∑/Divergence

For anyone who has recently sent personal documents to your Kindle, we'd like to let you know about some updates to our Personal Document Service (via Whispernet).

 
Starting May 4, in addition to the existing list of supported file types (DOC, HTML, JPEG, GIF, PNG, BMP, TXT, AZW, MOBI, PRC), you can send RTF files to your Kindle email address for convenient wireless delivery. In addition to the existing experimental support of PDF, you can also send DOCX files for conversion. Some complex PDF and DOCX files might not format correctly on your Kindle.

We have also modified the fee associated with sending personal documents wirelessly to your Kindle. This fee is now based on the size of your file. The fee for Personal Document Service (via Whispernet) is 15 cents per megabyte rounded up to the next whole megabyte.

If you would like to download your personal documents for free, or if you are not in a wireless area, you can continue to send attachments to "name"@free.kindle.com to be converted. These documents will be e-mailed to your computer at the e-mail address associated with your Amazon.com account login.

As always, you can also use our free document conversion service for any document you want to transfer over USB, and you will not be charged.

美国总统奥巴马宣布，美国汽车制造商克莱斯勒即刻申请破产保护。

奥巴马说，政府尽了很大努力争取避免克莱斯勒的破产，但是和债权人的谈判没有达成一致。

奥巴马还说，销售克莱斯勒车行的数目将在今后逐渐减少，但是短期内不会裁减工作机会。

克莱斯勒将在纽约根据美国破产法第11章的程序申请破产保护。

在美国汽车三巨头当中，克莱斯勒规模最小。此前，美国政府决定，如果克莱斯勒能够在周四午夜之前成功重组的话，将再次提供60亿美元的贷款。

克莱斯勒所作的重组努力包括争取劝说主要债权人接受20亿美元的现金，以此抵消克莱斯勒69亿美元的债务。

掌握克莱斯勒70%债权的四家主要债权人接受了上述提议。但是有报道说，其它拥有相当一部分债权的对冲基金拒绝接受。

白宫官员指责对冲基金的做法"既没有考虑个人经济利益、更没有考虑国家利益"。

美国破产法第11章规定，申请破产保护的公司有一定的时间在由法庭监督之下重组债务，同时可以暂免被追讨债务、继续经营。

白宫说，克莱斯勒的破产保护可能持续30至60天。

有业界分析人士指出，虽然美国政府希望克莱斯勒可以迅速重组，但汽车工业应该做好打持久战的准备。

分析人士还警告说，克莱斯勒申请破产保护有可能给"美国整个汽车工业和供应商带来很多不定因素"。

REDMOND, Wash. — April 30, 2009 — Today Microsoft Corp. has reached a significant milestone with the Release Candidate (RC) of the highly anticipated Windows 7 operating system, now available for download to MSDN and TechNet subscribers at http://technet.microsoft.com. Broader public availability will begin May 5 on the Microsoft Download Center at http://microsoft.com/downloads. The RC milestone is a result of feedback from millions of customers and partners around the world. It indicates the operating system is entering the final phases of development and is ready for partners to develop new applications, device drivers and services, and ready for IT pros to evaluate Windows 7 and examine how it will operate in their environment.

“Listening to our partners and customers has been fundamental to the development of Windows 7,” said Bill Veghte, senior vice president for the Windows business at Microsoft. “We heard them and worked hard to deliver the highest quality Release Candidate in the history of Windows. We have more partner support than we’ve ever had for an RC and are pleased to say that the Windows 7 RC has hit the quality and compatibility bar for enterprises to start putting it through its paces and testing in earnest.”

Overall, Windows 7 has garnered strong industry support. According to an independent report from Forrester Research Inc.’s Ben Gray: “The beta of Windows 7 shows significant promise, and most IT operations professionals are looking forward to its availability and eventual enterprise deployment ... start preparing for it now, and the best way to prepare for Windows 7 is by deploying Windows Vista. Short of that, begin testing your applications and hardware for compatibility against Windows Vista; it will pay off with greater compatibility with Windows 7.” (“Get Ready for Windows 7,” Forrester Research, April 2009.)

