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[–]ayudameplox 146 points147 points (11 children)
Too bad you'll never know the reaction on the other side. Hilarious.
[–]themormansound 60 points61 points (1 child)
IAMA poor African child who just received not one but four dildos in a clothing drop. AMA!
[–]PaulClavet 4 points5 points (1 child)
Drop a disposable camera with instructions in several languages, and a postage-paid return package.
[–]SelectaRx 8 points9 points (0 children)
Not really the kind of picture I was expecting when I sponsored that little African boy, but okay...
They probably use the dildos for weapons.
[–]INDELIBLE_BONER 1 point2 points (0 children)
African mothers have needs too
[–]I_WANT_PRIVACY 1 point2 points (2 children)
"Hey Mommy, why didn't we get any clothes today?"
"The batch got ruined, they say there was a bowling bowl in it."
"Why would they do that mommy?"
"I don't know son."
"I'm cold..."
And then they both DIE.
[–]ClockStalker 0 points1 point (1 child)
/u/I_WANT_PRIVACY: Analyzing 999 comments and submissions over the last 90 days
Hypothesized location: Western North America
Tempus neminem manet
[–]I_WANT_PRIVACY 0 points1 point (0 children)
Wrong, I live in Eastern North America.
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Are Nuclear Costs Unreasonable?
We are in the middle of an energy paradigm shift about.
Old assumptions are no longer true and even the outlines of the new world is not clear to most people. They were however, clear to a few far sighted people long ago. Both M. King Hubbard and Alvin Weinberg (see numerous posts in Nuclear Green) foresaw the transition form fossil fuels to nuclear energy over a generation ago. We can call this the nuclear energy paradigm.
A second post fossil fuel paradigm has been offered the renewable energy paradigm The Gore Plan and the Google Clean Energy 2030 Plan might be considered as poorly thought out examples of the renewables paradigm. My argument is that when the renewable paradigm is well thought out it falls apart.
The recent objection to Nuclear power is its cost. The overnight cost of Nuclear power was around $2000 Per KW in 2002. It has been estimated that the cost will have risen to $4000 this year, and that it will rise to as much as $8000 by the middle of the next decade. Some authorities suggest that the cost of Nuclear power will rise even higher with the figure of $12 Billion Per GW being offered. In time that figure is plausible. The cause of this rapid cost escalation is the Asian construction bomb. The rapidly expanding economies of India and China demand construction commodities and finished parts for energy plants. This demand has doubled the cost of building new power generation facilities and is expected to continue the rapid inflation of new power plant production for the foreseeable future.
The materials inflation is expected to impact the price of renewable power generating facilities even more than it will impact the cost of new nuclear pants. One of the flaws about the renewables paradigm is that it is rather vague about the source of base electrical generating capacity. Base capacity is those electrical plants that are producing power all of the time. I have recently argued that renewables generated base electricity required by a fully implemented renewables paradigm would be very expensive, perhaps as much as $25,000 per KW in the middle of the next decade. This would be two to three times as expensive as nuclear generated base power.
Other factors come into play. For example the cost of both fossil fuel fired power electrical generating facilities is rising, and fuel costs are rising as well. Last winter the price of Appalachia coal peaked at $300 on the spot market. Asian demand for coal fired electrical energy is pushing the price of coal as well as the price of other commodities. The price of natural has risen. New gas supplies have been tapped, but they are expensive to recover. And of course the cost of building replacement coal and gas fire power plants also has to be considered. Although some advocate the clean coal paradigm, in fact, at least 57% of the useful energy produced in a coal fired CO2 sequestering power plant, and possibly as much as 75% of it, will be used to power the sequestering and other gas cleaning operations. Thus a heavy fuel cost would be added on to the very expensive cost sequestration related equipment.
In 2007 the Tennessee Valley Authority put a reactor back into service after having been mothballed for two decades. The Browns Ferry Unit 1reactor had been refurbished at the cost of $2 billion Dollars. During the first year the Browns Ferry Unit 1 reactor was in operation, it saved TVA $800 million. That was the ammount that TVA would have had to pay, Thus the Browns Ferry reactor will pay for its rebuilding in 2 1/2 years. It will pay for its rebuilding and interest in a little more than 3 years. Encouraged by such how quickly the Browns Ferry reactor is paying for its rebuilding, tVA has decided to complete an old partly completed reactor, Watts Bar Unit 2. In addition TVA has two other partially built reactors, Bellefonte 1 and 2, that it is now considering completing. In addition TVA is planning two new more reactors at the same spot.
If we look at the cost of new coal fired generating facilities and add on top of those costs the cost of fuel, then even the $8 billion nuclear plant no longer seems so expensive. Compared to the new renewable bade electrical generating facilities, the cost of nuclear facilities is quite a bargain. This does not mean i am entirely satisfied with the present form of nuclear power, i am not. i am satisfied that the new Generation III+ reactors are very safe, and that they will produce electrical power for a very long time, perhaps as long as 100 years. I am not satisfied that the Uranium fuel cycle, with once through fuel technology is the best possible approach. I am not satisfied that once fuel leaves a Light Water Reactor it becomes waste. I am not satisfied that light water reactors are the lowest possible cost nuclear power generating reactors, clearly they are not. I am not satisfied that proposed storage solutions to the problems of nuclear waste are a resonable approach, and I am not satiasfied that no nuclear solution to the probl;em of load following or peak power reserve has been offered for the nuclear market.
At the moment the Light Water Reactor is the best technology on the market for post-carbon fuel electrical generation. But the shift to the nuclear paradigm will not be completed with Light Water Reactor technology. Because we have no other choice, we must begin to replace coal fired power plants with Light Water Reactors. We must begin to do this quickly, and with considerable numbers. This would be the case even if we were not concerned with global warming. The triple concerns of glonal warming, peak oil, and demand forced inflation of coal, makes it urgent that the shift to nuclear power be made quickly.
We out also to move quickly to improve the nuclear option. To decrease the cost of new nuclear facilities, to make them even safer. To solve once and for all the problem of nuclear waste, and to create new energy from spent reactor fuel, and useless nuclear weapons that only represent a danger to civilization.
The shift to the nuclear energy paradigm will talk place. There are very serious flaws in the renewable paradigm even if Al Gore and Google like it. We would be entering an early stage of the nuclear paradigm during the next few years. The final form of the nuclear paradigm is beginning to take shape in the minds of a few dreamers.
In honer of the 10,000th post on Energy from Thorium.
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I am doing exercises with weights 3 times per week. I started training 2 years ago and have made steady progress. I have lost weight gained strength. I had a very strict routine and I pushed myself to follow it and have not skipped any exercises or workouts for months.
However recently I switched jobs and moved to a new town and now I am experiencing a lack of progress with many of my exercises.
Stress in my work was really high, so 4 weeks ago I decided to take a break from working out for a week. Coming back, I was surprised that I still could do most of my exercises and it felt better.
This week, my motivation is once again gone. I already skipped my training on Monday and have now decided to take this full week off from training again.
My question is what recommendations are for workout breaks are and how it will affect my performance. Do I have to fear that I will lose the progress I made over the past 2 years? Nothing would be worse than regressing.
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Stalls can occur for a number of reasons. The most common reason has to do with recovery. You said that the stress in your job is very high, so that prompts me to ask "how are you sleeping?" and "how is your diet?".
Sleeping and eating are very important parts of recovery. You need the protein to build muscles. Unfortunately when you are stressed, most people want to fill up on crunchy salty snacks which are high in carbs--not protein. You can do the crunchy salty snacks in addition to the protein, but don't neglect eating/drinking your protein. Also, you really need 8 hours of real sleep for your body to really be able to perform the metabolic processes to build new muscles. If your eating habits have not changed, this is the first place I would look. Stress affects your ability to sleep and recover well.
To answer your question about breaks and training:
A week long break once or twice a year (vacation) isn't going to cause you to magically lose muscle. It will take at least 2 weeks before your body starts adapting to its lower amount of work.
Now, if you are squatting 1.5x your body weight, you are probably already past being able to progress as fast as you could at the beginning. If that's the case, you might want to look at some intermediate programs like Wendler 5/3/1, Texas Method, Madcow, or something of that sort.
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I agree that taking a short break isn't going to impact your strength/performance - HOWEVER you need to correct your stress/motivation levels, otherwise you may find yourself eventually taking a very long break. Find a sport, hobby, etc. that combines exercise (martial arts, volleyball, tennis) that will re-motivate you – Meade Rubenstein Jul 7 '11 at 12:22
Very good point, Meade. I hope I was able to help provide some insight into why he is stalling--which I believe is due to his increased stress. – Berin Loritsch Jul 7 '11 at 13:09
What I really would recommend is to change your routine, if you have followed the same for 2 years. Variation is key for continued progress. You could vary both the exercises in each workout, and also the reps. I usually vary between 5 and 15 reps pr set. Maybe a month I am doing 12-15 reps, the next 8-12, and the one after that 5-8.
Also focus to eat and sleep right. Eight hours a night is recommended.
You could also do a 4-5 week cycle, where you increase your effort each week, and maybe do a 50 % effort week before you start over. This is something a lot of athletes do. 70-80-90-100-50 is an example of one cycle.
If you only train each muscle group one time a week, just forget great progress. At least train them each five days. They should get 48-72 hours rest.
Good luck!
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If you're stressed out, take a week off, of course.
Over the long term, you could take "strategic" breaks once every 4 ... 8 weeks. This won't affect short term progress too much, and may actually improve things over the very long term.
Life is a marathon, not a sprint. Plan accordingly.
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I've had a couple of tasty rauchbiers lately, and got thinking about whether it would be possible to get the aroma of a cigar into a similar beer.
As a user, I don't mind getting nicotine into the brew, but I'm sure my guests would rather not. Much like a rauchbier, I think the magic comes from the aroma.
How can I "smoke" my beer? Can I drop raw tobacco leaves into secondary? Throw a can of snus in? Smoke malt over a case of cubans?
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Italy's Birra del Borgo do a range of beers that are made with tobacco. I don't know how they do it, but I have had the KeTo RePorter and the KeTo ReAle and can say that they genuinely taste like they have tobacco in them. The KeTo ReAle left my mouth feeling like I'd had a cigar... You could always drop them an email and ask how they use the leaves.
(2011-11-02) Also just found out that they are on Twitter so you could always tweet them, if you're on there...
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I don't read Italian, so can you say where you bought it, hopefully in the US? – drj Oct 29 '11 at 6:59
Can't find anything on their site about the KeTo ReAle, but the KeTo RePorter page says "Kentucky tobacco leaves are added, the same ones used for the famous Toscano cigars". – Mark McDonald Oct 31 '11 at 9:25
drj, I bought them in Rome when I was working over there last year. C4H5As, you're right, their website doesn't list it, it might have been a special, I have photos to prove it's real though... ;-) – fatboab Nov 2 '11 at 11:59
Of course, you can use anything in beer but that doesn't mean it's a good idea. Keep in mind that tobacco is poisonous when ingested.
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Very valuable advice, although doesn't quite answer my question. Thanks though - I hadn't taken this into consideration. – Mark McDonald Oct 31 '11 at 9:15
You could buy leaf-tobacco in bulk and home-smoke some grain with tobacco smoke. Nicotine's LD50 is pretty low, though. I would try to find combinations of ingredients to closely mimic the flavor, rather than using actual tobacco.
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I'm wondering if you went to a local cigar store and bought some of the empty wooden boxes, then used them like oak chips, if you would get some of the aroma transfer without the nicotine. My local cigar lounge sells these pretty cheap, but most of them are cedar and don't exactly smell just like the cigar smoke (just checked a couple that I use to store my 9mm's in my office and bedroom :-)). I vote for smoking the grain over some cuban clones (wouldn't want ATF after you). Definitely not the snuff.
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Great idea. I'll have to hit the local cigar store and see what old boxes I can find. I wonder if the LD50 for cedar is less than the cigars... – Mark McDonald Oct 31 '11 at 9:13
We routinely cook salmon on cedar planks on the grill here in the NW, so I don't think that you have anything to worry about. But, I'd look for non-cedar boxes (most are basswood, but not that common) to focus on the cigar smell. – drj Nov 1 '11 at 0:49
might be able to smoke the malts or store the cigars in your keg till they take the aroma!
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Lake's Cubs run continues with DeJesus back
Lake's Cubs run continues with DeJesus back
Lake's Cubs run continues with DeJesus back
PHOENIX -- Junior Lake primarily played the infield in the Minor Leagues, and Cubs manager Dale Sveum considered moving the rookie from the outfield to third base on Wednesday.
"[Sveum] didn't want to do that because [Lake's] riding such a wave right now. Why give him something extra to think about?" said Theo Epstein, Cubs president of baseball operations.
Lake entered Wednesday's game with 12 hits in his first five games, and then doubled in his first at-bat in the first against the Diamondbacks. He joins George Kelly (1930) and Emil Verban (1948) as the only Cubs to have a dozen hits in their first five games.
He was promoted from Triple-A Iowa after Brian Bogusevic aggravated his left hamstring, which left the Cubs thin as far as outfielders. The club could've sent Lake back to the Minor Leagues after David DeJesus was activated from the disabled list on Wednesday, but instead, Dave Sappelt was optioned to Iowa.
Lake isn't going anywhere now.
"He's got that incredible physical ability, amazing tools, where when he is locked in and seeing the ball well, he can do some things on the baseball field that make you drop your jaw," Epstein said. "His development is all about maturation and the mental side of the game. He's made huge improvements in seeing the right-handed breaking ball. He used to be a really big chaser. It's something he's cut down on. ... You don't see guys with bodies like that and power and speed.
"He's got the physical abilities to take a big step forward. Do I think one week in the big leagues show that he has? No. We're really excited for him and the start he's off to."
Lake finished third in the Most Valuable Player Award voting in the Dominican Winter League, which Epstein said may have helped the rookie's confidence. David Jauss, whom Epstein knows from his days with the Red Sox, was Lake's manager in the Dominican Republic.
"He's showing right now he's playing with a ton of confidence that he really belongs here," Epstein said. "This is the league he feels he's ready for and he's going out and showing it."
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More info on Lahaina Roads
Lahaina Roads: Map
Wikipedia article:
Map showing all locations mentioned on Wikipedia article:
Lahaina Roads is a waterway in Hawaiimarker. The surrounding islands of Mauimarker, Molokaimarker, and Lanaimarker make it a sheltered anchorage.
In 1941, Lahaina Roads sometimes was utilized as an alternate anchorage to Pearl Harbor. While planning for the attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet, Japanese planners hoped that some significant units would be at anchor there because with Lahaina's deep water, those elements of the Pacific Fleet would in all likelihood, would never have been recovered.
The possibility that elements of the Pacific Fleet would be at Lahaina Anchorage was taken very seriously in the attack plan of the Kido Butai (The Japanese Naval Strike Force). Scout planes were dispatched from the fleet, and I class submarines were sent to Lahaina Roads to reconnoiter the anchorage.
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I have read Brief History of Time in which he has wonderfully described the formation of universe. What is the frame of reference from which we are viewing the big bang? What is the frame of reference from which we are seeing the events associated with the big bang? Where is this frame situated?
Edit: The frame of reference cannot be same as the one we have now, right? Because physical laws break when we are witnessing BB. So this frame should be different somehow, right?
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Possibly related: – Qmechanic Oct 7 '11 at 8:29
Also see my related question: – Alan Rominger Oct 7 '11 at 14:27
The frame of reference cannot be same as the one we have now, right? Because physical laws break when we are witnessing BB. So this frame should be different somehow, right? – Mahesh M May 9 '12 at 7:29
It's not clear to me why witnessing the big bang breaks any physical laws. – qubyte May 9 '12 at 7:44
If you are asking "Where is the Big Bang origin now?", its (x,y,z) coordinate, the answer is that every point in the universe was at the origin of the Big Bang, thus every (x,y,z) point now, can be considered as the origin of the BB.
The analogy of two dimensional surface of an expanding balloon may help. At t=0, all surface points were putatively at the origin, then the balloon expands and all points on the surface recede from each other, and any one of them can be considered as the origin of the expansion in the two dimensional surface.
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This is the exact analogy that I have heard. But when we look at baloon we are not on when we watch big bang or (as some say its not possible theoratically for us to be at t=0) if we are watching few nanoseconds after big bang, where are we? are we inside the space-time that has just been created or watching it from "outside"??!!! – Mahesh M Oct 5 '11 at 4:21
And yeah, I am not asking about current x,y,z of big bang's origin. – Mahesh M Oct 5 '11 at 4:23
In the ballon analogy, we are a point , on the surface of the balloon. That is why it is a fair analogy. In our three space plus one time dimensions, our observation point is within these dimensions, and there is no point :) in asking where the origin of BB was, as it would be for a two dimensional citizen on the surface of a spherical radially expanding balloon. It is where we are as far as our observations can tell. – anna v Oct 5 '11 at 4:35
"Our observation is within these dimensions" :) We have freezed the time. We are trying to measure the width of the universe from "within the universe". How wide will it be? :) – Mahesh M Oct 5 '11 at 8:58
as an additional point, the balloon analogy is only true for a 2-D universe, where the universe is situated only on the surface. – Vineet Menon Oct 5 '11 at 9:58
There is no reason why we could not be viewing the BB in our frame. We can only view anything from our position in space-time, and in our frame. We don't see the whole BB 3-sphere, just that 2-sphere section of it which is located at just the right distance that light can reach us in the time that has since elapsed. That's why what we see is spread over a 2-sphere with us at the center, and at the end of our line of sight in all directions.
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We are discussing the big bang from a reference frame rigidly fixed with earth unless you are an alien ;-).
On a serious note, according to the general theory of relativity, every frame of reference is equally suitable to express the physical laws. So even if you are situated in a different rotating galaxy all the laws of physics of the origin of the universe should be the same!
A better question would have been why we say the age of the universe is such and such (we don't say with respect to us) when time is not an absolute quantity. The reason is the large scale homogeneity and isotropy of the universe which provides a lucky symmetry which enables us to describe the age of the universe in an absolute term.
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But when we are talking about big bang can the reference be still earth? I mean can we watch how food digests by being the food ourself? – Mahesh M Oct 20 '11 at 5:48
I share the OP's concern. I think the question here is one of the most important in physics. The idea of "frame" has to be abandoned or one is left with an eternity of infinite space and time sloshing about like a river or sea. It is becoming clear that things do not operate like that.
Einstein had the best stab at eliminating Newton's absolute space and time. Alas wrapping them up together and with the introduction of Minkowski space we are left with the problems of time in-variance, "rubber sheets" and still the need for some blackboard on which the fate of the universe is sketched.
For example if one considers that space and time are simply the effect of energy existing, and matter, then relativity can paint a slightly different picture. A bang in no space or time, even with infinite speed and energy, has a relative motion of zero. All directions are the same, so speed and acceleration are the same. Recent experiments have shown that at high temperatures quantum systems "lock" as degrees of freedom are limited and the system behaves as if extremely cold. Surely in the early Big Bang free from absolute space the degrees of freedom would be such that the event would be "cold" in the same way an aerosol spray freezes moisture out of the air? There is no observer or observer frame to be heated.
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Kyurem (MS015)
Revision as of 22:46, March 25, 2013 by (Talk)
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キュレム Kyuremu
Gender: Genderless
Ability: Pressure/Turboblaze/Teravolt (not activated)
Debut: MS015: Pokémon the Movie: Kyurem vs. the Sword of Justice
Current location: In his abandoned mine
Kyurem is one of the stars of Pokémon the Movie: Kyurem vs. the Sword of Justice.
When Keldeo brashly challenges Kyurem to a battle, it dominates the fight, easiy deflecting or dodging Keldeo's attacks, and the Boundary Pokemon ultimatly breaks off Keldeo's horn with Shadow Claw. When Terrakion attacks Kyurem with Hyper Beam in an attempt to defend Keldeo, Kyurem deflects it then freezes the Swords of Justice with Ice Burn to prevent them from interferring with the battle. Keldeo then runs away during the middle of the fight out of fear, and Kyurem gives chase, determined to finish their battle.
Keldeo stumbles on the train that Ash and his friends are on, while Kyurem and his Cryogonal henchmen catch up and attack Keldeo, but they are repelled by Ash and his friends.
Kyurem pursues them and attacks them several times, only for them to be distractioned by Iris and Cilan. Eventually, Keldeo and Kyurem face off where they first met, and, despite Keldeo giving it its all, Kyurem retains the upper hand until Keldeo learns the move Secret Sword. When protecting its friends from a stray Freeze Shock attack, Keldeo takes major damage, making Kyurem the victor. Instead of finishing the battle, however, Kyurem respects Keldeo's courage and states that it was better to lose a battle than to lose one's friends.
Known moves
Move Episode
Shadow Claw + Kyurem vs. the Sword of Justice
Ice Beam + Kyurem vs. the Sword of Justice
Ice Burn + Kyurem vs. the Sword of Justice
Freeze Shock + Kyurem vs. the Sword of Justice
Dragon Pulse + Kyurem vs. the Sword of Justice
Glaciate Kyurem vs. the Sword of Justice
+ indicates this Pokémon used this move recently.*
- indicates this Pokémon normally can't use this move.
• Kyurem has never used Glaciate. However, because Kyurem knows Freeze Shock and Ice Burn, it has to know Glaciate in its normal form.
• He is the second movie antagonist to be a Pokemon, the first being Mewtwo.
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Right now, I am getting two separate objects
1. A Win32_NetworkAdapter WMI object
2. A Win32_PnpSignedDriver WMI object
In my previous scripts, I've made sure I was calling separate objects, and relating them by the GUID
$mydev = Get-WmiObject -class Win32_NetworkAdapter | Where-Object {$_.pnpdeviceid -like "*VEN_0000&DEV_00AA*"}
If ($mydev.GUID -eq $relatedobj.ParentID)
But there is no GUID/ParentID/etc. property for a Win32_PnpSignedDriver object. Is there another way to obtain information about a device's drivers (specifically, the driver version), and also obtain the GUID of the device? Is it possible to do this win the Win32_PnpSignedDriver, and I'm just not seeing it?
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I found an easy way around this. I'm not great with the registry, so it was the last place I looked; but using it makes it much easier to find the information I was looking for.
I compare the nic information the same way as in my original post (with the Win32_NetworkAdapter WMI object), but I compare the GUID to the registry value instead. This can be done using the following line to get all nics:
$nicreg = Get-ChildItem -path "HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\" -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
foreach ($nic in $nicreg)
# do stuff with driver versions
And then iterating through each NIC comparing $nic.GetValue("NetCfgInstanceId") to $mydev.GUID. After you have confirmed you are looking at the right nic by verifying the GUID, you can get $nic.GetValue("DriverVersion") for the device you are looking at.
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Which would you choose? Some more detail:
I can choose between:
1. A dual-headed card with both heads DVI but only 256MB of memory
2. A dual-headed card with one VGA and one DVI, with 512MB of memory.
3. Both monitors are 1600x1200
4. I'll be doing mostly business app development on the computer. No gameplay or advanced graphics work. It's running Win7 and is a quad-core i5.
I'm thinking of going with 256MB one, just so both displays are DVI and I don't have to shift between sharp & blurry when I look from one screen to the other. But I'm not sure if the additional RAM would be a huge boon for some reason (Win7 GPU acceleration, for example? But with a quad-core, who cares?).
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closed as off topic by random Sep 16 '11 at 15:06
up vote 2 down vote accepted
You are very correct in that the 256MB one is the way to go as DVI offer pure digital link and you don't have to think about adjusting the parameters on the screens. You are also correct that the additional ram is unlikely to help much.
In general, if the GPU is good enough, RAM is usually not a big problem. If the GPU is not good enoguh, no amount of RAM will save it.
However, for the last bit, Win7 GPU acceleration, for example? But with a quad-core, who cares?, I think, for most of the GPU accelerated jobs, even the worst accelerated GPU of the current generation will give better performance than a quad-core CPU will give :)
share|improve this answer
VGA doesn't make the image blurry, as long as you set the settings on your monitor correctly. I'm running VGA & DVI on two identical monitors right now, and you can't tell the difference. Easy way to calibrate LCD running over VGA:
1. Pull up this test page in your web browser, hit F11 for full screen, fill the screen with as much of the test pattern as possible
2. Press the 'auto adjust' button on your monitor
3. Done! Your image should be nice and sharp now.
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So, over 3 years later, and I tried your trick. Worked great to calibrate my LCD monitor! Thanks. :-) – TimH Feb 25 '14 at 19:21
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Guest Blogger
Ignorance: A Shocking Reminder
Filed By Guest Blogger | January 26, 2011 8:30 AM | comments
Filed in: Living
Tags: David Gutierrez, HIV disclosure laws, HIV transmission, John Aravosis, McConnel Air Force Base, Todd Heywood
Editors' Note: Guest blogger Todd Heywood is a professional journalist for the Michigan Messenger.
heywood.JPGAs a reporter, I have spent a lot of time writing about HIV-specific criminal laws and their impact not only on those who are accused of violating them, but of the wider impact on HIV as an epidemic.
I have reported on the case of Michael Holder, a straight black man who was convicted in 2000 of failing to disclose his status to his white female partner. She recanted her testimony during trial, admitting that she knew he was HIV-positive, but a jury which included four members with blatantly racist attitudes convicted him.
I broke the story about the unprecedented bio-terrorism charges against a black gay man in the Detroit area. The man was charged with bio-terrorism for allegedly biting a neighbor during a brutal gay bashing incident.
So when the Jan. 20 post by John Aravosis supporting the hanging of a man convicted of failing to disclose his infection came across my inbox, it was a shocking reminder about how much work is left to do in relation to HIV and criminalization.
In that post he opined about how hard he was finding it to feel sorry for Sergeant David Gutierrez, 43.
First, let me begin by pointing readers to the Denver Principles. This powerful document was a declaration of the rights and responsibilities of persons with HIV written in Denver Colorado in 1983. Under recommendations for people HIV (called AIDS in this document because the virus would not be discovered for two more years), the Principles say HIV positive persons have an ethical responsibility to disclose their status to sex partners and to substitute low risk sexual behavior.
Let's be clear, no one is saying that HIV-positives don't have an ethical obligation to disclose.
What constitutes low risk behavior has changed significantly since 1983 when the Principles were written.
Sgt. Gutierrez was diagnosed while stationed in Italy in 2007. When he returned to McConnel Air Force Base, he began treatment. While the mainstream media report Arovosis linked to makes no mention of this, effective anti-retroviral treatment has been proven to reduce the risks of HIV infection significantly.
In 2008 the Swiss High Court ruled that an HIV-positive person with an undetectable viral load controlled by ART for six months of more and no other sexually transmitted infections was legally unable to transmit HIV.
Here is how AIDSMap sums up a study of HIV infectiousness and viral load:
A 2009 analysis of all studies to date in heterosexual couples where one partner was HIV-positive - but where most were not on antiretroviral therapy (ART) - has confirmed that a high viral load can significantly increase the risk of transmission, and that a low viral load (which is possible to achieve in a minority of people who do not receive ART) significantly reduces the risk. The authors calculated that out of 1000 HIV-positive individuals with a viral load below 400 copies/ml regularly engaging in vaginal sex with an HIV-negative partner, only one transmission could be expected to occur in the course of a year. In contrast, among 1000 HIV-positive individuals with a viral load above 50,000 copies/ml, at least 90 transmissions could be expected to occur in the course of a year.
Of course such information does not fit the narrow, stigmatizing view of HIV many Americans prefer to live with -- particularly gay and bi men.
Here is the result of a 2008 study of 1,725 men who have sex with men and HIV criminalization opinions:
Overall, 65% of men believed that it should be illegal for HIV-positive individuals to have unprotected sex without disclosure, 23% thought it should not be illegal and 12% did not know.
Support for criminalisation was highest (79%) among men aged between 18 and 20, and lowest (56%) among those aged 41 to 70. The investigators note that younger gay men were significantly less likely to have been tested for HIV. Separate research has shown that untested men are more likely to adopt a disclosure-based HIV prevention strategy "that gains credibility by transmission laws."
The overwhelming majority (70%) of HIV-negative and untested men (69%) supported legal sanctions, but only 38% of HIV-positive men endorsed criminalisation. "These differences most likely reflect a shift in orientation toward criminal statues on HIV transmission following seroconversion", comment the investigators.
Men with the lowest educational achievements were most likely to support criminalisation (75%), and those with a degree least likely (58%).
Over three-quarters of men who did not identify as gay or bisexual supported criminalisation compared to 63% of those who had some form of gay identity.
In addition, those who were least comfortable with their sexual orientation were most likely to endorse criminalisation.
That information is key to understanding an important study released in September of 2010.
That September study of 8,153 men who identified as gay or bisexual in 21 cities found the following staggering statistics:
• 19% of the men tested positive for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
• 28% of black, 18% of Hispanic, and 16% of white men tested positive for HIV.
• 44% of the men who tested positive for HIV had been unaware of their infection.
• 59% of black, 46% of Hispanic, and 26% of white men who tested positive for HIV were unaware of their infection.
• 63% of the HIV-positive men age 18-29 were unaware of their infection.
So what does all this information really add up to?
HIV is a disease, but one which is significantly unlikely to be transmitted when one is undergoing treatment. But in order to get treatment one needs to get tested for the virus. Sadly, as we see by the above studies, most men who have sex with men are relying more and more on these disclosure laws, relegating their safety to another person's power. Worse than that, nearly half of those infected don't know they have the virus, but presume they are uninfected.
The real question here is not should Sgt. Gutierrez obligated ethically to disclose his HIV-positive status, but rather, why are Americans of any sexual orientation abdicating their personal health and safety to another person's willingness or ability to disclose?
In short, our ignorance as gay men is literally killing us. All that blog post has done is re-enforce that ignorance.
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Thank you for this, Todd. The issue of criminalization is fraught with emotion ("My boyfriend infected me, he should go to jail!") and misinformation, and this is a great review of the facts.
By placing the onus on Sgt. Gutierrez's victims, rather than on himself, you are literally "blaming the victims." Sgt. Gutierrez acted not only "unethically" but also criminally. He doesn't deserve to be hanged, but he does deserve to be imprisoned, and that is the punishment he received.
Todd Heywood | January 26, 2011 12:24 PM
Jay, I understand how you can see that. But the reality is that I am talking about shared responsibility in consensual sex. What responsibility do you have if you are having sex with some one? Isn't there some level of personal responsibility here? Particularly since none of the people he is accused of having sex with without disclosing his status were infected, and at least one talked about how he used a condom? Isn't that taking an affirmative role, by him, to protect his partners (and himself?). Also don't you find it at all interesting that he was charged and convicted of adultery and indecency in front of others for having consensual sex in swinger situations? When are we going to stop using the law to moralize?
Under that logic Sgt. Gutierrez is himself a victim of someone else, and you're blaming him.
Seriously, stop blaming the victim. It's so inappropriate to attack someone who's clearly a victim and demand that they go to prison because they were victimized.
Richard Jefferys | January 26, 2011 1:25 PM
Although I agree with you about the criminalization issue, I'm not so sure about your take on Gutierrez. The original Smoking Gun post quotes him as writing:
“The research I have done raises several questions on weather or not HIV is even related to AIDs.”
And it also mentions the finding of two envelopes containing a total of 146 pages of "HIV related research articles." But it appears no journalist has inquired about the content of those articles, or who they were by. Based on his quote, it sounds like they might well have been by AIDS denialists. | January 26, 2011 1:35 PM
With respect, any merits to your piece are washed away by your cherry picking and outright distortion of the facts.
It wasn’t just a matter of Gutierrez choosing not to disclose his HIV status. He LIED about it.
“Gutierrez repeatedly denied he was infected, and was encouraged by his wife to carry on with his promiscuous lifestyle, several witnesses testified during the first day of the airman's court martial at McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita.
‘I watched a brother die of AIDS. It wouldn't have happened’, a Topeka woman testified Tuesday about her decision to have unprotected sex with Gutierrez on multiple occasions. She said she had asked him whether he had any sexually transmitted diseases and he assured her he ‘was clean’." – Associated Press.
2. Even had he NOT outright lied, as an airmen he’s subject to punishment for having violated an order TO disclose.
“Gutierrez's commander, Maj. Christopher Hague, testified that after learning about the airman's HIV status, he personally gave Gutierrez a written order in October 2009 requiring him to use condoms and notify his sexual partners of his HIV status before engaging in sex.” – ibid.
The overcharging [adultery/sex in front of others]due to the unique erotophobia of the military does NOTHING to invalidate the basic charge any more than Jared Loughner shouldn't be charged with shooting Gabby Giffords because government itself is pretty f-ed up.
And the potential exposure to blood in the military [regardless of his not serving in a combat zone] justifies such orders and prosecution for violating them. Initially, the treatment of people with HIV/AIDS by the military was even more horrendous than in the civilian world. The huge progress they've made must not be allowed to be jeopardized by the irresponsible actions OF CHOICE by service members like Guiterez.
3. In a 2007 post on, he wrote, “The research I have done raises several questions on weather [sic] or not HIV is even related to AIDs.” Not a crime, but "goes to state of mind."
4. NO, his partners’ stupidity in believing ANYONE and not insisting on safer sex/condoms doesn’t exonerate HIM.
5. NO, overcharging in the Detroit case, or the Florida spitting case, do NOT make all charges wrong in every other case, least of all this one.
6. “’Legally’ ‘unable’ to transmit HIV”? Mary, please! Don't get us started on Swiss "law."
7. “Unlikely” to transmit? Unfortunately, statistics don’t have to take expensive medications for life, suffer a degradation in the quality of or length of such life. Put another way, that’s like Obama saying “civil unions” are as good as “marriage.”
8. Your attempt to perpetuate the myth of “HIV criminalization” is both intellectually and morally irresponsible unless you can show me anywhere in the US that simply being HIV+ is a crime. You might as well claim “penis criminalization” because rape is against the law.
9. You selectively misinterpret the results of the study of attitudes about criminalization of NONDISCLOSURE, conflating two different facts into one conclusion to suit your assertion that fear of prosecution leads people not to get tested. There was nothing to support that, only:
“The overwhelming majority (70%) of HIV-negative and untested men (69%) supported legal sanctions, but only 38% of HIV-positive men endorsed criminalisation. ‘These differences most likely reflect a shift in orientation toward criminal statues on HIV transmission following seroconversion’, comment the investigators.”
[Again, the British-spelled “criminalization” refers to failure to disclose HIV+ status NOT “being” HIV+.]
There's also a correlation between opinions on gun laws and whether or not the respondent owns a gun. Doesn't prove there shouldn't be any gun laws.
Further the referenced first study summary reads: “Separate research has shown that untested men are more likely to adopt a disclosure-based HIV PREVENTION strategy ‘that gains CREDIBILITY by TRANSMISSION LAWS’.” Emphasis mine.
And the second study makes NO mention of fear of laws at all, but the fear of intersocial stigma and discrimination.
“’We must confront fear. Many men do not get tested and retested because they are afraid of what they might learn’, [CDC center for HIV/AIDS director Kevin] Fenton, says. ‘Finding out you have HIV is hard, but not knowing is even worse and puts your life and others' lives at risk. We must confront stigma’, Fenton says. ‘Homophobia and discrimination can also stand in the way of too many gay and bisexual men seeking and receiving appropriate HIV prevention services, testing, and care’."
“45% of MSM who were unaware of their infection DID report having an HIV test during the preceding 12 months, indicating they had acquired HIV recently or reported an incorrect HIV test result to the interviewer.” Emphasis mine.
Sorry, this wasn't "reporting" but editorializing. You retain your right to BELIEVE such laws are wrong, but opinion and empiricism are two different things.
Thank you.
I done plenty of articles on my own site, and the two sides of the HIV criminalization always separate very quickly: one side thinks that cases like Guitterez stigmatize those that are HIV positive and keep the cloud of fear out there. They're right to a point. The other edge of that sword is that he purposely lied to his partners about his status for a piece of ass; multiple times. Should he simply walk away from this scott free? No; but I don't know that years of incarceration are the answer either. He's lost his career and ruined his reputation. That's going to be hell to rebuild, if indeed he ever does.
His partners were also gullible enough to take him at his word when he said he was negative. My sympathy to his "victims" is within a very tight set of parameters.
Lastly, I think Aravosis showed a stunning lapse in judgment putting out a piece that voice his preference in hanging the Sgt. Passive aggressive to be sure, but a poor choice of wording. A regular contributor/owner/editor of a well-read site such as his should have taken the extra 60 seconds to think before he hit the "publish" button - obviously not a step they take very often.
I just saw on the news that according to a report from CDC, the number of gay people on the largest HIV dating site STDslove. com has reached 310,000. This site seems to be powered by plenty of fish and most of the gay people on it are sexy and good looking.
Personally, I have no objection to gay marriage. My concern is that more and more gay men get STDs. It seems that gay men is easier to get an STD and they even don't know when they have it.
Honestly, every time I read someone saying that people who don't disclose their status should hang, I can't help but assume that these people bareback regularly and are scared to death that they've had sex with someone who's poz who didn't disclose. It's the obvious explanation for such extreme rhetoric.
Also funny: We've been spending weeks talking about the "violent discourse" on the right, and here this pseudo-liberal asks for someone to be killed (I only want the government to kill him, he'd plea.) Gotta watch out for those pseudo-liberals - they can cause more damage than honest rightwingers.
Yeah, that was the first thing I thought of. What happened to civil discourse? Of course, for me it'd be like the pot calling the kettle black. I'm not known for holding back either...
"Let's be clear, no one is saying that HIV-positives don't have an ethical obligation to disclose." Well, actually a lot of people would argue that positive people don't have an absolute obligation toward disclosure under all sexual circumstances. There are a number of important aspects to the Denver Principles, but we should remember they were drafted prior to widespread awareness and adoption of safer sex practices. One could say that when any two people engage in unprotected sex without any conversation, this lack of conversation on a potentially important topic could be considered an ethical lapse by both parties. When a person who is HIV-positive engages in protected sex without disclosure, there is no ethical lapse on anyone's part. Positive people do not have a de facto ethical obligation to disclose in all sexual circumstances. | <urn:uuid:043794ac-aa32-464c-8a0b-ae6d2c8becec> | http://www.bilerico.com/2011/01/the_ignorance_is_killing_us.php | en | 0.971829 | 0.037545 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Crist Caves, Lawsuits Certain
Well, the governor went off and did it. Signed a compact that gives the Seminoles a gambling monopoly and imperils the already struggling pari-mutuels -- which actually pay taxes and are regulated by the state. Thankfully, it probably won't go into effect for a while as the lawsuits roll in.
The Sun-Sentinel, of course, cheerleaded for the deal. A September 12 editorial titled "Time to get deal done with Tribe" urged Crist to just shut and sign the compact. Now, after the fact, the newspaper is telling us it isn't such a good deal after all. Reporter John Holland writes this morning that Florida's deal is skimpy. The lede:
It's being sold as a windfall for taxpayers and the Seminole Tribe, but Florida's cut from an agreement to expand tribal gambling is dwarfed by some others negotiated around the country, industry analysts and public records show.
What's more, the 25-year agreement signed by Gov. Charlie Crist and Seminole Chairman Mitchell Cypress at the state Capitol on Wednesday provides for less state oversight and no permanent regulatory presence inside the tribal casinos.
Why didn't the editorial board bother to tell us this when it was selling the compact as a windfall? It is true, though, that the federal government pressured Crist to make the deal. And Crist, no heavyweight, quickly caved when his back glanced the wall.
So what to do now? Get a referendum to give blackjack and baccarat to the pari-mutuels in Broward (can't have them anywhere else or the Seminoles won't pay the state anymore) to even the playing field. Even Marco Rubio should see that the only fair thing to do at this point is let the people decide.
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"I'm actually quite worried because I think this is going to be the end of the British breakfast as we know it," Liberal Democratic lawmaker Tessa Munt told the BBC ahead of her appearance Wednesday before the House of Commons to fight the regulation change.
That might not be such a bad thing, in the mind of anyone who has endured the monotonous cooked English breakfast of egg, bacon, sausage, baked beans, two halved slices of white bread (with butter and preserves) and a flavorless grilled tomato.
"Since when did jam and marmalade become the Great British Breakfast?" the International Business Times wondered in a brief poke at the parliamentary tempest.
"Jam Wars: Will reducing sugar destroy British jams?" the Guardian asked in an exhaustive report on the pros and cons of cutting sugar and feared compromises on the spread's color and shelf life.
The newspaper quoted another Liberal Democratic lawmaker, Secretary of State for Business Vince Cable, as saying Britain's outdated content and labeling requirements were preventing the British products from occupying their due space on foreign store shelves.
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Social Question
mazingerz88's avatar
What are the kind words to say in this unfortunate situation?
Asked by mazingerz88 (18684 points ) May 28th, 2014
I need help jellies in phrasing words for a person that is distraught right now after hearing his mom’s cancer has recurred. Right now I’m not sure exactly what to say. Help-? Thanks.
Observing members: 0 Composing members: 0
15 Answers
jca's avatar
I would say “I’m so sorry. Your mom’s a fighter and you know she’ll fight this.” I would leave it at that. Then I might offer to spend some time with the person, go for a walk, go for coffee, something like that.
janbb's avatar
I agree with @jca‘s “I’m so sorry” but I’m not sure we can assume that everyone is a fighter. I would add, “I don’t know exactly how you’re feeling but I’d like to support you through this. Let me know if and when I can help, (then mention some specific things you might do) or if you just need to vent, call me.”
Pandora's avatar
Remind them that this diagnosis doesn’t have to mean the worst will happen. What their mother needs is a strong shoulder to lean on so she can fight a good fight. She needs people around her who can help with the little worries so she can concentrate on getting better. People who recover from cancer often have good support systems. Then let your friend know that you will be there for support whenever they need some help. As @janbb and @jca mentioned above.
Adirondackwannabe's avatar
Be willing to spend time with them and help them out with errands and stuff like that. One thing I see a lot of ill people lament is that none of their friends come around to see them when their sick. Don’t stay away. Yes being around someone seriously ill isn’t fun, but they need the support.
ZEPHYRA's avatar
So thoughtful of you to want to offer moral support. Sometimes not saying much or even anything is better than using words of sympathy. In many cases people don’t want to hear all those typical wishes which are undoubtedly heartfelt. Their pain is so much that they may not want to hear anything or they may just want to be heard as they unbottle all their pent up emotions. Even being there in a reassuring way and talking about other issues may be enough to help that person through the darkness.
All the best to your friend and his mother. I hope the disease is merciful the second time round too.
turtlesandbox's avatar
Be honest and tell your friend you are at a loss for words but you want to help any way that you can.
Do you live near your friend? If you do, offer to run errands, mow or clean so your friend has time to be there for his mom. Actions do speak louder than words. Especially during hard times like this.
Pachy's avatar
I could not more agree with @turtlesandbox and would only add that you should tell your friend that you’re there for him/her to talk/listen anytime, anywhere.
Pachy's avatar
@mazingerz88, my mother passed away quite recently after a very long illness, and what meant and mattered more to me than what my friends said or wrote was their simple loving act of acknowledgement.
filmfann's avatar
You don’t need to say anything. Give them a hug.
marinelife's avatar
I second @filmfann‘s advice. The offer to do whatever you feel comfortable with? Sitting with her so your friend can get errands done? Preparing meals for the family?
longgone's avatar
In addition to all of the above, I would remind your friend to take care of themselves, too. I think people need to hear that.
jca's avatar
@janbb: I am in a similar situation as the friend. I don’t put it on social media, as I tend to try to keep my personal life off Facebook or Fluther. My close friends know. I can tell you that when someone described my relative (who has cancer) as a fighter, it was very reassuring to me. With cancer, you have only two options. Fight it (meaning get treated for it) or let it go and die quicker than you would otherwise. I am also not religious, but when people tell me they are praying for her, I find that very comforting. I find any words of encouragement to be helpful. So I don’t think that it’s a negative thing to “assume” the woman is a fighter. If she is alive, she has fought it and she has won so far.
I find that cancer now is a chronic condition, not a death sentence like it used to be. I work with several people who have had recurring cancer and they just get treated for it as it arises and they go on. They work, they drive, they do everything we do. My relative with cancer had it metastasize, and in the autumn, she was in bed, in pain, unable to do anything except get up to go to the bathroom and to leave the house to go to the doctor. She could not cook. She could not drive, she could not even go down the steps to sit outside. Now she does everything everybody else does. She arose like a Phoenix. We marvel at her and we all say it’s a chronic condition. You don’t get cured, but you do get better. It will come back and the question is, will it come back in a year, two years, three years, five years, who knows. All we know is that we have her with us now.
flutherother's avatar
Just say you are sorry. There are no adequate words but it is important that you try to say what cannot be expressed.
janbb's avatar
@jca I understand what you are saying, I just think some people do, and have the right to, give up at a certain point. I feel that saying “s/he’s a fighter” has become a cliche almost. But this is nothing I need to argue about.
Adagio's avatar
When faced with a situation similar I usually find myself saying that I don’t know what to say, if I added anything else it would simply be glib words. If you think the other person would be comfortable with it, a hug expresses feelings that can’t be expressed in words. I think telephoning and saying something like you have the afternoon free and what can you do to be of help, what is needed, maybe it is just someone to share a cup of coffee with or perhaps their garden needs weeding, or they would like someone to read to them, or a meal cooked, the possibilities are endless.
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Pokemon Fusion Part 4
• Topic Archived
1. Boards
2. Pokemon X
3. Pokemon Fusion Part 4
3 years ago#71
Everyone looks at him like he's insane (which he is.)
"Do I hear autotunes? Maybe you're insecure 'cuz your voice be spewin' all kinds a' fumes!" -Contents.
"Starting to attack with your words now? Do not cry. I'm only trying to break your pride." -Meloetta.
And after a sudden sonic boom, Niche was off for Driftveil City.
3 years ago#72
Lol Pupitar=/=Larvitar but otherwise great job. I'll do the next part and thanks again.
Team Miror B Admin. Official Porygon Z of the Pokemon X/Y Boards.
3 years ago#73
The Pokemon herd was corralled into a large chamber. Gloria noticed that many other Pokemon were already in the chamber.
S.Grunt ------ "Alright, there's a fresh batch for the scientists. Wonder why they want all these Pokemon though."
SG 2 ---------- "Do not question the Lord. C'mon, there's a meeting scheduled for all grunts. Something about Project Cold Storage."
SG1 ----------- "Coming."
The chamber door slammed shut. The Escavalier took action, when the only sound was that of silence and Pokemon cries.
Looking around, the Escavalier spotted an AC vent. It slowly hovered up, and busted the grate with a well-placed lance thrust. Placing it's arms on the vent interior, the iron-clad bug deShifted, and Gloria climbed up into the vent. She made sure her Twin Lances were fastened to her back strap.
And we're in.
She began to navigate the vents.
Life is but a cruel Mistress.
RIP: Sadie, my beloved Golden. 9/11/2000 - 3/11/2013
3 years ago#74
[---Verdanturf Town---]
Within the Grassy fields, the white haired Octy(formally RS), his glasses still clean, and his lab coat still stretched out to fit a rashiram, looked towards the still blue sky.
A past life.. I wonder if we all each have gone through a past life..
He turns to the Fabulous, seeing the shades covering its Furret eyes.
Octy-----"Martini... can you let me look through your shades?"
Martini--"Oh my, what do you ever plan to do with them?"
Octy-----"I am just interested in what I might see.."
The Fabulous, ever so gracious, lends the shades to Octy.
Yes.. if this projects the true form of one into reality, him taking it off should've returned me to a Rashiram.. by why hasn't it?
Through the clever placement of the shades within his hands, Octy first looks at the Aggron Hybrid loafing around, seeing him become a middle Aged looking student again.
Interesting... I wonder, what will I see if I look at Martini?
He then turns the shades in the direction of Martini, but just before the looked through the dark shades, Celeste interrupted him, and the Fabulous with a question.
Celeste----"So, I'm guessing that being the villains isn't gonna work out after all eh?"
Martini-----"Nonsense dear, we've merely have gone past another act of this play."
He sees the sky above them all start to turn red.
Martini-----"See? Even the skies agree! We should continue on to be the grand villains!"
Celeste----"But what about Rhapsody? She-"
Rhapsody awakes from her sleep, still feeling enraged, but forgetting why.
Rhapsody---"Ugh! What happened?! I feel like I got hit by my cauldron.."
Celeste------"Oh, uh... you got sick-yes, sick! ..An-And.. we had to bring you here!"
Rhapsody---"Really? That's strange.. weird sky.."
Octy----------"Indeed, I've suspect it's being caused by something other than a really strong, and dangerous solar storm.."
Rhapsody---"Then let's get to the bottom of that, I want to return to my-I remember! THOSE LEGOS!!"
Octy----------"If we find them, will you stop screaming?"
Celeste------"I'll take that as a yes, where to?"
Octy----------"To a TV with news channel, the 'Legos' would certainly have shown up-"
Through the powers of the Fabulous, a portal showed up to them with a TV screen showing the latest footage of where Team Bionicle have been currently rampaging through.
Martini-------"My dear, maybe we should get to know their plots, they may be more than just rampaging buffoons."
Celeste------"Alright, hop on, I want to get this over with."
Martini obliged, along with Octy, and the three then flew off into the direction of Team Bionicle. But not before Octy gave back the dark Shades to Martini.
[Did I do Martini, Celeste, and Rhapsody okay?]
3 years ago#75
When Tablecune and Vapemile stopped howling,they put their noses together to show their love for each other.They walked outside to the lake.
Tablecune:Want to go for a swim?
They dived into the lake at the same time.They put their paws together and danced in the water.After they finished,they stepped out of the pool and shook the water off if them like a dog after a bath.They walked back to their cabin,walking close together.When they got back to their cabin,Tablecune layed on the bed and fell asleep.Vapemile layed beside him and fell asleep as well.
