Model Airplanes

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – An Iranian police airplane flying to the country’s southeast crashed late Saturday, killing all seven people aboard, including a top police officer, the country’s official news agency reported.

The propeller Turbo Commander airplane crashed in the mountains outside of the provincial capital of Zahedan and searchers later found the wreckage, IRNA reported. The agency said the flight carried four passengers and three crew members.

Among those killed was Gen. Mahmoud Sadeqi, a senior police officer in charge of investigations, IRNA reported.

Iran’s semiofficial Fars news agency says the plane took off from Tehran to head to southeastern Iran to investigate an incident involving an attack on police there, without elaborating.

Authorities offered no immediate explanation for the crash, though Iranian airlines, including those run by the state, are chronically strapped for cash, rely on aging planes and have a spotty maintenance record.

While some operate Boeing and Airbus models, spare parts for Western-made planes are often hard to come by – largely because of sanctions aimed at Iran’s nuclear program. Some sanctions have eased in recent months, however, due to an interim nuclear deal with world powers.

Those difficulties have left Iranian airlines increasingly reliant on planes developed by the Soviet Union and its successor states, though parts for aging Soviet-era planes can also be tough to get. That’s caused the country to be hit by a series of deadly crashes.

In August, a commercially flown IrAn-140, a twin-engine turboprop plane built with Ukranian technology off an old

Article source: http://www.kswo.com/story/26763102/report-iran-police-airplane-crash-kills-7

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Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/world/aviation-giant-is-nearly-grounded-in-ukraine.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

This is the sixth and last article in a series of company profiles that highlights the wide variety of Northeast Ohio companies that make consumer goods and their effects on the economy. Find the rest of the “Made in Northeast Ohio” series here.

Chip Gear boarded a commercial airplane last week and smiled as he pulled on the overhead bin. His Solon-based advanced manufacturing company made the door pull.

Gear runs the Technology House, an additive manufacturing or 3D printing business. It’s a field that’s getting a lot of attention the past couple of years for making manufacturers a one-stop shop. But Gear and Mark Horner founded this company 18 years ago, making it among the oldest in Northeast Ohio.

What started out as an additive manufacturing job shop has turned into a high-tech manufacturer with clients in the medical, aerospace, automotive, industrial and consumer markets. Despite the diverse fields, the jobs have one commonality: Rapid prototyping techniques all involve making a solid, three-dimensional object from a digital model.

The Technology House started out as a prototype shop. But 10 years ago, the company started operating a sister-company, Sea Air Space Machining, in order to increase volume and add to its conventional machining and molding capabilities. Project managers said they responded to growing customer requests to keep producing low volume products – in much higher volumes.

Now, with 72 employees, about 50 percent of the business is prototype additive products, and 50 percent involves making final products. The company is among a handful

Article source: http://www.cleveland.com/business/index.ssf/2014/10/post_134.html

If any further evidence of the uselessness of Netflix was needed, I refer you to the recently concluded four-picture deal with Adam Sandler, who is to movies as Danielle Steel and Ken Follett are to the novel. Did you ever forget to bring a book with you on a long airplane trip and stop in at an airline terminal to look for something to read? Wall to wall Steel and Follett, right? Bummer. That’s the same reaction I have been having lately looking for something to watch on Netflix. That is not to speak of the cheesy menu that basically propagates the same junk across “Popular on Netflix”, “Recently Added” and “New Releases”. A quick look there turns up “Jackass presents: Grandpa” and “The Coed and the Zombie Stoner”. Considering the fact that most Netflix subscribers have never heard of Kurosawa or Godard, it is quite a statement that “The Coed and the Zombie Stoner” only garnered one and a half stars, an inflated grade considering the fact that you can’t rate something as zero stars.

As a sop to the art house crowd, one supposes, Netflix is also releasing the sequel to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”, a film that has all of the superficial characteristics of Hong Kong cinema but none of the substance, least of all the nimbleness of the classics like the 1978 “Drunken Master” starring Jackie Chan. Ang Lee should have stuck to what he knows best, tales of anomie in the aging yuppie milieu.

I just checked

Article source: http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/10/10/why-you-should-junk-netflix/

August 2005: Willcox Playa, Arizona. The air was hot and full of wind, the ground hard and full of cracks, and an aircraft of sorts was flying directly at Josh Levinger’s chest.

It was, put mildly, irregular in composition. Its fuselage was a blue, five-gallon water cooler bottle. Its two three-liter ballast tanks once contained soda, and its aluminum propeller guard came from a bicycle. The engine originally belonged to a weed-whacker and the fabric wing overhead was designed for kite surfing. The machine’s name was Freedom Flies, and almost every part of it was borrowed or homemade.

Of the four-man team testing the airworthiness of Freedom Flies, Josh Levinger, an MIT undergrad, was one of two principle players. The other, holding a radio controller, was the device’s inventor, Chris Csikszentmihályi (pronounced CHEEK sent me HIGH), then an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab.

As a concession to the heat, Chris had traded his usual collared shirt — three or four buttons always undone — for a cotton tee. Otherwise, he looked like he always did at the Lab: three-day stubble, close-cropped hair, the high forehead of a man pushing forty. Perhaps the only uncharacteristic thing about him at that moment, as Freedom Flies’ propeller tunneled through the desert air, was that his tenor voice was silent. Had Chris been able to speak, or even form a coherent thought, he might reasonably have wondered whether he’d made a horrible mistake. Academia tends to frown upon injuring students.

(Article source: http://theweek.com/article/index/269700/the-robots-of-resistance