well this is the last thing i am going to write in here because its the last 6 weeks.well trogh out this year i have notice 1st that if you cheat you will get caught. people learn from their mistakes and i am one of those persons. This year we did all soerts of fun activities such as the scavenger hunt.which was cool in its own way.this year will be remmembered for sure. those who passed and those who failed knew what they were doing they just did not how important it was those who faile. i was so amazed in the fact that igf we got a 2500 we got 30 points on the blog that was preety cool.remember when jonathans papers were in my binder and you said i had to prove my self to you.well i scored a little more than a 2400 on TAKS which i thought was good even though i thought i could do better.well this is farewell or goodbye but i know your teaching will be thre.i dont worry much but i am hoping i pass the ACP for your classs. and sure alll my othr classes. have a great summer and peace...........
PS i know i passed my other classes
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
After a Silent Spring, NASA Gives Up on Spirit
By KENNETH CHANG
The Spirit is dead.
NASA said on Tuesday that it was abandoning efforts to get back in touch with Spirit, one of the two rovers on Mars. Spirit, which has been stuck in a sand trap for two years, fell silent last year as winter arrived and its solar panels could no longer generate enough electricity. Engineers had hoped that the rover would revive when spring returned, but they never heard from it again.
Now, as the Martian days grow shorter, Spirit’s managers decided that it was not worth the time and money to continue.
“We couldn’t recover any of the approved science objectives that we had for Spirit even if we heard from the rover, which is very unlikely,” said John Callas, the project manager for Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, which continues to operate on the other side of the planet.
The last set of commands to Spirit will be sent early Wednesday morning.
The Spirit and Opportunity rovers landed on Mars in January 2004, their original mission scheduled to last just three months. At first, it did not seem that Spirit would last even that long. A computer memory glitch disabled it three weeks after landing.
After engineers diagnosed and fixed the problem, the two rovers defied expectations with each passing anniversary. Both discovered evidence that Mars, which is cold and dry today, once had plentiful water at its surface.
Spirit did age over time. In 2006, its right front wheel failed. From then, it mostly drove backward, dragging the lame wheel through the soil. “It reveals stuff below the surface, and it reveals stuff that we would have just driven by because it’s camouflaged under the ground,” Dr. Callas said.
One of those discoveries was a material called amorphous silica, which scientists believe formed in an ancient hydrothermal system.
In May 2009, Spirit’s wheels broke through a thin crust into a hidden sand trap. Attempts to get it out only drove it deeper. Then a second wheel failed.
Last year, NASA announced that Spirit would continue operations as a stationary science station, observing the atmosphere and measuring the wobble in Mars’ axis of rotation.
But winter was approaching, which proved to be Spirit’s demise.
Opportunity is continuing its drive to a large crater named Endeavour, where scientists hope it will offer a close-up view of clay deposits that have been observed from orbit.
Clay forms in water, and the minerals left behind could provide important new clues about the history of Mars.
At its current pace, and if all goes well, Opportunity could arrive at Endeavour by the fall.
After months of spirit a roter that is in mars fell in a sand trap there was hope that the rover would be able to create just enough energy to get out of the sand trap spring came and the rover did not make it the person i command of this thing said they should just leave it because their eas no way and that it was a lost ho[e and waist of time and money
maverickssssssssssssssssssssss
After Comeback Win, Mavericks Focus on Ending Series
By TOM SPOUSTA
DALASL — Kevin Durant held his shooting pose for an extra second, convinced he had just delivered the decisive blow in Game 4 of the Western Conference finals. As his 3-point shot swished and the Oklahoma City Thunder surged to a 15-point lead Monday night, Durant turned and mimicked pulling an imaginary championship belt across his waist.
The Dallas Mavericks know how fickle and unforgiving five minutes can be, though. That would be Durant’s last basket as the Mavericks stunned the Thunder with a 17-2 run to force overtime, then claimed a 112-105 victory, their fifth in seven road games in these playoffs.
With a 3-1 series lead, the Mavericks are poised to finish off Oklahoma City in Game 5 on Wednesday night at American Airlines Center.