"I'll love you forever."
I don't even know anymore.
3 years ago#76
Changlini posted...
["Doing homework" on the PC]
You did great. :)
3 years ago#77
[S.o.U.L. Fortress]
Maximillion stood behind a podium, as the various grunts, Engineers, and his other subjects gathered in the large auditorium. The lights dimmed, as the last of them came in. Maximillion began to speak,
Maximillion --- "Loyal men and women of our glorious Syndicate of Universal Larceny, I present to you a change in plans.
As you are aware, Project Cold Storage is underway. We have sent the Containment Trucks to Mauville, expecting the target to arrive. has not arrived, defying our timetables.
So, today, we will send out the Containment Aerial Copters, who's designs our fantastic Spy Division have lovingly stolen from the Land of the Setting Sun. Our machines have been notably advanced thanks to them. So, Spies, please stand up, so you may be applauded by your fellow S.o.U.L. members."
Some of the audience rose, and were greeted by the booming noise of applause. They bowed, and sat back down.
Maximillion --- "We are one step closer to rivaling the mighty Legends. We are one step closer to owning the world. And we have good news on the Mio Front.
The scientists we put in charge of Project Mio Curative have released their latest results. The current success rate is now 99%. Very soon, we will be able to release our curative to the world, all the while snagging a pretty penny."
The audience roared in excitement and cheer.
Maximillion --- "This is the dawn of a new era! An era where our syndicate is at the top. Thank you for your time."
The crowd applauded, and returned to their work. Maximillion made his way to his office.
All according to plan.
While the flight squadron prepared to take off, everyone, full of cheer, paid no heed to the slowly reddening sky, ever defying the eternally dark cloud cover.
Life is but a cruel Mistress.
3 years ago#78
The Bump Ends With You: Bump Remix
"Fun Fact: Nothing that starts with 'Fun Fact' is fun, and half them aren't even facts." - Itennu
3 years ago#79
I'm goin to bed. G'Night!
Ain't no one gonna boss this fox around! =^_^= Official Shadow Fennekin of Team Miror Infinity.
My Fursona:
3 years ago#80
OcarinaofToast posted...
I'm goin to bed. G'Night!
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• Topic Archived | <urn:uuid:783a553e-9516-4887-80bc-f5e6e47eebad> | http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/696959-pokemon-x/65684017?page=7 | en | 0.928054 | 0.103297 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Psychology | Multivariate Analysis
P654 | 24639 | Wasserman, S
Psychology P654. Multivariate Analysis.
Examines the principal methods of descriptive and inferential
statistics used in the analysis of multiple measurements,
emphasizing linear transformations, multivariate normal
distributions, principal components, multivariate analysis of
variance, canonical correlation and variates, discriminant functions
and variates, and conventional procedures of factor analysis;
involves both theory and applications, with a strong geometric | <urn:uuid:b02038a8-1deb-4482-96fe-16a08f95e860> | http://www.indiana.edu/~deanfac/blspr05/psy/psy_p654_24639.html | en | 0.769622 | 0.1989 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Based on 24 Critics
critic reviews ( 3 )
fan reviews ( 3 )
• The actor literally takes the metaphors of his bull-headed character to the limits and is never less than believable or mesmerizing. show more
• Writer-director Michael K. Roskam takes his time in revealing why Jacky needs to shoot up, but that LaMotta restlessness is unmistakable - this bull here can rage. show more
• Bullhead contains the elements for a simple but overwhelming personal tragedy. It also contains other elements that create a muddle. It's one of those films you have to reconstruct in your mind. show more
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• March 26, 2013 ht00000000142046
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This guy Matthias Schoenaerts is off the charts. I first caught him in a beyond superior performance in Rust and Bone and now after seeing him, found this movie lastnight with this him starring as a young cattle farmer \'Jacky Vanmarsenille\' in Bullhead. Inspiring performance.. and beyond! A++++++
• July 04, 2012 ec00000000126086
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Great movie with an intense story and great performances. The character of Jacky is full of emotion and surprises.
• February 02, 2012 qh00000000110878
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Here\'s a great review from Drew McWeeny over at There\'s a restaurant right by the Alamo Drafthouse\'s parking lot, a Tex Mex place called Maudie\'s that has a sign I\'ve walked past several times during the festival so far. It says something about \"There\'s no bull in our beef,\" and lists all the things their meat does not have in it, including hormones. It\'s a selling point these days if you\'re growing animals that are just animals, and it\'s also something that I think takes place in a world I know nothing about. That world is the setting of the provocative, disturbing new film \"Bullhead,\" from Belgian writer/director Michael Roskam, and this is one of the most original things I\'ve seen here this week, strong and adult and sweeping in the way it handles some very complicated ideas about manhood and what we owe others as we move through this world. This is not a film that plays things easy or that establishes any clear moral lines early on. Both Jacky Vanmarsenille (Matthias Schoenaerts) and Diederik Maes (Jeroen Perceval) move in this shady not-quite-black market world, and when they run into each other early in this film, it\'s a shock to both of them. There\'s some shared history here. But what\'s the history? Why does Jacky almost melt down when he runs into Diederik? And why does Diederik have meetings with police officers? Jacky\'s family is a cattle family for generations, and there are times where they buy and use illegal hormones and drugs to help grow their beef quicker and cheaper. Jacky also uses hormones and steroids to grow himself, and Schoenaerts is terrifying in the film. People talk about the crazy transformation Tom Hardy went through on \"Bronson\" and \"Warrior,\" but this is at least that startling. He plays Jacky as a big dumb animal, emotionally stunted and unable to really connect to anyone. When we finally start to piece together Jacky\'s history, it\'s a miracle he\'s not just constantly trying to kill everyone he encounters. He\'s got a right to his anger, a reason behind his rage, and he changed himself because he had to if he was going to survive. There\'s a fair amount of the larger crime story in \"Bullhead\" that was pulled from real headlines, and it\'s dense, potentially confusing stuff. The film really wrestles with a world where everyone has secrets and everyone wears a public face and a private one, and sometimes more than one of each, and once it starts to pay off the various story threads it establishes, \"Bullhead\" is one of the most powerful experiences I\'ve had in a theater this year. It\'s an unsubtle sledgehammer of a movie, emotionally speaking, but that\'s exactly what I like about it. I think Roskam has an amazing voice for a first time feature director, and he really builds a beautiful sense of inevitable horror, a sinking feeling that is almost impossible to bear by the end of the film. It\'s a tremendous accomplishment. | <urn:uuid:be6e4146-bd14-4d15-96f2-451d31fb4c1d> | http://www.moviefone.com/movie/rundskop/10062525/reviews/ | en | 0.960443 | 0.0532 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Zeke and Ned
Larry McMurtry, Author, Diana Ossana, With
Larry McMurtry, Author, Diana Ossana, With Simon & Schuster $245 (0p) ISBN 978-0-684-00396-2
Reviewed on: 12/30/1996
Release date: 01/01/1997
At first glance, McMurtry (Dead Man's Walk) and Ossana (his screenwriting partner, and collaborator on Pretty Boy Floyd) appear to be spinning a merely folksy tall tale about a battle for a woman that spirals out of control in the Cherokee territory of Oklahoma in the late 19th century. As the story develops, however, it becomes apparent that they have greater ambitions, such as exploring the different values behind white and Native American justice and the different responses of men and women to the sudden, often brutal, enforcement of frontier justice. Zeke Proctor is the primary protagonist, a Cherokee tribesman with a wife and triplets who lusts after Polly Beck and decides to try to make her his second wife. When Polly's husband objects to Zeke's overtures, a shootout occurs in which Polly is accidentally killed. Zeke is arrested and tried in a Cherokee court. The impatient Beck clan seeks justice via a courtroom shooting spree, leading to Zeke's best friend, Ned Christie, a Cherokee leader with a razor-sharp temper, also being accused of murder. Zeke is eventually granted a government pardon, but Ned is hunted relentlessly by white posses. The friendship between Zeke and Ned gives the story its prime canvas, even as their battles with marshals and rivals add period color. But what gives this well-wrought tale its depth is how McMurtry and Ossana convey the era's various moral shades of gray. 100,000 first printing; major ad/promo; BOMC featured alternate; paperback rights to Pocket Books. (Jan.)
The Best Books, Emailed Every Week
Tip Sheet! | <urn:uuid:7acbcc0b-bc38-4216-af64-e5ec84ce76ee> | http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-684-00396-2 | en | 0.928052 | 0.129457 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Did Guy Fieri Get Rid of the 'Nuclear Waste' Cocktail?
It seems like the drink is the first to go from Fieri's (poorly reviewed) menu
Staff Writer
Photo Margarita 410 Modified: Flickr/ TheCulinaryGeek /CC 4.0
Blue curaçao is is probably the culprit of the nuclear taste.
It looks like Guy Fieri's Guy's American Kitchen & Bar has had its first casualty: the watermelon margarita, now known as the "nuclear waste" margarita.
After Pete Wells tore apart Fieri's Times Square restaurant — including the margarita — Hollywood.com has caught onto the noticeably absent drink. Wrote Kelsea Shaffer in a review, "After a failed attempt to order the suspiciously blue watermelon margarita, we learned that Wells’ claims had killed the item. It had been dramatically stricken from the menu." Could it be that Wells killed the margarita?
Eater also tore apart the drink in an earlier review, calling it "not so much a drink, as it is a cup of diabetes." Still, it looks like it's still gracing the pages of the cocktail menu. Now we know what's actually in the drink: El Jimador blanco tequila, watermelon, pineapple, lime and — what is probably the culprit of the nuclear taste — blue curaçao. We can think of a few better margarita recipes out there for those wanting a sugary blast of tequila.
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What Is the NRA Afraid Of?
Published: Sunday, January 27, 2013 at 2:07 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, January 27, 2013 at 2:07 a.m.
Contrary to what is being passed off as fact by certain news channels, President Barack Obama has actually made fewer executive orders than any other president. Listening to credible news sources and fact-checking articles that spew such statistics before repeating them will help to stop passing on misinformation.
As for the gun control measures that have been proposed, President Obama clearly states that the problem with owning guns is not with ordinary, mentally healthy citizens, and he is not trying to take away the right to own reasonable guns for self defense. The problem is assault-type weapons. I can't understand why anyone, other than the military and law enforcement officers, needs that type of weapon. Even Ronald Reagan stated that guns like AK-47s are not needed for home defense.
As a retired elementary teacher, I can't imagine the horror of what happened at Sandy Hook. The president is doing what he should be doing: trying to prevent more mass killings. As he said, it's not going to stop them all, but we have to at least try. Anyone who doesn't agree with that agenda needs to do some soul searching. The idea of arming teachers is absurd and brings up all kinds of issues.
The chatter and false emails being sent out recently by the heads of the NRA smacks of an intentional effort to incite paranoia. Proclaiming that the president is a tyrant has no basis in fact. Furthermore, using his children in their recent ad is unconscionable.
I would ask the reasonable members of the NRA, of whom there are many, to demand that the heads of that organization stop the unscrupulous tactics. Polls show that most members agree with background checks and other sensible gun-control measures that the president is proposing. What is the NRA really afraid of?
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Blog Is Moving
So, I’ve shifted this blog over to another one, where future updates will take place. The new site address is:
If you’ve bookmarked this page, feel free to adjust accordingly.
Thar She Blows
The recent eruptions from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano this past week has caused havoc with European air carriers, bringing everything to a virtual stop. Something along the lines of 60,000 to 80,000 flights have been disrupted, stranding passengers and cargo in place, having a huge effect on the economies of numerous countries. And to think, this is a pretty minor eruption, with a historic record of followup eruptions that have taken place after the first ones in surrounding Volcanoes.
Volcanoes are one of the world’s most powerful forces of nature, literally fire from the Earth itself, a force that has proved to be incredible devastating throughout planetary history. During my college years, I minored in geology (a trait that I seem to have inherited from my father, who is a professional geologist), and it remains a field that I continue to find fascinating, beautiful and awe-inspiring. In 2005 and 2006, I travelled to the American Southwest with the geology department for two separate trips to study the regional characteristics in the beds of rock below the surface of the Earth.
While most of my geologic interests centered around sedimentology and stratigraphy (studying sedimentary rocks, and interpreting the conditions in which they were laid down, respectively), there are some parallels with studying igneous rocks and the larger structures that are formed in the presence of volcanoes. Walking in and around volcanoes is an awe-inspiring thing to do, and it’s an experience that I would really like to repeat sometime in the future.
Volcanic activity occurs when molten rock from the Earth’s mantle pushes its way up into the crust and onto the surface. There are three general methods in which this is presented: shield volcanoes, cinder cones and stratovolcanos. There are a couple of other out there, but those are the general types. The formation of each respective volcano depends greatly on the surrounding environment in the crust in which it is formed. There is a key element that helps to dictate the type of volcano that erupting magma forms: Silica.
The explosive nature of a volcano depends greatly on the viscosity of the magma, which in turn determines the gas content within the magma. From Princeton University: [Viscosity is the] resistance of a liquid to shear forces (and hence to flow). In a nutshell, this means that something with a high level of viscosity will have a higher resistance to flow: it’s thicker. Something with a low viscosity will have less resistance. The move viscous something is, the better it is at releasing gases trapped within the magma. The more gas within magma, the more explosive potential within a volcano.
This is why features such as the ones that created Hawaii constantly erupt with little disruption to anyone outside of the lava flows: the gasses within the magma allow for it to escape, and as a result, there are a number of very smooth flows of molten rock that spreads out from the origin, resulting in what is called a shield volcano, because of the shape that it forms. Here, the magma is classified as Mafic, which has a lower silicone content within the minerals that compose the flow – the resulting rocks tend to be rich in pyroxenes and olivines, and are darker in color. The other major class of volcanoes is the Stratovolcano, which form over major subduction zones, such as what you would find ringing the Pacific rim. The magma here tends to be classified as felsic, with a much higher silicone content, which is more viscous in nature and allows for more gas to be trapped within. These volcanoes tend to be very tall, with high peaks composed of alternating flows and debris from prior eruptions. Cinder cones tend to be found on both types of volcano, and are usually one-time events that build mounds of basalt to some impressive heights.
File:Krakatoa eruption lithograph.jpg
The Stratovolcanos are the ones that are problematic, because they have effects that stretch far beyond their immediate vicinity, as we’ve been seeing with Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland, and more notably, with the Krakatoa eruption of 1883. This was one of the most violent eruption (About 13,000 times the strength of the Hiroshima atomic bomb) in human-recorded history, and had profound, long term effects on global climate. Following that eruption was a marked drop in global temperature (1.2 degrees C, according to Wikipedia). Eruptions of this nature do far more than throw out lava from the vents: pent up energy within the magma builds, then explodes, vaporizing rock and throwing up a massive plume of ash, debris and dust. Larger particles come down the quickest, given their mass, and the further from the volcano you go, the smaller the debris. The dust thrown up in an event such as this rises and moves to the Stratosphere, where it can be carried around the globe. This pumps other gasses into the atmosphere, which in turn helps to deflect sunlight from the planet, allowing for a cooling event to occur. The dust and gasses in the atmosphere has the added effect of filtering out sunlight, leading to some spectacular sunsets.
Another notable event was the 1816 ‘Year without a summer’, which had in turn been caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora the year before, which is likewise one of the most powerful eruptions in known history, at roughly four times the Krakatowa eruption. In this instance, a massive global cooling occurred, affecting the Northern Hemisphere by destroying crops and precipitating a famine. Here in Vermont, snow fell each month of the year, and the eruption would have an affect on the planet’s climate for years to come.
Most of the major eruptions in recorded history have been relatively minor, with explosions of Krakatoa and Mount Tambora occurring long before the advent of modern society and globalization. The dust that is thrown up into the air by the explosion is very fine, and has the ability to completely ruin mechanical engines, resulting in the grounding of air traffic around Europe, and soon, most likely Canada. Keeping in mind that this was a relatively small and localized eruption, imagine what will happen when there is another eruption on the scale of one of those eruptions. In that instance, we will have quite a lot more to worry about than stranded passengers.
New England Historical Association Recap
On Saturday morning, my father and I drove down to Salem Massachusetts to the New England Historical Association‘s spring conference, held at the Salem State College. Earlier this year, I had a paper accepted for presentation by the group, and it was time to present it.
The paper is entitled ‘The Military Roots of Manned Spaceflight and the Cold War‘, my master’s capstone paper that I graduated from Norwich University’s School of Graduate Studies with, and I was placed on a panel called Cold War Politics in the United States and Mexico, along with two women: Julia Sloan out of Cazenovia College with her paper: ‘Placating the Left by Vilifying the United States: Mexico’s Domestic Foreign Policy 1959-1979‘ and Matra Crilly from Simmons College with ‘Returning to Republican Motherhood: The DAR’s Postwar Strategy Against Communism‘, two excellent presentations that I learned a lot from over the course of each presentation.
My paper, as the title suggests, looks to the background developments in the military/political sphere that allowed for the proper conditions for manned spaceflight on the part of the United States and the Soviet Union. This largely starts from the Second World War, where rocket scientists found an ample supply of funding in Germany as Hitler worked towards building new weapons to use against the Allies. With the fall of Nazi Germany, rocket scientists defected or were captured by the United States and the Soviet Union, who in turn used them to create their own weapons. With the introduction of the nuclear bomb to the battlefield, missile and rocket technology proved to be a highly effective (after quite a bit of perfection) method for delivering them, and as such, each country began to build more and more missiles to counter the other. Ultimately, space became the ultimate high ground, and highly public programs that sent people into space were created, eventually leading to the landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon. My presentation went well, I thought, and I was able to stay within my allotted time of twenty minutes. (There was a little prompting of time, with cards)
The following two presentations were pretty interesting. Julie Sloan spoke on Mexico during the Cold War, which I knew nothing about. Apparently, there was a move on the part of the government to use public perception to move against the United States, capitalizing on old grudges over lost territory and worries over American imperialism to stay in power. While the country never became a communist style government, it did support fellow Latin American countries during that time period, including Cuba.
Marta Crilly also spoke about Communism, in this instance, with the way the Daughters of the Revolution sought to move against communist agents and teachings within the United States in a very scary way: seeking to promote patriotism over learning, and shunning anything remotely ‘un-American’ in the post-World War II era. The group, of which members could join only by proving that they had a direct link to members of the Revolutionary army during the 1776 War for Independence. Discussion turned to some observations of similar other organizations within the United States throughout its history, combating immigration during the 18/19th centuries and to the modern day, with the current Tea Party movement.
Our Moderator, Avi Chomsky, noted at the beginning of our panel that this seemed to be a selection of papers that had been thrown together linked only by their connection to the Cold War, with three very different elements. In light of this, she worked to pose several questions to the three of us that would help us put our papers together at some basic elements: What was communism, what was the Cold War, how was Cold War Policy made and how did the Cold War impact Latin America?
The three of us tackled the first question, with help from the audience: for me (the first two questions were wrapped up here), Communism and the United States was not really a war of ideologies: it was a conflict of two governments, and as such, the Cold War was really about domination. Ideology in this instance was a force that was used to get the citizens of each country in line with shared interests to diametrically oppose the other. Marta joined in here noting that the perception of Communism was an extremely vague definition, as looked at through the eyes of the DAR: it was essentially anything that was considered un-American. Someone in the audience brought up the point that this is similar to rhetoric about the current administration being a socialist: the definition is perhaps deliberately vague, enough to get anyone very annoyed. Julia also noted that there were similarities taken in Mexico at the same time: America was seen through a certain lens at this point in time, fueled by a large number of old grudges, pushed to certain perceptions by policymakers.
Throughout the discussion, I’ve realized that I’ve never really looked at how Communism was looked at through the lens of the space race: certainly, there is an amount of irony with the United States using NASA, a publicly funded venture, as a symbol of American economic, technological and military might against Communism. Certainly, there was a number of the above perceptions about communism from the astronauts themselves, as well as a mix of motivations from the rocket makers themselves, looking more for scientific achievement over politics. Within this context, I think that even more so, the Cold War was less about ideology and more about two large nations looking for a larger influence in the world around them for their own benefit. In George Friedman’s The Next 100 Years, he notes that nations will work towards their own interests, and at times, global chaos, rather than order, is far better for a nation, despite potentially stirring up national security concerns. In this is some truth: nations will act to preserve themselves. In the Cold War, the United States faced a massive and united foe: The Soviet Union. Their opposing ideology allowed for the nations to gather their people in a fairly united front, but at the end of the day, ideology really mattered little, just national concerns.
In the end, the conference was quite a bit of fun. I had spent several days reworking my presentation, pouring over books and sources to refresh myself, so having that aspect over with was a relief. I enjoyed sitting in on a couple of other papers and presentations, and enjoyed the historical discourse around me. With my presentation, I joined the New England Historical Association, and I suspect that I’ll be attending future conferences in the very near future. Many thanks to my father for both driving me down and attending my presentation, as well as Dr. Steven Sodergren from Norwich for sitting in and asking a couple of very good questions. Similar thanks goes out to my fellow panel mates, for their work and very interesting talks.
Obama’s Space Plan: Astronauts to Asteroids
Yesterday afternoon, President Obama spoke at the Kennedy Space Center, addressing the critics of his Administration’s plans for the future of NASA, indicating that there will be quite a lot to expect from the space administration in the coming years and decades.
Amongst the leading concerns, even some voiced by noted astronauts Neil Armstrong (Apollo 11), Gene Cernan (Apollo 10/17) and Jim Lovell (Apollo 8/13), charging the Obama administration with formulating a plan that would restrict NASA in the near future, and potentially allowing the U.S. to slip behind other nations in space supremacy. Much of the controversy has been around the massive Constellation program and its cancellation. With it went the first elements of a future moon program that would have utilized the new Ares 1 rocket and the Orion capsule.
President Obama noted at the speech that he was 100% behind the program, noting that the achievements that the Administration have provided much inspiration for the entire nation, noting that a space program was an essential element of the American character. The speech was mainly centered around what was to come: a six billion dollar increase in NASA’s budget over the next six years, which would be used to fund new programs, research and development for new means to reach space.
A major element of the speech was noting the issues with the Constellation program as a whole, and that the changes put into place would be more effective, faster and cheaper. The Constellation program was already behind schedule and over budget, according to an independent study, something that NASA itself really didn’t want. However, the President noted that a couple of elements from the program would be salvaged: the Orion capsule, to become an escape vehicle for the International Space Station, and alluded that a new, heavy-lift rocket would be developed by 2015, using older models – most likely, coming out of the Ares rocket design.
This mention of a new, heavy-lift rocket is a critical component of the President’s speech, because it signals a very different style of spaceflight in the future. A heavy-lift rocket will allow astronauts to travel away from a low earth orbit, for the first time since Apollo 17 (1975). Plans to land astronauts on an asteroid, and eventually, by the mid-2030s, to Mars, with a series of ever-increasing challenges to reach that goal, much like the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions were geared towards reaching the Moon.
Additionally, private industry will be a major component of this plan, with SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket getting named in the beginning of the speech. The President made a vital point in the middle of his speech, noting that Private industry has always been a major part of NASA’s plans, and that that relationship would continue. Personally, I find this to be an exciting proposition, with a number of companies starting up and well on their way towards reaching space. SpaceX is a company that I’ve personally followed for a couple of years now, and I’m very excited to see what they come up with next. Bringing in private industry makes sense to me, because it helps to shift some of the costs away from taxpayers, and it would seem that the President hopes that a major industry that will attract industry and highly skilled workers will spring up in the Florida region. To that end, they’ve promised $40 million towards an area redevelopment plan to further this along.
This seems to fit with a larger element of the Administration’s plans, especially bringing more people to college and by extension, creating a highly knowledgeable and skilled workforce. The main issue there is that this work force needs a place to exist after college, and it would be a positive thing for the country to grow and maintain a major industry that is geared towards space exploration.
There were some issues with President Obama’s speech. His address did not cover what the short term ramifications of creating a new program would be, and with the Space Shuttle program ending this year, it is likely that NASA will be left no choice but to travel to space with the Russians, at least until a replacement can be found. SpaceX is working towards this goal, but that is something that is a little ways out at this point. To his credit, Obama noted that the decision to cancel the Space Shuttle program did not come from his administration, but from the Bush administration, who rightly saw that the Shuttle was an aging piece of technology that would need to be replaced.
Furthermore, the President noted that he was not interested in returning to the Moon, setting his sights on the Red Planet instead. I can’t see a Martian mission being put into place without further exploration of the moon happening: The U.S. has been away from the Moon for 35 years at this point, and additional training and practice. Considering the distances involved for a Mars landing mission, it would make sense to perfect technology and crews close to home, where problems can be solved far more easily, and in the event that something goes wrong, solutions are far more achievable.
One thing is for sure, this plan, to me, sounds very ambitious, exciting and most of all, provides a rough point for NASA to work towards in the next twenty years: Mars. While the speech did not resonate with me as Kennedy’s speech in 1961 did, I hope that we will see much of the same results, and that the change in plans will pay off for the United States. What is most exciting is that there is a plan beyond simply going to space as a sort of placeholder, as the Shuttle program seems to really be. The first age of space was marked with a goal and time: land on the moon by the end of the decade, and is something that should have been followed upon with a larger project that would have taken the lessons learned from Apollo and applied them to new ventures in space. In short, Obama’s plan is long overdue, something that should have been put into place twenty years ago, and that should have yielded results by this point.
High Speed (or, I Want To Read On The Way To Work)
Recently, the problem of drivers texting while in a vehicle has been brought to the forefront of the news, shedding light on a vital issue that illustrates that driving is inherently a very dangerous activity. Road safety is something that should never be far from our minds, either in the car, or out of it, and every day on my drive to work, I see examples of poor training and practice amongst my fellow drivers. Two years ago, the issue was on the roads themselves, where cuts and transfers of funds to the roads took place, resulting in roads with plenty of hazards. Both issues taken separately are worrisome, but taken together, they’re both downright scary.
Thinking about this has brought to mind another initiative that has been making a bit of news over the course of the past year: high speed rail service. Currently, the nation lags far behind other industrialized nations, such as the United Kingdom, much of Europe and Japan, for large-scale access to a fast train system. In part, I suspect, that’s due to the sheer size of the United States, as well as competing for space with freight transportation across the country. Because of the size, a high speed rail system is going to be an expensive proposition, upgrading the current one to something far better.
However, despite the expense, I want to see a high speed rail system come to the United States. On my way to work, I cross a set of rail road tracks that have since been abandoned, and over a hill, follow alongside the major railroad track that runs from the Burlington area all the way down to Boston and down the East Coast. A friend once visited from New York City, and it took her just as long to get up as it would have been to drive. Driving alongside the railroad tracks this morning, I couldn’t help but think how much I would prefer to have the ability to make a short walk to a train station, get on a train and simply ride in to work. While I lived in England, in 2006, this was a common occurrence for me, and I found that I really enjoyed riding in to work and class via the underground and regular London transit system.
Maintaining a high speed rail system in the State of Vermont would be a good thing for Vermonters. Our long winters bring about hundreds of accidents each year on the highways that commuters use between Montpelier and Burlington, and hopefully, a rapid system would help to cut transit time for people who live a bit further away, and would help reduce the load on the roadways. With an increasing number of people texting and driving, deteriorating roads, moving more people off the roads into a mass transit system will help reduce some of the risks while on the road, and will help with the wear and tear on the roads. It’s an alternative that should be available, and as public transportation has increased as fuel prices have done the same, hopefully there will be the the perfect storm of dangerous drivers and accidents, federal spending and infrastructure and availability to Vermonters.
A system such as this would be good for the state as well, linking Vermont to the southern states and cities, allowing for the state to market itself as it has long done for weekend excursions during changing of the fall leaves to the ski season, as well as all of the other attractive reasons to visit our state. It’s easy to do that by car, but I’ve always seen taking a train ride somewhere as a sort of adventure, and have many fond memories of doing so while in London, travelling to Edinburg, Cambridge, Oxford, Eastbourne, Stratford-Upon-Avon and many other places. It was quick, allowed me to plow through fourteen books in four months and allowed me to see the rest of the country without requiring a personal vehicle.
Plus, mass transportation is a good, sustainable sort of practice. Thousands of people driving separately to their destinations is a woefully inefficient activity in the grander scheme of things, only going to highlight some of the issues that the country has when it comes to dependence on oil. It would be good to get used to the idea of having to limit ourselves and what we use before we’re forced to in the future by high price by becoming a more efficient society. Don’t get me wrong, I like driving my Mini very much – it’s one of the reasons why I bought a car in the first place. But I while I enjoy driving, I get very little joy out of my morning commute. I would much rather be reading a book and not having to worry about the other drivers around me.
Leadership and Apollo 13
40 years ago yesterday, on April 13th, 1970, an onboard explosion crippled the Apollo 13 spacecraft’s service module, forcing the ground crew and astronauts to abandon their original mission of landing on the moon. The story is a well known one, second only to the Apollo 11 mission and still resonates for the actions that occurred over the next week as all involved worked to bring the crew home alive. The successful return of the crew underscored the importance of organization, leadership and innovation on the part of NASA, and remains one of the best examples of the traits to this day.
On April 11th, the Apollo 13 mission blasted off from Cape Canaveral, headed towards the Fra Mauro formation, which was rich in geological significance, with a number of hills and meteor craters. Shortly after liftoff, the mission experienced its first problem with a premature shutdown of one of the main engines, but with a longer burn from the four remaining engines, the spacecraft was able to make it to space and on its way. The far better known disaster that befell the crew occurred two days later when the crew stirred the oxygen and hydrogen tanks onboard the ship, causing a short in a wire, thus detonating the tank, causing damage to the Service Module. With depleted oxygen, the crew had to shut down their fuel cells to conserve electricity, and used their Lunar Module as a lifeboat to survive the trip home. Mission Control on Earth decided that the crew would be better off by using a free-return trajectory (allowing the Moon’s gravity to pull the ship around and back in the proper direction) in order to return. In addition to their problems with power and returning home, the crew was forced to improvise a device that would allow them to filter out the carbon dioxide from the ship’s atmosphere. Despite the challenges that faced them, the crew returned to Earth and landed safely.
The Apollo 13 mission has long been a triumph of NASA, not just because of its successes in returning a crippled spaceship to Earth, but because it represents one of the best examples of leadership and ingenuity on the part of a massive organization in order to accomplish an almost impossible task. Oftentimes, these sorts of examples are seen amongst military operations: the Apollo 13 mission is a rare, highly public example of this in the civilian world.
The steps taken on the part of leadership were clearly laid out. The crew and ground teams had to first determine what the problem was – initially, the crew feared that they had been hit by a micrometeorite, but determined the problem shortly thereafter. From that point, they determined the steps to stabilize the spaceship, and ruled out the main mission objective: landing on the moon, and then were forced to work out exactly how the crew would be returning home. What makes Apollo 13 a good example of leadership lies in the successes of bringing the crew back: the clear objective in this instance was to prevent the death of the crew, and highlights a sort of ‘Commander’s Intent’ directive where the leaders of Mission Control, namely Gene Kranz, the lead flight director. From his position, he directed the people underneath his command to come up with solutions to the numerous problems, acting as an intermediary, collecting information and making a decision based on what he knew at the time. The responsibilities of the people below him were with specific issues: determining the extent of the problem, then the solution to either fixing it, or minimizing its impact on the event. These items included the supply of oxygen and trying to figure out exactly how to conserve power because of a reduction in supply, how to scrub the CO2 out of the ship’s atmosphere, how to accomplish burns and ultimately, bring the crew home safely. The end result was the return of Jim Lovell, John Swigert and Fred Haise. They owe their lives to good organization and leadership on the part of NASA and the flight control teams.
In the end, the crew received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their actions, and the Fra Mauro highlands were visited in the next mission, Apollo 14, crewed by Alan Shepard (The United State’s first astronaut into space), Stuart Roosa and Edgar Mitchell.
The sequence of events and actions that were taken demonstrate leadership in moments where the consequences were most dire. However, the lessons that can be learned from the event, such as identifying problems and then identifying their solutions, delegating to other team members and trusting their findings and conclusions, while fitting all of these elements together into the framework of an overall mission are essential traits that can be applied to any number of practices outside of space travel, any place where there are numerous, organized people. While the consequences might not be dire in all instances, having proper leadership and organization is essential to achieving an eventual goal.
The Clash of the Titans
For Christmas last year, my girlfriend bought me a copy of Jason and the Argonauts, the 1963 Don Chaffey film that featured a number of technical innovations, the coolest of which was the skeleton fight scene. We both really enjoyed the film, including its fairly decent special effects, which I found to hold up quite well with the test of time. I’ve long been a fan of the various Greek and to a lesser extent, the Roman mythology. As such, I was really looking forward to the recent remake of Clash of the Titans.
This is not a movie that I had any major expectations of, and in that way, it completely met my expectations by being the film equivalent of a big, dumb Labrador. Very nice to look at, and quite a lot of fun, but really, really dumb. Clash of the Titans is a big, dumb movie. But quite a bit of fun to watch. The film had the requisite amount of action, some very nice lighting with a couple of the epic looking scenes that really scream ‘Epic’. Where the film really succeeded though was where the production design and overall look and feel of the film: it looks like a concept artist’s dream project. As the heroes set out from Argos to track down Medusa, they venture through forests to deserts to volcanoes, and there’s quite a bit of really good scenery and setting here. What impressed me more was the crossing of the river Styx and the ferryman Charon. There was a large amount of detail there, with little touches that really made that stand out for me. Other scenes, such as the background of Argos and the Underworld itself worked just as well. Along the same lines, the Djinn, Sand-Demons with magical powers, which brings the film far more into the realm of fantasy than over any sort of adaptation of myth, were particularly fun to watch – constructs of dark magic and wood.
The action also really was a lot of fun to watch, with any number of monsters, soldiers and people waving swords at one another and attempting to kill each other. The camera work was good, and I have to say that the battle against the giant scorpions was something that kept me at the edge of my seat. The film presents itself as a completely over the top thrill that really is one of the few reasons to actually watch: it doesn’t feel like it’s taking itself seriously, from beginning to end, which I appreciated.
Still, I couldn’t help but think that there were things that could have been done far better. The acting from some very good actors, such as Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson was abysmal throughout, and Sam Worthington continues his trend of fairly lack-luster performance from Avatar into the ancient times. The acting element was something that I wasn’t too annoyed with, but at points, the story itself could have been tightened up quite a bit more, particularly when it came to the relationship between Zeus and Hades, which has essentially been likened to a Christianity-themed relationship, with Zeus taking on the part of God, and Hades, Lucifer. I can’t really think of a good reason as to why this was done, but it’s certainly a major departure from the mythos of the characters. (However, I have to continue to remind myself that this move as a whole is a major departure). What bothers me the most though, is that this film could have gone both ways, either a serious retelling of the myth, or a complete pulp version. Clash of the Titans as a whole falls somewhere in between. It’s fun, but not as much fun as it could have been.
“When ships to sail the void between the stars have been invented, there will also be men who come forward to sail those ships.” -Johannes Kepler
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Over at Speculative Heresy, I think we get to the core of the issue in the debate between realism and anti-realism, as well as how philosophical debates should be conducted. Responding to Mikhail, Nick gives a succinct summary of Meillassoux’s argument, writing:
I think we may be talking past each other to some degree, but let me try to clarify what I’m saying.
To be clear, ‘absolute time’ is not referring to Newtonian time. Einstein empirically discredited that (and Kant and Leibniz, as you note, philosophically discredited it). Absolute time, as Meillassoux uses it, is just a short hand for a time outside of the correlationist time (again, I’ll take Kant and Husserl as being the archetypes of this view).
Now when I say that absolute time is a fundamental assumption of cosmology, evolution, etc., I mean that these sciences are speaking of a time before the very possibility of correlationist time. To deny that an absolute time outside of correlationist time exists, is to deny that these sciences are speaking about anything. They literally make no sense if we assume time (and really, existence) burst onto the scene with the emergence of thought. But to argue that absolute time exists is only to accept a very minimal definition of it – that correlationism emerged within something larger. What that something is, is undetermined so far and a problem for future work. But that it is, seems indisputable to me. (And I believe Hawking’s quote says no more and no less than that, as well.) But maybe this is another manifestation of our differend, since I take these empirical sciences to clearly show the existence of an absolute time, whereas you are more focused on the philosophical conundrums?
The problem for correlationism then, as Levi succinctly points out in his post, is that correlationism sees the mind as condition for Nature, whereas the existence of absolute time shows Nature to be the condition for mind. (Although I’d need to read Kant’s later work to see how the Opus Postumum fits into this schema. I do have Forster’s book, on your recommendation, which I should really crack open.)
As for Hawking’s quote, I think he’d need to respond to the idea of structural realism. No one is denying that theories are used to give us knowledge about reality. What the instrumentalist says is that these theories are only pragmatic and have no truth-value, whereas the structural realist will say that this is incapable of explaining the predictive success of science.
To this, Mikhail responds, remarking that:
Nick, I think I understand your position but the problem with Meillassoux’s argument succinctly is this: while it looks as though he is critiquing correlationism from “inside” by showing how it cannot account for something like arche-fossil, he in fact is critiquing correlationism from outside perspective by imposing the meaning of time on correlationism that it would not accept. As I tried to show, his refutation of correlationism rests on the assumption that correlationism does not share, i.e. that time is something that is a property of mind-independent world.
Before proceeding to parse Mikhail’s actual argument, such as it is, let’s pause to note something. Mikhail criticizes Meillassoux for critiquing correlationism from the outside. I may be mistaken in my understanding of what Mikhail is suggesting here, but I think this is a revealing moment in his understanding of philosophical methodology and what it means to critique another position. If I am reading Mikhail faithfully, for him the only legitimate critique of a philosophical position would be an immanent critique. From the standpoint of immanent critique, you work within the constraints of whatever philosophical system you happen to be working with, bringing nothing external to bear on the position. A famous example of immanent critique would be nearly any movement in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. When Hegel critiques, for example, sense-certainty in the opening of the Phenomenology, he doesn’t bring anything from outside the claims of sense-certainty to show that this position is inadequate, but rather shows how the very claims of sense-certainty itself fail to say what it purports to say, thereby generating an internal contradiction with itself. Very different examples and procedures of immanent critique can be found in the works of Derrida or in the works of hermeneuticians such as Gadamer. In all of these cases the procedure is to restrict oneself to the text and the claims of the text in analyzing the text. All of us trained in the tradition of Continental philosophy more or less were trained in this tradition of critique and hermeneutics. In far less sophisticated terms than those of Hegel, Derrida, or Gadamer, this would be the standard pedagogical practice where the professor forbids the student from rejecting the claims of Aristotle’s Physics by bringing the discoveries of contemporary physics to bear. Here the reasonable pedagogical aim is for the student to understand Aristotle in his own terms, to attend to Aristotle’s own arguments, and to develop “close reading” skills (as Adrian Peperzak always used to say to us) rather than dismissing texts from the history of philosophy outright. From this pedagogical perspective, the only legitimate critique of a philosopher’s position in a student essay would be the demonstration of an internal contradiction in that position or the failure to take account of something crucial or fundamental with respect to our experience.
While I believe this pedagogical approach is laudable in its aim of cultivating close reading skills, developing an attentiveness to text, and promoting a respect for the history of philosophy, I also think that in textually oriented philosophy programs has had the negative and unintended side effect of developing philosophy students that see this mode of textual approach as the way that philosophy as such should be conducted. That is, rather than a question of determining the truth with respect to these questions, philosophy almost entirely becomes an engagement with texts from the history of philosophy and often texts from a highly specific canon. I also think it is worthwhile to ask why this approach to philosophy has largely been embraced by private liberal arts religious schools, rather than state schools (there are, of course, notable exceptions such as Suny Stonebrook, Memphis, and Penn State). The question here, however, would be that of why Continental philosophy, with its text based approach, has found such a welcome home in private religious schools. I don’t have the answer to this question but I do have some suspicions.
read on!
Now, Mikhail contends that Meillassoux is guilty of bringing something external to bear on Kant’s position. As Mikhail puts it, “as I tried to show, his refutation of correlationism rests on the assumption that correlationism does not share, i.e. that time is something that is a property of mind-independent world.” At the outset, I find this claim to be curious. No one is debating whether or not time, for Kant is a “property of mind-independent world.” Everyone who has ever read Kant is agreed that time is not a property of mind-independent world. The question is whether or not Kant’s thesis is true. This is properly where philosophical discussion emerges. While certainly the hermeneutically informed philosopher is reasonable in claiming that we must first have an understanding of a text or philosophical position before we can critique that position, understanding texts is not the final word where texts are concerned. Were this not the case, Kant would be guilty of bringing “external considerations to bear” in his criticisms of Hume.
Mikhail goes on to write:
Now I think you are buying Meillassoux’s argument about “time before time” too easily. There’s no two types of time – “absolute time” and “time of correlation” – it is either one or the other, that’s the point. If you think time is something that is characteristic of things-in-themselves and human subjects only recognize this time and learn to measure it, then there’s no “correlationist time” – if you think that time is a relation that the mind establishes (to put it simply) between objects or events (this comes before that etc etc) the same way space is a relation, then there is no other kind of time, period. I don’t think it disproves anything about cosmology or geology, as Alexei mentioned already, that time can very well be understood in terms of “correlationist time” – Now the question whether time existed before human givenness, as Meillassoux puts it, only makes sense if you already rejected “correlationist time” – that is before you are even making your argument against correlationism, you’ve already discarded its major premise. That’s all I was trying to show.
A couple of points are worth noting here. First, I am unclear as to why Mikhail is convinced that there cannot be two types of time or why it has to be one or the other. It seems to me, at least, that it is completely possible for there to be time experienced by humans as described by phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger, and time as it belongs to the natural world. Certainly the sun did not cease appearing to rise and set once Copernicus discovered, in fact, that the earth revolves the sun and certainly there is no reason to suppose that time will cease to appear as it does to humans should there also be a natural time that is a property of things-in-themselves. The two positions are not inherently mutually exclusive.
Now, Mikhail claims that Meillassoux’s argument only makes sense if we’ve already rejected “correlationist time”, but it seems to me that this is a distortion of Meillassoux’s actual argument. Meillassoux’s line of argument can be summed up by quoting a single passage from After Finitude. Meillassoux writes, “…why is this [correlationist] interpretation of ancestrality obviously insupportable? Well, to understand why, all we have to do is ask the correlationist the following question: what is it that happened 4.56 billion years ago? Did the accretion of the earth happen, yes or no?” (16). For those interested in a thorough discussion of Meillassoux’s argument and his response to counter-arguments, you can refer to my posts here, here, here, and here.
So what is it, Mikhail? Did the world accrete 4.56 billion years ago or not? If one answers “yes”, then you have one of two options. You can show how, within the framework of correlationism, this knowledge is possible. I have not yet seen such an account. The realist argues, contra the correlationist, that the correlationist cannot account for knowledge claims such as this. The reason is very simple. As Kant himself claims, time is not a mind-independent property of things-in-themselves. We’re all agreed that this is what Kant claims. If you disagree, I invite you to simply consult what Kant says in the Critique of Pure Reason A35-36/B52. The whole problem is that knowledge claims about the accretion of the earth 4.56 billion years necessarily pertain to things-in-themselves because they are claims about the world prior to the advent of consciousness. From the correlationist perspective, these claims should therefore be meaningless. Yet they are not meaningless.. This entails that the other possibility is for the correlationist to renounce correlationism, go back to the drawing board, and adopt a realist position. Consequently, if you answer yes, you have one of two options: either give a correlationist account of these knowledge claims or renounce correlationism and adopt realism. Perhaps Meillassoux is bringing something “external to correlationism” to bear (namely the arche-fossil, which, note, is not the same as the fossil… read the first post linked to above), but in doing this Meillassoux is not doing anything philosophically illegitimate, but is merely evoking a readily recognized element of our knowledge– that the earth accreted 4.56 billion years ago –and asking how the correlationist can handle this bit of knowledge within their framework. His claim is that they cannot, but he could be mistaken.
The other option is for the correlationist to bite the bullet and simply affirm that knowledge claims about a world prior to the existence of life and humans are meaningless and are not knowledge at all. This, for example, seems to be the route that Husserl took. As Husserl consistently argued, following the letter of the correlationist logic, Nature cannot be a condition for Consciousness because Consciousness is the condition for Nature. Consequently, from the Husserlian standpoint, any talk of a world prior to humans or consciousness (Husserl would argue that consciousness cannot be equated with humans, taking the thesis even further to its logical conclusion) cannot but be nonsense on stilts. If one takes this route, we have a genuine “differend” in Lyotard’s sense of the term, where we have a dispute between two opposed positions that can, under no circumstances, be brought into accord with one another.
At any rate, these are the options. It is not that Meillassoux is assuming from the outset what he sets out to prove. Rather, he very straightforwardly presents his argument and why he believes arche-fossils are at odds with correlationist thought. The ball is in the correlationist court from there. One further point. Alexei jumps in and writes:
Just a couple of things, which may be totally insignificant.
RE “the time of science.” As Far as I know ‘time’ isn’t an ontological entity for the sciences either (I tried to make this point above, but clearly didn’t succeed). Time = metric/mathematical dimension in virtue of which rates of change/movement can be calculated. Although theoretically ‘primitive’ (i.e. unanalysable), it’s not an object, or structure. Time isn’t a property of anything — nor is space for that matter (See the notions of block time and Spacetime for instance — more here). I take it that this is Mikhail’s point, really. If you don’t have theoretical objects that can undergo certain kinds of transformations, you don’t have time (hence why the big bang has come up again). So honestly, much of this argument seems to be based on a distortion of how the sciences actually handle time. It’s never treated as a property, but as a dimension (which means, it’s not something objects have). Ultimately, what’s important is that time and space are a priori — independent of experience, necessary, and non-conceptual — so they are by definition independent of facticity.
Less philosophically put, the Math comes before the observation, and actually determines what it is we’re looking for, what can be observed, and what follows form it. why isn’t that enough? I mean, this is actually one of those moments where we should actually look at what scientific researchers do with time, rather than speculating about what time is independent of us humans.
While I am all for looking at how scientists actually talk about the world and what scientists actually do, I think Alexei here conflates the metrics we use to measure the world with what is measured. As I argued in my previous post, these metrics are arbitrary, but it does not follow from that that what we measure is itself a human construction. Based on my own forays into physics– and I could be mistaken here –my impression is that physicists have sided with Lucretius on this issue. That is, the position of physicists is that time and space are products of entities and therefore properties of entities, rather than the thesis that time and space are containers of entities. | <urn:uuid:06a8470e-d945-4dd6-bd92-afad86cd3e58> | https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/the-question-of-time-and-meillassoux/ | en | 0.953273 | 0.050004 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
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Silent cinema was never truly silent as performances were more often than not accompanied by live music and the noise of enthusiastic audiences. Yet silent cinema is regarded as a specific era in the history of the medium, and often as a separate art form in its own right. New York Times-bestselling author Brian J. Robb's lively resource traces how, from the origins of cinema onwards to the coming of sound in 1929 with The Jazz Singer, many of the ground rules of cinema were laid and filmmaking techniques developed, including editing and special effects, styles of acting, and filming on location. Studying the earliest origins of cinema, including the stars, comedians, and directors who became popular from the late-Victorian era to the end of the 1920s, including D. W. Griffiths, Cecil B. DeMille, and Sergi Eisenstein, this book also includes a look at the Hollywood scandals of the time. The accompanying DVD includes lengthy excerpts from films such as The Perils of Pauline, Phantom of the Opera, Salomé, and Son of the Sheik.
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This is dedicated to the friends of the guy or gal...
There is no sex in this story.
I edited it myself, so blame me.
When I walked into the bar, Hank, Phil and Wes waved at me a little less enthusiastically then the first time I had walked in an hour or so ago. A waitress gathered Reggie's mug and plate of wings. They were laughing at something or another, probably one of Reg's stories.
"Hey guys." I said with a wave, setting my gift bag down next to the seat Reg just left. I'd actually arrived a while back, the guys having invited me for some brews and the baseball game, but when I entered and saw Reg there, I left, hence their diffidence.
"Why did you leave? You missed the first half of the game." Hank groused at me. He couldn't imagine a better time then sitting with his buds watching a game. He never actually went to the stadium. He found it less informative and fun then television. Just being able to Tivo it and hit the bathroom was worth it to him.
"I'm sorry. Reg was here." I explained...again.
"Jeez, Jim. What is it with you and Reg. I still can't believe you walked out of my own daughter's confirmation barbecue because Reg was there." Phil threw at me.
"We left the potato salad." I apologized again.
"That's not the point! I would think you were a big enough person to suck up Reg's presence out of respect and friendship." Phil said.
"And I would think that out of respect and friendship, you'd respect the fact that I think he's a slimy cocksucker and I won't go anyplace he is." I retorted. "Look, this is the third time you've invited me out with you guys and this is three times I've found that guy here. I'm getting a little pissed off. First your barbecue, then Wes' fishing trip and now this."
"Jim, chill. No reason to get upset. Heck, we told Reg and he thinks it's funny. So we were pulling a little joke. It's no big deal." Hank reasoned.
I shrugged. "Okay. It's no big deal. Are you finished pulling this little joke?"
"What bug crawled up your ass about Reg anyway? That he gets more pussy then you do?" Wes asked.
"He's always been a skirt chaser, and I didn't mind that in the old days," I said to him, "but when he started going after married chicks and girlfriends, I decided he's a fucking sleaze."
"As he says, 'all the pretty ones are taken these days'" Hank snorted. The other two smiled while my face twisted in disgust.
"Yeah," Phil said, folding his hands on his ample stomach, "if it wasn't for him telling me his stories, I'd have no sex life at all."
