collection of piling up allegations is, if anything, larger than Sharon's.
What is the furthest point in the world from the Middle East? Offhand, I'd look for it in New Zealand, but Jade Mountain, in St. Lucia, should definitely be a candidate.
Here's the first in what will probably be a series of reflections as we approach the Arab-Israeli-American event at Annapolis, later this month.
About a week ago Haaretz had a rather startling article by Danny Rubinstein about the Palestinian national movement. Unfortunately, so far as I can determine, no English version was ever posted at their website. (Here's the Hebrew original). Rubinstein is one of those knowledgeable, Arabic-speaking, left-wingish Israeli journalists that Haaretz likes to employ, and I like to read because they're informative, tell us things we otherwise probably wouldn't have known, and generally speaking don't allow their politics to blind them to the reality they're reporting on. Rubinstein once wrote a biography of Arafat, and if memory serves, he didn't pretend to have understood what the man was about.
The thesis of the article cited here was that the Palestinian national movement is, if not dead, then dying. Part of this is the disappearance of the nationalists, who have either died, or given up and left, going back to more comfortable lodgings in Jordan, Egypt, or the West. Abu Mazen, one of the remaining figures, is a powerless figure of popular derision, says Rubinstein. The Jordanians are retaking institutional positions in the West Bank they had abandoned in the 1980s and 1990s. Hamas, anyone?
None of this is to say that the Palestinian issue is disappearing, only that the possibility of the Palestinians getting their act together as a national entity (=state) is diminishing.
One reason Rubinstein's piece resonated with me was that I'd already heard it. I recently read Hillel Cohen's "The Rise and Fall of Arab Jerusalem 1967-2007", (Hebrew), The Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies, 2007. (Yes, Cohen is another one of that same group, tho he doesn't generally write for Haaretz). The book goes into lots of (interesting) detail about things happening in the Arab sections of Jerusalem, but the outline is the same: In the 1980s it really looked like East Jerusalem was the de-facto capitol of an inevitable Palestinian state, but this has changed completely since the collapse of the Oslo process. On the one hand, Israel's power has proven greater than that of the Palestinian institutions, many of which are no longer in town because they were forced out, or because the Israeli security measures and above all the barrier, cut Arab Jerusalem off from the West Bank. On the other hand, the Arabs of East Jerusalem themselves are making choices of their own: most of them did not join the 2nd Intifada in any meaningful way (tho Cohen details the actions of some murderous cells that did), and as the gap in levels of income between East Jerusalem and West Bank grow, there is ever less enthusiasm for being part of the West Bank. It isn't even solely a matter of economics: the chaos in the West Bank these days may be a far cry from that in Gaza, but seen from East Jerusalem life in the PA doesn't look so good.
Cohen also warns that none of this means the Arabs of East Jerusalem have embraced Zionism or wish to be Israeli patriots. But they're waiting, and in the meantime, they're drifting away from the West Bank, and their aspirations for the future are apparently ever less clear.
Remind me some day to propound my ironic theory whereby the further Palestinians are from Israeli rule, the worse off they are.
Ovadia Hamama recently put out a very interesting record, which sold very well since one of the songs, a novel rendering of a Cabalistic verse many people had never heard of, became a major hit (Ana beKoach). Well, no-one had heard of Ovadia before, either, since he seems to be all sorts of things but not a recognized singer.
The seventh song on the record has an elderly man with an Iraqi accent reading a letter which was obviously written around 1949, when he was a newly arrived immigrant dumped on a kibbutz far from his family. This is the stuff of much academic research since the 1980s: how the hegemonic ashkenazi establishment forced the poor and bewildered masses of traditional Jews from the Arab countries to come to Israel to serve as the underclass, their identity was torn from them, the hegemonic narrative was force-fed to them. Proof of all this? Well, take this letter, for example: the poor dupe tells how life at the kibbutz is good; he has volunteered to work in construction; young men are allowed to walk on the beach with young women; last week they were all bussed into Tel Aviv where they heard speeches, including one by Ben Gurion himself, and then they danced in the street until dawn, and isn't this a fabulous country?!
But then you read the small print in the enclosed booklet. The letter was written by Ovadia's father, in 1949, to his brother who was still in Iraq, and has remained as a prized possession in the family ever since; the father himself is reading it in the recording, accompanied by his grandchildren; and the whole thing is obviously a source of pride and lore.
An email reached me yesterday at my Yad Vashem address from a woman in her 70s, a Holocaust survivor. "I have achieved my revenge on the Nazis", she wrote, "I have raised children and grandchildren in our homeland". However, she continued, what she still hadn't achieved was closure; for that she hopes to find other people who shared her particular segment of fate, and might we be able to help her in finding them?
This post will have no links, since it will poke grim fun at a person who means well, has done me no wrong, and my problem is with her ideas, not herself.
Wandering around cyberspace today I came upon a psychologist offering advice on how parents should treat their two-year-olds who are testing their newly discovered power to be obnoxious (my formulation).
1. Meet her basic needs. She will certainly whine if you force her to endure one more errand when she's hungry and tired. The problem with whining is that it becomes a habit. Why create a negative situation which she'll then repeat?
2. Be pre-emptive. Make sure that your child gets enough of your positive attention, unprovoked. Pre-empt whining by giving attention BEFORE she gets demanding. Anyone who's had to ask a romantic partner "Do you love me?" knows that attention given after you ask can never really fill the need. The secret is to take the initiative and give attention the child hasn't asked for, often, so she feels your support and connection. And of course it's particularly important to give attention when she shows the first sign of needing your emotional support, before that quick downhill slide.
3. Give her alternate tools by teaching her how to ask appropriately for something and negotiate with you. Since whining is a function of powerlessness, generally helping your child to feel that she can get what she wants through reasonable measures will carry over into the rest of her life.
In other words, you don't want her to learn that she gets her way in life by whining or tantrumming, but you do want her to learn that she can get what she wants through managing her emotions, seeing things from the other person's point of view and setting up win/win situations.
