Alexander Gerst

Dr. Alexander Gerst (born 3 May 1976 in Künzelsau, Baden-Württemberg) is a European Space Agency astronaut and geophysicist, who was selected in 2009 to take part in space training. He was part of the International Space Station crew from May to November 2014.

Gerst studied at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, where he received a degree in geophysics. He also studied earth science at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, where he was awarded a master of science. He has been working as a researcher since 2005 and received his doctorate in natural sciences at the Institute of Geophysics of the University of Hamburg in 2010, with a dissertation on geophysics and volcanic eruption dynamics. In his spare time, he enjoys mountaineering, diving, climbing and skydiving.

He was officially selected as an astronaut in 2009 by the European Space Agency. He visited space as part of the Expedition 40/41 International Space Station crew from May to November 2014.

Faves.com

Faves was a social bookmarking and networking software that installs a single browser button for users to "fave" a webpage, making a link to the page part of their Faves profile. Until October 2007, Faves was called Blue Dot. As of January 2012, the service has migrated to fave.net, and later on migrated to MaxiConnect.com and is no longer active on faves.com which says "Faves is evolving to social couponing."

Features

While offering a service similar to the better-known del.icio.us, Faves had a wider range of functionality that encouraged interaction with "friends" in rating the content of linked webpages. When a registered user visited their Faves home page, they saw a summary of the bookmarks, called "Faves" by the company, that had been most recently shared by their friends.

In addition to features shared with other bookmarking and social bookmarking services, Faves provided an in-page dialog for saving a Fave, thumbnails generated from the page, dynamic voting, and topic-based auto-generated favorites pages.

Alexander

Alexander (/ˈæləɡzˈændər/, /ˈæləɡzˈɑːndər/) is a common male first name, and less common surname derived from the Greek "Αλέξανδρος" (Aléxandros). The most famous is Alexander the Great, who created one of the largest empires in ancient history.

Origin

Etymologically, the name is derived from the Greek Ἀλέξανδρος (Aléxandros), meaning "Defender of the people" or "Defending men" and also, "Protector of men", a compound of the verb ἀλέξειν alexein, "to ward off, to avert, to defend" and the noun ἀνήρ anēr, "man" (GEN ἀνδρός andros). It is an example of the widespread motif of Greek (or Indo-European more generally) names expressing "battle-prowess", in this case the ability to withstand or push back an enemy battle line.

The earliest attested form of the name is the Mycenaean Greek feminine anthroponym 𐀀𐀩𐀏𐀭𐀅𐀨, a-re-ka-sa-da-ra (transcribed as Alexandra), written in the Linear B syllabic script.

The name was one of the titles ("epithets") given to the Greek goddess Hera and as such is usually taken to mean "one who comes to save warriors". In the Iliad, the character Paris is known also as Alexander. The name's popularity was spread throughout the Greek world by the military conquests of King Alexander III, commonly known as "Alexander the Great". Most later Alexanders in various countries were directly or indirectly named for him.