"And he never did anything to you!" Wes retorted. "We aren't pussy police." They cracked up at that term and I have to admit that I smiled a bit.
"Yeah, but you're enabling him." I said after the levity died down. "He gets to come in here and be the big shot. You laugh at his stories. You ask him details. Tell me, Phil. Do you tell Wendy any of the stories that Reg shares?"
"Hell no." His expression indicated to me that I was treading into dangerous territory. Well, they had seriously pissed me off with these invitations to Dickheadland.
He looked even more uncomfortable. "She wouldn't like us socializing with him." he admitted. I had to give him points for his honesty.
"Because he's a cheater and a liar. And she wouldn't want you to be around someone who thinks it's okay and might encourage you to do the same. I think you're stupid, by the way. If she doesn't know what kind of character he is, what happens if he makes a run at Wendy?"
He snorted and looked askance at me. "Wendy? I love my wife but there's no way in hell he'd be interested in her." I liked Wendy too, but pregnancy had not been kind to her figure, even if she was one of the best people I knew. Not that Phil hadn't kept up with her once he left the Navy. "Besides, he's our bud." he continued.
"Well, let's hope his standards don't fall, then and he keeps liking you." I said sardonically.
"Shh shh! You're missing the game." Hank said. "I don't know why you got such a bug up your ass anyway. It's not like he's done anything to you. He says if the wives were happy, he wouldn't have a chance anyway. It's not his fault they are in shitty marriages."
"Assuming he's telling you the truth. But even so, it doesn't help a weak marriage with him sawing in and out of the wife now, does it? My brother's wife stepped out on him and after seeing what that did to him, I can't stand that fucker."
"Was it Reg?" Phil said, leaning forward sympathetically. The other two looked at me too. It seems they had some standards after all. They were just getting off on living vicariously through Reggie's conquests.
I sighed inside. They just didn't get it. "No, it wasn't Reg. But it could have been. It was a Reg and no doubt he has his own set of buddies smirking and laughing at his stories of how he put the horns on David. Making him feel that he isn't doing anything wrong."
Hank leaned forward. "We get what you're saying. And yeah, he's an asshole. But he's our asshole. He's been loyal and fun."
"And he's fucking over other people's marriages."
"That isn't our fault."
"Do you tell any of them? Did you warn any of the husbands or suggest to the wives that they might be fucking things up?" I pressed.
"He's our friend. What do you want us to do, rat out our friend to someone we barely know?" This was a serious man code violation and we all knew it. But I was married and since I wasn't a pimp, 'bros before 'hos' didn't work for me.
"You mean like Harvey Baker?" Harvey had been in one of the following classes in high school. Since we stayed in our hometown, you got to know pretty much everyone. He was a distant figure, but we all recognized the name.
"Harvey?" Wes asked.
"Yeah. Reg was fucking his wife and they just got a divorce." They looked even more uncomfortable with this revelation.
"We didn't know it was Harvey's wife. But we barely know him." Wes rallied.
"So that's an excuse? If you don't know them, that's okay to let him come in and betray their trust. Reg knew them. He knew them both. I would think that if he was doing it to you, you'd want to know." There were some tepid sounds of agreement.
I could see that the 'man code' was trumping everything with them, so I decided it was time for my props. I picked up my gift bag and put it on the table. "To give you a tiny sense of betrayal that Reg causes...okay, helps to cause since it takes two to tango, I decided to visit your houses when you weren't there and have a little chat with your wives." There were shouts of outrage from them "Calm down. I wasn't trying to screw your wives. Essentially I tried to 'sweet talk' them into letting me 'borrow' one of your most cherished possessions. It wasn't hard."
Hank glared at me. "That's way fucked up, Jim. Reg doesn't play games like that."
"You mean like him going on our outings knowing it will piss me off? Think of it as a joke." Hypocrite I handed a gift wrapped shirt to Hank, a jewelry box to Phil and small gift box to Wes.
Hank immediately started to tear the wrapping off the shirt. "You FUCKER! This is my signed Derek Jeeter Jersey! And you took it out of the frame!" He looked like he was about to pound me.
Phil, suddenly nervous, opened up his. "This is my Annapolis graduation ring. Jeesh. That's in the drawers in my bedroom!"
"She showed me where it was herself after I told her what kind of a scumbag you were hanging around. I don't think you'll be inviting Reg to many more barbecues. Or baseball games at the house." I said, looking meaningfully at Phil and Hank.
"We might be losing a friend, but it might not be Reg." Hank said ominously.
I shrugged helplessly. I knew that was a danger going into this.
"And what did you get from me?" Wes asked, frowning at me.
"I was trying for you fishing lures." He always was crowing if he caught one fish more then the rest of us and he never let us borrow one of his lures.
A look of anger crossed his face. He picked up and shook the box. It was silent. Then he opened it, looked inside and held up his middle finger at me and smirked. Then he held it upside down to show the others that it was empty. "I guess you couldn't talk her into betraying me, asswipe."
I scratched my cheek abashedly. "I actually started at your house since you pissed me off with that ruined weekend fishing trip. I never got the chance to talk to her. When I stopped by...well, you know I never go where Reg is. Enjoy the game guys." I put a twenty on the table for the drinks and left.
This may not be a complete story, but it is all I'm writing.
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I just reread this story. I was going to vote. But, it still shows that I had voted. I was disappointed that I had only given it three stars. I have no clue what I was thinking. To anyone who reads THISmore...
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Greg Jennings and Donald Driver: The Most Underrated Wide Receiver Duo
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Greg Jennings and Donald Driver: The Most Underrated Wide Receiver Duo
Matt Sullivan/Getty Images
The NFL.
It's a rather odd place.
Some players get respect, some get trashed, and head coaches continue to grow bigger and fatter as each regular season progresses. One remaining fact that seems to have stood the test of time though, is the word "underrated".
We've seen it come and go in the past, Braylon Edwards was once one of the most underrated wide receivers in his time with the Cleveland Browns, and former and soon to be Hall of Fame quarterback Kurt Warner was questioned and scrutinized when he first joined the NFL, fresh off a grocery store floor.
In more present times though, it isn't one single player that has had to bare the label of "underrated", it's two men that have become veterans of not only the wide receiver position, but the NFL in general.
Their names are Donald Driver and Greg Jennings, or as you Packer fans may know them as "Our godsend".
Stats are a mere highlight of the two men's careers, but the reliability on and off the field has been the glue of the Packers organization, that has ultimately proved to be the difference between winning and losing in recent years.
Whether it's the Week 1 highlight catch to win the game against the Bears, or Donald Driver's game saving touchdown against the New York Giants in the 2007, Donald Driver and Greg Jennings simply don't get the credit they deserve.
So why is it that Green Bay's two leading men continually slip under the radar year after year, week after week? Well it's simple, and there are two clear and concise reasons to explain this matter.
The first being, that the two wide receivers are from Green Bay. Arguably the greatest football town on god's green earth, the harsh reality is that the Packers aren't a very "media" type team. They don't grab the headlines, and they don't get top news stories on Sportscenter. However that doesn't take away from what a great organization the Green Bay Packers truly have.
The second reason is just as simple as the first, Donald Driver and Greg Jennings will never even come close to being in the same category as Larry Fitzgerald and Andre Johnson. Yes, they may have the exact same talent and exact same stats, but do they really have the same status symbol as other team leaders?
No, not at all.
Unfortunately, the term "underrated" has been ever present in the Packers history. Except for of course Brett Favre and other infamous names, quarterbacks such as Bart Starr are often overlooked in many Top 10 lists, and Aaron Rodgers still is trying to require the respect from many NFL fans that claim he doesn't have what it takes to be a top caliber quarterback.
Donald Driver and Greg Jennings may not be as tight a duo as Siegfried and Roy, but they sure to produce some magic on the field.
Touchdowns often rain when the two are at their best, and when one is missing their presence is missed.
Underrated, so what?
These two strive off of it.
Any team that discounts them are in for a rude awakening, as Driver and Jennings are play makers, and are the best at what they do. Judge them, criticise them, and overlook them as much as you want.
It will never change the fact that the Packers have one of the best wide receiver duo's in the NFL.
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Volcano Corporation Message Board
• juryman07 juryman07 Mar 25, 2010 7:36 AM Flag
I take it that Well Fargo is buying a lot
of VOLV stock. Instead of loaning money to small businesses and homeowners, they are speculating with public money that the FED has loaned them for their bad mortgages collateral. This is why the market is going up. And why we will see an even bigger bubble before it;s over. The FED and Obama's Geithner and Summers have learned nothing from the 200402006 housing bubble.
If the stock had sme earnings, I might buy some. This is an all-time high. They usually run.
17.980.00(0.00%)Feb 13 3:59 PMEST | <urn:uuid:dce90a7a-8475-49ef-8250-71254eae15f4> | http://finance.yahoo.com/mbview/threadview/?bypass=true&bn=21353d3d-417e-349d-81e3-41ef047696ae&tid=1269516976000-51b5805d-a048-39de-b744-095f3d62c6a9&tls=la%2Cd%2C49 | en | 0.962435 | 0.024177 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
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Using a shell & tube heat exchanger as a steam generator.
Would it be safe and make sense to use an appropriately rated shell and tube heatexchanger to make steam?
The application would be as follows. The HX is designed for low pressure steam (less than 150 psi) on the shell side and used for heating the fluid in the tubes. I am thinking of running it in "reverse".
Using a concentrating solar collector to heat up a suitable heat transfer fluid, pump the HT fluid thru the tubes of the Hx and supply water to the condensate output of the shell. The generated steam would need to go thru a moisture seperature to create dry steam, and then the steam would be used to drive a small steam engine to generate electricity.
Obviously overpressure safety reliefs would be required. Yes, this is an off grid application. Intended steam pressure would be around 80-90 psi. The thought is to run the heat transfer fluid thru a phase changing salt to store heat during the day and to use the stored heat plus solar collected heat to run the boiler when there is enough energy to run the steam engine for several hours.
HX would be something like a Bell & Gossett SU85-2 or similar.
Some additional thoughts are mounting the HX vertically or tilting it up at a steep angle to maintain half of the tubes under water to maximize steam generation and modifying the shell to add an external sightglass.
Assuming the math pencils out, would there be any major issues besides the steam being generated would be wet.
• [Deleted User][Deleted User] Member Posts: 395
Wouldn't it be more efficient to use photovoltaic cells to make electricity?
Al Corelli, NY
edited February 2012
dupe post
Al Corelli, NY
heat exchanger.
Why not use a plate and frame. Low mass fast heat up. much better heat exchange. But I could be all wet.
edited February 2012
It is like using a
12 volt generator to power your car down the road by way of a v belt to the main engine pully and a trunk full of batteries. The shell is designed for steam to go in and condense. There is no room for it to expand. I am not saying that electricity could not be made this way, just that it would be unsafe and inefficient. I love steam but there needs to be more thought given here to the 1700 times expansion rate.
Cost is what you spend , value is what you get.
cell # 413-841-6726
• Mark EathertonMark Eatherton Member Posts: 5,317 ✭✭✭✭
The typical PV panel is around 10% efficient BEFORE inverter losses.
A typical solar thermal collector can be between 60 and 70% efficient. So, even if your system losses accounted for roughly half the collected energy being lost, you;d still be able to produce 3 times as much energy as the typical PV system.
I'm not sure that it is possible to raise the pressure required to drive a turbine with a generator on it, but thermal solar is significantly more efficient than PV, which confuses me, because our gubernmint is spending so much money on a relatively inefficient technology...
Guess I shouldn't be too surprised tho...
• [Deleted User][Deleted User] Member Posts: 331
First reply.
Thanks for the responses.
From my understanding of boilers, the two basic forms of tubed boiler design are fire on the outside of tubes full of water to make steam inside the tubes, or running heat thru tubes to boil the pot of water. The first method confines the steam to pipes, which are easier to make strong enough to hold the force of expanding steam. Problem with the second method is that the boiler needs to be able to hold all of the force generated by the expanding steam.
In a previous life I used to operate Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) nuclear power plants for the US Navy. Our boilers or Steam Generators are vertical shell and tube heat exchangers that used a inverted U shaped tube bundle. The hot water that circulated thru the core of the nuclear reactor was pumped thru the tubes. Secondary or steam plant water was pumped into the shell side, circulated around the tube bundles, where it boiled off into steam, went thru a moisture separator to dry out the steam and then it went off to the turbines.
My thought is to do the same basic idea. Mount the HX vertical and pump 400 - 500 F working fluid thru the tubes, while maintaining a water level about half way up the tube bundle. That might give enough of a steam chest to minimize the amount of water carry over coming out of the steam exit.
Safety issues include maintaining a correct water level while steaming, over and under pressure safeties, etc. Materials would have to be compatable for all working fluids.
One thought that just occurred to me was to swap a longer but same diameter shell with a shorter tube bundle to increase the steam chest volume.
The logic behind using an existing heat exchanger is that the engineering and construction is already done. If the shell side is rated for MAWP of 150 psi, then we should have enough of a safety margin for system that would use 100 psi steam. I am assuming the max pressure inside the tubes would be less than 60 psi.
My limited understanding of thermodynamics is that heat travels from hot to cold so the amount of heat flow is primarily controlled by delta T between the heat transfer fluid and the saturated steam, transfer area, and conductivity of the material. Assuming there is not a condition of excessive buildup of steam clinging to the surfaces of the tubing due to excessive nucleate boiling.
Does my reasoning have any significant flaws?
Thanks Mark
Thank You
Al Corelli, NY
Anybody else have any comments?
Does anybody else have any other input? Am I pursuing a very expensive scrap metal sculpture?
• icesailoricesailor Member Posts: 7,265 ✭✭✭✭
Low Vs. High pressure:
It's my vague understanding that 15# steam pressure is considered "Low Pressure Steam. Anything over that is considered "High Pressure Steam."
It seems to me that what you are trying to do with your reverse heat exchanger is a potential bomb, waiting for the right conditions to prove that water has a very high expansion rate if and when the pressure drops. Sort of like the steam in those boilers that feed the propulsion and generating systems that you worked on while in the Navy.
Theoretically, it may make sense. On paper, less so. But in real world application, I would worry about what might happen if the pressure went below the boiling point.
I saw something here the other day that gave me pause to contemplate. "If you drive up to a steam power plant, and you see a stream of people running away from the building, follow them."
I would.
Safety concerns.
I agree with you 100% about the safety concerns. That is why I suggested using an appropriately rated heat exchanger to start with. I also mentioned the need for safety valves for both overpressure and underpressure situations. Safely maintaining correct water levels is a major hurdle to solve too.
I am thinking this method is a heck of a lot safer then their original plan of using a non rated tank and just using a copper coil to pump heat transfer fluid thru it. I understand their desire to create a functional steam boiler to drive a steam engine and I am trying to visualize a safe manner to do so.
As far as the 1700 times volume liquid to gas expansion concern, that is why I am thinking of using an oversized shell to hold the tube bundle to provide room for expansion along with room for the steam to dry out.
• [Deleted User][Deleted User] Member Posts: 244
This brings back memories
From 2000 - 2005 I was in charge of a facilities plant that used High temp hot water to create steam. There is a lot of math and engineering in the design of these systems.
High temp hot water was delivered to my building at 375'F and 270psi. 18inch welded pumps delivered the HTHW. not sure of the flow rate.
The Steam generator was in fact a shell and tube exchanger. I had 5 of these beasts to maintain.
As someone else here mentioned safeties safeties safeties. The rate of expansion is controlled by the flow of hot water into the steam generator. Double safety blow off's piped high above the boiler room were ther to insure the rate of expansion was kept safely. These steam generators had a 8 inch steel steam exhaust to the manifold. I was asked to maintain 21 psi steam pressure.
As for a home brew unit, I would have to say "DONT TRY THIS AT HOME" To much could go wrong in your design and equipment.
Once during a safety check one of the high pressure safeties blew off. I looked around and of the 4-6 guys in the boiler room before, I was the only one left taking the boiler out of automatic and bringing it back down. nearly had to change my pants.
Good luck and let me take out th insurance on you and your family if you do decide to nest one of these in your basement
How did they control water level in the steam generators?
How did they control the water level in the steam generators?
This is definitely not happening in my house. I am just trying to determine a safer way to generate 90 psi steam than welding heating coils into an existing tank. I am thinking the quantity of steam they will be needing is no more than one BHP (Boiler Horse Power) or 34.5 lbs of steam at 212 F.
Larry C
This discussion has been closed.
| <urn:uuid:4252fc9d-86ed-4de0-9651-0930c8b22b8d> | http://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/140537/Using-a-shell-tube-heat-exchanger-as-a-steam-generator | en | 0.952406 | 0.211456 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
November 21, 2012
Israel Remains Careless In Gaza's Fourth-Generation Warfare
Israel's fresh bombardment of Gaza and its political aftershocks have reinforced a maddening status quo: Hamas's armed resistance cannot reverse Israel's statehood, IDF operations cannot physically destroy Hamas's resistance, and involved foreign powers lack a concrete plan to advance an equitable two-state solution.
Hamas and those Palestinian leaders that fail to offer an alternative deserve their share of responsibility for bringing Gaza to boil. Fatah's inability to move a peaceful solution forward, albeit within a biased system of international mediation, has given Hamas ample room to grow and kept Israel's leadership focused on military action. However the blunt reality of asymmetric warfare does not place the burden of responsibility on non-state actors, but on the state actors theoretically beholden to international standards. Non-state actors attract popular support by offering modest improvements over a tyrannical, corrupt government. For this reason (and others, of course), Hamas's behavior is partially or fully accepted by Palestinians and Muslims who view Israel's behavior as incomparably monstrous.
Advanced states can make fourth-generation warfare (4GW) look flawless and futile at the same time.
4GW is named for its placement after 3GW, a phase that technologically evolved the tactical and strategic concepts developed in the 20th century. A major difference between 3GW and 4GW stems from the balance of power; while 3GW conflicts generally occur between states, 4GW develops between state and non-state actors. Firepower becomes less important in this type of warfare as the conflict blurs deeper into the local civilian population, placing a premium on the non-military factors - political, economic and social - that govern a territory. This strategy addresses the need to protect an area's natural and human resources instead of destroying them, along with the tasks of cooperating with international organizations and keeping battlefield blunders out of the international news cycle.
Although amplified by technology, 4GW is designed to confound superior militaries and their technological advantages. Accordingly, retired Marine Colonel Thomas X. Hammes advises America's leadership against believing that technology can overcome non-military sources of conflict and their political manifestations. Having monitored Washington's delusional expeditions in Afghanistan, Iraq and the "War on Terror," Hammes holds this error above all others in asymmetric warfare.
"We continue to focus on technological solutions at the tactical and operational levels without a serious discussion of the strategic imperatives of the nature of the war we are fighting," he writes in The Sling and The Stone, an authoritative study of 4GW.
Israeli leadership and the soldiers under their command are similarly geared towards urban warfare rather than the totality of 4GW. Israel's objectives remain military-oriented: eliminate a key Hamas strategist, destroy his long-range weapons, stop Gazan rockets from falling on southern Israel, and ultimately impose a ceasefire that demands the elimination of Egypt's smuggling tunnels into Gaza. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's political objective is domestic in nature, or else aimed at the Palestinians' upcoming recognition bid at the United Nations. Settling the conflict's non-military grievances has been noticeably absent from Netanyahu's agenda throughout his four-year term.
Israel certainly enjoys an abundance of political power and media influence, strong-arming Western governments with ease by dangling a ground invasion beneath a massive air raid. Netanyahu has reportedly told President Barack Obama that he will only launch a ground operation if Hamas continues firing rockets into Israel. Naturally Gaza's bombardment becomes more palatable in the face of a bloodier alternative, a comparison that helps maintain the West's green light for as long as possible. Furthermore, Netanyahu is attempting to portray himself as a tough but wise statesman (think Iran) ahead of January 22nd's election.
"Before deciding on a ground invasion, the prime minister intends to exhaust the diplomatic move in order to see if a long-term ceasefire can be achieved," a senior Israeli official said after Monday night's cabinet meeting.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has now arrived in the region to broker a truce "in the days ahead," allowing Israel to continue bombing every last target and giving Hamas little incentive to comply. Except this Western reservoir of diplomatic power cannot fully overcome the power attributed to world opinion, and steamrolling over all objections to the disproportionate force being applied in Gaza generates more enemies - civilian and militant alike - than Israel can eliminate.
Israel's government has grown dangerously accustomed to winning Gaza's tactical battles and losing the conflict's wider political narrative. Its military and intelligence agencies, among the world's elite, skillfully locate arms caches, intercept rockets and track Hamas officials with a Skynet-like grid of technology. Over 1,350 air strikes were counted by Monday, a growing number of them launched from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Many of Hamas's Fajr-5 rockets, considered a "tie-breaker," were wiped out in the moments after Ahmed Jabari's assassination. The Israeli military just Tweeted that it "surgically targeted a Hamas intelligence operations centre" on the seventh floor of a media building.
Meanwhile Carmela Avner, Israel's chief information officer, boasts that Israel can fight a war on three technological fronts: "The first is physical, the second is on the world of social networks and the third is cyber."
All of these capabilities, as Hammes warns, gives Israel's leadership a false sense of control over Gaza's military and non-military battlefields. There will always be more rockets to intercept from the political status quo. New Hamas leaders will inevitably replace the fallen and Israel's own websites are being hacked by supporters of the Palestinians. Worse still, the false sense of security inspired by the Iron Dome emboldens Israel to strike with minimal consequence, producing more hostilities instead of reducing them. "Precision" air strikes, far from precise, contribute to the eventual stalemate imposed by the international community's frantic jockeying to savage credibility with their own populations.
Israel is a master of war - disproportionate warfare. Over 150 Palestinians have been killed (at least 50 of them civilians) and over 840 wounded, including 225 children, since Operation Pillar of Defense began on November 14th. Israelis have suffered five fatalities and an estimated 250 injuries from Gaza's rockets, underscoring the conflict's fundamentally disproportionate nature. The faces of dead Palestinian children will outweigh anything Israel has to say to the world at large, and the government is losing minds and hearts at an unsustainable pace. Contrary to resolving any sources of conflict, disproportionate force and the resulting spectacle functions as a main driver of 4GW.
Israel's government argues that Hamas's stockpile has essentially been reset, but the same breathing room failed to yield any progress towards a two-state solution following Gaza's last war. Netanyahu will emerge wrapped in victorious rhetoric, ignoring 4GW and dooming the cycle to repeat again.
And if his government doesn't care what the world thinks, why should the world treat Israel with special care?
1 comment:
1. Israel should be tried by the international court for disregards to human life (mostly children and women killed by Israel air strikes, all suoolied by the US). I'm not a Muslim or terrorist as CNN, NBC< FOX and other major US main stream media (controlled by the CIA)would say. Israel will not stop their evil way since they CONTROL the US government beyond anyone's imagination in areas like politics where congress and senators are either bought out or they are Jews disguise in American name. I pray for Hamas and all the other little militarize middle east nation that these Illuminati western countries try to consistently systematically try to destroy, but you know what? They oppression only makes the come together with the rest of the world's support across the globe, then we would see if the US can fight the whole world. If i was from the middle east and see how my country is been turn apart by the real TERRORIST (like US, UK, US controlled NATO and UN), there is no way I'm going to sit back and watch, but instead, i will do anything ask of me because my life as been given up to help the ppl even if it means death. That's why the west will never win the so called war on terrorist because those Muslims who are ready to die knows they might get killed anyways since all Muslims from the middle east seems to be considered terrorist.
the media is the biggest weapon of mass destruction the US have. As they say "cut of the head of a snake and the body dies". Mainstream media CEO are the problems, there taking down the big media station forces the ppl to search for their news which will eventuall change how the see their government lies and EVIL ways.
God bless us all, we all need his blessing against these evil empire(s). | <urn:uuid:29ac2b0a-1fd9-48c5-a3d1-8fc3dee0f031> | http://hadalzone.blogspot.com/2012/11/israel-remains-careless-in-gazas-fourth.html | en | 0.951326 | 0.249024 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
How long does an iPhone 4 battery last?
I'm taking a road trip, and I was trying to figure out how long my batter will last. I've never really tracked it down. I remember seeing a website that showed like how many hours you could listen music, or talk on the phone, or text. I tried finding the info again but can't find it.
6-7 hours, I believe.
It depends on the age of the phone and a bunch of other factors like temperature, humidity, etc. However on average an IPhone battery should last about:
This is from
iPhone 5 offers up to 8 hours of talk time on 3G, 8 hours of Internet use on 3G, 10 hours of Internet use on Wi-Fi, 10 hours of video playback, or 40 hours of audio playback on a full charge at original capacity. In addition, iPhone 5 features up to 225 hours of standby time.
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Woody Guthrie: "Songs that prove to you this is your world"
ON JANUARY 19, 2009, a crowd of thousands gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. It was the day before the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States, a country where it had once been perfectly legal to own someone with Black skin. The historic symbolism of gathering in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where Martin Luther King Jr. had given his “I Have a Dream” speech, was palpable.
There, living folk legend Pete Seeger, along with Bruce Springsteen and Seeger’s grandson, Tao, backed by a multiracial choir led the large crowd in a celebratory sing-along. Their song of choice? “This Land Is Your Land” by Woody Guthrie.
Few musicians or songwriters have had as massive an impact on American music as Woody Guthrie. “This Land Is Your Land” is one of the best-known songs in US history—even among those who know nothing else of Guthrie’s works. It’s been featured over the years in commercials for Coca-Cola and American Airlines, and performed on floats at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Conversely, it’s also filled the air at union rallies, antiwar demonstrations, and, most recently, actions of the Occupy movement.
This year, there are countless concerts, performances, and other events being planned to celebrate what would have been Guthrie’s one hundredth birthday. These events and more are welcome. Guthrie’s legacy is well worth celebrating. But perhaps because of the sheer omnipresence of his influence, there persists a nebulous, “all things to all people” atmosphere surrounding the songwriter’s work.
As always, it’s a lot more complex than that. While Guthrie, the myth, may be easily manipulated and used, there’s a good chance that Guthrie, the man, might balk at his music being used to sell soda. After all, this was an artist who once passionately declared his outright hatred for what capitalism does to music:
I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own songs and to sing the kind that knock you down farther...the ones that make you think you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that.
Recent years have also seen discoveries surrounding the “original” or “lost” verses of “This Land” that show its content to be less of a celebratory missive than a bold reminder of American inequality. This is on top of scholarship seeking to bring Guthrie’s radicalism back to the center of an appreciation of his art, including the recent Woody Guthrie, American Radical by University of Central Lancashire professor Will Kaufman.
The sanitizing of Guthrie is nothing alien to the music business; anyone familiar with the real legacies of John Lennon, Bob Marley, and so many others will recognize this process. Rebellion might be dangerous, but it’s also cool. And if a musician’s radicalism can be hewn from their artistic greatness, then the bucks roll in unencumbered. What’s more, Guthrie’s career coincided with and was a crucial component in the formation of American popular music. Stripping his music of its subversive content means doing the same for a key link in American history.
The problem is that ultimately the shape of an artist’s work can’t be separated from the time in which it was made. This is especially true for Woody Guthrie, which might explain why his radical core inexorably resurfaces time and again, despite efforts to bury it once and for all. Explaining his music and contradictions means delving into the rich yet hidden history of American class struggle.
The Do-Re-Mi
In his autobiography Bound for Glory, Guthrie would claim that his activism began at an early age. But then, in true folk music fashion, he was often given to embellishment. In fact, Guthrie’s beginnings could not have appeared further from that of a radical.
Born July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was named after then-governor of New Jersey and soon-to-be-president Woodrow Wilson. Guthrie’s father Charles was an aspiring real estate developer and local Democratic politician with a strong racist and antisocialist streak. Charles would frequently rail in speeches and newspaper op-eds against the “moral depravity” of the Socialist Party.
Years later, the younger Guthrie would discover that his father was present at a notorious Okemah lynching the year before Woody’s birth. He also speculated that his father was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.
Well into his adulthood Woody clung to establishment ideas. By the time he had reached his twenties, however, the Great Depression had taken hold. Making matters worse was the “Dust Bowl” in the American farmlands—along with drought, disease, crop failures, and farm foreclosures.
The Guthries, who had always possessed strong middle-class pretensions, weren’t farmers. Nonetheless, they were literally scattered to the four winds by poverty like so many other families in their area. Woody was one among the thousands of “Okie” migrants who went west searching for some form of living. At that time, he believed his ticket out of poverty was to make it big as a cowboy singer in the vein of Will Rogers.
The journey to California—a stark and destitute reality contrasted to the “land of plenty” that was supposed to be at the other end—changed all that. When Guthrie and his cousin “Oklahoma” Jack knocked on the door of Los Angeles’s KFVD radio station in 1937, he had little to his name aside from the guitar on his back. One of the songs that Woody performed for their audition that day has since become one of his best known: “If You Ain’t Got the Do-Re-Mi.” According to Will Kaufman:
“If You Ain’t Got the Do-Re-Mi” [was] about an illegal blockade that had been set up by the Los Angeles Police Department, hundreds of miles outside their jurisdiction, to prevent the Dust Bowl migrants from entering the state of California unless they had fifty dollars or more to prove that they weren’t “unemployable.” The blockade had only lasted for a few months in 1936—it was gone by the time Guthrie arrived in California—but the memory of the insult was fresh enough to provoke a stinging musical critique. It was fairly strong stuff for someone who simply wanted to sing cowboy music and make a few bucks.
This “strong stuff” did indeed stand apart from the lion’s share of mainstream music. Record companies’ general interest was in smooth, prepackaged (and overwhelmingly white) crooners like Perry Como and Bing Crosby. Blues was shoved into the category of “race records,” along with all but the most accessible big-band jazz. What is now broadly called folk and country was demeaned “hillbilly music.”
Folk and country were seen as appealing to niche markets, those most marginalized in society and deemed somehow unimportant. Even KFVD, whose primary musical programming was “cowboy music,” was taking a risk by broadcasting an artist as coarse, unpolished, and brash as Guthrie. But the station’s owner Frank Burke was a leftist; he had been a supporter of Upton Sinclair’s End Poverty in California campaign. This surely had a lot to do with his agreement to hire Guthrie.
Another risky hire for Burke and KFVD was Ed Robbin, member of the Communist Party (CP) and local correspondent for the party’s West Coast newspaper, People’s World. Burke had given Robbin a spot three times a week at KFVD. One day in 1938, Guthrie approached Robbin about listening in on his show. Robbin agreed, and it was there that he was pleasantly surprised to hear Guthrie perform a song about Bay Area former labor leader Tom Mooney.
Mooney had been convicted of involvement in the San Francisco Preparedness Day parade bombing in 1916. His conviction was rightfully considered by labor activists to have been little more than the result of a show trial. In 1938, after over twenty years of campaigning among radical groups, California’s newly elected governor Culbert Olsen finally pardoned Mooney and had him released.
Mooney had recently been interviewed on KFVD. But Robbin was unaware that Guthrie—who was now hosting his show by himself—had any political streak whatsoever. By his own admission, his jaw hit the floor when he heard Guthrie perform “Mr. Tom Mooney Is Free” on the air. Not only that, but Guthrie had closed the song urging his listeners to tune into Robbin’s commentaries: “He tells the truth, and that’s pretty rare in this town.”
Robbin was stunned. Later that day he requested the songwriter perform at an indoor rally the CP was holding in Mooney’s honor the next evening. Guthrie was happy to oblige, and after some prodding, so were the rally’s organizers.
The thousands in attendance that night were as enthralled with Guthrie as Robbin had been. According to Guthrie’s biographer Joe Klein in Woody Guthrie: A Life,
The audience went wild over the last verse of the Tom Mooney song, where Woody suggested that the thing to do now was to free the rest of California. They wanted to hear more. So, while tuning his guitar between songs, Woody told a few stories about the goons and vigilantes he’d met on the road and then swung into one of his songs about the dust bowl refugees. He received another hooting, stomping ovation, and decided to sing another song. He’d never experienced anything like this before . . . and they obviously hadn’t seen anything like him either. It was love at first sight.
Guthrie had encountered many CP members in his travels; they were the most dedicated union organizers among migrant laborers and field workers. The Mooney rally had been his first official Communist Party event, though. Not long afterward, Ed Robbin became his booking agent, and he was quickly confirmed to play at picket lines and union halls around California. He also began writing his famed “Woody Sez” column for the Daily Worker. Guthrie had decisively stepped into the fray of the American Communist movement.
The CP in 1938 was a tragic contradiction. Though its members had played often heroic roles in myriad strikes, antiracist struggles, and international solidarity campaigns, it was by the 1930s completely “Stalinized.” The 1917 Russian Revolution had cracked under the weight of civil war and international isolation; its working class was a shambles and the country had fallen into hands of a bureaucratic apparatus led by Joseph Stalin.
The CP, like all official Communist parties, had its line increasingly determined not by the aim of workers’ revolution but by the foreign policy needs of Moscow. In 1936, the party began effectively lending its support to a “Popular Front” with the Democratic Party as the lesser of two evils, and in some cases became President Franklin Roosevelt’s most enthusiastic cheerleader.
Nonetheless, the party’s commitment to grassroots struggle and a workers’ world (at least in its rhetoric) was what inspired over a million people to pass through its ranks during the Depression. Countless others, including Guthrie, would never join but would remain sympathetic—sometimes for their entire lives.
Contrary to what some might think, Guthrie was neither rash nor disingenuous in his political loyalty. Both Klein and Kaufman spend a good deal of time in their respective books mentioning the books that Guthrie digested during his political life, for instance veteran labor activist and leading CP member Ella Reeve “Mother” Bloor’s autobiography We Are Many (whose experiences organizing miners provided the source material for Guthrie’s “Ludlow Massacre”) and William Z. Foster’s Pages from a Worker’s Life. Years later, Guthrie’s copy of Marx’s Capital was discovered with notes such as “must memorize contents” written in the margins.Years later, in a letter to his sometime collaborator and wife Marjorie Mazia, he would write:
The big rich landlords, gambling lords, rulers and owners are cussing the Communists loud and long these days. The Communists always have been the hardest fighters for the trade unions, good wages, short hours, nursery schools, cleaner workshops and the equal rights of every person of every color. Communists have the only answer to the whole mess. That is, we all ought to own and run every mine, factory, timber track . . .
The end picture is clear. Guthrie, far from being some naive Okie manipulated by cosmopolitan leftists, was a profoundly intelligent and sensitive individual who believed one hundred percent in a world run by working people. This isn’t to say that he didn’t make some truly boneheaded judgments in his defense of the CP. Most notorious was using his radio show to speak (sing, actually) in favor of the nonaggression pact between the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany in August 1939. Plenty of sympathizers cut ties with the CP for Stalin’s alliance with the fascist enemy; Guthrie wasn’t one of them. For his boss Frank Burke, this was one step too far. Guthrie and Robbin were both fired from KFVD.
Hard-hitting songs
Not long before Guthrie came around, the Communist Party’s views on music had been, at best, out-of-date. The Pierre Degeyter Society, a Communist-affiliated musical club with chapters on campuses across the United States, promoted the idea that music in a socialist society would be little more than workers composing classical operas. Stalinism’s heavy emphasis on stuffy, formalized art for the use of propaganda (laughably called “socialist realism”) certainly didn’t help matters.
The arrival of Guthrie, however, coincided with an influx of folk, blues, and jazz artists into the party’s orbit. Bebop innovators like Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie were playing CP-sponsored dance parties. Lead Belly was being invited to play his “Bourgeois Blues” at Communist summer camps. And a large crop of radical and progressive folk singers—Josh White, Aunt Molly Jackson, Sarah Ogan—followed with him.
Accompanying all this was a broader shift in music. Slowly but surely, the Perry Comos and Bing Crosbys of the world were being supplanted on the radio in favor of a more grassroots sensibility. Musician Mat Callahan, in his book The Trouble with Music, explains that the late 1930s were a time when “popular culture” had not only taken shape but assumed a position of dominance in the West:
Not only was bourgeois art knocked off its pedestal but the global struggle for revolution elevated the popular arts above it.... Some of the greatest popular music and literature was made during this period, quintessentially American and yet proletarian and internationalist. Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Billie Holiday, Pete Seeger, Leadbelly, Duke Ellington—the list is endless and it is most enlightening. The body and soul of what America purveys to the world as its legacy was made by artists whose work was dedicated to the “popular” in the artistic sense, to the People as a political category, and against racism, fascism, imperialism and war.
No more was music just the creation of some slick, uniquely gifted individuals with the backing of music industry honchos. Now, any working person could pick up a guitar or a harmonica and have their story taken seriously. What had previously been dismissed as “race” or “hillbilly” music was increasingly accepted as more credible and authentic. When Guthrie moved to New York City in 1939, this shift was in full swing.
Surrounding him was a throng of activists and musicians profoundly inspired by the emergence of a radical working-class folk culture. Pete Seeger, Josh White, Millard Lampell, Bess Lomax (sister of folk musicologist Alan Lomax, one of the earliest to record Guthrie’s songs), Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee.
It seemed only logical that they coalesce in some way, and in 1940, the Almanac Singers came into being. They weren’t so much a band as a confederation; membership was always changing depending on individual artists’ other commitments. Guthrie, while not always the most reliable, was certainly a powerful influence on the group. Looking at the tour schedule for the Almanacs, one gets the sense that they’re peeking at Eugene Debs’s day planner. They performed not just in New York but also across the country, at fundraisers for the People’s World and the American Peace Movement, and picket lines for striking gypsum miners and autoworkers alike.
This was a time of ascendancy for the American labor movement—in particular the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Since splitting from the American Federation of Labor (AFL) five years previously, the CIO had surpassed the AFL in both size and militancy. In contrast to the AFL’s concessions to segregation, the CIO put a premium on fighting racism both on the shop floor and, often, in the world at large too. The same was true for many other unions outside the CIO’s direct sphere of influence, particularly in the American South.
This put union organizers—which included a great many CP members and sympathizers—squarely in the crosshairs of American racism. One such organizer was Annie Mae Merriweather, an African American woman from Lowndes County, Alabama, active in organizing sharecroppers. After the suppression of a 1935 strike, antiunion thugs Vaughn Ryles and Ralph McGuire shot and killed her husband and fellow organizer, Jim Press. They then kidnapped her, hung her by her wrists in a nearby barn, whipped and sexually assaulted her, then left her for dead. She survived and later told her story to the NAACP.
Guthrie had heard Merriweather’s story before. It had become one of the most widely known of the Southern sharecroppers’ struggle—not just for its gruesome details but for the iron resolve that Merriweather displayed both during and after. After playing an engagement for Oklahoma City oil workers in May of 1940, local CP organizer Ina Wood asked Guthrie and Pete Seeger “isn’t it about time you wrote a union song for women?” They worked late into the night, and set Anna Mae Merriweather’s story to the deceptively upbeat tune of the “Redwing” polka:
This bloody crime was done
Out where the buffalo run
By old Bob Ryles [sic]
And Ralph McQuire [sic]
With a knotty rope
They soaked in blood
As this union girl they beat
[They] Said “I want naked meat”
They swung her up from a rafter there
For saying what she said:
“You have robbed my family and my people
My Holy Bible says we are equal
Your money is the root of all our evil
I know the poor man will win this world”
Though the graphic nature and particular references were later toned down, this was an early version of what has since become a labor standard: “Union Maid.” It was included in the Almanacs’ second album Talking Union, released in the early summer of 1941.
Guthrie’s output generally followed this theme during these years—as he called it in the folk song compendium he compiled with Seeger and Alan Lomax, “hard hitting songs for hard hit people.” Stories of ordinary people trampled under the system’s boot figuring out how to retain their dignity and hit back. His recording sessions included songs like “Tom Joad,” his two-part adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath; parables of modern-day Robin Hoods like bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd; and “Blowin’ Down This Old Dusty Road” with its quiet declaration “I ain’t gonna be treated this way.” He even retold the story of Jesus Christ as a man cut down by the Romans for daring to demand the rich give their money to the poor:
When Jesus come to town, all the working folks around
Believed what he did say
But the bankers and the preachers, they nailed him on the cross,
And they laid Jesus Christ in his grave
Given the heady and often desperate times in which they were released, there can be little doubt that the overarching message of these songs was as powerful as it was radical.
Whose land?
Guthrie and the Almanacs’ rise to prominence didn’t go unopposed. Several right-wing critics bemoaned the fact that self-declared Communists were becoming accepted in the mainstream. Carl J. Friederich, a Harvard law professor, wrote for The Atlantic magazine that the Almanacs’ song “For John Doe” in particular was “strictly subversive and illegal.” To Friederich, folk music generally was a “poison in our system” whose relative ease in spreading made it an especially pernicious threat to the American way of life.
Such criticisms, shrill as they were, weren’t entirely off base. Guthrie’s songs deliberately bucked the trend of Hollywood and Broadway’s sunshiny show tunes and Tin Pan Alley’s sanitized parlor ditties. Lyrics like those of “Union Maid” reveal just how serious he was about his role in this task. Guthrie seemed to have little tolerance for culture that attempted to sugarcoat the hard daily reality for poor and working people. And so, when he heard Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” choking the radio waves during his travels, something about the song obviously stuck in his craw. It was February 1940, and he set to work on writing an antidote:
One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the relief office, I saw my people—
As they stood there hungry
I stood there wondering if
God blessed America for me
Why Guthrie shelved these lyrics for almost five years isn’t clear. It’s likely that to him it was just another idea that hadn’t yet congealed. It is worth pondering, however, whether the CP’s attitude toward World War II had anything to do with it. After Hitler broke the nonaggression pact and invaded the Soviet Union, the Communist Party performed yet another about-face and became the most gung ho supporters of the American war effort. The party even went so far as to support a nationwide “no-strike pledge” and the internment of Japanese Americans.
Once again, Guthrie stayed the course on the CP’s line. He did three tours with the Merchant Marines and served in the US Army, though he was considerably hard to handle while being stationed at the barracks. His recording and performances were sporadic during these years. When he did manage to perform, his pro-union, antiracist, working-class militant material took a backseat to flag waving and militarism. Even many of his antiwar songs, often brilliantly bitter in their condemnation of Roosevelt’s saber rattling, were retooled into frightening pro-war missives. It’s easy to see how questioning whether God did indeed “bless America” would be off limits in the midst of all this.
“This Land Is Your Land” would eventually be recorded in 1944 between his military stints, and wouldn’t be released until a few years later. By that time, it appeared the pendulum had swung back. The year 1946 saw the biggest strike wave in American history, including the general strike in Oakland. The CIO launched “Operation Dixie,” an attempt to unionize the South and strike a blow against Jim Crow segregation in the process. The struggle for civil rights also appeared to be reemerging into American politics. When Isaac Woodard, a Black army veteran who had been honorably discharged mere hours before, was brutalized and permanently blinded by Batesville, South Carolina, police in February 1946, it produced a national outcry.
Guthrie, like many other CP members and socialists, threw himself headlong back into the unfinished business of American class struggle. His work reflected it too. He, along with writer Irwin Silber, Seeger, and others, formed the People’s Songs collective—a short-lived and more loose-knit attempt at continuing the Almanacs’ work—in 1946. He wrote reams of songs showcasing America’s radical labor heritage, including an entire album’s worth of material dedicated to executed anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti.
In August, he played in front of an audience of over 30,000 at a rally for Woodard in New York’s Lewisohn Stadium. The bill also included such celebrities as Cab Calloway, Orson Welles, Milton Berle, and Billie Holiday. Guthrie wrote a pair of songs dedicated to the “Trenton Six,” Black men convicted of killing a white man in New Jersey on shoddy evidence in 1948.
The apparent revitalization of radical and antiracist activism was short-lived, however. In fact, one of America’s most reactionary periods was only right around the corner. For Guthrie, much of this could be summed up in one word: Peekskill.
Fascism on the Hudson
On August 27, 1949, People’s Songs organized an outdoor benefit concert for the Civil Rights Congress featuring Guthrie, Seeger, Paul Robeson, and a collection of other progressive musicians not far from the town of Peekskill, New York. Before all of the artists had arrived, it was apparent that the show was in trouble. A growing mob of racists had congregated nearby, first lynching an effigy of Robeson, then beating thirteen people headed for the picnic grounds. They shouted slurs such as “commies,” “kikes,” and “niggers,” and burned a cross on a nearby hill. Members of the local Ku Klux Klan (KKK) had mobilized, and were also so confident that they appeared in public without their robes or hoods!
Police were called, but didn’t arrive until hours later, and even then refused to intervene. The local American Legion post, which along with the KKK had been instrumental in organizing the mob, claimed no involvement, and no real investigation was ever performed into their actions that day. In the aftermath, the local Klan reportedly received over 700 requests for membership in the Peekskill area.
The horrifying violence of August 27 made holding the concert impossible. Unionists and radicals in the area organized a protest campaign, and the show was rescheduled for a week later on September 4 at an old golf course at nearby Cortlandt Manor. Twenty thousand people showed up in support, with security provided by members of the longshore and electrical worker unions. Robeson, Guthrie, and others performed this time around without incident, but directly afterward violence erupted yet again.
As concertgoers and artists left via bus and caravan, another mob—again organized by the American Legion and KKK—pelted the passing vehicles with rocks. Some were dragged from their cars and beaten by rioters. Once again, local police stood by and did nothing; more than 140 people were injured. The aftermath saw Guthrie’s last big burst of songwriting. He had been in the same car as Seeger and Lee Hays on September 4, and had pinned his shirt against the window to prevent the shattering glass from injuring anyone. Says Kaufman:
In the weeks that followed, Guthrie was stung into action, reeling off a series of his angriest, most contemptuous, most defiant songs in a remarkable burst of energy—at least twenty-one songs about Peekskill written within a month. Collected in a makeshift volume titled “Peekskill Songs,” they were for the most part parodies of traditional and early country music standards.
Twenty-one songs is a lot—especially when considering that they were all written about the same series of events—but it also gives one an idea of just how much the events of Peekskill had affected him. It’s all the more impressive when one considers that Guthrie’s own father was likely in the Klan. Peekskill represented something of a last stand—both for Guthrie and for the radical workers’ subculture he had helped forge. By 1949, anticommunists like Joe McCarthy were already rounding up suspected subversives, pressing them to testify before Congress, and whipping up furor over “commies.”
This witch-hunt was most famously wrought in the world of culture and entertainment. Countless screenwriters, actors, directors, and musicians had their careers ruined. Paul Robeson, proud and defiant, was blacklisted and had his passport revoked for refusing to name names. His career never fully recovered. Even some of the Almanac Singers—including Burl Ives and Josh White—caved to the pressure and gave names to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Seeger himself escaped by the skin of his teeth, and was one of the few to maintain any kind of music career outside the coffeehouses with his much-sanitized Weavers.
As for Guthrie himself, he would be restricted from speaking and singing his mind too, but for a different reason. He had been diagnosed with Huntington’s disease some years earlier, the same disease that killed his mother. Though he tried to keep his guitar in his hands and continue writing, his motor skills deteriorated, and he died on October 3, 1967, at the age of 55.
Bound for glory, bound for freedom
We’ll of course never know what Guthrie might have thought about the upsurges of the 1960s; by the time he passed away he had long lost his ability to speak. According to many accounts, his biggest fear during these final days was that his legacy would be forgotten. In the 1950s, before his strength had been completely sapped, he had taken his son Arlo into the backyard of their home several times to teach him “This Land Is Your Land” in its entirety, including the lost verses. Perhaps he needn’t have worried. As we now know, “This Land” became iconic during the 1960s. Despite the contradictory way in which it was often used, the song’s lost verses didn’t stay lost forever. The month of Woody’s death was also, by coincidence, when Arlo released his famed, eighteen-minute song “Alice’s Restaurant,” humorously skewering America’s military draft. The resemblance to his father’s own “talking blues” songs was, naturally, uncanny.
Arlo obviously wasn’t alone. Despite the best efforts of McCarthyite America, the generation of “folk-rock” artists that emerged in the 1960s had imbibed Guthrie’s progressive spirit along with his aesthetic. Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, the Byrds, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, Neil Young, Buffalo Springfield, and countless others cited him as an influence. All at one time or another wrote songs protesting the Vietnam War and supporting civil rights, and some, in a few select cases, openly called themselves revolutionaries.
Chances are that if you’re a musician with even the slightest social consciousness, then you’ve been influenced by Guthrie in some way. The radicalism he brought into his songs was seldom forced; it was organically and seamlessly connected with a kind of humanistic appreciation of working people’s everyday struggles.
Steve Earle describes Guthrie’s music this way: “I don’t think of Woody Guthrie as a political writer. He was a writer who lived in very political times.” Earle, one of Guthrie’s many inheritors, may be right. It’s hard, however, to find a moment in contemporary history that wasn’t political. Maybe that’s why the Guthrie that has reemerged so many times in popular music has been Guthrie the radical. This goes well beyond just the limits of the 1960s folk revival. In the early 1970s, a young man named John Graham Mellor—later known as Joe Strummer of punk icons the Clash—grew his hair long and insisted his friends call him Woody.
Guthrie’s lyrics have been set to music by the Celtic punkers Dropkick Murphys, and respun by Billy Bragg and Wilco in the sublime Mermaid Avenue sessions. Even Alabama 3, the London-based electronic group best known for composing the theme for The Sopranos, cite Guthrie as an influence.
No doubt, “This Land Is Your Land” has long since ceased to be the de facto anthem of the Obama administration. Even when it was, it was on a shallow basis. It’s appropriate, then, that both Springsteen and Seeger have shifted their enthusiasm to the Occupy movement. It was Seeger along with Arlo who performed “This Land” at Zuccotti Park during the height of Occupy Wall Street.
