Mangalore Plane Crash

An Air India Express Flight IX-892, flying from Dubai to Mangalore, India, overshot a table-top runway, Saturday morning, upon reaching its destination, and burst into flames after it plunged into a forest about 600-900 feet below, killing 166 people on board. Onlookers and firefighters stand at the site of a crashed Air India Express passenger plane in Mangalore May 22, 2010.

Saturday’s crash underscores India’s poor aviation safety standards though it is the first major crash to take place in a decade in the country. The last major crash in India was in July 2000 when an Alliance Air Boeing 737-200 crashed into a residential area during a second landing attempt in Patna, killing at least 50 people.

According to the Flight Safety Foundation figures, India has the highest rate of aviation accidents in the world. Since January, nearly 550 people have been killed from plane crashes. The black box has been recovered from an Air India Express passenger plane from Dubai that crashed on landing in southern India on Saturday, the United Arab Emirates’ state media said.

Air India Express is the budget arm of the loss making state-run carrier Air India, which has been fending off growing competition from private airlines. Television channels said the plane crashed around 6:30 a.m. (0100 GMT). The plane had broken into two. I jumped out of the plane after it crashed. The flight had already landed.

Nearly 160 people are feared dead after an airliner crashed while landing near the southern Indian city of Mangalore. Air India Express mainly caters to the southern Indian states of Kerala and Karnataka, where this plane crashed, with flights to and from the Gulf, where a large number of Indian nationals work.

The runway at Mangalore airport is situated on a hillock, which in aviation parlance is known as a table top runway. According to aviation officials, the aircraft overshot the runway, hit a fence and went beyond the boundary wall of the airport. First, one tyre burst, then the other tyre burst and the plane caught fire. Airports Authority of India chairman V P Agarwal said visibility was 6-7 kms, more than that required, when the ill-fated plane landed in Mangalore .

Firefighter’s sprayed water on the plane as rescue workers struggled to find survivors. Meanwhile, civil aviation minister Praful Patel has rushed to the spot. Congress president Sonia Gandhi also expressed grief and sorrow over the tragic air accident in Mangalore . India’s worst aviation accident occurred in 1996 when two passenger planes collided in mid-air near New Delhi with the loss of all 349 on board both flights.

Sea of Okhotsk

The Sea of Okhotsk is a part of the western Pacific Ocean, lying between the Kamchatka Peninsula on the east, the Kuril Islands on the southeast, the island of Hokkaidō  to the far south, the island of Sakhalin  along the west, and a long stretch of eastern Siberian  coast (including the Shantar Islands) along the west and north. The northeast corner is Shelikhov Gulf. It is named after Okhotsk, the first Russian  settlement in the Far East.

The Sea of Okhotsk covers 611,000 sq.mi. (1,583,000 km2.), with a mean depth of 2,818 feet (859 metres). Its maximum depth is 11,063 feet (3,372 metres). It is connected to the Sea of Japan on either side of Sakhalin: on the west through the Sakhalin Gulf and the Gulf of Tartary; on the south, through the La Pérouse Strait.

In winter, navigation on the Sea of Okhotsk becomes difficult, or even impossible, due to the formation of large ice floes, because the large amount of freshwater from the Amur River lowers the salinity and raises the freezing point of the sea. The distribution and thickness of ice floes depends on many factors: the location, the time of year, water currents, and the sea temperatures.

With the exception of Hokkaidō, one of the Japanese home islands, the sea is surrounded on all sides by territory administered by the Russian Federation. For this reason, it is generally considered as being under Russian sovereignty.

Earth Music Ecology

Earth Music Ecology is a brand of casual clothing designed from natural fabrics. The concept is part of the Earth Day movement. The garments are made of good quality natural materials and designed to last. The fibers are made from cellulose from plants such as cotton, bamboo and other fibrous plants that have not been treated with pesticides. Wearing Earth clothing is a good way to go green, because you are wearing clothes made from the products grown in the earth.

By purchasing Earth clothing we are helping the earth. Earth Music Ecology is a sustainable line of clothing that preserves the integrity of the earth, without harming animals, since the clothing is not derived from animal sources. All the textiles at Earth Music store are organic and sustainable. Earth Music Ecology is the brand for women, while Earth Music is the men’s brand of clothing.