How? "Ok, you want to go to the playground, and I need to stop at the hardware store. Let's do this: If you cooperate at the hardware store, we'll have time to stop at the playground on the way home. And if you are really good about getting in and out of your carseat and not dawdling as we leave the house, we can stay at the playground for five extra minutes." If she feels like she only gets the playground by whining, she'll become an expert whiner.
4. Don't reward whining. Don't give in and buy the candy. Be nice about it, but explain that we don't reward whining. Of course, be prepared for her to switch gears and ask nicely. Then you might have to reward that with extra time at the playground, even if you can't agree to candy!
5. Support her in pulling herself together and talking normally. It's fine to say "My ears don't hear whining. Can you ask me in a regular voice?" but try to say it warmly and supportively. Reward all her efforts to express herself positively.
Huh. Now why didn't I ever think of that? All those fear-casting facts I've encountered in life? They're all figments of a neural network that helped my ape-like ancestors to survive all those falling coconuts in their jungle. All you need is to think positively and encourage everyone warmly and supportively and the world will be perfect.
You have to admit that most of the time, you don't. On the occasion of the 3rd anniversary of his death I did a bit of googling, and found remarkably few items mentioning him these past three years. Perhaps he wasn't as important at they told us most of his life.
Here's an article from today telling about how the world has changed since his "mysterious death". To be honest, I find myself unconvinced. Sure, many of the props have been shuffled, but has anything fundamental changed? I expect to mull this over in the coming weeks, as we approach the Annapolis event.
Out of the blue, for no particular reason, Michael Handelzaltz dedicates his weekly column to the story of the death of his grandmother in Warsaw in September 1939. The story was related by his grandfather, who saw himself as the survivor of a tragedy, and his woe echoed down to his grandson on three different paths, as told in the article. The real irony, of course, is that the grandfather didn't survive, he merely died later, and almost the only thing his grandson knows about him is how he mourned the death of his wife.
This underlying theme of contemporary Jewish life, which will not disappear anytime soon, is an illustration of the depth of the Jewish trauma of our age. Our critics (including the home-grown ones) love to mock us for being so caught up in memories of the Shoah, but that which they mock is merely human nature. Perhaps because they aren't interested in human nature.
Last week I linked to an optimistic article about Haredi women moving into the labor force, and I identified this as part of a tectonic change. Here's an article with statistics that demonstrate that there's still a very long way to go: 70% (!!!) of the Haredi man are unemployed, and 50% of the women.
Rabbi Elisha ben Avuya, who became an apostate and was thereafter called Aher (Other) is one of the most fascinating of the Tanaim, the sages who created the Mishna. A new book (in Hebrew) takes a new look at him - or mostly, at how he was remembered by the Jews of the Galilee verses their cousins in Babylonia. I have always felt his story to be extraordinarily powerful and complex.
Here's an interesting review of an interesting book by an interesting youngish scholar (as scholars go). The Rav Benni Lau is the rabbi of the congregation we are members of, and he has recently put out the second volume of his group biography of the Tanaim - the rabbis of the Mishnaic era, some 2,000 years ago, give or take a century or two. Since the book will probably not be available in English anytime soon, the review is second best and also the best you'll get.
As the possibility of dividing Jerusalem looms, hundreds of Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem are applying for Israeli citizenship, in the hope that if the division happens they can stay in Israel.
A group of law students, waiters, and a law professor who teaches his students how to engage in social issues has forced a chain of cafes to hand tips over to the waiters, rather than pocketing them and doling out only leftovers. You'd have thought this would be so obvious - elementary decency, even - that it would be a non-issue, but it seems you'd be wrong.
I can't link to this because it's not in the papers. I learned it from a friend at one of our far-lefty human rights organizations, who has me on his mailing list for whatever reason. (So I can quote him approvingly in rare cases, I suppose). Anyway, the law professor is Itai Svirski of Tel Aviv University.
Here's a story about a book that's so ancient it was smuggled out of Jerusalem when the Crusaders first arrived (1099), at which time it was already almost 200 years old. It survived intact until 60 years ago minus three weeks.
Here's an interesting and optimistic piece about an American insurance company which is employing Haredi women as insurance evaluators. Since they work Israeli mornings, nighttime in the US, the company saves time; they are also working for salaries that are lower than anything comparable in the US. However, unlike many business that use English-speaking employees in India or the Philippines, these women are doing quite skilled work. I'm familiar with a number of such places, and their advantage over the Asian competition is in the skills of their staff: they don't even try to compete at the simple levels.
The whole movement was given a tremendous boost a few years ago when then-Finance Minister Netanyahu slashed the subsides of large families (code: some orthodox, most Arabs, and essentially all Haredis). There was a cacophony of squawks and shrieks about his cruelty, but it seems he was right on all parameters - this being merely one of the longer-term results. And very long-term it may prove to be, if it helps in healing some of the severe distortions that have characterized the Haredi communities in Israel these past two generations or so. (Their New York cousins never had this particular set of problems, since no American government would ever have dreamed of subsidizing them off the labor market for generations).
And note the final paragraph to see the full subversive power of this change.
To round up this thread, here's a short article I wrote about Machsom Watch about three years ago.
Since the fine folks at NGO Monitor recently thought I was against them, it's time to link to them in an approving way. A good place to look would be at their recent report on Machsom Watch - that group of Israeli women who purportedly watch the IDF roadblocks so as to ensure that the IDF troops treat the Palestinian civilians correctly. Actually, as NGO Monitor correctly notes, Machsom Watch has a much broader agenda, which includes "ending the Israeli occupation".
I myself have had a number of interactions with them which indicate that this time, NGO Monitor is quite right in its criticism. A few years ago, for example, I participated in a series of op-eds in Haaretz about how bad Israel really is (predictably, I was claiming that it's not all that bad). Since I was out there in the public eye, I received various responses, one of them a thoughtful letter from one of the women of Machsom Watch. While her tone was civil and sincere, her thesis was that she has many Palestinian friends, and part of their common ground is their mutual agreement that the IDF is to blame for just about everything. What used to be called "a useful idiot" in a different historical context.