Springsteen, often recognized as Guthrie’s heir apparent, released his Wrecking Ball album in March 2012, a searing mix of folk-rock that frankly asks “Where’s the promise from sea to shining sea?” The Boss has also declared he will not be campaigning for Obama in 2012.
What does all of this say? Would a hundred-year-old Woody Guthrie be more over the moon for another Democratic president, or the first open-ended American class struggle in two generations? It’s an honest question; the Communist Party that he loyally followed his entire life went through some erratic shifts between ultraleft posturing and craven support for the Democrats and America’s policies abroad. Parsing out the kernel of genuine liberation is difficult with such an organism.
That kernel is most surely there, however; Guthrie made a point of highlighting it every chance he got. He was, in his own words, “out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world.” His songs, at their very best, have this woven into their fabric. It’s a cold, hard, undeniable fact.
Issue #78
July 2011
Slavery and the origins of the Civil War
Issue contents
Top story
Critical Thinking | <urn:uuid:907b9340-4e7d-4a2e-841a-f054d9c8033c> | http://isreview.org/issue/85/woody-guthrie-songs-prove-you-your-world | en | 0.97891 | 0.040847 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Vertical Lists, Bullets
Q. What are the proper guidelines for punctuating the phrases/clauses in a bulleted list?
Q. I am a course designer for a university, and I always have a difficult time figuring out how to handle punctuation and capitalization in multiple-choice questions. Do I capitalize the first letter of each choice? Do I add a period at the end of each choice? Does the rule change if it is a question rather than a statement?
Q. In a list of bulleted points where some are complete sentences and some are not, do you put a period at the end of a sentence, but not the list, or periods after all bulleted points, or none at all?
Q. In either numbered or bulleted vertical lists, what is the correct syntax? Should each item begin the same way—for example, with a verb?
Q. Is it ever okay to start a list with a sentence ending in a period instead of a colon? (“To determine the answer, use the following concepts.”) Does it matter if the list is set off by bullets or that the typesetting is different (by color or font, etc.)? What is the preferred method if both ways are correct? What if it is not a complete sentence? I appreciate the response. Me and a fellow copy editor are at odds.
Q. I do not believe it makes sense to use a bulleted list of one item. If it is just one item, should it not simply be a paragraph? At the end of many of our sections in an advocacy guide we have “Advocacy Reminders.” Sometimes there are many; sometimes there is only one reminder. It seems to me if there is one reminder it should be a paragraph. | <urn:uuid:eada49d6-954e-49c9-a2ca-22eae3464f63> | http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/VerticalListsBullets.html?old=VerticalListsBullets_questions01.html | en | 0.925383 | 0.873955 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Mission impossible: Design great-sounding, affordable speakers
Pioneer's Andrew Jones not only designs $80,000 speakers, he has now crafted a phenomenal-sounding $499 home theater system.
Andrew Jones Pioneer Electronics
Well, he's done it again and refreshed the line with newly designed speakers. The original series was still selling in brisk numbers, but Pioneer needed a redesign to comply with stricter regulations for the wood cabinets' formaldehyde content. They could have just changed the cabinets, but Jones saw the redesign as an opportunity to further perfect the tweeters and woofers. Then again, he could have messed up a good thing, but as soon as I heard the new speakers, those concerns evaporated. I spoke with Jones to learn more about the redesign process.
The new speakers don't look much different from the original models, but all the sound reproducing elements have been completely redesigned. He didn't use off the shelf existing drivers, Jones designed all of the drivers himself, and the crossover networks that direct the treble frequencies to the tweeter, and bass to the woofer. One new goal for the revised speakers was to make them more "sensitive," so they could play louder than the original models with the same amount of watts driving them. Jones said that was a priority because there's a good chance speakers in this price class will be partnered with low-cost/low-power receivers. Every watt counts, so he wanted to make the new speakers even easier to drive with inexpensive receivers. The new SW-8Mk2 subwoofer is the least changed model in the line.
Jones is a modest man; he thinks the real reason so few budget speakers sound good is the designers and companies aren't really trying to make great-sounding speakers. They're designed to have a certain look and fill in a price point on the lower end of the speaker line. Jones worked on the Pioneer redesign project for six months and used most of the time on research, explaining with a chuckle, "If I knew what I was doing, it wouldn't be research." He designed woofers and tweeters on a computer, had prototypes made, measured them, and revised the drivers again and again to get ever closer to his performance goals. He wasn't interested in making a speaker line with a lot of models, because he knew that only a few would really sell, so there's one tower, one bookshelf, one center speaker, and one subwoofer in the line.
An Andrew Jones-designed SP-FS52 tower speaker. Pioneer Electronics
The curve-sided speaker cabinets look nice, and while Jones concedes that the curves have minimal sonic benefit, the rounded sides improve the integrity and strength of the medium-density fiberboard cabinets. Jones wisely decided to make fairly large speakers; in general, all things being equal, big speakers sound better than small ones. But things weren't equal; Jones is one of the best designers working today.
I've heard the complete system and the new models really do sound better, they sound clearer, make more bass, and can play louder than the original speaker line. Yes, they're relatively large speakers, Jones' SP-FS52 tower speakers have three 5.25-inch woofers and one 1-inch soft dome tweeter, and the speakers are 35 inches high. These beauties retail for just $260 a pair, and sound as good as many speakers that sell for three times as much! The SP-C22 center speaker is 18.2 inches wide, 7.2 high, and 8.4 inches deep! It delivers the sort of natural-sounding dialog you can't get from more modestly sized center speakers. The smallest speaker in the line, the SP-BS22-LR, is 12.6 inches high; Andrew Jones, as talented as he is, can't make 6-inch-tall speakers that sound anywhere as good as these.
The new models are 25 percent more expensive than the originals, mostly because material costs are way up. Even so, they're still entry-level designs. Five hundred dollars buys the complete 5.1 system with four bookshelf speakers, the center, and sub (the 5.1 system with the towers adds $130 to the M.S.R.P.) The 5.1 systems will soon be available exclusively from the Pioneer Web site. Watch for my full CNET reviews, coming soon.
Featured Video | <urn:uuid:57fbfa69-cd46-43cc-b1f5-66c6418e4d4a> | http://www.cnet.com/news/mission-impossible-design-great-sounding-affordable-speakers/ | en | 0.971795 | 0.028446 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
This 2-Week-Old Kitten Wiggles Her Eyes When She Eats!
Have you ever seen anything so adorable? This tiny kitten named Polly is just two weeks old. And as if she wasn't cute already, she just so happens to wiggle her ears while eating. OMG.
Rate this video on the cute scale: 10 being the cutest thing you've ever seen and 1 being the least! Tell us in the comments!
| <urn:uuid:fcd6f001-1f98-43fe-828f-39a94a56eef0> | http://www.m-magazine.com/posts/this-2-week-old-kitten-wiggles-her-eyes-when-she-eats-35427 | en | 0.956344 | 0.610182 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Free Nights in Palm Springs | NBC Southern California
Worth the Drive
Our daily look at nearby getaways
Free Nights in Palm Springs
If you're a heat lover, there's a sweet summer deal afoot.
MISTERS AND BEYOND: People may moan about the heat in other places -- and rightfully so -- but you rarely hear complaints about summertime in Palm Springs. Why is this, exactly? Well, put it down to the resort city's ample use of misters in restaurants and other public places. Or thank the swimming pools that dot the swanky destination. Or credit the great warm-weather events the city hosts, like its June Restaurant Week and the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival, which recently wrapped. Whatever the reason, people shrug off the 100+ degrees in the desert and plan July and August weekends out thataway. (Oh, and we forgot reason #4: It's a dry heat.) Which is why whenever we see the hotels in the area band together and offer a whole caboodle of discounts and deals we do tend to cock an eyebrow and say "do they know that summertime is one of the best times to be in Palm Springs?" Well, shhh. We won't tell them because we do love the sweet sweltery money-saving offers.
LIKE... Stay two nights and get a third free at Andalusian Court. Get a $115 spa credit at the Hilton Palm Springs. Or nab a Desert Vacation Villa for $70 bucks a night. Over 45 properties in all are participating, with some even offering "complimentary weekday nights" when other nights are purchased. There are a bunch of dinner specials, too, on the Come Play in Palm Springs site. Best of all? The bulk of the deals'll roll right through the end of September, meaning if you want slightly cooler temps you can get them (granted, there won't be a huge drop in September, but the start of fall in the desert is pretty beautiful). For more desert dreaming, click. Now, please take us to the nearest mister and tall Arnold Palmer... | <urn:uuid:8ae220a2-490a-41ff-9790-e5d81e79f844> | http://www.nbclosangeles.com/blogs/worth-the-drive/Free-Nights-in-Palm-Springs-161291985.html | en | 0.912583 | 0.045608 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
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As Rebels Fight Rebels, Grim Reports From A Syrian City
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As Rebels Fight Rebels, Grim Reports From A Syrian City
Middle East
As Rebels Fight Rebels, Grim Reports From A Syrian City
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And I'm Roberts Siegel. We begin this hour with a new twist in the war in Syria. Rebels are now fighting other rebels in the north of the country. A fractious collection of rebel groups has come together to challenge Islamist extremists who are linked to al-Qaida. Those extremists, many of them experienced fighters, were once welcomed by rebels and civilians alike in the revolt to unseat Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
But their brutal tactics have instilled fear and resentment. As NPR's Deborah Amos reports, this rebel on rebel fighting has now spread to Raqqah, a provincial capital and extremist stronghold.
DEBORAH AMOS, BYLINE: To understand why Syrian rebel groups turned against the al-Qaida affiliate known as ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, you just have to talk to Syrian activists. They were the first victims of al-Qaida's ruthless ways, says journalist Adnan Haddad(ph) who fled Syria after the group targeted him.
ADNAN HADDAD: I think it's about, you know, feeling afraid of being tortured and feeling afraid of getting kidnapped.
AMOS: You were kidnapped.
HADDAD: For three days, yeah.
AMOS: Why do you think they kidnap journalists?
HADDAD: Just, you know, a typical al-Qaida kind of thinking, you know. They just don't want activists and journalists to cover the violations they commit.
AMOS: But the violations became well known after ISIS took over Raqqah, the only major city in rebel control, pushing other rebels out of the city last May. Chris Looney(ph), a Washington-based Syrian analyst, says ISIS made a dramatic gesture on the first day of its rule.
CHRIS LOONEY: On May 14, when ISIS came and took control of Raqqah, it executed three men in the town square in front of hundreds of people. And that really announced its presence in a very brutal way and set the tone for how ISIS would govern in Raqqah.
AMOS: Back then, ISIS allowed a Syrian media center to post a video of the execution, when armed fighters in face masks forced their captives to their knees and shot them at point-blank range.
AMOS: Soon after this event, ISIS created its own media organization, publishing a newspaper and releasing videos on YouTube. That's when local journalists started to disappear, kidnapped by ISIS, says journalist Rami Jarah(ph). He operated a radio station in Raqqah until ISIS seized the broadcasting equipment and arrested one of his reporters last seen in ISIS custody.
RAMI JARAH: He was badly beaten and bruised from head to toe and that he was left only in his underwear and he'd basically been tortured.
AMOS: ISIS moved swiftly to end any dissent in Raqqah and across northern Syria, he says, kidnapping more than 60 citizen journalists.
JARAH: I can tell you that Raqqah now there's a total absence of any activism or real citizen journalists.
AMOS: Everybody's gone.
JARAH: Everybody's gone from Raqqah.
AMOS: Now, Jarah and other activists have set up media outlets across the border in southern Turkey.
JARAH: R-A-D-I-O A-M-A-S-Y (foreign language spoken)
AMOS: This is Radio ANA, broadcasting news and call-in shows from a studio near the Syrian border.
JARAH: (Speaking foreign language)
AMOS: Jarah and his co-hosts tell listeners they're reporting the real news inside Syria. This is a media battle for hearts and minds in territory controlled by ISIS. But they're up against a well-funded transnational organization, says Chris Looney. These are Sunni extremists from Iraq, later joined by thousands of radicals from around the world.
The war in Syria, he says, has given ISIS renewed strength and safe havens along the Syrian/Iraqi border. Looney and other analysts say that ISIS funds its Syrian operation from money collected in Iraq. Estimates vary from 5 to $8 million every month.
LOONEY: It's mostly through extortion, also criminal activity.
AMOS: And Looney adds what ISIS has done with that cash is ensure its control of Raqqah's economy.
LOONEY: Citizens have become dependent on ISIS for the provision of goods and services. They feel like if they can provide for the community and establish themselves as the only group that Raqqans are able to turn to, it will generate some support for them among the community.
AMOS: Much of that support vanished this week as the new rebel coalition challenged ISIS.
In the first days of the fighting, rebels captured an ISIS prison in Raqqah and released 50 captives posting this video. But in recent days, ISIS has mounted a counterattack to defend their most important base of operations and today, residents report a city without power or water, the hospital abandoned and bodies lying in the street. Deborah Amos, NPR News.
| <urn:uuid:ddbb98a1-3520-4ac5-94b8-e453c6b14589> | http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=260771319 | en | 0.953659 | 0.047831 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
The 3 cent dollar!
Why $2,000/oz. gold is logical
By David Bradshaw, Editor RMP
Apr 23, 2007
This is a chart of the U.S. dollar between 1915 and today.
Do you still feel good about having your life savings in dollars? I hope not.
Eighteen years ago Swiss America CEO Craig Smith and I traveled the nation presenting "Economic Solutions" seminars using a chart of the dollar to open the event. Even back then attendees jaws dropped when they discovered a U.S. "dollar" was really only worth about 14 cents in real buying power.
Between 1989 and 2007, the dollar has shrunk to just 3 cents! Could it fall to just one penny in the next 5-10 years? Read on and judge for yourself.
Historically a U.S. "dollar" was defined by content, not by image, or symbolism alone. Truth is, today's "dollar" is really nothing more than a popular symbol for the tangible substances which it once proudly represented: gold and silver.
Substance vs. Symbolism
But starting in 1913, the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve began a slow process of redefining the "dollar" -- from representing a weight measurement of pure precious metals -- to representing public confidence in the U.S. government.
The result: today's "dollar" retains a mere 3 cents of its original buying power in relation to gold. Three pennies! Stated in reverse, 1/20 of an ounce of gold (at $650/oz.) will cost you $32.50 today, instead of just $1, as it did 75 years ago. Sad, but true.
This helps explain why the Federal Reserve's latest statement (3-21-07) admits the Fed continues be concerned about rising inflation (which, by the way, is largely the result of their own overprinting of "dollars" starting in 2001).
Yes, the buck's buying power has shrunken by over 30%, just in the last five years, but the ongoing decline of our gold-less U.S. "dollar" now spans over four generations as the chart above illustrates.
The true value of a paper "dollar" is now being defined by the world's waning confidence in America's ability to repay our deficits, debt and public entitlement obligations.
A Wake Up Call!
America's own head accountant David Walker is now traveling the nation with his "Wake Up Call" tour warning Americans that we're facing, "a growing fiscal cancer, a tsunami of spending." Walker hopes to gain public support in order to force politicians to do something now, rather than just kicking the can down the road, because "our present system is unsustainable."
"Anything that's healthy is reproduceable" is a truism, both in the natural world and in the financial world. Conversely, anything that's unhealthy (whether it be animal, vegetable, mineral... or currency) cannot produce healthy offspring.
Virtually every nation on earth is slowly dumping dollars in favor of more stable, healthy currencies, like gold.
Unhealthy U.S. dollars are even being shunned by central bankers, because they know what happens to all confidence-based currencies when that confidence fails. In financial terms it is called a panic.
Given today's increasingly transparent financial world, I ask you; does the monetary symbolism of today's paper "dollar" stand a chance of triumphing over the substance of gold and silver?
If you think so, stick with your paper "dollars", but don't complain when a loaf of bread costs $10 or $20 one day.
If you think not, we recommend converting a good portion of your paper dollars into gold, pronto.
Given the dollar's 100-year track record of decline, it's very plausable that the dollar will continue falling from 3 cents to just a single penny. At that point instead of costing $32.50 to buy 1/20 ounce of gold, it would cost $100 per 1/20 ounce of gold... which equates to $2,000 per ounce gold!
Sound logical? Or crazy? Do the math yourself. If you're still not convinced, please review our lead story from the latest Real Money Perspectives magazine, "The Future of Gold" Who Expects Four-Digit Gold... and Why!, which features over thirty gold experts with an average gold price target of $2,100/oz.
"Over the last century the U.S. dollar has been transformed from an 'IOU gold' into an 'IOU Nothing,'" according to John Exter, former Fed economist. If you can remain optimistic about the dollar's future, I congratulate you. Your faith in the tinkering of men with "IOU nothing" money far surpasses mine, which is limited to faith in God up above... and faith in real money, gold and silver, here below. -db
For further study:
"Rediscovering Gold: Substance Over Symbolism" by Craig R. Smith (8/01)
"Why the dollar is in trouble" by Craig R. Smith (2/07)
"Why the sudden dollar plunge? By John Stepek, MoneyWeek (10/06)
Special Offer: To help you better understand why gold's future is so bright, Swiss America invites you to review their new "Rare Opportunity" booklet and "The Future of Gold" 2007 magazine which are yours FREE, simply register here... or call toll-free 800-289-2646. Find out why gold is now the buy of a generation!
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2003 AUGUST 11 #223
Unnamed Artists - I'm Dressing Myself
When my older sister was a small child, like many other kids, she had a lot children's records that she loved to hear over and over again. Being that this was the age of 78's, this would have meant a lot of getting up every three minutes to change the record for most parents of children too young to do it themselves.
Ah, but our dad had bought one of the first commercially available reel to reel machines a year or so earlier (1952), a behemoth of an item made by the Concertone company. Our parents taped all of my sister's favorites, including some records she liked which were owned by the neighbors, onto a reel of tape. Turn the machine on, and she could hear her music for 30 minutes straight without anyone's help. (I still own that Concertone machine, by the way. It would work great if not for the fact that the flywheel was snapped in half 34 years ago. Any help in finding a way to replace the broken parts for this 53 year old machine would be greatly appreciated.)
So it was that, when I came along in 1960, I grew up hearing this tape of records, most of which we no longer had (perhaps they'd broken) or never had owned (they'd been borrowed). My two favorites were always "Where Will the Dimple Be" (which I later learned was a cover version of a Rosemary Clooney Record) and "I'm Dressing Myself", which struck me, even as a child, as wonderfully weird.
"I'm Dressing Myself" was the sort of recording I remembered for years, and I played it for friends well into adolescence and adulthood, because of the uncommon degree of weirdness which permeates it (being that this quality - weirdness - is shared by most of my friends and me). Playing the monaural tape on a stereo reel to reel machine, I could hear the entire contents backwards on side two in the right channel, and as a result, I learned to sing this song (and "Where Will the Dimple Be") backwards. "Little Socks, Socks" for example, is (roughly) "Coss, coss otill". I told you I was weird.
Flash forward to the early '90's: One category of records I've learned to keep my eyes peeled for at record sales is anything on the "Young Peoples Records" label. We had several of these when I was a child, but my reason for searching them out now is because many of them tend to feature a few of my folk music heroes like Pete Seeger and Tom Glazer. In addition, I've learned that some of the people involved with the label had also been part of the famed (and doomed) "People's Songs" organization out of New York in the late 1940's.
The Young Peoples Records label was vilified as a communist front, although the only way you could discern any socialist aims from most of their records was that they were often concerned with peaceful subjects and sometimes had moral messages about getting along. In one remarkable record for the label, Groucho Marx (of all people) tells a long story whose moral is that the best jokes are those which don't make fun of anyone. Pete Seeger did do one wonderful record about how "the farmer is the one who feeds us all", but that bit of propaganda seems to have been the exception, rather than the rule.
Getting back to "I'm Dressing Myself", I was astonished and delighted to find my very own copy of the record about ten years ago, and was equally pleased to find that it was a "Young Peoples Records" release. I offer it to the world here. Unlike every other record on this label I've ever seen, no artists are named on either side of this record. Musically, the record is a wonder of sound, one of those songs which adds a new item with each verse, with a different musical answer for each item.
The same things which struck me as odd 30 years continue to bring a smile to my face today. For instance: Why do mother and son sound as if they are roughly the same age? Why do they have noticeably different accents? Isn't he far too old to not know what these items of clothing are? And the biggest question for me: why does the mother wait until after telling him that he's been putting on what are apparently the wrong clothes throughout the song to tell him that he's found his party clothes? Wouldn't he have to start getting dressed all over again?
In trying to find out more about this recording, in order to write this piece, I've been told that the singers of "I'm Dressing Myself", who as mentioned are unnamed on the label, are Artie Malvin and Lois Winters.
Coss, Coss Otill,
- Bob Purse
TT-2:33 / 2.3MB / 128kbps 44.1khz
from Young Peoples Records 78 #803-A
Andrew Lenahan writes:
Apparently "I'm Dressing Myself" has made an impact on many people. Oscar-winning actor Brad Dourif sings (well... recites) the chorus of it in his 1985 thriller "Istanbul".
Narkspud writes:
Wonderful! A Young People's Record! They, and their sister label the Children's Record Guild, are favorites of mine as well. Thrift store seekers are advised to keep an eye out for "Train to the Zoo"--credited to narrator Norman Rose and/or the Gene Lowell Singers, the musical group on it is obviously the Weavers. | <urn:uuid:ac39f7b7-90bb-4b81-b290-9f9708e648cc> | http://www.wfmu.org/365/2003/223.shtml | en | 0.983265 | 0.219847 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
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MacArthur: DeRosa expects culture change for Jays in 2014
Scott MacArthur
9/20/2013 10:18:15 PM
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BOSTON - The Blue Jays arrived at Fenway Park on Friday knowing the division-rival Red Sox needed either a win, or a loss by Tampa Bay, to clinch the American League East.
Veteran Mark DeRosa sat down with on Friday afternoon to discuss when the Jays' season went awry and the changes in the clubhouse culture he envisions for next season.
Below is the transcript of the discussion.
-- We've talked a lot about the how's and the why's of the season and where it went wrong. Let's talk about when. You look back at the final game of that June series here, Jose hit the ball off Uehara to tie the game and then there was the way the ninth inning ended and you guys lost and that turned a potential 3-4 road trip off the win streak into a 2-5 trip and it seemed to zap momentum. Is it possible that a game like that is kind of a trigger for where things went negative or is that an over-simplification?
DeROSA: Nah, I mean there are moments you can look to throughout the course of the year. I always go back to the first two weeks of the season. We got off so slow, just put ourselves in such a pessimistic-type attitude where we were expecting things to go wrong. It's just been the tale of many weeks for this team. It's had its moments of playing really great baseball and taking it to some of the best teams and best pitchers in the game and then we've had moments where we've rolled out there and done a lot of things fundamentally wrong and made mental errors that have cost us. I don't want to look back to that game because I think you're referring to the game with Josh Thole at first and there's a situation where I was jammed up with my neck. I think Adam Lind was out of the game with a tight back and Josh Thole's put in a position he's not accustomed to being in. A lot of things contributed to that one day but I just feel like it's been a six-month grind where we've seen flashes of doing things really well but not consistently enough to stay in the race. So based on that answer is it an excuse to say it's early? You refer back to early April when the tone was set. You can always recover from a bad two or three week start but looking ahead to next year it sounds like something that you would like to see tidied up?
DeROSA: I think not only Gibby, Alex (Anthopoulos), everyone involved would like to see a lot of things tidied up. Myself included. There's enough blame to go around, no doubt about that. I just think we came out of spring training with such a swagger and such expectations that our balloon got popped real early and we didn't have a stopper at the time to kind of put a tourniquet on the bleeding. (Mark) Buehrle was struggling at the time, (R.A.) Dickey was struggling at the time, we didn't have Ricky (Romero). I mean, there was a lot of things that kind of went into it. The one nice thing, even though it's negatively impacted my season because I was brought in at 38 to kind of be a sounding board and hopefully be a nice piece to a championship team, but if there is a silver lining there have been a lot of young guys come up and do some things that have really helped us. Also, there's been some great personal seasons. What Eddie (Edwin Encarnacion) did was magnificent and he did it for five months. Adam (Lind) got hot and was able to protect him but there were times where he had no protection. (He) had a great year. Colby (Rasmus) has had a great year so there have been some bright spots. Obviously the bullpen was fantastic but collectively I feel like if we want to get to where I feel this team wants to get to then there needs to be a different outlook in spring training. That sounds cultural, a culture change.
DeROSA: I think so. That's just my personal belief. I just feel like, and rightfully so, a lot of us, because of the big trades and the big names and bringing a lot of different guys together, I felt like it might have been detrimental if all of a sudden camp was just so regimented when everybody from different organizations is coming in with different ways of getting ready and preparing for the season. I felt Gibby did the right thing by giving us the leeway to prepare ourselves. I don't think we've earned the right to do that again next year so maybe they're a little more involved in spring training. You know what? (As a player,) shut up and do your job. That's kind of where I'm at. I've never been in this situation, trying to play spoiler or play out the string and I know from my point of view, I love being here, I love being in the big leagues, it's a great organization but this ain't what it's about, trying to stop Boston from celebrating on us. So hopefully these guys, I'm sure with their magic number being one, we'll get a chance to see it and maybe it'll digest and maybe it will trigger something. At spring training next year, does that mean longer hours on the field or is that mean somebody stepping up and saying, hey, there's a way we've got to go about doing this to get ready for March 31, 2014?
DeROSA: You can't leave anything to chance. I feel like you earn leeway based on performance and we haven't earned that this year. If anything, we've lost that in my eyes. That's how I was raised. If you do good, you get rewarded. If you do bad, you get punished. That being said, I don't see us getting punished in spring but I think an attention to detail will probably be a big priority. The Blue Jays and the Toronto Argonauts finalized a deal to extend the Argos' lease at Rogers Centre through 2017. They've got some opt-outs before that. Ultimately the aim here is for the Argonauts to find a new home and for natural grass to be put in the stadium. There are only two stadiums in the game, Toronto's and Tampa Bay's, that have artificial turf. Have you ever spoken to players quietly, or friends you've made around the league, who've kept Toronto at a distance in terms of free agent consideration because of the turf?
DeROSA: No. But, definitely, it's dated now. I think it does more damage. I don't know the scientific studies but I know for me, personally, it's done more damage to my body physically than playing on grass. I think, you know, the game's evolving to the point where there are some guys who can really murder the ball down your throat on that stuff. I just feel like the game was meant to be played on grass. I understand why it was turfed and I get that but I would like to eventually see, if they can maintain it in there, for it to go to grass. Being around this team, have you noticed guys have more bumps and bruises than may be typical? Because, Mark, perfect example: the turf has changed since the 80s but the Blue Jays' great outfield of Bell, Moseby and Barfield were all out of the game by 33.
DeROSA: What I notice, for me, is my lower back and knees. You go on the road for a 10-day stretch and you go back there and you give it two or three days of really pounding on it and you feel it. I mean, some guys might love it, I don't know. I certainly enjoy hitting there. I don't know if the numbers justify that. I don't think they do but I enjoy hitting there. I think it's a great ballpark to hit in. The fans have been great, to be honest with you. They really have been great for as much as I feel we've disappointed a lot of people.
I think that's the biggest thing for me, and that's what I'd like, I want the guys on the team and this is just me speaking freely because I don't know the inner makings of how everyone's head's working at a certain time but I would just like everyone to really want to be great, to want to win the AL East and do what it takes to get it done. The talent's here, we've got no one to blame but ourselves. Gibby's done a tremendous job not, I don't want to say not losing the team, but not losing himself because of expectations. I know he's taken the brunt of the fury from the fans and the media and I feel like that's been unfair but that being said, I expect there to be a different mindset next year. You're talking about being great as a team, not being individually great?
DeROSA: Not be satisfied to be in the big leagues. Try to go next level. There are a lot of people who care about what we do off the field. I've always tried to remember that. Even the days you don't feel like getting out there and grinding it out and doing all the things you need to do to get ready, you owe it to the people that come to the games and the city that supports you. You owe it to them to give it your best. I feel like we have done that but at the same time we've made a lot of juvenile mistakes that have cost us games.
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Date/Time 29 Aug 2016 6:57:23pm
I do not believe in humanism because we still haven't managed to separate nurture from torture.
(With thanks to Alan Alda.)
The only thing I'm certain of is the guarantee for Homo sapiens to stuff things up, by doing things like turning a fresh water lake into a cesspit and a garden into a desert, and extinction of entire biosystems becoming our primary legacy.
Beside the evidence of human behaviour, where the fat few live off the skinny many, and torture and discipline are simile words, and greed has become a vital need, it is easier by far to believe in God.
If I had to believe in people, and this was all there were, then with certainty I'd be damned.
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What about us little guys, huh?
Not this…
What the hell is this? A next generation console manufacturer pausing briefly to congratulate its next generation console manufacturing rival? It’s disgusting and wouldn’t happen in my day.
You can almost feel the twisting of Sony's arm and grinding of teeth behind this tweet sent in reply a week later.
Microsoft won the PR war by being the 'better man' first. Especially after Sony's wilfully sarcastic jab in Microsoft's ribs from six months prior.
This brand interaction has also led to another bizarre little trend. An entire category in the recently announced Shorty Awards (as if an awards ceremony devoted to the best celebrities on social media isn’t already a tenuous enough proposition) called Best Use of Social Media by One Brand Responding to Another Brand.
There are three nominees. The above Microsoft tweet and the following...
Snack attack by Honda
Honda introduced a new minivan in 2014, the primary selling feature apparently the introduction of a built-in vacuum cleaner.
Honda felt this would be the perfect opportunity to achieve some cheeky cross-brand marketing and tweeted the following shots across some innocent brands’ bows.
I’m not sure what LEGO did to deserve that.
The tactic was a winner though. Most brands reacted fairly swiftly with their own responses, therefore spreading the reach of the campaign exponentially. Oreo, the kings of agile social marketing, reacted with this…
Which prompted further smack-downs from Honda.
Rival brands have so far shied away from using the fact that hundreds of thousands of Honda minivans have just been recalled due to a fire risk as artillery.
Again, I’ll repeat my very first question at the top of the article. What exactly are we as followers getting out of all this? Entertainment? Novelty value? Some sort of reflected acknowledgement of worth?
Here are some of the responses to the Honda campaign from us mere mortals.
She probably has a point there.
Perhaps I shouldn’t expect an unbiased opinion from someone called HondaProJason.
Maybe we just think that by interacting with a brand we’re going to get free stuff. Tweeting two brands doubles our chances.
Of course the above examples are merely playful. There’s nothing genuinely snidey about any of these tweets. Inter-brand tweets are more often than not an exercise in schoolboy cheekiness. Sure there’s a cynical aim in extending a brand’s reach towards an audience outside of its own demographic, but this is definitely a mutually beneficial tactic if the other brand responds.
There’s still the seamy side though. The side that indulges in news-jacking, march-stealing and glory-dampening. The side that makes a brand scream “hey no fair, that was our turn to shine!”
This is the other Shorty nominee for Best Use of Social Media by One Brand Resp… you get the idea…
The most retweeted brand tweet ever by Nokia
At the very moment that Apple announced its first ever vibrantly coloured range of iPhones, Nokia, a company that has been offering a similar range of colours for a while, tweeted this at the exact same time.
Nokia’s tweet hijacked the #Apple hashtag, stole the conversation away from the iPhone announcement and became the most retweeted brand tweet ever, doubling the previous record set by Oreo’s ‘You can still dunk in the dark’ Super Bowl tweet.
As of today, the tweet has 40,085 retweets and 11,257 favourites. That’s over 50,000 people saying a great big “up yours” to Apple.
I can understand the logic of followers engaging with this tweet. Despite Apple’s loyal army of brand ambassadors, it can be a very divisive company. Plus we as humans can be a petty, spiteful bunch when hidden behind the relative safety of social media.
It’s comparatively tame compared to other Nokia missives.
Now THAT would have beaten the retweet record if it hadn’t been swiftly deleted by Nokia.
The above tweet does however prove that there is indeed a human being behind a social media channel. A human being who may be having just as bad a day as you.
Something about throwing rocks in glass houses… blah blah blah
Well it would be remiss not to highlight some of our own ‘branded conversations’.
Perhaps brands just interact with other brands for the simple reason that a head of social media is in need of some company.
For more branded social media marketing fun, check out David Moth’s 16 social media fails of 2013. Some of them aren't even his own.
Christopher Ratcliff
Published 26 March, 2014 by Christopher Ratcliff
686 more posts from this author
Comments (2)
Nicole Kohler
Great post! I think there are two things that users get out of it: amusement and a reminder that there is a human element to social media.
I laughed pretty hard at Oreo's response to Honda. I don't think their tweets were designed to be jabs, but the response they got from other brands was probably exactly what they wanted. Oreo's response amplified Honda's messaging/campaign even more, and perhaps brought it to a different audience.
over 2 years ago
Gary's Carbinated Widgets
This sort of thing is so incredibly hideous. I've had to block a bunch of 'wacky' corporate accounts to stop idiots retweeting them into my feed. There's nothing more teeth-suckingly cringeworthy than a 'zany' back and forth between 'brands'.
John's Shoe Co.
We stock ten billion shoes. Bet even @xlstoragesolutions couldn't find the space for all of them!
XL Storage Solutions
.@johnsshoeco You'd be surprised. We're bigger on the inside.
John's Shoe Co.
@xlstoragesolutions So we've heard.
Barry's Waste Compactors
Hey, stop flirting, @xlstoragesolutions and @johnsshoeco!
Etc. etc. Kerazy corporate social media personalities. Kill them all with fire.
over 2 years ago
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On Point
The End of the Two War Strategy
by Austin Bay
Ending World War II is a tough job, especially inside America's bureaucratic monument to "the big one," the Pentagon.
However, that's what the leaked demise of the "two war strategy" (leaked by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's office) means in the language of Joe and Josephine Six-Pack: World War II is over.
The world created by World War II has changed. It's time for the Pentagon, its concrete poured because of Pearl Harbor, to recognize those changes.
While preparing and positioning military forces to fight both Hitler and Tojo (or their echoes, like Saddam and Kim il Sung) once provided a useful "large-scale pattern" for building American defenses, demographic, economic, political, historical and technological change have produced new strategic conditions.
In the 21st century, preparing for "East War and West War" is at best strategically misleading. Continuing to shell out tax dollars for World War II and Cold War bureaucratic overhead (to include base infrastructure) is economic and military nonsense.
Quibblers may argue that Rumsfeld is canning the 1990s' strategy of preparing to wage "two major regional wars." Throughout the 1990s, cognoscenti spent a lot of Ivy League time parsing that strategy, which when first articulated called for "winning two simultaneous major wars."
While FDR and Churchhill agreed to defeat Hitler first (win in the European theater), then tackle Japan ("hold" in the Pacific, then after the Nazis' defeat, take the offensive in Asia), once America revved its war machine, we conducted simultaneous strategic offensive operations in both theaters.
After the brief respite of post-World War II U.S. demobilization (when the United States alone possessed nukes), Stalin's Berlin squeeze, Soviet nukes, a Communist China and then the Korean War entrenched the Cold War. In a very real sense, the Cold War was World War II's long goodbye, with U.S. and Russian troops facing each other in a divided Germany and America's direct involvement in Asian tumults the fallout of smashing Japan.
The Cold War was "East War and West War." With the Cold War kaput, America only faces one nation that could possibly prosecute a sustained, long-term, high-intensity war: China. China, however, is a giant with clay feet, riven by corruption and regional infighting.
Given China's potential, however, the UnitedStates mulls an "Asian-focused" strategy. "Win, hold, win" has also explicitly returned as an organizing principle for defense.
But 21st century threats, however, aren't "one war" nor are they "East and West." Yes, the United States might have to fight two wars at once, or more. Technology, however, has altered the compass. Instant global communications and trade-entwined economies have changed strategic calculations.
The 21st century military challenges reflect this complex array of political and economic challenges.
"Capabilities-based threats" have emerged -- for example, the terrorist with chemical and biological weapons. Rogue nations, though unable to sustain all-out war with the United States, can rattle ballistic missiles and threaten U.S. targets and U.S. allies.
Cyberspace becomes a critical theater of war. A military website I visit got hacked last weekend. The attackers claimed to be Chinese. The webmaster says he can't confirm the attackers' claim, but the site is critical of China's handling of the EP-3 incident. Small-scale information warfare? Who knows. However, a concerted digital attack on the U.S. stock exchanges is an act of war.
"Capabilities-based defense" is one way of describing the Pentagon's replacement for the "two war" construct. "Maintaining homeland security, while ensuring quick and global military reach" is another.
This new pattern places intense demands on U.S. intelligence capabilities. Military forces designed to deter and defeat multi-valent, rapidly emerging threats must be flexible, agile, fast, highly trained and well-led.
If a symbol for the "two war strategy" is two heavy broadswords, the new American defense icons might be a shield (homeland security) and a rapier (fast global thrust and strike).
The Pentagon is acquiring pieces of "the rapier force" required to execute a rapier strategy: robot weapons, stealth missiles, air-lifted mobile ground forces.
Nixing the "two war" military will help accelerate the Pentagon's process of change, moving from defending a world that was to promoting peace in a world that is.
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Unless you’ve been living in an ice chest for the past couple of weeks, you’ve probably noticed that it’s been a tad hot. Ok, really hot. Ok, really, REALLY hot. Like record-breaking hot. Just four days ago, when the heat indexed reached 110F in New York City, 188 cities across the United States broke high temperature records, and 138 more cities tied them. And if you’re thinking that it’s just your average heat wave, you’re wrong. The fact is that the weather isn’t what it used to be. The extreme highs, just like the extreme snow fall, rain, drought, flooding, and tornadoes, are because of climate change.
Palmer Drought Index June 2011, high temperatures, extreme heat, heat wave, heat wave and climate change, extreme heat and climate change, global warming
Senior Meteorologist Stu Ostro of Weather.com explained that the extreme highs are related to very high pressure in the atmosphere just a few miles above the Earth’s surface. While there have always been extremes in weather, Ostro takes pains to point out the difference between our current extremes and what has happened in the past:
What’s changing now is the nature of those extremes, and also what’s important is the context.This time, the extreme drought, heat, and wildfires are occurring along with U.S. extremes this year in rainfall, snowfall, flooding, and tornadoes, and many other stunning temperature and precipitation extremes elsewhere in the world in recent years as well as, as I posted on my TWC Facebook “fan” page, record-shattering 500 millibar heights in high latitudes. And all of this is happening while there’s an alarming drop in the amount of Arctic sea ice.
The nature and context of the extremes is the difference between the 1930s and now.
Palmer Drought Index June 1934, high temperatures, extreme heat, heat wave, heat wave and climate change, extreme heat and climate change, global warming
In the southern U.S. states like Arizona and Texas have been experiencing extreme temperatures since before summer even officially started. Because the soil has been so dry, this has made the temperatures even hotter because no energy from the sun goes into evaporating the moisture. The intense drought has cause massive dust storms, also known as haboobs, in Arizona, with one that was nearly 50 miles wide swallowing Phoenix. Just north of this, states in the Central U.S. are experiencing the other extreme: high rainfall and flooding.
Numbers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that the Earth is 1.5 degrees warmer than it was in the 1970s, and the new average normals in 48 states have gone up. Heat has become the number one weather-related killer in the U.S. Heidi Cullen, a scientist at Climate Central and author of ‘The Weather of the Future: Heat Waves, Extreme Storms, and Other Scenes From a Climate-Changed Planet,’ explains what the “new normals” mean in a New York Times Op-Ed piece:
Drawing from methods used in epidemiology, a field of climate research called “detection and attribution” tests how human actions like burning fossil fuels affect climate and increase the odds of extreme weather events.Heat-trapping pollution at least doubled the likelihood of the infamous European heat wave that killed more than 30,000 people during the summer of 2003, according to a study in the journal Nature in 2004. And if we don’t ease our grip on the climate, summers like that one will likely happen every other year by 2040, the study warned. Human actions have warmed the climate on all seven continents, and as a result all weather is now occurring in an environment that bears humanity’s signature, with warmer air and seas and more moisture than there was just a few decades ago, resulting in more extreme weather.
The snapshots of climate history from NOAA can also provide a glimpse of what’s in store locally in the future. Using climate models, we can project what future Julys might look like. For example, by 2050, assuming we continue to pump heat-trapping pollution into our atmosphere at a rate similar to today’s, New Yorkers can expect the number of July days exceeding 90 degrees to double, and those exceeding 95 degrees to roughly triple. Sweltering days in excess of 100 degrees, rare now, will become a regular feature of the Big Apple’s climate in the 2050s.
In other words, get used to it. Because the days aren’t getting any cooler.
Via Treehugger and Weather.com | <urn:uuid:0ba033f1-493d-4b83-843e-12c3f88e0a99> | http://inhabitat.com/hot-is-the-new-normal-why-high-temperatures-are-evidence-of-climate-change/ | en | 0.931121 | 0.184923 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Lincecum mostly contains Manny
Lincecum mostly contains Manny
SAN FRANCISCO -- Tim Lincecum knew he had to be a little bit inventive Wednesday night when he faced Manny Ramirez.
Typically, Lincecum doesn't mess around. He's not one of those pitchers who gets ahead 0-2 on the count then works it full by trying to hit a corner. When strike three is one pitch away, he goes for it.
But Lincecum, arguably the National League's most dynamic pitcher as its Cy Young Award winner last year, figured that it wouldn't be enough simply to go after Ramirez, widely considered baseball's most dangerous hitter. Lincecum indeed approached Ramirez aggressively during San Francisco's 9-4 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers, but the Giants ace did so with a twist.
Lincecum figured that he would vary the pace of his deliveries to Ramirez.
"High knee kick, slide-step, that kind of thing," said Lincecum, who blanked Los Angeles on three hits through seven innings before yielding three runs in the eighth. "He still put some good swings on the ball, but I was fortunate that he didn't hurt me too bad."
Consider their confrontation a standoff. Lincecum, who had never faced Ramirez, retired him in his first two plate appearances on a line drive and a fly ball, both to right field and each time with a fastball. Ramirez singled to right in his third at-bat before drawing an eighth-inning walk, which happened to end Lincecum's evening.
Ramirez said little when asked about facing Lincecum. "I don't know," the slugger said. "He's a Cy Young [winner]."
Befitting his award-winning status, Lincecum succeeded in executing his plan, though Ramirez made solid contact in each at-bat.
"We tried to make him hit the ball to right field," Giants catcher Bengie Molina said. "A couple of times, we tried fastballs away and they came back right into the middle of the plate, maybe middle-in. That was the hit he got."
Said Lincecum, "I just went with my instincts and what Bengie was calling."
Hitter vs. Heater
In his first career matchup against reigning NL Cy Young Award winner Tim Lincecum, Manny Ramirez went 1-for-3 with a walk.
1stLineout to right field on 0-1 pitch
4thFlyout to right field on 1-1 pitch
6thLine-drive single to right field on 1-0 pitch
8thWalked on a 3-1 pitch
Molina wanted to tantalize Ramirez by requesting changeups, which often function as Lincecum's strikeout pitch. But Ramirez didn't exactly work deep counts. He connected with an 0-1 pitch in his first at-bat, a 1-1 offering his second time up and a 1-0 pitch in his third at-bat before walking on five pitches in his final plate appearance against Lincecum.
"He didn't give us many chances," Molina said.
From his vantage point of playing first base for the Giants, Rich Aurilia wondered how Ramirez would handle Lincecum's array of stuff, which is virtually unmatched in either league.
"It looked to me that [Ramirez] was trying to stay inside of everything and hit it the other way," said Aurilia, a 14-year veteran. "He knows Timmy has the offspeed stuff, he knows his fastball has great velocity, so try to stay back and hit it up the middle. Manny's a great hitter. Not a lot of pitchers are going to have extended success against him. So if we can get out of that game tonight with a win and give him a hit or two, that's fine by us."
From the vantage point of the Giants' dugout, anticipation surrounding the Lincecum-Ramirez faceoffs was genuine.
"You have one of the best hitters in the game and one of the best pitchers in the game," manager Bruce Bochy said. "We enjoy those matchups."
Said Giants closer Brian Wilson, who retired Ramirez on a grounder to shortstop to end the game, "We all watch the game, but I think more eyes are going to be focused on a player of his caliber, for sure."
The Giants play the Dodgers again next weekend in Los Angeles. Barring rainouts or unexpected changes, Lincecum will pitch the May 10 series finale. Ramirez will be waiting.
| <urn:uuid:c9458cb9-8202-4f2e-b550-72a7fabc5835> | http://m.giants.mlb.com/news/article/4495032 | en | 0.981936 | 0.021378 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Fake unemployment websites used in phishing scam
The state labor department began urging furloughed federal workers to file online after thousands overwhelmed the unemployment office last week when they tried to go down in person. But fake websites began springing up, trying to get potential victims to divulge personal information like social security numbers. | <urn:uuid:e6f84935-04fa-4432-99a6-228073809e61> | http://m.kitv.com/news/Fake-unemployment-websites-used-in-phishing-scam/22345868 | en | 0.933994 | 0.799977 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Did you watch basketball this weekend instead of motor racing? So did we! Catch up on what you missed with this weekend's Rennsport weekend review.
NASCAR Sprint Cup Series
For NASCAR, Fontana used to produce awful, awful processions. This hasn't been the case for the last few years, and this weekend, that past seemed but a distant memory after an absolutely incredible weekend of racing.
The Cup race began with a series of tire issues that, unfortunately, never really went away. Even in a series where a few flat Goodyears a race is almost a norm now, today's issues were far from few and far between. The result, at least one flat about every 10-15 laps, and by extent, a yellow around that time more often than not. It marred the proceedings in a way that reminded many of the notoriously disastrous 2008 Brickyard 400, but nonetheless, constant lead changes and fascinating multi-groove racing reigned when the race was green.
With 5 to go, Jimmie Johnson lead Jeff Gordon, and it had been about 20 laps since someone last had a flat. The feeling, with victory for Johnson just 10 miles away, was that this simply couldn't keep up, and unfortunately, it didn't. The 48's left-front was the first to go, but it didn't bring out the yellow. With Gordon in the lead, four more tires blew, but the yellow was kept under wraps for one more lap. Then, with just three laps to go, third place runner Clint Bowyer blew his left-rear, spun, and brought out the yellow.
Now, the implication at this point is that everyone would need to pit for four tires before issues appear again. However, Hillman Racing/CircleSport Racing (It's like RCR, but not in any way!) driver and noted haircut haver Landon Cassill stayed out and lead the field to the green. Of course, the young CircleSport team's car was far from prepared to be in this position with fresh tires, let alone with run-old tires, so Cassill's 40 soon fell back. The result was what ultimately became a seven wide fight for the lead, with Kyle Busch ultimately passing Gordon and his brother Kurt to take the lead.
However, even after clearing the field, Busch wasn't home clear. Elk Grove, California's Kyle Larson worked through the field on the final lap, and heading into turn 3 he took a dive to the inside to take the win. It was not to be, however, and Busch ran back to the start/finish line clearly ahead of Larson to take his second Fontana Cup win in as many years.
With the win, the younger Busch joins Kevin Harvick, Carl Edwards, Brad Keselowski and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. in presumably being locked into NASCAR's first ever "Knockout" postseason.
However, it wasn't all runner up finishes for Larson this weekend...
NASCAR Nationwide Series
Before we get to this weekend's second tier NASCAR race, let me preface this by saying that Kyle Larson is one of the rare athletes to come from my native Sacramento metro area, a region most notable for having an NBA franchise that was good for like four years in the early 2000s, being compared to Cleveland and producing a lot of state-level political gridlock. Though we're not exactly small town America, Sacramento's suburban areas are still relatively tightly knit, and thus even some random racing fan like me knows the stepsister of Larson's ex-girlfriend through a community college Spanish class (Really!). Thus, I have some biases towards him, and I've had them since he first started grabbing national dirt open wheel headlines.
With that in mind, his performance in this weekend's relatively straightforward Nationwide race in Fontana was the stuff of legend. Amid yet another pre-race argument about whether or not Cup drivers in Cup equipment should be allowed to run in these races, Larson was the only competitive Cup driver to strap into a Nationwide team's car for the race. His Turner-Scott car was being run by a team that hadn't won a race in over a year and his car was being crew chiefed by a man whose last win came with Boris Said, in a previous generation Nationwide car, at a road course that the series no longer races at.
As with every Nationwide race, the event was dominated mostly by the Cup drivers in Cup equipment, in this case the likes of Kevin Harvick (Driving for the Hendrick satellite JR Motorsports team), Matt Kenseth (Driving for Joe Gibbs Racing) and Kyle Busch (Also running a JGR entry). However, after a late yellow, Busch and Harvick began to roll away from the field on their own. Soon, they were joined by Larson, and for the next 20 laps an absolutely incredible battle, one that looked like an early CART race at the same Fontana track, that saw constant overtaking, around seven workable grooves and, ultimately, the first ever Nationwide Series victory for the young Larson.
The amazing race for the win ultimately sapped all attention from the Nationwide Series regulars in the event, as Cup drivers in the series unfortunately often do, but nonetheless they too raced. After the event, Regan Smith saw his one point lead on Trevor Bayne in their championship shrink to nothing, and the two now sit tied as the series heads into it's first off weekend of the season.
MotoGP World Championship
Short on actual races as it was, this was a rather brilliant weekend for on-track racing, and MotoGP's season opener in Qatar was no exception.
Months before the season began, reigning champion (And only now second year pilot!), Honda rider Marc Marquez found himself with a broken leg, one that left him sitting out the series's final two preseason tests. Did that stop him from being competitive this weekend? Well, did anything from his 2013 season imply that he was mortal!? Of course not. Incredibly, Marquez qualified on pole!
