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Please wear swimwear, a rash vest (swim shirt), and/or t-shirt, and bring sunscreen, a hat, and beach towel. We recommend you leave your valuables such as passports and credit cards in the hotel and only bring a small amount of spending cash. Note that the Maldives is a Muslim country, therefore please ensure you dress modestly whilst travelling to and from the meeting point.
We are unable to accept non-swimmers on this tour. Departures are subject to weather conditions — for safety reasons, we do not operate this tour during storms or excessively roughs seas.
In the interim, Rojas closed his other restaurant, Campestre Chula Vista, after only 10 months in business because of structural problems he said his landlord hadn’t fixed.
The Forest Park space has also been home to Sapristi! Bistro & Wine Bar and other restaurants.. Maybe Revolver’s move will stop the revolving door.
Elon Musk has shared an illustration and a photograph of a SpaceX steel rocket ship with a mirror-like finish.
This week, SpaceX finished building the vehicle, which Musk called the "test hopper."
The test hopper is a squat version of a full-scale Starship: a spaceship that's being designed to send people to Mars.
Musk said the test hopper could launch in Texas in four to eight weeks, or nearly a year ahead of schedule.
Last week, Elon Musk shared an eye-catching rendering of a stainless-steel rocket ship. Then last night, he debuted an almost identical image— a real one this time — complete with a person in a spacesuit for scale.
The initial futuristic image was an illustration created by SpaceX, Musk's rocket company. However, the company has worked feverishly to build the real-life prototype of the vehicle in southern Texas.
"Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site," Musk tweeted on Thursday. "This is an actual picture, not a rendering."
Musk and Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, most often call the ship the "test hopper" because it's not designed to launch into orbit around Earth. Instead, the somewhat crude and windowless ship will rocket on "hops" that go no more than about 16,400 feet in the air, according to Federal Communications Commission documents.
It's a critical experimental vehicle whose successes (or failures) will inform how SpaceX works toward a full-scale, orbit-ready prototype of Starship: a roughly 18-story spaceship designed to one day ferry up to 100 people and 150 tons of cargo to Mars.
Musk revealed on Thursday night that SpaceX plans to build a taller, orbit-capable version "around June" of this year. He said that rocketship would have "thicker skins (won't wrinkle) & a smoothly curving nose section."
An illustration of SpaceX's "test hopper," an experimental stainless-steel ship. Though it won't launch into space, the vehicle will help Elon Musk's rocket company work on a large and similar Starship spacecraft for reaching Mars.
A full-scale Starship is scheduled to launch people for the first time in 2023, and Musk previously said that "operational Starships would [obviously] have windows, etc."
The first fully crewed mission is being bankrolled for an undisclosed sum by the Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, who plans to pick eight artists as crew members for a flight around the moon.
Musk has said he hopes to launch the first crews to Mars in the mid-2020s, perhaps as early as 2024, to arrive at the red planet in 2025.
During most of 2018, Musk and Shotwell said repeatedly that the test hopper wouldn't make its first flight until late 2019.
But when asked January 5 on Twitter about the test hopper's first flight, Musk said Saturday that SpaceX was "aiming for 4 weeks, which probably means 8 weeks, due to unforeseen issues."
Either way, that's a major jump in the launch schedule — one that coincides with a recent influx of half a billion dollars.
Musk announced in late December that SpaceX was indeed building the test hopper at its lesser-known launch site in Boca Chica, at the southernmost tip of Texas.
Sections of SpaceX's Starship hopper coming together at the rocket company's launch site in Boca Chica, Texas.
Musk's confirmation and picture came after a flurry of photos appeared in the forums of NASASpaceFlight.com, where some dedicated followers of SpaceX congregate to chat about the rocket company's latest activities and share information.
The photos, taken by locals in Boca Chica, appeared to show the mythical test hopper being constructed nearly a year ahead of schedule. Musk later said the main parts were being made in Los Angeles and shipped to the semi-remote site for assembly.
The latest batch of local images shows workers and cranes assembling sections of the test hopper in plain sight of an access road.
The vehicle doesn't have a seamless finish but it's not supposed to look perfect. In fact, there is a decent chance that it may fail or explode, as is common during early test launches and has happened to many early SpaceX creations.
Musk has described Starship as a "Tintin" rocket, referring to the famous 20th-century Belgian comics series (which features a two-part space-exploration story).
"I love the 'Tintin' rocket design, so I kind of wanted to bias it towards that," he said during a press conference in September. "If in doubt, go with 'Tintin.'"
An illustration of the SpaceX's Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR, launching into space. Here, the spaceship is detaching from the booster.