Then perhaps two years ago Achikam and I participated together in a lecture series set up by a far-left organization that wished to educate the Israeli public about the evils of the security barrier aka Apartheid Wall. Most of our co-students were, how to say this, of mildly different political persuasions than the two of us. One memorable afternoon Achikam and I sat quietly in our chairs before the beginning of the lecture, and listened as two women from Machsom Watch told one another about the efforts they had recently gone to to somehow stage a photo of an Israeli soldier with his gun pointed at a Palestinian woman or child, and their frustration that - angles of photography notwithstanding - they somehow hadn't been able to create the incriminating photo. Achikam quoted that story often in the following weeks.
Here's a picture such as you'll never see in the media. I cannot give it an exact date or place it accurately, but it's clearly a picture of an Israeli soldier (of the Nachal infantry regiment, by his beret), having a friendly interaction with a Palestinian child.
I took it off an e-mail that was sent out from The Association for Prosperity and Security in the Middle East. A report in Y-net a while back (last July) identifies this association with the Israeli chapter of the Scientologists. To be honest, I'm not overly interested in the agenda of whoever is sending out such pictures; the pictures themselves interest me more.
Might it be a falsification? Given that Hezbollah and other Lebanese have a track record of falsifying pictures depicting Israeli atrocities, you can't be certain this is authentic, save for one consideration, and that is that anyone who has ever watched IDF soldiers interacting with Palestinians knows from experience that such scenes happen - jut like the other kind, regrettably, also happen.
I had a brief meeting early this morning in one of our top hotels. As soon as I got there it occurred to me that the American Secretary of State, Dr. Rice, must have arrived in town, because the place was literally swarming with security types. It's funny how those guys (and some gals, too) stick out like sore thumbs. A drunk blind man walking backwards in a dark alley would identify them from half a mile.
It appears not all of my readership agrees with me that Israel was too careless with Lebanese lives in last year's war. Since I'm not coming to the discussion as a bleeding heart pacifist or some such, I can see the sense of their objections; however, precisely because my position is that the waging of war is NOT the worst thing that can happen, and Israel will unfortunately need to continue at war for quite some time, we need to adhere to the highest practicable standards. Last year, we didn't. Our standards were much higher than those of our enemies, of course, but that is very feeble praise.
Martin Kettle at the Guardian finds himself participating in the English version of the same discussion. Many of his readers take him to task for daring to recognize that the subject is a thorny one, with no easy answers.
I am aware that I haven't been telling much of interest about Achikam's experiences for a while. Actually, I hope very soon to pull together lot's of impressions he (and I) have been collecting, and to post an article about them.
In your blog posting, you acknowledged NGO Monitor's critique of Human Rights Watch and its head, Kenneth Roth, but then you noted that the information and analysis that we provided would not change your opinions. I admit that I cannot understand how, after seeing the specific examples of HRW's unverifiable, and in many cases, clearly false claims, and its obsessive condemnations of Israeli responses to Hezbollah, you still believe" that it would have been better had the IDF tried to learn from [HRWws] report on the war in Lebanon last year" and that Roth is "unfortunately, right, and the IDF people are wrong." I wonder what evidence it would take to convince you that HRW, and Roth in particular, have a strong ideological agenda and that their research capabilities, particular when dealing with Israel, are practically non-existent? HRW's condemnations against Israel are almost entirely based on reports of so-called "eyewitnesses" based in Southern Lebanon, and the latest report on last year's Lebanon war regarding the number of civilian casualties in Lebanon is full of huge holes. Perhaps if you read some of NGO Monitor's detailed analyses on HRW since 2001, you would recognize that HRW's "halo effect" hides some nasty ideological agendas and biases.
point. HRW published condemnations of Israel without any verifiable evidence. If NGOs were to use a reliable and consistent methodology, more governments, including the Government of Israel, would take them seriously. As it stands, it is the powerful NGOs that need to be examined. HRW's annual budget is close to $50 million – money that could be much better spent. For example, as NGO Monitor has shown, for the past two years has spent only a small fraction of its resources on the abuses in Burma .
This is an important issue, both for Israel and for the effort to restore the credibility and impact of universality of human rights norms, and to end the exploitation of the language to promote the ideological and personal agendas of NGO officials.
But you see, I'm not really arguing with Steinberg, nor embracing Kenneth Roth. What my original statement was, and obstinately remains, is that since Israel was too careless with the lives of some Lebanese citizens in last summer's war, we need to be figuring out what we did wrong so as to learn from it for the next time (yes, there most assuredly will be a next time that Israel will be at war). I wish we weren't in such a situation, for all sorts of reasons, first and foremost because of the innocent lives lost, but we are. Israel wasn't trying to hit Lebanese civilians, as Hezbollah was aiming indiscriminately at Israeli civilians; I even have no reason to think that Israel was callously disregarding Lebanese citizens in its attempt to hit Hezbollah; but there can be no doubt that Israel was being less careful then necessary, and that as a result innocent Lebanese died. If Kenneth Roth - even he - has anything to tell about the events that we can learn from then we should be listening. Not because he's such a reliable witness. He probably isn't. But that's not the issue.
For a fuller description of my take on Israel's 2nd Lebanon war, see Michael Totten's interview with me, here.


Every year, since 2001, the Festival located in the mythical district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, cradle of jazz in Europe, offers a selection of new musical and jazzy discoveries.
A new museum opening in Paris!
Recently inaugurated, the Atelier des Lumières is the new place of exhibitions which is a sensation in Paris. And for good reason, this old foundry dating from the nineteenth century offers a dream space: nearly 3300 m2 of projection area.
The seasons go by and the exhibitions too! Here are the cultural novelties for spring in Paris.