However, he would lose the race lead almost immediately on the start, relinquishing it to Yamaha rider and fellow MotoGP champion Jorge Lorenzo. But, just fifteen corners later, Lorenzo had a massive off that lead to his retirement from the race, and the lead in turn fell to satellite Honda pilot Stefan Bradl. Just eight laps later, Bradl made a similar mistake and slid off the track, relinquishing the lead back to Marquez! Despite an incredible charge by living legend and faces-painted-on-helmets connoisseur Valentino Rossi that saw him come within 3/10ths of a second of the victory, Marquez ultimately claimed the victory, still-healing leg and all. The young Spaniard's team mate Dani Pedrosa competed the podium in third.
As you could guess, Marc Marquez leads the series championship over Valentino Rossi and Dani Pedrosa as the series prepares for it's next race, at Texas's Circuit of the Americas.
Next week, Formula 1's return returns at Malaysia, NASCAR heads to it's other half-mile wonder and IndyCar makes it's long overdue return to the limelight in St. Petersburg. Rather classically, we still don't know who will be piloting Dale Coyne Racing's #18 entry in that very race. Few things in our world are constant, but rather wonderfully, Dale Coyne seems always happy to run his team the same way. Also, there's some basketball again, if you're into that sort of thing.
(Title photo viaNASCAR's official Twitter feed) | <urn:uuid:04eacd7d-93f2-4a84-beb5-cd52f9b829ea> | http://rennsport.kinja.com/rennsport-weekend-review-fontana-has-good-nascar-races-1550168367 | en | 0.978429 | 0.023284 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
From Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia
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You can make fvwm-2 look pretty cool if you work at it enough.
FVWM, variously called the Feeble Virtual Window Manager, or Frigged-up Velcro Waste Machine, but most people simply like to fill in their own F-word in a way that describes the window manager to their tastes and emotions.
edit Design Philosophy
This window manager was created to run on top of an X-Windows server in a UNIX environment.
While windowed systems had been around for some time, by the early 90s, it was thought that icons had magical properties and pointed the way to technological progress in the future. Toolbars and icons were just the ticket to success, and if you can cram weird features into icons and taskbars you can make it do weird things, like contain a clock, or an xbiff process, or even a console. Maybe even the entire Corel Office 2000 suite can be made more compact and convenient if it was sucked into a section of a taskbar which moved out of the way when you lost the SloppyFocus by moving the mouse to the desktop area. That last feature had to be cancelled since the Corel CEO lost an arm wrestling match to the Microsoft CEO.
FVWM is one step above TWM in terms of user friendliness and delirious mass-market popularity.
edit History
FVWM was just about to take over the computing world by storm, when Rob Nation misplaced the CD-ROM containing the code of a brand new FVWM version he was just about to upload to the GNU archive back in 1995. People had to subsist on updating and debugging the version 1 code at the time, until Mr. Nation, one year later, found the CDs behind the couch. By that time, Windows-95 had caught the imagination of the ordinary user, FVWM-95, which was the next incantation of FVWM, was left behind playing catch-up, as if it were the "Johnny-come-lately".
edit FVWM-95
Feeble 95, precursor to FVWM-2: with the Start button that said "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
Windows-95 is an obvious ripoff of FVWM-95, which had now been reduced to simply attracting new users away from MS Windows with its similar interface. FVWM is credited with inventing a narrow-profile taskbar that allowed the user to turn off the computer by first pressing on a button called "Start". Early on, they noted it as a bug, but since this attracted new users to FVWM from Windows, it became a feature.
It would take hours of work to coax the look and feel you wanted from fvwm or its descendants. These days, you need to be able to coordinate several configuration scripts, which cannot be reconciled completely by their Braindead Configuration Tool (seriously, that was the name).
edit FVWM-2
FVWM-2 comes after FVWM-95, and is the current version. You can do more neat things with icons than ever before. The current version is extremely hard to configure, requiring having to know the language for a preprocessor as well as the script itself. Isn't that just uber-geeky? I knew you'd like it. You can currently swallow an xconsole in a button bar. We shall see a "Version 3" of FVWM the minute someone figures out how to swallow a blu-ray app into a taskbar icon.
edit Bug tracking
One of the FVWM man pages had this in its BUGS section (not certain if this is attributable to Rob Nation):
• Initially there were exactly 71.8 unidentified bugs. Since then 22.825 bugs have been fixed. Assuming that there are at least 10 unidentified bugs for every identified one, that leaves us with 71.8 - 22.825 + 10 \times 22.825 = 277.225 unidentified bugs. If we follow this to its logical conclusion we will have an infinite number of unidentified bugs before the number of bugs can start to diminish, at which point the program will be bug-free. Since this is a computer program \infty = 3.4028\times 10^{38} if you don't insist on double-precision. At the current rate of bug discovery we should expect to achieve this point in 4.27\times 10^{27} years. I guess we better plan on passing this thing on to our children...
It is likely that we are not quite at the peak of this bug distribution curve yet ...
edit See Also
BSD - FreeBSD | NetBSD | NetBDSM | OpenBSD
Darwin - OSX | Tiger Solaris
Applications and Documentation
People and Organizations
Personal tools | <urn:uuid:cfda50cd-0f8b-4b28-8b9a-8f5d9597c0eb> | http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/FVWM | en | 0.946779 | 0.028643 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
How Much Should I Pay For Replacing My Front Brake Rotors And Brake Pads
My brakes are going went to pep boys they said my brake pads are gone and i need to replace the pads and the rotor at the bare minimum but they said i should think about changing my front left caliper to and replace the brake pads for the back to with also the rear brake drums too how much should it cost to get it all done and what should i pay for just getting my front brake rotors and pads put on?
its a e250 1998
its a work van a 98 ford Ecoline 250 a E250
Answers for The Question
1. Mr. Knowitall
2. Roanmtman
3. Sarah
4. Wall C
5. Myhippiedaddy
6. Kelly_f_1999
7. Thresher | <urn:uuid:0c1e32a8-36dc-4f3a-b45e-ac75a58395a7> | http://www.carparts21.com/brake-suspension/brake-discs-pads/how-much-should-i-pay-for-replacing-my-front-brake-rotors-and-brake-pads/ | en | 0.89216 | 0.204892 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
This alarm clock could finally kick your awful snooze-button habit
When it comes to waking up in the morning, are you a frequent snoozer? Snoozing may give you that extra 5-10 minutes of sleep, but science says hitting the snooze button just ends up making you more tired.
Almost every alarm clock out there has a snooze setting that tempts you to go back to sleep for a few minutes, but a new Kickstarter project called Ruggie promises a clock that could jar you right out of your bad snooze habit. In fact, it doesn't have a snooze button at all.
The Ruggie is a memory-foam mat you place on the floor next to your bed. It has a built-in LED display that shows the time, and it plays a selection of standard alarm tones or soothing nature sounds to help wake you up. To turn the alarm off, you'll need to place both feet on the mat for at least three seconds, which means you'll either need to be sitting or standing up to disable the alarm.
Once you've done that, you're supposedly less likely to go back to sleep as your body will start to wake up naturally, especially since you have to actually get out of bed to reset the alarm. The controls for the alarm are housed in a hidden zipper pocket under the device, so you either have to get out of bed or pull the mat up into the bed with you to reset it.
You can upload sounds to the Ruggie like your favorite wake-up music or an inspirational saying to be said out aloud once you disable the alarm. For instance, the company's promo video has a pretty-much-perfect wake-up message from Arnold Schwarzenegger: "Ready to kick some a**? Come on! You can do it! Do it now! Have a wonderful day."
The company has already raised more than $76,000 (about £52,000, AU$110,000), far surpassing its $36,000 goal (about £25,000, AU$52,000).
Those interested can order a Ruggie for $79 (about £55, AU$115), plus $15 shipping to the US or $20 (about £15, AU$30) to the UK and Australia. Orders are expected to make it to backers in September, provided the company doesn't run into any production issues.
Or, of course, you could just build your own DIY face-slapping alarm clock that won't let you sleep in, but I'd personally rather ease into being awake than wake up to a smack in the face.
Featured Video | <urn:uuid:b4000377-2f49-4d8a-a252-a8bd03805313> | http://www.cnet.com/news/ruggie-alarm-clock-could-finally-kick-your-awful-snooze-button-habit/ | en | 0.955792 | 0.230201 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Evolution News and Views
Evolution NEWS
Is Evolution Random? Answering a Common Challenge
Evolutionists often challenge us for referring to Darwinian evolution as "random." They point to the fact that natural selection, the force that supposedly drives the train, always selects more "fit" organisms, and so is not random. That is only part of the story, though, and to understand why evolution can indeed be called random, the rest needs to be told.
Evolution can be considered to be composed of four parts. The first part, the grist for the mill, is the process by which mutations are generated. Generally this is thought to be a random process, with some qualifications. Single base changes occur more or less randomly, but there is some skewing as to which bases are substituted for which. Other kinds of mutations, like deletions or rearrangements or recombinations (where DNA is exchanged between chromosomes), often occur in hotspots, but not always. The net effect is that mutations occur without regard for what the organism requires, but higgledy-piggledy. In that sense mutation is random
The next part, random drift, is like a roll of the dice that decides which changes are preserved and which are lost. As the name implies, this process is also random, the result of accidental events, and without regard for the benefit of the organism. Most mutations get lost in the mix, especially when newly emerging, just because their host organisms fail to reproduce, or die from causes unrelated to genetics. It can also happen that new mutations are combined with other mutations that are harmful, and so get eliminated.
The random effects of drift are large enough to overwhelm natural selection in organisms with small breeding populations, less than a million, say. New mutations are not born fast enough to escape loss due to drift. There is a fractional threshold in the population that must be crossed before a new mutation can become "fixed," that is, universally present in every individual. A new mutation generally is lost to drift before that population threshold is crossed.
The third part, natural selection, is not random. It acts to preserve beneficial change and eliminate harmful ones. It can be said to be directional. But there are several caveats. Beneficial mutations are rare, and usually only weakly beneficial, so the effects of natural selection are not usually all that strong. Most changes provide only a slight advantage.
In addition, it can happen, and often does, that a "beneficial" mutation involves breaking something, meaning a loss of information, and a loss of potential improvement. This breaking can be irreversible for all intents and purposes. The premiere example in human evolution is that of sickle cell disease. Sickle cell disease is caused by a mutation to the hemoglobin gene that makes red blood cells resistant to the malarial parasite. In one copy the broken gene is beneficial (it increases resistance to malaria), but when two copies are present (both chromosomes carry the mutation), the red blood cells are deformed and cause painful debilitation. The broken gene is actually functionally worse than its normal version, except where malaria is present.
This brings out an important point. Natural selection does not always select the same mutations. The environment determines which mutations are favored. For example, natural selection acts to favor individuals carrying one copy of the sickle cell trait where malaria is present, but acts against the sickle cell gene where malaria is absent. So in this context, selection meanders over a fluctuating landscape of varying criteria for what is beneficial and what is not. Now it is beneficial to carry the sickle cell trait, now it is not. Different populations get favored at different times. In this sense one might say selection has a random component too, because only rarely is selection strong and unidirectional, always favoring the same mutation.
We see this variation in selection with another example, the evolution of finch beaks on the Gal�pagos Islands. In drought, large beaks are favored, in wet years, small beaks. The weather fluctuates, and so do the beak sizes.
Subpopulations may acquire traits, but because of environmental variation the traits do not become universal. For example, lactose intolerance -- we do not all carry the version of the gene that allows us to digest lactose as adults. Unless suddenly everyone in the world has to eat cheese as a major part of their diet, lactose intolerance won't disappear from our population.
There is a special way evolution can occur -- a sudden bottleneck in the population will tend to fix the traits that predominate in that population. Suppose a nuclear holocaust wiped out everyone except Swedes. The lactose-digesting gene would almost certainly become fixed, as would blond hair, blue eyes, and other Scandinavian traits, provided they ate cheese and lived at high latitudes. Until new mutations in new environments occurred, that would remain the case.
Now you know more about the population genetics of evolution than you imagined could be true. The sum of all these factors is what is responsible for evolution, or change over time. Mutation, drift, selection, and environmental change all play a role. Three out of these four forces are random, without regard for the needs of the organism. Even selection can be random in its direction, depending on the environment.
So tell me. Is evolution random? Most of the processes at work definitely are. Certainly evolution won't make steady progress in one direction without some other factor at work. What that factor might be remains to be seen. I personally do not think a material explanation will be found, because any process to guide evolution in a purposeful way will require a purposeful designer to create it.
Image credit: David Adam Kess (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons. | <urn:uuid:03869fdd-fdaf-4162-adec-19e22d1a3a49> | http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/10/is_evolution_ra100391.html | en | 0.940224 | 0.662543 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
History and GovernmentCongressional BiographiesIndiana
Donald Cogley BRUCE
BRUCE, Donald Cogley, a Representative from Indiana; born in Troutville, Clearfield County, Pa., April 27, 1921; graduated from high school in Allentown, Pa., and attended Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio; engaged in the radio broadcasting industry, serving as program director, business manager, and general manager, 1941-1960; elected as a Republican to the Eighty-seventh and Eighty-eighth Congresses (January 3, 1961-January 3, 1965); was not a candidate in 1964 for renomination to the Eighty-ninth Congress, but was an unsuccessful candidate for nomination for United States Senator in primary election; on leaving Congress, he helped form the American Conservative Union, a political action group; created a management and political consulting firm, Bruce Enterprises in Round Hill, Va.; died in Round Hill, Va., August 31, 1969; interment in Ebenezer Cemetery near Round Hill.
| <urn:uuid:e8788263-66c9-4f05-9bb0-9305faac2123> | http://www.infoplease.com/biography/us/congress/bruce-donald-cogley.html | en | 0.94454 | 0.02868 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
My Daughter's Homework Is Killing Me
Newest 5
Newest 5 Comments
My daughter goes to school in Southern California. And She gets hours of homework per night. Has since she was in 1st grade. While that is a problem in and of it self, the real problem lies in the fact that she has not been taught how to do the home work before it is sent home. We send her to school, pay the taxes, and for the most part, we have been teaching her for an hour our two each night. This is on nearly every subject, but mostly math. What is the point of sending my daughter to school if we are just going to teach her after she gets home.
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I teach in Canada and at my school we have spent the last few years moving away from homework. The majority of teachers in my school don't give any homework or rarely give homework. This didn't come about because parent were complaining, it came about because very few of the students did their homework. We are an inner city school and the kids are often working at least one job if not two, or going home and making dinner and caring for siblings, or a million other reasons why they don't get to it. So we just stopped the struggle. It meant marks actually went up because there were no zeroes for homework. Instead we came up with different strategies to cover things in class and have the students show us that they understand the information.
It's completely idiotic to deduct marks for not having the correct column in place, Esmee had the right answer, she met the learning outcome!
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Sometimes I see how little some students focus on getting their work done in class. Is all this homework assigned to be done at home? Or is it because she didn't do it at school?
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Pretty much all homework these days counts for a grade. Back when I was in high school only certain homework assignments were graded. I did have a math teacher that would occasionally check student's notebooks to see if they had done their homework and chastise those who may not have done it. I habitually didn't do my math homework, but when I would see the teacher start walking through class looking I would furiously start working a few problems to show I had done my work. More often than not I got caught. He would be FURIOUS and throw me out of class into what was termed "controlled study hall" (a kind of in-school detention). When he asked me why I didn't do the homework, I explained the idea of homework was to practice so I could learn the material, and as I always made an A on my exams, why did I need to practice?
In the end I found out that doing my homework in high school would have taught me better study habits for college.
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Yeah, at least where I live. A kid in my extended family has a "conditional C" in one high school class right now because of some homework not yet turned in. That kind of thing can damage a transcript for college.
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Close: I already like you guys! | <urn:uuid:2acdf2e9-5428-42cc-8d6e-4156601746a9> | http://www.neatorama.com/neatobambino/2013/09/20/My-Daughters-Homework-Is-Killing-Me/ | en | 0.988204 | 0.063071 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
NavigationGroups Object (Outlook)
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This documentation is archived and is not being maintained.
NavigationGroups Object (Outlook)
Contains a set of NavigationGroup objects that represent the navigation groups displayed by a navigation module in the Navigation Pane.
Version Added: Outlook 2007
Use the NavigationGroups property of the parent navigation module, such as a MailModule object, to return a NavigationGroups object.
Use the Create method to create a new NavigationGroup object and add it to the collection. Use the Item method to retrieve a NavigationGroup object from the collection. Use the Delete method of the NavigationGroups collection to create a new NavigationGroup object.
Use the GetDefaultNavigationGroup to return the default navigation group for a specified group type.
© 2016 Microsoft | <urn:uuid:1c7e684e-638e-47c0-8559-25fe7bd6cc19> | https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff860649(v=office.14).aspx | en | 0.651744 | 0.021814 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
"Open Source Car" which isn't
Unfortunately, some people don't realize that "Open Source" has a definition. They think it's a loosey-goosey term meaning "stuff that people like", more or less. So they apply it to anything which can be opened, like a door, or a box, or in this case, a car (english). Sorry, no. Unless they're actually publishing the design specifications, the blueprints, the CAD files for this car, it's not an Open Source car. And apparently Hilmar Simoncontacted them and no, they're not planning to give the design away to anybody. | <urn:uuid:09fa443c-d294-4ca9-8a72-08c2a5f9ca8a> | https://opensource.org/node/385 | en | 0.976069 | 0.997875 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Version 3 (modified by zshahan, 3 years ago) (diff)
Trac Ticket Conditional Validate Fields Plugin
This plugin will validate fields based on the ticket type. This plugin is similar to TracTicketValidatorPlugin with the addition of being able to validate different fields dependant upon the ticket type.
Bugs/Feature Requests
Existing bugs and feature requests for TracTicketConditionalValidatePlugin are here.
If you have any issues, create a new ticket.
Download the zipped source from [download:tracticketconditionalvalidateplugin here].
You can check out TracTicketConditionalValidatePlugin from here using Subversion, or browse the source with Trac.
defect = comment, summary
enhancement = summary
comment.rule = .*
comment.tip = Please input comment
summary.rule = [A-Z].*
summary.tip = Please correct summary
Recent Changes
13380 by rjollos on 2013-09-07 17:11:15
Corrected url in
13258 by zshahan on 2013-06-03 18:39:49
small enhancement to not validate fields when closing a ticket. ticket:none
12741 by rjollos on 2013-03-19 03:16:01
Removed empty directories.
Author: zshahan
Maintainer: zshahan | <urn:uuid:1d717ff0-0986-42db-a3e5-5ebe50f3c0e5> | https://trac-hacks.org/wiki/TracTicketConditionalValidatePlugin?version=3 | en | 0.722227 | 0.044402 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Five College Consortium
Cultural Agency
Subject Name:
Course Number:
Amherst College
This tutorial offers an intensive introduction to writings of contemporary democracy, tourism studies, and cultural agency in Latin America. We will study the role that African dance in Bahia, Brazil plays in the dynamics of social and political inclusion of marginal lives. Examining the works of cultural agents in Latin American contemporary history, we will interrogate the definition and function of cultural agency set within the context of contemporary discourses of democracy. Is democracy an empty buzz-word that re-defines the Brazilian nation internationally without really reshaping the everyday lives of individuals locally? What role do tourism and the arts play in creating venues for cultural inclusion? Is cultural inclusion synonymous with political insertion? How does violence preclude or propel political change? Within that frame, the working goal of the tutorial is to help students identify a researchable topic, master the literature presented by the professor (this includes original interviews and videos), develop a viable research design, and become comfortable with the process of academic research, synthesis, and organization. During the seminar, each student will develop a detailed prospectus for a research project.
This course is part of a new model of tutorials at Amherst designed to enable students to engage in substantive research with faculty. It is open to six sophomores. Proficiency in Spanish and/or Portuguese highly welcomed, but not necessary. Limited to six sophomores. Spring semester. Professor Suarez.
Instructor Permission:
Permission is required for interchange registration during all registration periods.
Schedule #:
Course Sections
Cultural Agency
Sect # Credits Instructor(s) Instructor Email Meeting Times Location
01 4.0
Lucia Suarez
TTH 08:30AM-09:50AM
CHAP 103 | <urn:uuid:9415f320-99f2-44ff-a6e4-6dbe9a796963> | https://www.fivecolleges.edu/courses/details/node/26633 | en | 0.852546 | 0.039568 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
American Jewish experience is not what it used to be, and neither is American Jewish fiction. During the three decades after World War II, American Jews were still making the trek from city to suburb, working to middle class, immigration to assimilation. The old country was still fresh in memory, its accents and attitudes still potent in their hold over feeling and expression. Anti-Semitism was still pervasive, the Holocaust a recent event, Israel a source of unmitigated pride. The American Jewish writers who emerged during those years gave form to those experiences (and to those of a still earlier time, the prewar decades during which they had grown up) with a power and virtuosity that brought them to the front rank of American letters: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick and, in authorized translation, Isaac Bashevis Singer.
But over the past three decades, the dense particularity of American Jewish life has, outside the Orthodox community, largely disappeared. No one speaks Yiddish anymore, or even English that sounds like Yiddish. There may be suburbs with a lot of Jews, but there are no Jewish suburbs as there were once Jewish neighborhoods. With Jews as senators and governors and Ivy League presidents, the wounding, binding sense of exclusion has melted away. Communal institutions remain strong, traditions are still cherished, but American Jewish experience is now, by and large, simply American experience. Jewish mothers don’t say “Ess, ess” anymore; they say, “Do you want me to call Sophia’s mom to make a playdate?”
While there are young Jewish writers aplenty, no important voice has emerged to speak about contemporary Jewish life. Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, perhaps the finest recent novel by a young Jewish writer, is not about being Jewish at all; it’s about the quintessentially American subject of race. But there have always been Jewish writers who have chosen to speak about things other than being Jewish (most notably, in the Bellow-Roth generation, Norman Mailer and J.D. Salinger). What’s really telling about the current state of Jewish fiction is that even those prominent young writers who do speak about Jewish experience don’t speak about contemporary experience.
In other words, they don’t speak about their own experience. The most celebrated of these authors are probably the two under review here and Jonathan Safran Foer. Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated reaches back to the Holocaust and the grandparental generation (as does Daniel Mendelsohn’s acclaimed recent memoir The Lost). Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is set in New York and Prague during the war; his new novel, a work of counterfactual history like Roth’s The Plot Against America, in an imaginary Jewish autonomous region in the Alaskan panhandle. About half the stories in Nathan Englander’s PEN/Malamud Award-winning For the Relief of Unbearable Urges are set in the Orthodox world of his youth, but the two strongest are allegorical tales of European persecution, and his new novel takes place in Argentina during the “dirty war” of the late 1970s.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this, but the phenomenon does cry out for explanation. It’s hard enough giving reasons why someone chooses to write something, let alone why he chooses not to, but Chabon’s work offers a clue. The narrator-protagonist of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, is the son of a Jewish gangster. The narrator-protagonist of his second novel, Wonder Boys, is a gentile married to a Jew, and his account of her family’s Passover Seder draws its brilliance and wicked humor from his outsider’s defamiliarizing gaze. Chabon’s detective novella The Final Solution centers on the relationship between a young German-Jewish refugee and Sherlock Holmes. Gentlemen of the Road, the tale just serialized in The New York Times Magazine, follows a group of adventurers in the tenth-century Jewish kingdom of the Khazars. It’s safe to say that Chabon likes his Jews exotic or, more to the point, wants to recharge Judaism with a sense of the exotic, a sense that the horizon of Jewish experience is wider than the boundaries of middle-class American life. As for Englander, who grew up on Long Island, he recently quipped in an interview about his new work that “in terms of personal experience, my only other option was to set this novel at the Roosevelt Field mall.”
My own experience tells me that American Judaism has long been beset by a deep sense of banality and inauthenticity. To the usual self-contempt of the liberal middle class is added the feeling that genuine Jewish life is always elsewhere: in Israel or the shtetl, among the immigrant generation or the ultra-Orthodox. Jewish culture as lived by the non-Orthodox tends to feel bland and thin even to its practitioners–the last, worn coins of a princely inheritance. (To those who have fled Orthodox backgrounds, like Englander and myself, that very different milieu tends to feel, for all its traditionalism, spiritually dead.) The most visible of the current generation of self-consciously Jewish novelists appear to be avoiding their own experience because their own experience just seems too boring. What is there to say about it? Better to write about a time or place where there was more at stake.
That’s certainly what Chabon does in his remarkable new novel. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union invents an entire world out of whole cloth, one almost comparable in scope to the Republic of Costaguana in Conrad’s Nostromo, though Chabon’s models were more likely the science fiction he’s talked about having loved since he was a kid. The district of Sitka, we’re given to understand, was set up in 1940 as a refuge for Jews fleeing Hitler. Since then, it’s maintained uneasy relationships with the Alaska Natives, with American Jews and with the American government itself, since the settlement was only ever intended to be provisional. But with Israel, in this universe, having lost its war of independence, the Sitka Jews, forbidden from entering the United States proper, have nowhere else to go. In their sixty years of existence, they’ve built up a complete Yiddish-speaking society on their narrow strip of gloomy coast. Since this is a hard-boiled detective story, we tend to see that society’s underside: cops, gangsters, hookers and junkies; historical events like the Shavuos Massacre and the Synagogue Riots; Sholem-Aleykhem Park and Max Nordau Street; the Polar-Shtern Kafeteria and Bronfman U.
Reading the novel is like wandering through a dream where the State of Israel has been crossbred with Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles and 1930s Warsaw. We encounter the familiar Jewish sociology of Yekkes vs. Galitzers (Jews from Germany vs. those from Polish Galicia), the religious semiology of needlework yarmulkes vs. velvet yarmulkes vs. black hats. A cop is a “shammes” (watchman), a detective a “noz” (nose), a cellphone a “Shoyfer.” The slang for “fellow” is “yid.”
The wit and brio of Chabon’s inventiveness are unfailingly delightful, but he’s also playing a deeper game. Sitka is Chabon’s laboratory for creating something that never had a chance to exist in the real world: a modern Jewish society that embodies the spirit of traditional European Jewish life–its language, its mentality, its ways. Israel was founded as a historical break with Diaspora (hence, among other things, the revival of Hebrew as an alternative to Yiddish), and its establishment as a haven and beacon created a discontinuity of experience within the Diaspora itself. Even the Diaspora is no longer the Diaspora. But in Sitka, it is. Chabon’s model world is an arena for exploring the Jewish psyche under conditions of purity and pressure that don’t exist in real life.
For Sitka’s Jews aren’t just ghettoized and concentrated; they are also on the verge of expulsion. The novel is set on the eve of “Reversion,” when the district will go back to Alaskan control and its 2 million Jews will be left scrambling to find the next land of exile. The story begins in classic hard-boiled fashion, when a dead body is discovered in the flophouse where Detective Meyer Landsman, our embittered but oddly noble antihero, has been making love to a bottle of slivovitz since splitting with his wife. But as Landsman starts to pull on that one thread, the whole story of Sitka and Reversion begins to unravel. The anonymous corpse turns out to be connected to a sect of ultra-Orthodox gangsters, in turn connected to a series of shady operators and shadowy figures intent on finding a Messiah to lead the Jewish people out of Alaska and into the Promised Land.
This is, of course, the eternal Jewish situation: poised between the sea and a pursuing host, praying for deliverance. And not just literally. Chabon shoves his Jews up against the edge of the world because that’s where Jews always are. “But there was always a shortfall, wasn’t there?… Between commandment and observance, heaven and earth…Zion and Jew. They called that shortfall ‘the world.'” And so in this story, too, the father’s impossible demands for perfect obedience: Abraham’s of Isaac, God’s of the Children of Israel. And so also the disillusioned melancholy, the mordant humor: “Like most of his mother’s compliments, it was convertible to an insult when needed”; “‘What my husband tells me,’ she says, making it sound rhetorical, like the title of a very slim tract”; “his body emits a weary sound, a Yiddish sound, halfway between a belch and a lamentation”; “It’s Messiah…. What else can you do but wait?” The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is about no Jews who have ever lived, but it is one of the best novels in English about what it means to be a Jew, and how it feels.
In fact, the book is so good not despite taking place in an imaginary world but because of it. Chabon has gotten into trouble before when he’s tried to re-create a historical situation he hasn’t experienced himself. Kavalier & Clay, which lists more than forty consulted sources in its “author’s note,” never succeeds in making its world seem more than secondhand. This is obviously a minority view–the book was a huge bestseller–but never for one minute did I believe its characters were fully real. The materials may all have been there, painstakingly assembled, but as with the golem who appears in its pages, the magic formula was missing that would quicken them to life.
I mention this only because the same problem besets Englander’s new work. The Ministry of Special Cases also lists a healthy number of sources in the back, seeks to re-create a time and place of which its author has little or no firsthand knowledge and feels, to me at least, imaginatively dead. Englander has said that he didn’t spend much time in Argentina researching the book, and I believe him. The story concerns a Jewish couple searching for their teenage son, who has been “disappeared” by the regime, and given its subject matter and its author’s reputation, I wouldn’t be surprised if it receives rave reviews. But though the streets and the buildings are all, undoubtedly, accurately described, there’s little sense of the human world they once represented. The novel focuses so narrowly on Kaddish, Lillian and their son, Pato, that the social milieu in which they live–which is much harder to work up from books than other kinds of historical particulars but is ultimately what gives a character specificity and depth–remains unrealized. We don’t know how this world smells or sounds, can’t feel the weight of the characters’ histories, never find out who Kaddish and Lillian’s friends are, or ever were. Aside from a couple of minor figures, the characters remain one-dimensional, the whole situation largely schematic.
The Jewish and Argentine parts of the story are also essentially unrelated. Kaddish is an hijo de puta, a son of a whore, and a child of Buenos Aires’s old Jewish underworld, and as such he is shunned by the respectable members of the community. But those upright citizens, or at least the ones who also have underworld roots, do have a use for him: They pay him to chisel their forebears’ names off their tombstones, lest anyone start drawing unwelcome connections. When one of his customers, a plastic surgeon, can’t afford the bill, he pays by giving Kaddish and Lillian free nose jobs. The symbolism is not hard to decipher: These Jews are all chipping away at their identities, effacing their Jewishness so as to fit the profile of gentile, anti-Semitic Argentina. But Pato’s disappearance, though Englander seems to want us to read it as a parallel effacement, has nothing to do with any of that. He’s not arrested because he’s Jewish, he’s arrested because he’s a leftist, and Kaddish and Lillian are not stymied in their pitiable efforts to retrieve him because they’re Jewish either. Nor is their response to the tragedy significantly inflected by their Jewishness, though Englander makes some largely symbolic gestures in that direction (including the choice of Kaddish’s name). The two parts of the story exert little creative pressure on each other.
Another difference between these two novels is their language. In literature, style is the main transmission cable of imaginative force. Whether a novelist can conjure feeling and compel belief rests less on what he or she tells us than on how. Chabon’s vivid style is charged not primarily by his alert diction or tight syntax or ear for idiom or even by his keen sense of humor but by his prodigious talent for simile and metaphor. Consider the following passage, in which the figures of speech have been italicized:
He stands by the window, watching the sky that is like a mosaic pieced together from the broken shards of a thousand mirrors, each one tinted a different shade of gray. The winter sky of southeastern Alaska is a Talmud of gray, an inexhaustible commentary on a Torah of rain clouds and dying light. Uncle Hertz has always been the most competent, self-assured man Landsman knows, neat as an origami airplane, a quick paper needle folded with precision, impervious to turbulence. Accurate, methodical, dispassionate. There were always hints of shadow, of irrationality and violence, but they were contained behind the wall of Hertz’s mysterious Indian adventures, hidden on the far side of the Line, covered over by him with the careful backward kicks of an animal concealing its spoor. But now a memory surfaces in Landsman from the days following his father’s death, of Uncle Hertz sitting crumpled like a wad of tissue in a corner of the kitchen on Adler Street, shirttails hanging, no order to this hair, shirt misbuttoned, the dwindling contents of a bottle of slivovitz on the kitchen table beside him marking like a barometer the plummeting atmosphere of his grief.
The density of figuration is unusually high even by Chabon’s standards, though not by much. Its brilliance is not unusual at all. The most elaborate of these figures, “Talmud/Torah,” grows out of the novel’s thematics, but the rest take their range from everyday experience (Chabon is clearly someone on whom nothing is lost) and seem to come to him (but undoubtedly only seem to) as easily as breathing. Each radiates implications and associations–Uncle Hertz’s persona as artfully self-fashioned; Uncle Hertz as an unclean, cunning beast; the snot and tears of grief–that amplify the literal, linear sense of the passage. This is how Chabon gives his writing its reach, by continually unfolding half-conscious extensions of feeling and meaning in every direction.
Englander’s prose, by contrast, is prostrate. Sometimes it’s not even grammatically correct. Dangling participles are a specialty of his; this sentence manages to pack in both a dangling participle and a misplaced modifier: “The table itself was upholstered in fine leather and padded, so that in jotting down the names twice Kaddish’s pen poked through.” (What exactly do book editors do these days?) More often his writing is simply clumsy or unclear or flat. After more than 100 pages of clanking preliminary exposition, the novel does finally start to wake up with Pato’s disappearance, especially in a series of confrontations in which Kaddish and Lillian vent their rage, sometimes improbably, at figures of authority. Englander’s writing gets better at this point, too, as if he’d finally reached the part that interests him.
But he also violates, late in the game, the novel’s point of view–which had been confined after Pato’s disappearance to one or the other of his parents–in order to convey certain information about the young man as well as to inject a spurious note of lyricism into the proceedings. This isn’t just a technical matter; the story’s dramatic tension had depended on our sharing Kaddish and Lillian’s ignorance of their son’s fate, but then Englander decides to try to have it both ways. I don’t think Englander’s first book, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was nearly as good as everyone said–its two allegorical tales are strong, but its half-dozen stories of contemporary Orthodox life lead up, in my view, to some pretty feeble epiphanies–but it was certainly better than this. Given that it’s been eight years since the previous volume, it’s safe to assume that Englander ran into a lot of problems with the new book, and if so, many of them were never solved. The novel feels like it was written in handcuffs.
There is one respect in which Englander’s book has the advantage over Chabon’s, and that has to do with the writers’ choices of genre. Chabon has spoken frequently about his love of “genre” fiction–horror stories, ghost stories, spy stories and so forth–and it is clearly part of his project to reclaim those forms for serious literature. His last four works all make use of such forms: the hard-boiled detective story here, the genteel detective story in The Final Solution, the adventure story in Gentlemen of the Road and the fantasy story in Summerland, a novel for young adults. There are also strong genre elements in Kavalier & Clay. A born storyteller, Chabon handles the conventions in each case with practiced skill, and in at least two cases, here and The Final Solution, he succeeds in endowing his adopted forms with the significance of high art.
But the new novel also shows the limits of his project. Throughout its history, the novel has refreshed itself by drawing from the well of popular fiction. Cervantes appropriated chivalric romance, the airport novels of his day, in founding modern European fiction with Don Quixote. Jane Austen began her career by rewriting the Gothic and sentimental novels of the late eighteenth century. James Joyce makes use of popular forms at several points in Ulysses. The appropriation of genre conventions infuses serious fiction with the energy and exuberance of popular writing. It reconnects high art with the novel’s eternal source in sheer readerly pleasure, serving as an antidote to academic effeteness, snobbish fastidiousness, solipsistic introspection and arid formal experimentation. No wonder the practice largely stopped with Joyce–most novelists since have been too nervous about being taken seriously to be seen trafficking with low forms–and no wonder Chabon wants to revive it.
The difference between him and Cervantes, Austen and Joyce is that the older writers all made use of popular forms in the spirit of parody. They didn’t simply reproduce them; they rewrote them so as to appropriate their energy while simultaneously marking their limitations. In each case, they used the falsifications of ossified conventions–the improbability of chivalric romance or Gothic fiction, the emotional mendacity of sentimentalism–as a springboard to a reinvigorated realism. The novel has continually renewed itself not by embracing genre fiction but by arguing with it. Here, Chabon lets himself get trapped by it. The novel’s plot keeps you turning the pages, but because the conventions of its chosen genre are so firmly established, its surprises are entirely predictable: The dick will run afoul of his superiors but press ahead nevertheless; the dick will fall into the bad guys’ clutches but get rescued at the last minute; the dick will solve the murder, and turn his life around, in the final chapter. The profundity of Chabon’s exploration of Jewish themes remains after the novel is over, but as with any detective story, the appeal of its plot evaporates once you learn how it turns out. And in the last chapters, because of the conventions Chabon has imposed on himself, his story gets away from him. Once the dimensions of the plot Landsman uncovers expand from the local to the geopolitical, the detective framework can no longer contain them, and the biggest events, which necessarily happen offstage, simply cease to seem real.
There’s a more fundamental problem with Chabon’s generic choice. Because the novel’s plot moves are prescribed by its genre, the characters’ choices are similarly prescribed. Freedom of will and uncertainty of fate, the constitutive features of the novel’s existence as an arena of moral reflection–the constitutive features of any serious narrative art–are absent. The outcome is fixed rather than open, and the story drives the characters instead of the reverse. (It’s no accident that, as Chabon has pointed out elsewhere, the common characteristic of all genre fiction is a strong plot.) But in The Ministry of Special Cases, the very essence of Kaddish and Lillian’s situation is that they don’t know how events will turn out, or even how to influence them. They wake up every day having to decide what to do to try to get their son back, and they don’t even know if their efforts will make things worse. This is the novel’s one strength: the sensitivity with which it traces the agonized process by which a mother and a father, individually and often at cross-purposes, try to wrest a child, or at least an answer, from a faceless and brutal bureaucracy.
This is not, as I noted, a particularly Jewish dilemma, and I half wonder why Englander felt the need to make his characters Jewish at all, especially since, given their estrangement from both the Jewish community and Jewish tradition, there’s so very little that’s Jewish about them. As for Chabon, it is telling that the rich complexity of Jewish meanings he manages to develop in an invented Jewish Alaska he has not thus far shown any faith in being able to locate in contemporary Jewish America. His novel is a stunning act of imagination, but it underscores all too clearly the extent to which American Jewish experience, insofar as it possesses the kind of density necessary for it to function as a substrate for fiction, is receding, precisely, into the realm of the imaginary. | <urn:uuid:d723083c-aeb0-48a4-953e-990efe9a7655> | https://www.thenation.com/article/imaginary-jew/ | en | 0.963437 | 0.05789 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Spend Like a Pirate Day
Why do we Americans continue to carry around drab $1 bills, struggling to cram mushy, wrinkled paper into vending machine readers, when we could carry gleaming, clinking, golden doubloons?
Admire the gleam and the weight. This is the proper sensory experience for money!
I just found out you can buy boxes of 250 coins directly from the mint. Granted, there's $5 shipping, so you're paying $255 to get $250, but your credit card kickback should cover that. Then you can eschew that lame ATM for months! Let's face it, you only use cash for little purchases these days anyway. Make every cash transaction enjoyable!
When you receive your coins, feel free to run your hands through them several times, purring, "Arrrrrr! Thar's treasure for ye, me mateys!" Do NOT, however, bury them in a sturdy wooden chest and draw a map with a dotted line and an X. I know it's tempting! I want to do it, too! But the point is to get more of these beauties into circulation.
oraclenerd said...
So this one time, in band camp...i mean Australia, I started throwing pennies into the fountain, only to realize that they were $2 pieces that resembled pennies.
D'gou said...
Getting $ coins was always a special effort from my local bank; they claim it's hard for them to get the coins and they had to save them for me instead of being able to order them; not sure what to believe about that.
Harrrr! No more skulking about bank lobbies! No more buying books of ten first class stamps with larger bills just to get the coins in change... | <urn:uuid:d80a8704-8f49-4e4c-84ed-082597ca0805> | http://catherinedevlin.blogspot.com/2009/08/spend-like-pirate-day.html | en | 0.962332 | 0.27182 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
This diagram shows the object table Customer_objtab as containing objects of type Customer_objtyp. The non-scalar attributes of a customer object, varray PhoneList_var and column object Address_obj, are expanded to show their respective fields and datatypes.
The figure is a graphical representation of the CREATE TABLE Customer_objtab statement and the description of the Customer_objtyp type that precede the figure in the text. | <urn:uuid:e99a3d12-43c4-4d52-9d2d-be60543e2c6e> | http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B19306_01/appdev.102/b14260/img_text/adobj008.htm | en | 0.807759 | 0.792846 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Silencing the Scientists: the Rise of Right-wing Populism
2011•03•02 Clive Hamilton Australian National University
Last month, Americans were shocked at the attempted murder of Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the killing of six bystanders. The local County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik captured the immediate assessment of many when he linked the attempted murder to the rise of violent anti-government rhetoric and imagery, observing, “The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous.”
The same hate-filled rhetoric that created the circumstances in which Gabrielle Giffords was gunned down also stokes ferocious attacks on climate scientists and environmentalists in the United States. Debunking climate science is official policy at Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News; a leaked memo from management has instructed reporters to always cast doubt on data reporting global temperature increases.
Some of the bitterest attacks on climate scientists are made by commentators employed by Fox News. Fox ranters Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity often ridicule climate science. Glenn Beck calls global warming “the greatest scam in history” and gives air-time to Christopher Monckton to attack the work of climate scientists as fraudulent with his unique blend of statistical gobbledegook, invented “facts” and off-the-planet conspiracy theories. The network sometimes features Steve Milloy, an energy lobbyist who ran the The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, a front group initially devoted to denying the link between smoking and cancer. As James Hoggan points out in his book Climate Cover-Up, Milloy is introduced as an expert on “junk science”, meaning climate science.
Another Fox regular is Marc Morano, the former aide to Republican Senator James Inhofe, founder of the most malicious anti-science blog, and the man who said climate scientists deserve to be publicly flogged. Last April on Fox News, Morano launched a virulent attack on Professor Michael Mann of Penn State University, calling him a “charlatan” and responsible for “the best science that politics can manufacture”. When Morano singles out a climate scientist for attack on his website he includes their e-mail addresses and invites his followers to “get in touch”. Many of them do.
Last year I wrote a series of articles detailing how Australia’s most distinguished climate scientists have become the target of a new form of cyber-bullying aimed at driving them out of the public domain. Each time they enter the public debate through a newspaper article or radio interview they are immediately subjected to a torrent of aggressive, abusive and, at times, threatening e-mails. I have spoken to Australian climate scientists who have upgraded security at their homes because of threats from climate deniers.
The exposé of cyber-bullying was immediately picked up in the United States where the phenomenon is even worse. Scientific American gave it prominence and, in Britain, Nature did too, and many more stories of intimidation emerged into the light of day. Several scientists confirm that the volume of abuse reached a peak in the months after the Climategate story broke in November 2009.
Dr Kevin Trenberth, head of analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, turned over to university security 19 pages of “extremely foul, nasty, [and] abusive” e-mails collected in the four months after the Climategate storm broke. Another prominent climate scientist had a dead animal dumped on his doorstep and now travels with body-guards.
Stephen Schneider, an eminent climatologist at Stanford University who died a few months ago, said last year that he had received hundreds of threatening e-mails. Exasperated he asked: “What do I do? Learn to shoot a magnum? Wear a bullet-proof jacket?” He believed that a scientist would be killed, adding: “They shoot abortion doctors here”. They shoot Congresswomen too. When his name appeared on a neo-Nazi “death list”, alongside other climate scientists with apparent Jewish ancestry, the police were called in. Schneider said he had observed an “immediate, noticeable rise” in e-mails whenever climate scientists were attacked by prominent right-wing US commentators.
Paul Ehrlich was quoted in Nature saying: “Everyone is scared shitless, but they don’t know what to do”. The story noted that the bullying and threats intensify after anti-climate science rants from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Marc Morano and Steve Milloy. Except Limbaugh, they are all either employed by Fox News or appear often on the network.
Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame said the same about the hate mail he had received: “I’m not comfortable talking about the details, especially as some of these matters remain under police investigation,” he said. “What I can say is that the e-mails come in bursts, and do seem to be timed with high-profile attack pieces on talk radio and other fringe media outlets.”
The most influential “fringe media outlet” vilifying scientists is Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. Cyber-bullies and Fox demagogues are not the only ones out to punish Mann for his work. Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has attempted to use state fraud laws to force the University of Virginia to release huge volumes of documents and correspondence in an attempt to show malfeasance by Mann when he was employed by that university (he is now at Penn State). Cuccinelli claims that Mann had defrauded taxpayers in seeking grants for his research, but had no evidence to convince the court to grant subpoenas. A lawyer for the American Association of University Professors has said that Cuccinelli’s suit has “echoes of McCarthyism” and will deter others from undertaking climate research.
Official harassment
The campaign of harassment against scientists took a sinister turn last year when Oklahoma Republican Senator James Inhofe called for some of the world’s most eminent climate scientists to be investigated for criminal violations. A document prepared by his staff on the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works claims scientists mentioned in e-mails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia are guilty of manipulating data and obstructing its release. It lists federal laws they may have violated and names 17 climate scientists whom Inhofe claims should be investigated for possible criminal prosecution.
The accusation of criminality against leading climate scientists takes the denialist campaign of harassment and intimidation to new depths, and immediately conjures up images of McCarthyism. In November 2009, Inhofe’s fellow Republican Congressman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin wrote to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) demanding that scientists whose names appear in the stolen CRU e-mails be blacklisted from all further work with the IPCC.
In an editorial last March on cyber-bullying, Nature reported on Senator Inhofe’s attempts to criminalise climate scientists before commenting: “As a member of the minority party, Inhofe is powerless for now, but that may one day change.” That day came last November with the mid-term elections in which the Republicans, powered by a surge of support for the Tea Party, won a majority in the House of Representatives. Before the election Climate Progress noted that “every single GOP [Republican] Senate candidate now either denies climate science or opposes even the most moderate, business friendly, Republican-designed approach to reducing emissions”.
With the elections, both houses saw a flood of new representatives who are climate deniers. “Of the freshmen Republicans … 36 of 85 in the House and 11 of 13 in the Senate have publicly questioned the science.” McCarthyite congressman James Sensenbrenner is now the deputy chair of the House Science Committee, which plans to investigate the veracity of climate science.
“I personally believe that the solar flares are more responsible for climatic cycles than anything that human beings do,” Sensenbrenner said, as if the role of solar flares were a matter of personal belief and had not been thoroughly investigated by climate scientists. Suddenly Senator Inhofe appears less isolated and fanatical.
A series of inquiries has exonerated the scientists whose e-mails were stolen, and affirmed that there is nothing in them to undermine the science. If you read them, what the hacked UEA e-mails reveal is the enormous external pressure climate scientists work under. They show they have constantly been accused of being frauds and cheats; their work has been twisted and misrepresented; and they have been bombarded with vexatious freedom-of-information requests orchestrated by denialists.
[quote quote=”It’s certainly very off-putting for scientists who want to talk about their stuff in public but fear the political consequences.” author=”NASA scientist Gavin Schmidt” type=”text” ]
In short, they were caught up in a hot political debate that they did not really understand or want to be part of, yet they were the target of savvy, secretive and ruthless organisations ready to pounce on anything they said or wrote. This is the real story of Climategate. Instead, the scientists in question have seen their professional reputations trashed in the world’s media for no cause. After the media storm and a series of death threats, the head of the Climatic Research Unit Dr Phil Jones was driven to the point of suicide.
Moves are underway to suppress the dissemination of climate science. Last year the South Dakota legislature passed a resolution calling for “balanced teaching of global warming in the public schools of South Dakota”, the type of resolution that now sees creationism taught alongside evolution in some states. The draft resolution noted that the climate is affected by “a variety of climatological, meteorological, astrological, thermological, cosmological and ecological dynamics”. The inclusion of “astrological” and “thermological” effects suggests a woeful understanding of science.
Last February the Utah House of Representatives passed a resolution rejecting climate science. One supporter of the Bill said “environmentalists were part of a vast conspiracy to destroy the American way of life and control world population through forced sterilisation and abortion”. In January of this year a bill titled the Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act was put to the Oklahoma legislature that would require teachers to challenge theories including evolution, the chemical origins of life and global warming.
The culture war
That global warming has been made a battleground in the wider culture war is most apparent from the political and social views of those who reject climate science outright. Among those who dismiss climate science, 76 per cent describe themselves as “conservative” and only three per cent as “liberal” (with the rest “moderate”). They overwhelmingly oppose redistributive policies, programs to reduce poverty and regulation of business. They prefer to watch Fox News and listen to Rush Limbaugh.
Like those whose opinions they value — shock jocks and television demagogues — climate deniers are disproportionately older, white, male and conservative — those who feel their cultural identity most threatened by the implications of climate change. While the debate is superficially about the science, in truth it is about deep-rooted feelings of cultural identity. This makes deniers immune to argument, and their influence will wane only as they grow old and die.
Creative Commons License
Silencing the Scientists: the Rise of Right-wing Populism by Clive Hamilton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Clive Hamilton
Charles Sturt Professor of Public EthicsAustralian National University
Clive Hamilton is Charles Sturt Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics based at the Australian National University. He has held visiting academic positions at Yale University, the University of Cambridge and the University of Oxford. Professor Hamilton has published on a wide range of subjects but is best known for his books, a number of which have been best-sellers. His last book, titled Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change, was published by Earthscan and Allen & Unwin in 2010. His new book, Earthmasters: The dawn of the age of climate engineering, was published by Yale University Press and Allen & Unwin in February 2013.
Join the Discussion
• John22
How are we supposed to believe the Climate Science stuff when you start out lying about the guy who shot Rep. Gifford? He was a Left-Wing extremist, who wrote publicly how much he hated conservatives and George Bush.