The choice of polished stainless steel is a major shift from what Musk called his "final iteration" of the rocket's design.
In September, Musk revealed design updates for his two-part Mars launch system, called the Big Falcon Rocket. The Starship that Musk unveiled then was set to be about 30 feet wide and 180 feet tall, and sit atop a roughly 219-foot-tall rocket booster that Musk now calls Super Heavy. Both parts were supposed to be made primarily of carbon-fiber composites, which can be much lighter yet many times as strong as steel alloys.
Experts in materials science and aerospace interviewed by Business Insider expressed some reservations about the choice of carbon fiber for the spaceship, given the punishing environment of space and the difficulty in repairing carbon-fiber parts on Earth, let alone in space or on another planet.
Super Heavy may yet be built mostly out of carbon fiber, since it won't reach orbit and will instead land back on or near its launchpad for reuse. But it appears Musk and his engineering team are now committed to using a stainless-steel alloy to make Starship.
Musk said SpaceX's newly developed Raptor engines, which will power the vehicle, would be made of an in-house "superalloy" called SX500. He has also suggested that the final steel body of Starship will "look like liquid silver" and act as its own heat sink — most likely without protective thermal tiles, as NASA's space shuttle used — during the blazing-hot reentry into Earth's or Mars' atmosphere.
"I will do a full technical presentation of Starship after the test vehicle we're building in Texas flies, so hopefully March/April," Musk tweeted on December 22.
In addition to launching people, Starships should help SpaceX affordably launch a fleet of next-generation telecommunications satellites. The US government has given the company approval to launch nearly 12,000 of the satellites — many times more than have been launched in human history — to create an ultra-fast global internet network called Starlink.
This story has been updated. It was originally published on January 8, 2018.
SEE ALSO: An extraordinary year of rocket launches, meteor showers, and space exploration is here. This is a 2019 calendar of space events you can't miss.
Delia Flores with the California Conservation Corps helps 227 different plant species per acre take root.
here isn't much that looks revolutionary at Dos Rios Ranch, a low-lying, 1,603-acre stretch of land at the confluence of the Tuolumne and San Joaquin rivers where corn, wheat and almonds grow.
The flood-prone property near Modesto is nevertheless at the heart of an innovative movement combining flood management with ecosystem restoration that could change the face of the entire river corridor in the San Joaquin Valley.
The ranch was purchased in April by the group River Partners, using $21.8 million in federal, state and local grant money. The plan is to transform the farmland, beginning this month, into a riparian floodplain, said John Carlon, president of the nonprofit, which has partnered with government agencies on restoration projects for 15 years.
"A really major component of this project is flood control," said Carlon, who expects the project to take 10 years to complete. "If all these low areas near the river were acquired, theoretically you could store more water in the reservoirs because you could spill more out all at once without hurting the neighbors. It is a different way of looking at water supply management."
The project, which is expected to cost $10 million, is the largest, most sophisticated effort yet to restore the ancient wetlands once used by migrating fish as well as hundreds of thousands of birds along the Pacific Flyway, one of the largest migratory bird paths in the world. The restoration will be funded using federal and state grants, local fines for sewage leaks and pollution violations, and donations.
The effort is one of several projects along the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers to restore a natural system that humans altered. Some 95 percent of the historic floodplains in the Central Valley were filled in or blocked by levees after the Gold Rush.
Restoring Dos Rios Ranch will involve the reintroduction of hundreds of native plants and trees, using a sophisticated computer model to maximize distribution of species and native wildlife habitat.
The work is a model for California's first-ever attempt to create a systemwide flood management plan for the state's major reservoirs. The $4.9 billion FloodSafe initiative, which was created by the Central Valley Flood Protection Act in 2006, is an attempt to increase public safety, promote long-term economic stability and improve environmental stewardship in the areas that have historically flooded during winter rains.
The plan is to allow floodwater to breach the levees around Dos Rios during rainy winters and inundate the land, creating a mini-reservoir during peak flows. The flooding, combined with native plant restoration, will create the kind of marshland habitat favored by birds. It may also help avoid disasters like the one in 1997, when both the Tuolumne and San Joaquin rivers flooded, inundating much of the valley for weeks.
"These are the kinds of projects we are hoping there will be more of in the future," said Tim Ramirez, one of seven members of the Central Valley Flood Protection Board, who are appointed by the governor. "If you can create more space for the rivers in the winter, it creates a little more room for things downstream. We have to have more space. Floodplain restoration has to be part of the mix."