text:
Persoonia terminalis
☰ Contents
Distribution and habitat
Cultivation potential
P. t. terminalis at the Australian National Botanic Gardens
Clade: Tracheophytes
Clade: Angiosperms
Clade: Eudicots
Order: Proteales
Family: Proteaceae
Genus: Persoonia
P. terminalis
Binomial name
L.A.S.Johnson & P.H.Weston
P. t. subsp. recurva
P. t. subsp. terminalis
Synonyms[1]
Persoonia nutans subsp. D P.H.Weston
Persoonia terminalis, also known as the Torrington geebung, is a rare shrub belonging to the family Proteaceae, and native to northern New South Wales and southern Queensland in eastern Australia.[2] Reported as a subspecies of Persoonia nutans in 1981, it was described as a species by Lawrie Johnson and his colleague Peter Weston in 1991.
Two subspecies—P. t. terminalis and P. t. recurva—are recognised; both are found on well-drained acidic soils in sclerophyll forests, and P. t. terminalis is also found on granite outcrops. Although similar in appearance, they differ in leaf length and curvature. Both have a restricted range, with P. t. terminalis found in an area of under 100 square kilometres (39 square miles).
P. terminalis grows to 1.5 metres (5 feet), with an upright or spreading habit, and narrow short leaves up to 1 centimetre (0.4 inches) in length. The yellow flowers mainly appear in December and January (Australia's temperate zone summer),[3] and are followed by purple-striped green drupes (stone fruit). The fruit of persoonias are edible, and dispersed by wild vertebrates.
Persoonia terminalis was first reported by Lawrie Johnson of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney, in the 1981 edition of Flora of New South Wales.[4] He viewed it as a distinctive subspecies of Persoonia nutans,[a] a broadly defined species that included many forms since classified as distinct.[5] Queensland botanists Trevor Donald Stanley and Estelle M. Ross classed P. terminalis as part of Persoonia oxycoccoides in their 1983 work Flora of South-eastern Queensland.[6] They considered it more likely a species in its own right,[5] as they believed the description of the Queensland populations did not match the P. oxycoccoides from central New South Wales.[6] Upon re-examining Persoonia nutans and Persoonia oxycoccoides, Johnson and Peter Weston concluded that there were in fact several distinct species, and that Persoonia terminalis was described as such in 1991. The type specimen was collected 3.4 kilometres (2.1 mi) south of the Torrington pub on the Emmaville–Torrington road by Weston and ecologist Peter Richards,[7] and is now housed in the National Herbarium of New South Wales, which is part of the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust Sydney and Office of Environment and Heritage. The Herbarium houses over 1.2 million other specimens.[2][8] The generic name Persoonia is derived from the name of South African botanist Christiaan Hendrik Persoon.[9] The specific name terminalis refers to the inflorescences (clusters of flowers) that are in this species at the ends of the branchlets.[5] Its common name is the Torrington geebung.[10]
It is classified within the genus as within the Lanceolata group, which consists of 58 closely related species with similar flowers but very different foliage. These species will often interbreed with each other in areas where two members of the group occur.[11] P. terminalis has been reported to interbreed with Persoonia cornifolia and Persoonia sericea,[12] two other members of the group.[11]
Two subspecies are recognised: P. t. subsp. recurva has shorter leaves, with margins more curved downwards, that reach a maximum of 0.75 centimetres (0.30 in) in length, while P. t. subsp. terminalis has longer, straighter leaves measuring a maximum of 1 centimetre (0.4 in) long.[12]
Persoonia terminalis subsp. recurva
Persoonia terminalis grows as a shrub reaching a height of 0.7–1.5 metres (2 1⁄4–5 ft), with an upright or spreading habit. It has smooth bark,[2] although new growth is covered in fine hair. The small, narrow leaves are 1.2–2 millimetres (1⁄16–3⁄32 inch) wide and 3.5–10 millimetres (1⁄8–3⁄8 in) long, with a convex upper surface and margins curved downwards. New leaves can be hairless or slightly hairy; if the latter, they lose the hair with age. They are concolorous—that is, both leaf surfaces are the same colour, or slightly discolorous (surfaces slightly different).[7] The leaves are rougher than those of other persoonias.[5]
The yellow flowers mainly appear in December and January (summer in the temperate zone of Australia),[3] although occasional flowers have been seen as late as July.[7] They are terminal, that is, arising at the ends of branchlets, where they appear in groups of one to five. P. terminalis is described as mostly anauxotelic, which means each stalk bears an individual flower that is subtended by a scale leaf at its junction with the stem. A proportion of flowers have a true leaf at this junction instead, and are described as auxotelic.[5] Each individual flower consists of a cylindrical perianth that splits into four segments or tepals, and contains both male and female parts. Within this, the central style is surrounded by the anther, which splits into four segments; these curl back and resemble a cross when viewed from above.[11] They provide a landing area for insects attending to the stigma, which is located at the tip of the style.[13] Flowers are followed by the development of the fleshy purple-striped green drupes.[5] These are 1–1.2 centimetres (3⁄8–1⁄2 in) long by 0.7–0.8 centimetres (1⁄4–3⁄8 in) wide, with the remnant style at the end.[6]
The plant grows in the temperate zone of the Australian state of New South Wales (red, above) and in the more specific region of New England (range marked in green) along its Northern Tablelands.
