Find the perfect prime aviation stock photo, image, vector, illustration or 360 image. Available for both RF and RM licensing. Save up to 30% when you upgrade to an image pack. Stock photos, 360° images, vectors and videos ...

Prime Aviation was founded in December of 2005 and is the leader in providing VIP prime services and business aviation in Kazakhstan and Central Asia. Company primary purpose is to provide the highest level of aviation service based on the principles and standards of the EU. Contact Us: +7 (727) 355 66 44 sales@primeaviation.kz More about us

With a daily readership of over 1 000 000, AeroTime Hub offers breaking aviation industry news, while thousands attend major conferences, shows and concerts managed by AIR Convention and Seven Live. ... Avia Solutions Group delivers prime aviation services to keep air transportation running smooth and steady. Are you here to join the mission?

The National Company Law Tribunal on Tuesday granted relief to Ace Aviation Ltd., the potential buyer for Jet Airways Ltd.'s grounded aircraft. The court has allowed an application that allows them to purchase the debt-ridden airlines' aircraft, based on an agreement reached between Ace and the monitoring committee of Jet Airways.

Best vehicle I have ever owned!!!

Total piece of junk from day one

Remarkably solid machine, and great fun to drive and own

Great until 200k

This New York Times RSS feed is no longer available and you should unsubscribe from it. Available RSS feeds are listed on this page on the New York Times website

Title: Hookahs vs. Cigarette Smoking (Addiction and Health Dangers)
Category: Diseases and Conditions
Created: 5/24/2017 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 5/25/2022 12:00:00 AM

Title: nicotine lozenge
Category: Medications
Created: 7/21/2022 12:00:00 AM
Last Editorial Review: 7/21/2022 12:00:00 AM

“Skinny Boy,” the new single by Original Coral Reefer Guitarist, Roger Bartlett and Steven Taylor, is now available for download exclusively at The Songwriters Joint. Featuring an all-star lineup including TC Carr, John Frinzi, and members of …

Although the economy isn’t nearly as bad as some politicians would like us to believe (i.e., teetering on the edge of catastrophic collapse) nor as good as others claim (seriously: have you bought a bag of potato chips lately, one of the many items that victimizes consumers through shrinkflation?), one thing is certain: It is tough to get a job.

One of the recent events that could have conceivably caused a pandemic of globe luxation (i.e., eyes literally popping out of one’s head) was General Motors announcement a few weeks ago that it was jettisoning more than 1,000 software and services engineers. Just imagine a few years back when Susie or Johnny wanted to pursue studies of 17th-century metaphysical poets and were told by their parents that that was a dead-end and that they should go into a field with a bright future, one that would provide assured employment—like software engineering.

So it very well be that the un- or underemployed may think that now is a good time to take that weekends-only musical performing to a full-time gig.

After all, there was Swift’s remarkably lucrative Eras Tour, followed by Coldplay’s Music of the Spheres, which made it the first band to gross over a billion dollars.

Read more at Glorious Noise...

Full disclosure–hell, this whole article is a full disclosure–Tiny Jackets is a project fronted by Kelly Simmons, who I played with in the band Daystar.

Some time ago I moved from Portland back to my hometown in Michigan and while we kept Daystar alive through those years (including through the pandemic lockdown), Kelly naturally got restless and started a new project called Tiny Jackets. 

Now, here’s the thing: Tiny Jackets is exactly the band I would have loved to be in. They have big hooks, big harmonies, occasionally jangly guitars, and clever lyrics. That sounds like me, right? 

Well, Tiny Jackets has a new single out called “My Own Dark Age” and it has all of the above plus a nifty outro that would sound natural on a banger from Waxwings (another band I wish I was in!).

Tiny Jackets Release Party

The Fixin’ To in Portland, Oregon

6:00 pm

Pre-order “My Own Dark Age”

Photo credit: Sarah Almedia

Read more at Glorious Noise...