The Central Valley was once a vast Serengeti-like bowl, with grizzly bears, elk, and a huge diversity of birds and wildlife along the rivers. Fisheries biologists believe that the loss of these vast floodplains is one reason California's once-ample population of chinook salmon has declined. Migrating juvenile salmon historically rested and fattened up in flooded marshlands during the winter before heading out to the ocean. The confluence of the San Joaquin and the Tuolumne was a prime spot for those fish.
Carlon said the new marshlands will be crucial as experts restore chinook farther upstream in the San Joaquin, where a long section dried up after Friant Dam was built in 1942.
The restoration work falls in line with an effort by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to restore at least 26 miles of riverfront along the San Joaquin leading to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, said Kim Forrest, the manager of the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge Complex.
"It's basically a migrating bird freeway, but it is disjointed and broken now," said Forrest, who is working closely with River Partners. "We want to restore that freeway."
Forrest is the caretaker of a living example of the kind of thing that is possible. Three Amigos Ranch is 3,200 acres of former farmland purchased by the federal government in 1998 directly across the San Joaquin River from Dos Rios.
The crops have been replaced by 14 different species of plants, willow trees and shrubs, laid out in a grid pattern containing 227 different species per acre. The planting is done by schoolchildren, the California Conservation Corps and local farmworkers, and the land is carefully watered and cultivated.
The farm - now a natural landscape dotted with forest, wetlands and meadow - expanded the San Joaquin River National Wildlife Refuge, part of the San Luis complex. It is home to coyotes, beavers, river otters, weasels and the Riparian brush rabbit, which has been on the U.S. Endangered Species list since 2000.
Flocks of Aleutian cackling geese flew over fields covered with tall Sandhill cranes standing shoulder to shoulder during a recent tour of the property led by Forrest and Carlon. The group passed a former tomato field that is now a wetland pond surrounded by tules and squawking birds. Doves covered a nearby tree and a hawk lurked nearby.
The land floods frequently in heavy winter rains. Dos Rios will eventually connect to - and, if everything works out, be part of - this lush wildlife refuge, which officials hope will eventually reach 12,000 acres, storing some 30,000 acre-feet of floodwater.
"We are trying to re-create a habitat that can withstand all of the interference that people bring," Carlon said. "It's a system that will all be driven by the river."
Today is the world’s biggest startup demo day ever, but it’s not happening in Silicon Valley. It’s happening all over the world as 1,584 companies complete Y Combinator’s online Startup School Founders Track program. 797 of them have posted demo videos anyone can watch.
That’s out of 2,820 startups accepted from the 13,321 companies that applied to Y Combinator’s 10-week program of one-on-one mentorship from past YC startup founders, virtual office hours with a group of fellow students, and an online lecture series.
The leading accelerator typically teaches two batches of about 100 startups per year through an in-person program where YC partners and guest speakers teach them how to grow faster. The startups get $120,000 in funding, education, and connections in exchange for 7% of their equity.
But Altman says YC was looking for a way “to advise not just a few hundreds companies a year but a few thousand.” Its first attempt at scaling was the YC Fellowship, where a few dozen startups even more nascent than its typical admits were given remote guidance for a 1.5% equity stake. Here are our picks of the top companies from last year’s YC Fellowship.
Yet YC decided to shut down the Fellowship, because Altman says it “was not going to be the thing that added another zero to what we were doing.” So after the success of Altman’s Stanford online class, YC took its teachings and molded them into a massive open online course (MOOC) called Startup School. It features founders like Facebook’s Dustin Moskovitz and Slack’s Stewart Butterfield on how to build a startup, and Sequoia and Khosla VCs on how to raise money, plus sessions on recruiting, diversity, and PR.
By democratizing startup knowledge, YC hoped to spur economic activity around the globe while promoting and preparing companies for its more formalized accelerator program. The problem with MOOCs is that there’s often no accountability or support network to keep students engaged.
The solution was the Startup School Founders Track. Founders would apply, and if admitted, be assigned a YC alumni as their mentor and a set of 20 other startups as their peer group. YC invests no cash and takes no equity in the companies, which don’t have to pay anything to participate.
The 10-week program required them to watch the lectures, attend 9 of 10 online group office hours with their peers, and submit updates on their growth and metrics at least 9 of the 10 weeks. There were also individual mentor-on-startup feedback sessions and support via email available.
“The amazing thing is that it worked at all” Altman tells me of the 7,746 founders who went through the program . In-person dinners were replaced by rapid-fire Slack rooms where the peer groups stepped up to help each other out. And while it didn’t invest in the startups, Altman says YC helped some arrange deals for free hosting credits and other resources.
