Hurricane Katrina was one of the deadliest hurricanes to ever strike the United States and the second Category 5 hurricane of the record-breaking 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. The storm formed over the Bahamas on August 23, where it moved west and hit south Florida as a Category 1 hurricane two days later. Katrina then crossed over Florida and strengthened into a Category 5 hurricane moving west in the Gulf of Mexico. The storm then turned north, had an eyewall replacement cycle, and hit east Louisiana and Mississippi, flooding coastal areas on the morning of August 29. The leftovers of Katrina then died out over the Great Lakes on August 31.
80% of New Orleans was flooded when the levees protecting the city broke. Most of the people killed by Katrina were thought to have died from drowning. Many of the survivors had swum to higher roofs or tree branches.
Hurricane Katrina formed as Tropical Depression Twelve over the southeastern Bahamas on August 23, 2005, as the result of the merger of a tropical wave and the remnants of Tropical Depression Ten four days earlier. The storm strengthened into Tropical Storm Katrina on the morning of August 24. The tropical storm moved towards Florida and became a hurricane only two hours before making landfall between Hallandale Beach and Aventura on the morning of August 25. The storm weakened over land, but it regained hurricane status about one hour after entering the Gulf of Mexico, and it continued strengthening over open waters. On August 27, the storm reached Category 3 intensity on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, becoming the third major hurricane of the season. An eyewall replacement cycle disrupted the intensification but caused the storm to nearly double in size. Thereafter, Katrina rapidly intensified over the "unusually warm" waters of the Loop Current from a Category 3 hurricane to a Category 5 hurricane in just nine hours.
After attaining Category 5 status on the morning of August 28, Katrina reached its peak strength at 1800 UTC, with maximum sustained winds of 175 mph (280 km/h) and a minimum central pressure of 902 mbar (26.6 inHg). The pressure measurement made Katrina the fifth most intense Atlantic hurricane on record at the time, only to be surpassed by Hurricanes Rita and Wilma later in the season; it was also the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico at the time, before Rita broke the record. The hurricane subsequently weakened due to another eyewall replacement cycle, and Katrina made its second landfall at 1110 UTC on August 29, as a Category 3 hurricane with sustained winds of 125 mph (205 km/h), near Buras-Triumph, Louisiana. At landfall, hurricane-force winds extended outward 120 miles (190 km) from the center and the storm's central pressure was 920 mbar (27 inHg). After moving over southeastern Louisiana and Breton Sound, it made its third and final landfall near the Louisiana–Mississippi border with 120 mph (190 km/h) sustained winds, still at Category 3 intensity. Katrina maintained strength well into Mississippi, finally losing hurricane strength more than 150 miles (240 km) inland near Meridian, Mississippi. It was downgraded to a tropical depression near Clarksville, Tennessee; its remnants were absorbed by a cold front in the eastern Great Lakes region on August 31. The resulting extratropical storm moved rapidly to the northeast and affected eastern Canada.[1]
Carlos Fuentes
Carlos Fuentes (11 November 1928 - 15 May 2012) was a Mexican novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and diplomat.
Fuentes was born in Panama City, Panama. His father was a Mexican diplomat, and while Fuentes was growing up, the family moved to different countries in South America and then to the United States.
He got a degree in law from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, but instead of being a lawyer, he chose to be a diplomat and writer. He published his first novel, called "La región más transparente" ("Where the Air Is Clear" in English) in 1958. From 1975 to 1977, Fuentes was Mexico's ambassador to France. He died in Mexico City, Mexico from a haemorrhage.
Bass guitar
A bass guitar (also called an electric bass or bass) is a string instrument which is related to the electric guitar. The bass guitar is shaped like an electric guitar, but it is longer than an electric guitar. The electric bass has many of the same parts as an electric guitar. However, the bass guitar produces lower tones than the electric guitar.
The bass guitar is used to play low musical sounds called "bass lines" in many styles of music such as rock, pop, country, jazz fusion and many more.
The bass guitar was first made in the 1930s by inventor Paul Tutmarc in Seattle, Washington. However, very few musicians were interested in the instrument that Tutmarc made. The need for a new instrument developed in the 1950s. At that time, the double bass was the main bass instrument used in jazz, blues, folk, early rock music and bluegrass. The problem was that the double bass was big, heavy, hard to carry around, hard to play precise notes on, and it was hard to make it louder with a bass amplifier. Musicians wanted a smaller instrument that weighed less and was easier to play and amplify. Inventors tried to think of ways of building a smaller and lighter bass instrument. One of these inventors was a man named Leo Fender in the United States. Leo Fender developed a bass guitar in the 1950s using the ideas developed by Tutmarc.
Leo Fender used many parts for the bass guitar that are similar to the parts of an electric guitar. Leo Fender called the instrument the "Fender Precision Bass". He used the word "Precision" in the name because his instrument had metal frets on the neck. The double bass did not have frets on its neck. The frets on the bass guitar made it easier for musicians to play precise notes. The bass guitar developed by Leo Fender became very popular. In the 2000s, many bass guitars are still designed to look like his Fender Precision Bass.
Bass guitars are normally made out of wood. The main pieces are the body, neck, fingerboard, frets, and strings. The body is made out of wood. A wooden neck is glued or bolted onto the body. A wooden fingerboard is then glued onto the neck. Thin metal strips called frets are glued onto the fingerboard. The frets are placed at specific placess along the fretboard, with each fret representing one half step in the Western tonal scale.
At the bottom of the body is an assembly called the bridge, a large metal assembly into which one end of the strings are fitted. On some designs, the strings are fasted through the back of the body into the bridge; on others, the strings fit into the front side of the bridge. In some basses, there is a cavity inside the back of the body that contains the electrical parts of the bass. These are usually called active basses. The bridge often has adjustments that allow the height of the strings to be changed. Other components found on the body include one or more pickups and various knobs or switches that control the sound of the bass.
The pickups are magnetic devices that sit below the strings. As the strings vibrate, an electrical signal is produced which is sent via an instrument cable to an amplifier. Pickups are either "passive", which means they send the signal with no additional amplification, or "active", which process the signal through a pre-amplifier. Some basses have pickups that can be set to passive or active mode. Basses that have two pickups (generally referred to as bridge and neck pickups) often have a switch that lets the player select neck-only, bridge-only, or a blended signal. Each pickup may have different tonal qualities that results from its placement relative to the bridge and its components.