This is another installment of research into the biochemistry of HIV and Aids by Cal Crilly, an Australian who finds himself fascinated with the intricacies of biology. Crilly analyzes the seemingly unconnected studies that show the biochemical changes that accompany the presence of numerous retroviruses - one of them called HIV - in humans. The mechanism that makes retroviruses appear is hypomethylation, and it is the same mechanism that accompanies pregnancy and inflammation. Those retroviruses are produced in the course of normal biological activity and they are not infectious. There are many different types (ever heard of HIV 'mutating'?). As an aside, we declare pregnant mothers to be "HIV positive" as pregnancy causes the presence of retroviruses in the course of normal biological activity, and those harmless endogenous retroviruses react with what's generally called an "HIV" test. Certain basic nutrients - Selenium, Folate, B12, B6, Choline are the most important - counteract hypomethylation of the cells and thereby calm the production of human endogenous retroviruses. The toxic Aids drug AZT causes hypermethylation but it is so destructive of normal cell processes that most patients die. The 'life prolonging' effect of HAART, the drug cocktail that is prescribed to Aids patients today is due to a sharp decrease in the dosage of deadly AZT in the cocktail. Cal demonstrates those facts and more with reference to studies you can find as well, if you're interested in the details. Meanwhile we continue to treat immune compromised people with drugs that further compromise the immune system and - in many cases - kill the patient. When is medicine going to start treating those people by insisting on better eating and supplementation supplying the correct nutrients? How long will it take until the toxic drugs are phased out in favor of real prevention?...

Many thanks g to Cristina in Greece for her report on this - originally published on her justiceforgreece blog as A seed For Change a documentary project by Alex Ikonomidis and the declaration on seed freedom Alex Ikonomidis is a Greek film maker who lived, studied and worked in Lebanon. After returning to his native Greece and serving his time in the military, he took up his profession there and was happily going along, producing in the world of media and advertising when, suddenly, the economic crisis hit. Through the crisis, Ikonomidis recognized that when money becomes more and more scarce, it is important to be where food is grown. This brought him to embark on a documentary project. A Seed for Change is his soon-to-be-released feature length film documenting why agriculture must start with seed freedom. Chemical inputs are often toxic and are disruptive to human health and the environment. "Standardized" seeds, as imposed by the agro-chemical conglomerates through legislation pushed through in much of the civilized world, are destroying our heritage of biological diversity, created by nature and harnessed by farmers for producing our food over thousands of years....

More and more evidence is coming to light that Dr. Wakefield was on the right track when he researched the connection between the MMR vaccine and intestinal inflammation in the vaccinated children. Was Dr. Andrew Wakefield Right After All? Wakefield’s Lancet Paper Vindicated New Published Study Verifies Andrew Wakefield’s Research on Autism But how did Dr. Wakefield first get into the sights of the UK vaccine industry and how was the campaign against him mounted? Martin Walker, the author of "Dirty Medicine" and a number of other books on health, closely followed the case that eventually resulted in Dr. Wakefield's exile from the UK. He describes how it all happened and how the vaccine manufacturers were able to bring down the full weight of government and the courts against both Wakefield and the many parents who were suing for recognition of the damage vaccines had done to their children. "As a campaigner of 40 years, I think that what surprises me most about Dr Wakefield’s case, is how easily and how completely we were defeated by the pharmaceutical companies, how over a thousand parents and children were written out of history together with their adverse drug reactions. Part of this defeat for the parents, the children and the doctors concerned was grounded in an unfortunate understanding that pharmaceutical company executives were decent people and humanitarians. In fact the pharmaceutical companies, their corporate structure and their relentless pursuit of profit, their fraudulent practices represent one of the last remaining shibboleths, in our society which need to be completely reformed, democratised, divested of vested interests and made public from top to bottom." We do learn from experience. That is why we should pay attention to how this case went so wrong and why the campaign to ruin those researchers and to leave the damaged children by the wayside was mounted in the first place. So it won't happen again. Here is Martin Walker's essay....