“According to MSNBC, the assailant was an unstable “left winged, (and) liberal” ideologue, according to friend Caitie Parker. “She Tweets: “As I knew him he was left wing, quite liberal. & oddly obsessed with the 2012 prophecy” and “well for the Bush/Kerry election we all wore ‘1 term president’ buttons. That election was huge to us.” The assailant’s favorite books included the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.
According to relatives in Arizona the assailant was, “an atheist who is well know for his support of Global Warming causes and Al Gore”.”
• Subtleties are lost on John22, it seems. The lead paragraph is not to me inferring Jared Loughner is a right-winger or a climate change denier, but is rather trying to make a point about the dangers of rabid anti-anything. However, hmm, a thought did just occur to me that the “stokers” of both the anti-govt atmosphere that may have lit Loughner and the anti-climate change science gang may indeed be the same.
• GoFigureXXX
“Anti-climate” ? The whole premise of the accusation of hatred by “anti-climate” people is based on the fact that anthropogenic global warming is a serious problem. There is no evidence of that. While it would be silly to believe that humanity does have some influence on almost anything, in the case of global warming, it’s been warmer, for longer, during the Medieval Warming Period. The warmists have no explanation for that – not even abloe to accuse humans. Read my google-doc, if interested.
• DataJack
And you are wrong. What happened during the middle ages is not germane to this (and, incidently, we CAN explain it – just like we can explain the “little ice age”). In your paper, you say the rising temperatures “paused” at “around 1995”. That is an easily debunked lie (
CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
Greenhouse gasses do warm planets.
We are pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere now than ever before.
The last decade was the hottest decade on record
Last year was the hottest single year on record (tied with 2005).
Arctic ice is shrinking.
All of these are facts.
How much of a problem it will cause is the only thing still debatable. Right now, signs are looking like “quite a problem”.
• SteveA
CO2 is a greenhouse gas. No contention.
Greehouse gases do warm planets. Agreed. The debate is over exactly how much they contribute to warming. All past predictions of where the temp should today have far exceeding the actual warming. So the models have exaggerated the sensitivity.
We are indeed pumping CO2 into the atmosphere now than ever before. This means nothing since the sensitivity of the atmosphere to CO2 reamins in question.
The last decade was the hottest decade on record. True, if you believe NASA GISS’ adjustment algorithm (which I do not). Again, however, this means nothing. We have been in a warming trend for over 150 years, long before the significant burning of fossil fuels. So, even if it is the warmest on record, it is quite possibly a continuation of something started long ago.
Last year was the hottest single year on record. See comment above.
Artic ice is shrinking. False. Arctic ice was shrinking up to 2007, mainly due to winds and warm waters entering the Arctic ocean from the North Altantic. It has since reversed and ice has been added steadily for the past 3 years.
• GeoffG
The so-called Medieval Warming Period was not as warm as where we are now. It also wasn’t a global phenomenon, some parts of the Southern Hemisphere were cooler for some of this period. Even so, though the consequences of the warming were benign in Europe, it disrupted many societies, caused famines in China and droughts in North America. It was caused by eccentricities in the Earth’s orbit and wobbles in its rotation. Such eccentricities cannot explain the currently observed warming. Moreover, the current warming is a global phenomenon, and is well established and accepted by people who can weigh up scientific evidence in an un-blinkered and impartial way. Sure, we would very much like this not to be the case. It would be really nice if the Earth wasn’t warming, if the polar ice wasn’t melting. It would be really nice if we could go on living as if there was no tomorrow. But “shooting the messenger”, metaphorically speaking, is not a mature way to face reality, though it is a human enough failing. One shudders to think that some could take the phrase literally. Let us hope that the “denialists” will get over projecting their wishes onto reality and have the humility to learn and face facts.
• There is only one thing I can say about your post GoFigure, but it is impolitic. What I would like to point out to the other posters is that 9 people “liked” your comment. This points to a social network that actively works counter to science, which is the point of the original article above.
There was a debate up to 2005. Sorry but it’s over and has been for years. The “debate” is just an echo in your heads.
• TheShadow
Bob – The point of Clive’s article is denigration of anyone who holds an opinion different than your own without seeking civil engagement. Implying that skepticism, the cornerstone of the scientific method, is “counter to science” is the epitome of ignorance for how science advances. GoFigure made what he believes is a valid empirical observation. Your comment, far from addressing his, quite simply denigrated him. Welcome to the world of cyber-bullying.
And, quite contrary to your comment, the scientific debate is alive and well. Fortunately for us all, despite being massively outfunded, skeptics continue holding the pro-CAGW community’s feet to fire for their terrible record of data analysis, data adjustment, predictions, and pronouncements.
• DataJack
Sigh. Look, it doesn’t matter what this article says. It doesn’t matter who says what, or who believes what. The only thing in science that matters are the facts. For you to “not believe the Climate Science stuff” because a journalist in an online opinion piece got the details of a shooting wrong is ridiculous.
The facts about global warming are available, and irrefutable. It is impossible for a cabal of scientists to “fake” something like this, because other scientists would see right through it. That’s how science works. Ignore the politics. Ignore the ramifications, even. Cap and trade doesn’t mean a thing. Utah’s goofy laws don’t meant a thing. Follow the evidence.
• HaroldVanner
Pretending that these are facts because “facts are facts” doesn’t wash. Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas. So is H2O. here is a big difference between stating that “arctic ice melt” is a fact and “artic ice melt is caused by increases in CO2 output by humans” is a fact. Serious scientists do not diddle with the data to bend it to their preconceptions. On the other hand, logic tells us that bad data does not prove global warming is NOT caused by humans. The diddled data simply does not prove anything at all. Why are hundreds if not thousands of scientists opposed to this conclusion? It is because we do not shut down industry that supports human life because the IPCC says so. We need new clean data, examined and re-examined by responsible scientists. First good data. Then, good logic. This is how you get good conclusions.
• SteveA
“The facts about global warming are available, and irrefutable.” Seen the “facts”. They are refutable.
“It is impossible for a cabal of scientists to “fake” something like this, because other scientists would see right through it.” That’s what skeptical scientists have been trying to point out but CAGW proponents are simply not listening. Whether its Mann’s disingenuous pasting together of tree ring data and thermometer data to “hide the decline” and generate an erroneous global temperature profile; to Keith Briffa’s selection of Russian tree data that that showed warming (when the full data set did not show the same); to the NASA GISS adjusted data showing warming when rural data does not show the same; to the idea that a single temp measurement can be applied to an area hundreds of miles in diameter; to the refusal to comply with FOI requests; to the continual downward revision of future temp predictions; to the ever changing storyline that drought, flood, record hot, record cold, no snow, snow are all caused by AGW, the history of CAGW “science” is littered with deception, analysis error, and statistical sleight of hand. That people still defend these guys is astounding!
• Harry W2
I don’t understand how people like you still don’t believe in climate change despite the huge amount of evidence in proving it. I bet you think creationism is right and not evolution, vote republican, and are against immigration even though ninety per cent of your population is immigrant-descended.
• SteveA
Climate change is real. Always has been. Always will be. Plenty of evidence to prove this. There is simply no irrefutable data that support CAGW. And save the personal slurs. Despite being wrong on every count, I’ve heard them all before. It simply goes to show that Clive is totally wrong and that CAGW proponents started and continue to support cyber disparagement.
• RickinSC
I think Phil Jones was driven to the point of suicide because he was caught manipulating and destroying data, his reputation and life’s work trashed, all for the sake of gavernment grants, not because of any threats to his life. If he was proud of his work and viewed it as honest, I doubt he would’ve considered suicide.
• Johan
Cite your sources. Multiple investigations have showed that no data was altered. No data was destroyed. The only indication of his suicidal thoughts are your claims and based on how far from the truth your other claims are I have huge doubts.
Why do denialists need to lie to back up their opinions? Either cite your sources or admit you are wrong.
• TheShadow
Johan – You are correct, no data was altered. But are you really that naive? The hockey stick was supposedly based on tree ring data. But when that data implied a near-term temperature decrease, the decreasing portion of the data was eliminated and substituted with near-term, increasing temperature, thermometer data to give the appearance of a consistent temperature record. Hence the “hide the decline” statement from Phil.
Please, have a go at attempting to justify such an obvious lack of scientific integrity.
• Rehaines77
Phile Jones himself and this article refers to his contemplating suicide. It is well known that original data upon which findings were based was either destroyed, deleted or lost.
• jeff
Pretty funny you wimpering about incivility while calling climate skeptics “deniers” in a direct and disgusting link to the holocaust. Additionally, you bring up Joseph McCarthy without admitting that he was correct in that our govt was filled w/ dirty commies like yourself. The science you speak of is flat out GARBAGE based on “climate models” that can give you any results you choose and are not duplicated when real events are programmed in. The hockey stick is top notch science you say? Really? Leaving out a several hundred year span of climate in the middle ages to “prove” unprecidented modern warming is OK? Really? How about the data E Anglia U used to base it studies on magically being lost or destroyed. Do most scientist destroy their data? Why wont any of you experts debate anyone in public. Do you feel any shame for the blood on your hands by using billions of $ to perpetuate your scam that could have been used for clean water, food and health care for the worlds poor….shame, shame, shame on you sir.
• Johan
No data was destroyed. Cite your sources or back off from making false claims.
• TheShadow
From The Sunday Times
November 29, 2009
Climate change data dumped
Jonathan Leake, Environment Editor
No one will really know if it was incompetence or malice that led to the raw data being destroyed. But destroyed it was.
So now, Johan, feel free to apologize.
• Zelia3
Leake is a well know liar he admitted it himself and has been totally discredited,you should read more and not watch Fox News you may though I doubt learn something
• SteveA
Fine. As a CAGW proponent, you should have no problem contacting UEA and have them make the raw data available to you. Simply do so and post it. Until then, the data is presumed lost and your position is unsupportable. And, please, grow up and stop the cyber-bullying.
• Mymy
Mr. SteveA. How can you accuse others of bullying when you are the one who seems to have come back here so many time to only disagree with anywone who has different opinon than yours?
• Skeptic2011
For so long, any view which desented from the orthodox Warmist view was attacked, now the playing field has been somewhat leveled by the Internet. Climategate showed how being a Skeptic, or simply presenting both sides of the issue would result in having your career threatened.
Science should be challenged, and the challenges should be welcomed, not suppressed.
• Johan
Climategate turned out to be nothing. Multiple investigations have concluded that nothing was done wrong. No data altered, no data destroyed. How is it that you are so certain that those things happened when the facts say otherwise?
Honest people can deal with the facts. How do you deal with them?
• RickinSC
Climategate turned out to be nothing as long as you believe the whitewashes and the left wing media.
• Dear Rickin, Jeff & Skeptic2011…
Measurements show that burning fossil fuel is dramatically increasing levels of CO2. in the atmosphere. Satellite and surface measurements show that extra CO2 is trapping heat that would otherwise escape out to space. Many verified (by a large body of observations) warming patterns are consistent with an increased greenhouse effect. The whole structure of our atmosphere is changing and though while yes, there are still a lot of unknowns (because since when are scientists in any field all-knowing? do neurologists know more about the brain than climate scientists know about the climate? have cancer specialists solved cancer?) most of us, whether we are skeptical or not, know that the evidence for human caused global warming is not just based on theory or computer models (or conspiracy theories about grants or such nonsense) but on many independent, direct observations made in the real world.
And finally, to further clarify the difference for you, most skeptics also know how to actually debate an issue, rather than just denying a POV that scares them (or which they have some vested interest in denying). Scepticism as one of you kindly points out, is the very basis of science and still does go on in the climate science field, despite all the deniers who claim that any dissent is ignored. No, it’s only the nonsensical denial without basis that intelligent people find tedious, until it turns scary.
So my final question is the one most of us non-scientist skeptics ask your types: can you find the courage to actually say something to discount all the tons of evidence available? For personally I haven’t seen any convincing study to disprove that climate change is underway and that our activity has contributed. And certainly, any of us who can read know where to verify the facts and confirm your disinformation for the lies that it is.
• Scotthastings
Carol, nobody forces me to pay taxes to a neurologist or cancer specialist. That is why they call it the “practice” of medicine. Your lack of understanding of this difference underlines your inability to infer that man is warming the planet.
None of us care what climate scientists do with their time. For all I care, they can study the effects of little green martians in the middle of the earth and publish studies and have conferences. Just don’t make me pay “dues” for your little club. That’s all.
• Johan
Paying taxes or discussing the cost of climate change has no bearing on whether climate change is occuring. That is just a cowardly attempt to change the discussion from climate change itself to the cost of doing something about it.
If you cannot deal with the facts surrounding climate change itself then your desire to change the subject is perfectly understandable. If you can deal with those facts then changing the subject would be silly.
• Gcwilliams
Start with “Slaying the sky dragon” Then simply review temperature, co2 and Solar activity graphs.
If you still believe the AGW myth after that, you base it on faith alone.
• Oh yeah, you guys are working so hard to convince me. LOL & goodnight.
• GoFigureXXX
Convince you? Didn’t you spin out that long initial blurb, or was that some other “Carol S”?
• Johan
So you are right and all of the people doing the measurements and data analysis are all part of a vast conspiracy. What else could it be? Do you really imagine that thousands of scientists are just spontaneously forming a conspiracy to hide the facts when random dudes on the internet can see right through their so-called lies? Either you have a vastly overinflated picture of your own intellect or you form your opinion on global warming as if it were a religion.
Please don’t stop taking your meds. Anyone that disconnected from reality is potentially dangerous.
• RickinSC
It’s not really a conspiracy, but a lot of people believing in an ideology, scientists on the gravy train, mainstream media following a story that sells, etc. There are lots of reasons why so many people are wrong about Climate Change, and most of it is ignorance. Why is this climate change any different than all of the others that happened over the thousands of years of human history? Well, we have politics and worldwide mainstream media now.
• GoFigureXXX
Tons of evidence? The increase in CO2 which can be attributed to industrial activity amounts to 2ppmv per year. Total level of CO2 is about 390 ppmv. It’s still a (very trace) gas. Water vapor is also a “greenhouse” gas, and is 50X more prevalent. The CO2 level has been many times higher in the distant past, much higher during 3 ice ages, and much higher going into one ice age. The only correlation found between CO2 and planetary temperature is the reverse of Al Gore’s claim. CO2 variations, very similar to temperature variations, FOLLOW temperature by some 800+ yearw. That’s the nature of the carbon cycle. Rather than speak in generalities, which is no ifferent than politiss, look at this google-doc (by me):
• Peter3127
Using terms like “show” in capitals shows an unquestioning acceptance. That is in the realm of religion. It is hard to debunk religious views.
Nobody is denying that the climate is changing. Of course it is. Always has, always will.
All good science requires questioning of the data. Good science demands that questioning occur from the raw dat forwards. It is not good enough to embolden your text, and your argument in passive acceptance.
• When it comes to debunking religion, yeah you have a really really good point as I don’t know what on earth possessed me to engage in this senselessness!
• Johan
Naturally good science demands questioning. However what you are doing has nothing to do with science. Denialists don’t base their opinions on the science or they wouldn’t be using deception. They wouldn’t need to make false claims about the data because they would be basing their opinions on the data rather than the other way around.
Can you justify thinking that the vast majority of scientists in the relevant fields agree with AGW and that it tends to be cranks and people out of their field who disagree? There is some cognitive dissonance going on in your brain. You have to believe that the cranks are right just because you agree with their conclusions.
If your side of this argument has good scientists on its side why are they the horribly overwhelmed minority and why do they tend to be out of their field when speaking about climate change?
How do you justify your cognitive dissonance to yourself?
• Ken
What a gullable fool you are believing in the global warming scam. Lets take Co2, did you know everytime you exhale you put out 40,000 ppm of C02 that cames from air-sacks in your lungs? We are to worry about 390 ppm of Co2 in the atmosphere, I do not believe I will. Polar Bears are doing fine, both poles have plenty of ice. New Zealand has re-done thier temperture and have found NO warming in the last 150 years, but before that was done they were manipulating data and of course it showed a warming (lie). I profess right now all of man-made global warming is simply manipulated data.
• Johan
Ice is down on both poles. The NZ temp data found warming. You are either woefully misinformed or a liar.
Back up your claims with proper citations. That ought to be enough to convince people whether you are a liar or just wrong.
• Insider
NZ’s NIWA found ONE rouge Fool Dr Jim Salinger, part of the ClimateGate, Adjusted real Data for NO reason other than to form a trend which in fact did not exist… Lies will always teach you that these people, their agenda, there beliefs are all for sale, basically educated criminals with a price!.
• RickinSC
Spoken like a true MSNBC lefty believer. The “dramatic increase” of CO2 you mention is a whopping 2ppm(parts per million) per year, not proven to be totally due to humans. Even if you assume that the 110 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1880 is totally due to humans, that is still only 0.00011 as a fraction of the atmosphere, a little more than 1 part in 10,000. Tell me how that small fraction accounts for the little over 1 deg F of global warming we have seen over the last 100 years or so.
• LOL, spoken like a true copy-paster. Thanks for sharing this little “inappropriate denominator” trick. Bait on, bait on.
• RickinSC
I’m sorry, but some source must be spreading this idea that we are “dramatically” or “exponentially” increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere, because I’ve heard this several times from believers. Maybe it’s in the Global Warmist’s Bible. I was wrong to blame MSNBC since I have no idea where it comes from.
• Johan
I think it comes from your mind. Please cite your sources of any reputable person in the relevant scientific fields making any such claims.
If (and when) you fail, please be a man and admit it.
Honest people have no problem admitting when they are wrong or misinformed.
• Rehaines77
I said I don’t know where it comes from. I keep hearing it from liberal Democrats. They seem to be on the same page, so it must come from somewhere. Maybe you can tell me!
• RickinSC
Here is an article that refers to the “compound growth” of CO2. I’m sure there are others.
• LOL. As you well know, we were asking for the source of your calculation, Rick, not the quote.
• SteveA
No one doubts or is trying to disprove that climate change is underway. With all due respect, you make it sound like our recent temperature increase something extraordinary when it is not. There have been numerous periods in Earth’s history when temperature rose as fast, or faster, than that of the late 20th century. The question is then, given that the recent temperature rise is within natural variation, how does one know what is natural and what is human? Extracting a human signature from the data is no easy feat. And again, with all due respect, you make it sound as if its quite simple when it is not. Neither does anyone doubt that man has some effect on the climate through the burning of fossil fuels. The questions that remain unresolved, though, are how much is caused by said burning, how much is caused by other human actions (i.e. land use), and how much is caused by as yet unaccounted for natural factors? That is why we need to explore as many avenues of possibility instead of settling on CO2 alone.
There is indeed data that supports the theory of AGW. But there is also data that conflicts. Dr. Mann ran across just such data in his Bristlecone Pine proxy temperature reconstruction. The most recent data implied a temperature decrease when an increase was expected. However, instead of publishing this data and attempting to deal with the inconsistency, he eliminated this data and added thermometer based data that showed an increase. The result was the now infamous (and erroneous) Hockey Stick. This is an act of dishonesty on which CAGW proponents and skeptics should agree. The data should speak for itself. If data is eliminated or filtered, it should be noted in the analysis and explained. And, in accordance with the scientific method, all data and analysis code should be freely dispensed to anyone asking in order to (in)validate the results.
To a lesser degree, this same issue snared Dr. Briffa. He was given a subset of Yamal tree ring data. This particular subset implied a late 20th century temperature rise. However, when the entire dataset was analyzed, the temperature rise was not nearly as impressive. Personally, I believe Dr. Briffa was diligent in the analysis of the data he was given. That it gave an inaccurate picture of the climate history of the area was not his fault.
The land-based temperature record of NASA GISS holds a special place in skeptic’s hearts. Dr. Hansen’s continuous adjustment of this data should give anyone pause. While an analysis of the entire dataset, performed by a pro-CAGW resource, found no inconsistencies in the data, it was very easy for a single skeptical investigator to gather the raw data from numerous city-based measurement locations. This data was compared to raw data from more rural-based measurement station located within 150 miles of the city locations. The result was not surprising. Where the city data showed a noticeable increase, the rural data did not (i.e. the Urban Heat Island effect). Dr. Hansen’s supposed solution to this issue was to apply an adjustment based on the nighttime light generated by city/town in which the measurement station was located. To no one’s amazement (skeptics that is), the overall temperature record was elevated. Knowing that rural data is far less contaminated than city data, one is left to wonder why city data is not simply emliminated or, at least, adjusted down by the well-known UHI factor that was previously used in the NOAA dataset.
So, whether it’s CAGW proponent’s contention that the Arctic is still melting (it stopped in 07 and has been increasing), that the melting that did occur was/is caused by AGW (it was caused by wind and warm water from the N. Atlantic)), that Katrina was caused by AGW and was the poster child for future, more intense storms (global occurrence and intensity of storms are at an all time low), that sea level rise is accelerating (it is rising but decelerating), or that the decrease in snow on Kilimanjaro is caused by AGW (it was/is caused by deforestation), scientific investigation has shown that the predictions and pronouncements of CAGW proponents simply do not stand up to scientific investigation and scrutiny. It isn’t that skeptics refuse to believe that mankind is having a significant impact on climate, it’s just that CAGW scientists have not presented a bullet-proof analysis.
My personal opinion based on my investigation to date. The warming that began with the ending of The Little Ice Age was the start of a trend that has continued to today. The ups and downs along the way correlate quite nicely to the roughly 60 year cycle of ocean oscillations, especially the PDO (CO2 contributes little). I have not found anyone who can identify the source of the trend but, if this observation holds true, we can expect Earth’s temperature to remain relatively flat for the next roughly 20 years (the PDO turned negative around 2000). However, if the temperature increases during this period and all natural factors can be eliminated, I will be among the first skeptics to suspect CO2.
• Hi Steve. Thank you for your efforts to continue to engage in this discussion but… after this note, I’m afraid I’m going to have to bow out. I am not a scientist, as I have said before. However, the research that I do tend to follow is obviously not the same as yours/what you read. For example, when it comes to your contention that “given that the recent temperature rise is within natural variation, how does one know what is natural and what is human”, I believe scientists who say that natural climate change in the past proves that climate is sensitive to an energy imbalance. Currently, CO2 is imposing an energy imbalance due to the enhanced greenhouse effect. Past climate change actually provides evidence for our climate’s sensitivity to CO2. Also, though there’s no point getting into a whole Mann debate with you, I believe that, since the orig hockey stick paper in 1998, there have been a number of proxy studies analysing a variety of different sources including corals, stalagmites, tree rings, boreholes and ice cores. They all confirm the original hockey stick shape: the 20th century is the warmest in the last 1000 years and that warming was most dramatic after 1920.
So you see, essentially I think we should just agree to disagree, as I (for one) seem to be one of the majority who psychologists say tend to gravitate towards things that back up what they already believe. Since I was a teen (confession: that means over 20 years), I’ve thought that we humans are acting like proverbial pigs on our host planet and a) that there is no need for it and b) it will come back to bite us, eventually. However, I, like most people I know who are concerned about climate change, do not believe it will be a snap catastrophe of any kind, so I admit to being perplexed by your insistence on using the C before the AGW. But then nor do I believe that humans are entirely to blame and the climate wouldn’t be changing without our impact, hence even the AGW part strikes me as a misnomer.
But I guess, speaking of labels, some might call me a hippy or a lefty or whatever they want because I personally don’t mind if emissions are taxed or the economy suffers because of gov’t spending on environment, or grants are given to those investigating alternatives to genetically modifying food crops as a means to boosting food production, to give some broad examples. That’s because I believe that in the end, such costs will be less than cleaning up whatever messes such measures were taken to prevent.
So wow, now I realize it’s been a quarter century that I’ve spent wondering when everyone else was going to start to see things the way I do. Now you see how far I am stuck in my ways…
• This key insight deserves highlighting:
“…climate deniers are … those who feel their cultural identity most threatened by the implications of climate change. While the debate is superficially about the science, in truth it is about deep-rooted feelings of cultural identity.”
So long as one’s sense of self is at stake – particularly when that sense of self is narrowly defined – then there is no reason for these people to abstain from doing whatever it takes to “protect” themselves, which by extension means defending against any and all threats to their ideological plank.
The status quo thus has an amazingly effective individual and collective insurance policy to maintain itself. Taking that to its logical end, it would seem that the ecological floor has to fall out from under these folks (and everyone and everything else) before they change their behavior.
The good news, though, is that in seeming proportion to the entrenchment of this old guard, there is emerging an increasingly influential counter-force of ecologically-aware people who, blessedly, have more expanded senses of identity, and are responding accordingly.
May these latter individuals and groups prevail for the Earth’s sake.
• Thanks Alan, for bringing sanity, as usual. :-))
• GoFigureXXX
Silencing the scientists has indeed been the operative word, but the only people deserving of that title have been the skeptics. However, as Lindzen of MIT says, to be called a skeptic, the issue in doubt must at least be plausible, and it isn’t.
• climate123
The hockeystick graph is garbage science, any red noise put into the model gives a hockey stick shape. The “confirmatory” studies used the same flawed data used to derive the original flawed result. Climate models are pure conjecture. To paraphrase the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, they are “not even wrong”.
• SteveA
@ Alan Zulch – CAGW theory is flawed …. badly. Green solutions are flawed …. badly. Your view of your opponents is flawed …. badly.
Skeptics of CAGW are not opposed to change. We ARE opposed to change that creates economic turmoil on the basis of a theory that is still in dispute.
Finally, get off your moral high-horse of being more ecologically aware and having an expanded sense of identity. You’re just another exasperated CAGW proponent.
• Johan
Back up those claims with proper sources. Try to do it in a manner that doesn’t wind up implying a massive conspiracy by scientists all over the world.
Cranks (feel free to look up the word) hate the facts. When the facts disagree with a crank’s opinion the facts must be wrong. Please take a little time and try to back up your claims. When you fail and need to resort to conspiratorial thinking you will see my point. You may not learn from it but you cannot fail to see it.
• SteveA
I learned long ago that providing sources to those like yourself is a waste of time. You are hopelessly consumed with disdain for skeptics and beyond consideration of the most simple of CAGW data conflicts. Feel free to insult at will, though. It only goes to prove my point.
• Mark In Arizona
Dear Mr. Hamilton,
The really really cool thing about science is that it stands on its own. It didn’t matter that the consensus of Catholic Cardinals and Bishops in Galileos’ time was that the earth was flat and the center of the universe. Ultimately science won the day. Your diatribe full of pejorative statements about those who doubt human caused global warming is irrelevant. The answer is simple. All you have to do is post videos of you in a fair public debate with Marc Morano where you utilize your immense scientific prowess to make mince meat of Mr. Moranos’ lack of scientific knowledge. Prove to the world in a moderated scientific debate that Mr. Morano has mash potatoes between hi s ears rather than brains. It proves itself.
The simple fact is that the leaders of the global warming movement have let you down. Al Gore should obliterate Christopher Monckton with his vast scientific superiority. Michael Mann should humiliate his critics with an avalanche of data that proves his point.
Diatribes like the one you have published here only cause those of us who doubt you to become more convinced that the science is not on your side. Simple videos would prove your case but I fear that ois too much to ask because you know they will fail to convince the public. If you know they would succeed they would be everywhere for all of us to see.
• Pahaley_2000
Time is on our side, as it was in the 1970’s. They make sweeping predictions about how the climate will change for $$$, and then they quietly just go away because they are eventually proven WRONG like ALGORE. Funny thing, the same morons, e.g. Holdren, have no shame and will surface again when their crowd calls on its political soldiers.
• Insider
The only problem with your thinking is that one little lie, Mann hockey Stick, Al Gore Polar Bears, proves the whatever is said is irrelevant and more of the same Lies. QED!
• Imonaboat2
I’ve never met a truly science or math literate person that’s bought into the AGW. CO2 has increased as a percentage of the atmosphere by 0.01% in 150 years and the UN thinks they have grounds for world domination through carbon policy.
We’re not buying it, no matter how hard you tyranny loving media people try.
• Johan
I think you are lying. I have a scientific education and many friends who are practicing in their fields. I find that they are much more likely to believe than not to.
What do you base your lies on? How much scientific literacy do you have? Why make such ridiculously false claims? Do you expect that people will let you lie and never call you on it?
Why do denialists lie so often if they are so sure they are right? Cognitive dissonacne!
• James
You have got to be kidding! It was climate alarmists who thought it was a good idea to blow up children who weren’t taking action against global warming! It is left wing ideologists who have a track record of inciting violence against those who do not agree with them. Just look at the violent anti-globalisation rallies. Once again your are showing how blind you are to reality.
• marknotaras
99% of PUBLISHING CLIMATOLOGISTS agree that climate change is happening and that it’s because of humans.
I repeat, 99% of publishing climatologists agree that climate change is happening and that it’s because of humans.
And although there is much more to learn, the right and courageous thing to do is to trust those who are experts and take a prudent, risk-averse approach. Let’s limit our impact on the planet by developing sustainable lifestyles and improve the human condition at the same time.
• SteveA
I have no issue with limiting our impact on the planet, developing sustainable lifestyles, and improving the human condition. But this study was one of the most misleading ever.
One should also consider that there is precious little (if any) funding for research into natural factors affecting climate change. If there is no funding, there is no research. If there is no research, there is no publishing. Hence, the results of this study are nothing more than a reflection of the funding bias toward CAGW.
• No research on natural factors? I’ve heard the sun’s a (no-pun-intended) very hot research topic these days.
• SteveA
Very true, Carol. But this study removed the responses from anyone studying the Sun.
• Steve, I “did my own research” and found the source of that ninety-whatever% McCandless based his graphic on:
It turns out that your statement is incorrect: the study did not remove responses from scientists who were not climate-specialized (nor did it remove the non-publishers), in fact respondents came from a variety of fields: geochemistry (15.5%), geo- physics (12%), and oceanography (10.5%). General geology, hydrology/hydrogeology, and paleontology each accounted for 5–7% of the total respondents. Approximately 5% of the respondents were climate scientists… Results show that overall, 90% of participants answered “risen” to question 1 and 82% answered yes to question 2.”
So much for Johan’s hopes.
• SteveA
Carol, I am contending that the study results are wrong, per se. Only that the questions asked and the funding make the results predictable. The questions:
This question is meaningless with regrad to CAGW. We have been in a warming trend since exiting the LIA. Frankly, I am surprised the results weren’t 100% risen.
At what level did each scientist consider contribution significant? 90%? 50? 20% And was each scientist considering only the contribution from CO2? How about other GHGs not generated from fossil fuel burning? How about land use changes?
I will also go back to my statement that the overwhelming majority of funding goes to those who support AGW/CAGW (just try getting funding to support skeptical research). So, the demographics of the respondents is obviously going to be skewed towards those who support CAGW.
The approach of this study is so vague, it’s virtually meaningless.
• Johan
Back up your claims, Steve.
Denialists often resort to deception and rarely if ever back up any of their claims. I hope you prove to be different.
• SteveA
As Gavin Schmidt told me many years ago, “Go do your own research.” I did. And this what I told Carol regarding this study, in a civil manner. If you have done your own research and are satisfied that CAGW is real, then engaging you is pointless. But, please, feel free to fling around the denialist/deception meme. It only serves to show that Clive’s assertion is wrong and that CAGW proponents, not skeptics, were the first to engage in and continue to promote bullying, cyber or otherwise.
• Tania_N3
I would agree with some of the above commentators that the tone of the above article by Mr. Hamilton, whilst no doubt driven by frustration, does little to win over those who doubt AGW. However whilst reading the article, and even more so the comments that followed it, it struck me that all of these arguments may to some extent be missing the point. I agree that there is always a need for robust debate around issues of such great significance of these, and I for one, though I am not a scientist, welcome any well-founded and well-intentioned criticism of the findings of climate science. That said, I have several points to make:
1. There seems to be a general disagreement with the whole idea of ‘climate science’, as in the climate is not something that we should concern ourselves with studying scientifically as we have not yet ‘perfected’ our models and apparatus of measurement- this seems to me very short-sighted. Our very survival, and that of all life on earth, depends on the climate which sustains our biosphere. I would think that the very least we can do is attempt to understand our natural life-support system in whatever way we can. So climate science is not yet perfect. No science is perfect. It is perfected through trial and error, rigorous tests and falsification -all of which is on-going in the AGW debate. And on a side note to Scott Hastings, I do not know your nationality but your supposition that you are not ‘forced to pay taxes’ in order to fund neurological or cancer research seems dubious. Here are the web links to government expenditure on cancer research programmes for the US and UK, paid for by your taxes, no doubt:
2. As many commentators here have already asserted, including Peter 3127, the climate is changing. Now whether you believe that these changes are man-made or not, there cannot be any doubt that they are happening and that they will affect us, to a greater or lesser extent. I think that this is something on which we all agree, and even sceptics who make reference to the medieval ‘heatwave’ must conclude that if they believe this then they also must believe that climate change is at the very least cyclical. If these changes are occurring, doesn’t it make sense to research into methods of adapting and mitigating against the worst effects of them? In medieval times perhaps similar things were happening (rising flood waters, increased drought, intensification of the water cycle) and no doubt many people died. We are now in a position to be able prevent a great deal of these climate change related deaths, yet there are some who would focus on whether or not climatic change is ‘our fault’ over how we are going to protect ourselves from it. People who argue with paying carbon taxes(some of which goes into investing in green energy and reducing emissions, some if which is used for adaptation and mitigation funding) might like to consider how much more expensive it will be to repair the damage from climate change related natural disasters, rather than to try and prevent them. Australia has just introduced a ‘Flood recovery tax’ after the recent devastation there, which has so far cost the economy 5.6 Billion Aussie Dollars. Something to think about if grumbling about carbon tax is your biggest concern…
3. Peak oil is a reality whether you like it or not. Fossil fuels are a finite resource and will run out. It makes sense to invest in green energy so that we can provide enough to meet the needs of the estimated 9 billion people who will be living on this planet by 2050. Non-green industry causes pollution (not just GHGs) that imperils the lives of the 1 billion people on this planet that are directly involved in subsistence agriculture. If you are of a right-wing bent then perhaps the argument of domestic energy security is more appealing to you then the idea of generally improving the welfare of the human race. And it is true that energy independence will give you greater political and economic independence, especially from the Middle East. Either way, investing in green energy will create jobs and improve the condition of the environment. Again, those who object to being ‘forced’ to pay evil carbon taxes might like to note the cost of clearing up the gulf oil spill.
Lastly, ‘Jeff’, your comment likening the use of the term ‘climate deniers’ to that of ‘holocaust deniers’ is frankly absurd. The term climate ‘sceptics’ can be applied to people who are intellectually rigorous in their examination of the facts but do not rule out the possibility of climate change. They are ‘sceptical’ but not outright denying the possibility of AGW, which is an understandable position. However, people who deny that climate change is even happening regardless of man’s involvement in it are climate deniers- a perfectly acceptable term and nothing at all to do with the holocaust, despite the fact that you see see a clear and exclusive relationship between the word ‘holocaust’ and the word ‘deniers’, a connection that I have never before heard made. This is a semantic argument but an important one, as sensationalism must not be allowed to detract from facts and constructive debates around this topic. However I must say that calling the author of the text a ‘commie’ compounds the impression that you have little constructive to contribute to this discussion, and does nothing to enhance your argument.
• SteveA
A very civil comment to a very contentious issue. From the skeptic view, thanks for the respect. For that respect, I will maintain the same in my comments.
1. The climate is indeed something we should be concerned with, regardless of one’s position on CAGW. I also agree that science moves forward “through trial and error, rigorous tests and falsification.” That has been a big part of the contention in this debate. It is well documented that pro-CAGW scientists have actively worked to prevent skeptical scientists from acquiring their data in order to verify or falsify their results. Further, pro-CAGW scientists and their supporters in the professional media have actively worked to prevent the publication of the skeptical view. This is NOT the way science is supposed to work and has given rise to an understandable assumption that pro-CAGW scientists are either agenda-driven or do not want their work scrutinized because there is something not quite right.
2. Agreed. I do not know of any skeptical scientist who does not believe in climate change. Skeptics have always held that there is no such thing as a nominal climate and that research into adaptation is more valuable than research into prevention as there is no unified belief that CAGW is settled science. At this time, carbon taxes make no economic sense. It would raise the cost of energy which would be very painful for the poor. Subsidies to green energy are a waste of money. Solar panels and wind turbines have no chance of supplying base load power at a national level, due to their intermittance of supply. Finally, given that there is data that both supports and undermines the idea that CO2 drives temperature to a worrisome degree, subsidizing or adding regulation to reduce emissions is uncalled for.
3. Agreed. Fossil fuel will run out…someday. It is always an excellent idea to diversify our energy supply sources, applying each source in a way that matches the utilization mode. While solar panels and wind turbines are poor options for national base load power, they are excellent choices in certain application, and should be used. I disagree with your implication that energy usage, domestic or otherwise, and the welfare of the human race are mutually exclusive outcomes. The increase in both living standards and lifespan are highly correlated to increased energy consumption. I would agree with any call for a voluntary national campaign to increase energy efficiency and conservation. Put before the American people and industries as an, “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country” goal, I believe this country could make great strides without regulation or subsidy. I also dispute that green energy will also be a net job creator. Using Spain as a prime example, the manipulation of the energy sector by the Spanish government eliminated over 2 jobs for every green job it created. Green energy must stand on its own to create and elminate jobs through the market force of creative destruction.
The term ‘deniers’ was indeed used and compared to the holocaust in pro-CAGW publication in the past. Whether the whole of the pro-CAGW community meant or means it this way in the present may be disputed. But the fact that it was once used in this context makes it hard to accept its meaning in any other way. Kinda like waving the Confederate flag around and saying it is being done in support of State’s rights.
I applaud your acceptance that at least some skeptics have approached this issue from an intellectual, data-driven perspective. I hope you will not find it surprising that the overwhelming majority of skeptics believe in AGW, they simply do not believe in CAGW.
Washington would do well to call the leading scientific advocates of both sides of this debate together, put into a room, and not allow them exit until they come up with either a unified agreement or a path of research that will allow them to get to a unified agreement. The mud-slinging that skeptics are all funded by big oil or that proponents are only in it for the grant money has got to stop. The only way to do this is for Washington to treat them all like little children and state that nothing will occur until the scientific method is restored to the debate.
• Rehaines77
Climate change deniers are the ones that deny that the climate changes naturally due to factors we do not understand and that we humans must be doing it.
• Doug Proctor
AGW, regardless of pronouncements and models, is rooted not in any temperature rise, but in a temperature rise greater than 1.8K/century, the rate at which the world came out of the LIA in the 1850s to about 1965. The only reason we start the AGW scenario in 1965 is that from 1940 to 1965 the temperature of the planet dropped, said by the AGW models to be due to dust, soot, aerosols and the like that cooled the planet until God’s gift to humanity, the environmental movement, stopped the most egregious of airborne pollution. Be that as it may, the assumption behind AGW is that a) natural global warming stopped somewhere between 1940 and 1965, and man-made, CO2 & water vapour driven took over. The dominant heating element since 1965 is modelled to be CO2 with its H2O vapour demon ally.
That said, the temperature rise since 1965 HAS to be greater than 1.8K/century for the models, and HAS to accelerate as the CO2 ppm increases. It also HAS to increase for a number of years even if we were to stop CO2 increases today. Those are fundamental parts of the CO2 driven, IPCC temperature model. So what are we to look for?
Hansen says that the global temperature rise since the ’60s is about 0.9C or so. That puts the rise rate in the comfortable >2C/century. It is easy to argue with that number as the cooling period is blamed by Hansen on aerosols: without the cooling event, the “natural” temperature in 1965 would be greater, obviously. Which would mean that the 0.9C since 1965 cannot be all attributed to AGW. This is where the AGW meme begins to fall down.
If 0.9C since 1965 is not all AGW, how much is? On top of the recovery from a 25 year cooling event, one might note that adjustments account for about 0.4C (or more). Correlation of urban vs rural records, the world vs mainland USA, the oceans vs urban areas, hemishperic and other subsets – all these suggest that internal positive biases account for perhaps 0.3C of incorrectly increased by adjustments to world temperatures since 1965. The actual temperature increase since 1965 might be more appropriately – I’d say unequivocably it is – more like 0.5C. I’d even be generous in saying 0.7C. The rate increase then fails the model rise and rate. CO2 as a global warming threat fails at its fundamental prediction: the temperature rise.
Gavin Schmidt admits this in a roundabout way. On January 21, 2011, on a RealClimate blog in which he reviews Hansen’s 1988 model prediction (obviously improved but not changed except to make the future worse), neither of the two rises or rise-rates (Scenario A or B) match what has happened. The closest match was “C”, a reference model in which no emissions after 2000 occurred. “C”, clearly, does not reflect reality, but it does say that the other “non-world” parameters lead to a temperature rise that well matches reality. CO2 is unnecessary, and, as “A” and “B”, with CO2 in the mix lead to a worse prediction, CO2 in the model took the model over the top. You could say that the “other’ parameters were too robust, and should be reduced, but that would mean that Scenario “C”, would then predict a global cooling. Which is not modelled.
It all comes down to the points of a degree that have actually happened. These points of a degree have to be global. You can’t say, well, the Arctic warmed, so AGW is true. A regional cause is better (Occam’s Razor) for a regional effect than a global cause.
So, what is the rise since 1995, for example? 15 years should be 0.4C (2.8C/century). It is nil. What is going on? If we go back further, the test results get worse.
All threats of the future ride on the temperature rising. Ignore the stories of ice melting in the Arctic unless the global temperature rise is consistent with AGW models. A regional situation cannot have a global cause without the global rise as modelled.
There are other answers than AGW to climatic or weather shifts. Only with the tempeature rises matching the CO2-H2O connection can the argument be made that AGW is happening, and even then other aspects of the model would have to be confirmed – like the tropospheric tempeature and humidity rise (which aren’t seen).
The sketpical position, outside of the outrage about being accused of heinous moral crimes against humanity yet unborn, boils down to some simple observational facts that are not born out without a biased view to “adjustments”. The Precautionary Principle has invaded the science: if a sign could go either up or down, it is better to make it go up, and thus be alerated to danger, than go down, and be surprised later. Any report that is worrisome about the future gets a 30% increase in value relative to one that says the future will be fine.
The principle of avoiding potential risk is how all of us on the planet survive crossing busy streets: if it looks possible to get run down, we wait at the traffic light. It is a good way to get to the corner store and back, but a disasterous way to run an economy or a society.
• BrendanBarrett
In a fascinating development, News Corporation, owner of Fox, has achieved carbon neutrality. By 2015 their goal is to ‘reduce absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 15 percent, reduce emissions intensity by at least 15 percent, and invest in clean energy equal to 20 percent of the company’s electricity use.”
So Fox News finds itself in the rather embarrasing position of deliberately casting doubt on climate change ( while its parent company takes climate change seriously.
You can check out Newscorps claims of being carbon neutral at their Global Energy Initiative website –
If only their news coverage was as well informed. It is great to see climate science being taken so seriously by a major news company.
• Gord
It’s amazing how much time people spend on internet forums argueing about climate change. If you got outside more, you might see first hand some of the radical changes that have happened in our lifetime. These changes would be fine if humans were able to move around according to where the resources are. However, we are fixed in our places, by borders drawn on a map, or because we’ve set up civilisations next to a resource e.g. a river. Once the cloimate changes, the resources will move. They already have. My home city doesn’t have the long-existing seasons anymore, not for at least 20 years. So, trees don’t flower on time, don’t propagate like they used to, animals that rely on them run out of food (and don’t help distribute the seeds), increased extreme weather destroys crops and farmers can’t predict the seasons anymore. These things are fact and are happening. Trying to deny it is like sitting in the middle of a road watching a car coming at you, but instead of moving, you want to argue about what model car it is and how long it will take to kill you!
• The climate denier’s comments are adorable. Their faith in their little intellectually isolated universe is nothing short of cute after all these years.
• SteveA
Congrats, Bob. In 2 sentences you just disproved Clive’s assertion.
• As recently as 2009, Fox News claimed (falsely) there was debate among scientists about global warming.
Please note that Fox News defended itself in Florida courts, successfully claiming it was not required by law to tell the truth in news reports.
Climate scientists determined in 2005 there was no reason to debate further the central facts of global warming trends.
• SteveA
Climate Progress. Now there’s an unbiased source of scientific info.
Since when has ANY news org felt bound to the truth?
Exactly which central facts are you referring to there, Bob? | <urn:uuid:01058298-f0d7-4325-bc4e-35990e88b4be> | http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/silencing-the-scientists-the-rise-of-right-wing-populism | en | 0.961275 | 0.033543 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Walker could be a serious contender
No one outside of Wisconsin had ever heard of him two months ago but our newest national poll suggests Scott Walker could be a serious contender for the Republican Presidential nomination.
Walker's favorability with Republicans is a +44 spread at 55/11. That makes him already more popular with the party base than Mike Huckabee (+42 at 58/16), Sarah Palin (+40 at 63/23), Mitt Romney (+21 at 47/26), and Newt Gingrich (+19 at 49/30).
None of the folks most seriously considering this race have been able to get any momentum yet, leaving a lot of room for a fresher face to enter and get a lot of traction. Walker's crusade against the unions has put him in a position where he could be that guy.
Walker's in good standing with the GOP base but overall Americans have a negative opinion of him and side with the unions in the current conflict, although it would be hard to describe the country as anything other than closely divided. 34% of voters have a favorable opinion of Walker to 39% who rate him negatively. 46% generally have a favorable opinion of labor unions to 40% who rate them negatively. And 45% say they side with the unions in the Wisconsin dispute to 41% who go with Walker. These findings all closely mirror what we found in the state itself- voters are extremely polarized but do side narrowly with the workers.
Even for the general election Walker's favorability numbers, though under water, stack up well to the rest of the Republican field. His -5 spread is better than Huckabee's -7 (35/42), Romney's -12 (32/44), Palin's -22 (35/57), and Gingrich's -31 (26/57). The primary flaw with the top GOP hopefuls is that Americans already know them well and dislike them. That might prove to be the case ultimately with Walker as well but a candidacy from him is an intriguing possibility. We'll throw him on some of our polls over the next few weeks for both primary and general elections and see how he does.
Full results here
Jonny V said...
Man, Republicans make me sick. That so many of them like this jackass says something really bad about them. They are just ... not good people (to put it mildly.)
I'd love to see Walker run for President and then get recalled in Wisconsin.
Wolf of Aquarius said...
Well, Walker will be out of a job once he gets recalled in 2012.
Anonymous said...
I noticed that your ideological question (Liberal vs Conservative) wound up with 25% Liberals. This is a bit higher than some other pollsters, so I was wondering if this was a roughly what you get on most of your other polls, or if that suggests this sample might be a bit more Liberal than the other ones you test. If it is, than is suggests Walker is doing even better relative to the Front-line Republicans if he posts better favorable even in a more liberal sample.
Dustin Ingalls said...
This is only the second month since we switched to asking very/somewhat liberal and conservative versus just liberal/mod/con. Last month it was 26% very and somewhat liberal, so very similar. Breaking it down has caused more moderates to admit they're at least somewhat liberal than would admit they were just "liberal."
Anonymous said...
I live in Wisconsin and follow the politics pretty closely. I can only see that he has 2 options at this point:
1. Run for president or vice president.
2. Lose re-election and pick a cushy well paying job in the private sector.
He has very little chance of being re-elected in Wisconsin. The GOP field is wide open and he has tangible results (whether you agree with it or not) that appeal to Tea Party side of the GOP as well as the Business Executive side of the GOP. Kind of Palin meets Romney. Oh and his ego is big enough to go for it.
Anonymous said...
What do people love most about him: that he's acting like a fascist dictator, or that he's good at spinning awful things into something that the Republican sheep will swallow?
Anonymous said...
That Gauleiter Walker does so well among Republicans tells how pathological the GOP has become.
Web Statistics | <urn:uuid:ebb8b3ff-0bdf-4528-8951-097ecffc9915> | http://publicpolicypolling.blogspot.com/2011/03/walker-could-be-serious-contender.html?showComment=1300403460269 | en | 0.974897 | 0.062456 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Massage College
Often when talking to friends about college the question that comes up most frequently is, "okay, but what do you do at college?", normally qualified with questions about whether we actually do practical massage, or how we fill a full week, never mind 18 months of full weeks, with massage.
So here we go people, a full week of massage college:
8:15-2:15 - assessments class, where we learn postural assessments, range of motion for all the different joints of the body, and approximately 300 tests for different conditions, syndromes, and general ailments.
8:15-10:45 -palpation class, where we learn how to palpate ("feel out on the body") all the bones, muscles, joints, bursas, and ligaments that we need to be able to identify in order to properly massage. If someone says "I hurt here" and points, we need to be able to identify what structure that is, and what other structures are likely involved. It's not enough to learn the textbook anatomy since no one person actually looks like a textbook cadaver.
11:45-2:15 -regional anatomy 2, the follow up course from regional anatomy 1, where we learn the textbook anatomy. While last term had us learning all the bones, muscles, joints, and ligaments of the body (excluding the head), this term we learn the anatomy of the cardiovascular system including names of all the veins and arteries as well as the structure of the heart itself, and all about the bones and muscles of the head which is intensely confusing due to its 3-dimensional set up.
8:15-10:45 -anatomy and physiology 2, a continuation of anatomy and physiology 1, where we learn about the chemistry and biology that allows the anatomy of the cardiovascular system to function. We also learn about the body's chemical response to stress, and sleep, and how those impact our general system.
11:45-2:15 -pathology, where we learn in depth about various diseases. So far we've been focusing on the different types of arthritis, as well as lupis, and how to distinguish them from one another, and which massage techniques to use, and which techniques would be potentially harmful.
