Shaun Tait signs up with Peshawar Zalmi

 

Australia’s express pacer Shaun Tait has signed up with Pakistan Super League (PSL) side Peshawar Zalmi, bolstering an already lethal pace attack led by Pakistan’s left-arm duo of Wahab Riaz and Junaid Khan.

“Australian pacer Shaun Tait has reached an agreement with Peshawar Zalmi for ‪#‎HBLPSL‬,” said a post on the PSL official Facebook account.

Tait, 32, is also set to return to the Australian side, when the World Champions take on India in a T20 series which kicks off on January 26.

One of the fastest bowler’s in the world, Shaun Tait, will don the Australian colours after a long gap of five years — his last international outing came against India in 2011.

“I suppose I feel pretty privileged, honestly, to be called in at this stage of my career,” he said while talking to ESPNCricinfo on Tuesday.

“And obviously with a few injuries around, it has been timing and probably a little bit lucky. But you go through a career, you have bad luck and good luck. This is a good luck one for me and I will take it,” he added.

Under the captaincy of Pakistan T20 skipper Shahid Afridi, Peshawar Zalmi start their PSL campaign when they face Islamabad United on February 5 and the match could potentially feature the Aussie pacer.

Tait has 19 scalps in the 28 T20Is he has played for Australia.

Mysterious Fault Downs Reaper Drones

The US Air Force’s flagship Reaper drone is plagued by a mysterious technical fault which causes the craft to fall out of the sky, a report says.

An investigation by the Washington Post found that the unmanned drone – which conducts surveillance and airstrikes against Islamic State – has been hit with a number of technical problems.

It said that electrical faults have caused 20 Reaper drones to be destroyed or to suffer at least $2m (£1.4m) in damage in the last year – the worst annual toll ever.

Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act show that investigations have traced the problem to a faulty starter-generator, but cannot work out why it keeps failing.

Since 2001, more than 400 large US military drones have crashed.

Video: How Do Drones Find Their Targets?

The Post said: “Military drones have slammed into homes, farms, runways, highways, waterways and, in one case, an Air Force C-130 Hercules transport plane in midair.

“No one has died in a drone accident, but the documents show that many catastrophes have been narrowly averted, often by a few feet, or a few seconds, or pure luck.”

In one incident, documents obtained show that a $3.8m (£2.6m) Predator drone crashed near Kandahar because the pilot did not realise she had been flying the aircraft upside down.

Another crashed because the pilot pressed the wrong button on his joystick.

Video: 2015: RAF Reaper Hits IS Vehicle

No-one has died in a drone incident, but errors have resulted in a number of near-misses.

The drones are manufactured in the US but are also used by the Royal Air Force and the Italian Air Force.

RAF Reaper drones are being used for surveillance and airstrikes against IS targets in Syria and Iraq.

Operators control the drones using computers on the ground.

Saudi grand mufti says playing chess is forbidden in Islam

 

RIYADH: Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti Sheikh Abdullah al-Sheikh during a television program said playing chess is forbidden in Islam, British newspaper The Guardian reported.

Responding to a question on a television show in which he issues fatwas (religious decrees) after listening to viewers’ questions, Sheikh said playing the board game is ‘haram’ (forbidden) as it encourages gambling and is a waste of time.

He claimed that the game was “included under gambling” and was “a waste of time and money and a cause for hatred and enmity between players”.

Al-Sheikh justified the ruling by referring to a verse in the Quran banning “intoxicants, gambling, idolatry and divination”.

Iraq’s Supreme Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani too had issued a decree terming the game ‘haram mutlaqan’ (forbidden absolutely or under any circumstances), with or without betting.

Also Read: Saudi Arabia’s grand mufti calls suicide bombers ‘criminals’

The game of chess, a board game can be traced back to an ancient version called Chatrang, popular in Persia during the 600BCs.

The name ‘chess’ is a variant of the Persian ‘shah’ (king) that replaced the original ‘shatranj’ and ‘ajedrez’ and came to be modified through dialect across Europe as ‘check’ and later ‘chess’.

Gameplay in chess is of two kinds: tactical and strategic. Tactics is concerned with the immediate action taken by each player, as in the advancing and positioning of a piece, while strategy is focused on achieving long-term positioning advantages.

Largest known prime number discovered in Missouri

The largest known prime number has been discovered by a computer at a university in Missouri in the US.

Prime numbers – such as two, three, five and seven – are divisible only by themselves and one, and play an important role in computer encryption.

The new prime is more than 22 million digits long, five million longer than the previous largest known prime.

Primes this large could prove useful to computing in the future.

Endless quest

The new prime number was found as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (Gimps), a global quest to find a particular type of large prime numbers.

Mersenne primes are named after a French monk who studied them in the 17th Century.

 

 

They are hunted by multiplying two by itself a large number of times, then taking away one. It is a relatively manageable calculation for today’s computers, but not every result is a prime.

The discovered prime is written as 2^74,207,281-1, which denotes two, multiplied by itself 74,207,280 times, with one subtracted afterwards.

The Gimps project has calculated the 15 largest Mersenne primes in the 20 years it has been running and it is possible that there could be an infinite number of them to discover.

What use are large primes?

Large prime numbers are important in computer encryption and help make sure that online banking, shopping and private messaging are secure, but current encryption typically uses prime numbers that are hundreds of digits long, not millions.

“This prime is too large to currently be of practical value,” the Gimps project admitted in a statement.

However, searching for large primes is intensive work for computer processors and can have unexpected benefits.

“One prime project discovered that there was a problem in some computer processors that only showed up in certain circumstances,” said Dr Steven Murdoch, cybersecurity expert at University College London.

The new large prime, the 49th known Mersenne prime, was discovered by Dr Curtis Cooper at the University of Central Missouri.

Although computers do most of the hard work, primes are said to be discovered when a human takes note of the result