“Perhaps you’re familiar with “the tragedy of the commons,” a social dilemma outlined by the late biologist Garrett Hardin in a famous 1968 essay of the same name. The dilemma is that when individuals pursue personal gain, the net result for society as a whole may be impoverishment. (Pollution is the most familiar example.) Such thinking has fallen out of fashion amid President Bush’s talk of an “ownership society,” but its logic is unassailable.”

That response seems like a pretty damn obtuse interpretation of the essay, simply because the essay is nothing if not a plea for the creation of property rights. Furthermore, while it is true that Hardin claims that pursuing individual gain leads to group catastrophe, the word “when” in the paragraph above implies that there are times when the individual doesn’t, whereas Hardin claims that individuals basically always pursue their own interest, which is the problem in high-density situations where some amout of coordination is necessary. However, upon re-reading it, I realize that for Hardin property rights only forms a part of a wished-for imposition of coercive measures which will prevent individuals from pursuing personal gain at the expense of their environment. Which makes sense, because property rights, for all this may get lost in the ceaseless ideological wrangling today, are themselves forms of state-imposed coercion. Dismiss the semi-metaphysical nonsense in Locke and Kant about gaining “just propriety” over an object by making a visible mark on it. Think about it: animals control exactly as much “property” as they can defend; cheetahs peeing on trees only works because they will fight to defend what they have claimed. By contrast, think about who adjudicates the (in theory) incontestable property rights: the authorities, i.e. in our society, the State. The corollary of this, of course, is that nationalized or federal property is not “public property,” in the sense of property owned by the public—quite the contrary. The dichotomy between it and “private property” is spurious. “Public property” is simply property owned by the government. This no doubt seems obvious and intuitive, but based on the foolishness I cited above, it bears repeating that property rights, whether granted to others by the government or to itself, are not opposed to coercive state power but are in fact the very essence of it. That fact is perhaps more apparent in regards to so-called “intellectual property.”

As a marginal note, Hardin’s essay, despite the pithiness of its central analogy, is rather dispiriting insofar as it takes Hegel’s statement that “Freedom lies in the recognition of necessity” as its motto and guiding spirit. That formulation is, as I believe I have said before, perfectly monstruous. Freedom means nothing if it is not the absence of restriction, and it is perhaps a sign of the evasive confusion of priorities in Western culture that one would pretend to celebrate this value in such a way while in fact describing its opposite. Freedom is not an act or a thought, but rather a set of conditions under which action and thought occur. This is the same idealistic debasement of the language that has turned love into a deed: making love.

“Young man, in mathematics you don’t understand things, you just get used to them.” —John von Neumann¹

This, in a sense, is at the heart of why mathematics is so hard. Math is all about abstraction, about generalizing the stuff you can get a sense of to apply to crazy situations about which you otherwise have no insight whatsoever. Take, for example, one way of understanding the manifold structure on SO(3), the special orthogonal group on 3-space. In order to explain what I’m talking about, I’ll have to give several definitions and explanations and each, to a greater or lesser extent, illustrates both my point about abstraction and von Neumann’s point about getting used to things.

First off, SO(3) has a purely algebraic definition as the set of all real (that is to say, the entries are real numbers) 3 × 3 matrices A with the property A^TA = I and the determinant of A is 1. That is, if you take A and flip rows and columns, you get the transpose of A, denoted A^T; if you then multiply this transpose by A, you get the identity matrix I. The determinant has its own complicated algebraic definition (the unique alternating, multilinear functional…), but it’s easy to compute for small matrices and can be intuitively understood as a measure of how much the matrix “stretches” vectors. Now, as with all algebraic definitions, this is a bit abstruse; also, as is unfortunately all too common in mathematics, I’ve presented all the material slightly backwards.