With Windows 7, customers will have access to the broadest array of software and hardware options the industry has to offer, and Microsoft is committed to delivering tools and support that enhance software compatibility as well as ease deployment and migration concerns for businesses and consumers alike. Customers also will benefit from the strong industry and partner support of Windows 7.

Strong Partner Support for Windows 7

More than 10,000 companies have signed up to have access to a breadth of helpful tools and resources needed to prepare their products and services to take full advantage of the innovations in Windows 7.

“With the upcoming introduction of Windows 7, Microsoft’s new operating system will redefine how people think about computing,” said Joe Roberts, executive vice president, Products for Corel Corp. “Drawing on our customer research, we’re building new creative consumer applications that take advantage of the solid performance and powerful touch capabilities Windows 7 offers to turn the typical user experience of mouse clicks and menus on its head — completely changing how users interact with Corel’s creative software.”

Windows 7 RC Reflects New Advancements

New to the Windows 7 RC are advancements such as Remote Media Streaming, Windows XP Mode (beta) and the upcoming beta of the Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor:

•	Remote Media Streaming. Enables highly secure, remote Internet access to home-based digital media libraries from another Windows 7-based PC outside the home.
•	Windows XP Mode. Utilizing Windows Virtual PC, Windows XP Mode allows Windows 7 users to run many Windows XP productivity applications, launched right from the Windows 7 desktop. Windows XP Mode will be available to Windows 7 Professional and Windows 7 Ultimate customers via download or, for the best experience, pre-installed directly on new PCs. As part of today’s announcement, Microsoft is releasing the beta of Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC. For larger businesses where management is important to reduce the total cost of ownership, Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization (MED-V) within MDOP adds management to Windows Virtual PC including centralized policy, administration experience and deployment.
•	Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor. To help enable a smooth transition, Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor will help people analyze their PCs in preparation for a Windows 7 upgrade. Available soon, Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor will be a downloadable tool that will help people determine their ability to upgrade from their Windows XP-based or Windows Vista-based PC to Windows 7.

In addition, a number of enhancements were made to existing features based on feedback from beta testers, including the following:

•	Refined navigation. Several enhancements to the Windows taskbar, JumpLists and search make navigation and finding exactly what you want much easier.
•	Internet Explorer 8. InPrivate browsing in Internet Explorer 8 prevents browsing history, temporary Internet files, form data, cookies, and usernames and passwords from being retained by the browser. With Windows 7, you can start an InPrivate session straight from the JumpList. You can also open a new tab from the JumpList.
•	Windows Touch. Controlling the computer by touching a touch-enabled screen or monitor is a core Windows 7 user experience. Improvements in the RC include several Windows Touch updates, including the ability to drag, drop and select items with touch, even inside Web sites that scroll both horizontally and vertically.

System Requirements for Windows 7

With the RC, Microsoft is also providing guidance on the minimum system requirements for Windows 7, showing that Windows 7 will work on a broader array of hardware than any other release of Windows at launch:

•	1GHz or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
•	1 GB of RAM (32-bit)/2 GB of RAM (64-bit)
•	16 GB of available disk space (32-bit)/20 GB (64-bit)
•	DirectX 9 graphics device with Windows Display Driver Model 1.0 or higher driver

Windows 7 Ready for IT Pros and Tech Enthusiasts to Preview

For enterprises, Windows 7 is designed to empower users to work from anywhere while providing enterprise IT the tools to manage security, compliance and data protection through an infrastructure that will drive down the cost of operations. IT professionals and small and medium-sized businesses will find that Microsoft is committed to delivering tools and support that enhance software compatibility as well as ease deployment and migration concerns. Some key features for IT professionals include the following:

•	Direct Access. This feature enables IT managers to provide mobile users with reliable and security-enhanced access to corporate network resources when they are on the Internet, without having to initiate a VPN connection. It also allows servicing and updating of remote PCs, even when they are on the road. This helps ensure that all mobile PCs are always up to date, and Windows Powershell means IT pros can automate many standard tasks to help reduce helpdesk costs, minimize user disruption and ease PC management. Direct Access is delivered by Windows 7 with Windows Server 2008 R2.
•	BranchCache. Delivered jointly by Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, this feature enables IT pros to decrease the time branch office users spend waiting to download files from remote servers by caching the previously accessed content locally in a branch’s network.
•	BitLocker and BitLocker To Go. This helps ensure that sensitive data is protected across PCs and removable storage devices.

