Previously available on the iPad version only, Dolphin Connect is now also on the iPhone version.

Destination

Starwood Hotels & Resorts has announced the opening of a private luxury resort, Naka Island, which is located at the coast of Phuket. This beautiful Island resort will be opened to public in November this year. Situated at Thailand’s southernmost province, the resort will soon be a collection of Resorts & Spas. The island is situated amid breathtaking Andaman Sea, surrounded by lush green landscape, coconut groves and beautiful beaches.

Accommodation

The Island is 100 square kilometers in size and has 67 exclusive villas spread in exceptionally large 450 square area. The huge sized villas have private plunge pools, open air bathrooms, sala pavilion and large outdoor space. Each villa will also feature comprehensive library, indoor sound system and extravagant views over Phang Nga Bay and Phuket Island.

How to reach

Set on Naka Yai Island, the resort is just 25 minutes away from Phuket’s International Airport. One can reach to the Island only through speedboat and the whole Island is easily navigable on foot or a bicycle as it is spread on just 100 square kilometers.

 

Other highlights

Each guest will be provided with an ‘Experienced Guide’ who will act as a concierge, guest relations officer and a personal butler who will take care of each and every need of the guests. This Experience Guide will book a dining reservation, will arrange for outing and sightseeing, will take you to the driving trips and will help you to explore the Island and other nearby places.

Outstanding Gourmet

The resort has an exceptional seaside sitting all day running restaurant Tonsai which offers healthy and tempting cuisine of the region. The island also has an open beachside grill house which is a delight for seafood lovers. wine lovers can also enjoy at the extensive wine cellar in the Z Bar along with magnificent sunset views.

Rejuvenating Spa

The Naka Island has the largest spa in the region that offers complete peace of mind, body and soul through their world class spa therapies. The Spa is bespoke for every individual guest at the Island.

Local attraction

Known as the “Pearl of the Andaman,” Phuket is Thailand’s largest island and one of Southeast Asia’s most highly-regarded destinations. Phuket FantaSea is just 28.0 km away from the Island and also offers exciting jungle experience. Apart from these attractions, Golfers have three wonderful courses to choose from: Laguna Phuket Golf Club, Blue Canyon Country Club, and Mission Hills Golf Course.

Wayne Buckingham, Starwood Hotels & Resorts’ regional vice president of Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia commented:

“We are thrilled to introduce The Naka Island, A Luxury Collection Resort & Spa, Phuket to people with a sense of adventure who want to escape from everything and experience something truly unique, private and memorable.The Naka Island is a beautiful hidden treasure of luxury – located away from everything, but far from nothing.”

Via: Naka Island/Thai Travel

the tallest mountains aren’t necessarily the most impressive when climbed.

5 Basic Improv Rules

Here is another set of Rules that makes rounds on the internet (see our comment about Rules of Improv though). We are not aware of the source of this set of rules – if you do by all means let us know.

1) Don’t Deny

Denial is the number one reason most scenes go bad. Any time you refuse an Offer made by your partner your scene will almost instantly come to a grinding halt. Example: Player A) “Hi, my name is Jim. Welcome to my store.” Player B) “This isn’t a store, it’s an airplane. and you’re not Jim, you’re an antelope.”

2) Don’t ask open ended Questions

Open ended questions (like “Who are you?”) are scene killers because they force your partner to stop whatever they are doing and come up with an answer. When you ask your partner and open ended question, you put the burden of coming up with something “interesting” on your partner – so you are no longer doing a scene together but forcing one person has to do more work than you are willing to do.

3) You don’t have to be funny.

The hidden riddle of improv is that the harder you try not to be funny the more funny your scene is going to be. Why? Because it’s the very best kind of improv scene you can do is an “interesting” scene, not necessarily a “funny” one. When you do an interesting scene, a very surprising thing happens… the funny comes out all by it’s self.