This is natural, because it seems obvious that the first thing to do in any explication is to define what you’re talking about, but, in reality, the best thing to do in almost every case is to first explain what the things you’re talking about (in this case, special orthogonal matrices) really are and why we should care about them, and only then give the technical definition. In this case, special orthogonal matrices are “really” the set of all rotations of plain ol’ 3 dimensional space that leave the origin fixed (another way to think of this is as the set of linear transformations that preserve length and orientation; if I apply a special orthogonal transformation to you, you’ll still be the same height and width and you won’t have been flipped into a “mirror image”). Obviously, this is a handy thing to have a grasp on and this is why we care about special orthogonal matrices. In order to deal with such things rigorously it’s important to have the algebraic definition, but as far as understanding goes, you need to have the picture of rotations of 3 space in your head.

Okay, so I’ve explained part of the sentence in the first paragraph where I started throwing around arcane terminology, but there’s a bit more to clear up; specifically, what the hell is a “manifold”, anyway? Well, in this case I’m talking about differentiable (as opposed to topological) manifolds, but I don’t imagine that explanation helps. In order to understand what a manifold is, it’s very important to have the right picture in your head, because the technical definition is about ten times worse than the special orthogonal definition, but the basic idea is probably even simpler. The intuitive picture is that of a smooth surface. For example, the surface of a sphere is a nice 2-dimensional manifold. So is the surface of a donut, or a saddle, or an idealized version of the rolling hills of your favorite pastoral scene. Slightly more abstractly, think of a rubber sheet stretched and twisted into any configuration you like so long as there are no holes, tears, creases, black holes or sharp corners.

In order to rigorize this idea, the important thing to notice about all these surfaces is that, if you’re a small enough ant living on one of these surfaces, it looks indistinguishable from a flat plane. This is something we can all immediately understand, given that we live on an oblate spheroid that, because it’s so much bigger than we are, looks flat to us. In fact, this is very nearly the precise definition of a manifold, which basically says that a manifold is a topological space (read: set of points with some important, but largely technical, properties) where, at any point in the space, there is some neighborhood that looks identical to “flat” euclidean space; a 2-dimensional manifold is one that looks locally like a plane, a 3-dimensional manifold is one that looks locally like normal 3-dimensional space, a 4-dimensional manifold is one that looks locally like normal 4-dimensional space, and so on.

In fact, these spaces look so much like normal space that we can do calculus on them, which is why the subject concerned with manifolds is called “differential geometry”. Again, the reason why we would want to do calculus on spaces that look a lot like normal space but aren’t is obvious: if we live on a sphere (as we basically do), we’d like to be able to figure out how to, e.g., minimize our distance travelled (and, thereby, fuel consumed and time spent in transit) when flying from Denver to London, which is the sort of thing for which calculus is an excellent tool that gives good answers; unfortunately, since the Earth isn’t flat, we can’t use regular old freshman calculus.² As it turns out, there are all kinds of applications of this stuff, from relatively simple engineering to theoretical physics.

So, anyway, the point is that manifolds look, at least locally, like plain vanilla euclidean space. Of course, even the notion of “plain vanilla euclidean space” is an abstraction beyond what we can really visualize for dimensions higher than three, but this is exactly the sort of thing von Neumann was talking about: you can’t really visualize 10 dimensional space, but you “know” that it looks pretty much like regular 3 dimensional space with 7 more axes thrown in at, to quote Douglas Adams, “right angles to reality”.

Okay, so the claim is that SO(3), our set of special orthogonal matrices, is a 3-dimensional manifold. On the face of it, it might be surprising that the set of rotations of three space should itself look anything like three space. On the other hand, this sort of makes sense: consider a single vector (say of unit length, though it doesn’t really matter) based at the origin and then apply every possible rotation to it. This will give us a set of vectors based at the origin, all of length 1 and pointing any which way you please. In fact, if you look just at the heads of all the vectors, you’re just talking about a sphere of radius 1 centered at the origin. So, in a sense, the special orthognal matrices look like a sphere. This is both right and wrong; the special orthogonal matrices do look a lot like a sphere, but like a 3-sphere (that is, a sphere living in four dimensions), not a 2-sphere (i.e., what we usually call a “sphere”).