Persoonia t. subsp. terminalis is found in the Torrington-Binghi area on the western parts of the far Northern Tablelands in New South Wales, roughly halfway between Glen Innes and the Queensland border, at an altitude of between 900 and 1,100 metres (3,000 and 3,600 ft) above sea level. It grows on acidic, sandy or stony granite soils in dry sclerophyll forest.[5] The region is dotted with granite outcrops, where the subspecies is a component of Babingtonia odontocalyx–Brachyloma saxicola shrubland and Prostanthera staurophylla–Kunzea bracteolata low shrubland in the Torrington area, and Allocasuarina brachystachya shrubland in the Severn River Reserve.[14] It is rated 2R[b] on the ROTAP list.[16]
Persoonia t. subsp. recurva has two disjunct populations. One is found on the North Western Slopes in New South Wales, near Warialda north west of Inverell, and the other is southwest of Inglewood in southeastern Queensland, between 350 and 450 metres (1,150 and 1,480 ft) above sea level. It grows on acidic sandstone-based sandy soils in dry sclerophyll forest.[5] Within the Warialda State Conservation Area, it is found in black cypress pine (Callitris endlicheri)—dirty gum (Eucalyptus chloroclada) woodland and smooth-barked apple (Angophora leiocarpa)—black cypress pine woodland.[10] Although P. t. recurva has not been recorded from Kings Plains National Park, it could be expected to be found there due to the availability of suitable habitat.[17] It is rated as 3R[c] on the ROTAP list.[16]
Both subspecies are commonly found near the Severn River Nature Preserve,[18] as well as in the Arakoola Nature Reserve, where they are components of a woodland ecological community dominated by smooth-barked apple and long-fruited bloodwood (Corymbia dolichocarpa), which grows on sandstone soils.[19]
Persoonia terminalis grows in a bushfire-prone habitat, where fire is essential for many species to regenerate. P. t. terminalis is killed by bushfire and regenerates from seed,[20] which lies dormant in the soil.[21] Large numbers of Persoonia seedlings appear after fire.[11] However, rocky outcrop habitat is vulnerable to fires occurring at too-frequent intervals of less than five years, which puts many species that regenerate by seed at risk of local extinction as plants are unable to mature to set seed before the next fire.[20]
Colletid bees of subgenus Cladocerapis within the genus Leioproctus exclusively forage on and pollinate flowers of many species of Persoonia. Bees of subgenus Filiglossa in the same genus also specialise in feeding on Persoonia flowers, but do not appear to be effective pollinators. The fruit are adapted to be eaten by vertebrates, such as kangaroos and possums, as well as currawongs and other large birds.[11]
Horticulturists and scientists Rodger Elliot and David L. Jones have proposed that cultivating the plant would aid in its conservation. Cultivating the plant would most likely require good water drainage, a sunny or part-shaded position and acidic soil. P. terminalis is hardy to heavy frosts, and is expected to fare better in a temperate rather than subtropical garden climate. Propagation would theoretically be by seed or by taking cuttings of new growth,[22] though plants of the genus Persoonia as a genus are generally difficult to propagate by any means in cultivation.[9]
^ Persoonia nutans subsp. D[1]
^ The '2' indicates it has a range of under 100 square kilometres (39 sq mi).[15]
^ The 'R' signifies the taxon as rare but with no current identifiable threat, and the '3' indicates it has a range of over 100 km, though in small populations.[15]
^ a b Weston, P.H. (2002). Harding, G.J. (ed.). Flora of New South Wales. 2. UNSW Press. ISBN 978-0-86840-609-1. Retrieved 1 November 2015.
^ a b c "Holotype of Persoonia terminalis L.A.S.Johnson & P.H.Weston [family PROTEACEAE]". Herbarium Specimens. Global Plants. Retrieved 7 February 2016 – via JSTOR.
^ a b "Australian weather and seasons – a variety of climates". australia.gov.au. Archived from the original on 4 November 2015. Retrieved 3 November 2015.
^ The citation is collected in Flora of New South Wales, Volume 2, ISBN 0-86840-609-0, p. 14
^ a b c d e f g h Weston, Peter H.; Johnson, Lawrence Alexander Sydney (1991). "Taxonomic changes in Persoonia (Proteaceae) in New South Wales". Telopea. 4 (2): 369–406 [281–83]. doi:10.7751/telopea19914929.
^ a b c Stanley, Trevor Donald; Ross, Estelle M. (1983). Flora of South-eastern Queensland. Brisbane, Queensland: Queensland Dept. of Primary Industries. p. 8.
^ a b c "Persoonia terminalis L.A.S.Johnson & P.H.Weston". Flora of Australia Online. Department of the Environment and Heritage, Australian Government.
^ "National Herbarium of New South Wales". anbg.gov.au. Retrieved 4 November 2015.
^ a b "Persoonia chamaepitys". anbg.gov.au. Retrieved 2 November 2015.
^ a b Hunter, John T. (2009). Vegetation and flora of the Stonehenge section of the Warialda State Conservation Area :A Report to the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service (PDF) (Report). doi:10.13140/RG.2.1.1239.9201.
^ a b c d e Weston, Peter H. (2003). "Proteaceae subfamily Persoonioideae: Botany of the Geebungs, Snottygobbles and their Relatives". Australian Plants. 22 (175): 62–78 [70]. ISSN 0005-0008.
^ a b P.H. Weston. "New South Wales Flora Online: Persoonia terminalis". Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain Trust, Sydney, Australia.
^ Wrigley, John; Fagg, Murray (1991). Banksias, Waratahs and Grevilleas. Sydney: Angus & Robertson. pp. 475–76. ISBN 978-0-207-17277-9.
^ Hunter, John T.; Clarke, Peter J. (1998). "The vegetation of granitic outcrop communities on the New England Batholith of eastern Australia" (PDF). Cunninghamia. 5 (3): 547–615. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 June 2014.
^ a b Walters, Brian (February 2010). "Threatened Flora Lists". ANPSA website. Australian Native Plants Society (Australia). Retrieved 2 November 2015.
^ a b "PlantNET – FloraOnline". nsw.gov.au. Retrieved 1 November 2015.
^ Hunter, John T. (2000). Flora Survey of Kings Plains National Park: A Report to the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service (PDF) (Report). doi:10.13140/RG.2.1.1740.2724.
^ Hunter, John T.; Clarke, Peter J. (1998). "The Vegetation of Granitic Outcrop Communities on the New England Batholith of Eastern Australia" (PDF). Cunninghamia. 5 (3): 547–618 [594]. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 June 2014.