The best ways to go are to stick to your character, stick to the story that is being told, and to stay within the reality of the scene you are playing.

4) You can look good if you make your partner look good.

When you are in a scene, the better you make your partner look the better the scene is going to be and, as a direct result, the better you are going to look. All too often, I’ve seen players enter a scene and I can just tell they have some really great idea about the character they are going to play or an idea they want to do. This is wonderful, but guess what? Your partner probably has absolutely no idea what’s cooking in your evil little mind, and so has no idea how to react. And no matter how brilliant your idea might be, it’s practically worthless if the scene as a whole goes bad.

5) Tell a story.

Storytelling is probably the easiest rule to remember but the hardest one to do. The real magic of improv is when we see the players take totally random suggestions (like a plumber and a cab driver selling shoes in a leper colony ) and somehow “make it work”. If all these unrelated elements are going to come together then it’s going to happen in the course of an interesting tale. So that’s just what the players are going to try and do, tell us all a story.

December 13, 2010 — In the teaser trailer released last week for Transformers: Dark of the Moon director Michael Bay rewrites the history of the first moon landing. Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are sent on a mission that takes “a giant leap” beyond collecting rocks and planting the American flag.

According to the preview for Bay’s third film about “robots in disguise,” while everyone thought the astronauts were exploring the moon “for all mankind,” they were really off discovering a crashed alien spacecraft.

But that’s not all Bay did to transform Apollo. Although the teaser is only about two and a half minutes long, it packs in a surprising number of changes to how the 1969 moon landing — and to quote the trailer, “a generation’s greatest achievement” — was accomplished.

Where exactly was Tranquility Base?

Within seconds of touching down on the moon on July 20, 1969, Armstrong — the real Armstrong — gave the Apollo 11 landing site its name.

“Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed,” radioed the Apollo 11 commander, borrowing “Tranquility” from Mare Tranquillitatis, or the Sea of Tranquility — the area on the moon where they landed.

Back on Earth however, flight controllers did not know exactly where the lunar module “Eagle” now rested. They tasked Michael Collins, who was orbiting the moon aboard the command module “Columbia,” to try to spot Eagle as he flew over but he was moving too fast and as such, was unsuccessful.

It wasn’t until the mission was over that the exact location of Tranquility Base was determined, based largely on the moonwalkers’ description of the area, their photographs and their spacecraft’s telemetry.

One thing that Mission control could be certain of though, was that Apollo 11 was on the side of the moon facing the Earth. Had they landed on the far side — the side that always faces off into space due to a peculiarity about the moon’s orbit — all communications between Earth and the astronauts would have been cut off.

There were no communication satellites orbiting the moon that could relay the moonwalkers’ voices and television broadcasts once they were out of the line of sight with the Earth.

In Transformers, the location of Tranquility Base is even less clear.

“Apollo 11 is on the far side of the moon,” reports Walter Cronkite, in a CBS news clip replayed during the trailer.

“Neil, you are dark on the rock,” radios an unidentified man from what appears to be a back room at Mission Control in Houston.

What follows is a scene showing Armstrong and Aldrin departing the vicinity of the Eagle lander, bounding over a boulder-strewn ledge of a crater to explore the crash site of a clearly alien spacecraft.

A wide shot reveals the Earth in the black sky above.

So where exactly were they? Did they secretly land on the far side of the moon? Or was Bay trying to depict a real nearby crater (though not as close as depicted)?

As Apollo 11 was the first attempt ever at landing men on the moon, NASA sought out an area that was geologically interesting but devoid of major obstacles like craters and boulders.

In reality, as Armstrong was piloting Eagle to a landing, he considered a site near the northeast slope of a large rocky crater, which they had dubbed West Crater during training. But the area was surrounded by a large boulder field and it would have required Armstrong to stop their approach short, neither situation ideal for a safe first landing.

Ultimately, Armstrong piloted Eagle over another, smaller crater (“Little West Crater”) before touching down at what would become Tranquility Base.