In the end, 1,584 startups passed the course. They encompass every vertical you can imagine, from drones and alternative energy to augmented reality and biotech. You can watch their demo video presentations here. Though not as polished as the slide decks you’d see at the main YC Demo Day at Mountain View’s Computer History Museum, the videos still feature plenty of pithy buzz phrases and up-and-to-the-right growth charts.
“One big and obvious but important difference is how much more internationally focused this is” Altman said. Expanding beyond the U.S. has been top-of-mind for Y Combinator lately. It did Startup School events around the world last year, which translated into YC’s winter 2017 batch being its most geographically diverse set of companies yet, hailing from 22 countries.
The 1500+ Founders Track graduate companies won’t get full access to YC’s alumni network and software like those in the main accelerator do. Altman says “We didn’t call it ‘YC Startup School’ intentionally. That’s in part because calling it the ‘YC Fellowship’ led to some confusion, and the accelerator doesn’t want to dilute its elite alumni graph with startups who weren’t screened as vigorously.
(1.) A Kohathite Levite, father of Elkanah (1 Chr. 6:35).
(2.) Another Kohathite Levite, of the time of Hezekiah (2 Chr. 29:12).
President Shimon Peres on Wednesday said that a nation "needs a majority to do the right thing."
Speaking at the fifth Israeli Presidential Conference in Jerusalem to a standing ovation, he added, however, that "a minority can do the wrong thing."
"Leaders today should not lead, they should agree to be lead by the people," Peres stated. He added that a leader has to "enhance the capacity of the people to express their deep worries."
Dark money is pushing for a no-deal Brexit. Who is behind it?
Modern governments respond to only two varieties of emergency: those whose solution is bombs and bullets, and those whose solution is bailouts for the banks. But what if they decided to take other threats as seriously?
This week’s revelations of a catastrophic collapse in insect populations, jeopardising all terrestrial life, would prompt the equivalent of an emergency meeting of the UN security council. The escalating disasters of climate breakdown and soil loss would trigger spending at least as great as the quantitative easing after the financial crisis. Instead, politicians carry on as if nothing is amiss.
The same goes for the democratic emergency. Almost everywhere trust in governments, parliaments and elections is collapsing. Shared civic life is replaced by closed social circles that receive entirely different, often false, information. The widespread sense that politics has become so corrupted that it can no longer respond to ordinary people’s needs has provoked a demagogic backlash that in some countries begins to slide into fascism. But despite years of revelations about hidden spending, fake news, front groups and micro-targeted ads on social media, almost nothing has changed.
In Britain, for example, we now know that the EU referendum was won with the help of widespread cheating. We still don’t know the origins of much of the money spent by the leave campaigns. For example, we have no idea who provided the £435,000 channelled through Scotland, into Northern Ireland, through the coffers of the Democratic Unionist party and back into Scotland and England, to pay for pro-Brexit ads. Nor do we know the original source of the £8m that Arron Banks delivered to the Leave.EU campaign. We do know that both of the main leave campaigns have been fined for illegal activities, and that the conduct of the referendum has damaged many people’s faith in the political system. But, astonishingly, the government has so far failed to introduce a single new law in response to these events. And now it’s happening again.
So who or what is Britain’s Future? Sorry, I have no idea. As openDemocracy points out, it has no published address and releases no information about who founded it, who controls it and who has been paying for these advertisements. The only person publicly associated with it is a journalist called Tim Dawson, who edits its website. Dawson has not yet replied to the questions I have sent him. It is, in other words, highly opaque. The anti-Brexit campaigns are not much better. People’s Vote and Best for Britain have also been spending heavily on Facebook ads, though not as much in recent weeks as Britain’s Future.
At least we know who is involved in these remain campaigns and where they are based, but both refuse to reveal their full sources of funding. People’s Vote says “the majority of our funding comes from small donors”. It also receives larger donations but says “it’s a matter for the donors if they want to go public”. Best for Britain says that some of its funders want to remain anonymous, and “we understand that”. But it seems to me that that transparent and accountable campaigns would identify anyone paying more than a certain amount (perhaps £1,000). If people don’t want to be named, they shouldn’t use their money to influence our politics. Both campaigns insist that they abide by the rules governing funding for political parties, elections and referendums.