^ Hunter, John T. (2003). "Vegetation and flora of Arakoola Nature Reserve, North Western Slopes, New South Wales" (PDF). Cunninghamia. 8 (2): 188–201. Archived from the original (PDF) on 24 June 2014.
^ a b Clarke, Peter J.; Knox, Kirsten J. E. (2002). "Post-fire response of shrubs in the tablelands of eastern Australia: do existing models explain habitat differences?". Australian Journal of Botany. 50 (1): 53–62. doi:10.1071/BT01055.
^ Clarke, Peter J.; Knox, Kirsten J. E.; Campbell, Monica L.; Copeland, Lachlan M. (2009). "Post-fire recovery of woody plants in the New England Tableland Bioregion" (PDF). Cunninghamia. 11 (2): 221–39. Archived from the original (PDF) on 13 March 2016.
^ Elliot, Rodger W.; Jones, David L.; Blake, Trevor (1997). Encyclopaedia of Australian Plants Suitable for Cultivation. 7: N–Po. Port Melbourne, Victoria: Lothian Press. p. 233. ISBN 978-0-85091-634-8.
Science and environment of New South Wales at Curlie
Original: Original:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persoonia_terminalis

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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Sudden-Lee, Yankees Are Without A Plan
This is not good. This. Is. Not. Good.
I was thinking of sending in the lyrics to Pearl Jam's "Black" instead of writing this since I am holding back tears and shaking, but I wasn't sure if turning in Eddie Vedder's work as my own counts as plagiarism since it's a song.
On Friday, I told Sweeny Murti that I had made a playlist of sad songs in the event that Cliff Lee didn't choose the Yankees. I asked Sweeny what the Yankees' Plan B was if he didn't sign, and he said it wouldn't be to make a sad songs playlist, but I'm not so sure it isn't. (Now playing: "Everybody Hurts" by R.E.M.)
Cliff Lee wasn't Plan A. He was The Plan. There isn't another free agent pitcher even close to his abilities; in fact there isn't even another free agent pitcher I would want on the Yankees. And according to Joel Sherman, Felix Hernandez, Josh Johnson and John Danks aren't available. So I'm not exactly sure where the Yankees go from here. All I know is it's never a good thing when you are googling "Sidney Ponson" to see if he is available knowing that he is probably somewhere on Cashman's list of backup plans. And yes, he is. He was placed on the Atlantic League's retired list on June 18. Ponson Part III, anyone?
I'm scared. I'm scared of what Brian Cashman might do now. I'm scared of what will happen to the Yankees in 2011. I'm scared that CC Sabathia might opt out after this season and sign with the Phillies. I'm scared that the Yankees are banking on the idea that Larry Rothschild thinks he can fix A.J. Burnett. I'm scared that, right now, Sergio Mitre is the No. 5 starter on the $200 million New York Yankees.
Last week on Twitter I joked that this offseason Brian Cashman publicly bashed the face of the franchise, forced the best relief pitcher in the history of baseball to talk to Red Sox, scaled a building in Stamford, Conn., had dinner with Carl Crawford and then hours later Crawford signed with the Red Sox and now you can add letting a pitcher turn down seven years and $154 million to that list. His offseason has been as bad as Tim Redding's only start with the Yankees on July 15, 2005 against the Red Sox in a 17-1 loss at Fenway Park (1 IP, 4 H, 6 R, 6 ER, 4 BB, 2K). I was joking with that tweet, but now I'm not really joking because my 2011 summer hinges on whether or not Cashman can trade for a pitcher worth getting excited about. (Now playing: "All Out Of Love" by Air Supply).
I know people are sensitive about just about everything when it comes to the Yankees and there are those that get easily offended when Cashman's decision making is questioned. But on a day like today after a night like last night, I think it would be unfair not to question Cashman and his decision to leave next season in the hands of a lefty willing to leave two years and $28 million on the table. This isn't so much to blame Cashman for failing to land Lee since, according to Jon Heyman, Lee is the one that initiated talks with Philly and probably never wanted to come to New York. This is more to blame Cashman for putting the Yankees in a position in which they absolutely had to have Lee.
So, here's a look at just how much of an impact Cliff Lee's decision has on the Yankees. And to take us through all the aspects of Lee's choice to pitch for the Phillies and not the Yankees are quotes from Michael Scott of The Office because right now that is the person who most resembles our trusty GM, who is one non-move from ruining the 2011 summer the same way that Cliff Lee just ruined Christmas.
"But I always thought that the day that Steve Martin died would be the worst day of my life. I was wrong. It's this."
When Derek Jeter was still not signed, I kept thinking, "What if he goes somewhere else? What if I have to write my 'Tribute to Derek Jeter' story at least four years before I'm supposed to?" I never really thought that Jeter would leave, but there was that chance that he might.
I always thought there was a slight chance I might have to write the story you are currently reading. I thought I might have to write about being devastated that Cliff Lee didn't choose the Yankees, but really, I didn't think I would because I just figured that the Yankees would give him whatever he wanted to make sure that they would never have to face him again. And when everyone tells you he is going to be a Yankee and that they will pay whatever it takes, you believe it. So much for that. (Now playing: "Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness" by The Smashing Pumpkins.)
"How do I feel about losing the sale? It's like if Michael Phelps, came out of retirement, jumped in the pool, belly-flopped and drowned."
This is bad for Brian Cashman. This is as bad as giving $82.5 million to A.J. Burnett or giving Javier Vazquez and Nick Johnson second chances or letting Johnny Damon and Hideki Matsui go. Maybe Cliff Lee was never going to come to New York, but Cashman put the Yankees in a position in which they had to have Lee because there was no other option and now they don't have him.
"My whole life, I believed that America was No. 1. That was the saying. Not, 'America is No. 2.' England is No. 2, and China should be like 8."