“All of us involved with this team have been through a lot of these wars,” Mavericks Coach Rick Carlisle said. “We understand the position we’re in. We respect it. We’re very humble about it. We’ve got to get rested up and ready for Wednesday because that’s an opportunity.”
Jason Kidd, 38, led the Nets to two N.B.A. finals, only to be denied each time. Dirk Nowitzki and Jason Terry, both 33, are haunted by their only brush with a championship in 2006, when they led the Mavericks to a 2-0 lead against the Miami Heat, followed by a 13-point lead in the fourth quarter of Game 3, only to be eliminated in six games.
“It’s just a bunch of veterans with unique stories,” said Nowitzki, who scored 40 points Monday, including two free throws with 6.4 seconds left for a 101-101 tie at the end of regulation. “A lot of guys have been through a lot in this league and have been around forever. It’s a bunch of experienced guys that ultimately have one goal and came together and fought through some stuff.”
Once in overtime, the Mavericks’ huddles were calm and focused; the Thunder’s bench exuded panic and vacant stares. Nowitzki said the Mavericks talked about not wasting their comeback.
“We’re here and this is our ballgame, we’ve got to go for it; that’s what we talked about,” he said. “We’re just a veteran team trying to play off each other. We were finally getting stops and getting rebounds. We just ran down, we free-flowed. I don’t remember actually calling a play the last couple minutes. We just ran down and pick-and-rolled and free-flowed it.”
Only eight N.B.A. teams have rebounded from a 3-1 deficit to win a playoff series, and the Thunder’s body language did not translate into adding to N.B.A. history. Oklahoma City outplayed the Mavericks for most of the game, holding a 55-33 edge in rebounding and a 23-16 advantage in assists.
Although the Thunder shot 46.7 percent from the field, it was again stone cold from 3-point range, making only 2 of 13 attempts. In its two losses at Oklahoma City Arena, the Thunder was 3 of 30 on 3-point attempts.
On Monday night, the Thunder also committed 25 turnovers, led by Durant’s 9.
Durant finished with 29 points, but with a chance to win the game in regulation, Shawn Marion blocked his 3-point jumper.
“Shawn knows exactly what we need from him,” Carlisle said. “We just need his tenacity defensively. We need him to be wearing Durant like a suit.”
Including overtime, the Mavericks finished off the Thunder with a 28-6 run. Kidd’s 3-pointer with 40 seconds to play was the dagger that Durant thought he had delivered.
“Everybody asks questions about his age and all that other stuff, but the thing I would say to anybody is never underestimate greatness,” Carlisle said of Kidd.
Kidd finished with 17 points and 7 assists.
“I’m proud of Jason Kidd, the way he battles on defense, the floor game he leads for us every night, the steals he gets, and then the huge 3 in the corner in overtime to put us over the top,” Nowitzki said. “I tip my hat to him every night the way he competes.
“People still think that Kidd is not a good shooter, but over the years he’s proved everybody wrong. He made big shots for us this season ever since he got here. Anytime he’s open down the stretch I think it’s going in.”
obama presses Israel to make strong choices
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Obama Presses Israel to Make ‘Hard Choices’
By HELENE COOPER
WASHINGTON — President Obama struck back at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in a speech to a pro-Israel lobbying group on Sunday, defending his stance that talks over a Palestinian state should be focused on Israel’s pre-1967 borders, along with negotiated land swaps, and challenging Israel to “make the hard choices” necessary to bring about a stable peace.
Mr. Obama, speaking before a conference of the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee, offered familiar assurances that the United States’ commitment to Israel’s long-term security was “ironclad.” But citing the rising political upheaval near Israel’s borders, he presented his peace plan as the best chance Israel has to avoid growing isolation.
“We cannot afford to wait another decade, or another two decades, or another three decades, to achieve peace,” Mr. Obama said. The world, he said, “is moving too fast.”
Administration officials said it would be up to Mr. Obama, during an economic summit in Paris next weekend, to try to talk his European counterparts out of endorsing Palestinian statehood in a coming United Nations vote, a prospect that would deeply embarrass Israel. Some French officials have already indicated that they are leaning toward such an endorsement.