8:15-10:45 -manual skills, where, you guessed it, we learn massage techniques. A new technique always starts with a class of notes on the theory behind the technique, what it does, who it helps, who shouldn't have it, and whatever precautions need be taken. The following class after will begin with a teacher demonstration of the technique, and then we are divided into pairs and the classroom is partitioned into cubicles and we practice while the teachers walk around, give us pointers, correct our posture, and answer any questions we have about that technique on its own or in combination with others.
11:45-2:15 -neurology, where we learn about all the nerves in the body as well as the layout of the brain, and which lobes are involved with which parts of human life, and the spinal cord.
8:15-2:15 -manual skills, all day.
In addition to these 30 hours of class time, we each also have 5 hours of clinic a week, scheduled for one consistent day each term (I have mine on Fridays this term). The student clinic has a ratio of 12 students to one registered massage therapist, and we treat the general public who come in. We go through a standard intake procedure, do a postural assessment and test ranges of motion and use whatever assessments we've learned that may be applicable. We then do a full consent, and a full 1 hour massage to address whatever problem has walked into our cubicle. As well as the one day a week of clinic, we also have 1 Saturday every 4 weeks of clinic.
As if class time and clinic weren't enough, we're also expected to complete a certain number of outreach hours by the time we graduate. These we sign up for as fits our schedule, and come in various styles and time commitments. There are sports and hospital outreaches, both of which we have to complete a certain number of hours in (8 for sports, some higher number for hospital). If you complete 50 hours in either one (or both) you get a certificate of specialization along with your graduation degree. I'm going to try to get mine in hospital.
And that, in a nutshell, is college.
No comments: | <urn:uuid:285865c4-ac33-4982-a881-09cf3568e434> | http://theunmarkedtrail.blogspot.com/2007/10/massage-college.html | en | 0.951079 | 0.068883 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Spasm! Dang it! Differentiating between Pain & Injuries in Weightlifting
Matt Foreman
We’re all such a bunch of little go-getters, aren’t we?
We love to train hard. One of the big pleasures in our lives is going to the gym and working our asses off until we’re drained, sore, and completely shot. We want to feel like we made ourselves better, conquered obstacles, or whatever. Everybody who reads this blog knows what I’m talking about, so I don’t need to explain it much more.
And we get sore, right? Actually, it often goes way past “sore.” Many times, we hammer ourselves to the point where we need some kind of restorative help before the next workout session. Recovery methods have become one of the most popular topics in strength training over the years. When people work as hard as we do, their bodies get tightened up, broken down, twisted around, etc., and they eventually learn about things like muscle spasms. These little suckers aren’t tears or ruptures, nothing that requires surgery or serious medical treatment. Basically, a spasm happens when a group of muscles clinch up like a fist and won’t release on their own. They might not sound like much, but they’re no joke. When they stay clinched, it feels like somebody is sticking an ice pick in you.
Have you ever split wood with an axe? If you have, you probably know what it’s like when you hit a knot in the wood. It’s just a little ball of twisted fiber in the middle of the log, but it feels like you’re trying to cut through solid metal when you hit it. That’s what a muscle spasm is like.
To get rid of a spasm, you have to put in some extra work. We’re talking about the basic stuff like foam rolling, icing, and massage therapy. It’s a little-by-little process where you use these methods over and over, and you just chip away at it until the muscles loosen up all the way and you’re back to normal. The length of this process depends on how severe the spasm is. If it’s a bad one, we’re probably talking about several days. A minor one might go away over a weekend.
Sometimes they can trick you. You’ll feel a pop or twitch in your body and you immediately think it’s an injury, but it doesn’t turn out to be anything serious. I’ll give you an example. I lifted in a meet a few years ago where I was planning to open with 132 kilos in the snatch. My warm-ups were feeling great, but then I got to 120 kilos. As I was pulling this lift past my knees, I felt a sharp pop in my lower back. I dropped the bar, stood up, and twisted my torso around a little to inventory the damage. There was some hot tightness in my spinal erectors but I couldn’t tell how bad it was. I freaked out just a little at the idea that I might have to pull out of the meet if it was going to stop me from being able to lift anything off the floor.
I waited about five minutes and then snatched 40 kilos, just to see if it was okay. It didn’t hurt too bad, so I waited a few more minutes and snatched 117 kilos. That felt okay too, so I decided to go out for my opener at 132. I made it easy, followed by an easy second attempt at 137. I missed 140 on my third attempt, but it wasn’t because of pain. I just didn’t finish my pull.
In the clean and jerk, I made 156 and 163 kilos before passing on my third attempt. My back was getting pretty fired up at that point and I had already made the 300 kilo total I had set as my goal for the meet. Lots of pain in the following days, but it loosened up after a week or so. What caused it? Hell if I know. I was 37 at the time, so that might have been what caused it more than anything. These types of things are more common when you get older.
Little false alarms like this can happen. They feel serious at first, but they don’t end your day. However, there are also times when you feel a pop and it’s the real thing, unfortunately. Something tweaks or strains and you can’t get through it, no matter how tough you are or how much ibuprofen you swallow. I’ve had a couple of these, had one recently as a matter of fact. I think every serious athlete has had a moment where they got hit with pain they couldn’t beat. It sucks, but it’s possible when you’re pushing your body’s limits.
Some people like chiropractors to fix them. A lot of people do, actually. I went to a chiropractor once when I was nineteen to fix a pain I had in my upper back/neck. He adjusted me and it made things a lot worse. I was walking around with my head tilted to one side for two weeks afterwards. I’ve never been to another chiropractor since then. Now, before any of you chiropractic folk start screaming bloody murder, make sure you understand that I’m not condemning the whole field. I think the guy I saw wasn’t very good, plain and simple. Chiropractic care is a huge field, so I know this was just an isolated incident. He was a weird dude with one eyeball that pointed up and another one that pointed down, like he could hunt birds and squirrels at the same time. I’m not saying that had anything to do with his chiro ability, but he had an odd personality too and I obviously wondered about his expertise since I went to him to feel better and he sent me away fricked up. I wouldn’t be against trying it again with somebody else, but I’ve just never sought it out.
I like massage therapy, but you have to find somebody with some lead in their ass to get serious benefits. If you work with a therapist who doesn’t have the strength to really dig into your muscles and forcibly loosen up the knotty tissue, you’re basically spending money to get rubbed and stroked. But a good massage therapist can do wonders. It’ll hurt when you’re on the table, but you’ll get the results you’re looking for.
These are just some random thoughts about minor injuries and pain management. Basically, we can boil it all down to two key ideas. A) You should expect some pains and spasms if you train hard and B) It’s a very good idea to seek out some extra help in treating them.
And one more thing… Don’t whine about your pain all the time. Handle it without torturing the whole gym with your complaining.
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Spenco 2013-03-25
Sounds like that chiropractor had one eye going to the shops and the other coming back with the change!
Lincoln 2013-03-25
I've never had good results using ice on spasms. Heat has always worked better for me.
Josh 2013-03-25
Given the title I figured it was an article about what it looks like when I miss a snatch.
Heather 2013-03-25
I've had FANTASTIC results with IMS for these spasms that at 40, seem to keep re-occurring! I'm fighting with one right now in my shoulder that has come back. Not fun!
Cliff 2013-03-25
I was doing a light snatch about ten days ago, and the same thing happened to me. My back locked up so bad, that over the next few days, everyone was asking me what was wrong, because even just standing, I was tilted. Went to a therapist who really knew his myofascial release (Erick Hudson in Santa Barbara). After every treatment felt good, and would then slowly regress, just not as badly as prior to treatment. After third treatment this morning, he also gave me some work to do on my own. Ready to start lifting again!
Pete 2013-03-25
A-R-T chiropractor. They are the best!
Jen 2014-07-13
Have you ever heard of a spasm causing numbness? My whole right arm and part of my hand are numb but my bicep feels bruised from all the massage therapy. Going on 2 weeks...
Andre 2014-07-13
Magnesium rich food and stretching helps a lot.
Greg Everett 2014-07-15
Jen -
With any numbness, I would work with a chiro, PT or doc to find the source.
Craig 2015-06-26
Has anyone used a "tens unit" to rehab a strained muscle and what kind of results? Also, any specific brands better than others? Thanks for the article, speaking directly to me now.
Jose Torres 2015-12-13
What exercise regimen do you recommend for a right arm bicep tear? Recommend surgery or not? My orthopedic. Is not familiar with Olympic lifters..
Can I do pulls higher than deadlifts? Front squats a no no? Or just back squats?
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The man who caused a fatal four-car crash in Quebec's Pontiac region has previous convictions related to impaired driving, CBC News has learned.
Three people were killed, including a father and his four-year-old son, and two others were seriously injured in the crash, which happened around 6:15 p.m. Tuesday on Highway 148 near Quyon, Que., about 50 kilometres northwest of Ottawa,
Outaouais police officers responded and found a red car that was damaged beyond recognition.
Kevin Black, 51, of Bristol, Que., who was driving that car, and his young son died at the scene.
Black's 12-year-old stepdaughter and 13-year-old stepson survived, but were sent to the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario. They were admitted in critical condition, but have been upgraded to stable condition.
Campbell's Bay, Que., man caused crash: police
The third person who died has been identified as John Robertson, 51, of Campbell's Bay, Que. Police said he was driving alone when he tried to pass another vehicle, crossed the centre lane at a curve in the road and was "100 per cent" at fault for the collision.
CBC News has learned Robertson has a 1997 conviction for refusing a breathalyzer test. Toxicology results in this crash, though, are not expected for a few weeks.
The people in the other two vehicles involved were not hurt.
Highway 148 was shut down in the area all night as police investigated, but reopened around 5:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Police continue to investigate but said the crash was caused by one vehicle trying to pass at a curve in the road. | <urn:uuid:1fd18867-4733-4048-8e87-fd2cb2d773a4> | http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/quebec-father-and-son-among-dead-in-4-car-crash-1.1061612 | en | 0.987576 | 0.042338 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Alexander Kent
Pseudonym for Douglas Reeman (possibly)
All of Kent's books that I have read/seen are in the Richard Bolitho series. Bolitho is an officer in the Royal Navy during the age of Fighting Sail . The books are listed below chronologically, rather than in order of publication, and can be read in either order, although since they cover the events in the life of this one individual, chronologically later books contain spoilers for the chronologically earlier books, although the publication order may be reversed.
List of books
The Richard Bolitho Saga
Note that this title is my own.
1. Richard Bolitho - Midshipman 1772
2. Midshipman Bolitho and the Avenger 1773
3. Stand Into Danger 1774
4. In Gallant Company 1777
5. Sloop of War 1778
6. To Glory We Steer 1782
7. Command a King's Ship 1784
8. Passage to Mutiny 1789
9. Form Line of Battle! 1793
10. Enemy in Sight! 1794
11. The Flag Captain 1793
12. Signal - Close Action! 1798
13. The Inshore Squadron 1800
14. A Tradition of Victory 1801
15. Success to the Brave 1802
16. Colors Aloft! 1803
Douglas Stuart
Department of Computer Sciences
The University of Texas at Austin | <urn:uuid:a3270e86-e75c-450a-a20a-8361abd72af3> | http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/dastuart/fictiondir/authordir/akent/index.html | en | 0.839086 | 0.04184 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Ed-Tech Readers’ Choice Awards nominations
Readers Choice AwardsHave you had success with a particular ed-tech product or service? Want to recognize that product and share your success with your colleagues? Then nominate your favorite product(s) for our Ed-Tech Reader’s Choice Awards from eSchool Media.
Nominations can include hardware, software, or online services in any area of educational technology. Please include the name of the product or service, the company that provides it, and a brief but detailed description (no more than 200 words) telling us how you use the product or service and how it has benefited your school, school district, classroom, teachers, students, or community.
Thank you to everyone for your numerous nominations.
Nominations for the 2014-15 Ed-Tech Reader’s Choice Awards are now closed. Nominations are being reviewed and tabulated. The results will be published in August. | <urn:uuid:a98b0876-5949-4d37-b1e9-d3f99aac853c> | http://www.eschoolnews.com/rca-nominations/ | en | 0.932304 | 0.030954 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Performer Kristin Chenoweth has captivated audiences for years on Broadway, television and the big screen. Now, she’s added asthma awareness advocate to her impressive resume.
Chenoweth, 45, was first diagnosed with asthma a decade ago.
“I was one of those people that got it as an adult. It was not long after 9/11 and I just felt like something was sitting on my chest,” she said. “I was constantly wheezing and coughing and my mom said, ‘You need to go to go to the doctor,’ and I ignored it - like we do - and then found out I had asthma.”
The award-winning singer and actress said she was afraid the diagnosis would affect her career.
“Of all the things you could get, it stands in the column of: Why me? Why this?” she said.
Fortunately, Chenoweth does not have persistent asthma, meaning she doesn’t need to use an inhaler every day. However, she’s careful about always having one of her inhalers within reach in case she starts experiencing breathing problems— and especially when she’s traveling.
One development that has been especially useful for Chenoweth is dose counters in inhalers that tell patients how many doses of medication they have left before they run out.
“For many years I just used an inhaler with no dose counter,” she said. “Which would literally ‘suck’ if you reached for your medication and you were out. And that has happened to me before.”
Now, the star has teamed up with the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America for their “Know Your Count” campaign, which encourages patients to keep track of remaining doses on their inhalers. During asthma awareness month in May, Teva Respiratory is donating a dollar for every person who visits to a camp for children with asthma.
Her advice for others suffering from asthma is to listen to their bodies.
“Take care of your heart, take care of your body, mind, spiritual, whatever that means to you,” she said. “And they have these medications for a purpose. Use them.”
For more information, visit | <urn:uuid:b68b45c7-9262-4bbb-98c6-95b7f1f4e1e1> | http://www.foxnews.com/health/2014/04/24/kristin-chenoweth-gives-voice-to-asthma-awareness.html | en | 0.98342 | 0.043078 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
What's On
1. Eric-kessels-list What's On Collector extraordinaire Erik Kessel's latest unconventional photographic exhibition, Album Beauty
2. Ben-woodeson What's On The unbearable tension of being, new sculptures by Ben Woodeson
3. Soren_t_running-list What's On Caught in the headlights: we speak to Tabitha Soren about her drama-laden photography and new show
4. Wide-open-school-list What's On An alternative education from the finest contemporary artists at the Hayward's Wide Open School
5. Edward-burtynsky-list What's On Oil be damned! The brand new Photographers' Gallery presents an epic Edward Burtynsky
6. Paul-elliman-list What's On Paul Elliman's Found Font installation at MoMA's Ecstatic Alphabets / Heaps of Language
7. Andy-hope-1930-list What's On Andy Hope 1930s brilliant Medley Tour reaches London's Hauser & Wirth gallery
8. Katie-peterson-list What's On 100 Billion Suns is a poetic staging of an epic concept by Katie Paterson
9. Yasuaki-onishi-list What's On The latest extraordinary, space-defying installation by Yasuaki Onishi now on show at the Rice Gallery
10. Lilianna-ovalle-list What's On New Colour Me work from Liliana Ovalle on show in THE CHROMA SEASON
11. Alex-katz-list What's On Tate St Ives presents a great influencer and octogenarian painter, Alex Katz
12. Jaehyo-lee-list What's On Jaehyo Lee creates bewildering forms from simple materials and high-craft
13. Bauhaus-list What's On The Barbican's Bauhaus: Art as Life shines a light on design's biggest influencers
14. Yale-list What's On Great animated promo for YGDMFA, aka Yale Graphic Design MFA exhibition
15. Yumiko-utsu-list What's On They're squid heads and we like them – a new show in Paris for Yumiko Utsu
16. Gabriel-dawe-list What's On The Density of Light sees super-chromatic artist Gabriel Dawe make rainbows real
17. Mark-mulroney-list What's On Cartoon abstraction in Mark Mulroney's new show Spring Time Pictures
18. Jamie-shovlin-list What's On Jamie Shovlin returns to the Montana Modern Masters series with the missing pieces
19. Alex-prager-list Film Alex Prager stages a cinematic tale of death and compulsion in heavy noir style…
20. Ron-list What's On Ron Mueck's pint-sized, hyperrealist sculptures are showing at Hauser & Wirth
21. Br_list What's On New Ben Rivers show, Phantom of a Libertine, to open at Kate MacGarry gallery
22. Daniel-clowes-list What's On The witty realism and trenchant cool of Daniel Clowes' comics in a survey at OMCA
23. Jeff-milstein-list What's On Another chance to see Jeff Milstein's The Jet as Art in Washington
24. Keith_haring-list What's On Career-defining retrospective of Keith Haring at the Brooklyn Musuem
25. List-rosie-sanders What's On Contemporary botanical painting in Rosie Sanders' exhibition Against the Light
26. List-danielpalacios_waves What's On The physicality of sound and the sound of physicality by Daniel Palacios
27. Parra-small What's On What's On: Parra, Weirded Out
28. Lead1 What's On What's On: Alan Rath
29. Raymond-pettibon-small What's On What's On: Raymond Pettibon - Whuytuyp
30. Galy-tots-ken-garland-small What's On What's On: Galy Tots
31. Richard-hollis-small What's On What's On: Richard Hollis
32. Small What's On What's On: Antiquity Bonk
33. Gandg What's On What's On: Gilbert & George
34. Lasvegaslead Film SXSW Film Festival: Electrick Children
35. Lead2 Film SXSW Film Festival: Syndromes
36. Cs What's On What's On: Hisaji Hara
37. Cs What's On What's On: Alighiero Boetti
38. Into-the-fold Exhibition What's On: Into the Fold
39. Deller-small What's On What's On: Jeremy Deller - Joy in People
40. Alicja-kwade What's On What's On: Alicja Kwade - In Circles
41. Petra_small What's On What's On: Void Mastery / Blank Control
42. Small What's On What's On: Rineke Dijkstra
43. Lead2 What's On What's On: Picasso & Modern British Art
44. Lead1 What's On Stockholm Design Week 2012: Never Mind the Object
45. Lead1 What's On Stockholm Design Week 2012: Katrin Greiling
46. Lead1 Publication Angoulême Winners: Frank and the Congress of Animals
47. Small Architecture What's On: Luis Urculo
48. Leandro Exhibition What's On: Leandro Erlich
49. Katharina-grosse Exhibition What's On: Katharina Grosse
50. Art-basel-miami-beach What's On What's On: Art Basel Miami Beach
51. Rm_small Exhibition What's On: Robert Mapplethorpe curated by Sofia Copola
52. Zimoun Exhibition What's On: Sculpting Sound
53. Denis-darzacq Exhibition What's On: Denis Darzacq
54. Aa-small Exhibition What's On: Bartholomew
55. Small Exhibition What's On: Despite Intentions
56. Small Exhibition What's On: UK
57. Rbwain What's On Roger Brown
58. Small Exhibition What's On: Miracles & Charms
59. Small Exhibition What's On: Still/Life
60. Whatson Product Design What's On: The Intellectual Work: Enzo Mari | <urn:uuid:cb8f8406-2dc7-4809-a538-962af5f807c4> | http://www.itsnicethat.com/categories/whats-on-2?page=1 | en | 0.773341 | 0.741281 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Watch It
On DVD: TBD | On Blu-ray: TBD
Shadow of a Woman
This little-known Warner Bros. melodrama reteams co-stars Helmut Dantine and Andrea King. He is cast as Dr. Eric Ryder, a seemingly respectable medico, while she plays Ryder's impressionable young bride Brook. Despite significant evidence that Ryder isn't all that he seems to be, his wife continues to believe in and worship him. Only when it's nearly too late does she realize...more | <urn:uuid:98a38262-15be-4ed8-8ca6-e5fab2cb3c02> | http://www.movies.com/shadow-woman/m57690 | en | 0.95972 | 0.156531 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Far from a gaffe, his remarks reflected both a long-standing belief among conservatives that the nation faces a "tipping point."
Mitt Romney's decision to reaffirm rather than renounce his controversial taped comments about dependency underscores the extent to which Republicans want to frame the presidential election as a contest between "makers and takers" -- as well as the risk that construct could pose to a GOP coalition that has grown increasingly dependent on older voters who rely on government aid.
Romney, in his initial comments at a private May fundraiser that were released by Mother Jones magazine, conflated the concern among conservatives about two distinct trends: The fact that the share of Americans who live in households that receive some government benefit is approaching 50 percent, according to the Census Bureau, even as the share of households that pay federal income taxes is falling toward 50 percent or slightly below, depending on the estimate.
Far from a gaffe, Romney's remarks reflected both a long-standing belief among conservatives that the nation faces a "tipping point" in which growing dependency will create an insurmountable electoral majority for big government -- and Democratic candidates. Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Romney's running mate, has delivered similar arguments for years. "We risk hitting [a] tipping point in our society where we have more takers than makers," he said recently. "President Obama's policies are feverishly putting more people into the column of being takers than makers ... being more dependent."
NJ logo.JPG
The conservative Heritage Foundation, in the latest edition of its Index of Dependence on Government likewise concluded earlier this year: "Perhaps the greatest danger is that the swelling ranks of Americans who enjoy government services and benefits for which they pay few or no taxes will lead to a spreading sense of entitlement that is simply incompatible with self-government."
Throughout the summer, the Romney campaign has heavily relied on these arguments to fashion its case against Obama. In particular, Romney has used the "takers versus makers" framing to rebut the relentless Democratic accusation that he favors the rich over the middle class: In essence, he has responded by arguing that Obama favors the poor over the middle class by promoting programs that encourage dependency and demand redistribution.
The sentiments Romney expressed at the fundraiser made more explicit arguments that are implicit in his campaign ads this summer on welfare and Medicare (in which a narrator warns, over pictures of worried older whites, that Obama, to finance his health-care reform, has diverted funds from the program to an entitlement that's "not for you"). Those claims reached a crescendo at the Republican convention, where a succession of speakers sought to position the GOP as defending an economically squeezed middle class against a Democratic coalition determined to transfer income to "undeserving" claimants, from illegal immigrants to public employees.
That language pointedly echoed arguments from the Ronald Reagan era, when Republican claims that Democrats supported a redistribution of income from the hard-pressed middle class to the idle poor helped the GOP make enormous inroads among whites, particularly those in the working class. Those disputes between the parties receded as Bill Clinton promoted welfare reform and tough measures against crime, but hard times have brought them back to the surface in recent years.
"I told my friends I felt I was at the 1980 or 1984 Republican convention," said Democratic consultant Donna Brazile after attending the GOP gathering. "They are basically saying, 'We are the ones who are working, and the other side is [for] those who are not working and are draining resources from us.' "
GOP pollster Whit Ayres says that focus groups still find a powerful response to the basic argument Romney delivered in his taped comments. "Much of what he was saying in the tape is stuff we hear in focus groups all the time -- where people are complaining there are too many people who are not carrying their own weight and too many people living off the sweat of others," Ayres said. "The fundamental message that we have too many people taking and not enough people giving is very consistent with a majority of voters in this country."
Democrats remain dubious those arguments will cut as deeply as they did during the 1980s. "This feels like a black-and-white movie in a color age," said Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of NDN, a Democratic advocacy group. "The cards they are playing are from a deck that is 25 years old. It is going to work for certain segments of the aging white population. But it just reinforces President Obama's framing of this choice as a choice between forward and backward."
Ironically, the biggest risk in Romney's remarks will be how older white voters receive them. Census figures show that the share of households receiving either Social Security or Medicare is larger than the share receiving all means-tested government benefits combined. Seniors also represent an important component of the group that does not pay income taxes. And while Census data show that the share of Hispanics and African-Americans living in households that receive a means-tested government benefit (56 percent and 52 percent respectively) is much larger than the share of whites (22 percent), roughly four-fifths of the senior population drawing on Social Security and Medicare is white.
Republicans are now extremely dependent on those older white voters: The party won about three-fifths of white seniors in both the 2008 presidential and 2010 House elections, according to exit polls. In that sense, Romney's claim that voters receiving government benefits are beyond his reach was questionable not only as political strategy, but even as political analysis.
These older whites have moved toward a hardening opposition to transfer payments for the poor. In a Pew Research Center survey last year, a significant plurality of them agreed that "poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return."
Polls also show them intensely opposed to Obama's health reform plan: In a recent United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll, less than one-third of them said they believed the initiative would benefit them personally. But surveys show they also fiercely oppose cutbacks in entitlement programs for the elderly -- which they tend to view "as social insurance ... that they've earned," as Ayres said.
Many forces are pushing white seniors away from Obama. But if a meaningful number of them interpret Romney's remarks as equating them with the "dependent" poor, it could widen the opening for Democrats created by senior skepticism of the GOP ticket's proposal to convert Medicare into a premium-support or voucher system.
Like other Republicans, Ayres says he believes Romney is unlikely to abandon the basic arguments about dependency he delivered in the May fundraiser. But, Ayres added, Romney needs to sharpen his language to reassure seniors that he is exempting them from his indictment. Given his challenges elsewhere in the electorate, the last thing Romney can afford is any erosion among the white seniors who have provided Republican presidential candidates a larger share of their vote in each of the past five elections.
Stephanie Czekalinski contributed. | <urn:uuid:d253e208-9293-4877-98f7-070fd7979dd8> | http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/the-deep-gop-roots-of-romneys-47-remarks/262578/ | en | 0.969593 | 0.04125 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
August 29, 2016
21° C, Partly cloudy
Full Forecast
Severe thunderstorm watch ended
Manitoba storm-chasers take a trip down Tornado Alley
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/8/2013 (1108 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
It was a trip down Tornado Alley these Manitoba storm-chasers will never forget.
The University of Manitoba offers a class in storm-chasing every summer, now open to the public, which includes the irresistible lure of a trip to Tornado Alley, the name given to the route storms track through midwestern American states, like Oklahoma, with predictable and devastating effects every summer.
The rolling hills northeast of Calgary draw a large crowd of storm-chasers hot on the trail of a supercell under scorching heat and looming darkness.
The tornado this time was in South Dakota outside a town called Erwin, 60 kilometres southwest of Watertown.
We asked one of the experts, John Hanesiak -- a U of M professor of environment and geography -- what happened. Here are excerpts from his email response.
"It was the first day of our University of Manitoba's storm-chase course field trip... And a long drive for the first day out of Winnipeg." he wrote.
Ahead, four vehicles out of Winnipeg spotted a cluster of atmospheric elements with all the right ingredients: Cool air aloft, churning winds and acres of farm crops on the ground below.
It was the U of M's storm-chase course's very first tornado and it will forever be engrained in all of our memories for the rest of our lives.
John Hanesiak, University of Manitoba professor of environment and geography and Manitoba's unofficial storm-chaser
Crops, it turns out, sweat moisture that winds whip up to spit out fingers of fate.
The Manitoba crew got into position.
"The road network... was not the greatest and there were little options for emergency exit routes. There was a large line of storms behind, to the west of the storms we were watching, when suddenly, that line accelerated and caught up to the storm we were on and merged into the line," Hanesiak wrote.
Hanesiak's description of the single thunderhead turning into a hydra is the join-up moment for storm-chasers. Here is power -- barely harnessed and totally unpredictable.
"With our storm now accelerating, and the updraft-rotation intensifying, we were suddenly in a precarious position with the road network being rather poor.
"We were caught in what is called the 'bear's cage' a (phenomenon) where the updraft and mescyclone are strongest, where our tornado ended up forming."
In the teeth of the storm, the group raced the wind as the tornado spun out of the hammer cloud above them.
"We were running from the storm at this point, and only a few of us managed to get photos and video of the tornado. In fact, we think there were multiple funnels and touchdowns as we were running." Hanesiak wrote.
"My only personal vision of the tornado was in the rear-view mirror... The debris cloud was very dark and fairly wide at the very bottom. It filled half the rear view mirror."
The roads weren't helping them outrun the twister, and they were moving so fast the photos they hoped to get were never captured.
"The roads unfortunately took us deeper into the bear's cage...
"The tornado was likely only hundreds of metres away... to our right. It was tall; a thin tornado, maybe EF-1.
"Three of our vehicles stayed together and hunkered down in a farmer's driveway that dipped down off the main road," Hanesiak wrote.
They didn't seek the deepest part of the ditch, in case there was flash flooding. Later on, there was.
One vehicle in the group got separated.
"The fourth vehicle ended up going into the town of Erwin and parked beside a church on the downwind side. They now had God on their side," Hanesiak quipped. "Or at least they hoped."
All four vehicles felt the thrust from strong winds, driving rain and nickel-sized hail.
"The fourth van had a very large tree crash right in front of them, just as they were moving away from the church."
Afterward, they tracked a trail of minor damage to buildings and trees in town to a restaurant. Steak is a quirky custom after storm chasers spot a tornado. No one was hurt.
Read more by Alexandra Paul.
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Browse Dictionary by Letter
Dictionary Suite
oddity a peculiar or puzzling thing, person, or event. [2 definitions]
odd man out any outsider; one who has been excluded. [2 definitions]
oddment a leftover or isolated item; one item among several odds and ends. [2 definitions]
odds the probability that one thing is more likely to happen than another. [4 definitions]
odds and ends miscellaneous items; bits and pieces; scraps.
oddsmaker a person, usu. an expert, who calculates the odds in betting.
odds-on having an even or more than even chance at winning or succeeding, as in a horserace or athletic contest.
-ode1 something that resembles (whatever is specified).
-ode2 way or path. [2 definitions]
odious provoking or deserving of hatred; loathsome or repellent.
odium hatred, strong dislike, or repugnance. [3 definitions]
odometer an instrument that measures the distance traveled by a vehicle, such as is found on the dashboard of an automobile.
odonto- tooth.
odontology the science that deals with teeth and gums, and their development and care.
odor the property or quality of a thing that stimulates or is perceived by the sense of smell. [3 definitions]
odori traditional Japanese dance, or a particular set of dance movements in the traditional style.
odoriferous having or spreading an odor, esp. a pleasant or fragrant one.
odorless combined form of odor.
odorous having or giving off a distinctive or strong odor. | <urn:uuid:b2557304-d951-4ba9-9fa3-f034ce9370fb> | http://www.wordsmyth.net/?mode=browse&as_word=odious | en | 0.81602 | 0.376139 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Getting Started with Three.js
## Introduction
For all the awesomeness of Three.js, there can be times where you might struggle. Typically you will need to spend quite a large amount of time with the examples, reverse engineering and (in my case certainly) hunting down specific functionality and occasionally asking questions via GitHub. If you have to ask questions, by the way, you should do that on Stack Overflow!
The basics
I will assume that you have at least a passing knowledge of 3D, and reasonable proficiency with JavaScript. If you don’t it may be worth learning a bit before you try and play with this stuff, as it can get a little confusing.
In our 3D world we will have some of the following, which I will guide you through the process of creating:
1. A scene
2. A renderer
3. A camera
4. An object or two (with materials)
You can, of course, do some crazy things, and my hope is that you will go on to do that and start to experiment with 3D in your browser.
Just a quick note on support in the browsers. Google’s Chrome browser is, in my experience, the best browser to work with in terms of which renderers are supported, and the speed of the underlying JavaScript engine. Chrome supports Canvas, WebGL and SVG and it’s blazingly fast. Firefox is a close second; its JavaScript engine does seem to be a touch slower than Chrome’s, but again its support for the render technologies is great. It’s also getting faster with each version, which is handy. Opera also has WebGL support and Safari on Mac has an option to enable it. So while it has it, it’s best to work on the basis that Safari only supports Canvas rendering. Internet Explorer 9+ only supports Canvas rendering right now, although you never know what the future holds.
Set the Scene
I’ll assume you’ve chosen a browser that supports all the rendering technologies, and that you want to render with Canvas or WebGL, since they’re the more standard choices. Canvas is more widely supported than WebGL, but it’s worth noting that WebGL runs on your graphics card’s GPU, which means that your CPU can concentrate on other non-rendering tasks like any physics or user interaction you’re trying to do.
Irrespective of your chosen renderer you should bear in mind that the JavaScript will need to optimised for performance. 3D isn’t a lightweight task for a browser (and it’s awesome that it’s even possible), so be careful to understand where any bottlenecks are in your code, and remove them if you can!
So with that said, and on the assumption you have downloaded and included three.js in your HTML file, how do you go about setting up a scene? Like this:
// set the scene size
var WIDTH = 400,
HEIGHT = 300;
// set some camera attributes
var VIEW_ANGLE = 45,
NEAR = 0.1,
FAR = 10000;
// get the DOM element to attach to
// - assume we've got jQuery to hand
var $container = $('#container');
// create a WebGL renderer, camera
// and a scene
var renderer = new THREE.WebGLRenderer();
var camera =
new THREE.PerspectiveCamera(
var scene = new THREE.Scene();
// add the camera to the scene
// the camera starts at 0,0,0
// so pull it back
camera.position.z = 300;
// start the renderer
renderer.setSize(WIDTH, HEIGHT);
// attach the render-supplied DOM element
Not too tricky, really!
Making a Mesh
So we have a scene, a camera and a renderer (I opted for a WebGL one in my sample code) but we have nothing to actually draw. Three.js actually comes with support for loading a few different standard file types, which is great if you are outputting models from Blender, Maya, Cinema4D or anything else. To keep things simple (this is about getting started after all!) I’ll talk about primitives. Primitives are geometric meshes, relatively basic ones like Spheres, Planes, Cubes and Cylinders. Three.js lets you create these types of primitives easily:
// set up the sphere vars
var radius = 50,
segments = 16,
rings = 16;
// create a new mesh with
// sphere geometry - we will cover
// the sphereMaterial next!
var sphere = new THREE.Mesh(
new THREE.SphereGeometry(
// add the sphere to the scene
All good, but what about the material for the sphere? In the code we’ve used a variable sphereMaterial but we’ve not defined it yet. First we need to talk about materials in a bit more detail.
Without doubt this is one of the most useful parts of Three.js. It provides for you a number of common (and very handy) materials to apply to your meshes:
1. Basic, which just means that it renders ‘unlit’
2. Lambert
3. Phong
There are more, but again in the interests of simplicity I’ll let you discover those for yourself. In the case of WebGL particularly these materials can be a life-saver. Why? Well because in WebGL you have to write shaders for everything being rendered. Shaders are a huge topic in themselves, but in short they are written in GLSL (OpenGL Shader Language), which tells the GPU how something should look. This means you need to mimic the maths of lighting, reflection and so on. It can get very complicated very quickly. Thanks to Three.js you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to because it abstracts that away for you. If you want to write shaders, however, you can do that too with a MeshShaderMaterial, so it’s a flexible setup.
For now, however, let’s apply a lambert material to the sphere:
// create the sphere's material
var sphereMaterial =
new THREE.MeshLambertMaterial(
color: 0xCC0000
It’s worth pointing out as well that there are other properties you can specify when you create a material besides the colour, such as smoothing or environment maps. You should check out the docs for the various properties you can set on the materials and, in fact, any object that the engine provides for you.
If you were to render the scene right now you’d see a red circle. Even though we have a Lambert material applied there’s no light in the scene so by default Three.js will revert to a full ambient light, which is the same as flat colouring. Let’s fix that with a simple point of light:
// create a point light
var pointLight =
new THREE.PointLight(0xFFFFFF);
// set its position
pointLight.position.x = 10;
pointLight.position.y = 50;
pointLight.position.z = 130;
// add to the scene
## Render Loop
We now actually have everything set up to render, remarkably. But we actually need to go ahead and do just that:
// draw!
renderer.render(scene, camera);
You’re probably going to want to render more than once, though, so if you’re going to do a loop you should really use requestAnimationFrame; it’s by far the smartest way of handling animation in the browser. It’s not fully supported as yet, so I’d totally recommend that you take a look at Paul Irish’s shim.
Common Object Properties
If you take time to look through the code for Three.js you’ll see a lot of objects “inherit” from Object3D. This is a base object which contains some very useful properties, such as the position, rotation and scale information. In particular our Sphere is a Mesh which inherits from Object3D, to which it adds its own properties: geometry and materials. Why do I mention these? Well it’s unlikely you’re going to want to just have a sphere on your screen that does nothing, and these properties are worth investigating as they allow you to manipulate the underlying details of the meshes and materials on the fly.
// sphere geometry
// which contains the vertices and faces
sphere.geometry.vertices // an array
sphere.geometry.faces // also an array
// its position
sphere.position // contains x, y and z
sphere.rotation // same
sphere.scale // ... same
## Dirty Little Secrets
I just wanted to quickly point out a quick gotcha for Three.js, which is that if you modify, for example, the vertices of a mesh, you will notice in your render loop that nothing changes. Why? Well because Three.js (as far as I can tell) caches the data for a mesh as something of an optimisation. What you actually need to do is to flag to Three.js that something has changed so it can recalculate whatever it needs to. You do this with the following:
// set the geometry to dynamic
// so that it allow updates
sphere.geometry.dynamic = true;
// changes to the vertices
sphere.geometry.verticesNeedUpdate = true;
// changes to the normals
sphere.geometry.normalsNeedUpdate = true;
Again there are more, but those two I’ve found are the most useful. You should obviously only flag the things that have changed to avoid unnecessary calculations.
Well I hope you’ve found this brief introduction to Three.js helpful. There’s nothing quite like actually getting your hands dirty and trying something, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. 3D running natively in the browser is a lot of fun, and using an engine like Three.js takes away a lot of the headaches for you and lets you get to making some seriously cool stuff.
To help you out a bit I’ve wrapped up the source code in this lab article, so you can use that as a reference.
If you’ve enjoyed this let me know via Google+ or Twitter, it’s always good to say hello! | <urn:uuid:cba165ef-27bc-4082-b09d-c8a2117aa539> | https://aerotwist.com/tutorials/getting-started-with-three-js/ | en | 0.912522 | 0.046862 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
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Linux Business
OSCON 2008 Roundup 182
OSCON 2008 Roundup
Comments Filter:
• by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @01:35AM (#24397337)
This just is flat out wrong.
This is like claiming that Apple has such polished desktops and product design because they have really good artists and industrial designers.
It is the management culture at Apple that makes those things happen and the people doing it are just the tools they use. And the same goes for Core Animation and the rest of OS X's UI and imaging technologies.
Just take one look at the visual abortion that is KDE 4.1:
Core Image isn't going to do anything to make that UI nightmare any better. There are fundamental problems that go far beyond the rendering tech used. There is a complete lack of even the most basic UI design concepts that have been developed over the past 20 years. Font rendering and layout problems, colour usage for UI elements, shadowing and light source consistency just to name a few of the most glaring errors.
A year from now KDE and Gnome will be just a train wreck of UI elements with some more random bling thrown in a continuing futile attempt to 'prove KDE/Gnome is ahead' of Windows and OS X.
Core Animation would do nothing to help the mess that is KDE/Gnome. It would just add additional pointless bling.
• by daemonburrito ( 1026186 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @01:35AM (#24397343) Journal
I totally agree with you. I just started hacking around with Cocoa, and I am pretty blown away by how elegant it is.
Objective C is pretty amazing, too. (I couldn't speculate about whether developing for Cocoa with Java is fun or not).
It's a total cliche, but it's true: You only get one shot at making a good API. If it has warts that you want to get rid of later, be assured that millions of developers will have written code that depends on those warts.
• by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @01:38AM (#24397363)
Yeah it's basically due to the easy modularisation of the apple API due to Cocoa (objective-c). THat makes programming for mac so simple. Linux has an equivalent to this in Gnustep/Etoile with Objective C but it is lacking developer manpower. I am convinced that with a lot of developers backing gnustep/etoile it could easily replicate the mac experience on linux and surpass it.
• by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @01:49AM (#24397449) Journal
From your answer I can see you have never used Cocoa. A house-framer with a 12-oz hammer isn't going to have to work twice as hard to get stuff done as one using a 21-oz hammer. The tools a person uses are extremely important. A person who is tired from fighting all the time with the GUI-toolkit is not going to have the energy to be creative about how it looks. The GGP had a better point: it is not enough to just create 'prettiness,' it more importantly has to be functional. And that is where you get the double win with openstep: not only is it easy to make pretty, it is easy to make usable. If you so desire.
• by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @01:56AM (#24397515)
About 3 cups vegetable oil
2 (1 1/4-inch-thick) boneless top loin (New York strip) steaks (about 1 lb each)
3 1/8 teaspoons spice rub for beef
1 (1-lb) package frozen french fries
2 large garlic cloves, thinly sliced lengthwise
Put oven rack in middle position and preheat oven to 450F.
Heat 1 inch oil in a 4- to 5-quart heavy pot over high heat until it registers 375F on thermometer.
While oil heats, pat steaks dry, then rub all over with spice rub (and salt if necessary). Heat 1 tablespoon oil in a 12-inch ovenproof heavy skillet over moderately high heat until hot but not smoking, then sear steaks, turning over once with tongs, until well browned, about 5 minutes total. Transfer skillet to oven and roast 10 minutes for medium-rare.
Check oil while searing steaks, and when it registers 375F, begin frying french fries in 2 batches (add fries carefully; they may have ice crystals, which could cause spattering), stirring occasionally, until golden and crisp, 4 to 5 minutes per batch. Transfer fries with a slotted spoon to paper towels to drain and season with salt and pepper while hot. Return oil to 375F between batches.
Turn off heat under pot, then add garlic and fry until pale golden, 30 seconds to 1 minute, and transfer with slotted spoon to paper towels. Toss fries with garlic in a large bowl.
Transfer steak to a cutting board and let stand 5 minutes. Slice steak and serve with fries.
• by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @02:17AM (#24397637) Journal
Yeah, I agree, it needs a lot of work. It will happen, let me tell you why. Microsoft is going to be out of the picture (even their stock-holders have no faith in them: check their stock price). So what is left? OSX. Imagine you are Dell, HP, and Lenovo. What are you going to do if you can't push OSX, and Microsoft is dying? You start pushing Linux. Maybe this won't happen, but it isn't an unreasonable scenerio.
And it can be done. Each one of the problems you have listed can be overcome, and furthermore OSX has showed how to solve a lot of those problems. It's going to be a lot of hard work, but it can be done. And incidentally, I don't even think Interface Builder is that great. It gets the job done, but the latest version annoys me.
• by speedtux ( 1307149 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @04:52AM (#24398441)
May I interrupt your rant and ask for some facts please? Where are the usability studies showing OS X or Windows to be superior?
The fact is that Apple has never shown their usability to be better than anybody else's.
And you have nothing to back up statements "There is a complete lack of even the most basic UI design concepts that have been developed over the past 20 years." Come on, try naming those "basic UI design concepts" that Gnome or KDE supposedly violate.
• by speedtux ( 1307149 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @05:12AM (#24398519)
If you take a Mac from the Mac store and sit down and use it (i.e. don't install a bunch of garbage on it before you figure out how to use it), well, most people find it pretty intuitive.
And this is different from Linux how?
If you plop down an Ubuntu system on someone's desktop, in my experience, they find it "pretty intuitive" as well. Actually, many users prefer the Ubuntu desktop because it's easier to find and launch the apps that they need; nobody has has had any complaints about it.
or a linux machine (which could look like anything depending on the window manager installed and the programs opened).
That's a bullshit comparison. You need to compare desktop operating systems, not a kernel and a desktop OS.
Furthermore, OS X can also "look like anything" if people choose to theme it.
• by ndogg ( 158021 ) <(the.rhorn) (at) (> on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @07:16AM (#24399167) Homepage Journal
E17 (i.e. Enlightenment) has been promising a lot of this kind of thing for a while now. Of course, the Hurd, and DNF also promise a lot as well...
• by Builder ( 103701 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @08:00AM (#24399489)
What's X11-like about the Apple windowing system ?
• by Burz ( 138833 ) on Wednesday July 30, 2008 @10:40AM (#24401719) Journal
I have used and administered Linux systems for a decade now. Whenever I try to setup a "Linux" desktop such as Ubuntu, there is always a long list of problems that would never, ever afflict a Mac or Windows system.
Here are some of the current problems:
- NumLock light is opposite the NumLock mode (this on a dead-common 104-key setup). We see a very high degree of spurious breakage of what should otherwise be very solid functionality.
- Right-click in Firefox 3.x sometimes executes random context item without even displaying the context menu. This bug remained in the 3.0 GA release (and I doubt Mozilla cares all that much, as they are actually not fond of "Linux" as a PC platform).
- Certain non-GPL drivers keep disappearing whenever a system update happens to include the kernel (an essential design flaw of the Linux kernel, though a workaround should be possible).
- Video settings keep getting 'reset' after system updates. The user is then often deprived of a workable UI and they are told to edit xorg.conf from a CLI! Bizzarrely, Xorg and the others will supply example GUI apps (like a clock) but won't write a GUI to manage the display. The 'experts' at the Xorg and Xfree projects also have no concept of a usable 'fallback' mode for a desktop display, say switching to XGA res and framebuffer mode when things go wrong. Supposedly this would be "up to the distro" to take care of, but "the distro" doesn't have the comprehensive knowledge to make an integrated fail-safe display configurator (or not a good one).
- NetworkManager in the Control Panel having a markedly different feature set than the seperate network manager that resides on the "systray"... and that stamp over each others' settings particularly when Wifi is used. This is disgraceful.
- Poor support for a wide range of devices, large and small, internal and USB: TV tuners, modems, Wifi, etc. Even video cards are still a problem.
- Audio blockages in inexpensive hardware. Don't rely on calendar alarms, nor softphones, nor audible status indicators because they may turn out to be inaudible - you never know. And ever it shall be through last year's fashionable audio architecture, and probably next year's too.
- High power consumption on both desktops and notebooks. On desktops, starting many programs will spin-up all of my drives 'just because'. And why a file dialog that pops up with my home directory needs to spin up all of my drives is beyond me. It certainly isn't needed on other desktop OSes. I can't tell you the number of times that changing the display res or doing a system update has remove the power-saving option from xorg.conf. Also, many other examples of low battery life on laptops.
Other observations:
- File browsing is very screwed-up. The browsers keep displaying data through differing schemas, often within the same program, and they have differing ways of describing a file path. Even when they stick to a URL format, the 'handler' part can be made-up and non-sensical, conflicting with other parts of the same utility for accessing the same resource. When file dialogs from other apps are brought into the picture, the confusion becomes severe.
- Drivers: There is no standardization and logo-branding effort to address the devices problem. Are hardware vendors supposed to put a penguin on the box if their product is compatible? They don't really know, and no one at the Linux Foundation or the major distros is going to approach them about this simple but essential practice. There is also no ABI, but I won't "go there".
- Drivers: The group that is responsible for adding and maintaining most device support isn't interested in providing a simple way to find out whether a particular device is supported. Because, you know, that would be interfacing with end-users... Ick.
- Apps: Try doing tech support for a "Linux" application. I have done it for a living! There is literally no way to predict what sort of UI you will have to guide them through or which supporti
| <urn:uuid:c96ede96-760d-40ce-b3dc-681f7ddeb53b> | https://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/07/29/1948250/oscon-2008-roundup/interesting-comments | en | 0.942566 | 0.030654 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
[New-bugs-announce] [issue5720] ctime: I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Zooko O'Whielacronx report at bugs.python.org
Tue Apr 7 23:57:49 CEST 2009
New submission from Zooko O'Whielacronx <zooko at zooko.com>:
The stat module currently uses the "st_ctime" slot to hold two kinds
values which are semantically different but which are frequently
confused with one another. It chooses which kind of value to put in
there based on platform -- Windows gets the file creation time and all
other platforms get the "ctime". The only sane way to use this API is
then to switch on platform:
if platform.system() == "Windows":
metadata["creation time"] = s.st_ctime
metadata["unix ctime"] = s.st_ctime
(That is an actual code snippet from the Allmydata-Tahoe project.)
Many or even most programmers incorrectly think that unix ctime is file
creation time, so instead of using the sane idiom above, they write the
metadata["ctime"] = s.st_ctime
thus passing on the confusion to the users of their metadata, who may
not know on which platform this metadata was created. This is the
situation we have found ourselves in for the Allmydata-Tahoe project --
we now have a bunch of "ctime" values stored in our filesystem and no
way to tell which kind they were.
More and more filesystems such as ZFS and Macintosh apparently offer
creation time nowadays.
I propose the following changes:
1. Add a "st_crtime" field which gets populated on filesystems
(Windows, ZFS, Mac) which can do so.
That is hopefully not too controversial and we could proceed to do so
even if the next proposal gets bogged down:
2. Add a "st_unixctime" field which gets populated *only* by the unix
ctime and never by any other value (even on Windows, where the unix
ctime *is* available even though nobody cares about it), and deprecate
the hopelessly ambiguous "st_ctime" field.
You may be interested in http://allmydata.org/trac/tahoe/ticket/628
("mtime" and "ctime": I don't think that word means what you think it
means.) where the Allmydata-Tahoe project is carefully unpicking the
mess we made for ourselves by confusing ctime with file-creation time.
components: Library (Lib)
messages: 85750
nosy: zooko
severity: normal
status: open
title: ctime: I don't think that word means what you think it means.
Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
More information about the New-bugs-announce mailing list | <urn:uuid:cc5fa52b-f526-47c4-b09e-daf68d3623c7> | https://mail.python.org/pipermail/new-bugs-announce/2009-April/004604.html | en | 0.870079 | 0.048008 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
# Enbld *Enbld is yet another package manager for building development environment.* Enbld helps you install the software required for software development (programming language, text editor, version control system, etc). - Unlike other package manager, Enbld can install specific version. - Unlike other programing language version manager, Enbld offers the same interface of installation for all programing languages. - Conditions of installation software are defined by using perl-based DSL. target 'git' => define { version 'latest'; # -> install latest version } target 'perl' => define { version '5.18.1'; # -> install specific version } # SUPPORTED PLATFORMS *Enbld is performing verification of running on OS X Mavericks.* But probably, it may run also on Linux (Debian, Ubuntu etc.). When not running, I'm waiting for the report :) # REQUIREMENTS - perl 5.10.1 or above NOTE:Enbld certainly use the system perl (`/usr/bin/perl`). - GNU Make - compiler (gcc or clang) - other stuff required for individual target software (e.g. JRE for scala etc.) # INSTALLATION $ curl -L http://goo.gl/MrbDDB | perl To run Enbld, since a set of PATH is required, add to an environment variables according to the message. # MORE DOCUMENTS Displays the introduction of Enbld (same as perldoc lib/Enbld.pm). $ enblder intro Displays the tutorial of Enbld. $ enblder tutorial # WEB SITE [https://github.com/magnolia-k/Enbld](https://github.com/magnolia-k/Enbld) [http://code-stylistics.net/enbld](http://code-stylistics.net/enbld) # ISSUE REPORT [https://github.com/magnolia-k/Enbld/issues](https://github.com/magnolia-k/Enbld/issues) # COPYRIGHT copyright 2013- Magnolia . # LICENSE This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself. | <urn:uuid:c8eb5f2b-c7e6-4c10-aa2c-fe83171ad039> | http://cpansearch.perl.org/src/MAGNOLIA/Enbld-0.7035/README.md | en | 0.711408 | 0.026835 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Vitor Belfort vs. Tim Kennedy announced for Brazil event
Discussion in 'General MMA discussion' started by imhungry4444, Jul 26, 2013.
Who wins?
Vitor Belfort 34 vote(s) 97.1%
Tim Kennedy 1 vote(s) 2.9%
1. imhungry4444 Well-Known Member
2. Spud Well-Known Member
Eh, it wasn't announced. Dana said it's what they're looking to do though.
3. BRF Well-Known Member
trt-tor belfort by whatever he wants (spinning heel kick of death)
4. Spud Well-Known Member
Oh, and Vitor wins then Kennedy gets cut.
PsychoIcon and BiggDogg like this.
5. JonnyRico Well-Known Member
Hm, not the bout for Vitor I expected or wanted, but I'm excited to see him back in action
PsychoIcon likes this.
6. BRF Well-Known Member
so.. he beat luke rockhold and the fight he gets is the guy luke rockhold just beat?
BallsThruWall, newERA and Sapper like this.
7. Sapper Well-Known Member
That's what I was just thinking.. I know Vitor needs a fight, but this does not make any sense to me. I would think Vitor vs Munoz makes the most sense right now....
BallsThruWall likes this.
8. callithowyouseeit Well-Known Member
Fight makes no sense.... but Vitor's options are limited I suppose.
Woulda way rather saw Belfort v Wandy II
PsychoIcon likes this.
9. KZUFCchamp2013 Well-Known Member
thats what Tim gets for his comments on fighter pay
10. Spud Well-Known Member
Not to mention he was bitching about Joe Silva before.
PsychoIcon likes this.
11. mMikal Active Member
Vitor officially ducks Mousasi AGAIN. First in Affliction, now in the UFC.
12. KZUFCchamp2013 Well-Known Member
what did he say about him? i never saw that
13. Spud Well-Known Member
I can't remember exactly what he was, but he was critical of Silvas match-making. Considering that it's Silva in charge of cutting fighters, it's probably best not to piss him off.
14. The Green_Wombat Well-Known Member
this will teach Him not to open his f---ing mouth.
15. BRF Well-Known Member
as much as i hate this match up i'll admit that kennedy has something bisping and rockhold don't.
a decent ground game.
belfort has shown weakness to wrestling in the past.
i would have preferred Munoz vs belfort with bisping and kennedy in the co-main but whatever
noobMMAfan likes this.
16. renjr84 Well-Known Member
Call me off base here but I believe this does 2 things...First gives Belfort a much much easier fight to waste time and then face the Silva Weidman winner but also this really almost is a FU to Kennedy and I could see him being fed to Belfort so they can cut his ***.
BiggDogg likes this.
17. renjr84 Well-Known Member
I don't see Kennedy doing what Rockhold doing and thats getting him to the ground. With their new olympic wrestling coach I would not be suprised if Belforts tdd has and will get even better.
18. renjr84 Well-Known Member
any one else having trouble with that mmafighting link
19. ScreamBloodyGordon Well-Known Member
The fight actually makes perfect sense from the right angle. This is just a gimme fight so Belfort can stay active and then they can have Belfort in line to face the Silva/Weidman winner.
noobMMAfan likes this.
20. Spidy Well-Known Member
I did not see this coming. Kennedy was nowhere on my radar as possible opponents for Vitor, but I feel he is the safest of the available options,if there truly is such a thing. I would say there is a pretty damn good chance The Phenom retains his no 1 ranking and gets his rightful shot at the strap as long as there isn't a 3rd installment of AS/CW. Hey ya never know
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Monday, February 15, 2010
Memory Barriers and GHC 6.12.1
I've moved to UNSW (University of New South Wales) to help with the DPH (Data Parallel Haskell) project. The first order of business has been to make a SPARC/Solaris binary release for 6.12.1.
It looks like this week will be spent spelunking through the runtime system trying to find the source of #3875. Running the DPH Quickhull benchmark on SPARC/Solaris with the current head causes a consistent runtime crash, and running sumsq causes a crash about one time out of twenty. Simon M reckons this is likely to be caused by a missing memory barrier somewhere in the runtime system, and if that's true then it's going to be tricky to find.
According to this wikipedia page the default memory ordering properties on SPARC (TSO = Total Store Ordering) are supposed to be the same as on x86, but the x86 benchmarks don't crash like on SPARC. I'm not sure if this is because the memory ordering on SPARC and x86 are actually different, or if we've just been lucky on x86 so far. I'll spend today reading more about the ordering properties of these two architectures.
I'm also eagerly awaiting the new GHC buildbot, which Ian is working on. GHC HQ develops mostly on x86_64/Linux + Windows, so if we want to keep other platforms working then having reliable buildbots is an absolute necessity.
1. My guess: you've been getting lucky on x64. I believe there are subtle differences between x86 and TSO ordering, but for present purposes they ought to be the same. It's more likely that higher thread counts and/or different levels of sharing in memory pipelines are causing SPARC to crash more often.
2. The bus error would probably indicate a misaligned memory access. This would not be a problem on x86 as it handles misaligned accesses, but SPARC doesn't.
3. If it is a memory ordering thing it could be that the x86/amd64 chips that you've tested have been conservative in how they conform to their memory ordering standards.
In non-parallel contexts I've seen code work on x86 but crash on sparc because of geinuine bugs, for example C's heap may be layed out differently and cause a bug that is present in both programs to surface only on Sparc. I've also seen SIGBUS when I was using misaligned memory as Darryl said.
4. your site is very informative thank you
bus ticketing machine!/ElitePalm Elite Palm™ | <urn:uuid:959a356d-80f9-45ad-94e8-772959b19e9c> | http://ghcsparc.blogspot.com/2010/02/memory-barriers-and-ghc-6121.html | en | 0.955263 | 0.252236 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Hurricane may have uncovered Civil War shipwreck (Texas)
Breaking News
Experts know of about a dozen Civil War-era shipwrecks off the Texas coast. They might have just identified another.
Contractors searching for debris from Hurricane Ike near Galveston Island took a sonar scan of what the Texas Historical Commission believes is a previously undiscovered ship carrying cotton that sank in 1864.
The Carolina, also known as the Caroline, was a privately owned merchant ship that tried to break though a federal blockade of Galveston. After being pursued for several hours by Union gunships, the crew of the Carolina ran the ship aground in shallow water between Galveston and San Luis Pass, then set it on fire rather than let it be captured.
comments powered by Disqus | <urn:uuid:85d27d24-e634-45ca-bb57-7ee7383ba505> | http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/66574 | en | 0.975451 | 0.050515 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
On Fifth Try, Diana Nyad Completes Cuba-Florida Swim
Sep 2, 2013
Originally published on September 3, 2013 9:48 am
After years of unwavering tenacity, Diana Nyad has completed her quest. At 64 years of age, she became the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a protective shark cage. That is more than a hundred miles of water full of sharks, venomous box jellyfish and treacherous currents.
Nyad had attempted to cross the Florida Strait four times before. Last year, she was stung by a jellyfish and was pulled from the water. But this year, wearing a face mask to protect her, she finally swam to shore at Smathers Beach in Key West, Fla. And here's a little bit of what she had to say.
DIANA NYAD: I must say I'm a little more out of it than I thought I'd be. My mouth is just sea - sea - seawater.
SIEGEL: Well, Nancy Klingener, of member station WLRN in Miami, was there at the finish and joins me now. And Nancy, tell us what the scene was like when Diana Nyad came up on the shore.
NANCY KLINGENER, BYLINE: It was a huge celebration. There were thousands of people waiting for her on shore. A big, big cheer went up. People were blowing conch shells. People were waving flags. People were just really, in a party mood to greet her.
SIEGEL: That sound we heard of her speaking, it sounds like someone who had six shots of Novocain within the past hour. She had difficulty speaking.
KLINGENER: She did. Her tongue was swollen from all the saltwater she took in. And one of the members of her support crew told me that that mask actually made it a lot harder for her to breathe as she was swimming because, you know, when she would lift her face up out of the water to breathe, the mask would kind of allow seawater in there. So she took in even more seawater than she normally would on a swim like that.
SIEGEL: Apart from that, so far as you know, is she well? I mean, is she unharmed by this long swim?
KLINGENER: Yeah. They took her to the hospital to check her out, which, I think, makes a lot of sense. But she sounded pretty good for somebody who'd been in the water for 50-plus hours and swam 100-plus miles.
SIEGEL: Well, tell us about how things went on this swim, about the conditions that Diana Nyad encountered.
KLINGENER: This time, her crew said, everything just went right. The weather was pretty good. They did encounter one little squall, but otherwise they had pretty good weather. The seas weren't too bad, and the jellyfish weren't too bad this time either. So they really thought that everything just worked out right this time.
SIEGEL: This has been a - well, it's not a dream, it's been a real-life ambition of hers for decades. What's she going to do now?
KLINGENER: That's a good question. I don't know. We didn't get a chance to ask her that question. I think she's going to rest and appreciate the accomplishment for a little while, anyway.
SIEGEL: That's reporter Nancy Klingener of member station WLRN talking with us from Key West, Florida. Thank you, Nancy.
KLINGENER: Thank you.
| <urn:uuid:4810a00f-57df-40ec-ab76-c42782da20fe> | http://kttz.org/post/fifth-try-diana-nyad-completes-cuba-florida-swim | en | 0.985936 | 0.040352 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
With fiber making inroads and traditional carriers boosting speeds to compensate, internet connections are getting faster. What type of connection do you have?
Even though internet connections are better and more reliable than they've been in the past, things still aren't perfect—at least not in the US. Fiber is only available in select areas, cable companies tend to monopolize particular areas, and wireless just isn't quite there yet. We've talked in the past about how to deal with slow connections and how to troubleshoot flaky connections.
But we'd like to know:
Image by Adamantios and Dmitry G (Wikimedia Commons), geralt (pixabay), and psdGraphics. | <urn:uuid:1cc0a3e5-6c93-4e78-b44c-406a0133ffce> | http://lifehacker.com/5993514/what-type-of-internet-connection-do-you-use?tag=wireless | en | 0.951255 | 0.282466 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Nets is doing what is right
Nets is a commercial enterprise and must have profits to survive. It is not a charity organisation. The raising of its levy is part and parcel of its business. It will raise the level until the consumers find it unbearable and refuse to use it. Hey, that is basic. As long as they price it competitively, it is really a business decision. It is doing something not different from public transport or other service providers. And it is better to 'increase in small amounts rather than to raise a big lump sum after several years.' If public transport companies and other monopolistic service providers can do it this way, while reaping huge profits, what is wrong with Nets doing it? What about credit card companies charging 2% interest rate per month and compounded if the consumers did not pay the debt promptly? How many per cent is that a year? Compare that with the loan sharks. Oh it is international practice and no one can do anything about it.
No comments: | <urn:uuid:1f02def3-536f-45f2-b583-785eb5431bcc> | http://mysingaporenews.blogspot.com/2007/06/nets-is-doing-what-is-right.html | en | 0.972153 | 0.037152 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Committing to the Vegan Diet
Things to Consider Before Committing to the Vegan Diet
With many celebrities and even an ex president committing themselves to the vegan diet, and also exhibiting some impressive results many people are wondering if they could also gain such health benefits by jumping on the bandwagon.
The first thing to know is that being a vegan is an arduous life of self-denial for breakfast and pea soups for dessert, are you still here? Excellent, as an avid vegan myself, I try to paint the picture as black as possible because affecting the diet our bodies have been accustomed too for the last million years without the proper precautions can cause even worse health debacles.
Having said that there are many benefits to be had from adopting the vegan diet including plenty of energy to work think and play, protection from many diseases and even the ability to reverse heart disease.
So without much more introduction, here are a few things to be fully aware of as you make this essential health transition that can lead to a longer life and fewer health disruptions along the way.
You May Need to Consider Supplements
As you leave of animal products you will need to consider how you will supplement certain vitamins and minerals that your body depends on. For this reason the switch should be made slowly and gradually. By learning to interface with your body you will become more aware of what your body needs regularly and be able to provide this nutrition.
Following are some of the Vitamins and minerals that you will need to find a suitable supplement for:
Vitamin B12
B12 is prolific in things like juicy steaks, greasy hamburgers and those flavorful organ meats I used to love. B12 works to keep the nervous system in tip top condition and even aids in the production DNA. When you are low on this essential vitamin you may begin to feel drowsy, fatigued and even upset.
B12 is found solely in animal products, although cereals and grains do contain certain amounts, most vegans try to get their nutritional intake in supplement form or through enriched food products.
Iron is also a mineral we obtain in high quantities by eating animal products. Iron is essential for building red blood cells and a severe lack of this essential mineral can lead to many health problem especially anemia.
Vegans are fortunate to have a huge selection iron rich vegetables that they must include their daily diet if they are to achieve better health and not do themselves undue damage. This includes spinach and many other dark leafy veggies, beets, legumes and dried raisins too. Be sure to get copious amounts of this essential vitamin each day.
Proteins are what our bodies use to build strength and stature and you don’t want to be the vegan making the rest of us look bad, do you? Proteins are also essential to repairing injuries and if you are deficient minor scratches and cuts can take weeks to heal completely.
The good thing to know is that the body requires a relatively small amount of protein to function at optimal condition, people that assume you can increase body mass by eating exorbitant amounts of protein are mistaken.
Good sources of protein for the vegan include legumes, seitan and quinoa. Natural soy products are also very high in protein but should be eaten in moderation.
Final Note:
How you make this important adjustment will decide how you are affected by this change in your lifestyle. Many people who lack understanding make the mistake of substituting their nutrients for junk food that is technically “vegan”. This is not only seriously missing the point it can be very hazardous to your health.
Making Vegan Cookies
Making Vegan Cookies
While many people want to become vegan, it can feel like there is a limited number of options in terms of food and the types of foods available. This is what causes so many people to dismiss the notion of being vegan, and to feel like they need to look somewhere else for their food. However, if you know how to bake, cook, and create your own foods, then partaking in a diet free from all animal products is incredibly easy. In fact, it is usually easier that eating animal products as recipes have much more freedom and are much less likely to be problematic if they are made incorrectly.
One of the best ways to introduce someone to being vegan is through sweets, the forbidden food that so many people feel they won’t be able to have if they make the switch. One of the easiest ways to do this is with vegan cookies, simple, delicious, and very healthy cookies. As an added bonus, they can usually be sugar free, leaving your guest in awe of your baking skills, and showing them that life can truly be enjoyed with fewer ingredients.
Remember, you can feel free to experiment around with recipes without fear. If you are using replacements for animal products, you may find that you need to read a few more labels, but generally everything should be much more stable than items like milk, eggs, and fat. This means that dough can be left in the fridge overnight, have extra coconut milk put in it, or can store for longer than traditional cookies. While they will obviously taste best when fresh, the ability to store food for much longer can also help you with your grocery budget as well.
If you are stuck for ideas, there are always bakeries that specialize in cruelty free goods that will have tried and true combinations. However, they are usually much more likely to try out of this world combinations, so it’s okay to feel a little overwhelmed by their choices as well. Not everyone thinks about putting beets or carrots into baked goods on the first try.
Another resource for figuring out new recipes is going to be online forums or friends in your day to day life. A simple search will bring up a number of groups who can recommend the best cook books, combinations, and even websites for amazing vegan cookie recipes. This takes all the guess work out of your baking adventure, and lets you enjoy your life.
Overall, taking the time to make something vegan will not only improve your life, but will also improve the life of many different animals. In addition, you can help improve the life of your friends, and help them learn more about the way that they treat the world around them. So share your best recipes, don’t be afraid to experiment a little, and enjoy the happiness that comes from knowing each bite is simple, clean, and free from cruelty.
Delicious Vegan Biscuits
How Can You Make Delicious Vegan Biscuits?
When you are serving soup for dinner, nothing goes better with it than a plate of delicious biscuits fresh from the oven. However, most biscuit recipes involve the use of plenty of buttermilk, butter, or other dairy products. Is there a way to make vegan biscuits that taste just as good as these classics?
The good news is that a few simple substitutions let you create fluffy, delicious biscuits that do not require the use of any animal products. While it may take a little trial and error to come up with the perfect recipe, before long, you will be able to bake great-tasting biscuits that will fool even the most traditional of guests.
One of the first things that you will need to find a substitute for is butter. Many traditional biscuit recipes involve the use of quite a bit of butter. You need to be able to find a non-dairy alternative that will still give your biscuits that rich, buttery flavor that so many people love.
Doing so is not as difficult as you might have feared, however. There are plenty of non-dairy alternatives that can often be substituted for butter in the recipe. For example, some kind of vegetable shortening, such as margarine, can easily be used in place of butter.
You can also just use canola oil or some other type of vegetable oil. However, it is a good idea to use some shortening as well, rather than just oil. This way, the biscuits will be as fluffy as possible when they come out of the oven.
There are also some fruits and vegetables that can be used as partial substitutes in biscuit recipes. For example, applesauce is often used as a substitute for oil or butter in vegan recipes. However, because it is rather sweet, using it in a biscuit recipe may not be to everyone’s taste.
The same holds true for prunes or sweet potatoes. By roasting and mashing a sweet potato, you can bake delicious biscuits that are a rich orange in color. They may not be entirely traditional, but they certainly taste good.
If you make buttermilk biscuits, you will also have to find a substitute for this ingredient. Finding a way to get that tangy, sour flavor can be challenging. One simple approach is to use vinegar or lemon juice to curdle your favorite non-dairy milk.
For example, take a cup of soy or almond milk and add a tablespoon or two of vinegar or some other acid. Let it sit overnight, and in the morning, the acid will have curdled the milk. This makes a good non-dairy substitute for buttermilk. You can also use some type of vegan yogurt that has been cultured by mixing it with non-dairy milk.
As you can see, making a delicious batch of vegan biscuits does not have to be as difficult as you fear. Give these substitutes a try to see how well they work for you. Before long, you will have the perfect recipe! | <urn:uuid:191ac698-cd2b-49ba-86d2-7290d74b6322> | http://www.3byone.com/ | en | 0.965806 | 0.04015 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
The Abhidhamma Philosophy
Clarification of Terms
Many thinkers of all times and climes have insisted that a clarification of concepts and terms must be the basis of all realistic and successful thought, action, and, as Kungfutse says, even of government. But as shown by the widespread confusion of ideas throughout the centuries, this has been neglected in nearly all branches of life and thought - a fact responsible for much of man's unhappiness.
It is another evidence of the scientific spirit of the Abhidhamma that the definition of its terms and of their range of application occupies a very prominent place. In particular, the Dhammasangani is essentially a book of classifications and definitions. In addition, a very elaborate and cautious delimitation of terms is given in the sixth book of Abhidhamma the 'Yamaka', which to our modern taste appears even over-elaborate and over-cautious in that respect.
The Suttas, serving mainly the purpose of offering guidance for the actual daily life of the disciple, are mostly (though not entirely) couched in terms of conventional language (vohara-vacana), making reference to persons, their qualities, possessions, etc. In the Abhidhamma, this Sutta terminology is turned into correct functional forms of thought, which accord with the true 'impersonal' and everchanging nature of actuality; and in that strict, or highest, sense (paramattha) the main tenets of the Dhamma are explained.
While vague definitions and loosely used terms are like blunt tools unfit to do the work they are meant for, while concepts based on wrong notions will necessarily beg the question to be scrutinized and will thus prejudice the issue, the use of appropriate and carefully tempered conceptual tools will greatly facilitate the quest for liberating knowledge, and is an indispensable condition of success in that quest.
Hence the fact that Abhidhamma literature is a rich source of exact terminology, is a feature not to be underestimated.
| <urn:uuid:13cef445-2284-43d8-a6ec-89ac6925bd4f> | http://www.buddhanet.net/abhidh04.htm | en | 0.942994 | 0.021295 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
How Long? How Long? 1st edition
African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights
How Long? How Long? 0 9780195114911 0195114914
Details about How Long? How Long?:
A compelling and readable narrative history, How Long? How Long? presents both a rethinking of social movement theory and a controversial thesis: that chroniclers have egregiously neglected the most important leaders of the Civil Rights movement, African-American women, in favor of higher-profile African-American men and white women. Author Belinda Robnett argues that the diversity of experiences of the African-American women organizers has been underemphasized in favor of monolithic treatments of their femaleness and blackness.
Drawing heavily on interviews with actual participants in the American Civil Rights movement, this work retells the movement as seen through the eyes and spoken through the voices of African-American women participants. It is the first book to provide an analysis of race, class, gender, and culture as substructures that shaped the organization and outcome of the movement. Robnett examines the differences among women participants in the movement and offers the first cohesive analysis of the gendered relations and interactions among its black activists, thus demonstrating that femaleness and blackness cannot be viewed as sufficient signifiers for movement experience and individual identity. Finally, this book makes a significant contribution to social movement theory by providing a crucial understanding of the continuity and complexity of social movements, clarifying the need for different layers of leadership that come to satisfy different movement needs.
An engaging narrative history as well as a major contribution to social movement and feminist theory, How Long? How Long? will appeal to students and scholars of social activism, women's studies, American history, and African-American studies, and to general readers interested in the perennially fascinating story of the American Civil Rights movement.
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Rent How Long? How Long? 1st edition today, or search our site for other textbooks by Belinda Robnett. Every textbook comes with a 21-day "Any Reason" guarantee. Published by Oxford University Press. | <urn:uuid:0bd340cf-fe63-4468-bf92-b36fe3d8f5cd> | http://www.chegg.com/textbooks/how-long-how-long-1st-edition-9780195114911-0195114914 | en | 0.918251 | 0.717544 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Monday, Aug 29, 2016
Bill Nye Denies 'Attacking Religion' in Anti-Creationism Video
• (Photo: Reuters/Fred Prouser)
Bill Nye recently defended comments he made regarding creationism, in which he urges adults to teach children about evolution.
By Katherine Weber , Christian Post Reporter
August 28, 2012|5:19 pm
Famed television scientist Bill Nye is defending a recent video produced by BigThink.com entitled "Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children," arguing that he did not attack religion in the video, in which he says that those believing in creationism live in a "fantastically complicated world."
Nye, who gained famed by starring as "Bill Nye the Science Guy" on the popular children's show by the same name, went on "CBS This Morning" Tuesday to defend the previous comments he made regarding religious beliefs and creationism in his Aug. 23 video.
"You can believe what you want religiously. Religion is one thing, but science, provable science is something else. My concern is you don't want people growing up not believing in radioactivity, not believing in geology and deep time," Nye said on "CBS This Morning."
"[…] I'm not attacking anybody's religion, but science, if you go to a museum and you see fossil dinosaur bones, they came from somewhere, and we have by diligent investigation have determined that the earth is 4.54 billion years old. The sun is a star, like all the other stars you see in the sky, and we are made of the same stuff. This is wonderful! This is fantastic discoveries that fill me with reverence, make me excited," Nye added.
In the Bigthink.com video, Nye begins the video by saying that the "denial of evolution is unique to the United States."
"When you have a portion of the population that doesn't believe in [science], it holds everyone back really," he continues.
"Your world becomes fantastically complicated if you don't believe in evolution," he adds.
Nye, who is also a mechanical engineer, concludes the video by urging all grown-ups who believe in creationism, which is the religious belief that the universe and all human life are a product of God's creation, to teach their children about evolution.
"I say to grown-ups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world where everything is completely inconsistent with the universe, that's fine. But don't make your kids do it, because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and tax payers for the future," Nye says in the clip.
"In another couple centuries, [the creationism] world view […] I'm sure won't exist," he concludes.
Some groups, such as Answers in Genesis, a creationist group that believes in a literal translation of the Bible, claims in contradiction to some members of the scientific community that dinosaurs were created by God and existed along with man. The group also believes the Earth is thousands of years old, and not millions.
"As you add up all of the dates, and accepting that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came to Earth almost 2,000 years ago, we come to the conclusion that the creation of the Earth and animals (including the dinosaurs) occurred only thousands of years ago (perhaps only 6,000!), not millions of years," Ken Ham, President and CEO of Answers in Genesis, wrote on the Answers in Genesis website.
"The Bible tells us that God created all of the land animals on the sixth day of creation. As dinosaurs were land animals, they must have been made on this day, alongside Adam and Eve, who were also created on Day Six (Genesis 1:24–31)," Ham added.
"Evolutionists declare that no man ever lived alongside dinosaurs. The Bible, however, makes it plain that dinosaurs and people must have lived together," the CEO concluded.
A June 2012 Gallup poll found that 46 percent of Americans believe in creationism, while 32 percent believe in evolution with the guidance of God, and 15 percent believe in atheistic evolution.
Source URL : http://www.christianpost.com/news/bill-nye-denies-attacking-religion-in-anti-creationism-video-80746/ | <urn:uuid:3bcac54e-aa9a-4ca6-9abe-bdbbd9e0cc0b> | http://www.christianpost.com/news/bill-nye-denies-attacking-religion-in-anti-creationism-video-80746/print.html | en | 0.969275 | 0.040009 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Gums That Bleed Easily
What Causes Bleeding Gums?
Bleeding gums can have various causes, ranging in severity from 'worrying' to 'generally fatal'. Finding the true cause means ruling out or confirming each possibility – in other words, diagnosis.
Diagnose your symptoms now!
• understand what's happening to your body
• learn what you should be doing right now
• have a doctor review your case (optional)
Diagnosis is usually a complex process due to the sheer number of possible causes and related symptoms. In order to diagnose bleeding gums, we could:
• Research the topic
• Find a doctor with the time
• Use a diagnostic computer system.
The process is the same, whichever method is used.
Step 1: List all Possible Causes
We begin by identifying the disease conditions which have "bleeding gums" as a symptom. Here are four possibilities:
• AML Leukemia
• Periodontal Disease
• Mercury Toxicity
• Vitamin C Need
Step 2: Build a Symptom Checklist
many loose teeth
bulging eyes from hyperthyroidism
moving white lines across nails
very early puberty onset
wearing dirty dentures all day
poor bodily coordination
regular sore throats
chronic mouth soreness/sores
loss of appetite
often/always feeling unusually cold
poorly-removed amalgams
being an unsocial person
... and more than 40 others
Step 3: Rule Out or Confirm each Possible Cause
A differential diagnosis of your symptoms and risk factors finds the likely cause of bleeding gums:
Cause Probability Status
AML Leukemia 96% Confirm
Mercury Toxicity 12% Unlikely
Vitamin C Need 4% Ruled out
Periodontal Disease 3% Ruled out
* This is a simple example to illustrate the process
Arriving at a Correct Diagnosis
In the Mouth/Oral Symptoms section of the questionnaire, The Analyst™ will ask the following question about gums that bleed easily:
How often do your gums bleed when you brush your teeth?
Possible responses:
→ Never / don't know
→ Rarely, and only with hard brushing
→ At least once a month
→ At least once a week
→ Always or most of the time
Based on your response to this question, which may indicate either gums that bleed easily or gums that bleed very easily, The Analyst™ will consider possibilities such as:
Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML)
Very rarely, bleeding gums are due to leukemia.
Periodontal Disease - Gingivitis
Bleeding gums are nearly always a symptom of gingivitis.
Vitamin C Requirement
Bleeding gums are sometimes due to scurvy (vitamin C deficiency), but this is a rare condition nowadays.
Concerned or curious about your health? Try The Analyst™
Symptom Entry
Symptom Entry
Full Explanations
Optional Doctor Review
Review (optional) | <urn:uuid:880a29bb-388a-4ec2-a9c1-9b57a62a4960> | http://www.diagnose-me.com/what-causes/bleeding-gums.php | en | 0.807653 | 0.037721 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
California man gets 15-year prison sentence for economic-espionage conviction involving China
Markets Associated Press
A federal judge has sentenced a California chemical engineer to 15 years in prison and fined him $28.3 million for a rare economic-espionage conviction for selling China a secret recipe to a widely used white pigment.
Continue Reading Below
U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White said Thursday in Oakland that Liew, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had "turned against his adopted country over greed."
A jury previously convicted the 56-year-old Liew of receiving $28 million from companies controlled by the Chinese government in exchange for DuPont Co.'s pigment technology for making cars, paper and a long list of everyday items whiter.
Along with the $28.3 million Liew was ordered to forfeit and pay to DuPont, the engineering company launched by him and his wife was fined $18.9 million.
White expressed doubt that Liew would pay back much of his debt.
White noted that U.S. authorities had managed to trace $22 million of the $28 million received by Liew to various Singapore and Chinese companies controlled by Liew's in-laws before losing the trail.
Continue Reading Below
"We'll never get it," White said. "It has been spirited out of the country."
Liew and his wife, Christina Liew, launched a small California company in the 1990s aimed at exploiting China's desire to build a DuPont-like factory to manufacture the white pigment known as titanium dioxide.
The Liews hired retired DuPont engineers and, according to the FBI, paid them thousands of dollars for sensitive company documents laying out a process to make the pigment.
Two former DuPont engineers have also been convicted of economic espionage. Another engineer committed suicide in early 2012 on the day he was to sign a plea bargain acknowledging his role in the conspiracy.
Except for a few months of release on bail, Liew has been in jail since his arrest in 2011. Wearing yellow jail garb and with his wife and family looking on from the gallery, Liew apologized for his actions.
"There are many things I would have liked to have done differently," Liew told the judge. "I regret my actions."
Liew was born on a farm in Malaysia to Chinese parents and went on to earn advanced degrees in chemical engineering.
"He's an ambitious man who made huge mistakes trying to make it into the big time," said Stuart Gasner, Liew's attorney.
Liew's wife has pleaded not guilty to obstruction of justice and other charges.
In 2009, the Chinese government-controlled Pangang Group Co. Ltd. awarded the Liews' company a $17 million contract to build a factory that could produce 100,000 metric tons of the pigment a year. The same company had earlier awarded the Liews' company millions more in similar contracts for smaller projects.
Prosecutors allege that the Chinese factory was built with a detailed DuPont instruction manual stamped "confidential" that was previously used to build DuPont's newest plant in Taiwan.
Robert Maegerle, a retired DuPont engineer, was convicted of economic-espionage charges along with Walter Liew in March. They are the first people to be convicted of economic espionage by a jury since Congress passed the Economic Espionage Act in 1996, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. About 20 other defendants have pleaded guilty to economic espionage charges before trial.
Federal officials say foreign governments' theft of U.S. technology is one of the biggest threats to the country's economy and national security.
"The battle against economic espionage has become one of the FBI's main fronts in its efforts to protect U.S. national security in the 21st century," said David Johnson, the FBI's special agent in charge of the San Francisco office.
Maegerle, 78, is to be sentenced later and remains free on bail. | <urn:uuid:10bbce59-2e67-4d17-a978-f98721ee88c0> | http://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/2014/07/11/california-man-gets-15-year-prison-sentence-for-economic-espionage-conviction.html?cmpid=prn_aol | en | 0.980666 | 0.020297 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Daft, dazzling Tarantino does it again in ‘Django’
• Mon Dec 24th, 2012 12:42pm
• Life
By Robert Horton Herald Movie Critic
If an unknown filmmaker had come out of the blue with “Django Unchained,” it’s possible we’d be wondering about the director’s sanity. Because what sort of lunatic would make a movie like this?
The answer is, of course, Quentin Tarantino. No one else would have, could have, possibly dreamed up this mad movie fantasia, but then that pretty much describes Tarantino’s entire career.
Like his 2009 “Inglourious Basterds,” the new one is a wish-fulfillment version of history. Set pre-Civil War America, it creates a scenario in which an escaped slave named Django (Jamie Foxx) might execute revenge against a plantation owner (an unusually animated Leonardo DiCaprio) who holds Django’s wife (Kerry Washington) in captivity.
Getting to that point will require a longish 165 minutes of looping, winding storytelling, ranging from shocking violence to “Blazing Saddles”-style humor. The wackiest example of the latter is a sequence involving a posse of hood-wearing vigilantes who must put their attack on hold while they discuss how difficult it is to see out of the little eyeholes in the hoods. Perhaps that’s Tarantino’s answer to “Birth of a Nation.”
Django is liberated from a brutal slavekeeper by an itinerant German bounty hunter named King Schultz (Christoph Waltz, the Oscar-winner from “Inglourious”). Schultz makes a bargain: He’ll grant Django his legal freedom if he spends a winter helping Schultz claim bounties on wanted men.
Deal. This plot is fairly simple, as many revenge fantasies are. Yet Tarantino seems less interested in riling up the audience into a lather — as those grindhouse movies he cherishes were so good at doing — as he is in upending our expectations.
The film is laced with references to other movies, beginning with the title. “Django” was a 1966 spaghetti western that Tarantino taps for music and other cues. Its star was Franco Nero, who gets a rather laborious cameo here.
Amidst all the goofiness, Tarantino deploys his talent for sustained, suspenseful and wonderfully talky scenes. (Christoph Waltz is especially glourious — er, glorious — at the dialogue sequences.) A moment shared by Django and Schultz as they peer down from a hill at a potential target is philosophical in a way both thoughtful and funny.
And there’s a great scene involving a cave and a campfire, in which the nature of storytelling itself is elucidated. A scene like that won’t be included when people mention the movie’s horrifying explosions of violence, or its wildly risky deployment of a calculating plantation slave (Samuel L. Jackson, kind of brilliant).
Because one walks away from “Django Unchained” reeling from the audacity of it all, it’s a little challenging to rate the film in any definitive way. It’s not a western or a parody or an homage or an exploitation picture, but a combination of those all things. We call it a Quentin Tarantino movie — and, yes, the man has become his own film genre.
“Django Unchained” (3½ stars)
A crazy offering from Quentin Tarantino, about a pre-Civil War slave (Jamie Foxx) who teams up with a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) to go after a plantation owner (Leonardo DiCaprio). This one’s a typical Tarantino brew of violence, humor and homages to other movies, and it detonates its best sequences with regularity, if not brevity (it runs 165 minutes).
Rated: R for violence, language, subject matter.
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Pooling knowledge is an intelligent decision
Mark Schnurman/The Star-Ledger By Mark Schnurman/The Star-Ledger The Star-Ledger
on January 31, 2010 at 2:00 PM
Mark_Schnurman.jpgCAREER COACH: Mark Schnurman
Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb, said ignorance is always better than false knowledge, because if you think you know something and you don’t, you may make bad decisions.
On the other hand, knowing you don’t know something may lead to good questions and better decisions.
I am reading the book "Intellectuals and Society," by Thomas Sowell. Sowell discusses the disparate impact intellectuals have on society. While Sowell defines intellectuals as purveyors of ideas, the same idea applies to the workplace, where smart people — experts, entrepreneurs, business leaders — have a disproportionae effect on the workplace even when their reach exceeds their areas of native talent, ability and experience.
To paraphrase Sowell, the Achilles Heel of smart and successful people is they assume their expertise can be generalized and extrapolated to other areas. Put differently, they imagine there is no limit to their abilities.
The self assurance engendered by their achievement often leads to ill conceived notions of omnipotence. For example, an entrepreneur may have a great idea, but once the business starts growing he may lack the skills to manage the finances, contracts or people. Because of his accomplishments, however, he may think the scope of his ability will transfer to all areas of his professional, and perhaps personal, life.
In some cases, their intellect can be applied effectively outside of their expertise if they diligently learn the details and mundane attributes in the new realm so they can generalize their knowledge. Those cases are rare, since the commitment and learning necessary to be great is significant.
In his book "Outliers," Malcolm Gladwell posits it takes 10,000 hours of effort to become an expert in something. Clearly, it is hard to be an expert in multiple areas.
So how do you effectively manage your professional relationships with people whose impressive accomplishments lead them to think they have all the answers? It depends on whether you have to follow them (e.g. the boss) or don’t. If you have to, I suggest trying to influence them by spinning their ideas in ways that will make them effective.
They may need ownership, so give it to them. For example, after being presented with their idea you might say, "I see what you mean. Your idea makes sense and if we did xyz as well it would further enhance your results."
By taking their idea and adding or subtracting a piece, you can get them to adjust their ideas. Do not make a frontal attack on their idea because they probably have a strong belief in it. Also remember, they are smart and you can learn a lot from them.
Where do you fit in?
What if you are one of these people? It is critical you understand your strengths and weaknesses. We all have limits, but at times may fall prey to overconfidence. Let me use myself as an example. Early in my career I thought I could do anything.
Experience, the precursor of wisdom, taught me that my true proficiency lies in the people side of human resources — strategic planning, recruiting, employee engagement and morale, learning and development and succession planning.
Additionally, I learned I am merely competent in the areas of benefits, compensation and the legal side of HR. While I engage others in everything I do, in these areas I need more assistance and guidance.
Understanding my ignorance (in Teller’s parlance) allows me to be successful because I know when to leverage the skills and specialized knowledge of others. Another example is when I recruit for a high level technical position in finance or accounting. Lacking the specialized technical knowledge, I can assess a candidate’s personality, commitment, past successes, cultural fit, etc., but must rely on the hiring manager and competency testing to assess their technical skills.
As a kid I thought there were people who were hugely intelligent and made the best decisions in all situations. I now realize most people struggle outside their area of expertise, making each individual vital to the success of our organizations.
Mark Schnurman may be reached at or on the web at | <urn:uuid:f0d6760c-b301-402d-acdf-05d63c93145d> | http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2010/01/pooling_knowledge_is_an_intell.html | en | 0.96278 | 0.024513 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
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EVGA 790i SLI FTW Review
Category: Motherboards
Price: $289.99
» Discuss this article (7)
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It's time to upgrade your PC when the old faithful has been just that but frankly can't keep up with the latest games. You have given it more system memory, a better graphics card but with the aging technology you can go no further to increase the performance of your once top o' the line rig. Now it's time. You've done some research into the graphics possibilities, memory and processors but the task of choosing a motherboard to fit your needs is a little daunting. You have multiple Intel and Nvidia chipsets used by who knows how many manufacturers. With the Intel chipsets supporting ATI's CrossfireX multi GPU standard and Nvidia's chipsets supporting their own multi-GPU strategy SLI (Scalable Link Interface), the choice really comes down to what you want to do with this new rig of yours. If it's gaming you want, then gaming it is. All it takes is for you to pick your poison.
The EVGA NF790i SLI FTW is the latest motherboard from EVGA sporting the 790i SLI SPP and MCP. This board is targeted squarely toward the enthusiast and gamer. Since that's the target audience, EVGA has loaded this one with all the bells and whistles. Support for the latest 45nm Intel CPUs, DDR3 1600 to 2000MHz support, 8GB memory can be used to fill the four DIMM slots, three PCI-E x16 slots (two x16 PCI-E 2.0, and one x16 PCI-E1.0) that let you install and use three Tri SLI capable video cards in a three GPU setup to get the most from your gaming experience. Having eliminated the data corruption issues with the earlier boards, this latest offering should do well to feed your gaming "jones." Hey, I know it's an older term but it fits! Having seen what the Asus Striker II Extreme can do, it's time to dig a little deeper into the EVGA 790i SLI FTW edtion.
Closer Look:
The packaging has the typical lime green and black Nvidia coloring so there can be no mistaking what brand this board represents. The front panel includes a view of an atom with the nucleus and surrounding electrons, while highlighting the product name. Prominently shown are a couple of the specifications enthusiasts and gamers care about, DDR3 2000MHz, PCI-E 2.0 and 1.0 and the three x16 graphics capability. If you know anything about EVGA then you know about the 90 day step up program that allows you to trade up to a higher or lower performing product and pay the difference toward the cost of the new product. The rear of the package expands on the feature set. The highlighted features are the Tri SLI, ESA (Enthusiast System Architecture) and SLI memory with EPP capabilities. As an ESA certified motherboard, this board can be teamed up with other ESA based components such as power supplies and video cards for monitoring and tweaking of the performance they deliver.
Slipping the contents out of the box shows the bundled accessories on top of the plastic clamshell that holds the 790i SLI FTW. There is enough room on top to hold the large number of included supplies. Once the bundled accesories have been removed the motherboard can be seen. The clamshell package adequately protects the 790i SLI FTW, preventing any damage during shipping.
Now you have seen what the packaging looks like so you know just what to look for when it comes time to spend your hard earned dollars. Let's see what you get for those dollars.
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System and method for controlling client machine access to a portion of a file with a variable length
Image Number 7 for United States Patent #5175851.
A system and method in which client access to data at a server is synchronized to keep the data consistent by ensuring that each portion of the data accessible for modification at a node is not accessible for reading or modification by any other node, while allowing portions of the data accessible only for reading to be accessible by any number of nodes. If a conflicting request arises from a different client the server must revoke data that has been previously distributed to a client. For a revoke.sub.-- bytes request, all outstanding get.sub.-- bytes are marked so that the bytes that are being requested to be revoked will be discarded when they do arrive at the client. To insure that read and write system calls on a file are performed in a serializable fashion throughout a distributed environment, each machine at which a read is being performed must acquire a read token and each machine at which a write is being performed must acquire a read/write token from the server for the file. When any machine has a read/write token, no machine is allowed to have a read token, although any number of machines may have a read token at the same time. The server coordinates the distribution of these tokens by revoking all read tokens whenever a write token is requested and revoking the write token whenever any read token is requested.
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China From the Inside
Power and the People
Women of the Country
- Program Description
- Opinion: Population
- In Depth: Activists
- Discussion
- Related Links
Shifting Nature
Freedom and Justice
Interactive Map
China-U.S. Quiz
About the Series
Behind the Scenes
For Educators
Gallery of Women Activists
Dai Qing: Journalist-turned-environmentalist Hou Wenzhuo: Human rights activist Wu Qing: Champion of people's rights Xie Lihua: Advocate for rural women Dr. Gao Yaojie: AIDS education activist Nominate another female Chinese activist
Hou Wenzhuo
Human rights activist
Hou Wenzhuo
Hou Wenzhuo runs the Empowerment and Rights Institute (EARI), a human rights organization based in Beijing. She has worked for the UN in China on programs designed to help women and disabled children, and has studied human rights and refugee studies at Harvard and Oxford. She has a history of activism: in 1989 she was detained for three months after leading student protests at Sichuan University.
With EARI, Hou works to give legal aid and advice to disadvantaged groups in Chinese society, particularly to people from rural areas who are most often the victims of injustice. For example, some victims of violence or traffic accidents may be unable to receive compensation because the culprits have bribed the court.
As China's economy continues to develop and become more industrial, land seizure is becoming an increasingly common problem that falls within EARI's purview. In land seizure cases, farmers are forced by local government to give up their land for construction but often receive insufficient payment. But farmers who depend on their land for survival will often not give it up without a fight, and not just with an EARI volunteer at their sides. Cases of unrest and violent confrontations between farmers and developers have become more and more widespread, such as the case in Shengyou, Hebei province, where a farmer managed to film hired thugs violently trying to drive farmers off their land.
Hou feels the political and judicial system, which offers no guarantee of a just outcome, is to blame: "The current problem in the Chinese villages is that there is neither rule of law nor democracy. So such clashes are absolutely inevitable."
Clashes between Hou and local authorities -- unhappy with any outside organization or "troublemakers" advocating legal rights -- has thus far been inevitable as well. Hou was once arrested while advising victims of land requisitioning in Guangdong, China's wealthiest province. She remembers the police who interrogated her and warned her that she would be held personally responsible for any riots or disturbances in the area. Other members of EARI have also suffered. In December 2005, one EARI member was viciously attacked by an unidentified group of men while traveling in western China. He believes the attack was retribution for his human rights activities. Hou says that the authorities' use of criminal gangs to intimidate activists is a new trend. Now that local governments have to appear to obey the law, they use untraceable gangs to do their dirty work, whereas in the past they may have used the police.
One might call Hou's all-inclusive approach to human rights populist -- at least in China.
"I want to know people from the grassroots," she said. "I want to know what kind of problems they have. Why do I care about those people? Because traditional human rights ignores that group of people. Traditional human rights normally concerns the rights of intellectuals or of political activists. I'm not saying those rights aren't important. They are. However, they've turned human rights into something from the ivory tower, while the ordinary people don't know what their relationship is with human rights."
Hou maintains that she has not done anything illegal, even though she's been persecuted as if she had. "Our approach is not to go against the state, nor to go against the government. We want to protect the rights of citizens and demand that the government fulfill its promises. To do what's written in its constitution. If it promises to do so, the Chinese government should protect the rights of the peasants. If it says that it represents the people, then it should represent the people. We want the government's actions to be consistent with its words."
NEXT: Wu Qing: Champion of people's rights
PREVIOUS: Dai Qing: Journalist-turned-environmentalist
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TripAdvisor API
TripAdvisor is one of the world's largest travel sites featuring reviews and advice on hotels, resorts, flights, vacation rentals, vacation packages, travel guides, and more. The sites operate in 30 countries worldwide and TripAdvisor-branded sites have more than 50 million monthly visitors, and over 60 million reviews and opinions. TripAdvisor makes the following information available through its API: traveler photos, detailed reviews and rating data for accommodations, attractions, and restaurants and destination content. The TripAdvisor API content is not publicly available and is only for licensed partners. A partner key is required to access content from the API. | <urn:uuid:20ab4d88-2a48-46d5-af09-f15a0fc4c10f> | http://www.programmableweb.com/api/tripadvisor?page=1&tab=developers | en | 0.909072 | 0.163093 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
Roll-Aid Safety Inc.
Makers of the Backup self-righting aid for kayakers.
If your Eskimo roll fails, avoid the dangers and hassles of a wet-exit by pulling the handle of your BackUP. It will immediately inflate and hold your hand near the surface of the water so you can do a "solo Eskimo Rescue"!
But it's easier than an Eskimo Rescue because you don't have to wait around, upside down in the water, waiting for the rescue boat. And you don't have to feel around above the surface for the bow of the rescue boat once it does arrive. You know exactly where the BackUP is (you mounted it there), and it fully inflates within about 3 seconds of pulling its handle. The inflating bag jumps to the surface of the water beside your boat. The inflated BackUP floats very well (it takes over 80 pounds to sink it), so you can lean on it heavily.
Click on the image to the left to activate a real-life righting sequence. (Or press Reload or Refresh.)
Here the BackUP is strapped to the bungy cord tie-downs just ahead of the cockpit.
To study the individual frames in this sequence (shot 1/3 of a second apart), look here.
Are you wondering what is happening underwater? Look here.
The University of Sea Kayaking featured the BackUP self-rescue as a "skill of the month". They have some great underwater pictures.
is it for you?
BackUP versus paddle-float
also a re-entry aid
features & specs
using one
rolling a double
common questions
buy one
entire Owner's Manual
about the company
Roll-Aid Safety Inc.
P.O. Box 72005, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6R 4P2
Ph: 604-224-4010 Fax: 604-224-4045 | <urn:uuid:c823237c-5952-4f8d-96f1-425daf3ab63c> | http://www.roll-aid.com/ | en | 0.905545 | 0.076432 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |
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Posts: 1
Location: USA
Sunday, April 18th 2004, 1:47pm
Water in the Meter pit & main valve tube
Just turned my system on yesterday. A friend was helping so don't know for sure, but when the main valve to the sprinkler system was turned on, there was just small amount of mud in tube. When I got involved, I remember looking down and able to see the "X" on top of the valve
Looks like the main valve hole is 4" plastic pipe that goes into the ground near the meter pit. We use a "u" ended tool to reach down and turn on the water.
We got everything working ok, replace 3 or 4 heads, and then noticed that there was water in the valve tube. Checked 4 hours latter and still water. It looks like "still" water, and doesn't rise out of the tube. Checked the meter pit and it has water too. There too, don't know or remeber if there was water in the meter pit.
Also, this system has 3 zones, and we can only find one round valve box, that has three small "relays"? and looks like a valve further down in the box. Can't see any other square boxes for valve control, blow-out, etc.
Is this normal, or do I have a leak? If this system has auto drain valves, does that account for no other boxes, and if so, does that eliminate the need for blowing out for winter?
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Results 1 to 4 of 4
1. #1
Camping near San Fran
Going for 2 weeks in June into San Fran. Plan on driving in between there up to Eureka depending on where swells best. Looking for best camping spots near beaches along that stretch of land...or any sublet services/hostels in those areas. Thanks.
2. #2
Jedidiah smith right on the border of Oregon and CA. Also Butano state campground, just south of Half Moon Bay is a gem. Ocean Beach picks up the souths that time of year. Tons of misto stuff north from SF. You might find something near Mendo worth surfing.
3. #3
yezz im familiar with the surf but not as much specific campsite locations..
4. #4
have you lived in that area? | <urn:uuid:19b1cb23-d2c7-4f0b-a098-6cd77fb688bb> | http://www.swellinfo.com/forum/showthread.php?18772-Camping-near-San-Fran&p=160857 | en | 0.947179 | 0.190275 | mlfoundations/dclm-baseline-1.0-parquet |