George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees in 1973. In the 37 ½ years of his life that he ran the team (I know that number depends on when he technically stopped being in charge and you also have take away the years he was banned), only one ace turned down the Yankees' money (to my knowledge) and that was Greg Maddux. Steinbrenner has been dead for five months, and the number of pitchers to turn down the Yankees' money has already matched the total number during Steinbrenner's 37 ½ years as The Boss.
Aside from Maddux, I never really thought anyone would turn down less money or not accept the Yankees' eagerness to overpay for someone. But at the end of the day, it turns out the Yankees didn't even offer Lee the highest contract in terms of average annual salary. Here were the offers to Lee, according to Jon Heyman:
Yankees: Six years, $148 million plus player option for seventh year at $16 million.
Phillies: Five years, $120 million.
Rangers: Six years, $138 million.
In the end, Lee left $28 million on the table, but did end up getting a higher average annual salary. (Now playing: "Every Breath You Take" by The Police.)
"Here's the sitch. Two weeks ago, I was in the worst relationship of my life. She treated me poorly, we didn't connect, I was miserable. Now, I am in the best relationship of my life, with the same woman. Love is a mystery."
Before the winter meetings, it was expected that Cliff Lee would be a Yankee, and once the Red Sox got Carl Crawford and the Yankees improved their six-year offer to seven years, it was basically a guarantee that Lee would sign with the Yankees.
And before the winter meetings, the Yankees rotation was CC Sabathia, Phil Hughes, A.J. Burnett, Ivan Nova and Sergio Mitre, but it was expected to improve over the next week. Guess what? That's still the rotation right now. So before the winter meetings the thought of that rotation was a joke, and now it's still our rotation. Do I expect the rotation to stay the same? No. But I also don't know how Lee's decision will impact Pettitte's.
"You know what? I had fun at prom. [pause] And no one said yes to that either."
Brian Cashman and the front office will have to speak to the media about what went wrong in trying to entice Cliff Lee to the Bronx, and I fully expect them to spin in a way that make it sound like it's no big deal. I'm sure they will tell Yankees fans how they are focused on the bullpen and the bench, and they will eventually believe their own lie that this is somehow for the better.
After the Red Sox traded for Adrian Gonzalez for prospects and not a single current major leaguer (I wonder if Jed Hoyer is still technically a Red Sox employee) and signed Carl Crawford the same night that Cashman had dinner with him, Cashman said you just have to "tip your hat" to the Red Sox for making great movies. I wonder if he will tip his hat to the Phillies too? Why not? Seems like the polite thing to do. (Now playing: "With Or Without You" by U2.)
"You know what Toby, when the son of the deposed king of Nigeria e-mails you directly, asking for help, you help! His father ran the freaking country! OK?"
Brian Cashman was embarrassed in July when the Mariners used the Yankees to get the Rangers involved in a deal for Cliff Lee. The Mariners got the Rangers to offer Justin Smoak, and once they did, they cited David Adams' ankle injury as a way to cancel the deal on the Yankees.
At the time I was crushed. The Yankees missed out on the chance to add Lee even if it came at the cost of Jesus Montero. Here is what I said to Sweeny following the deal that didn't happen:
"Many people thought that Lee to the Yankees would be too much or even "overkill" given the already star-studded roster. I was clearly not one of those people and even though I have been anxiously awaiting the debut of Jesus Montero, I could deal with the Yankees losing him given the depth of catchers in the minors. The Yankees would have gone from favorites to win the World Series to heavy favorites, and would have had a real chance to run away and hide in the AL East."
And here is Sweeny's response:
"I don't think it was a necessary move to make, but I'll repeat what one GM said to me last week when I told him the Yankees didn't need Cliff Lee. He said to me, "Everybody needs a Cliff Lee!"
If Lee gets traded to the Yankees, they probably would have beaten the Rangers and might have won the World Series. Lee would have had a half season under his belt in New York and been reunited with his so-called "best friend" CC Sabathia (maybe they aren't exactly best friends after all) and fellow Arkansas native A.J. Burnett, and would have never had a taste of the Rangers, so they wouldn't have had much of a say in the sweepstakes. The Yankees could have signed him to an extension after trading for him or waiting until right after the season, and just like that there would be no problems.
Then again, what if the Yankees had traded Montero for Lee, and then Lee still left for Philly the way that the Rangers traded Smoak for a half-year rental? I'm just glad Chuck Greenberg made it impossible for me to feel sorry for Rangers fans. (Now playing: "How's It Going To Be" by Third Eye Blind.)
"There are ten rules of business that you need to learn. Number one: You need to play to win. But, you also have to … win, to play."
Here is the Yankees rotation as of today:
CC Sabathia, Phil Hughes, A.J. Burnett, Ivan Nova, Sergio Mitre.
One second, I need to grab a tissue.
Here is the Red Sox rotation as of today:
Jon Lester, Josh Beckett, Clay Buchholz, John Lackey, Daisuke Matsuzaka.
Am I the only one that sees a problem here?
Let's not forget that the Red Sox were without Dustin Pedroia and Kevin Youkilis for a large portion of the year and still caused me to hyperventilate as late in the season as September 26 when there were only seven games left. A healthy Red Sox team in 2011 with the additions of Adrian Gonzalez and Carl Crawford has kept me awake for nearly a week and will probably cause a great deal of stress this winter and eventually ruin my summer. Merry Christmas, Cliff Lee!
"I miss the feeling of knowing you did a good job because someone gives you proof of it. 'Sir, you're awesome, let me give you a plaque! What? A whole year has gone by? You need more proof? Here is a certificate.' They stopped making plaques that year."
Two years ago, Brian Cashman ended the World Series drought by unloading the Yankees' checking account on CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett and Mark Teixeira, and the Yankees won the World Series. Then, instead of doing all he knows how to do (spend money), he tried to be a real general manager and get creative. So he traded for Javier Vazquez and signed Nick Johnson. He let the No. 2 hitter and the World Series MVP both leave via free agency and essentially ripped apart two of the Yankees' most important offensive weapons and two players essential with winning and big-game pedigrees. He did trade for Curtis Granderson, so it wasn't all bad.