“He basically said, ‘I can continue defending you to the hilt, but if you give me nothing to work with, even America can’t save you,’ ” said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator and a fellow at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group.
The appearance by Mr. Obama on Sunday punctuated a tense week in which he and Mr. Netanyahu made their separate cases about Palestinian statehood to American audiences. Mr. Netanyahu will address the same group on Monday and will speak before Congress on Tuesday at the invitation of Republican lawmakers.
In his speech, Mr. Obama did not directly confront Mr. Netanyahu, who, while seated next to him at the White House last Friday, rejected the proposal Mr. Obama made a day earlier that negotiations use Israel’s 1967 borders as a starting point.
Mr. Obama’s decision to stick to his position, albeit with strong reassurances about America’s lasting bond with Israel, is a risky one politically. Mr. Obama is just starting a re-election campaign, and Republicans are doing what they can to present themselves to Jewish voters as more reliable protectors of Israel than the Democrats.
Republicans moved swiftly to criticize his Middle East proposal. “The U.S. ought not to be trying to push Israel into a deal that’s not good for Israel,” the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Administration officials said Mr. Obama chose to confront Israel on the stalled peace negotiations after his aides calculated that given the historic upheaval under way in the Arab world, the United States and Israel would both benefit from being seen as taking bold steps toward ending the impasse between Israelis and Palestinians.
As Mr. Obama himself pointed out, his theme in the speech last Thursday was not extraordinary. American presidents, including George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, have consistently instructed their foreign policy aides to pursue an agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians using the 1967 borders, with mutually agreed land swaps, as a basis for talks.
Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel, in fact, made such a proposal to the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, in 2008, as the two sides rushed to complete a peace deal before Mr. Bush and Mr. Olmert left office.
But the 1967 border issue has always been privately understood, not spoken publicly, and certainly not publicly endorsed by a sitting American president.
When Mr. Obama did so last Thursday, he unleashed a furious response from Mr. Netanyahu. The prime minister’s office put out a statement in advance of his meeting with Mr. Obama the next day in which Mr. Netanyahu said he expected to hear certain assurances from the president.
“That was Bibi over the top,” one administration official said Saturday, referring to Mr. Netanyahu by his nickname. “That’s not how you address the president of the United States.”
Mr. Obama addressed his critics on Sunday, saying, “What I did on Thursday was to say publicly what has long been acknowledged privately.”
Mr. Obama did offer words of assurance. He repeated what the Israeli prime minister so objected to — the reference to pre-1967 borders — and challenged those who he said had “misrepresented” his position.
But, he said, “let me reaffirm what ‘1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps’ means.” His view, he said, is that “the parties themselves — Israelis and Palestinians — will negotiate a border that is different than the one that existed on June 4, 1967.”
“It is a well-known formula to all who have worked on this issue for a generation,” he continued. “It allows the parties themselves to account for the changes that have taken place over the last 44 years.”
Mr. Netanyahu, in his critique of Mr. Obama’s earlier remarks, had ignored the “mutually agreed swaps” part of the president’s proposal.
Mr. Obama’s remarks Sunday contrasted with those delivered a few minutes earlier by Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland, who gave a no-holds-barred speech filled with applause lines for the assembled lobbying group delegates.
Administration officials argue that one way to try to derail the United Nations vote is to have a viable peace process under way between Israelis and Palestinians.
On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu gave a more muted response to Mr. Obama’s speech than the one he issued last Thursday. “I share the president’s desire to advance peace, and I appreciate his efforts in the past and the present to achieve it,” he said in a statement. “I am determined to work together with President Obama to find ways to renew the peace negotiations.”
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, commented on the speech by telephone from the West Bank city of Jericho: “I am waiting to hear from Prime Minister Netanyahu. Does he accept the doctrine of two states on the 1967 line with agreed swaps or not? Before we hear that acceptance, we are just grinding water.”
the main idea of this article is that President obama talks over a Palestinian state should be focussed on israels 1967 borders and how to make peace with them
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