For those who are interested in previewing Windows 7 and experiencing the new features firsthand but are not TechNet or MSDN subscribers, the Windows 7 RC will be publicly available May 5 on the Microsoft Download Center (http://microsoft.com/downloads). For customers who want to take advantage of Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC, there will also be a download available on the site.

For an ambitious landscape design project, Magnus Larsson, a student at the Architectural Association in London, has proposed a 6,000km-long wall of artificially solidified sandstone architecture that would span the Sahara Desert, east to west, offering a combination of refugee housing and a "green wall" against the future spread of the desert.

[Image: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].

Larsson's project deservedly won first prize last fall at the Holcim Foundation's Awards for Sustainable Construction held in Marrakech, Morocco.
One of the most interesting aspects of the project, I think, is that this solidified dunescape is created through a particularly novel form of "sustainable construction" – that is, through a kind of infection of the earth.
In other words, Larsson has proposed using bacillus pasteurii, a "microorganism, readily available in marshes and wetlands, [that] solidifies loose sand into sandstone," he explains.

[Image: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].

Larsson points out the work of the Soil Interactions Lab at UC-Davis, which describes itself as "harnessing microbial activity to solidify problem soils."
But the idea of taking this research and applying it on a megascale – that is, to a 6,000km stretch of the Sahara Desert – boggles the mind. At the very least, the idea that this might be deployed for the wrong reasons, or by the wrong people, in some delirious hybrid of ice-nine, J.G. Ballard's The Crystal World, and perhaps a Roger Moore-era James Bond film, deserves further thought.
An epidemic of bacillus pasteurii infects all the loose sand in the world, forming great aerodynamic fins and waves in a kind of global Utah of glassine shapes.

[Images: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].

Clarifying the biochemical process through which his project could be realized, Larsson explained in a series of emails that his "structure is made straight from the dunescape by flushing a particular bacteria through the loose sand... which causes a biological reaction whereby the sand turns into sandstone; the initial reactions are finished within 24 hours, though it would take about a week to saturate the sand enough to make the structure habitable."
The project – a kind of bio-architectural test-landscape – would thus "go from a balloon-like pneumatic structure filled with bacillus pasteurii, which would then be released into the sand and allowed to solidify the same into a permacultural architecture."

[Image: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].

The "architectural form" of the resulting solidified sandscape is actually "derived from tafoni," Larsson writes, where tafoni is "a cavernous rock structure that formally ties the project back to notions of aggregation and erosion. On a conceptual scale, the project spans some 6,000km, putting it on a par with Superstudio's famous Continuous Monument – but with an environmental agenda."

[Images: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].

I'm reminded of Michael Welland's recent book Sand. There, Welland describes "how deserts operate" (he compares them to "engines" of mechanical weathering); he points out that you can still find "sand-sized fragments of steel" on the D-Day beaches of Normandy, war having left behind a hidden desert of metal; and he mentions that the UK now maintains "the world's first database of sand" – but that it's used "specifically for police forensics."
Welland's descriptions of sand dune physics are particularly memorable. He writes, for instance, that an avalanche is really a sand dune being "overwhelmed by the huge number of very small events" on its surface, and that these "very small events" unpredictably lead to one decisive moment of cascading self-collapse.

[Image: A photomicrograph of sand grains].

Fantastically, though, and more relevant to this post, he then compares the internal structure of sand dunes to Gothic cathedrals: the grains of sand piled high form "microscopic chains and networks... in such a way that they carry most of the pressure from the weight of the material above them." This is the architecture of sand:

These chains seem to behave like the soaring arches of Gothic cathedrals, which serve to transmit the weight of the roof, perhaps a great dome, outward to the walls, which bear the load.

Briefly, though, this image can be sustained through Welland's descriptions of the great ergs, or sand seas, of today. These dune seas "are tangibly mobile, ever changing," Welland writes, "but there are larger areas of ergs past that are now fixed by vegetation."