Now, Cashman is going to need to get creative again. The problem is being creative doesn't win in baseball. You either have a lot of money to spend or you have enough homegrown starting pitching that you don't need to spend money. Look at the Red Sox. After trying to save some pennies on Mark Teixeira and trying to get creative with reclamation projects like John Smoltz and Brad Penny and Mike Cameron, and winning zero postseason games since all of this, the Red Sox went to the winter meetings with Adrian Gonzalez already in hand and left with Carl Crawford. Lots of money. Zero creativity.
I can't wait for the creativity era to begin. (Now playing: "The Heart Of The Matter" by Don Henley.)
"Andy Bernard. Pros: he's classy. He gets me. He went to Cornell. I trust him. Cons: I don't really trust him."
I'm supposed to like Brian Cashman, but I don't. It's not because of this or that he told No. 2 to test the market if he didn't like the Yankees' offer, but they are just the icing on the cake of a mountain of problems in the last decade. I have no idea what Brian Cashman is going to do now. No one does. I don't even know if Brian Cashman knows what he's going to do.
Cashman's biggest flaw has always been that he doesn't know pitching and to think that he is now being asked to make a move regarding pitching to save the 2011 season before it even starts is as bad as it gets.
Now playing until the Yankees bring back Andy Pettitte and trade for a front-end starter: "Wake Me Up When September Ends" by Green Day. September 2011 that is.
Sudden-Lee, Yankees Are Without A Plan added by Neil Keefe on Dec 10, 2010


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This pack includes one poco of each of these sayings: BRUNETTES + LOVELY + VEST, and their respective envelopes.


text:
Porsche 919 Evo Sets All-Time Fastest Nürburgring Nordschleife Lap Record!
Cars, Driving, News
Porsche has claimed and set the fastest ever lap time at the Nürburgring with their latest 919 Hybrid Evo. How fast? A blistering 5 minutes and 19.55 seconds. Those are the numbers that five-time Nürburgring 24-hours winner Timo Bernhard took to cover the 20.8 km Nürburgring Nordschleife in Porsche's hybrid prototype race car.
This new lap time is one for the record books and a stuff of legends. Because for 35 years, the fastest Nürburgring lap time of 6 minutes and 11.13 seconds was held by Stefan Bellof in a Rothmans Porsche 956 C.
The car that has made history is an Evo version of the Porsche 919 Hybrid, a car that took an outright victory at the Le Mans 24-Hours and won the FIA World Endurance Championship in 2015, 2016 and 2017.
How does it go so fast?
The magic of setting a new record that is 51-seconds faster than the previous is all due to weight, aerodynamics and power. Weighing in at only 849 kg, the Evo is undoubtedly lighter than a Perodua Myvi and also has a total system output of 1160 hp. The 919 is powered by a two-litre turbocharged V4-cylinder engine and two energy recovery systems – brake energy from the front axle combined with exhaust energy. The active aerodynamics also generate 50 per cent more downforce than the WEC model. Timo managed to drive the Evo up to a top speed of 369.4 km/h.
Thanks to the removal of the air-conditioning, windscreen wiper, several sensors, electronic race control devices, light systems and pneumatic jack system, the dry weight was reduced by 39 kg. In terms of rubber, Michelin also developed a special tyre compound for the 919 Evo that produces more downforce than a Formula One car.
On-board Lap
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The 2019 Perodua Axia is here – New Style, Better Safety
Here's why the latest 2019 Toyota Vios is the Best It's Ever Been
© 2015-2018 Carsome Sdn. Bhd. All right reserved.


text:
An Post issues video game icons stamp set
An Post announced the release of a brand new stamp set on the 16th of October, and Mario, Pac Man, Sonic and Space Invaders will be going around the world on snail mail letters.
You can buy the stamps (minimum purchase €5.00) at http://www.irishstamps.ie/shop/c-190-game-icons.aspx, from major post offices or if you're around Dublin, the stamp shop from the GPO. and as they're limited edition, use your opportunity to get them while they're still around! Press release is below.
Dublin 16/10/2014 Did you hear the one about the moustachioed superstar, the hedgehog, the yellow dot and the space invader? Well stand by, because this week An Post has issued a four-stamp set celebrating the great video game icons.
Nintendo's Mario, SEGA' s Sonic the Hedgehog, BANDAI NAMCO Games Inc's PAC-MAN and Taito Corp's Space Invaders will feature on the colourful four stamp set that looks likely to prove a huge hit with gamers of all ages. The set marks the iconic status of the games and the transition of gaming from novelty to global industry.
The stamps were designed by Zinc Design Consultants, the Dublin-based, award-winning graphic design studio. The stamps and a beautiful first day cover (FDC) are available from main post offices, at the stamp shop in Dublin's GPO or online at www.irishstamps.ie.
The four constitute probably the most iconic images of popular culture since the 1970s and lie at the heart of a multibillion dollar global industry. Mario was created by Nintendo in 1981 and wears his distinctive red cap and blue overalls, beginning one of the biggest video game franchises of all time with Mario appearing in more than 100 video games to date with more than 307 million units sold worldwide. The distinctive blue Sonic the Hedgehog first appeared in 1991 and has been blazing a trail for SEGA ever since. Sonic lies at the heart of some 70 games and has grossed over €5 billion in sales. PAC-MAN first appeared in 1980 and saw players steering a yellow dot around levels of maze, eating Pac-Dots and fruit, and avoiding ghosts . Two years earlier in 1978 Space Invaders was born, originally manufactured and sold by Taito of Japan and one of the forerunners of modern video gaming.
In the early years, games were mostly aimed at children but very quickly became the stuff of everyday life for people of all ages and all walks of life. An Post's new stamps will be eagerly sought by gamers past and present and by anyone with an interest in popular culture.
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