The Earth Music Ecology brand of fashion was created by a fusion of artists and designers such as Ryan McGinness, Darek, Mambo, and others. Earth Music Ecology clothing is manufactured without animal testing; therefore parents that are concerned about animal cruelty will have assurance that no animals were used in the manufacture and testing of the product. Earth Music Ecology clothing is a product of the organic fashion industry. Who would purchase Earth Music Ecology clothing? Earth Music Ecology gives you a choice.

Acoustic Ecology may have been inspired by music but never became music and, conversely, some of his music may have been influenced by Acoustic Ecology but never became “Acoustic Ecology” except in the most rudimentary and academic of cases.

In many ways the current expansion of the term Acoustic Ecology—which otherwise seems historically appropriate is reinforced by a largely conservative musical establishment—especially in academia—interested in placing experimental musical activity into a zone of non-musical status. As a composer, Schafer has essentially been a Romantic Modernist (by no means meant as a pejorative) here defined as an interest in expanding the expressive palette of music while maintaining an essentially 19th-century aesthetic concept of what the social role and purpose of music should be. As such he could not accommodate his insights about environmental sound into his music, and the logical way open to him was to define a new intellectual discipline. It is also a tradition concerned with achieving many of Schafer’s Acoustic Ecology concerns but through active creative strategies that emphasize the materiality of sound, listening, environment, perception, and socio-political engagement.

In addition to the artistic activities that were evolving parallel to those of Acoustic Ecology, many developments were taking place in scientific fields concerned with the relationship of sound to the environment. While all of these events have to some extent more precisely advanced issues originally put forth by Acoustic Ecology, further blurring its original meaning and intellectual focus, Acoustic Ecology has itself influenced other disciplines beyond music and the arts. It is obvious that some commentators within the traditional music world have seen the development of these new events and genres as directly hostile to traditional musical values. Meanwhile, many “sound artists” have seemed eager to part from the music world’s aesthetic and educational expectations. They often reinvent concepts that the experimental music community has always embraced but can now be retrofitted into the art market gallery system. If music in any way reflects the evolving human condition, then this is what we should have expected music to become in the 21st century.

From an environmental viewpoint, music may have been a means through which humans structurally coupled to the larger systems of mind that comprise our natural and social environments. Beyond the cultural richness and entertainment that recent uses for music afford us, assumptions about musical authorship, communicative intention, emotional expression, and musical genius may—in evolutionary terms be short-term phenomena and even distractions from a more profound significance.

In the light of insights inherited from the experimental music tradition and the broader meaning for Acoustic Ecology previously outlined, I am willing to contend that this capacity to hear the sounds cape as music is simultaneously one of the most archaic ways of listening and the most modern. Music is both a conserving action for keeping alive a mode of communication similar to non-human forms of cognition and an intuition to a future communication modality that we are actively evolving.

There is one final caveat to include before concluding this discussion of the link between Acoustic Ecology and musical experimentalism. My position is not intended to negate prior musical forms and assumptions. Like any living ecosystem, a near infinite diversity of musical realities can coexist and be widely valued and that is the true meaning of our human heritage of music.

Earth off axis

An earthquake can make Earth rotate faster by nudging some of its mass closer to the planet’s axis, just as ice skaters can speed up their spins by pulling in their arms. Conversely, a quake can slow the rotation and lengthen the day if it redistributes mass away from that axis, Gross said Tuesday.

Conversely, a quake can slow the rotation and lengthen the day if it redistributes mass away from that axis the calculated changes in length of the day are permanent.  The Chilean earthquake has shortened the length of the day by making the Earth rotate faster, according to NASA scientists.

The Sumatran earthquake from 2004 should have shortened the length of day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted Earth’s axis by 2.76inches. Soldiers patrol the streets during curfew hours in Concepcion, Chile three days after an earthquake killed at least 700 people

Chilean rescue crews fanned out with sniffer dogs today around quake-ravaged cities and villages, some still hoping to find survivors and others facing the daunting task of recovering bodies buried under mountains of rubble.