Most of today's active sandy deserts are surrounded by vast stretches of old stabilized dunes, formed as the trade-wind belts and arid regions expanded in the cold, dry climate of the last ice age and immobilized as the climate changed. However, continuing shifts in the climate may bring these fixed ergs, granular reserves awaiting activation, back to life.

He mentions the Sand Hills of northwestern Nebraska, "formed originally from the debris of the glacial erosion of the Rocky Mountains."

The hills were stabilized eight hundred years ago but have had episodes of reincarnation since: a long drought toward the end of the eighteenth century resuscitated dunes on the Great Plains, whose activity caused problems for the westbound wagon trains decades earlier.

But if sand dunes are Gothic cathedrals, and if those dunes can come back to life, the resulting image of resuscitated Gothic cathedrals moving slowly over the American landscape is almost too incredible to contemplate.

[Images: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].

Larsson's project descriptions maintain this somewhat hallucinatory feel:

I researched different types of construction methods involving pile systems and realised that injection piles could probably be used to get the bacteria down into the sand – a procedure that would be analogous to using an oversized 3D printer, solidifying parts of the dune as needed. The piles would be pushed through the dune surface and a first layer of bacteria spread out, solidifying an initial surface within the dune. They would then be pulled up, creating almost any conceivable (structurally sound) surface along their way, with the loose sand acting as a jig before being excavated to create the necessary voids. If we allow ourselves to dream, we could even fantasise about ways in which the wind could do a lot of this work for us: solidifying parts of the surface to force the grains of sand to align in certain patterns, certain shapes, having the wind blow out our voids, creating a structure that would change and change again over the course of a decade, a century, a millenium.

A vast 3D printer made of bacteria crawls undetectably through the deserts of the world, printing new landscapes into existence over the course of 10,000 years...

[Image: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].

Larsson goes on to contrast his method with existing vernacular techniques of anti-desertification:

Traditional anti-desertification methods include the planting of trees and cacti, the cultivation of grasses and shrubs, and the construction of sand-catching fences and walls. More ambitious projects have ventured into the development of agriculture and livestock, water conservation, soil management, forestry, sustainable energy, improved land use, wildlife protection, poverty alleviation, and so on. This project, apart from utilising a completely new way of turning sand into sandstone, incorporates all of the above. Inside the dunes, we can take care of our plants and animals, find water and shade, help the soil remain fertile, care for the trees, and so on. In this way, it's an environmental project that hopefully provides an innovation for other architects/builders to use and copy time and time again.

The following images show us the lab-based biochemical practices through which a landscape can be lithified. However, for me at least, these photos also come with the interesting implication that rogue basement chemists of the future won't be like Albert Hofmann or Ann & Alexander Shulgin; the heavily regulated underground rogue chemistry sets of the 21st century will instead synthesize new terrestrial compounds, counter-earths and other illegal geosimulants, rare earth anti-elements that might then catalyze a wholesale resurfacing of the world through radical landscape architecture.
Which leads me to ask: where is landscape architecture's Aleister Crowley, Madame Blavatsky, or even John Dee? Mystics of terrestrial form, hacking the periodic table of the elements inside makeshift labs.

[Images: Synthesizing rare earth compounds – bioterrestriality; from Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].

In any case, Larsson's "solidified dunes," we read, would also "support the existing Green Wall Sahara initiative: 24 African countries coming together to plant a shelterbelt of trees right across the continent, from Mauritania in the west to Djibouti in the east, in order to mitigate against the encroaching desert."

[Images: From Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].

Clearly having thought through the project in extraordinary detail, Larsson then points out that the structure itself would generate a "temperature difference between the interior of the solidified dunes and the exterior dune surface." This then "makes it possible to start building a permacultural network, the nodal points of which would support water harvesting and thermal comfort zones that can be inhabited."

[Image: The view from within; from Magnus Larsson's Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture].

Eventually, then, a 6000km-long wall of permaculturally active, inhabited architecture will span the Sahara.
Check out more images in this Flickr set for the project, or read a bit more about the project over at the Holcim Foundation.