In fact, locally SO(3) looks almost exactly like a 3-sphere; globally, however, it’s a different story. In fact, SO(3) looks globally like , which requires one more excursion into the realm of abstraction. , or real projective 3-space, is an abstract space where we’ve taken regular 3-space and added a “plane at infinity”. This sounds slightly wacky, but it’s a generalization of what’s called the projective plane, which is basically the same thing but in a lower dimension. To get the projective plane, we add a “line at infinity” rather than a plane, and the space has this funny property that if you walk through the line at infinity, you get flipped into your mirror image; if you were right-handed, you come out the other side left-handed (and on the “other end” of the plane). But not to worry, if you walk across the infinity line again, you get flipped back to normal.

Okay, sounds interesting, but how do we visualize such a thing? Well, the “line at infinity” thing is good, but infinity is pretty hard to visualize, too. Instead we think about twisting the sphere in a funny way:

You can construct the projective plane as follows: take a sphere. Imagine taking a point on the sphere, and its antipodal point, and pulling them together to meet somewhere inside the sphere. Now do it with another pair of points, but make sure they meet somewhere else. Do this with every single point on the sphere, each point and its antipodal point meeting each other but meeting no other points. It’s a weird, collapsed sphere that can’t properly live in three dimensions, but I imagine it as looking a bit like a seashell, all curled up on itself. And pink.

This gives you the real projective plane, . If you do the same thing, but with a 3-sphere (again, remember that this is the sphere living in four dimensions), you get . Of course, you can’t even really visualize or, for that matter, a 3-sphere, so really visualizing is going to be out of the question, but we have a pretty good idea, at least by analogy, of what it is. This is, as von Neumann indicates, one of those things you “just get used to”.

Now, as it turns out, if you do the math, SO(3) and look the same in a very precise sense (specifically, they’re diffeomorphic). On the face of it, of course, this is patently absurd, but if you have the right picture in mind, this is the sort of thing you might have guessed. The basic idea behind the proof linked above is that we can visualize 3-space as living inside 4-space (where it makes sense to talk about multiplication); here, a rotation (remember, that’s all the special orthogonal matrices/transformations really are) is just like conjugating by a point on the sphere. And certainly conjugating by a point is the same as conjugating by its antipodal point, since the minus signs will cancel eachother in the latter case. But this is exactly how we visualized , as the points on the sphere with antipodal points identified!

I’m guessing that most of the above doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I would urge you to heed von Neumann’s advice: don’t necessarily try to “understand” it so much as just to “get used to it”; the understanding can only come after you’ve gotten used to the concepts and, most importantly, the pictures. Which was really, I suspect, von Neumann’s point, anyway: of course we can understand things in mathematics, but we can only understand them after we suspend our disbelief and allow ourselves to get used to them. And, of course, make good pictures.

² As a side note, calculus itself is a prime example of mathematical abstraction. The problem with the world is that most of the stuff in it isn’t straight. If it were, we could have basically stopped after the Greeks figured out a fair amount of geometry. And, even worse, not only is non-straight stuff (like, for example, a graph of the position of a falling rock plotted against time) all over the place, but it’s hard to get a handle on. So, instead of just giving up and going home, we approximate the curvy stuff in the world with straight lines, which we have a good grasp of. As long as we’re dealing with stuff that’s curvy (rather than, say, broken into pieces) this actually works out pretty well and, once you get used to it all, it’s easy to forget what the whole point was, anyway (this, I suspect, is the main reason calculus instruction is so uniformly bad; approximating curvy stuff with straight lines works so well that those who who are supposed to teach the process lose sight of what’s really going on).

So blöd, wie es auf den ersten Blick aussehen mag, war die Frau keineswegs, die am 19.9.2007 einen Ehescheidungsantrag beim Schleswig-Holsteinischen Verwaltungsgericht einreichte. Welches Ziel hatte sie wohl mit ihrer - laut OLG Schleswig rechtsmissbräuchlichen, im Ergebnis aber doch erfolgreichen - Aktion im Auge?