As they must know better than most, the rules on such spending are next to useless. They were last redrafted 19 years ago, when online campaigning had scarcely begun. It’s as if current traffic regulations insisted only that you water your horses every few hours and check the struts on your cartwheels for woodworm. The Electoral Commission has none of the powers required to regulate online campaigning or to extract information from companies such as Facebook. Nor does it have the power to determine the original sources of money spent on political campaigns. So it is unable to tell whether or not the law that says funders must be based in the UK has been broken. The maximum fines it can levy are pathetic: £20,000 for each offence. That’s a small price to pay for winning an election.
Since 2003, the commission has been asking, with an ever greater sense of urgency, for basic changes in the law. But it has been stonewalled by successive governments. The exposés of Carole Cadwalladr, the Guardian, openDemocracy and Channel 4 News about the conduct of the referendum have so far made no meaningful difference to government policy. We have local elections in May and there could be a general election at any time. The old, defunct rules still apply.
Our politicians have instead left it to Facebook to do the right thing. Which is, shall we say, an unreliable strategy. In response to the public outcry, Facebook now insists that organisations placing political ads provide it (but not us) with a contact based in the UK. Since October, it has archived their advertisements and the amount they spend. But there is no requirement that its advertisers reveal who provides the funding. An organisation’s name means nothing if the organisation is opaque. The way Facebook presents the data makes it impossible to determine spending trends, unless you check the entries every week. And its new rules apply only in the US, the UK and Brazil. In the rest of the world, it remains a regulatory black hole.
So why won’t the government act? Partly because, regardless of the corrosive impacts on public life, it wants to keep the system as it is. The current rules favour the parties with the most money to spend, which tends to mean the parties that appeal to the rich. But mostly, I think, it’s because, like other governments, it has become institutionally incapable of responding to our emergencies. It won’t rescue democracy because it can’t. The system in which it is embedded seems destined to escalate rather than dampen disasters.
Ecologically, economically and politically, capitalism is failing as catastrophically as communism failed. Like state communism, it is beset by unacknowledged but fatal contradictions. It is inherently corrupt and corrupting. But its mesmerising power, and the vast infrastructure of thought that seeks to justify it, makes any challenge to the model almost impossible to contemplate. Even to acknowledge the emergencies it causes, let alone to act on them, feels like electoral suicide. As the famous saying goes: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Our urgent task is to turn this the other way round.
Kimmel used his personal experience to ask the philosophical questions that need to animate every debate over whether health care is a right that ought to be underwritten by government: Why should being born with any sort of defect raise your insurance costs all your life? Why should the babies of well-off people, including comedians, have a better shot at surviving than newborns whose parents lack the money to buy health insurance? More generally, why should anyone be denied coverage?
“Before 2014, if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you would never be able to get health insurance because you had a pre-existing condition. You were born with a pre-existing condition, and if your parents didn’t have medical insurance, you might not live long enough to even get denied because of a pre-existing condition.
What makes this especially powerful is what appears to be the political naivete that underlies Kimmel’s sentiment: that regardless of party, we all think everyone is entitled to equal medical treatment.
If Kimmel were describing politics in just about any other economically advanced democracy, he would be absolutely right. Conservative parties elsewhere routinely support a very large role for government in guaranteeing health care. Britain’s Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May, who faces an election next month, brags about funding the National Health Service at record levels. Her opponents challenge her on what this means in practice, but that’s not the point: She wants voters to know she supports Britain’s essentially socialized system.
But Kimmel’s assertion is not accepted by right-leaning politicians in the United States. It is not, alas, something “we all agree on.” This is why Republicans are trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
A few honest ideologues are willing to admit this. “I do not believe health care is a basic human right,” Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, told a town hall meeting earlier this year. The crowd reacted angrily, suggesting they’re with Kimmel.
Let’s count the problems here. What, exactly, did Billy Kimmel do wrong to have a heart problem on his first day of life? What should we do about all those Americans who lead “good lives” by Brooks’ exacting definition but don’t earn enough to afford good insurance? Why should rich people who live “bad lives” have a huge health care edge over lower-income people who jog every day?
Republicans are having trouble with their repeal bill because the gut response of most Americans is that Kimmel is right and right-wing ideologues are wrong. Any parent who has had a child get very sick knows this. That is why President Donald Trump and GOP leaders try to pretend that a cruel bill threatening the health coverage of millions is far less damaging than it is.
After Kimmel’s intervention, we have to face the fact that either we pay the public cost of covering everyone, or kids like his son will die when they could have lived.
There are few resources in this world more valuable than sleep — and it looks like mattress startup Casper has found a way to cash in on everyone's obsession with getting a little more shut-eye.
Casper opened the doors to The Dreamery, its new facility offering customers "nap sessions" for $25 a pop, on Wednesday.

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