But what of the trailer’s mention of the far side?

From what little it shows, that appears to be a cover story. A flick of a switch in a Mission Control back room seems to take Armstrong’s and Aldrin’s voice transmissions to an encrypted channel. Meanwhile, the rest of the world thinks there has been a loss of communications.

“We’ve now had confirmation of loss of signal from Apollo 11,” reports Cronkite.

And how did Bay get Cronkite, who passed away in 2009, to help change history? Easy — he didn’t.

The two clips from Cronkite’s news reports did actually air in July 1969 but well before the landing as Columbia and Eagle passed behind the moon to enter lunar orbit.

Houston, we have a (spacecraft) problem

If locating the Transformers’ version of Tranquility Base is a challenge, identifying exactly how Armstrong and Aldrin got there presents an even bigger problem.

The very first shot audiences see in the trailer is an Apollo command and service module firing its engine between the Earth to the moon.

The real Columbia did perform a 3.13-second engine burn on the way the moon, which is about the same length as the scene, but something is missing… Eagle!

During the real mission, Columbia did fly alone for a brief period of time before docking with the lunar module Eagle, but it certainly didn’t do so while firing a course correction. Further, since the trailer provides views of Columbia from ahead and behind, it is clear that Eagle is no where to be found (to say nothing of the Saturn V rocket’s third stage in which the lunar module was launched).

Before Columbia disappears from view though, a second problem is exposed: it has transformed — not into a robot, but a different Apollo spacecraft.

The trailer’s very next scene shows Columbia docked with Eagle. Where did Eagle come from? No idea. But a closer look at Columbia’s service module shows it has an open scientific instrument module, or SIM, bay — no relation to Michael Bay — which only flew on Apollo 15 and the later missions.

Further, Columbia is now trailing what looks like a debris field, reminiscent of Apollo 13 (or perhaps “Apollo 13,” the movie).

Eagle, after its mysterious arrival in lunar orbit, seems to fare better, at least while it’s still in space. Once on the surface though, it too develops problems.

That’s one small nitpick…

Re-staging one of, if not the most famous scenes in all of human history, the Transformers trailer takes audiences to the surface of the moon at the very moment Armstrong is about to first step foot on the surface.

“That’s one small step for man…” Armstrong — again, the real one, courtesy a sound clip — proclaims.

The audio plays back over footage of the Transformers’ Armstrong descending the ladder and then — timed with “giant leap” — jumping off directly on to the surface.

In reality, Armstrong did jump off the ladder’s bottom rung but it was onto Eagle’s footpad and he didn’t speak his now famous words until taking a step off that pad.

This scene also raises the question as to how the millions back on Earth ever got to see that famous “small step” in the first place. During the real mission, one of the first things Armstrong did after crawling out onto Eagle’s porch was to deploy a small shelf that swung open on the side of the lunar module to reveal, among other things, the TV camera that broadcast his climb down to the surface.

In the trailer, it appears that the Modularized Equipment Stowage Assembly, or MESA, remains closed.

“Dark of the moon,” indeed.

And while on the subject of cameras, the trailer introduces another anomaly based on how the astronauts’ recorded their activities. As Armstrong and Aldrin explore the alien craft, both have Hasselblad cameras attached to the front of their spacesuits.

It might be a minor nitpick, but that’s one too many. Only one such camera used on Apollo 11 (which incidentally, is why there are no portraits of Armstrong on the surface of the moon, as for the most part, he always had the one and only camera).

Transforming Apollo

At one point, the trailer describes the lunar mission as “a secret hidden for 40 years.” The real secret — alien robot spacecraft aside — is that the Apollo 11 mission as it was recreated in Transformers: Dark of the Moon was different in key ways from the real mission that made history four decades ago.

Will Bay, who shot scenes at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida and Johnson Space Center in Houston, further transform space history when the film is released in July 2011? Time will tell if more than meets the eye.